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

Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 206 posts

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#31

Post by hx87 »

xienze wrote: post #17
hx87 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many other problems in California, this one can be largely traced back to a single source: Proposition 13

Which was created to combat the problem of grandma kicked out of her house because she can't afford her property taxes. How do you get around that?

She can take the payout and buy some place more affordable, perhaps even an apartment in the building that replaces her house. Not the best outcome for her, I'm sure, but beats the hell out of starving municipal and state governments of revenue, broken infrastructure, and forcing everyone else to pay extortionate rents and mortgages just to live there.

If the law allows it and the regulatory compliance costs are low enough, maybe grandma can take out a home equity loan and turn her 1-story ranch into a 3-story apartment and take advantage of the cash flow. If she needs a little more, and her neighbors are also having trouble paying their property taxes, they can pool their resources together and build an even larger apartment block to replace their old houses. Win-win for everyone, except for busybody NIMBYs who care about "neighborhood character" to the exclusion of everything else.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#32

Post by pjlegato »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #10

> The really strange thing is that the city's officials aren't being irrational. As Yglesias is well aware, the city officials are only being rational in a very narrow sense. A building project can only create as many jobs as it can pay for -- and the workers must be payed enough to buy or rent places to live. What lies behind the claim that it will "create too many jobs" is that the construction workers will compete…

Construction workers already cannot remotely afford to compete in the Santa Clara / SV housing market, and they haven't been able to for a very long time. Construction work is also short-term and temporary in character. That is not the issue. Not everything that happens is a hidden plot against the long-suffering proletariat by the evil, scheming bourgeois.

The issue is what happened in Mountain View with Google, and in Cupertino with Apple -- a company builds a huge new campus that creates 60,000 or 100,000 new permanent, high-paying jobs, but zero new housing gets created, making the cost of living insanely high for everyone (not just for construction workers.)

This is because the cities won't allow any zoning changes to their low-density 1960s suburban setup. Their goal is to preserve the physical infrastructure in that low-density shape, not to keep out lowly poor people as such.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#33

Post by skewart »

dragonwriter wrote: post #20
baron816 wrote: post #9

Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes, but if you think about places like New York, London, and Paris, that argument doesn't exactly hold. Those cities are incredibly dense and expensive, but people love living there enough to pay the high prices. People who can live anywhere choose to live there. I'm willing to bet that SV could triple its popu…

> Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails. In many cases, its not to prop up the market value of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the personal value they place in their homes: its "I live here, and I'd like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here".

The desire to keep a city looking the same as it was decades ago does seem to be a powerful motivator for a lot of anti-housing people.

It's always seemed a little perverse to me. Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Trying to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#34

Post by TulliusCicero »

dragonwriter wrote: post #27
TulliusCicero wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with knocking down existing houses? If the homeowners want to sell to developers that will build higher-density housing on their land, what exactly is the problem? I mean, probably every dense neighborhood in the world was at one time lower-density, and had its old buildings knocked down and replaced. This isn't anything new.

> If the homeowners want to sell to developers that will build higher-density housing on their land, what's wrong with that? Generally, not all of them do, which is why redevelopment usually involves use of eminent domain.

Source on that? AFAIK eminent domain for private development is rare, the vast, vast majority of the time developers just offer enough money to convince people to sell.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#35

Post by TelAviv_1 »

jandrese wrote: post #25
johan_larson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning laws. And existing owners who staunchly oppose increasing density by building larger buildings. A lot of people who bought their single-family homes years or decades ago now live in appealing low-density neighborhoods with home values that are sky-rocketing. They don't want their neighborhoods to change into concrete canyons, and the ever-rising values of their homes fund their retirements very nicely. They th…

It is also one of the big reasons California can have such an enormous theoretical tax base, but still manage to run a massive deficit. You can bet there would be more pushback on those skyrocketing home values if people had to pay the taxes on them. Its too late for a lot of people in the valley, they couldn't afford to pay anything close to what their homes current access at. It is the epitome of Got Mine, Fuck You…

Why do you think I should pay crazy property tax values on the Sunnyvale house I paid $250,000 for in 1988 just because some nut paid $2,000,000 for the identical house next door to mine last year? Why do you want to see my pushed out of my home with a $45,000/year property tax bill? You are pure evil, plain and simple.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#37

Post by jtmcmc »

xienze wrote: post #17
hx87 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many other problems in California, this one can be largely traced back to a single source: Proposition 13

Which was created to combat the problem of grandma kicked out of her house because she can't afford her property taxes. How do you get around that?

by means testing whether or not people can have their property seized over property taxes for one thing, rather than a blanket freeze on taxation except during sale that has horrific consequences.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#38

Post by jekdoce »

xienze wrote: post #17
hx87 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many other problems in California, this one can be largely traced back to a single source: Proposition 13

Which was created to combat the problem of grandma kicked out of her house because she can't afford her property taxes. How do you get around that?

Grandma can get a reverse mortgage on her $3M house and pay the property taxes.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#39

Post by TelAviv_1 »

hx87 wrote: post #8
beachstartup wrote: post #6

i went to school with a lot of wealthy kids from the bay area. they and their families simply do not want to develop the area any further, in order to keep housing as high as possible and the area exclusive as possible. in private conversation they talk about it openly. personally i don't think it's much more complicated than that.

Like many other problems in California, this one can be largely traced back to a single source: Proposition 13

Fuck you.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#40

Post by HarryHirsch »

Animats wrote: post #3

That's been called the "jobs-housing imbalance" since the 1980s.

It is was only housing! But it's infrastructure, too. You need to put in extra sewage, electric, roads, schools &c to accommodate the rise in population, and that is going to be painful. With Proposition 13, how does a municipality raise funds for new schools or a sewage plant expansion?
Post reply on HN