Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

strongtowns.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 256 posts

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#211

Post by dredmorbius »

nostrademons wrote: post #19

> No neighborhood should be exempt from change. > No neighborhood should be subjected to radical change. Is there any dynamic evolutionary system that actually follows these rules? The tech industry is famous for lumbering behemoths that are constitutionally incapable of innovation and then get replaced wholesale by nimble startups. National borders change all at once, in wars or revolutions, rather than incrementall…

Is there any dynamic evolutionary system that actually follows these rules?

Arguably, not really. Bernhardt J. Stern's 1930s-40s explorations into resistance of technological innovation has been revelatory to me:

"Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937) https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/fZajYSGa

Having some item, totem, or mechanism for producing, securing, or controlling wealth, the cheapest way to grow power further is often to defend that against new advances or competition.

Stern describes both technology and housing in his article.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#212

Post by dredmorbius »

tarr11 wrote: post #149

Would a “technology” answer be to make telepresence technology better and invest in higher bandwidth infrastructure? If we could have high resolution video, audio and even VR for business, would people be required to be colocated as often? That way people could live wherever they want.

Paradoxically, advances in transport and comms tech seem to increase rather than decrease hub concentration. Greater friction and more need for local presence might reverse the trend.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#213

Post by mktmkr »

nostrademons wrote: post #84
ProblemFactory wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? I don't see how that could be the case. The property value of a plot of land on which a 50, or even 5 story building can be built is much higher than the property value of a single-family home.

There's a substitution effect. If zoning restrictions are relaxed and developer turns an acre into a 50 unit condo complex, that developer reaps a huge windfall. But everyone else who owns an Eichler on a 1/4 acre has fewer buyers competing for their property. It's sorta like when labor unions go away. The company that hires non-unionized labor at half the price and double the productivity reaps an enormous windfall.…

I'd like to point out this is true only if the developer held the property during the regulatory change. Otherwise the developer makes their customary razor-thin profits and it is the seller of the land who reaps the huge windfall.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#214

Post by cylinder »

Animats wrote: post #3

It's being overdone. A solid wall of railroad flats (cheezy "luxury" condos) is going up for miles along the Caltrain tracks. Those wooden multistory buildings are the slums of tomorrow. It's about time for the next Bay Area recession. Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?

Isn't that where you'd want flats? Nobody wants a SFH next to tracks. Certain types of people (I won't generalise) always seem to want to call apartment buildings "future slums." This almost never materialises. Is it a racial thing for you?

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#215

Post by andrewprock »

There is simply no demand from municipalities for more housing. The logical consequence of Proposition 13 is that housing becomes a liability for governments, instead of an asset. Therefore, they forego developing new liabilities, and instead develop new assets, commercial property use.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#216

Post by carapace »

CydeWeys wrote: post #198
carapace wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because we're hella young out here. Relative to the East Coast anyway (I mean, London has Roman ruins...) Do an image search for old timey SF and you'll see: the Sunset was sand dunes until about last Tuesday, etc. Dudes used to pan for gold out by Lake Merced. Also, this was the weirdo town. Bohemia on the Bay. Serious folk didn't really come here to be serious and sane. The old line was, "All the crazy people…

"My concern is the weakening of the commitment to keeping the wild areas of the Bay Area wild. SF is the largest city with the most wilderness around it in the world." "I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo." These two sentiments are in direct conflict though. Your options are to either build up or to build out. Building up will preserve the nearby…

> These two sentiments are in direct conflict though.

I know. Quoting Whitman, "I am large. I contain multitudes."

> Your options are to either build up or to build out.

Or, in a word, arcologies.

> Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated, ecologically low-impact human habitats.

> The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who believed that a completed arcology would provide space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities while minimizing individual human environmental impact. These structures have been largely hypothetical, as no arcology, even one envisioned by Soleri himself, has yet been built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

If I had my druthers, I would roll up the low density stuff into arcologies and rehabilitate the old creeks that ran and still run to the bay. Use Permaculture (applied ecology) and passive design. IIRC the Australians were going to build a huge multi-acre combined solar chimney and greenhouse to generate electricity and grow food. &c.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney

We have all the solutions we need (often they are decades old) we just have to clue up and get crackin'.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#217

Post by DrScump »

ImplicitNone wrote: post #89
brent_noorda wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s

That's not true! Peninsula voters never got the chance to vote on the November 1962 BART referendum. Instead, on April 12, 1962 the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors opted out, citing high costs and concerns over shoppers leaving their county for stores in Downtown San Francisco. Keep in mind that Silicon Valley did not exist yet. There was no support for BART in San Mateo County-grassroots or otherwise. Many Pen…

  the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol)
Don't forget Southwest Expressway, that sad little stretch from Stokes(?) to 280 south of San Jose City College.

As for San Mateo county, Caltrain already served as an artery through it. San Mateo county residents would have been used as cash cows for SF to Western Alameda county, just like eastern Alameda County has been for five decades.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#218

Post by DrScump »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #58
brent_noorda wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s

The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s BART is a basket case of incompetence on its own. SF residents were largely willing to support an infill station at 30th and Mission, but BART stuck its thumbs up its ass and eventually built a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport (ripping up recent renovations t…

  a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport
... which was suspended mid-construction for several years.

The empty trestles over Hegenberger were reminiscent of the "Freeway to Nowhere" (the 280/680/101 interchange in San Jose).

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#219

Post by DrScump »

api wrote: post #31
CPLX wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula (including SF) looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense. Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacen…

It's quite sane if you bought property in the 60s-90s and are riding property appreciation to fortune.

Fortune?

The problem is recognizing that appreciation without weathering the crushing taxes. Proposition 5 (portability of Jarvis Gann property tax bases) would have helped, but it was voted down.

Take a single person with $1 million in appreciation. $750K gets hit with (unindexed!) Federal capital gains, full CA income taxes with surtaxes "for the rich" (likewise unindexed), and you'd be starting over with respect to property tax basis (with a few exceptions in 9 counties).

You could eventually do a 1031, but you'd have to move somewhere in the meantime... probably out of state.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#220

Post by DrScump »

yks wrote: post #190
siphon22 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then. I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majorit…

Btw, the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person and not about SoCal neighborhood. Regardless, these people are not "natives" who got SF entirely in its current state from God, it was growing up, as prosperous cities do, and neighborhoods were changing. So why should it stop its development in 1976, why are people who moved in to SF back then entitled to this? If you ask me, this is beco…

  the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person
You didn't give a single example, let alone one where you know the ethnicity of the author.
Post reply on HN