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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

#611

Post by exterrestrial »

woah wrote: post #427
exterrestrial wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job. Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Ra…

Wait.. so you are just opposed to people having somewhere to live? You’re saying that more apartments on the market makes prices higher? I don’t think I’m going to be able to follow the logic here. The problem with the “try to understand NIMBYs” concern trolling in this thread is that there isn’t much to understand. The only common thread in NIMBY philosophy is fear of change, and some mild xenophobia. I think there’…

When investors buy property, they almost always intend to raise it’s value to increase their profit. That’s how this works. They very often tear down affordable units and build luxury ones, because the YIMBY policies peculiarly never take issue with that.

Realize most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and is why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.

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

#612

Post by exterrestrial »

darksaints wrote: post #214
exterrestrial wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job. Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Ra…

Speaking as the SO of a major property management company exec operating in Portland, no it wasn't a policy that benefits landlords. Not in the slightest. More competition and lower prices are a landlord's and developer's worst nightmare. And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are lower than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go up regardless, and the scale of development that happened act…

As I said, rents are higher than ever before. Why should renters care if investors are exploiting them for as much profit as they originally wanted to? My point stands: rents are higher than ever before. Not lower.

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

#613

Post by exterrestrial »

throwaway34241 wrote: post #430
exterrestrial wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job. Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Ra…

I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for to be convinced but I'll try. First of all, for example in the Bay Area there are more people who would like to live there than there are houses, and so the people with more money bid up the price and "win" the house, while the people with less money are priced out and must live elsewhere. Hopefully you agree with this basic premise? With this model, if there is one less…

Citing Japan only further proves my point. Property values don’t appreciate the same in Japan because, and one reason is that they don’t have a finance industry that allows them to. Land owners cannot get rich by mere property appreciation like they can here. I definitely think we should imitate Japan more, but this isn’t simply a matter of “allowing more housing”. Acting like that’s all there is to it is disingenuous.

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

#614

Post by Spooky23 »

davidw wrote: post #227
Spooky23 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned. 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 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…

Take a stroll in a prosperous city like NYC and tell me why the market hasn’t filled the empty storefronts.

The reason is that there are implicit price floors through tax policy. It’s cheaper to “lose” money on property to offset taxes on winning properties.

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

#615

Post by joefkelley »

kofejnik wrote: post #586
joefkelley wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tough thing is of course you are right. It's obviously in your best interest to vote against new housing if you own a house. But it's not in society's best interest.

> But it's not in society's best interest. 1. why are you so sure? What makes you an authority on the whole society's interests? 2. even if so, are you saying that collective interests trump individual rights? This is socialism 101. Government will decide who should live (and work) where, and who should own what.

1. I am not sure. This is all just my layman's interpretation. I'll admit I could be very wrong and have no expertise. I'm just discussing. 2. No, in general I believe there's a difficult balance to be struck between individual rights and collective interests. I tend to lean more toward individual rights actually.

I would love it if local governments would stop restricting the rights of local developers and allow the free market to determine what is built where more often.

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

#616

Post by dv_dt »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #526
dv_dt wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a stretch, it doesn't increase the market price or the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, if anything it lets the owner save more money so they have more options to buy.

It does increase the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, because for a given level of government spending, if the government gets less tax revenue from long-term owners they have to get more from newer owners. It also increases the minimum price the seller is willing to accept for the property, because they won't sell unless the buyer offers enough to compensate them for the higher tax rate they'll…

No actually prop13 limits both the property tax percentage of market value as well as increase of the tax from year to year.

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

#617

Post by cbHXBY1D »

usaar333 wrote: post #598
tlb wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that ending rent control increases prices does not support the claim that building more homes increases prices. They should have opposite effects according to basic supply and demand theory.

Ending rent control also should lead to lower prices in non rent controlled housing according to supply and demand. The sequence of events that lead to a rise in prices are similar - that is there is evidence that more affluent people moving in to a local area can result in rents going up for others in that same area.

A good example is Jerry Brown's 10K Project — his plan to attract 10,000 people to live in downtown Oakland by 2001, which was the cornerstone of his tenure as mayor. The idea was that 10k affluent people would create a positive feedback loop of gentrification. As someone living in the area in the 90s-2000s, I can say it "worked" but at the expense of the working class as Oakland began gentrifying rapidly by 2010.

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

#618

Post by Spooky23 »

mlyle wrote: post #293
Spooky23 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned. 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 supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access. vs. the article: > ... how expensive new housing today would become affordable old housing tomorrow ...

With 1-2 family houses, that’s how it works. Not for high density.

For complexes, everything is based on depreciation cycles. Apartments typically get shittier over a relatively short timeframe.

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

#619

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

The 100k mile thing came with the enhanced emission controls in the late 90s.

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

#620

Post by darksaints »

exterrestrial wrote: post #612
darksaints wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as the SO of a major property management company exec operating in Portland, no it wasn't a policy that benefits landlords. Not in the slightest. More competition and lower prices are a landlord's and developer's worst nightmare. And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are lower than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go up regardless, and the scale of development that happened act…

As I said, rents are higher than ever before. Why should renters care if investors are exploiting them for as much profit as they originally wanted to? My point stands: rents are higher than ever before. Not lower.

Before rent control passed, this was what was happening.

https://reason.com/2018/10/10/booming-construction-and-falli...

> Portland added 4,419 unit of completed housing in 2016, a slight increase from the roughly 4,365 it added in 2015, which combined is more than all the housing units added in the five years prior to 2014, according to the Portland Housing Bureau's 2017 annual report.

> Year-over-year average rents declined by a full 1.2 percent in the city of Portland, with average rents dropping to $1,140 per month for a median one-bedroom apartment, according to the yearly rent report from Apartment List. It's a similar story in Seattle, with Apartment List data showing rents declining 1.6 percent from where they were in 2017. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle is $1,346.

When you don't build more, rents go up. When you start to build enough, rents go down. It's pretty fucking simple. In fact, it is econ 101.

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