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

To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

sfexaminer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 361 posts

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#321

Post by Spooky23 »

TomVDB wrote: post #221
Spooky23 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the way it works. The reality is that the apartment building goes up and you house is worth nothing unless the government allows an eminent domain for your property or a developer with the bucks to buy out the neighborhood shows up. Until that happens, your house lost a third of its value because there's an apartment next door. If you're unlucky, rates go up and you're stuck.

I don't understand why you're being down voted. Is it really controversial to say that a regular single family house in a single family house neighborhood will go down in value when somebody decides to plant an apartment complex right next to do?

I think the reason is that people living in places like SFO are effectively locked out of the market. They are angry and passionate about it, and I sympathize.

The problem from my perspective is that the "crisis" of housing is really a boomtown phenomenon. The problem exists because companies can afford to pay people enough, which won't last forever.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#322

Post by seehafer »

rspeer wrote: post #303
eanzenberg wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelessness is rising here because SF is open to homelessness therefore it attracts it from the rest of the country. Increasing housing supply by 50% will increase homelessness because you have 50% more people willing to financially support it.

You'd think it wouldn't take so much effort to defend the claim "if you build enough housing, people won't be homeless", but it does. So let's go with a prominent example: Tokyo. Neighborhoods in Tokyo have no local control over zoning, and houses are widely understood to be a depreciating asset, not an investment. So Tokyo builds enough housing and homeowners can't pull up the ladder behind them. The homelessness ra…

I think Tokyo is a good counter to the nonsense perpetuated in SF that the law of supply and demand doesn’t somehow apply to housing.

Homelessness however is more a multi-headed beast, and Japanese culture likely plays as much into a lack of people on the street as does housing availability.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#323

Post by Spooky23 »

stouset wrote: post #266
TomVDB wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you're being down voted. Is it really controversial to say that a regular single family house in a single family house neighborhood will go down in value when somebody decides to plant an apartment complex right next to do?

Honestly? I appreciate your willingness to engage in this thread, but I have to say I really don’t care if it does or if it doesn’t. Making a real estate purchase is a risk. Making a huge one is a huge risk. Right now, the Bay Area is prioritizing rewarding the obscenely wealthy and rewarding massive risk-taking by the moderately wealthy. If those risks don’t pan out, but people can afford to live here, I’m not that…

The counter-point is that if I was a homeowner in the Bay Area, I want to protect my property as much as possible, and I'll use my political power to do that.

People who are disrupted by this can build character by living in a van or move to any of the hundreds of metro areas that are more affordable -- it's not my problem. If you work for some tech company, you should appreciate that controlling a resource like a technology or real property has benefits.

FWIW, I chose the latter option and live in a mid sized urban core. I make about half of what I'd make in the Bay Area, but my costs are probably about 80% less, even factoring in private school. So if you make a choice to live in a van as a rational actor, that's your choice. Own it.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#324

Post by coccinelle »

boreas wrote: post #137
rubicon33 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. This. This. This. This. Absent from the vast majority of these threads is the critical component in this "crisis": Property can be purchased and held onto for purely speculative purposes, thereby draining the inventory pool, and raising the cost of housing for residents of the city. This has been happening in the bay area for a very long time. Wealthy Chinese investors who do not LIVE in the bay area, have purc…

You need to provide statistics for extraordinary claims about housing being purchased by foreign investors and not used. Common sense says it should be a very marginal phenomenon. After all, renting out property should almost always be worth it with the high housing prices in the area.

I’ve been wondering about that when it comes to rent-controlled places like SF. It seems « tenant occupied » properties sell for less than equivalent empty places. Then is it worth it to let a tenant in who might just drive down the price of the place if you decide to sell a couple of years later?

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#325

Post by collyw »

lallysingh wrote: post #279
matte_black wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The homeowners aren’t selfish, they are motivated. Why would they act against something that would clearly devalue them? If the roles were reversed I doubt these observers would be calling for a change in narrative.

It's a death spiral waiting to happen. Companies will move away from areas where their employees can't get hosting. Not many have to move before the rest start to follow, and the speculative part of the home valuations disappear. Either they let the pressure out gradually or the thing is going to pop.

They have been saying that for years, and instead the opposite has happened. Most IT work could be done remotely, yet the vast majority of companies want staff on site. Almost every job I have had has involved distributed teams yet I am still expected to be in an office most of the time.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#326

Post by collyw »

TomVDB wrote: post #70
rb808 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If density increases the people who will benefit the most are current landowners. If you have single family home on a big lot, its value will go up many times if you can suddenly build an apartment building on it.

Most current home owners have no interest in selling to a developer or developing ourselves. We just want to continue live in conditions that were present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street. Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to…

I am pretty sure if the price was high enough they would be interested. "Everyone is a bit coin operated" as Ed Zander said when I worked at Mortorola.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#327

Post by rmk »

BurningFrog wrote: post #256
rmk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some key differences between Detroit and the Bay Area ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=San+Francisco-Oakland-F... ): 1. Less room to spread out in the Bay Area. Detroit does not have many high-rises, and as far as I can tell, it has had a large number of single-family dwellings condemned/abandoned etc. during the recession. Also, Detroit is in a seismically stable zone. 2. Large number of incoming peo…

There is an enormous amount of room to build in the Bay Area. The constraints are political, not physical.

How? The area west of 280 is mostly protected land, so it's hard to build. Some of the empty areas out by Alviso/Milpitas are superfund sites. Apparently it's much harder than it looks to reclaim the Bay and build on it (best chance of opening up large amounts of land). Is there some map that shows areas that can be developed?

Also, Santa Clara county is chock-full of EPA superfund sites. Lots of soil and groundwater contamination.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#328

Post by 089723645897236 »

Hey maybe some other parts of the world need populating too. This obsession with location location location is quaint to me in the age of telecom. Maybe the Bay Area is just Done. It'll turn into every other Rich Person Town and the people who need to get real s* done will go somewhere else.

Legacy industry is no excuse to keep cramming more people onto a tiny peninsula in California. It sucks for people in the middle and lower involved right now but honestly I encourage them to move at all costs.

The writing is on the wall.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#329

Post by swebs »

raldi wrote: post #210
swebs wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: It's literally on top of a fault line, most of the land is unsuitable for skyscrapers due to soil liquefaction during an earthquake, 80% of the area surrounding downtown is water >I'm sorry to say it, its time to bail out. We need to start lobbying software companies to get the heck out of the bay area Agreed. SF is just a bad location to build a large city.

Tokyo

The only thing they have in common is that they're both near a fault line. Tokyo has a foundation of solid bedrock so soil liquefaction is not an issue. Very little of the area surrounding downtown Tokyo is sea, compared to San Francisco, which is a peninsula around 10 km wide.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#330

Post by Clubber »

I would think this could be solved by allowing remote work when viable, and making sure there is plenty of internet in rural areas. I would love to live on 5-500 acres somewhere and work on the porch. There's plenty of land to go around; we're just stuck in the 20th century way of thinking about work in a digital age. Strange.
Post reply on HN