If you click the link and, leaving all the rest of the defaults alone, drop the required affordable housing percentage from 10% to 0%, you lose about 4,000 affordable units but gain 6,000 market-rate ones.
So, would this change increase or decrease displacement?
Therefore, the benefit of the extra market-rate units fails to offset the damage from the loss of affordable units (6000/2 < 4000). It fails similarly, but to a lesser degree, if you drop it to 5%.
But if you crank it up to 15%, the gains from the extra affordable units are overwhelmed by the lost market-rate units (4000/2 > 784). So it looks like the default value of 10% is the sweet spot.
By the way, the math is even easier for the 25% threshold that Supervisors Jane Kim and Aaron Peskin are proposing (http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Prop-C-...), because that would actually lead to less affordable housing being built. Less market-rate, too. A double displacement whammy.
The entire concept of low income housing is a scam to keep market rate prices high. Build enough market rate housing that the price falls to what low income people can afford and you don't need any low income housing.
If the government spent the money it spends subsidizing rents on subsidizing construction then the problem would be solved.
The dangerous problem is that it isn't the government who subsidizes rents, it's everyone else. If the subsidy were visible (the government writing a check to landlords) people would raise hell. Instead it's a hidden subsidy. The housing costs and rents of everyone goes up (including low-income income people) except for the lucky few who win the subsidized housing lottery.
The intent of low income housing is laudable, but the execution causes more problems than it solves.
The government forces everyone to write cheques to car owners. (Even the car owners themselves, of course. It's a tragedy of the commons; like eg communal charging for electricity in a whole city.)
It's not tragedy of the commons, it's path dependence. If you don't have excellent mass transit then you need parking, so you build parking. Then if you have parking everybody drives and nobody is willing to invest in mass transit, so you continue to need parking.
Now, we mostly see the demand for parking at zero [#] marginal cost to the parker, not the demand for parking at its true cost---because the costs are shared by society.
The short term demand for parking is relatively inelastic---so right after introducing pervasive charging for curbside parking and dropping minimum parking requirements for new developments, we will see roughly the same number of cars parked. (That's where your dependency comes in.)
In the longer term, demand for parking is more elastic. (One can see a similar relationship between oil price and demand for gas guzzling cars: inelastic / path dependent in the short run. More elastic with enough time.)
This holds even without public transport at all. Public transport is just one of the things that can serve as an (imperfect) substitute for private car rides. There are other ones, like car sharing, choosing job/home combinations that are closer to each other, telecommuting, home delivery of groceries, buying groceries in bulk, etc.
(To take one example right now, people already prefer to work closer to home, and make trade-offs all the time when considering a home or a job. The point of indifference between eg home price/salary and commute length will shift. Full disclosure: I hate commuting myself and have decided to fork out the money to live very close to the office.)
All the people in the market are probably much cleverer than me in coming up with substitutes. The price mechanism can guide them.
Some of these substitutes can and are provided by the private market. Public transport is generally not. Though eg Britain has privatised train companies.
Add in as another complication that without careful regulation, lots of public transport options are natural monopolies. One attempt to blunt this effect is by careful separation: eg run the rail network as a heavily regulated, public utility and make private companies bid for the right to run trains on it and for slots at the stations etc. And be very careful to specify that apart from meeting some minimum standards, the height of the bid alone determines the winner of the auction---politicians like beauty contests, because it gives them power to meddle.
Since I'm already on a tangent: the American freight train market and its history are another interesting piece to learn from. (It's doing pretty well, mostly because they don't have many passenger trains clogging up the network like in Europe, and the new regulatory environment of the Staggers Rail Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staggers_Rail_Act) seems to have worked out reasonably well. (They called it `deregulation', but that almost never happens---it's just a different form of regulation.)
[#] Zero in terms of dollars plus the effort and hassle of congestion and cruising for parking.
> All the people in the market are probably much cleverer than me in coming up with substitutes. The price mechanism can guide them.
I'm not sure you're going to like the market price of parking. If a parking space is 25% of the size of a $3000/month apartment then the market price of a parking space should be something like $1/hour, which isn't that high. And which puts it right in the hard spot where people subsidizing the price down to zero may actually make sense.
If all you care about is maximizing the revenue from parking spaces then you can set a price like that, but having a price at all discourages people from using parking spaces that you've already paid to construct whether you use them or not. And if you don't use them then the local shops lose customer traffic. So the local shop owner does the math and says hey, if there was free parking here I would get an extra $20,000 profit from more customer traffic, so I should go lobby the city to have free parking even if it means my taxes will be $10,000 higher.
Then their customers realize that if parking was paid for through taxes rather than at the meter the local businesses would be paying part of it instead of the customers paying all of it, so they would be paying less, and paying at the meter is more stressful than paying via taxes anyway.
Then the government realizes that to get the money from taxes they only have to put a slightly higher tax rate on the tax forms but to get it from parking they need meters and credit card processing computers and customer service and parking wardens and dispute resolution systems and the whole works.
So the vote comes up and 90% of everybody votes for free parking because the lack of free parking would collectively cost them more in money and grief than it costs to provide free parking.
The way out of this is to make the alternative to cars (or parking) more attractive, without making cars less attractive. Because people are going to fight you and win if you try to make cars less attractive without immediately replacing them with something which is at least as good.
Already existing parking (especially curbside parking) should be priced to reach approximately 85% occupancy. Less, and you are leaving too many spaces empty, higher and people have to cruise for a while before they find a spot.
That pricing will not discourage too many people directly---because you price it exactly at a point where not too many people are discouraged. (That point might have to be adjusted over time.)
Like a congestion charge, you shift from people bidding with their willingness to sit in traffic and endure queues, to people bidding with their chequebook. (Interestingly, your mix of parkers would shift towards more people who value their time more than their money. Affluent customers are good customers!)
Congestion charges worked out well for Singapore and London.
Politically, it's a good idea to hand out the fees from parking at the same level as the people who can decide about it. So if local opposition could derail the scheme, you have to hand out the proceeds very locally. Otherwise you get the political dynamics you describe.
Charging for parking is relatively easy and does not require high-tech. For example Singapore uses a scheme (amongst others) where you buy a bunch of perforated cards. When you want to park, you take a card and push out the appropriate chads to indicate the date and time of day and display the card in your car's window. Each card is valid for an half-hour slot. You can punch out multiple cards with consecutive slots. Each card can only be used once (obviously).
(If you want a crud variable pricing, you can require people to display multiple simultaneous cards for peak hours.)
I have also seen a system where you send a premium SMS with your licence plate number to pay.
> That pricing will not discourage too many people directly---because you price it exactly at a point where not too many people are discouraged.
Except that you're admitting to discouraging 15% of the customers. If there isn't enough parking for everyone then the shops much prefer people to be cruising around so that as soon as a space opens up there is someone to take it, rather than not showing up in the first place because they can't afford parking.
> (Interestingly, your mix of parkers would shift towards more people who value their time more than their money. Affluent customers are good customers!)
You can't actually make more money strictly by losing profitable customers, even if the customers you lose are below average customers.
> Like a congestion charge
It is like a congestion charge, which have exactly the same problems.
> Congestion charges worked out well for Singapore and London.
They keep poor people off the roads so rich people can use them, anyway.
> Charging for parking is relatively easy and does not require high-tech.
People don't use the high-tech stuff because it's harder. Either way you need something vs. the alternative where you don't need anything.
> Politically, it's a good idea to hand out the fees from parking at the same level as the people who can decide about it. So if local opposition could derail the scheme, you have to hand out the proceeds very locally. Otherwise you get the political dynamics you describe.
The problem is there are no "proceeds" -- the money is going to come from the local residents whether it's parking fees or taxes. The only way you can save anything is to have fewer parking spaces, which nobody is going to allow until after there is already a better alternative in place.
> Build enough market rate housing that the price falls to what low income people can afford and you don't need any low income housing.
There are other kind of problems like buy-to-leave (http://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Buy_to_leave).
In that scenario the amount of housing to build to get to a point that it is affordable is a lot higher than it should be.
> subsidizing construction
If you mean state owned properties. I agree on that. Having low rent housing competing in the market bring prices down. But the number should be significant enough. Otherwise it just becomes a lottery where a few win but has not broader impact in the market.
> There are other kind of problems like buy-to-leave (http://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Buy_to_leave). In that scenario the amount of housing to build to get to a point that it is affordable is a lot higher than it should be.
Not if you publicly announce your intentions ahead of time. Then people have no incentive to do that because the expectation will be for housing prices to decline and the investment to lose value.
> If you mean state owned properties.
I mean giving subsidies to builders who create new market rate housing. Although another major problem is zoning regulations that prevent new housing from being constructed regardless of financing.
The solution to buy-to-leave is surely extremely high taxation on properties left empty (and I'm talking "10% of market value" levels of taxation, enough to obliterate any possible returns on investment).
That would be either unreasonably punitive or easy to avoid. Properties needing renovation or structural work can't reasonably be penalised for not being occupied, so owners would simply arrange for unoccupied buildings to be permanently having work done on them. I'm sure there are plenty of builders that would help them out for moderate fees. I'm sure there are other ways round something like this too.
Or you can just keep the taxes on unoccupied properties and people will make sure they get fixed up quickly. You'd be surprised how quickly and efficiently work gets done when penalties for lateness are high enough.
> That would be either unreasonably punitive [...]
If it was levied on the value of the land alone, there's no such thing as unreasonably punitive: land values would just drop until the tax is priced in.
If you look purely at economic efficiency, and leave out any morals about _who_ should be taxed, the only thing keeping taxes from going up all the way to taking everything is economic inefficiency. Ie if you heavily tax a particular widget, people will produce fewer widgets.
Land is fixed. You can't produce it, thus no tax can interfere with its supply. (Unless it's a tax system that incentives you to keep your land off the market, like negative gearing in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_gearing).)
However, if the tax was levied on the value of land plus building on it, a high tax would discourage building houses---whose supply is emphatically not fixed.
That's fairly easily dealt with. Require it be occupied for more than 6 months of the year, otherwise 1% (or 0.5%, whatever) of market value per month unoccupied. 80% of construction costs can be subtracted from any unoccupied housing fees applied. Any fudging on the construction fees paid/received is tax fraud on one or both parties.
I really like this idea, except that "market value" is vague, and would require a bit of work to determine accurately. Maybe the best you could do would be to have a by-block square footage to value chart to be used for these purposes (and you would want a definitive source anyways, to prevent gaming the market value side).
This could also help quite a bit with the property owned in New York as a way to launder money[1].
It seems like a cute solution. But it's a bit unnecessary, and complicated.
Ie you probably would want to tax under-occupation as well. (Otherwise you just declare a bunch of apartments as a single unit, and have a single dude check in every once in awhile. They did that in Britain, because of different legal treatment of trespassing between empty and `occupied' buildings.) But how do you define under-occupation? Where do you draw the line?
Just use a land tax. It's simpler and harder to evade.
2008 was because of incredibly dangerous mortgages being handed out due to a mix of deregulation and the government still guaranteeing corporate profits (bailouts or otherwise) so the mortgage lenders involved didn't need to actually accept the risks. It was at the point where a bank would write you a mortgage on practically anything for any amount because they were effectively free money with no risk to the lender.
That environment did artificially inflate the growth of urban sprawl McMansions above any working class persons paygrade, but it was nowhere close to direct intentional housing subsidy beyond trying to achieve some pipe dream of families on 30k combined income affording a 5k square foot house.
So you're saying you don't believe that an affordable unit has twice the displacement-fighting power of a market-rate unit?
If so, what's the basis for this belief? Have you read the study I linked to, which concludes otherwise? If so, what part of its reasoning do you contest?
The flaw is scale. If you build one market rate unit (or ten or a hundred) then you get displacement, because the price of the market rate units remain too high for low income people to afford. You need to build a million.
What do you mean? The model is nothing but rent=demand/supply with an attempt to figure out what weights go on these parameters. What would you do differently?
It may be that it's just not obvious what the individual rent values are in the model, and that they do go down when the supply goes up. The only numbers visibly shown in the model are the number of units, the tax revenue, and the number of "affordable units"; the model doesn't display the expected distribution of rents, or the actual threshold for "affordable". As a result, it's hard to see how the parameters actually affect individual rents.
For the primary target audience (city planners), this makes sense.
I think you're reading it backwards. The coefficients are the exponents that follow the parameters. The large negative one is the housing supply, because prices go down as more housing exists.
And lose a third of it to the government bureaucracy? And probably construct a new generation of welfare-trap, making people afraid to earn more money for fear of losing their benefit?
Government price controls do not fundamentally change the cost only the price.
If the government is so efficient and can, somehow, make housing cheaper than it would be in a free market why shouldn't they also take control of the food supply? Computers? Software? All industry?
Because thus far they have intervened with the opposite effect, to push housing prices upwards.
In London this is through the Green Belt, torturous planning laws, height and density restrictions, low interest rates, government-backed mortgages and lending schemes, etc.
Supply in the markets for food, computers, software, etc. is not nearly so controlled by government action (or inaction).
The government created a market failure by passing restrictive zoning regulations leading to a severe under-supply of housing. Resolving the market failure requires either eliminating the restrictions or providing enough cash money to justify the builder's expense in contending with them.
Obviously the better solution is to do away with the restrictions, but politics is the devil's day job and all that.
Government policy determines the price of land. Land is a major component of the cost of housing, so it stands to reason that government intervention in housing policy can make housing less expensive.
For instance, imposing a very high land value tax would reduce the value of land, which would in turn reduce the cost of housing.
> For instance, imposing a very high land value tax would reduce the value of land, which would in turn reduce the cost of housing.
It would only potentially reduce the tax-exclusive cost of housing. It would not reduce the tax-inclusive cost. (In fact, the rational expectation would be that it would radically increase the tax-inclusive cost.)
It would not change the tax-inclusive cost of housing. Land taxes can not be passed on.
You are right, that the tax-inclusive cost of housing won't change with a land tax on its own, at least not as a first order effect.
If however, you eg use the land tax proceeds to lower taxes on labour and capital, building higher (ie using more capital for housing) will become more economically feasible. (No economic revenue will be lost. Lower taxes in a jurisdiction directly lead to higher land prices---which the land tax will capture.)
This is going off into the weeds, but the government can and does provide food assistance: food stamps. Still, though, people use those to purchase food at market prices, which makes sense.
This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't consider opportunity cost. Instead of building special units that would benefit 4,000 people, a tiny fraction of the Bay Area, cities could charge an equivalent general fee that benefits everyone. The money could pay for mass transit, parks, services for the poor, programs for children, and so on.
That Berkeley study only considers units subsidized by taxpayers when it talks about subsidized housing. Inclusionary zoning is not studied, and like all disincentives to build more homes, I think it makes displacement worse.
The bay area. The best, brightest, smartest, pedigreed, hardest working most motivated people on earth. And we cant solve the simplest problems in the Maslow's hierarchy. American Indians solved the housing problems with Teepees and Wigwams - so much for being "smart." There was an article recently where a google employee was living in a 24 ft truck in the google parking lot. This Bay Area mess is a self inflicted joke. What I find amazing is Tokyo. Tokyo, 1945, burned to the ground, population 3.5 million. Today, Tokyo is at 13 million and the Tokyo-Yokohama urban area is 37.8 million. And if you've ever been to japan public transportation is functioning and the society seems to nail basic needs much better than smarty-pants bay area.
Really appreciate the note on public transportation. Limited housing gets a lot of the press currently but other infrastructure including public transportation is pretty overwhelmed currently as well. The traffic is already the second worst in the nation [1], and existing major public transportation like bart[2] and caltrain[3] are also overloaded. It also seems like it would be a lot easier to fix as the current system is pretty crazy with most public transportation done at the county level with 20 operators in 9 counties so for most public transportation you can't cross a county line without transfering[4]. I think a lot of people living in the bay would be more open to development if there were actually going to be infrastructure to support it.
The Bay Area does not have the 2nd worst traffic - off the top of my head, NYC, LA, and DC are often ranked higher in most articles on worst traffic, and from experience, I at least know that NYC and DC have it far worse.
Report from I cited TomTom says SF in particular has second worst traffic in the US[1]. I think lots of other cities have terrible traffic and ranking would certainly change depending on how exactly one evaluates traffic and what are the limits of the metro area. Point here is just to show that traffic is already bad and public transportation is also impacted. Especially in SF where Muni is by their own report [2] the slowest and most expensive to operate public transportation of 10 comparable US cities.
I just appreciate top comment bringing up this type of infrastructure as I think there is room for big improvement in Bay Area. We really need it to support any increase in housing which is also badly needed to ensure a diverse and prosperous economy going forward.
Yeah, traffic is so bad in New York that we have to have three different rail systems to bring commuters into the city! Even investment bankers from Greenwich have to commute with the peasants, what a infrastructural tragedy!
I personally take my helicopter to work to avoid all that, but it's pretty expensive.
The problem is there's no solidarity with the newcomers, and a strong desire by incumbents to keep the place the same and not turn it into skyscraper-filled Guangzhou. For a lot of people not building housing is an important priority in their life that they will fight for. Not to mention the question of money.
You might equally ask why the tech industry feels the need to be stuck so tightly to SF when it's far more amenable to remote work than most industries.
There's also the little matter of the earthquake zone.
We don't need to turn into Guangzhou. We could cut housing prices in half by increasing the supply by 30%, and we could do that by replacing 6% of the city's single family houses with six-story apartment buildings. The other 94% could be left alone, and we wouldn't have to build anything else.
You can't try to cut prices in half withoit a story for the people who are going to lose have their investment in real estate (including tax payments on unrealized gains) or they will fight you on it. You need a way to move the windfall profits to the people crushed by regulation changes.
Those people are profiting from the misfortune of others. They aren't providing any useful good or service. They simply held on what should have been a depreciating asset, reaped the benefits of negative externalities, and now they expect the government to protect their ill-gotten gains. Fuck that. The entire point of regulation is to prevent these sorts of market failures.
The best part is many of these people aren't even landlords. So many homeowners are obsessed with the values of their homes staying high, even though it benefits them in no way whatsoever. Well, unless you count "paying more property tax" and "making the neighborhood affordable to everyone but wealthy white families" as benefits. These people are working against their own self-interest because some banker convinced them that real estate was a good investment.
Realistically, all that building is not going to happen overnight, and likely it'll only be enough to stabilize prices, rather than radically drop them.
Indeed; my point was more that even if we decided to build so much new housing that prices fell by half, it still wouldn't bring us anywhere close to Paris, much less Manhattan or Hong Kong.
Since realistically we're probably not going to do even that, fears of Manhattanization are completely unfounded.
> You might equally ask why the tech industry feels the need to be stuck so tightly to SF when it's far more amenable to remote work than most industries.
This pops up in every thread about housing.
The answer is that there's still a ton of value in being in the same place as other people. Stuff happens faster. Ideas are more easily shared. Spontaneous ideas are born.
Of course at a certain point, having to pay someone way more makes it just not worth it, but that seems to be a pretty high number for a lot of companies.
If they bought in, they don't have to. If they had got their act together 20... 40 years ago and got rid of some of the NIMBY stuff causing so many problems there, that would have helped too. If there were enough housing, no one would "have to" move away.
But no, in most western countries, there is no right to live in a city just because you currently happen to live there. If you want to live in an inclusive place with room for everyone, you have to ensure that the right policies are in place. If it's something you care about, you should get involved with these people: https://twitter.com/sfyimby
There's no right for anyone to live in any city. So why should I be cheering for a bunch of rich people coming in and forcing out people who have been living there for most of their lives?
"... a strong desire by incumbents to keep the place the same and not turn it into skyscraper-filled Guangzhou. For a lot of people not building housing is an important priority in their life that they will fight for."
Which is totally reasonable.
You or I may not like it, or disagree with it, or work against that idea, but it's incorrect to claim that incumbent property owners (anywhere) protecting their perceived value in the status quo is somehow wrong or morally bankrupt or misinformed or illiberal.
Sorry, it's morally bankrupt. Four middle class families spend more on housing than most Bay Area single-family homeowners. If it were legal for those families to live in a four-plex, they'd outbid wealthy families for that land. The wealthy pay cheaper prices by using the law to prevent people with less money from bidding against them. The wealthy can't actually afford the idyllic single-family neighborhoods they claim the right to without economic segregation laws.
"Sorry, it's morally bankrupt. Four middle class families spend more on housing than most Bay Area single-family homeowners. If it were legal for those families to live in a four-plex, they'd outbid wealthy families for that land."
In the face of injustice, some accept it as the way the world works. Others fight to end injustice. Economic segregation laws are abhorrent, and I am fighting to end them in Austin. I hope others fight to end them everywhere.
They own property, and the value of that property is linked to how hard it is to find housing for other people. Their actions make economic sense (is this what you are referring to as "reasonable"?).
Still, most people find these actions to be immoral, as they result in plenty of suffering and wasted potential. The mealymouthed excuses about preserving historical parking lots or not creating wind tunnels or whatever are easy to see through.
The balancing act is between "what I can do with my own property" and "what I can legislate to limit what other people do with their own property". Only the most libertarian would tilt almost completely in favor of the first, but I think that currently the balance in too many places is tilted far too much towards the second. And I would not hesitate to call it illiberal.
1. In one city, incumbents rule. Their property values rise to a level that keeps everyone else out. They make all the rules. They were there first and they win. It's theirs and outsiders should respect that.
2. The second city is open to anyone, always changing. Incumbents cannot expect gains by virtue of having been first. Everyone there has the same expectation of benefiting from the city as anyone else. Anyone in the country is free (and able) to make a life there, if they choose.
I know which city sounds better to me. I know which one sounds like it benefits the most people, for the longest amount of time.
Again, at the same time, why should I cheer for people who are coming in, forcing out people who have lived there for their entire lives, simply because they have more money? That sounds like straight up bullying to me.
Japan is in the worst earthquake zone. How are 2 million dollar 4:2 "homes" and stressed and strained schools a good thing? Where are your kids going to live? Do even consider planning for the future?
If you're so worried about earthquakes, you're more than welcome to leave the Bay yourself. And I love how you equate building more housing to lifeless Chinese skyscrapers.
Especially as I'm five thousand miles away from the Bay.
Anyway, the point stands that the problem isn't solved because plenty of people either don't want it solved or refuse a solution that disadvantages them the slightest bit. A common problem the world over.
> The best, brightest, smartest, pedigreed, hardest working most motivated people on earth.
Come down back to earth.
Putting your post into the context of neuroscience, Einstein's brain consisted of much smarter (or "just better" and "harder working") neurons than can be found in all other brains!
Or maybe Einstein's brilliance was an emergent property of how they are working together in their network?
You should take some time and think about the nonsense in your statement. You raise a question without much understanding. It's not in the hand of individuals, and to change system outcomes is very, very hard. Politicians and businesses have power - but they have power because they function in a system. If they go against it they lose it. Like the king on that tiny planet in "The Little Prince" who commanded the sun to rise and to set.
You understand humanity as a bunch of individuals - that will always leave you baffled why we act (or don't) the way we do. It is a very inadequate model if you try to apply it to things like the missing housing in the BA.
Also, there are risks few are talking (or thinking) about when significantly increasing the Bay Area's population: Water and earth quakes, for example (the latter can severely impact the former). http://www.bayareacouncil.org/issues-initiatives/water-polic... What will happen in "Black Swan" events? Especially since we can be pretty certain that they will come. The water situation in particular needs to be addressed for the entire Bay Area.
> What I find amazing is Tokyo. Tokyo, 1945, burned to the ground
Perhaps that's the reason why everything works? It was all rebuilt much more recently. Also, to my understanding the Japanese culture doesn't place the same value on historical structures[1][2]. It's much easier to secure right-of-way when there is less importance placed on the actual locations or buildings, or when it's expected it will be torn down at some point in the next 20-30 years anyway.
What 'historical structures' are there in Silicon Valley? The place was a bunch of orchards that were later burned down to make place for random ugly office parks. Let's be honest here.
There are portions of Silicon Valley with quite a bit of history (relatively speaking, as the West coast is fairly recently developed compared to the East coast, much less Europe). For example, San Francisco. See who comes out of the woodwork if you try to replace a chunk of Victorian style homes (the "Painted Ladies"[1]). San Jose has its own historical areas[2], as does Palo Alto[3]. I'm not saying our veneration of our history through structures is necessarily a bad thing, just that if your new city improvement project conflicts with one, you'll likely have a fight on your hands.
I've lived in a dozen cities all over the world and there is something special about the people in the Bay Area.
This is the area where the Gold Rush happened. It was an entrepot for valuable commodities. It still has that dynamic to this day. People come from all over to extract as many resources as possible, sell them and run off to somewhere else not caring about the externalities their opportunistic behavior creates. The political landscape here is mostly about pandering to special interests and never really solving social problems. Whoever panders best uses their constituent base to get elected into state and federal government positions leaving behind the dumpster fire that is the Bay Area.
the most special thing about the bay is its the best place for a software engineer to find a job in the entire country, and maybe the best density of highest paid software jobs in the world
Tokyo has a couple things that the Bay Area does not.
1) Zoning happens at the national level in Japan, not the local level so there are no, or at least very weak political mechanisms for neighbors to block projects.
2) There is no Proposition 13, which caps property tax levels for incumbent homeowners. What this means is that transit providers can pay for infrastructure needs through increases in land value created by better connections to transportation. California can't do this because if it improves infrastructure or experiences an economic boom, the incumbent property owners basically get to appropriate all the increases in land value.
> The best, brightest, smartest, pedigreed, hardest working most motivated people on earth.
Silicon Valley has the brightest minds in software engineering, which is great for building the world's most advanced ad-serving network or behavior tracking.
Software is easy.
The Bay Area's housing and infrastructure issues require political, social, economic, and engineering management fluency; these problems will not be solved by software engineering.
These problems will not be solved by "disruption."
These problems are hard.
> And we cant solve the simplest problems in the Maslow's hierarchy.
Maslow's hierarchy seems focused on individual psychology.
Solving these problems for 7 million people with different values, cultures, and perspectives is not "simple."
> American Indians solved the housing problems with Teepees and Wigwams - so much for being "smart."
Yeah with a few orders of magnitude lower population and a drastically different standard of living.
This is a ridiculous over-exaggeration.
> Tokyo, 1945, burned to the ground, population 3.5 million.
Throwing it away and completely starting over might be the easiest way to fix a metro area's infrastructure issues.
But to your point there are also very significant cultural differences between CA and Japan; the present debacle can be blamed in a large part on CA's endemic cultural values.
The tents of the Arabian rulers that they used when traveling were very luxurious. So it very much depends - the variety in the comforts of (and inside) such structures is as big as in houses. Trucks are usually more limited in the layout and in space, but of course there are multi-million dollar "rolling homes" trucks too.
It might be a tad bit difficult to build a proper tipi (Lakota: thípi) in the bay area, and some damn fool would set the entrance up in the wrong direction anyway.
American Indians didn't believe in land enclosure and didn't have banks issuing fiat money against land, they also bartered I think rather than issuing paper against future labour.
I think hacker news isn't smart at all about fiat money because it's inextricably bound up with the venture capital world where you agree to hand over your labour for paper.
Fiat money is ex nihilo and therefore creatable in infinite amounts. Many of you won't be old enough to realise the productivity gains computers have brought. It's amazing. Yet here we are all scratching around for enough to cover our basic bills.
It will always be like this when you have land enclosure and tax labour. Create more and you can devote more to land costs. Hurry up, the rentiers are waiting.
I'm running for governor next whenever that happens. I really had to put myself in the shoes of a California voter to get the numbers to work out. I think for all new housing going forward, it's important that we enrich the state's coffers so that all y'all don't have to pay as much property tax -- as manded by the State Constitution. I'm therefore raising the fees per unit to the maximum this game allows (really not high enough but it's good as a working model). I also think the whole point of California is big open parking lots and lots of freeways; so I'm going to require that density be lowered by 40% and parking increased by 40%. I've noticed that there's no affordable housing in the entire state pretty much, so each new project will be required to set aside 40% of their units to qualified people-in-need-of-affordable-stuff. It's a real problem and these fat cat housing developers only care about themselves. Additionally, the banks going bust really fucked our economy a couple years ago, so I'm mandating that they charge no less than 10% per year of interest. Finally, as a show of good faith, the State of California is levying a tax on property development of 16% of the total project cost.
With this, there is a 0% chance of any new housing being built. You won the lottery when you happened to be alive 40 years ago to buy a house, and it's my job as the Governor of California to protect that asset for you and your children.
An easy fix might be to turn single story strip malls into two story dual purpose buildings. Stores on bottom, rooms on top. I doubt this would do much to change aesthetics.
Usually when a strip mall is re-zoned for mixed use, they demolish the older structure.
But on the aesthetic side it's possible to turn these buildings into something interesting if they're renovated by someone creative. Worked across the street from this place when an architecture firm bought and renovated it: http://www.rchstudios.com/639-larchmont-boulevard/
If you cut parking spaces without corresponding improvements in transit infrastructure, the city is strictly less livable and living sprawl looks like an even better idea.
You just start charging for curbside parking, and remove mandatory minimum parking requirements for buildings.
People are still free to build parking places (and even charge for them).
The hope is that by ending the parking subsidy for car owners, they choices will be informed by something closer to their full economic impact.
(The cost can even be borne by the same people---ie currently a car owner might as well be paying for his own parking on average with other taxes / higher rent / etc. The economics still work out to better incentives, if we allocate the whole cost to the decision that causes it.)
>they choices will be informed by something closer to their full economic impact.
There's no need for weasel words. We want fewer cars and less driving, so we use policy to make it less pleasant to own and drive a car.
Okay, fine. But what are you replacing it with? Because making driving hurt more is a net loss to subjective well-being unless you're prepared to replace it with something better (i.e. a few billion dollars of rail).
Oh, we don't impose any new costs here. We'd just stop sharing the cost of car ownership like some dirty communists.
People can still do the same amount of car driving and parking as before---and on average [#] the same amount of income will go to parking as before. Only now the cost will be directly visible, as opposed to hidden in other prices.
But of course, decisions on the margin will change. Someone might want to move closer to work, or decide to carshare, or take a job closer to home. (All these options cost money or are inconvenient. But they can save the person in question money otherwise spent for parking. Different trade-offs are viable than before.)
Yes, investing a few billion dollars in rail might make sense. But you don't have to invest in rail before you start de-socialising the price of parking.
This is somewhat covered in the pdf I linked.
[#] On average means: the total amount of resources society as a whole spends on parking won't change. The population won't change. Since the average is just total divided by the population, it will stay constant.
This is somewhat different to eg proposing an extra tax on parking or petrol. And definitely different to eg the price of oil rising on the world market.
Of course, even if the average stays constant, the burden on individuals will change. Eg people too poor to own a car will benefit from other goods and services becoming cheaper, but won't be hit by the de-socialising of parking.
And of course, we want people to `game the tax' by changing their behaviour. Ie encourage stuff like the Google bus for employees even more.
Even if all the tougher regs were removed tomorrow, very few builders with the large $$$ it takes to build housing are also stupid enough to risk government seizure in the future. The population will keep growing. The demand for housing will increase. The city leaders have already proven that stealing control of someone's personal asset is something they will do. (the personal asset in this case is a pre-1979 mom-and-pop rental property)
After 1979, long-term tenants moved in and the supply of rent controlled units dropped to nothing very quickly. Then what? You can't tell the entrenched 'fast movers' who got there first with the cheaper rent control units "move out and give someone else a chance."
Once a government shows a willingness to steal control of someone's personal assets, NO one who is smart enough to afford to build housing is also DUMB enough to build in rent control zones.
Only enticements get builders to build in those areas. And most builders see this:
- in Southern California there was a move to 'move the goalposts' and instead of pre-1979 rentals being rent controlled, now everything built pre-1995 would become rent controlled.
- here recently on the Peninsula the same topic came up -- re-classify candidate rental properties for rent control up to 1995.
Both of those were defeated. But it signaled to developers that the goalposts can be moved.
Until leadership stop stealing control of people's personal assets, it doesn't matter if all building code/zoning/etc. rules are removed -- very few builders will put a new project in a rent control area, where city leaders have already stolen control of personal assets.
"You like to steal control of assets that don't belong to you? I won't be building assets near you."
Properties included in the model have total development
potential, measured by FAR and residential units, of 20%
or less of the maximum allowed under local zoning law.
All properties above this level are considered "built
out" and do not factor in to the maximum potential units
number.
FAR is "floor area ratio" and controls how many square feet of building you can have on a given lot. I'd love to have a slider for this, since increasing the allowable FAR is a good way to make more efficient use of limited land.
(For example, zoning where I live sets a maximum FAR of 0.75, but most properties are over that limit and grandfathered in, averaging more like 0.90. Allowing people to build to 0.90 instead of 0.75 would not substantially change the feel of the area, and would make a lot more units available.)
I think the housing troubles could easily be fixed if those jobs which can easily be moved over to telecommuting were done so over time. Like honestly, how many devs and QA staff have to physically be in the same place throughout the work week? I'd understand if we're talking a firm that built physical prototypes for products but a website/service is easily accessible from the high rise office as it is from home office. At some point, software development is going to have to suck it up and be 100% remote for day-to-day concerns (excluding certain meetings with clients and the like).
So, would this change increase or decrease displacement?
Well, another recent Berkeley study concluded that a new market-rate apartment has about half the displacement-fighting impact of a below-market-rate apartment: http://www.urbandisplacement.org/sites/default/files/images/...
Therefore, the benefit of the extra market-rate units fails to offset the damage from the loss of affordable units (6000/2 < 4000). It fails similarly, but to a lesser degree, if you drop it to 5%.
But if you crank it up to 15%, the gains from the extra affordable units are overwhelmed by the lost market-rate units (4000/2 > 784). So it looks like the default value of 10% is the sweet spot.
By the way, the math is even easier for the 25% threshold that Supervisors Jane Kim and Aaron Peskin are proposing (http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Prop-C-...), because that would actually lead to less affordable housing being built. Less market-rate, too. A double displacement whammy.