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The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

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

#91

Post by mikeyouse »

epoxyhockey wrote: post #20

Housing affordability is a nation-wide problem. Since the housing bust of 2007, little new housing stock has been added, save for oil & gas boomtowns of Texas and North Dakota. We are all now competing for limited housing in most every major metropolitan area. The solution is for every city to build more housing, not just SF. Unfortunately, new housing starts have only recovered to 1993 levels. http://www.macrotrends…

It's even more striking if you adjust for population:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=...

That's just a quick look of housing starts / population but we've steadily been building fewer houses and the whole thing fell of a cliff during the financial crisis. Even in the recovery, we're off the chart.

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

joshrotenberg wrote: post #83
mahyarm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ferries are even slower and less reliable in my experience. If you didn't live where the track died, then you would still say BART is more reliable. I've noticed BART is less reliable in the edges vs the core of SF, berkeley and downtown oakland

I ride (and complain about) BART regularly to/from SF from the Berkeley/El Cerrito area. The truth is that it's still pretty reliable, though having lived where I am now since 2004 the decline in reliability and increase in crowding clearly isn't going to stop. One alternative is AC Transit's transbay service, which I swore by for many years. Unfortunately the increase in road traffic has that option declining as wel…

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by gedy »

mikeyouse wrote: post #87
jjav wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are only adjusted upon sale of the property While often repeated, that is incorrect. In reality property tax goes up 2% every year under prop 13.

So over 20 years, your property taxes would increase by ~49%. The median sale price in 1996 for a home in SF was $275/sq. ft, today it's more like $1,250/sq ft. 450% appreciation in 20 years, or something like 7x faster than property tax increases.

And why exactly would that help housing availability and costs for people living in SF?

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

#94

Post by ThrustVectoring »

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…

>However, after years and years of very slow building, the amount of pent up demand is such that even if builders were allowed to construct houses, 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.

I hate the term "affordable housing". All dense housing construction helps make housing more affordable - after all, you'll be convincing people who can afford it to move out of "bad" housing into the nice stuff you're building.

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

#95

Post by joshrotenberg »

mahyarm wrote: post #88
joshrotenberg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ride (and complain about) BART regularly to/from SF from the Berkeley/El Cerrito area. The truth is that it's still pretty reliable, though having lived where I am now since 2004 the decline in reliability and increase in crowding clearly isn't going to stop. One alternative is AC Transit's transbay service, which I swore by for many years. Unfortunately the increase in road traffic has that option declining as wel…

Boats are fundamentally slow and cannot dock at the center of a city where most jobs are, but it's edges. Docking and boarding/unboarding is a minimum 5-10 minute process too. A really fast ferry goes at 30 knots, which is around 35 miles per hour. Often ferries are there because building the equivalent bridge or train doesn't meet the cost/benefit ratio, otherwise they are an inferior transportation option. The reas…

Sorry, to clarify I was saying that the only ferry service that does exist is from Jack London Square and then north of that all the way up in Vallejo. The entire, pretty well populated chunk of the East Bay between those two points basically has BART from Richmond, AC Transit Transbay, or their cars as an option into SF and below. That was sufficient for a while, but is less so more and more.

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

#96

Post by gedy »

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…

You should separate absentee owners from all owner occupied. Otherwise it seems you are saying: "Housing is too expensive - so we need to increase the property tax to be much higher than it is now."

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

#97

Post by Renevith »

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…

> If you have a job that pays $100,000 and the taxes on your $250,000 house is $7,500 (3% property tax) and the tax quadruples to $30,000 in five years; why would you want the market fluctuations to be able to force an individual to leave their house?

I shed exactly zero tears for someone whose $250k property quadruples in value to $1m in five years. Sell the house and dance with joy at your (untaxed!) $750k capital gain.

The only argument for freezing tax assessments is to soak the new residents in favor of the current residents. It's a result of the absolute worst kind of democracy: voting to make other people pay more taxes.

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

#98

Post by rsync »

muzz wrote: post #69
zt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the author) Prop 13 is a problem, no doubt. It would deserve a very long essay -- some of them exist as sub-essays within Kim-Mai Cutler's writings. I tried to focus on policy ideas that, more-or-less, San Francisco could implement themselves.

The magnitude of Prop 13's distortions contribute much more to the problem than policies that a city could implement itself. Housing is often viewed as a San Francisco problem, but really it's an area-wide problem acutely and a state-wide problem more broadly. I.e., areas outside the policy of San Francisco, such as peninsula, south bay, etc, are not significantly cheaper. And entire other metros, like Los Angeles an…

I am sympathetic to the notion that prop 13 is a massive distortion that is driving all of these problems ...

But I have a hard time reconciling that with the relative pricing in other equally desirable coastal areas that do not have prop 13 (or anything like it).

I am simplifying greatly, but in a broad sense, SF housing is as expensive as Boston housing is as expensive as NYC housing ... and certain hot-or-not inspired pic sites[1] lead me to believe that Vancouver beats all of them.

Are you suggesting that, all else being equal, if prop13 was not extant, SF housing would be markedly lower than the aforementioned areas ?

I can't imagine it would be ...

[1] http://www.crackshackormansion.com/

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

#99

Post by mjevans »

gedy wrote: post #93
mikeyouse wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So over 20 years, your property taxes would increase by ~49%. The median sale price in 1996 for a home in SF was $275/sq. ft, today it's more like $1,250/sq ft. 450% appreciation in 20 years, or something like 7x faster than property tax increases.

And why exactly would that help housing availability and costs for people living in SF?

Supply side market pressure. More housing, lots, and lost, and lots of housing. Also, corresponding infrastructure (including civic utilities like parks) to accommodate the additional residents.

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

#100

Post by socrates2016 »

Rich people with money vs rich people with property. The poor people have mostly been driven out already. There is plenty of housing for tech workers. The problem is it's not hip enough: bay view, outer mission, outer sunset, outer richmond, portola valley, etc...
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