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California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

nytimes.com

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Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#381

Post by tathougies »

likpok wrote: post #42
rjkennedy98 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show the stats that Bay Area is building like crazy. I am so sick of people saying things like New York and Bay Area and California are building like crazy. No they are not. There is not one stat that shows that. Period.

The bay area is building, but very unevenly. SOMA has a bunch of visible construction, as do certain places along El Camino. That can give the impression of building like crazy even when the reality is different. The other problem is the bay area only does megaprojects, so the little building it does is the extremely disruptive and visible kind.

> only does megaprojects

That's because only megaprojects can afford to overcome all the regulatory and neighborhood hurdles.

Do you think the average homeowner trying to become a landlord by converting their home into a duplex has enough money to pay for both sides of a law suit, as this developer had to?

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#382

Post by smogcutter »

allovernow wrote: post #281
davidw wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access. In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars. Same goes for housing. Also, it's a longer term process with housing, but 'filtering' is a real thing: htt…

>In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing perfectly good used cars.

Eh, I’ve heard that before as well but I don’t know if it’s true. By the time the program ended in 2009, cash for clunkers had taken ~700k cars off the market. The same year, about 35 million used cars were sold in the US[1]. Cash for clunkers was a rounding error.

[1] Had a hard time finding statistics for 2009, but it’s in here: https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010IndustryReport.p...

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#383

Post by istjohn »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #369

Let me the ask the YIMBY crowd this...what is stopping 2 dozen do you to pool funds together to build a community where land is affordable and have tailored amenities. And you can literally have your own transport to anywhere. Co-Own your shared vacation paradises. Private schools. Incorporated communities. Invest in farms and automation. You can grow your own food and use economics instead of govt bureaucracy to mak…

Because the great value of cities lies in the network effects that arise when hundreds of thousands of people live and work in the same neighborhoods. Ideas cross-polinate, spawn, and mutate creating wealth. And the value produced by a city increases super-linearly, perhaps exponentially, as population density increases. Policies that place artificial limits on city densities choke off that engine of wealth.

It may be possible to create an extremely dense, high population, productive charter city with an enormous investment of capital, but it would be far easier to simply remove the restraints that hold back our existing cities.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#384

Post by tathougies »

ryandrake wrote: post #55
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #11

How about we talk about building infrastructure? The whole Bay Area is building like crazy, and yet the roads are getting worse (more building? more traffic lights!). Public transportation is a big joke around here. Caltrain from South San Jose to Mountain View? We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does not go this route on weekends. We have the same situation as a startup focused on developing a p…

Not to mention water, sewer, electrical capacity, schools, parks, police and fire services... You can’t just plop a 100-unit apartment down and then say you helped with the housing problem.

So typically, developers pay the fees to develop water, sewer, and electrical capacity, and sufficiently large developments must pay for parks and even schools. Property tax pays for fire service.

Source: schedule fees for various bay area cities on new construction.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#385

Post by zacksinclair »

jayd16 wrote: post #371

This might be an unpopular question but why is everyone certain that more housing will cut homelessness when these California cities are already quite dense (not the most in the world but more than most of the US)? Why don't we assume more housing will not simply bring more non-homeless from elsewhere? The homeless are certainly not the most competitive home buyers.

More housing is not a panacea for homelessness - but supply and demand are real. Increasing supply will decrease equilibrium price; this increase in affordability is one measure (of the many necessary) to help homelessness.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#386

Post by bbreier »

Koremat6666 wrote: post #346
jdc wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you fill us in on what those reasons might be instead of making strawman arguments?

>A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. I do not think strawman argument means what you think it means. I am not even refuting YIMBY argument. I am suggesting that since there is a NIMBY group which has already been successfully achieving their goals and ap…

Why don't you fill us in on what those reasons might be?

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#387

Post by tathougies »

jayd16 wrote: post #371

This might be an unpopular question but why is everyone certain that more housing will cut homelessness when these California cities are already quite dense (not the most in the world but more than most of the US)? Why don't we assume more housing will not simply bring more non-homeless from elsewhere? The homeless are certainly not the most competitive home buyers.

Yes, you are totally right. The homeless issue in SF is one of drug addiction. The issue that housing would solve is exorbitant rents in the area. People aren't homeless because of prices. But people are leaving the area leaving Silicon Valley less competitive.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#388

Post by tmh79 »

rb808 wrote: post #380

Not luxury apartments. Projects. In the 50s and 60s NYC built loads of massive housing projects for the poorest people on welfare. This is something that is needed in California. Most of the homeless can't afford fancy new builds, the state should be building big cheap buildings to house the people who can't afford anything. Say there are 20k units required in the Bay Area, each building can have 20 floors, 25 aprts…

Yea... there are way more than 20k units needed in the bay area (all 9 countie), its closer to 1m. You need to account for the huge amount of office space growth in the past 15 years and the next 10 years, as well as our historical trend of underbuilding due to regulations for the past 40 years.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#389

Post by papreclip »

gdubs wrote: post #61

Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay Area without turning it into Los Angeles?

There are going to be tradeoffs one way or another.

You can build a bunch of high rises and fill them with people, and private transportation will become impossible. The experience of going to the beach or some hiking spot on the weekend will be degraded. Everyone will be living in a godawful megacity instead of the nice neighborhood they'd rather live in. There's a reason people push back against growth with respect to housing.

The real problem is overpopulation. If you eliminate one negative feedback loop for population growth, you will ultimately run into another one, and all the different kinds of waste we produce (CO2, garbage, light and noise pollution) will only pile up while finite resources in the region (breathing room, nature, water, room on the road and on hiking trails) will be divvied up into smaller portions

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#390

Post by jayd16 »

zacksinclair wrote: post #385
jayd16 wrote: post #371

This might be an unpopular question but why is everyone certain that more housing will cut homelessness when these California cities are already quite dense (not the most in the world but more than most of the US)? Why don't we assume more housing will not simply bring more non-homeless from elsewhere? The homeless are certainly not the most competitive home buyers.

More housing is not a panacea for homelessness - but supply and demand are real. Increasing supply will decrease equilibrium price; this increase in affordability is one measure (of the many necessary) to help homelessness.

>Increasing supply will decrease equilibrium price

Hmm but this is not a given is it? I think many would move to SF if housing was only slightly cheaper.

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