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

Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

city-journal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 326 posts

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#241

Post by sokoloff »

helen___keller wrote: post #101
werfds wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We don't talk about the lack of affordable AAPL shares do we? That's insane, it's an investment, we want it to go up. The less affordable, the better!" I've always found our obsession with stock price amusing. It's the dividend that technically matters (and, with risk and growth potential, what ultimately should be setting the stock price). When you sell your stock at a gain it just means that, while you owned it, t…

> So yea, we should be complaining that, not AAPL but financial instruments, are expensive! And to the point of this topic I think this contributes to housing woes, atleast in major markets where there's a very low rental yields. I can afford to rent in my area, but I can't afford to buy because (with an identical unit in the same neighborhood) my monthly costs would go up by $1000 or $1500 or so, even with 20% down.…

> if you could buy bonds yielding 5% why would you hold rental properties that yield less before maintenance?

There is leverage available for real property that is much greater than that typically available for other investments. (There are also depreciation tax incentives that further help cash flow.)

An investor who is seeking cash-on-cash returns can invest $200K to control $1MM of property or invest $200K to control $200K of bonds. If the bonds yield 5%, that's $10K per year. (With bonds yielding ~2% now, that's $4K per year on $200K invested.)

If the property appreciates at 3% per year, that's $30K per year in appreciation. Add rental income, subtract insurance/taxes/interest on the mortgage (but not principal), and you can often find that real estate is a "better" investment than bonds, particularly if you discount the fact that you're working it as a second job, the labor of which is not taxed as labor but returned to you as capital gains later.

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#242

Post by jelliclesfarm »

How can we think of housing without considering resource constraints. It’s not just space to build vertically that determines how many homes can be built..it’s traffic, infrastructure, roads, water, power, schools, essential services, public services, public spaces, community amenities..the list goes on.

Urban density cannot keep on increasing. You cannot ‘keep on adding homes’. We are already having very high costs of living and this also contributes to unaffordability of Bay Area cities.

The only winner is the state which can get more property tax dollars in Bay Area and other urban centers than elsewhere in California. Essentially a handful of high tech dollar fueled California cities are subsidizing the entire state.

This state will implode with this ‘high density is sustainable’ and ‘build and they will come’ mantra. We are already having power outages, crumbling infrastructure, increasing water rates, more and more tolls, high rents, overcrowded schools and unending traffic jams. And the rent is nothing to sneeze at..

The high density lobby is going to incinerate my state. Having already witnessed the devastation this kind of building has caused in my home country, this breaks my heart and frankly I am terrified for the future.

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#243

Post by filoleg »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #71
arcticbull wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they spent that $4.5B on lobbying for upzoining and densification the problem would likely sort itself out. Probably for a fraction of the cost.

If we divided that 4.5B by the number of tech workers, where would we be at? If there are 100,000 tech workers in the Bay Area, that'd be around $45,000 per person of lobbying for affordable housing. If those tech workers saved $500 per month, they would earn back what their companies spent on them in 90 months, or 7.5 years. Assumption, I don't know how many tech workers there truly are.

>100,000 tech workers in Bay Area

Seems pretty low of an estimate tbh. Just for scale, Google has around 45k employees in Bay Area alone. I realize that not every single one of them is an engineer. But even if just 30k of them are (completely ballpark guessing here), it seems pretty implausible that every 3rd engineer in bay area is a googler.

Just did some googling, and according to this source[0], there are about 624k software developers in CA. I realize that it includes not only Bay Area, obviously, but I am willing to reasonably bet that a heavy majority of the developers are there, with a notable chunk in LA as well, something on the order of 116k.

To be more specific about how I arrived to that estimate, I checked StackOverflow Jobs portal, to see how many job openings there are in LA vs Bay Area, assuming that the number of job openings proportionally correlates (positively) with actual people working in said jobs. LA had 118 openings [1], while Bay area had 518 [2]. 624,000/(518+118)*118 ~= 116,000. Yes, it is napkin level of statistics, but that's the best estimate I could think of.

0. https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software... 1. https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=Los+Angeles%2C+CA%2C+USA&d=... 2. https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?l=bay+area&d=20&u=Miles

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#244

Post by pdonis »

nhebb wrote: post #80
arcticbull wrote: post #5

The whole topic of conversation around housing affordability is backwards. Specifically, housing affordability is 100%, entirely, a problem of artificial constraints on supply by city councils. (1) Americans consider housing to be an investment. An investment is only an investment if you expect a positive return over time. We generally want that investment to match or exceed inflation. (2) That's antithetical to the…

> (1) Americans consider housing to be an investment. Apparently I'm the lone dissenter on this, but I think for many people this is a side benefit that they may hope for, but the primary objective is simply to own a home that they can live in and raise a family.

> the primary objective is simply to own a home that they can live in and raise a family.

And owning that home, as opposed to renting it, is an investment.

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#245

Post by tick_tock_tick »

sujNansnam wrote: post #203
munificent wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blame tech It confuses the issue to anthropomorphize an industry category. I don't think it's fair to blame rank-and-file tech workers . In today's scary economy, you can't blame anyone for entering a growth industry and taking a good job that's offered. Who wouldn't want a great salary, good benefits, a safe comfortable workplace, and a stable work-life balance? The more interesting question is why are there so ma…

If a company is spending some revenue as wages, they aren’t paying taxes on that revenue at all.

That money is taxed as income on the employee's side and they still pay payroll taxes.

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#246

Post by larnmar »

arcticbull wrote: post #5

The whole topic of conversation around housing affordability is backwards. Specifically, housing affordability is 100%, entirely, a problem of artificial constraints on supply by city councils. (1) Americans consider housing to be an investment. An investment is only an investment if you expect a positive return over time. We generally want that investment to match or exceed inflation. (2) That's antithetical to the…

Tokyo has a declining population. When Tokyo’s population was still increasing, housing prices there were ridiculous (there was the 80s factoid about the Imperial Palace grounds being worth more than the entire state of California).

If you look at many other major cities in Asia (especially China) you will see a combination of wall-to-wall skyscrapers as desired by yimby (usually really yiseby) types, plus insanely high property prices.

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#247

Post by tick_tock_tick »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #123

> the city passed a series of neighborhood plans in and around downtown that relaxed zoning and removed parking requirements, making it easier and cheaper to build. Wait, you mean deregulation isn’t just a republican talking point? And restrictive city (and state) governments were the problem this whole time???

I mean in this case it's hard to find any expert that doesn't agree the problem is self created from over regulation. That doesn't mean we don't need any zoning laws though.

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#248

Post by throwaway34241 »

slg wrote: post #141
treis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live further away over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never trickles down to the poor people in the city It does because the poor people move into the housing that the upper middle class vacated. Population growth is an independent confounding factor. In other words, housing cost can still go up due to popula…

>It does because the poor people move into the housing that the upper middle class vacated That only works if the system is closed. If housing in the bay area goes down in price, you get people moving in from New York, LA, Boston, Austin, etc who previously avoided the area due to costs. Do you just ship off those poor people to those vacated homes hundred or thousands of miles away? >Population growth is an independ…

> If housing in the bay area goes down in price, you get people moving in from New York, LA, Boston, Austin

Yes, and the other direction too, if NYC dropped hugely in price probably a lot of people would move from SF. If a city manages to solve its housing problem in some enormous way some of the benefit would go to other cities.

The reverse is true too, SF building nowhere near enough will cause people to move away and drive up housing prices in other places like Austin. This sounds more like the reality today.

It's a real effect, but it seems like the best action for people who need housing is still to build more.

The main thing is does luxury housing act like a totally separate market. For example, if no affordable luxury 2bd apartments are available, will a software engineer move to Boston from SF instead of settling for an ordinary 2bd apartment. I'd expect the majority of the time high-income people who can't afford luxury apartments simply displace middle-income people in ordinary apartments rather than move cities, but I don't have hard data on it.

Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes

#249

Post by jelliclesfarm »

I think there has been a very successful diversion of derision towards ‘Americans who own homes’ and ignoring the vast majority of foreigners who own properties(both rent seeking and farmland) in the Bay Area as speculative/investment properties that they have purchased sight unseen.

Deriding pensioners on fixed income whose taxes actually built the infrastructure and schools and roads of the Bay Area is shameful..Whose final home is not ‘speculative property’, but their retirement nest egg. Not everyone has a pension from a public sector job.

Look into pension funds, foreign investors,insurance companies, university investment funds ..and yes, Wall Street..who are literally raiding California from the other side of our state to see how this inequality and unaffordablility is caused. And the Govt in the state of California seated in Sacramento is complicit in this.

On a broader scale, they are also stealing our water(example: family farms in Paso Robles can’t grow their crops like alfafa and corn because of a water moratorium because Harvard investment funds have bought acres and acres to grow grapes in vineyards..and drilling wells at the fence line which makes it legal but essentially taps into aquifers and water tables meant for the entire region. 1500 ft when water was found at 300 ft.)

This is causing a divide between rural and urban causing the former to become unliveable and increasing population pressures on highly dense urban hubs.

Post reply on HN