IMO, it's gotten bad enough in the Bay Area that local control of zoning ought to get abolished. Make a new regional zoning commission, put together some clear and consistent rules about what can be built and where, and rubber-stamp everything that meets those rules. Literal rubber-stamp here, as in "you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day, and if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact".
> you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day, and if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact".
My wife used to work as an engineer approving (or demanding changes) to plans for Toronto. The biggest problem is that developers will cut every-single-corner and later plead ignorance when they build the 'wrong' (cheaper) way.
Here's what would happen in the scenario you're describing: Developers would build whatever the heck they like. Then, they'd be told "You built something that doesn't meet code". The developer would say "Well, my mistake, but it's built now and do you really want to tear down this new housing development that people paid for 3 years ago?". Now you have a political situation where the people who want to move in are being told that the building has to be torn down. Politicians would get involved, and the building (not meeting code) would be allowed to stay.
This would repeat over and over again.
I completely agree that we need a straightforward set of clear, consistent rules. But the idea of pre-approval without checking what the developer plans to build, how they plan to deal with waste-water, storm-water, parking, and a long list of other requirements, that's asking for trouble.
This seems like the sort of behavior which can be disincentivized with steep fines. You, a developer, built a large building not to code? You have to pay to have it re-worked, and in addition you pay the local town $1000 per domicile affected per day it's delayed. Made-up example, but you get the idea.
Createdmall development company, take the contract, deliver faulty building, accept payment, pay out funds to employees (subcontractors) and owners of the company, shut down company if the district comes after them.
Shell corporations can be made to funnel money around to the right people then die. As it is incredibly difficult to pierce the veil due to corporation protections being more important than human health and safety, all the "law" will find is a dead corporation with no assets. The developers will have already stripped it clean and started 10 more in the same way.
What if the owners were required to sign the affidavit personally and the affidavit included an assumption of personal liability for the damages if anything in the affidavit is found to be false?
Yes, it can be disincentivized with steep fines. But then you just end up back where we are now. Developers would not build if they face the future prospect of such steep fines. What happens if the code is unclear or ambiguous (and when big money is involved everything magically becomes ambiguous).
This is why a balanced regulatory approach is needed - one that is more proactive than reactive. By the time we're reacting way too much damage has been done.
This sounds like the sort of disincentive (after the units are sold and the horse has left the barn) that a good lawyer can easily prevent. Just like movies & funds can make/lose money that can't be clawed back, you just build an investment that pays out on sale to be nonexistent/bankrupt when fined.
Are there regulatory
ways around this? Of course, but they are complex, restrict the market in other ways, and lead to different distortions.
If the city/public is funding a building, i would think they are checking if it is built to code before they pay the company in full.
If its not built to code, the contractor didnt finish the job and will not be paid until the building is up to code.
If its a private investor building the building, thats on them, they shouldve hired better contractors or been more thorough in their management of their contractors
Flooding is a big issue right now in Toronto because we've had a few 'incidents'. You can build a building such that every drop of rain is gone from the property within minutes of it landing, straight into the storm sewers. But you can't have everyone do that, or every rainfall will mean a major flood in the lower-lying areas. And anyone in Toronto back in 2013 remembers exactly what that is like (last week too, nearly).
Instead, regulations now say that new buildings have to retain their water for as long as possible. You can release it, just not all at once, and hopefully not all of it. Green roofs are great to absorb the water. Car washes in the underground parking garage. Options like this exist, but they cost money.
This is only one example (storm water management). There are others. The goal of the city regulating certain engineering aspects of the buildings isn't just to protect those directly living in the building, it's to protect the city as a whole.
Fuck NIMBYism straight to hell, but don't tell me that the developer flooding my property isn't my problem.
I couldn't agree more. I'm originally from the Twin Cities and we solved (parts of this) problem years ago with a regional government called the Metropolitan Council. When you have a metropolitan area that spans multiple local governments, coordinating efforts around transportation, development, and environment is critical. And coordination is difficult without some sort of central authority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council
Originally from Minneapolis. Farmlands extend infinitely outwards in all directions. The real Met Council power is over the sewer pipes, which allows them to limit sprawl and set a growth boundary. Maybe things have changed, but it used to be run mostly by real-estate types who wanted "controlled growth". (that is, it was a racket.)
In San Francisco, the situation is entirely different. We have a massive greenbelt surrounding a geographically constricted urban area, which is 99% developed. Californians have a long history of anti-growth "pull up bridges" politics. It is not so simple as putting some enlightened developers in charge.
Not really. There's plenty of room to build a ton more in San Francisco.
Just because there's already, say, a parking lot or a Burger King with a drive-through on a block in the city doesn't mean that it wouldn't be possible to build apartments there instead.
Geography and existing land use do not prevent building more housing in SF. Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted.
Actually, I was quite surprised during a recent visit to Japan. There aren't many cars, but most of them are big saloons (lots of Crowns). Then again maybe if you can afford a car in Tokyo or Osaka, you can afford a big one.
That sounds an awful lot like you're suggesting that people who have already acquired the rights to a piece of property shouldn't be allowed to keep them if a housing developer wants to put a high rise where your Burger King is.
Also, I wonder if you would make the same argument for places that are also generally though of as real-estate constrained. Like Manhattan, or Tokyo. Or the part of Brooklyn where I live.
Here in Japan your neighbour can build pretty much anything they want (within zoning constraints) and there is little you can do about it.
The zoning here is pretty different than in the US though. The government created a national, unified zoning standard consisting of 12 zones.
Local governments can split their land into more-or-less arbitrary regions, and choose which zone type they want each region to have. They also have some control over how large the resulting buildings can be in each region by mandating the maximum ratio of floor space to land area for each region.
The main difference between Japanese and American zoning rules is that in the US, the zones are exclusive where-as in Japan they are (mostly) inclusive.
We not only have zones, but we layer on historic districts, parking minimums, setbacks, etc., going further than just not mixing commercial and residential. We mandate certain lifestyles in a pretty big way. A big shock vs. living in Japan where one can choose very different lifestyles.
I also miss the freedom Japanese architects seemed to have, where a building shaped like a treehouse would be just one of several interesting buildings.
It would be interesting to see if this is related to Japan's slightly bizarre real estate market. As I understand it, Japan has a culture that heavily emphasizes purchasing a newly built residence to live in for life. As such, the resale market for homes is limited.
Lots of NIMBYism is inspired by some level of home value protectionism. It's possible that if you don't expect to resell your home, you don't have to worry so much about protecting its value.
That makes no sense. GP is saying that the owner of the land, whether it's a parking lot or a Burger King, can decide to do something else with it like build a high rise. It's their land after all.
It's not like a random housing developer can come and kick you out just because they want to build condos.
If the problem is severe enough I see no reason in theory to not apply Eminent Domain in such cases. In practice what would likely happen is a local councilman's friend gets the lucrative development plot in an act of corrupt capitalism.
"Not really. There's plenty of room to build a ton more in San Francisco."
"Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted."
Prove your claim. The GP is right that there is essentially no undeveloped land in SF; a huge part of the housing moratorium debate centered on the fact that there are only a half-dozen or so vacant parcels in the Mission. This is true across the city.
You're arguing about underutilized land, which is a subject that cannot be addressed with simple assertions. In most cases, that "parking lot or burger king" is a contrived example that doesn't really exist: either the lot really is being developed (and you just don't know about it), or the owner of the land doesn't want to redevelop it (i.e. they're making more money with the current use than they would otherwise), or the land is in a place where a developer can't make a building work (pollution, neighborhood, etc.), or any number of other practical reasons.
I used to believe, like you, that "regulations" were the reason that SF has a housing problem. Then I started looking into it. Regulations make a difference on the margins, but the root cause of SF's housing crisis is simple economics: too much money chasing too little land. No matter what you do, it's going to be expensive.
SF city occupies approximatively the same area as Paris, with only a third of the population. Most of Paris is developed with a 37m ceiling, hardly skyscrapers.
Cost of land goes up with density, but that's the point. You build more and spread that cost among more units. Up to a point, it is economical to build higher in that situation (then for skyscrapers you start to see cost per unit going up again). Look at all the 3 or 4 stories apartment buildings sprouting in the city right now. Most of them could be double the height without increasing construction costs per unit.
If your artificially reduce the number of units that can be built on a plot of land, you're forcing to spread the price of land among fewer units and you increase their cost.
> Look at all the 3 or 4 stories apartment buildings sprouting in the city right now. Most of them could be double the height without increasing construction costs per unit.
I'm not sure that's correct. I think the reason that you see a lot at that height is because building codes change quite a bit as you go past a certain height and the costs go up as well.
The height limit you're thinking of is higher. The IBC allows for five stories of wood construction over a multi-story concrete podium (often one or two stories).
AFAK this is what the codes are. When I see building frames under construction, I see an awful lot of "three floors of wood framing above a steel base" (usually mixed-use commercial 1st floor with residential above, but I'm assuming things here)
"SF city occupies approximatively the same area as Paris, with only a third of the population."
And so? Is it affordable live in Paris? No, it is not. I just looked up rents there, and a 500sf studio will run you around $1300-$1500USD a month. Given average salaries in the area, this does not compare favorably to SF. (As a matter of fact, the city of Paris has just enacted strict rent-control laws, because rents were seen as unaffordable.)
Also, be more specific: what part of SF are you talking about? If you're talking about the 1/3rd of SF that could be characterized as "city", the density is already quite high. Increasing the density of already dense areas won't meaningfully impact rents. But meanwhile, average density numbers completely ignore that the western 2/3 of SF looks like suburbs:
That's in the city of San Francisco. I dropped a pin randomly in the west side of the city. You can see Sutro Tower!
When we talk about density in SF, these are the areas that matter. But even if you could build higher density in these areas, you'd still have to buy the land (which would suddenly be much more expensive), build transit, infrastructure, and so on. There is no inexpensive solution to this problem.
> But meanwhile, average density numbers completely ignore that the western 2/3 of SF looks like suburbs
Yeah, lots of discussion treats SF as if it was the "downtown" urban core of the Bay Area, but in fact only a part of SF is that way, and a lot of SF, if still urban, not the kind of core that it is often compared to.
Yep. I make this point constantly on HN, and routinely get down-voted to -1. People just don't want to see data that contradicts their preferred narrative.
I'm actually not opposed to higher density or building up. I'm just pointing out that it isn't a panacea, and certainly won't work if you focus on the wrong places.
There are a lot of vacant buildings being sat on by property speculators, with very little property tax to motivate use thanks to Prop 13 (and because existing tenants hurt resale value).
Uh, this definitely falls under "citation needed". I've lived in SF for the better part of a decade, and I've never personally seen a vacant building that wasn't vacant for a reason (i.e. condemned, slated for demolition, etc.)
"or the owner of the land doesn't want to redevelop it"
I don't know the English terms here, but that kind of situation where individuals are earning massive profits because everybody else built city around them, is just wrong. That unearned rise in the property value should be taxed away.
So, just zone more apartments in that area and put big enough property tax on underdeveloped land area. That way the economic incentive of the property owner aligns with the interest of the whole city.
> That unearned rise in the property value should be taxed away.
That is so wrongheaded I don't know where to start. Increasing property taxes is the exact reason you have older folks be forced out of their homes after having lived there most of their life.
No one should have a continuously growing tax burden over time.
This idea is pretty hard to square with economic incentives for infrastructure development. If the state builds a freeway or a fire station or other development, one major effect is that it enables a lot of valuable economic development. For public goods, it's hard to capture that value - even though it makes society better off, it's not worthwhile for any one economic actor to do it.
Property taxes (specifically on the unimproved value of the land) offers a way out of this dilemma. If you can do more valuable economic activity with a piece of land, you can and should pay more for it, so it'll be worth more. So if you spend $10MM/yr in financing for building a bridge, and it increases land value in the catchment area by $100MM, and you have a 12% land-value tax, the state responsible makes more money.
Why should society subsidize someone using a piece of land, when another potential tenant will pay taxes on its true value? The government has to fund itself, so a reduction in property taxes means increases in other taxes. If the replacement taxes apply to everyone equally, that means wealth is effectively being transferred from average people (who are likely in debt with little savings) to people who completely own homes often worth 800k+.
The old person will make a good amount of money selling their home, and they can use that windfall to buy a nice new home somewhere warm and cheap, so it isn't like they're being trampled on.
>The old person will make a good amount of money selling their home, and they can use that windfall to buy a nice new home somewhere warm and cheap, so it isn't like they're being trampled on.
It deconstructs communities.
This land is too valuable to allow you people to squat on it. We'll compensate you, so it's all fine and fair, now get out.
It's not hard to understand why people don't like being treated that way.
They're subsidized by building infrastructure. If the state builds a bridge that allows a homeowner in town A to commute to work to town B, this directly increases the land value in town A. The state paid for this bridge, not the homeowner. This is what the subsidy is - having access to state-provided infrastructure by virtue of location. Why should the homeowner have exclusive right to that increase in land value?
This is the gigantic pitfall of overly-individualistic property rights - that socially beneficial infrastructure development doesn't happen, because nobody has the power to siphon off enough of the value created to make it worth doing.
> I don't know the English terms here, but that kind of situation where individuals are earning massive profits because everybody else built city around them, is just wrong. That unearned rise in the property value should be taxed away.
Prop 13 prevents this, and in fact makes it so that only redevelopment or change of ownership allows increases in property value to be taxed, which is one reason owners might prefer not to redevelop.
Full value assessment (even retaining the Prop 13 limit on tax rates) would encourage redevelopment because underdeveloped properties would still be paying taxes based on value increases from potential uses.
"that kind of situation where individuals are earning massive profits because everybody else built city around them"
Like so what? Your property value, whether house or some artistic drawing, can go up or down based on other peoples actions. There is nothing wrong with that, that is how ownership of anything works.
When people loose business or work because those around them abandoned area or supermarket appears, they get no reimbursement. It is market force in practice. Therefore, when the same people earn on others coming in, they should not be punished either.
If eviction regulations and tenant laws were less strict in San Francisco there would be more property for rent. I've met quite a few home owners who don't rent because it's either a "headache" or it actually decreases the value of their home.
There are tons of vacant houses in San Francisco. Most of these homes are bought in cash from outside investors who have way more wealth than your average Bay Area citizen or tech employee.
These homes aren't rented because there are too many tenant rights and it's more trouble than it's worth to the owner.
> a massive greenbelt surrounding a geographically constricted urban area
We have a bunch of parks (which add enormously to our quality of life) surrounding massive suburban sprawl. Within the city, there is space for hundreds of residential towers without demolishing anything but parking lots and decrepit buildings. Outside the city, in most places you could easily double the density of single family units, they are so spread out.
This is a funny example to pick since the Metropolitan Council has demonstrated NIMBYism in its own right on a few topics. Importantly, the Council has been able to direct huge groups of people to far reaches of the Metropolis (with their attendant reduced bus service, higher crime, etc).
This is exactly what we lack in Atlanta, which, as you probably know, is notorious for its decentralisation and far-reaching sprawl. As a result, everything that's done in the Atlanta metro area suffers from narrow incorporated municipality focus and a total lack of regional-scale goals.
> if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact
That would likely lead to a solution that's actually worse than the problem. Court cases to resolve these violations will take years to adjudicate and will in most situations lead to a settlement that still fucks over those who were victimized.
A better approach would be to reform our legal system so that it isn't and/or hire more court employees, judges, etc. If our court systems are perpetually overburdened, it makes sense to clear the bottlenecks to give them the resources and reforms so that they can meet their obligations.
It's a travesty that in all the places I have lived in the US, going to court for some minor infraction or permitting issue will take me at least 3 hours or more, necessitating me taking a vacation or sick day if I didn't work remotely. When my number is called, the actual process takes usually no more than 5 minutes. Perhaps a relatively small investment in our legal system could lead to a large return
Waiting in lines and paying by spending time is what you get when you can't pay for a service by spending money. The alternative is that the poor can't afford access to the legal system.
Basically, the wait is serving an important role in making court expensive in an egalitarian way.
> if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact
You'd better be prepared to demolish a lot of buildings if you're going to play it that way. A developer can have the buildings up, sold, the money moved offshore and the shell company responsible for the building wound up before the court case about lying on the affidavit completes.
Also, you'd better have a plan to deal with the angry voters.
Precisely this. Especially in a market with a humongous appetite for development like the Bay Area, if you unleash the flood gates, you're going to get a lot of charlatans who cut dangerous corners, and they will mysteriously disappear before they will be held to account. In the meantime, their victims will pay the price, either in blood or in the financial losses incurred from losing property that must be destroyed because it's unsafe.
Regulation isn't so much the problem as regulation which is slow to the point where it effectively kills development. There is a balance.
Obvious-to-me solution: developers can't sell the building until the information in the affidavit gets verified. Basically, the entire scope of my proposal is to turn the "am I allowed to build here?" question into something that can be determined without the uncertainty of "how much effort will the local community put into fucking with the project".
Under existing rules, developers do not pay enough fees to allow the School Districts to build new schools to support the new housing. Now you'd like to rubber stamp this?
For example there's a new development in Fremont of a few hundred houses: the school district had to zone it as "we'll provide school for you, but it'll be wherever we have space across the entire city." That's not good.
To me the idiocy is this: the state government mandates that all cities build new housing. But they don't mandate that housing and jobs balance. A city like Fremont was master-planned with enough space for both, but is being forced by the state to build houses instead for people who will work in Sunnyvale which has too many jobs and not enough houses.
Thanks to the vagaries of prop 13, schools (and other municipal services) tend to get a lot better-funded from commercial real estate than housing. So we see cities prioritizing office space and not building enough housing to hold the people who will be working in those cities. It's pretty ridiculous.
Property taxes pay for the schools that already exist. It's hard for a district to 'save up' because, well California, and 'surplus' money should be returned to the taxpayer. If developers don't cover the cost a district usually issues a bond but that's hard because, well, California, and direct democracy rarely votes to raise property tax mil rates whatever it would cost to cover the bond. And doesn't California basically freeze assessment values? Because why should the people who already live there pay for services for newcomers? It's all very hostile and backward.
A state shouldn't need a per-value increase in taxes to cover anything that scales with the number of residents, which would include schools; the additional revenue from the new residents should cover that. (Unless they've utterly failed at economies of scale, but that should not need repeated fixes.) The cost of accommodating growth for new capacity should be factored into the ongoing existing costs. The people already there aren't paying for it; the new people in the new development are.
The hostility is built up of years of expecting each new increase to be the last, and yet continuing to receive urgent demands for more, all with the plaintive "for our schools and our children" exhortations that try to suggest only an absolute monster would dare to say "enough".
Where does it say that property taxes pay for schools that already exist? I have never seen that mentioned on any of my $22K/year property tax documents.
Forgive my ignorance, but are taxes really earmarked in the US? As far as I understand, in most of Europe the government and municipality just collect their dues and spend according to an approved budget with no earmarking whatsoever.
...in most of Europe the government and municipality just collect their dues and spend according to an approved budget with no earmarking whatsoever.
If this system were used in USA, our shameless politicians would regularly just completely fail to fund schools. The fact that some money goes directly to schools means that most of them can at least keep the lights on.
More like a common gripe for people who don't understand the role of government or the fungibility of money. My first political season spent in California I was shocked at how in the discourse some people used the phrase "general fund" as shorthand for political wrongdoing without any further elaboration. Ok, they pool the money, so what? If they spend the money for something else, we the people are still receiving government services in exchange for our taxes as allocated by our duely elected officials, so I see no harm, no foul.
I am sure some fake-libertarian HNer who wants the shrink government to the size of a bathtub drain will tell me I am wrong.
Oh I didn't mean that this phenomenon addresses the fucked-up-ness; I meant that allocating specific taxes to specific programs is no way to run a government.
Most of my fellow classical liberals don't have an issue with state populations choosing to grow state governments, just the federal government (this fact is often overlooked by people who have not taken the time to understand the classical liberal point of view).
Common misconception- usually what happens is we are promised that funds from a new tax will be earmarked for something, then it winds up going in to the general fund, or spent somewhere else.
Taxpayers have a real blind spot to the whole 'money is fungible' concept.
Generally speaking, the money that gets earmarked goes where it belongs. It's all the other money that wasn't earmarked before-hand that gets pulled out.
The political promise is usually "Hey, we'll implement a lottery and earmark 100% of the taxes towards education -- that'll be $20 million a year!" to which everybody thinks that $20 million will be added to the $30 million already being spent. But what happens is the $20 million lottery gets added, then the $20 million non-earmarked funds get pulled to pay for <insert other thing here>, such that the schools don't end up with any more or less than they had.
Past that, "earmarked for schools" is also a way to reframe over political opponents against the lottery as "voting against education".
This isn't a misconception in California; the literal text of the law in some circumstances effectively earmarks funds. For example, take the first proposition from the last election — which happens to be about schools — Prop 51 from the November 2016 general election:
> A fund is hereby established in the State Treasury, to be known as the 2016 State School Facilities Fund
> no disbursement shall be made from any funds required by law to be transferred to the General Fund.
> Bonds in the total amount of nine billion dollars ($9,000,000,000) […] may be issued and sold for the purposes set forth…
Right, but if you were paying schools $x from the general fund, then a special law gives them an extra $y, you can reduce the payment from the general fund by $y.
Thus the schools are receiving the $y, just as promised. Only they aren't any better off, and the general fund has an extra $y in it now.
Where I live the developer has to pay an "impact fee" per unit as part of the permitting process that is supposed to offset the cost of road and school construction. Right now it is about 4500 for a single family home (in semi-rural Maryland).
In California, under the Prop 13 tax reform, property tax values were rolled back and frozen at the 1976 assessed value level and only allowed to raise at 2% per year.
Property values (and therefore property tax receipts) vary relatively modestly with the economic cycle, but income tax receipts are fully exposed to the booms and busts of the stock market. What this leads to is school funding that is somewhat directly tied to the financial markets :( So if you're in school during a recession, it sucks
Prop13 values reset on a sale. So the geriatric couple living in a million dollar cracker box might have low property taxes, but the next owner is in for a surprise.
Property taxes pay to run the schools, barely. The obvious problem with paying for building new schools from property taxes is that it gives every single existing resident a financial incentive to block new development: they have to pay for all the supporting infrastructure, whilst all of the financial benefits go to the property developers. If there's no provision that says otherwise, they'd probably even have to pay to buy the land for the schools off the property developers.
I think what they are talking about is the resident who will move in that need schools (and will pay property tax), not the developers. He developers can't build the residencies without having enough schooling for families moving in.
> A city like Fremont was master-planned with enough space for both, but is being forced by the state to build houses instead for people who will work in Sunnyvale which has too many jobs and not enough houses.
The legislation discussed in the article is largely about making Sunnyvale (and the rest of the job-heavy housing-light peninsula cities) build more housing.
I always find it interesting to hear what people believe they deserve. In these comments you can hear the "I deserve to live in a house with my family of 4 in Palo Alto". Do you really deserve that? Says who? That would be like me showing up in NYC and saying I deserve to live in a penthouse on 5th Ave. No I don't. There is plenty of wide open space outside the Bay Area.
The bay area cities allowed lots and lots of commercial real estate but relatively little residential (apartments and homes) to be built more or less in the entire bay area. Where were those workers supposed to live?
Other metro areas have balanced these competing needs much better.
A lot of the laws proposed still require any proposals to follow the existing zoning (a law championed by the governor last year is one example), etc. but just prevent a few motivated individuals from blocking growth.
And I "deserve" to commute for over an hour to my nice awesome office that's in San Francisco from some distant suburb, because - why? Why do I "deserve" such punishment? Because someone was born at the right time and place 70 years ago and could afford a place in San Fran working a blue collar job and now fuck everyone else, he got his? Why? Why sacrifice all future generations on the altar of some baby boomer's "retirement plan" (said property?)
I'm not aware of any country or city (besides London) that does this to young people. It's insane to be making over $100,000 anywhere in the world and be expected to pay $5000/month for a studio just because building some high-density housing would diminish some entrenched gentry's view of the ocean.
The NIMBY's can all go and shoot themselves in the face, as far as I'm concerned.
I suppose that's what this discussion is about. Who deserves what.
I don't think anyone really has suggestions that enable anyone to by a family home in Palo Alto. But, the question is do local residents deserve the right to keep out newcomers.
Who has what rights (who deserves what) is not an abstract truth we discover. It’s decisions we make.
> But, the question is do local residents deserve the right to keep out newcomers.
Also, when does someone become 'local'? All the time on Nextdoor I see, "we need to stop the building", "traffic is bad", "there are too many people". Yet, the loudest complainers are people who literally just moved to my town in the last year. The building, etc... is what allowed them to move here in the first place so don't complain about it now.
SF is not the only city experiencing these issues, although they are amplified. Nearly every nice weather coastal city in the US is growing out of control right now as people flee much of the center of the country.
But then you're asserting that those who live in Palo Alto don't have the right to govern their community. They aren't keeping out newcomers at all, in fact, there are houses for sale in Palo Alto. For some reason people think that living in that area should be affordable. It shouldn't be. Live somewhere else.
Houses are for sale, of course, but suppose I passed a law requiring all new houses to be mansions. I'm talking palace of Versailles level amenities, out of reach for all but the most wealthy.
It's true that anyone is legally allowed to live here.
It's also true I've excluded, by legal fiat, almost all Americans. I've declared my lifestyle superior to all others and no one else can live here except those who enjoy the same.
Palo Alto is not as extreme.
But it still limits the number of houses, tells everyone what lifestyles are legally permissible (don't forget to include parking or yards!), and excludes vast swaths of Americans.
This isn't good governance. It's not healthy for the region, and it's not healthy on a national basis.
This is why many nations take away zoning power from localities and move it to regional or even national levels.
It's also why we don't have the power to vote for who lives next to us, at least explicitly. That would be local governance, but quite cruel and prone to abuse.
Why do we give localities this right to implicitly vote out people?
I would argue it is just as cruel and misguided as voting to ban your neighbor
Again, why shouldn't the be allowed to do that? I want to live on Harvard/MITs campus and live next to the smartest people in the world (at least some of them) and have a nice little 3 br house on a half acre. These high home prices keep me out it's not fair!!
This simply cannot work. The most desirable areas in the world are going to have high prices that exclude "normal people" period.
> Houses are for sale, of course, but suppose I passed a law requiring all new houses to be mansions. I'm talking palace of Versailles level amenities, out of reach for all but the most wealthy.
This actually happens all the time. Every time a new subdivision is built in the suburbs this is exactly what happens. Hell, even new condos being built in my small city in the downtown area do this. So unless you're going to mandate that every single development that will house human beings stratifies the cost such that each income level can afford the exact same setup and you don't allow people over that income level to purchase housing, then you will never solve this "problem".
Does it suck and is it not fair that you're not mega rich and can afford to live in Manhattan or in the hippest part of SF? No. That's just a market economy. I also can't buy a Ferrari and have to drive a Honda around. Can I afford a 1.5mm shack in SF? Sure. Why would I do that when I can afford a 1.5mm giganto-mansion on the Great Lakes?
City ordinances, national ordinances, any of those are fundamentally the same thing. You're just arguing about what's most prolific because that's in your field of vision. Why can't I buy an affordable house in Switzerland? Why are they keeping average Americans out?
Why can't I afford a 2br/3b flat in Paris next to the Louvre? Why don't they just fill that place up with skyscrapers?
etc. etc.
Maybe people want to keep their neighborhoods how they are? Maybe the charm that makes a place what it is has value, and should be protected? Why should they lose tens-hundreds of thousands of dollars in value because other people want to move next to them?
If everyone adopted this attitude, there'd be nowhere to live. All of the reasons you enumerate are people wanting to live in an area that makes it valuable for them; I think there's a fair number of people in the Bay Area that don't really care to live here particularly, but this is where the tech industry has decided to concentrate a ridiculous amount of its jobs. Job markets in other metropolises like Boston are a tenth the size of the Bay Area's. Not only is moving across a continent incredibly non-trivial, but finding a job at the other end is as well. And that's for populous areas like Boston or NYC where the land is cheaper, but not by much; you move to somewhere actually cheap and the job prospects are just simply not there. California also has better employment laws than other places. Not everyone here is here because we want to be "next to the Louvre": some of us just want to make a living.
Sure but you're framing it as if you somehow don't have a choice and how dare other people who have live there now want to protect their communities and lifestyles.
I've lived all over the world. Moving sucks. But life is what it is. If I wasn't making the money I am now where I live and it was too expensive then I would just leave. You don't have to work for Google or Facebook or whatever. You can go have a huge impact at a smaller company that really needs the talent somewhere else in the country. If Google can't find good people because rent is too high and they aren't raising wages, don't be an idiot and move there and just get paid shit and then complain about it. Move to Michigan and work in automotive, or move to Nashville and work doing something there. Don't act like you don't have choices. You do.
Environmental requirements are often a back-door for NIMBY-ism. If you black-box the process, raising environmental concerns is a lever folks can pull to make specific proposed development more expensive and possibly cancelled. We have enough such levers. Everything of this "levers NIMBYs can pull to discourage development near them" category should get offloaded to a a bureaucracy that's empowered to ignore people yanking on them.
> raising environmental concerns is a lever folks can pull to make specific proposed development more expensive and possibly cancelled
Environmental concerns under CEQA aren't "black-boxed" or generic, they have to be categorized, detailed, and public. Mitigation measures are sometimes expensive, yes.
Rubber-stamping construction permits in my island is how we ended up with rows of hotels destroying the coast illegally. Once the buildings are there, the harm is done, and no one has the money to demolish them. "Going after them after the fact" can work for arbitrary zoning requirements, but it doesn't work for environmental ones.
The trouble is that "environment" can grow to encompass many highly political issues beyond the most obvious things. It lets politicians wiggle out of deciding things by setting up a scientific process.
Yes, it is. And it's _much_ easier to bring and maintain a lawsuit under CEQA. The costs of environmental review under the federal law is basically baked into the cost of doing business these days. But CEQA is too easy to abuse, and NIMBYs can and do tie up projects for years, often killing them altogether, without any serious threat of substantive environmental harm. The procedural rules of CEQA make it difficult for judges to handle the cases efficiently, and it effectively immunizes plaintiffs from repercussions.
The reason why CEQA can't be amended or repealed is because it effectively gives the environmental lobby a veto over projects, and that lobby is a pillar of the governing coalition in California. Setting aside the wisdom of granting such leverage to non-state institutions, any amendments that cut down on NIMBY abuse would almost necessarily reduce the environmental lobby's de facto veto powers.
California can keep putting the screws to city councils, but unless they amend CEQA you'll see very little change in number of units built, except for large projects or well-heeled (i.e. well-lawyered) developers. Alternatively, the Supreme Court could step in. A possible silver lining of adding another conservative vote to SCOTUS would be that it might strike down CEQA as commonly applied. Likewise, they would hopefully crack down on the "community input" process that makes it difficult for developers to clear zoning hurdles. In particular, in cities like San Francisco zoning laws are so loosely defined and applied that it's impossible to submit a plan with any degree of confidence that it meets zoning and other regulatory requirements. In reality you're basically bargaining with the city like you would bargain with a corrupt city political machine in the 19th century, except it has the imprimatur of the courts.
It's a failure of Due Process, the most basic guarantee of Western constitutional law. Government is supposed to apply clearly defined laws. In particular, zoning boards and other instruments of government (courts in CEQA lawsuits) aren't supposed to be venues for democratic feedback. NIMBYs are free to lobby to change zoning and regulatory law to shape the character of their neighborhood; they shouldn't have a backdoor to change those rules on-the-fly as part of development plan approvals.
This. CEQA is a nightmare. If I recall correctly, CEQA has been abused multiple times to prevent bikesharing and expansion of bike lanes in San Francisco. The argument made I believe was that such changes would change the car driving patterns and increase pollution from emissions.
"..if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact"
If I were a developer, I'd be hesitant to build anything with that hanging over my head. It probably also means I'll have more difficulty getting financing. Less up-front bureaucracy, more risk and cost.
I think it's really hard to overstate how deep of a hole we're in up in the Bay Area. With the kind of growth numbers we're predicting, I believe nothing short of a radical shift in planning and housing policy is going to produce any relief for the beleaguered Bay Area.
The nine counties are currently permitting about 20,000 units of housing per year [1]. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments are expecting 27,000 new households (not people, households) and 43,000 new jobs per year in the thirty years to 2040 [2]. Thus, we're about 25% short of the units we need to preserve today's unaffordable status quo. To make any sort of dent in cost of living, the nine counties need to shoot far, far higher than what we're producing today.
For a bit of micro NIMBYism: my street in Palo Alto just instituted resident-only parking (I was the only one to object). Thus the people who cut our hair, serve our meals etc will have to walk even farther to work (my house is about 1.25 miles from downtown) while the wealthy shoppers park downtown for free.
Yes it was a pain having a lot of cars on the street but I didn't feel it was a hardship that I couldn't park in front of my house but occasionally (horrors) across the street.
As my passive aggressive neighbor put it, "well they can just buy a downtown permit. It's just a tax." So again, the minimum wage earners get the shaft. The discount permit for low earners is $100.
PS: my kid wants to buy up the extra parking permit allotment and offer them to folks parking the next street over.
If SF housing politics has taught me anything, it's that the nastiest of human behavior is revealed by parking disagreements :(
I never understood the residential parking permit argument anyway.
Public dollars built the road, which now contains public parking spots.
Implementing residential parking permits is a transfer of value from the public domain to private land owners.
In Palo Alto (and the rest of the Bay Area, where land owners are inherently millionaires), this constitutes a transfer of wealth from the public to the wealthiest few.
A street's sewer infrastructure, for example, is treated as a public good for the residents of that particular block. They, and only they, will be assessed extra property taxes when it needs work.
Where it snows, homeowners are on the hook to shovel the portion of the public sidewalk along their property.
It's not exactly unprecedented for municipal governments to treat the properties nearest infrastructure as more responsible for it than the rest of the city. It's not unreasonable that they then have preferential access to it.
An RPP program is a formalization of, "look, it'd be a waste for us all to build off-street parking when there's perfectly good street frontage here, let's agree to be reasonable and share the street frontage equally."
I think you're right. I my observation (though not in SF) the top 2 sources of dispute are 1.) parking, and 2.) dogs. Not infrequently, there's a correlation between offensive parking and promoting bad dog behavior.
Of course it makes sense that would be the case. Inconsiderate people are likely not to care about encroaching on others' driveways when they or their guests leave their vehicles. They're also not likely to heed city leash laws, leaving their dogs deposit excrement randomly which neighbors tend to object to.
In some neighborhoods in town parking is a nightmare because there are not enough spaces on the street for visitors and residents. Institution of metered parking and permits was a price of success of urban redevelopment. Around here the residential permits aren't cheap, but most residents cough up the fee anyway. Even then there's no guarantee they will be able to find parking close to home, though the odds are improved and local dwellers say that's better than nothing.
Under the conditions operating here, I don't think there's a substantial "transfer of value" from public to private hands. It may be a different story in Palo Alto.
Sounds like the permits are still cheaper than they should be, though. Presumably if people value the parking such that it's the best use of land an enterprising person could set up a parking garage and make a profit?
That's not quite the issue. Public parking garages have been proposed but getting them sited has been difficult. One reason is competition from developers of apartments, who want to use the space for residences. Rather a dilemma to resolve as both are needed. Not exactly a NIMBY matter in that case.
Yeah, garages is one idea, but that's a land use matter of importance re: need for residential development. Garages have been proposed, but difficult to squeeze in among the competing needs. Sometimes the conflicts are just hard to resolve with the various constituencies fighting it out.
Well, yeah, I'll admit some bias here - I think cars are a cancer to cities that destroy them. I've never met anyone complaining about a lack of parking unless they were complaining about a lack of free parking. Of course, I think we could use that land as places for humans to sleep instead of cars, but I digress.
When presented with the true cost of driving, most people choose other modes. Driving and car ownership are ridiculously expensive once you realize how much you're paying for "free" parking (higher rent), "free" roads (higher taxes), and of course tens of thousands of dead people per year in the US alone. What we do now is largely force people to pay whether they drive or not, which of course encourages car ownership.
I mean, a helicopter would be a fun way to get to work but that doesn't mean we expect free helipads everywhere.
You should tell your kid to buy the extra parking allotment, then knock on your neighbor's doors and note that "for a small fee" he or she can make sure that no one with a permit parks on the street in front of their house.
"Beautiful street you've got there. It'd be a shame if someone were to start parking on it. Every. Day."
I once observed that a few of my college-aged friends were subsisting on canned tomatoes and beans, and struggling to make ends meet. I suggested that they use my Costco membership to buy a months worth of supplies at once for roughly half to two-thirds or what they were spending. They patiently explained to me that part of why they lived this way was because they were already barely living within their means, which made acquiring two weeks worth of dining funds impossible (even if it meant "free" food for the rest of the month).
These fees are the kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts that keep people in poverty.
Being poor is expensive, indeed. Most people don't realize that until they experience it. If they ever do.
If you never have much surplus money, you can rarely if ever do the things that save money in the long term. You can't invest in good clothes or household goods that might cost twice as much, but last more than five times as long as what you can afford, for example. You can't buy a freezer and stock up on food when it's on sale, or cook large cheap meals and freeze them to free up time later. Often, things like good benefits from banks and credit card companies are simply not available to you. Et cetera.
Obviously things like being unable to afford preventative health care and sort of health maintenance stuff like checkups and new glasses and so on can lead to much more expensive problems down the road. "Noncritical" health services like dental and vision are big things there. It's not like you can get a root canal or new glasses at the ER.
And it's very difficult to fight back against mistakes other people make that screw you over when you have few resources on hand. Problems with your bank? In my experience, if you have money a bank is a lot more likely to help you than if you're poor. I was treated a lot better when I had thousands of dollars in the bank than I am now, when I'm scraping by. And that's if you can even open a bank account at a reputable establishment at all. That is not a given.
Then there's renting vs owning property. Owning property isn't for everyone perhaps, but if you're handy and don't need to pay a professional to do everything the house needs, it's a lot cheaper to own than rent. Plus there's the general freedom you have on your own property vs rented property which opens all kinds of doors for saving money or just better quality of life in general.
Having money means you have the freedom to live very frugally by making smart choices and thinking long term. Not having money in the bank, free to spend on the right investments and opportunities, makes that enormously more difficult. And it's only getting worse with time.
sounds like a good situation for giving your friend a loan for a couple hundred dollars. Not necessarily you personally, but it would be a step towards being above hand-to-mouth if they could borrow a small amount of money to get the benefit of some economies of scale.
I'm making what I would think to be an upper middle class salary and I can't afford a home in a modestly decent neighborhood in L.A. It seems to me that there is definitely a problem and I support loosening development restrictions.
It's not only restrictions though. Of the people I know who own property, many, if not the majority, own more than one property, some of them empty. I also know many remote Chinese that own a property in L.A. It's super frustrating.
You have hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, i fear that any sufficiently strong measures to restrict empty homes or foreign investment (see: empty home taxes in British Columbia) will be met with strong resistance from Democrats.
As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, the same property squeeze is happening here on a similarly massive scale, also driven by foreign "investment". In my experience, advocating for strong countermeasures is a great way to get one's self labeled as a Trump-er or anti-immigrant.
Canadian-style empty home taxes would be a fairly easy sell to most Democrats. I suspect you're glossing over some additional rhetoric that's coming with it if you're being called an anti-immigrant Trump supporter.
>>i fear that any sufficiently strong measures to restrict empty homes or foreign investment (see: empty home taxes in British Columbia) will be met with strong resistance from Democrats.
Uh, I'm not sure why Democrats would be against this, especially considering Prop 13 was passed by Reagan.
I know people like to blame Reagan for lots of things, but Prop 13 was passed by voter initiative in 1978, Reagan was Governor from 1967 to 1975. He probably voted for it though.
I'm not sure this rather dated precept is compatible with the exigencies of 21st century economics, and the flexibility, mobility and long hours demanded.
For one thing, houses are cash sinks. It doesn't make sense for highly paid professionals to spend enormous amounts of time or money reshingling roofs, painting, mowing lawns, treating weeds, trimming hedges, repairing plumbing, etc. The deep specialisation and constant attention that the professional economy asks are orthogonal to all those things. It's prudent to upload those demands to the cloud (aka your landlord, at scale) so to speak.
I know far more urban professionals that were hindered by the ballast of owning real estate than those empowered by this "most basic form of security". Here in the sprawling metro Atlanta area, taking another job will very likely take you to a wholly different part of this vast agglomeration and doom you to a punishing commute unless you sell your house and relocate. The uncertainty, transaction costs and other friction kept a number of people I know in dead-end jobs until they were finally laid off.
As a personal anecdote, I bought a condo in May 2007. I was drinking the very same Kool-Aid about basic form of security and whatnot. I finally let my home go to foreclosure in summer 2015. I financed at $160K, and in summer 2015 it appraised at $85K. I still owed $140K. One of the lenders sued me for a $29K deficiency and got a judgment, and I'll be paying them $250/mo for the next six years. Some security. I grant that my effort at partaking of the most basic form of security a human needs was exceptionally disastrous, but I think the housing crash educated a lot of people about just how much security it really offers. A senseless push to ownership for ownership's sake threatens to discard those valuable lessons.
The real argument for owning vs. renting is the mortgage interest deduction, and that's an artifice of government tax policy that hugely distorts the market and the incentives.
Where did you go rent a place for less than your 160k mortgage?
I agree that owning a house is not right for everyone, but if you're planning on staying in a location for awhile it can make a lot of sense (although ATL is its own special hell). If I had not bought a house in 2011, I actually could not afford to live in the area I currently live in. Sure, taxes, insurance, and maintenance will always be ongoing cost, but for the most part my housing costs are fixed way below what rent would be now.
I also do not know what's wrong with professionals doing things like cutting the grass and trimming hedges. Every hour of my day does not need to be spent in some highly productive fashion. An hour/week in the summer, outside doing the yard while listening to music is a great way to relax and unwind.
>It doesn't make sense for highly paid professionals to spend enormous amounts of time or money reshingling roofs, painting, mowing lawns, treating weeds, trimming hedges, repairing plumbing
So we pay HOA fees for high-rise condos.
Rents in SF grew $2000 over 5 years. I would be ecstatic if my worst-case housing market outcome were a measly $250/mo. My standard of living is going to fall every year at lease renewal time until I can't take it anymore, and then I'll go live out my days in a soul-crushing Midwestern cost center IT department, if any haven't been outsourced or automated by then.
Housing costs that can't increase are looking really good right about now.
Oh, we've got problems of that sort in Atlanta, too (at a different price scale than SF, of course). There's an enormous spread between mortgages and rent at the moment; so many fewer people qualify for mortgages after the housing crash due to tougher underwriting standards and a return to traditional down-payment requirements that many, many more people are forced to rent. That has pushed rents way up. But for those who qualify, buying has never been cheaper. Needless to say, they pocket the difference, and it's an extreme landlord's market. They've got their pick of tenants and getting a place inside the Perimeter with anything less than impeccable credit is hard.
Median rent in Midtown Atlanta, where I last lived, is pushing north of $2000, which for Atlanta is a _princely_ sum considering it's ... well, it's Atlanta. It's not Brooklyn or Chicago. If I'm going to pay that much, I want Brooklyn or Chicago.
That's true. Condos do provide a compromise that I find relatively acceptable, though I'm still not sold on overstating the security premium, particularly given the greater financial volatility of condos.
Since the value appreciates in land, condos do not tend to gain value over time. At best a condo will have the same value because of exhaustive maintenance.
That's not true at all. Condo prices rise just like single family homes. And when you own a condo, you own a fraction of the land it sits on.
I would agree that condos tend to be more volatile than single family homes. More of them can be built quickly and when real estate prices start to drop it often starts with the condos.
Seems to be regional. I'm sure condos in places like DC appreciate, but in my region, condos absolutely seem to depreciate on average. It's exceedingly rare for me to find a condo on Zillow asking more than it was sold for 5+ years ago.
Wouldn't rent and a monthly mortgage end up being about the same? The value provided by one unit of housing to its tenants should be about the same as the value to an owner living there, so an investor buying a unit shouldn't expect to reap huge returns relative to someone buying a unit with a X0-year mortgage, right?
I think owning property would be much more expensive than renting in the case where the value is based on future appreciation, vs actual value that it provides as a living area. I admit I'm not an expert on real estate, so please explain to me whether this makes sense or not.
In the last housing bubble rents and mortgages disconnected pretty severely. My friends and I were renting a million dollar house in Los Gatos for just $2400/month. Not sure how things are nowadays though.
Well given the number of houses in a major city obviously SOMEONE is affording them. Unless they are all owned by a handful of people (not really what we are shooting for here I'd think).
Point being, its not unreasonable at all to expect to be able to afford a home.
Why would affording to purchase a property in a large diverse city like L.A. with a high salary be unreasonable? I really don't understand your stance.
Didn't it? Were individuals ever commonly buying houses (EDIT: any property) in Manhattan, for example?
I don't have any hard numbers, but I suspect LA simply having become more urban and desirable is a big part of it. It's certainly still possible to buy houses in suburban flyover country very cheaply.
the recent ballot measure that uncorks development passed; it will get better in LA. the NIMBYs reigned supreme here for a while but they are being beaten.
The other side of the coin is this is akin to what employees from bay area are doing in, say, Texas. They buy properties and propping up the prices elsewhere.
'During the recession, many market-rate projects that had been OK’d were abandoned by cash-strapped developers and converted into affordable housing projects because the government was the only entity doing any building. The community’s reception of a market-rate project compared with the same project when it became an affordable housing project was noticeably different, says Gloria, who was a San Diego city council member at the time.
“Whatever reason that might be, it could just be a pure no-growth approach or it could be a true fear of what affordable housing is perceived to be—and it’s never what it really is—maybe this [bill] is a way to address that,” he says.'
Amazing how they described this odd reaction without once uttering the words "black people".
While you have the general idea right, it really could be more accurately described as "poor people of a variety of backgrounds". I mean, there's plenty of poor latino (especially in San Diego), black, and white folks who need housing.
It's particularly galling when it happens in a charming neighborhood that used to be run-down and redlined but now that people are discovering trees and walkability are a nice thing has mostly $750k+ houses and residents who oppose any new construction of any sort. I mean, reading the nextdoor feed these are people who wanted to fight a discount grocer opening on an empty lot because it wasn't classy enough for them. They also oppose bike lanes and street calming, which is one of the reasons I left. (I refer of course to Golden Hill)
Right now cities have all the incentive to create office space to bring in as many jobs as possible, and the taxes that come with them, while leaving housing and infrastructure as someone else's problem.
There needs to be an incentive in place for this not to happen. Perhaps we need to force the municipalities to split their employment tax with the city where the employee actually lives?
Admittedly I have no idea what legal mechanism would make that possible, but something like this would give cities an incentive to build more housing along with increasing their employment/tax base.
I have what would appear to be a good middle class job at a state university but because I live in the Bay Area, half my paycheck goes to rent. Many of my coworkers are now working weekend jobs just to stay ahead. Positions remain unfilled for many months because the jobs don't pay enough. The chances that the state will give us a meaningful pay raise is basically zero. The California Faculty Association negotiated a 10% pay raise over 3 years and that required major arm twisting right up to a strike vote.
Forget home ownership, forget starting a family. This current situation just isn't sustainable.
It sounds like working at a university in the Bay Area is what's unsustainable. Why not just let the market sort itself out? If the university can't find staff, they'll have no choice but to raise salaries or move out. No need for union pressure. You've chosen to take the low pay and high cost of living, so it must be good enough for you. Perhaps at some point you'll be pushed over your limit and move out yourself.
The point of this article is that "the market" in housing is not functioning as one. Supply isn't rising to meet demand because it's being constrained by arguably unjust political restrictions.
Supply isn't the thing expected to raise boundlessly whenever demand goes up. Prices are.
In this case supply is said to be bounded by government. But imagine an alternate reality where SF was Tokoyo-fied to the max. The city has every last housing unit that could possibly be squeezed in. The peninsula is slowly sinking into the ocean. And there is still more demand for housing. What then? Supply isn't going to rise then, either.
So all I see is a whine that the government should prioritize one interest group's desires for lower prices over all the other desires and interest groups that coalesced to constrain housing in the first place.
Want to talk about the market not functioning like a market is "supposed to"? Look no further than consumers overpaying to pack into a city for salaries that do not offset the higher cost of living.
Oversupply, ironically, from the educational sector.
Lets say the economy is big enough to consume X new graduates of major Y. The problem we have as a nation and an economy is we've been producing between 2X and 100X degrees of major Y for many years. The majority of OPs fellow grads from that graduation year are working as bartenders or waiters or salespeople or software devs, so being stuck in horrible living conditions yet in his academic field means OP graduated at a very high percentile of class (maybe more than 99th if he's english lit, or at least 90th for a "normal" field). If OP bails there are at least 10 to 100 grads who currently have worse jobs probably not even in the field, with the same degree as OP, chomping at the bit to take his awful job.
Restriction of supply is the only way out. That means eliminating socialized student loans, and that would result in crying and squealing like the world has never seen before, so that's not politically possible. A massive world war and draft? Close the borders? We know the demand side of the economy will never grow big enough to provide enough jobs for the people already qualified and living here, so don't count on the demand side to fix things, its gotta be a supply side solution.
In the long run, a large fraction of the population has to immigrate elsewhere or die or tune in turn on drop out NEET style or do hippie commune UBI or have a (hopefully nonviolent) revolution ... I'm unaware of any viable alternative to the list. Kicking the can down the road BAU style means the inevitable crash will be much bigger.
Currently trying to build a house in San Diego county. Red tape, permitting, and waiting on the county to review things has consumed no less than 18% of our total budget. I'm happy that California protects our environment from negative environmental impacts, but the way in which they do it makes new housing almost entirely uneconomical.
I've always suspected if not the overt aim, then a "side benefit" of this kind of activity was to restrict the inflow of people into desirable areas (rather than just protecting the environment or collecting taxes or else general bureaucratic nonsense).
I'd love to live in San Diego. If I could afford it and live like I do now I'd be there in a heartbeat. Not the case with San Fransisco which I'd have to be paid a whole lot more than could reasonably be expected to go near.
I live in North County San Diego and there are various communities of new construction available. From what I've seen, places are more willing to accept planned communities where you can account for traffic, water/sewer, schools, etc.
I'm not sure if you're talking about building a new home that replaces an existing one, or building a new home where no home has ever been built. I assume the latter, but if so, there is certainly a lot involved.
In NJ a state supreme court ruling created something called the Mount Laurel doctrine, which according to Wikipedia: requires that municipalities use their zoning powers in an affirmative manner to provide a realistic opportunity for the production of housing affordable to low and moderate income households.
Unlikely to happen, in my opinion. Locals, who have lived in the Bay Area for a long time, have all the voting rights and they either own homes and want to see their property value increase or are considered poor and get cheap housing and plenty of handouts. Only those who move here actually suffer and pay all the taxes to support the locals and end up renting forever.
Local renters, yes; but local renters are somewhat apathetic if their rent is governed by rent control and they're not paying market rate. (The ones that are paying market rate should absolutely be, and it's disheartening.)
Those of us who are or feel priced out of those areas, however, have no voting rights, but are stuck with the outcomes.
<sarcasm>
It recently occurred to me that NIMBY policies probably are secretly promoted by US government as a way of protecting cities against nuclear attack: thanks to them cities get spread on the largest possible area, minimizing potential casualties and damages by exploding nukes.
</sarcasm>
That actually was a design consideration in the 50s, especially for infrastructure. Part of the reason that highways were more favored was that they're more resistant to attack than trains.
Instead of growing vertically up, cities ought to consider down because it doesn't ruin existing property owners' view and the community's beauty of not turning into a concrete, brutalist jungle. Furtheremore, there's effectively infinite subsurface real-estate while the maximum usable height of buildings is finite. Musk's Boring Company transport ideas are also onto something but housing and office space should also be deployed underground to maximize spatial efficiency.
For example, the Mountain View San Antonio Shopping Center development has become an uninspired eyesore. I don't live there but it's unattractive.
Building downwards into space that has no natural light makes for housing that is unpleasant and in many cases dangerous in case of fire (on the 1st to 4th stories, roughly; windows provide a secondary means of egress; and above that, fire escapes).
Additionally, building downwards is extremely impractical where downwards is below the water table, which is the case in many parts of most major cities (since cities tend to have historically developed along rivers or shoreline for access to drinking water and transportation).
I'm glad they're starting to crack down in NIMBYs. we desperately need a vast increase in housing.
One of the long term side effects of this enormous housing shortage and the presence of prop 13, is that 50+ aged people are making up a larger and larger % of the population, as many of the younger people get pushed out (the next generation has nowhere to live). Already just in the last 10 years, % of 65 years olds and up has increased from from 13% to 18%. I'm guessing this trend will continue for the next 10-20 years, until the housing starts to correct.
I am tired of NIMBY's in Bay Area and all over California. I am wondering if there is some economic analysis on the impact of NIMBY on job growth and poverty. I am convinced that at least some of the joblessness in Central Valley is due to NIMBYism in Bay Area.
Having said that, I don't believe any amount of legislation will solve the housing problem in California. The appeal for living in California extends beyond US borders and there is a large population abroad willing to move to CA.
> Residents might be less likely to rally against a new project, the thinking goes, if it means their new neighbors will be teachers and firefighters in addition to those receiving housing subsidies.
I suppose the implication here is that teachers and firefighters make a middle-income salary. The author is gonna freak when they find out how much housing a teacher or firefighter salary will buy you in a major US metro city real estate market.
If they want to solve housing, they need to incentivize the hell out of "permanently remote" positions.
It is insane that so many teams in such dense areas have these butt-in-chair policies that require employees to live in expensive areas and commute great distances.
Frankly, there are tons of jobs that can be done just fine from anywhere. Managers have to get over this idea that they can't keep track of people wherever they are.
What I really don't get is why isn't the free market working? It seems like other cities in other states would compete for high tech jobs aggressively enough to make companies willing to move to cheaper areas where they could pay their employees less and the employees have a better cost of living.
>It seems like other cities in other states would compete for high tech jobs aggressively enough to make companies willing to move to cheaper areas where they could pay their employees less and the employees have a better cost of living.
> What I really don't get is why isn't the free market working?
That is an excellent question that you could ask about many of our modern social dilemmas. The beginning to an answer might be found in Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The residents are blocking the construction to protect their real estate value. Nice move from the government, however I don't know how would this go through because there will surely be some intensive lobbying from the NIMBYs' side.
Oh, I know what it means. That was a public service.
Acronym soup can be maddening. Sure, one can look up every acronym but this can reach the point of jarring the reader out of a story. It is often a better idea to help the reader retain the desired mental state by taking a second to clarify acronyms.
Anyone who's read legal documents know just how easy it is to do this. The first time you use the acronym you define it, just like this (JLT). Any time after that the reader knows what it means without having to run a separate search and change mental states, JLT.
It's a very anti-democratic move by California. They are willing to destroy local control of people in their communities to foster growth that will lead to further deterioration of living standards.
Wouldn't it be better to try to grow tech outside of California in places like the Dakotas and Idaho where there is plenty of land and people in need of work?
The American heartland could be a place rich in opportunity if we invest there as a nation. Considering urban/rural income differentials it would ease inequality also.
Why would you expect California to want to grow the tech industry in other states? California has a pretty vested interest in making sure that high-earning tech employees and companies continue to pay California state taxes.
It's perfectly democratic. Our elected state legislature is doing what they were elected to do. I'm sorry that you didn't like the result, but it's not undemocratic.
Not a lot of people want to live in places that you mentioned. The really smart people will find a way to stay in California forcing all others to gather around them.
Not many want to live in these areas yet, but there was a time when Paris was a few mud huts on an island, and Venice was a swamp.
Determination, patience, and wealth are what create destinations, even if you don't have California's climate. (And Idaho's climate is pretty nice, from what I've heard of it, certainly better than the South's and the interior Midwest's.) And in the meantime, there's a great deal of unspoiled nature to enjoy -- as a sibling comment points out.
How far is it from Silicon Valley to a really good trout stream? In Boise, it's a lot closer.
How about hiking in a wilderness area? Skiing?
Now, true, if you want high-quality Chinese food, Boise may not be your cup of tea (pun intended). But I bet there are enough tech people who like the outdoors more than the big city to make a small-ish tech hub in someplace like Boise.
California is great for outdoorsy stuff as well. Beach is right there, plenty of hiking areas around the Peninsula, skiing is available 4 hours away about 8 months per year and there are enough fresh water rivers.
This is an odd comment. Have you ever lived in the Bay Area? Because part of what non-tech people love about it is great hiking is almost always within half an hour's drive.
The climate doesn't support skiing or trout fishing, but outdoor activities are very big here. It's a significant part of why many people stay here rather than going to NYC or Boston.
That sort of intellectual/economic wealth concentration is problematic for society. Wouldn't it be better to have many smaller hubs that more expansive communities can grow from?
It's not anti-democratic. It's the opposite. California State representatives were elected into power by all voters (home owners and renters). Where as local anti-building policies in communities exist because the NIMBY's pay the taxes and local governments have an inventive to encourage higher property prices.
Also I think you've forgotten we live in a free market. Tech has decided to base its industry in the Bay Area. And unfortunately the new participants in this industry have a higher purchasing power than the existing community. You can not tell people where they can and can not live or work. So if your strategy is to limit the supply of housing the only outcome possible is higher property prices with the existing residents pushed out.
I've been in Silicon Valley for close to 20 years, and I have been concerned about this for a long time. I want to say it was somewhere around 2010 that I began noticing a sudden increase in the number RVs I see in non-RV places, such as large parking lots and along industrial area roads. Now it seems like I hardly go anywhere and not see several RVs that are clearly out of place - they used to only be found in sideyards, RV parks, or driving down the highway.
Next, the homeless situation has truly grown to epic proportions. Take a peak into any of the inbetween areas, and you'll find a small encampment. How many of these exist, I can't say, but once I began to understand where the homeless go, I started to venture and take small peaks - they're everywhere.
Next, the homeless started showing up, en masse, in large public places. The most obvious is the parks near San Pedro square in San Jose. Yes, this area has always had an "element" to it, but that element used to live in the nearby housing. Now, the element is in the park.
I was talking with a friend who lives in a very expensive and beautiful home near this park, and this friend was really annoyed at how the homeless population around this house has really exploded. At the same time, this friend had not identified any link to the homeless population and crazy median home prices, now approaching $1 million for San Jose. I asked this friend to please consider the statistic of a $1 million median home price in a city with a population of 1 million, and what does that really mean for its residents?
My feeling is that, in time, this is going to be incredibly bad. The first problem is an increase in property crime. When people are forced out of their shelter, they will become desperate. Some percentage of any population is going to be pre-disposed to considering crime, so increasing the number of people who are desperate will increase the absolute number of people who will turn to crime.
Police forces do not exist to protect - they are really just for cleanup, and currently there is a new trend that will eventually get reported of how the nature of burglaries, especially in the San Jose area, have changed. It used to be that perps would case and then burglarize when owners were out for a weekend or vacation. Now, the owners are out for only a few hours and return home to find they have been burgled. Obviously they are using some more sophisticated surveillance or network tech of some sort. In at least one precinct, the police have yet to catch anyone performing burglaries in this manner.
With this new trend, a group of, say, five clever people can do 10s of millions in property damage annually. As these small groups are increased, the dollars in damage become very real, plus the emotional impact of feeling insecure in your own property will often push people over the edge to sell their homes or at least move away, converting their residence into a rental unit.
The second trend that I fear will begin to occur is the less clever criminals who simply mug, loot, and smash-and-grab.
Finally, there will simply be violence against the property owners. People are not dumb, as we can see by this article that even the politicians and bureaucrats are beginning to get concerned for their jobs. In San Francisco, there was the violent demonstrations against the Google buses. I don't know in exactly which way the violence comes out or is directed, but when you force enough people in to desperate circumstances, you will eventually have enough of those who are pre-disposed to violent "solutions" that they will find a target.
In all of this, people will begin selling and moving out. The property values will drop, not because of increased supply of housing, but because of an exodus of existing buyers coupled with a sharp reduction in new buyers. Eventually, companies start moving jobs or entire companies to other areas (owners, executives, and managers don't want to live in all of that), and demand for residential housing falls yet further.
As the prices drop, people will consider selling to get equity, so the prices drop further (selling encourages selling). Getting things to go up from here will be a serious problem. All of the governments are maxed out, credit-wise, and their revenues will tank.
At this moment, today, it seems like increasing housing is a bad idea for cities and property owners because they will lose at least some of the current equity in their homes, but depending on the property owner's time-horizon, they may well lose all of their equity.
There's a very simple solution here: build more housing and pay better wages in the first place, so as to avoid the awful dilemmas of French Revolution-style situations.
Inadequate wages is not the issue. There simply isn't enough housing. In the most recent 6-year period for which there is data, 500,000 net new jobs were created in Silicon Valley, but only 65,000 new residential units were built in the same area.
It's fascinating to see how the NIMBYs couch their arguments in terms of environmentalism and morality, when they are motivated by nothing else than greed and shallow personal interest at the cost of everyone else.
Maybe the answer is to stop growing and let other parts of the country grow. The brain drain to SV has been disastrous for other communities. It's contributed to inequality and deep geographic/political polarization.
Yes, you can downvote me but consider formulating a counter-argument.
That's... not really how it works. Or, you could also argue that's what the area has been doing for the past 40 years, and look at the current state of housing.
EDIT: I didn't downvote you, but I will elaborate: there's very little you can do to stop people from moving to California, short of forcefully putting them on buses and sending them away (which is what some cities actually do[1][2]). What you can do is figure out a plan before they show up to provide them decent housing for a fair price, or else they'll figure something out, something likely to be illegal/extremely uncomfortable/look a lot like homelessness.
Some anecdotes: one friend of mine lived in a house-boat in Berkeley for 2 years while going to college. Another lived out of his van in Los Angeles. These are regular young people, both born in California, trying to make things work.
It has been extremely hard to build new buildings in hotspots throughout the state for quite a long time. You could argue that preventing growth to meet demand is, in a sense, what it means to "stop growing" (short of turning folks away at the state line). This is what I meant by my comment.
But how many people are going to move there to live in a bus? I certainly wouldn't. If property values get too high I'll just not move there. I don't understand this mentality where everybody thinks they should be able to afford to live in the best cities in the country, especially in California. It's just simple supply and demand. If housing prices get too high and people can't afford to live there they will live somewhere else. Period.
Now that's an oversimplification. There is a lot to be said for mixed income communities and whatnot, but just saying "oh I can't afford to live here this sucks" is not good enough.
I think you both have the causality backward. Vanishingly few people are moving to California to live in a bus.
People are moving to California to get better jobs, and most of them can comfortably afford to live in California. The people who are ending up in buses have lived in California since housing was cheap enough that they didn't have a problem, or since they were children.
People who can't afford to live in California anymore also can't afford the cost of moving. So they end up on the street and unable to find work or leave the state.
> The people who are ending up in buses have lived in California since housing was cheap enough that they didn't have a problem, or since they were children.
Most of the people I know who complain about the housing cost in California are young people who make considerably less money than their parents do but expect to be able to maintain the lifestyle they had growing up. That's incredibly unrealistic and I doubt that's ever been attainable unless you're exceedingly wealthy.
When my parents moved to the area I grew up in, it was not even close to the desirability that it is when I eventually moved out. I've done what they did. I bought a house further away in a less expensive neighborhood because I can't afford to live there.
The amount of young people who think they have a right to move in the opposite direction and maintain their lifestyle is strange to me. Tons of people I know moved to bigger, expensive cities out of college/high school but they had to live with 3 roommates to do so. Eventually, when you want your privacy back, you have to move away.
For most young people, you can't have your cake and eat it too when it comes to where you choose to live.
I know you and the other poster are using "California" as a shorthand for "Coastal California", but the Central Valley and the Inland Empire are very affordable.
I don't understand this mentality where everybody thinks they are entitled to prevent others (from the same country, no less!) from moving in to their community.
It's not "supply and demand" until the supply caps come off. It's just policy set by the entrenched.
No different than any other prevention, or rule. Why shouldn't they be able to? If you moving to my community and doing whatever causes damage to the value of my property that's no different than doing damage to anything else.
It's their community they set the rules. Why have communities or governments, or even countries for that matter? Fundamentally they do the same things.
Why should I not be able to just come live in your house or just build a house in your backyard? Oh you have a great view? Let me just build a huge nonsense wall here and live in a small shack or something. Why not?
We have laws and governments to protect public safety (from hazards such as violence, unsafe driving, unsafe building design, fire, communicable disease, environmental toxicity, etc.), to enforce property rights over what people actually own, to provide essential services such as water, sewer, police, firefighting, and education, and to look after the interests of those who can't get their needs met in the market.
There's not much precedent around protecting the scarcity of assets as a job for government. Maybe taxi medallions?
>Why should I not be able to just come live in your house or just build a house in your backyard?
Because I own my backyard. On the adjacent lots, if you can buy them, knock yourself out. No one owns their view, unless they actually own a view easement. The government has no business enforcing property rights that don't exist.
>Oh you have a great view?
Are you seriously suggesting that someone else should be prevented from living the life they want, the job they want, affordable rent, enough space to raise children, etc. to protect someone else's view? That's an unbelievably fucked up level of dystopian.
K so I'll buy the houses surrounding yours and build some huge barbwire walls, then on the outside of the walls I'll just paint them with horrific images, just gross stuff that anybody would find disgusting to look at. You spent 1.5mm on that house, and now because it's surrounded with these walls the property value is cut to basically nothing. House appraised as worthless, financial ruin for you.
But hey fuck you right?
>Are you seriously suggesting that someone else should be prevented from living the life they want, the job they want, affordable rent, enough space to raise children, etc. to protect someone else's view? That's an unbelievably fucked up level of dystopian.
Me me me me me.
I want an affordable house, with enough space to raise children, affordable rent, the job that I want and I want to live right next to Breckenridge so I can ski all the time! Oh and I want a short commute, freshly paved roads, bike lanes, HUGE parks, the best schools, and free community events. That's the life I want. So I guess I get to move in and start demanding those things?
Sorry. Life doesn't work that way. Whether it's somebody's view, or the neighborhood they moved in to, you aren't entitled to things like that. Housing will be expensive in desirable areas. You don't get to just move in and complain it's expensive. Move somewhere else or deal with it.
lol I do and will continue to cal people entitled when they act as if they are the only ones entitled to anything. Maybe since none of you are property owners you don't understand. Idk. Neighborhoods form and get to do things like create zoning laws and regulations. Don't like? Don't move there. Period.
Neither views nor neighborhoods are considered to be property under real-estate law. Basically, no. Just no. Other people do get to spend their own money on property near yours and use it as they please. That's a free economy. If you don't like it, try some form of central planning. I think feudalism might really suit you.
But yes neighborhoods do get to control things like that and they should. Ever wonder why there are no skyscrapers in DC? Ever wonder why there are home owners associations that can dictate what colors and upkeep you do on your property? My example was extreme, but rules and controls exist for a reason. If you don't like it, then don't live there.
The fact that I'm critiquing a poor argument has nothing to do with my philosophical views. Just as I could argue a fascist policy would be poor to implement or is inconsistent (or the opposite), I can do the same with liberal democratic property rights.
While a view may not be property (and this depends on what laws are written etc...) communities in this system of government regularly create laws and regulations for said communities. It's just a normal thing that happens in democratic societies. Being upset about that doesn't change that fact, nor does it make those communities immoral or unethical or anything like that.
>It's their community they set the rules. Why have communities or governments, or even countries for that matter? Fundamentally they do the same things.
Let's try changing this up. "It's my community, so I set the rules. We're seizing the means of production, and any bourgeois scum who don't want to give them up can be put against the wall and shot."
Chances are you suddenly developed an objection. Maybe "we'll set the rules we want in our town" tends to get overridden from above for a valid reason? I dunno.
That's nonsense. Seizing property against somebody's will is an initiation of force and violence to deprive somebody of rightful ownership of property. That's far different than a home owners association or a neighborhood ordinance. Now you could go in and vote that ordinance out, but aside from that your analogy here is not good at all.
And towns do set rules all the time. People get together, vote in legislators, and set rules. For example, building height restriction. I don't understand what your problem is here.
>That's nonsense. Seizing property against somebody's will is an initiation of force and violence to deprive somebody of rightful ownership of property.
Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.
> Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.
Who said anything about Ayn Rand? Are you unfamiliar with political philosophy? Have you read Robert Nozick for example? I find it curious that you're using Ayn Rand here.
But with that aside, I am in fact arguing morals that have grounding in the real world. If you're unable to understand how force is abstracted then I can explain it for you, but you have to be willing to be educated on the subject.
The analogy presented was incredibly poor, one is seizing property, the other is a normal function of a liberal democracy.
We move in anyway. We cram into existing bedrooms, increasing the number of incomes needed to afford a single unit. We mega-commute, taking up resources like train seats and roadway space for ridiculous lengths of time, consuming energy and releasing pollutants along the way. We crowd out parking, particularly when the room for us is far from transit and walkable areas. People we displace become desperate, which has public health and crime effects, or they move away, diminishing the character that made the place desirable. We live in the suburbs, depriving insolvent city governments of needed tax revenue.
You can't stop us from moving in. Controls on internal migration in the United States are unconstitutional. The best you can do is allocate new units in proportion to new residents so that we don't wreck the existing market.
Because how the fuck can your view, the uncrowdedness of your street, be worth more than everyone else's pursuit of happiness?
> Because how the fuck can your view, the uncrowdedness of your street, be worth more than everyone else's pursuit of happiness?
You're ruining their pursuit of happiness. They want to live in an uncrowded neighborhood that was how it was when they bought their home. If you don't like the home prices then don't live there. It's quite simple. I choose not to live there when I could because I believe the prices are too high. Instead of cramming my family into a crowded area I just live in a nice little home with a good income and space. You're free to make your own choice.
Because they only are responsible for the property they own and not the property/land next door? It might make financial (or even quality-of-life-related) sense for a property owner to fight against construction next door, but I can't think up any reasonable or legal justification for why a property owner should have the power to prohibit construction next door...
It's just a matter of degree. You're drawing an arbitrary line here. Nobody is prohibiting anybody from construction, they're prohibiting certain types of construction. You can build a house, it just has to follow the rules and guidelines that the community has established.
It's a pretty common thing in the United States. There are historical neighborhoods for example. People pay a lot of money to live in these neighborhoods. You can't just waltz in and tear down an expensive house and turn it into a property with a couple of trailers on it.
The area has housing problems, no doubt about it, I'm not arguing that they don't, but there is clear legal, and social precedent for establishing rules for communities throughout the United States.
Indeed. Communities can collaborate to keep things the way they'd like them by leveraging local networks. One particular and exciting example of this sort of policy is Redlining[1]. Agreements such as height limits aren't as bad (and are less explicitly racist), but it's a similar sort of idea. I understand the reasons why someone would want this for their neighborhood (and in most neighborhoods throughout the USA it's not a big deal), I just think in these examples where there's extreme tension between external demand and the desires of current residents, something has to give.
> There are historical neighborhoods for example. People pay a lot of money to live in these neighborhoods. You can't just waltz in and tear down an expensive house and turn it into a property with a couple of trailers on it.
I'm not against historic neighborhoods in general. I live in NYC and am aware of multiple, but I feel that some, such as parts of the West Village, have been harmful to the city as a whole. The point of a historic neighborhood should be to preserve exceptional period architecture: for example, the Upper East Side historic district in the low/mid 60s preserves a particular style of late 1800s row houses[2]. Many parts of the West Village that are historic are preserving a bunch of shitty 1 or 2 story buildings constructed when the area was a slum in the teens and 20s, after half the neighborhood was torn down to build the IRT 7th Ave Line (i.e. the 1/2/3 train) that would be covered as 7th Ave South[3].
To use a historic neighborhood as a chance to "preserve community" is, I think, an extreme distortion of intent (although the ultimate result for many well-positioned historic areas is preserving a particular sort of extremely wealthy community).
The thing is living in alternative housing is also generally illegal in the state. Someone in a Redwood City tiny house was forced to move because they were blocking the view and creating a public nuisance (besides that most places don't even allow for mobile homes or live-in RVs). Living out of your car/van/truck is also potentially illegal. This is truly becoming a state where only the rich are allowed to live.
Unless you can get a Constitutional amendment to legalize and then implement controls on internal migration, this isn't an option you have. People are already moving here faster than housing is being built, and they have been for a long time. Maintaining a housing shortage doesn't prevent migration, it just means that when migration happens it results in a pressure-cooker of a housing market.
We'd need an enormous amount of building just to accommodate the people who are already here.
You want to stop growth, put controls on migration or job creation. Controls on housing aren't working.
You don't stop growth by limiting it, you slow it by creating more attractive alternatives. Consider start-up zones in the interior of the US wired with fiber and zero taxation for 10 years. It is something the federal government could do to start alternative hubs.
Not that I want the federal govt meddling... I'm surprised other cities haven't pushed for this. I mean, just about any city within a 90 minute flight to SV is probably close enough if one has to do business there, and if you don't, all the better.
I'm frankly surprised that there isn't more effort to bring tech business into Denver, Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta... They all have some, but there's plenty of room for growth and the income to cost of living ratio for tech work is pretty nice... No you don't have the relatively great year round weather, but you do get more options.
Are you suggesting the federal government intentionally sabotage our biggest economies in order to try and redistribute people? That sounds like gross federal overreach.
The optics of that are terrible. We create low tax zones to bring employment back to disaster areas and blighted communities with buy in across the political spectrum. But to do the same for a bunch of rich white yuppies who get offers that put them in the top 2% out of college? Good luck with that.
There is a very, very simple way to stop the "brain drain" to SV: start paying comparable salaries. Don't come with a bunch of crap about "cost of living". Pay those salaries, or better and you'll start pulling talent away from SV. As long as the other parts can't or won't provide similar opportunities they don't deserve to have the talent.
The main thing capitalism is meant to do is prioritize where resources should be focused. And they get focused where they get the most value.
It's not that simple. High salaries aren't the only benefit that comes from high concentration, there's also high fluidity in the job market. And it goes both ways. In our industry, employers are picky (what's the on-site to offer conversion rate at your company?), and potential employees are picky (rightly so, in my opinion) given the huge variance in job satisfaction.
I agree with you in principle. Specifically, having the "coastal elites" spread out a bit could also serve to close the political chasm that is threatening to swallow the US.
But, thinking of counterarguments, it appears there is a network effect going on here, i. e. the value (an attractiveness) of a tech hub is proportional to something larger than the sum of its components.
The obvious counterargument is that the Bay Area has been trying exactly what you propose for years, and the result has been a crisis instead of a shifting of gravity to other locations.
Does the state have a plan for the water crisis that keeps getting worse if it were to make it easier and easier for more and more people to settle down in it?
Only ~10% of California's water use is residential/urban (varies a little bit year to year) [0].
The majority of non-environmental water is used to grow cash crops in the central valley, like almonds, which take 1 gal/almond.
Overall, urban residents have far less impact on climate than exurban residents who drive around in SUVs. It is in the best interests of everyone on planet Earth to make our cities denser and more inviting [1, 2].
CA exports a large portion of its agricultural products, including several top exports that are very water intensive to grow (again, almonds, walnuts, dairy & beef).
Moreover, current irrigation methods in the valley are not ideal for water conservation. Many farmers have water rights dating to the 19th century allowing nearly unfettered access to whatever water they can find, providing no economic incentive to invest in conservation infrastructure.
There is no Californian Malthusian crisis, just a story of poor resource management.
I feel like I can also be sure the export isn't really going to drop much with people coming in, but the domestic usage will rise if you keep letting people in. So the mere fact that we export doesn't really seem to help things.
There is a set of assumptions in your argument that I believe are false.
1. Unregulated water use that allows for production of export cash crops will continue
This could easily be fixed by regulating water use properly, such that farmers have economic incentive to grow crops that are less water intensive given that CA is not water rich.
2. Market prices of current export and current import crops will hold constant regardless of growth
That's not how markets work.
If there was a sudden surge in lettuce demand, farmers in Salinas would respond to increasing prices by switching some fields currently used for export crops to lettuce, which would be consumed locally.
This is aided by point (1) above, where we could push this shift with water regulations.
On the whole -- your concerns seem best addressed by sensible regulation of water in CA, which is a long term political problem. Opposing the farm lobby is well known third rail in the CA Leg.
Nativist population control programs are not the solution to a market failure of water distribution, however they might be implemented. Opposing housing construction is even a really poor way to implement a nativist population control program.
One gallon per almond? But... one gallon of bottled water is more than a dollar. I know there's packaging and transportation, but there's packaging and transportation for the almonds, too. And almonds are not one dollar per almond.
Do the almond growers receive subsidized water? I don't know how else the economics of this works out. (Unless the water used to grow almonds isn't up to the purity standards of drinking water, and they're counting on the tree to filter it...)
Yes, they do. Water is a lot less expensive for farmers, always has been.
This [0] is a pretty good analysis of how California spends its water. One interesting point: instead of carefully installing low-flow fixtures and rationing showers and letting your lawn die, you could pay the california alfalfa industry about $2 to grow $2 less alfalfa for a year.
I think people (especially urban dwellers) are disconnected from how agriculture works. It takes lots of water to support plants, and even more to support animals (including people).
The disconnect is with whoever decided that desert farms should receive water that could instead be used by cities. No one has a right to farm the desert. Quit subsidizing that, and agriculture will move back to areas that have plenty of water. Dairy, in particular, should be concentrated in the Midwest.
Agricultural land is often connected to 19th century water rights in CA, allowing nearly unlimited access to ground water and a set allocation of running streams at very low cost.
Water is typically very cheap, when it's not bottled. So I imagine they aren't using bottled water, which would be outrageously priced, but hopefully it deters some people from buying it.
Two things:
1. Despite population growth, urban water use is falling in california
2. Residential water consumption is dwarfed by industrial & agricultural uses
Some of us just wanted a 3 bedroom house on a 5000 sq ft lot -- so we could have a small yard with room for a dog and BBQ. Maybe a kid playing outside.
Now we're being told we're greedy, and our neighborhoods should be replaced with 3 story townhouses on 1200 sq ft lots. No room for Fido.
Makes me wonder what we're working insane hours for -- to settle for permanent apartment style living. At least we don't have cage houses yet.
Some are proposing state-forced re-zoning, converting residential neighborhoods into multi-family condos. Essentially the eminent domain taking of property. "Your land is too valuable; others need it". Kind of a slap in the face, after working a lifetime to afford a small home.
I didn't downvote you, and I'm not offended, but I sure as hell rolled my eyes at your comment.
Nobody in a city deserves their own yard. Public parks where everyone can BBQ make far more sense. Want a dog? Move to Montana, or get a housecat instead.
Thanks. But what are we defining as cities? Are suburbs included? Where are suburbs allowed to remain, as we force zoning shifts to high density?
The YIMBY movement is strong throughout the Penninsula, between SF to San Jose -- areas previously considered suburbs.
Clearly a 5000 sq ft lot is unacceptable in SF, but where _is_ it acceptable? San Bruno? Menlo Park? Mountain View? Sunnyvale? Pleasanton? Oakland? And for how long?
The article is talking about State laws. Presumably they would apply to all cities, not just SF.
Cities area already defined. Yes suburbs are included. They should allowed to remain as long as it's economically viable to do so.
If you're neighbors want to sell for $10MM each to a developer who wants to build an apartment, they should be allowed to. If your other neighbor wants to tear down their house and build a duplex and rent the other out, they should be allowed to. If you want to keep your dog and bbq, you should be allowed to.
The general idea is to allow people the ability to extract the wealth from their property. It's possible that they are "drinking your milkshake" by extracting wealth from surrounding properties too. But everyone was given the same opportunity.
You are twisting what people want to do. I don't think the goal is to force people out of the homes they own, but to allow property owners to build on the property what the property owner wants to build. If that ends up being a condo or apartment complex where there used to be houses, that is the choice of the property owner.
