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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

#351

Post by stouset »

RestlessMind wrote: post #345
stouset wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If those risks don’t pan out...I'm not that upset. But see, now you have introduced an "us vs them" mentality to this discussion with homeowners on one side and non-homeowners on the other. If I, a homeowner with 800K mortgage, is going to face people like you who want to act in a way that will reduce the price of my home below 800K thus wiping out my equity in my home and saddling me with an underwater mortgage, t…

The us-vs-them situation exists whether you like it or not. I have the means to purchase in SF and have not done so, not in small part because it would position my self-interest counter to so many in this city who aren’t as lucky as I’ve been. Every act of public policy creates winners and losers. Not acting just preserves the status quo of homeowners as winners and everyone else as losers. Feel-good-yet-practically-impossible suggestions like yours are effectively arguments in favor of an unlimited extension of this status quo.

You took a large gamble with a massive sum of money—what is literally a lifetime of earnings for most families in the US—and are now arguing that the city should continue to prioritize the positive outcome of your gamble over the needs of the hundreds of thousands in this city who are struggling to get by.

This leveraged gamble has been growing at a rate of 8–9%, and with typical mortgages here it’s reasonable to guess you’re seeing over a 12% return on that gamble annually as a result, after mortgage interest and property taxes. Pardon my complete lack of empathy for the hardship you might endure should your gamble only return 5%, were we to consider the needs of the rest of this city over your own.

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

#352

Post by BurningFrog »

rmk wrote: post #327
BurningFrog wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, the "protected land" is one of the biggest political constraints.

The other is that most of the built land is zoned extremely low density.

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

#353

Post by stouset »

RestlessMind wrote: post #346
stouset wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I totally get that, but it's a) unfortunate that when one buys a home, their financial self-interest becomes immediately opposed to the needs of the overwhelming majority in this city who rent, and b) ridiculous that city politics safeguards the value of thes…

> city politics safeguards the value of these risky bets by homeowners Mainly because homeowners are more engaged in the city politics? If renters or would-be homeowners were more engaged, this would have been a totally different situation.

You might be surprised to find that most renters have jobs, and can’t get away from those jobs during the day to attend neighborhood and city council meetings.

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

#354

Post by draw_down »

debt wrote: post #121
sampo wrote: post #25

Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need. > Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are continuing to choose the interests of those who…

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 $…

Who will make their lunches?

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

#355

Post by tabtab »

seabrookmx wrote: post #95
justherefortart wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I was told Austin is the SF of Texas?!!?! I used to laugh my ass off at ignorant Californians that would say that. It's still fucking Texas.

It's not a _terrible_ analogy though. I haven't been to all the major US cities but I got a bit of a Portland vibe from Austin. It's definitely not what I expected from my first time in Texas (I'm a West Coast Canadian).

Let's not get into the usual culture wars here. My comment was meant as a joke. My apologies if it offended anyone. Live and let live.

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

#356

Post by namlem »

TomVDB wrote: post #228
beavisthegenius wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an SF resident, you people are ruining the city.

I'm ruining my city because I went to a bunch of open houses, choose a house that I like in a nice neighborhood and paid (a lot) for it? That's definitely an original kind of argument.

If you in any way put pressure on the zoning board to reject new apartment buildings, then yes, you are ruining SF.

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

#357

Post by passiveincomelg »

aswanson wrote: post #282
dgritsko wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite authors! Reading The Diamond Age right now as a matter of fact. Favorite of his is probably Anathem or Seveneves.

All of those have been in my kindle over a year. Need time to read.

Find a hammock in Nicaragua. Worked great for me. :)

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

#358

Post by cwkoss »

badminton1 wrote: post #350
cwkoss wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except that in 2118 those wealthy residents may not need less wealthy residents because of automation.

Interesting point. I'm skeptical, but certainly plausible.

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

#359

Post by rspeer »

eanzenberg wrote: post #349
rspeer wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Japan culture is very different than US. There is inherent respect obtained from having a job, any job, and dedicated yourself to it no matter how small. Being without a job or worse, homeless, brings much shame to that person and their family. There is strong social pressure to maintain your career and pour many many hours into it.

There's strong social pressure to maintain your career and pour many hours into it in the US, too.

That doesn't have very much to do with whether there are enough places to live. If the places where the careers are have fewer available places to live than they have people, it doesn't matter how dedicated you are, you can still fall out the bottom of the market.

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

#360

Post by bobdole1234 »

debt wrote: post #121
sampo wrote: post #25

Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need. > Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are continuing to choose the interests of those who…

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 $…

So, Google pulled down 9.9B in profits last quarter. That means if they've got 88k employees, they could hand out somewhere around an EXTRA $450k to every single employee every year and still be in the green.

Facebook looks roughly the same.

The leverage of a software engineer to produce money is really quite astounding when you get them in large herds.

I'm pretty sure the Bay Area is going to be just fine.

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