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

The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

blog.zactownsend.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 243 posts

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#71

Post by tlogan »

paulpauper wrote: post #66

We are on a self-imposed path leading to only one place: a city that is entirely rich and, more or less, entirely white. I want to live in a beautiful, multiethnic, socioeconomically mixed community. A city where people of low, moderate, and high incomes live together, and people of different ethnicities interact. I guess he's never heard of Chinatown. SF is one of the most most ethnically diverse cities in the count…

Did you know that Valencia St was full of latinos? Or are you saying that as long as there is something called "Chinatown" it is ok to kick all Mexicans out?

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#72

Post by muzz »

BurningFrog wrote: post #62
Fede_V wrote: post #31

Housing in SF is an incredibly powerful illustration of the danger of letting things get so bad that the usual remedies no longer apply. Basically: - Traditionally, the proper fix for a shortage of housing is to build more houses. Just lift the existing regulations, and let the free market do what it does best: take care of the demand at an efficient price. - However, after years and years of very slow building, the…

...the houses would almost all be built for the very well off. The amount of houses you'd have to build before you started constructing truly affordable housing is immense. This is a common mistake. In reality, all added supply brings down price levels across the board.

Actual market dynamics are complicated. There are so many effects that happen when housing is built. New housing in SF is being sold to out-of-towners who don't actually live there. Building housing into a downtrodden neighborhood can improve it significantly and actually increase values, etc.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#73

Post by b3550943 »

imtringued wrote: post #45
ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

It doesn't matter how much housing you build. The landlords will still charge as much as the market can bear.

Fuck off with your downvotes. You retards don't even understand basic supply and demand.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#74

Post by coroutines »

mdb333 wrote: post #28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281... Good thoughts. You failed to mention Prop 13 which was put into place a long time ago and simply doesn't make sense anymore. It's at least part of the reason it is so affordable (in relative terms) for rich people to keep second homes here when they bought them years ago. We live in a building of 60 units where probably at least a third of those are abse…

Prop 13 is really great and really bad.

My grandparents own a home in Livermore they've had from 1925. Livermore is now a very costly place to live in, and modern property taxes would make it impossible for them to live in a city they saw grow up around them.

I do think Prop 13's protection should be eliminated for businesses - most definitely.

If you're a landlord, perhaps it would make sense to allow up to 2 x Prop 13-protected [low-density] properties, and all those after would have unfixed property tax.

The problem here is landlords will simply pass this along to renters, so it seems 'sane' to just eliminate Prop 13 for commercial and not residential properties.

We lose billions of dollars in tax money from corporations because of Prop 13. :(

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#75

Post by api »

aetherson wrote: post #63
nkurz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's mostly a "thought exercise", but here's a treatment looking at the costs of commuting to SF from Las Vegas: http://mobile.businessinsider.com/its-cheaper-to-commute-fro...

As that article points out, you're looking at 2 hours of commuting each way with that. I assure you, you can find a cheaper total cost of living + commuting within 2 hours of SF by car.

My point was simply how absurd this is, not that it's a practical alternative.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#76

Post by runchberries »

shostack wrote: post #46
runchberries wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. In Palo Alto my crappy 1 bedroom apartment that I was living in 3 years ago was in the middle of suburban jungle (no restaurants or shops for a few miles in any direction) and was $1650. I looked last week and it was $2500. That was a crappy place. If you want to live by downtown PA (university Ave) its right around $2800-3000 for a 1 bedroom, for places with 20 year old appliances and no upgrades. The peninsul…

Can you clarify where in PA you were that had no restaurants or shops for a few miles in any direction? PA is relatively small, and there aren't any apartments further west in the really nice parts. Further east there are still stores and shops and such (albeit not as nice as near downtown).

Past past California ave about 2 miles near el camino. It was a little over 2 miles to California Ave and maybe 2 miles to the san Antonio shopping center. They weren't pleasant walks the most direct way (along el camnino) and even longer if you decided to take the scenic route and everything is spread out.

Not an impossible feat to bike, but the energy is low and there are much better ways to spend rent money.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#77

Post by tptacek »

Animats wrote: post #50

"We are on a self-imposed path leading to only one place: a city that is entirely rich and, more or less, entirely white." Sounds like a plan. The problem is this. SF is built out; to build something, you have to demolish something first. So the alternative is high-rise housing. High-rise low-income housing, especially high-rise low-income housing, has been a disaster in the US. Chicago had to demolish the Robert Tay…

Hold on. Chicago demolished the Taylor houses, but not because they were tall; Chicago continues to build high-rise housing.

I went to high school across the street from the ABLA projects. Most of those were low-rise buildings. They got demolished, too.

Nobody is proposing to build high-rise housing projects.

I moved out of San Francisco at the end of 2001, and it was (for the time) nosebleed expensive. It's obviously gotten much worse since then, but even at the end of the first bubble it was notoriously expensive, and gentrification was a top-of-mind concern for the whole area.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#78

Post by BurningFrog »

wernercd wrote: post #70
BurningFrog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...the houses would almost all be built for the very well off. The amount of houses you'd have to build before you started constructing truly affordable housing is immense. This is a common mistake. In reality, all added supply brings down price levels across the board.

But you completely ignore the "time and amount of houses it would take" aspect. If you can only build 10 houses, and make 10% commission... are you going to build a shack? or are you going to build mansion? The houses that get built, if the gates were to open wide, would all start off on the high end... while that would start a downward pressure, it would still be a very long time before those who can afford $200k fo…

Well, a mansion should be able to house more people than a shack, so it would increase supply more, and pressure prices down more.

New housing would start off being expensive because all housing in SF is expensive. Not the other way around.

Maybe the root of this fallacy is that it assumes prices are constant. If you build something today and charge $5k/month for it, that's how it will somehow remain forever. But in reality prices are set by supply and demand, for both new and old housing.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#79

Post by mahyarm »

Agustus wrote: post #67
mdb333 wrote: post #28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281... Good thoughts. You failed to mention Prop 13 which was put into place a long time ago and simply doesn't make sense anymore. It's at least part of the reason it is so affordable (in relative terms) for rich people to keep second homes here when they bought them years ago. We live in a building of 60 units where probably at least a third of those are abse…

In your example, the building you describe is a condominium? If so, then what does it matter what your tax bill is and if they are absentee owners; if the owner maintains the property, pays their bills and taxes, then you should be happy to have them. Tax reassessments during the boom of 2001 to 2007 were on track to price a lot of people out of their houses based on their current economic status. Proposition 13 and…

It creates a built in incentive for NIMBYs to not block development, lest they feel the pain of increased 'rent' too. If the bay area built as many units at the rate of texas or seattle for example, none of this would of been a big deal.

Imagine old people viciously fighting for increased development lest their property tax bill goes up, unlike the opposite today at most city council meetings. The elderly drive most housing policy in many ways because they have the free time, general boredom and incentive to participate in the political process this way.

Property tax is also almost never approaching %3. The range can be %0.5 to %2.5. A high property tax rate actually helps modulate the value of houses in a market since the price of housing is based on the monthly payment. This is what contributes to texas being a cheap housing state, since the high property tax prevents housing values from going up too quickly.

Unoccupied properties also cause the supply to go down without a person or family inside it contributing to the local economy. Idle assets should be put to productive use, it's half the point of a property tax already.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#80

Post by DavidSJ »

Agustus wrote: post #67
mdb333 wrote: post #28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281... Good thoughts. You failed to mention Prop 13 which was put into place a long time ago and simply doesn't make sense anymore. It's at least part of the reason it is so affordable (in relative terms) for rich people to keep second homes here when they bought them years ago. We live in a building of 60 units where probably at least a third of those are abse…

In your example, the building you describe is a condominium? If so, then what does it matter what your tax bill is and if they are absentee owners; if the owner maintains the property, pays their bills and taxes, then you should be happy to have them. Tax reassessments during the boom of 2001 to 2007 were on track to price a lot of people out of their houses based on their current economic status. Proposition 13 and…

> In your example, the building you describe is a condominium? If so, then what does it matter what your tax bill is and if they are absentee owners; if the owner maintains the property, pays their bills and taxes, then you should be happy to have them.

The owner may not care, but the city as a whole should: it makes poor use of the scarce housing supply if sales are discouraged due to tax artifacts.

Post reply on HN