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

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

#331

Post by raldi »

swebs wrote: post #329
raldi wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of SF actually has quite shallow bedrock. As for the part that doesn't, it already has subways and tall buildings (except for the part near Ocean Beach). But anyway, we wouldn't actually need any tall buildings to solve the housing crisis; 4-to-6-story apartments would do the trick.

http://images.slideplayer.com/22/6340453/slides/slide_27.jpg

If being surrounded by water is an insurmountable problem, how do you explain the tall buildings and subways in Manhattan?

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

#332

Post by CodeWriter23 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #197
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #75

Someone who recognizes the opportunity to develop tech centers between the coasts is going to cash in big. Zappos and Tesla seem to have had their fingers on that pulse by settling in the Reno/Sparks area.

For the past 20 years or so, every state has tried doing just that. Very few have been anywhere near successful, and those that have end up with housing problems similar to (maybe not as severe as) SV.

Difference being, Silicon Valley was not entirely booked up until recently.

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

#333

Post by nerfhammer »

ojbyrne wrote: post #233
nerfhammer wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

72% of renters have rent control and thereby have the primary reason to care removed

That seems unlikely - would love to see a citation.

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-San-Francisco-apart...

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

#334

Post by nerfhammer »

irq11 wrote: post #297
nerfhammer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here's a thorough cost comparison breakdown: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Tokyo rent in particular is drastically less expensive

Again: you can’t just compare rent values without adjusting for income. Japanese people aren’t earning San Francisco salaries. The number you want there is the the one that says Tokyo is 10% cheaper than NYC. That’s the adjusted number. Say what you will about rent, but “10% cheaper than New York” is nobody’s definition of cheap.

the tool has all that in it

according to it, salaries in SF are ~66% higher than Tokyo and rents are ~300% higher.

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

#335

Post by asdsa5325 »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #185
asdsa5325 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If Silicon Valley is full, then don't move there! Live somewhere else, your wallet and your sanity will thank you!

Unfortunately, until the big guys and the startup scene decide to move elsewhere, or at least spread out beyond the Bay Area, that's not very practical advice. I recently had a couple interviews with Google, and basically, for the positions they wanted me for, I would be required to move to Mountain View. So your advice in my situation would boil down to "Don't work for Google."

Google has many offices in other states

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

#336

Post by khazhoux »

asdsa5325 wrote: post #335
s73v3r_ wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, until the big guys and the startup scene decide to move elsewhere, or at least spread out beyond the Bay Area, that's not very practical advice. I recently had a couple interviews with Google, and basically, for the positions they wanted me for, I would be required to move to Mountain View. So your advice in my situation would boil down to "Don't work for Google."

Google has many offices in other states

But the majority of jobs obviously in SV.

Apple Austin, e.g., is only GPUs and Apple Store.

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

#337

Post by [deleted] »

TomVDB wrote: post #240
debt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct; the numbers don't lie. The future of the Bay Area will be outsourcing lower waged jobs that also includes software engineers, QA staff, administrative, etc. to other areas of the state or country where cost of living is less expensive. It's already happening, just ask around. Again, because the value turned around by SWE peeps etc. for tech companies has an actual cap. You can't pay a QA/SW engineer $…

> Eventually the only people left in the Bay Area will be executives and really high-paid lawyers Yesterday's headline: "Alphabet median pay close to $200k" https://www.investopedia.com/news/googles-alphabet-median-pa... Those are not all executives and high-paid lawyers. One of the biggest reasons why a 1300 sq.ft. house in Sunnyvale now sells for $2M is because a lot of engineers are perfectly capable of paying for…

[deleted]

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

#338

Post by s73v3r_ »

redthrowaway wrote: post #307
s73v3r_ wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's far easier to create tech clusters in other cities" Wouldn't it have been done by now if that were the case? Yet SF is still the Mecca for the tech and startup scenes.

Network effects are powerful. But beyond the original secondary tech centres of Seattle, Boston, and NYC, there are now thriving tech scenes in all sorts of smaller markets--Portland, Denver, Austin, etc. It's easy to see every major tech company having a base in SFBA for the foreseeable future, but it's also easy to see being a working programmer living in one of those smaller markets and actually being a homeowner…

Given how hostile most of those companies have been to remote work, I'm not too optimistic. I hope to be wrong, though.

And while those other cities do have some tech scene, it's still nowhere near that of SV, and that's still the first choice of most developers.

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

#339

Post by s73v3r_ »

asdsa5325 wrote: post #335
s73v3r_ wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, until the big guys and the startup scene decide to move elsewhere, or at least spread out beyond the Bay Area, that's not very practical advice. I recently had a couple interviews with Google, and basically, for the positions they wanted me for, I would be required to move to Mountain View. So your advice in my situation would boil down to "Don't work for Google."

Google has many offices in other states

They do. And I literally live around the corner from one. But the position they're looking at me for would still require me to move to Mountain View.

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

#340

Post by cwkoss »

badminton1 wrote: post #308
cwkoss wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the joke, "If our daughter keeps growing at this rate, she'll be 12 feet tall by age 18"

Sounds dumb but consider the evolution of world population over time: - 1950: 2.5 billion - 2000: 6 billion - 2018: 7.6 billion

I don't mean to be dismissive of your general sentiment, I think we agree - I just think your example is a bit superlative.

I think when viewing exponential trends we need to consider the maximum 'carrying capacity' - typically when something is growing exponentially there is some latent 'available energy' that is being consumed to fuel the growth. Once consumption reaches parity with that energy production - growth may continue for a bit longer as 'excess reserves' are drained, but a trend reversal becomes inevitable.

> even the worst cities of 2018 will be unaffordable for the regular person.

In your city example, I'd argue that once a city is too expensive for any 'regular' person it will create a negative feedback loop: if unable to source enough labor to satisfy the service demands of the wealthy residents, those residents will begin leaving, reducing housing prices until the problem is at least somewhat mitigated.

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