Why is this always framed as a problem caused by people looking for a place to live?
I moved to SF for a job. I'm not the one who decided to not build enough new housing for 30 years. I'm not the one who decided to approve all those new office buildings. Yet I was the problem for renting an overpriced apartment from an SF native who bought in the 90s, and now pays less than $8K/yr in taxes on a place worth over $1M. And now I'm still the problem if I decide to leave?
I've lived in several US cities over the course of my life, and the only constant is that whoever you talk to, the problems are caused by the people who moved there after them.
I’d say that another constant is the belief that living in a place for a certain period of time confers a sense of ownership over a city, along with the right to decide who should and should not live there.
You obviously see that in states where Californians are moving, but you even see that in California against those who moved there recently for a job.
I know this is kind of the opposite of the (mostly joking) point I made that you replied to. But the thing I find bizarre is that people can't understand why other people oppose change in the place they live in. Most people choose places to live because they like those places. I think it's safe to say that the things they like extend beyond the four walls of the residence they buy or rent. They might like the walkability, or the views, or the diversity of the neighborhood, or the proximity to friends and family. All of these are things that are subject to change over time, and are more likely to change as the demographics of the town do. The shops you liked to walk to get priced out and replaced with Starbucks and Lululemon. The views get blocked by new buildings. The diversity goes away as people are priced out. The friends and family move because rent went up too much.
How can you possibly be surprised that people don't want the things they like about the place they live to change? This doesn't mean they "own" the city, but it does mean it's quite understandable for them to try to do things to prevent the change if they can. I'm not arguing that this is good, or even completely rational in all cases, but it's far from surprising.
> How can you possibly be surprised that people don't want the things they like about the place they live to change?
People can and should obviously get upset (or excited!) about specific changes. What I'm more surprised at is the idea that some people have that any change at all is unacceptable. It's not like the town that one loved sprung up into existence as is, it took change to get the parts that you like in the first place! No one has an affirmative right for their town to remain as-is from their favorite point in time, as that's just not how life works.
I'm specifically thinking of my time in Santa Monica, with the residents thinking that they should be able to keep their small town vibe despite living close to one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. It struck me as neigh upon delusional to think that one can live near a major city and demand that the city halt expansion wherever it might be convenient to you. That's just not how humanity has ever worked, ever. Cities expand, live too close to them at your own peril.
Assuming that people are against any change at all seems like quite the strawman. Perhaps those people support building some change, perhaps they just want to ensure that public transit, utilities, road infrastructure can handle the added density.
Very few people are are against any new growth in cities. We could likely have a more productive discussion if we framed it around the optimal rate of growth of a city.
> Very few people are are against any new growth in cities.
It seems you’ve never met a NIMBY.
“No new people in my city” is actually a pretty surprisingly popular position. Usually these people are super pro growth, as long as that’s somewhere else.
Because it's quite xenophobic behavior, you say diversity but mean the diversity of people who you happen to like. It's rather easy to be tolerant if only things that you like apply. You can hear exactly the same things racists say about their small towns changing without all these sophisticated meaningless words.
Why should people living at some place even be concerned about diversity? I find your comment almost surreal - after relentless media campaigns, people really believe "diversity" should be their top priority in life?
Both of these comments are so viscerally true. I live most of the year in a very small town (as in, no home mail service) that's also a big tourist destination. It has all the usual tension between townies, second home owners, and tourists, but the thing that really shocked me when I moved here was how there is a sort of caste system among locals with a bunch of dimensions like how long you've lived there, if you own a shop in town, if you are on a town council, etc. Living here can be strange. On one hand, some of the people are extraordinarily friendly, while on the other, I've never felt more unwelcome in a place in my entire life.
We moved to Asheville a few months ago and noticed the same phenomenon. Combine low local wages with high incomes of people working remotely or buying a second home and you get a strange dynamic within the town.
Without taking an opinion on whether that "sense of ownership" is right or wrong, I would say that the response to gentrification is another example of the phenomena you are describing.
I live in one of those state Californians are moving to, and the hate for them is simply epic.
I keep thinking it would be amusing to give out bumper stickers that change in the rain -- with text to the effect of "STAY OUT", or "GO HOME", and a red circle/slash over an image of California. When it rains, the image of California changes to an image of Mexico.
The two most populous states in the US are California and Texas. One demonizes immigrants for moving in and destroying the local culture / way of life. The other, of course, is home to The Alamo.
I find it pretty ironic that in Idaho they would oppose a scenario that is aligned to “free market” principles and that Oregon would oppose immigration. I once took a job in Portland and had stuff thrown at my car because of the CA license plate along with screaming “go back to your own state.”
Opinions change very quickly once they involve people personally.
“When California sends people north to Oregon, they’re not sending their best and brightest. They’re drug dealers and smugglers. Some, I assume, are good people.” — my sixth generation Oregonian wife.
The NIMBY problem suggests that it's not so much your fault at all - the locals would have passed zoning laws preventing housing for you from being built, as they did in SF ("protect our views" and such) - but actually the fault of the locals for resisting density upgrades.
Imagine, in SimCity terms, if your Low-Density High-Wealth Residential citizens passed a ballot measure preventing you from building Medium-Density Residential zones, and you have the essential problem of SF and other regions in a nutshell.
People don't like density upgrades, and they fight against them tooth and nail. It's what we get for allowing density to be zoned locally, and it's something that other countries just don't even allow when it's bad enough that homelessness is a problem. "Your city block is being upgraded to a megatower, here's due payment for your home and you get first right of refusal on a free home in the megatower."
Be warned, though; once you become an established local, you are extremely vulnerable to falling prey to this exact behavior. I know several awesome people who finally made their wealth and bought a house in SF, and promptly turned into anti-density NIMBY folks - because they were afraid that they might not make a profit on their home, or because they liked their neighborhood, or whatever.
Now I want NIMBYs in city builder games randomly preventing the player from creating and/or upgrading zones. Chances are they will be treated like the nobles in Dwarf Fortress, that's forced to leave or killed off in spectacularly creative ways.
It's all fun and games until someone's home value is depressed by a zoning decision, and then your city goes bankrupt because they mob against you on SimCitter :)
"Due to your citizens refusing to approve tax levies for sewage system upgrades, your city has died of dysentery."
It is understandable that people are selfish but why society as a whole should pay for that? It is a relatively recent development, no more than a century, that people actually have such a power to derail urbanization while at the same time profiteer off of it. Society just pays [1] those people basically because they were born at the right time.
I'm pro density but the densification process really trips core parts of people's psyche. We're human beings.
It affects your _home_. You've lived in a place for 10 years and suddenly you have no privacy because a big block of units gets stood up looking right over you. Or they block your sunlight, build right up to the boundary, or your quiet leafy neighbourhood just isn't quiet anymore and that's after you lived next to a construction site for 6 months. These things can have impacts on people's relationships as well.
Of course the world changes, such is the price of progress, and _usually_ those affected can afford to wipe their tears with big stacks of cash.
But I don't think it's fair to characterise all NIMBYs as just greedy, a lot of people just want to live in the neighbourhood they thought they were buying into.
I agree, it's not a pure calculated greed but some sort of a "mental denial of change" coupled with the historically unusual legal powers. Immediate property appreciation is more like blinders, it is very hard to swim against "number go up". End result for society is still the same though.
'I like they way my lawn is and i don't like construction noises'
vs
'I can't get a job because it's too expensive to rent or buy where the jobs are, so i live in poverty'
(or i can't start family because i can only afford a room-share, or any number of other effects from NIMBYism)
Existing residents resisting change really aren't any more selfish than new residents demanding change. Both are championing changes that are in their self interest at the expense of the self interest to others.
Sure, and every oppressed person demands changes in their self interest at the expense of the oppressor. Now, I'm not trying to call people who want to live in HCOL city but don't have money oppressed but want to point out that this line of thinking is unhelpful. What matters is the outcome for the majority of people now and in the future, and based on that I don't see how rights of the existing residents to tell their neighbors what to do with their property in the world class cities make the world a better place. And research supports that conclusion.
> People are not better off without property rights.
Sure, but the problem at hand is they have more than property rights, they have rights to a neighbor's property, conversely my neighbors have rights to my property, and how's that fair under capitalism. Besides, there are other capitalist countries where zoning is not a local level affair and they don't seem to be marxist hell-holes as you imply.
> I guess you celebrate colonialism
I don't celebrate anything but people are born in increasing numbers, the whole economy and governments rely on this trend so I think it is only fair to the new generations if we at least return to the respect of the private property which is long gone.
Of course people have more than property rights. Like access to clean drinking water, infrastructure, and so on. It's wrong to assume their rights should stop at the border of their property. Like if they have a water pipe to their house, other people shouldn't be allowed to cut off that pipe. (As a simple example).
You are talking about a kind of societal contract of society having to provide housing for people. Likewise, there are other societal contracts.
"I don't celebrate anything but people are born in increasing numbers, the whole economy and governments rely on this trend so I think it is only fair to the new generations if we at least return to the respect of the private property which is long gone."
The argument "the economy depends on more people being born" doesn't really fly in a discussion of how more people cause problems (like needing a place to stay). I don't think most people are asking other people to have lots of children.
Even if you assume everybody should be provided with such a place, why in my backyard (or anybody else's)? Since you seem to have given up on the notion that people might deserve a nice place to stay in, why not just build ugly skyscrapers somewhere else (other than my backyard), and house people there? How about starting in your backyard?
It's understandable that people want control over property they don't own. Doesn't make it right though. And it doesn't make sense for the law to give them that control.
I think it makes sense to give people some rights. For example if you build a highway right in front of their house, it devalues their investment, and they could deserve compensation. Or make it a garbage dump. Are you really of the opinion the the government should be allowed to simply create a garbage dump in front of your house? What about a garbage dump in a poor black neighborhood, would you consider that OK?
It's possible there was a promise of "quiet surroundings and lovely views" when they bought the land from the government. So the government should stick to those promises.
You're debating a strawman. The argument is that NIMBYs oppose more housing in a place already zoned for housing. No one's talking about building a nuclear power plant next to a kindergarten.
Somewhat reminiscent of the GME short squeeze phenomenon. New entrants buy expensive homes, they go up in value because of nimbyism, more people buy homes at the higher prices because they saw the others return, and have to become nimbyist themselves in order to further constrain supply to see return. It just accelerates at each iteration as the next wave has to constrain supply more and more to break even.
No, it really doesn't. SF tried that with neighborhood commissions. It turns out that higher density housing is hideous to existing residents, regardless of the shell it's in.
It doesn't need to be. Vienna has quite a few of higher-density council housing buildings that are architecturally pleasing, one example is Alt-Erlaa [0].
> Why is this always framed as a problem caused by people looking for a place to live?
It would have been hard to win friends or votes if anti-housing people 50 years ago disclosed what segment of "people looking for a place to live" bothered them so much. It's no coincidence that this all starts around the 1968–1974 period: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/racial-segregation-san-franci...
Why is it everyone else's problem to accommodate you?
>I'm not the one who decided to not build enough new housing for 30 years.
California's population has increased 4x since 1950 vs 2x for the country as a whole, more so in SF. To say there is no new housing is just ignoring the (finally waning) population boom.
The tone suggests OP is entitled to more and that housing policy should change to benefit them over other residents. Its a common sentiment I see on HN that seems to suggest California should continue to bend to support new residents.
I have no problem with the people that move to California but the back pressure is bound to happen and native Californians seem despised for it.
Again, I don't mean to imply that anyone owes me anything. But as I said, I'm not the one who decided how much housing to build. And I'm not the one who decided how much rent to charge. Both of those decisions were made by "native" Californians (whatever that means). So all I'm objecting to is the notion that I (and other "transplants") the ones solely responsible for this mess.
I don't think the article frames it that way, really, if you look at the conclusion. I'd also highly recommend his book for an introduction to land use politics, centered around the bay area:
I can see that, but the headline[1] and much of the first half of the article[2] strongly imply it (imo).
[1] The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis
[2] Example: According to a recent study by Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, the budget for out-of-town home buyers moving to Boise is 50 percent higher than locals’ — $738,000 versus $494,000. In Nashville, out-of-towners also have a budget that is 50 percent higher than locals. In Austin it’s 32 percent, Denver 26 percent and Phoenix 23 percent.
The problem is that not only is there zero appetite to phase out housing-as-investment boosting policies like the mortgage interest deduction, imputed rent exemption, and cap gains exemption at the federal level, en vogue affordable housing strategies have focused on keeping interest rates low, providing 1st time home-buyer tax credits, and strengthening fair lending regulations.
The U.S.(western nations with high housing costs really) are drunk on the housing-as-investment model, and zoning increases and / or social housing positive policies will always take a back seat when speculative profits are involved.
I think removing many of these housing discounts would only partially impact housing costs, since these affect the majority of buyers and most home purchasing decisions are made on the basis of the monthly payment. That is, after removing some of these policies, people would probably still end up paying the same monthly payment, just with lower nominal housing costs.
The bigger issue to me is the constriction of supply. The suburban development pattern in many areas is simply unable to support the densities needed to manage regional issues well, causing traffic issues and forcing people to live very far from their places of work. I also have more unpopular opinions that there is too much "protected" land in areas like the bay area (specifically in the North Bay). Regardless of that, California needs to do better to fix the supply problem, because these housing policy failures are slowly beginning to affect more and more areas outside of just the bay area and SoCal, and the measures passed so far just don't cut it.
Also, prop 13 has essentially removed much of the "carrying costs" which penalize undeveloped land usage (prop 13 isn't the only thing here, IIRC there are also lots of state/federal tax deductions you can get from not using land, oddly enough). And the low property tax rates across the board really penalize young high earners since the low taxes are made up for with income/sales taxes.
I think both you and OP have a point. The way it ties together is that "owner-occupied housing as a retirement plan" creates the political demand for NIMBY supply restrictions.
When people have 500% of their net worth tied up in a single piece of property, that created very strong incentives to lobby for policies that prop up the value of that asset. You take away the tax incentives, and the mortgage subsidies. People probably still wind up with similar monthly payments. But now as a percentage of their wealth, housing becomes much less important. A 10% decline in home prices no longer leads to a global financial crisis. That makes it a lot easier to build a political coalition to increase housing supply.
I take issue with the “too much protected land” stance. The protected land is a treasure. And paving it over with suburbs will not fix housing. See LA. Vast sprawl and still sky high housing. Oh it’s a wee bit better prices? Let’s pave everything. Turning the Bay Area into la or Phoenix sounds like an awful idea.
Densifying I can get behind, turning the protected lands into a concrete wasteland of parking lots and hoa developments of boxes and mandated office parkish landscaping is not something to advocate. Is that really the best we can do?
They're not talking about protected nature preserves and national parks, they're talking about protected single family zoning which prohibits density increases.
I'm talking about both, but separately. For example Marin County has a lot of natural areas where development is verboten but it's also a big part of the appeal of the area (well, the fact that it's a wealthy white suburban area is a lot of the appeal too, and NIMBY policies keep housing expensive so it stays that way). I just wanted to bring it up because I feel it's yet another piece of the puzzle behind housing costs in the area - but I'm aware it's even more a contentious subject than zoning so it's not a hill I would die on.
The biggest problem, by far, is single family zoning though.
Since this article is about California you can't leave out Prop 13. I'll argue that's done more for real estate investors in the state than all those other policies combined.
Without additional supply, you might succeed at dampening demand and temporarily decreasing prices - most US homebuyers are shopping a payment similar to rent (and accounting for their downpayment amount). However for places that have more desirable properties (employment, weather, etc), all else being equal, you will still get an influx of people over the less desirable and will still be in a supply shortage.
Bay Area in particular you have a crazy imbalance that basically absorbed the high salaries of those working there. For many, the issue could be fairly easily solved with some additional height and/or townhome density. It’s happening slowly. The pandemic has created other dynamics though, so who knows.
EDIT: just a closing thought on the policy side, you are basically making affordability problem worse by reducing incentives. Those already in the real estate market/ownership will be fine, but price of entry will be a lot higher.
In the UK mortgage interest deductions were eliminated from income tax but it just pushed professional landlords to move to holding property in more elaborate incorporated structures
Individual tax payers should be able to deduct all interest payments just like corporations. Not just mortgage interest but also interest on auto loans, credit cards, etc.
Nowhere is building enough housing for growth. In low cost of living places, chances are if you look at population data, the metro region has been stagnant for decades which has alleviated pressure on supply. In any area with growth at all, prices rise because we don't build actual dense housing like we did before WWII (when row houses and mixed use development in walking distance to frequent public transit were the norm everywhere from Manhattan to Los Angeles to downtown Boise, Idaho). We build either tracts of single family homes by clearcutting wildlands adjacent to freeways, or far too little apartments in a single 4-5 story building spanning an entire city block.
In comparison to a block of 4-5 story row homes, these apartment builds are a compromise and will come back to bite planners in the coming decades as construction costs continue to rise. Since it's a single building, you can't redevelop this structure without leveling the entire block. That makes it impossible to do unless you are a deep pocketed development corporation, versus a row house that could be owned outright by an individual and redeveloped by that individual to meet the market demand of the growing city.
It's handy to say "nowhere is building" but it's not really supported by the data. Look at Dallas and Houston compared to San Francisco. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6Tc
Yes, housing isn’t a problem in a city whose population is the same today as it was in 1935, in a country that’s projected to slowly shrink over the next century.
I've never been to Vienna so I can't speak to it but my experience in traveling around the world is that many cities have incredible central cities but also have sprawling medium to high density suburbs that everyone turns a blind eye to. The low density automobile focused suburbs of North America might not exist around those cities but the denser suburbs still have poor livability, especially compared to the central cities they surround.
Yeah, Vienna is very nice! It doesn't feel like a "Big City" at all. I'm partial to the Montreal example in the article - it feels the most 'human scale' to me - but everyone has different tastes.
however as the pandemic has shown us, we may as a whole starting to realize how much your location doesn't matter in technology jobs which will go a good way to freeing up more space for affordable housing in metropolitan areas.
the real reckoning to come is all these tax authorities looking to make up the losses from the exodus and use of facilities in town. a lot was built up not to just serve the population but to reward political friends by making sure they had the properties and contracts to build and even run businesses in town. that gravy train for the tax coffers and political campaigns won't go down without a fight.
one faster way of building out new housing is not rezoning existing areas of housing but going after areas that are not currently zoned for any housing. especially true are larger commercial districts that have collapsed or seen sufficient change to where most businesses up and left. plus removing the requirements that only union labor can be used will help as well in addition to allow hiring people who need work but are not attractive to union employers (most of these rules were originally put in place in the North stop cheaper labor cost black worker construction companies from getting a foothold - go look it up)
Density also matters if you're trying to avoid sprawl. A city like Houston basically requires you to own a car and drive everywhere, because public transit will never be able to keep up with the construction nor will the density be high enough to make it economically viable.
Cost of building a tower is much more than something like rowhouses, multiplexes. Cities like Toronto and Vancouver bypass the "missing middle". So it's mostly single family homes with various "tower node districts".
Yes, towers are expensive, but building them doesn't make the existing SFHs more expensive. Maybe tower building and rising home prices both coincide with certain economic trends, post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Not really. Dallas is an example of a metro area that has extended sprawl as far as it can go. A ton of new highways have been built out but growth in car usage and population have eaten back all the gains. There will never be enough land to make the sprawl work. As a result home prices there are jumping just like everywhere else. No one wants a 2 hour commute.
Not as far as it can go. It can still go many dozens of miles in every direction, and has, and will continue. Companies are following employees to the burbs and employees are moving even more with the uptick of remote work. Home prices are jumping due to population, but sprawl continues unabated.
Density doesn’t matter right up until you hit the limits of what the highways will handle. Then you’ll suddenly wish you’d built dense enough for light rail to alleviate the load on common routes.
Is there a similar source that would let you compare MSAs for building of housing units? I'd be interested to see how Boise's MSA lines up with the Bay Area. Most Californian transplants I'd met growing up in the area were from Sacremento/SoCal though.
It's comparing DFW metro area vs. Houston/Sugarlands metro area vs. SF/Oakland/Berkeley metro area.
As of 1990 (the point where the graphs diverged), DFW had 3.8M people, Greater Houston had 3.3M, and SF/Oakland had 3.7M. They were pretty comparable then; subsequent growth has been simply because the Texas metro areas have added more housing.
Explain? The fact that the population of greater Houston has more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea that they are building enough for growth. They've got a city the size of Berkeley that didn't even exist 50 years ago.
> The fact that the population of greater Houston has more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea that they are building enough for growth.
This isn't enough to support the idea unless prices have also not climbed.
The Bay Area population has dramatically increased and prices have too because building to support this growth has been fought by NIMBYs via bad policy.[0] As a result houses on the peninsula have reached insane prices and there is little available for new people, see: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom...
Myself and many of my friends (~30yrs old) rent with multiple roommates.
The only people that can buy experienced some sort of exit event or have a lot of FAANG equity with two FAANG incomes. Even then they have to pay property tax on that insane value that the NIMBYs don't pay.
Maybe Houston has done a better job, but population increase itself isn't much evidence.
Bad incentives for existing owners to restrict growth exist everywhere, but they're particularly bad in California because of Prop 13.
The most frustrating bit to me, is that the NIMBYs that won the housing lottery and leverage their political power to screw everyone else also play victim. I hope one day we can pass something that corrects a lot of these bad incentives. The new RHNA housing policy and things like Sacramento's elimination of single family zoning are the way. SB50 and related policy would help too.
I mean, population _is_ pretty good evidence of growth. 20 years ago Houston MSA was 15% larger than SF MSA and today it's 50% larger. What other evidence of "building for growth" can you demand?
You can expand sprawl via single family homes and still not build nearly enough housing to meet population growth requirements.
You can have a lot more population and still build little. It just forces people to live in shared housing with roommates at very expensive rents.
I'm not arguing that you're wrong about Houston - maybe they did build enough. I'm just saying that population growth itself doesn't tell you too much.
It's the change in population vs. the change in new housing with a separate line for each.
It's not super easy to understand because the population change is in thousands of people and housing is just in individual units, but I think it's clear from the graph (if I'm reading it correctly) that Houston is not building enough to meet demand. When you mouse over you can see the amount of new people and compare it to the amount of new housing. There's a lot more new people than new housing.
[Edit]: I found an even cooler dataset which I added to the above graph, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B72x - it doesn't go back as far, but it shows available housing inventory which is a more relevant metric (and it's going down). I tried adding median price too, but it made the graph hard to read.
Basically, in a city not meeting demand I'd expect to see the following:
- Prices increasing faster than inflation
- Population increasing faster than new housing
- Availability of housing going down (supply constraints which cause prices to go up)
How bad the situation is depends on the above variables, but generally if you don't build enough to meet demand things get worse. That is true in a worst-in-the-world way in the bay area, but also appears to be true most places due to bad incentives - people who already bought in benefit (or at least think they benefit) from restricting supply.
Wouldn't you have to have some sort of adjustment for singles vs families over time? and for average number of people in a household? Number of people in a household has a cultural factor and age factor also (young single people often share households, more young people => higher density).
I have no idea impactful those numbers would be, just pointing out that there are lots of confounding factors to consider.
Yeah totally, I think those are all things to consider.
I'd also guess a factor of young single people sharing households is due to limited supply and high cost. If it was affordable to have your own apartment, more people would do so. The roommate situation is partly (though not entirely) a symptom of failure to build.
You can see this when you compare regions, where I grew up (western new york) housing is super cheap even though there's a lot less economic opportunity. Nobody I know from high school that stayed there lives with roommates. Many have bought their own (nice, new) house for ~150k. That house in the bay area would be 3 million easily.
So while I agree there are confounding factors at play, the housing supply issue is so extreme I think the others are largely rounding errors.
The only reason one wouldn't be able to demolish the house in the US is if it was designated a historical landmark, that I know of.
Otherwise, if it's still zoned for a single family home, then the owner of the land has the right to deconstruct and construct a single family home, per the updated building codes and whatnot.
I would like to be educated if there's something I'm missing. Is there a legal maneuver in CA that can prevent people from using their real estate for whatever it's zoned for, excluding frivolous lawsuits?
Yes, many jurisdictions in California require city permits for demolition and the process for getting those permits is by no means guaranteed. In my city after you apply for a permit you have to post public notice for 90 days so your nosy neighbors have a chance to go to the "landmarks preservation commission" to argue that your dilapidated shack in which nobody has lived for 50 years is, in fact, a priceless treasure and an irreplaceable piece of the city's identity, an event for which you'll need to hire an expensive land use attorney, a historian, and a forensic architect. Assuming you miraculously get through that part of the process, it certainly is by no means assured that you'd get a permit to build another home because the development standards are written in such a way that "by right" permits don't exist. You need a use permit from the city for everything, and for that you'll need to go through more public hearings at the zoning adjustments board and the design review committee. Meanwhile, you and your lawyers and architects will probably have to appear again before the full city council multiple times because each of the LPC, ZAB, and DRC decisions can be appealed to the full council by anyone, even if they don't live in the city.
On initial reading, I don't see why land zoned for a house would even need a use permit. But then the linked "more" website (which goes to blob.core.windows.net?) says:
>What is a Use Permit?
>A Use Permit is a discretionary land use approval which, under certain circumstances, may authorize a use that is not allowed as a matter of right in a particular zoning district.
>Is a Use Permit Required?
>Each zoning designation has certain uses which are allowed subject to the securing of a Use Permit. These discretionary uses are listed in the Use Table ofArticle 2 of the zoning ordinance.
The first answer says use permits are for authorizing something that's not zoned, and the second answer says all uses require securing a use permit, even for the zoned designations? Looks like a lot of local corruption.
I don't know things about that county, I can only tell you the tactics they use in my city. One of them is at some point the minimum lot size for anything was increased to 5000 sq ft, even though most lots are 4000 or less. This means if you want a new structure on a 4000 sq ft lot, you need a special permit from the city.
Another one is setbacks. If most parcels are 40x100 feet, and the city says you need a 15-foot side yard on both sides, then you either need to figure out how to build a house that's only ten feet wide, or you need a special permit.
It's unfortunate that such blatant corruption on the local level is allowed to fester. One would hope a court somewhere up the chain in the state would come down the right side.
That's not the case, unless you consider tenement conditions acceptable. The working class in these cities aren't suddenly affording $2000 in rent, they are simply cramming more people and more incomes into smaller apartments (1). In Houston over the last 10 years alone, some neighborhoods rate of overcrowding has gone up well over 100% (2). No, Houston is not building enough either, and paying for the population increase by sacrificing the quality of life of the overcrowded working poor, and pushing the middle class out of the city and elsewhere.
As you say some places are growing and others are stagnating or shrinking. If every place has a certain capacity to grow given the necessary pressure to do so, wouldn't more evenly distributed growth reduce the problems caused by the current uneven distribution of growth/stagnation/shrinkage?
In other words, how can you say we're not growing fast enough when so many places aren't growing at all?
Because growth isn't even nor can it be, it depends on connectivity of an area to relevant features that spur further growth, such as industry, jobs, education. There are highly specific reasons for growth to happen where it happens, and 9/10 it's due to some piece of immovable necessary infrastructure that supports a wider region. For example, Chicago is the size it is because it is a confluence point of freight, first from the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, now freight rail. Los Angeles is the size it is because the Port of Los Angeles/Port of Long Beach is the mouth of all east Asian trade coming into the continent, which started a century of industrialization and job growth in the area. San Francisco and Boston are innovation centers due to the number of high quality universities in these areas that continually feed the local talent pool by the year. There are plenty of places that are zoned for growth but it hasn't happened yet, either. For instance, just across the Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles, you have the Antelope Valley, which remains relatively depopulated in comparison to Los Angeles due to a lack of connectivity to very many job centers or much industry, even with roads having long been laid for eventual development (1).
> we don't build actual dense housing like we did before WWII
Because that's not what is profitable for new construction. Builders will build what they can make the most money on. It's not a bad thing -- it's still an increase in housing and every new home sold or rented opens up an older home somewhere for a (probably) less wealthy person, and so on down the line.
Builders will build what they are allowed to build, and often what is zoned are variances for these massive structures with expensive parking structures and requirements like a mandatory 100sqft balcony for every single unit, and not piecemeal small lot apartments like what was built decades ago. Los Angeles in 1920 had a higher zoning capacity than it does today. I mean, it was a celebration when the city recently let you convert your garage into a tiny studio apartment (after a byzantine permitting process), in neighborhoods where 50 years ago homeowners were tearing down their single family home to be a landlord of a 6 unit dingbat apartment spanning the entire 90ft parcel, which is probably illegal today according to the zoning code.
If we loosen zoning code, builders would be able to turn a profit on a lot more types of housing and would be able to meet a lot more market demand. Instead, what they are able to make a profit on with the current review and permitting process is that bog standard 4 floor apartment above a subterranean parking lot with a balcony for each and every unit.
Banks are part of the problem too. In Atlanta the city has loosened up many of the density restrictions and parking requirements only to find developers unable to build dense pedestrian focused housing because the banks won't make construction loans for those types of properties.
I feel like I got served an appetizer and a small dessert, with no main course in between.
California has a housing crisis in some cities. Californians are moving out of those cities. The cities that they're moving into are experiencing an increase in demand (directly restating the previous). That's pushing up prices (not shocking), which is preventing some people with less money from outbidding people with more money (also not shocking).
Conclusion: Single Family Zoning is bad, but only a few places have been enlightened enough to limit or ban it.
OK, maybe, but strikes me as an argument from declaration of opinion rather than a logical conclusion from the priors.
The only thing new I learned from this article is a rough estimate of how much higher an ex-Californian's budget is on average, which was novel but hardly surprising.
Demonizing single family houses seems rather dated in 2021. Single family home prices are surging in much of California too (while apartment prices and condo prices... not so much!), it's not just "everyone is fleeing!"
California was short on both types of housing - what has changed is that it is in even higher demand now! And if remote work continues after COVID, that will continue.
Add to that more efficient electric cars + more self-driving capabilities, and I think the demand pendulum will continue to swing back towards sprawl.
You also have a bunch of millennials still in child-bearing age ranges who are getting around to that.
You won't fix a single family home demand surge by replacing single family homes with other things.
"How will we make sprawl work better than it has in the past" seems a more useful question.
From my observations it seems as though many houses and apartments are intentionally left empty and one possible approach towards improving housing availability is to disincentive this practice by increasing property taxes on those.
Not necessarily California specific, but more in touristy spots: They're also being let out on AirBnB to short term tourists. It's done a huge number on available housing in many markets. Dublin, for instance, say the long-term rental supply double from August of 2019 to August of 2020 because of all the AirBnB residences looking to keep making money and thus returning to the long-term rental market. Hopefully they'll stay on that market (and more will follow), and AirBnB can disappear.
People may prefer single-family homes in a vacuum, all things being equal, but people don't live in vacuums and all things aren't equal. If high-demand cities were allowed to build more apartment buildings, then the value proposition would be undeniable. The very fact that many lots with single-family homes on them retain those homes by making the alternatives illegal should be seen as pretty strong evidence for this claim.
People don't buy houses because they have children, they gather both children and houses because they are prosperous. Millenials (some of whom are now past their child-bearing years) and younger generations won't just get houses because of the inexorable march of time. First they'll need money.
If you believe that fertility is negatively associated with prosperity, then the idea that people will buy these houses because they have children is especially wrong.
The crisis described here is that more people want them than can get them. So if the trend is that more people will want standalone houses specifically, versus just any sort of housing unit, proposed solutions that reduce the supply of them are bound to backfire for areas that implement them.
Basically: is this the start of a different era in terms of demand profiles, driven by remote work, or is this just a short-term bubble?
But why are we treating fertility as exogenous, rather than as a choice? Fertility is not exogenous. Demographers are predicting a 15% decline in live births in 2021 in the US, because women are choosing against pregnancy. It is long-studied and well-known that unemployment also depresses fertility. The idea that people will have children and buy houses just because they turn 30 is silly. They will not have children and they will not buy houses unless the environment in which those appear to be rational choices is established.
I do believe that (see my other response to you). I don't believe that people buy houses because of children. I do believe they want to buy them because of children. I believe they actually buy them because/when
they can afford them and prefer to live in a house they own over a rental. (Plenty of people have kids in rental housing, of course.)
Anecdotal: rented until out first child was school-age. The school near where we were renting was not good so we decided to move.
The thought of school and a child nurtures in you a kind of "long term" view. I believe that lead to our buying our first home rather than continuing renting.
If we are planning on staying in the same place (school district) for 13 years it suddenly made sense to put down roots of a housing nature as well.
Only if you make improper global comparisons. Within comparable American populations, wealth is positively associated with fertility.
"Examining data from 1985 to 2007, Lovenheim and Mumford use short-run home price variation over time within cities as their shock to family wealth. They find that a $100,000 increase in the value of one’s home results in a 16% increase in the probability of having a child."
So, among the slice of the population wealthy enough to own a home and have a difference of +$100K in equity vs a control group, there's a modest positive correlation of having at least one child.
That's not entirely rejecting that across Americans the curve could rise at the lower end of "prosperity" as well. Which, according to this study, it does and average number of children decreases almost perfectly steadily with increasing decile of lifetime earnings (see Table 2): https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~scholz/Research/Kids%20and%20Wealt...
> The only thing new I learned from this article is a rough estimate of how much higher an ex-Californian's budget is on average, which was novel but hardly surprising.
My story related to this: Californians (and other comparatively rich people) moved to Dallas, TX in droves and outpriced an already saturated housing market. This was happening far before COVID but I think it was really mostly talked about in the circles of state to state income inequality which is largely ignored. When you have loans like the FHA or VA loan this means while you may be qualified for a loan, you'll never actually get a house near where you work in big cities. Instead, you're forced to buy in towns that are increasingly far away from these cities.
As someone who has been through this nightmare I don't think "Single Family Zoning is bad, but only a few places have been enlightened enough to limit or ban it" is the right conclusion or even near it. Generally speaking, remote work can help alleviate this problem because then you remove the problem that I experienced which is that I was driving 2.5 hours to and from work every day.
Some other things that I've read is that these people also destabilize the cost of goods in enough quantity. The outcome is that communities that have seen decades of development will soon price out the resident who paid for its development in taxes only to reward people who are taking advantage of inequality.
> The outcome is that communities that have seen decades of development will soon price out the resident who paid for its development in taxes only to reward people who are taking advantage of inequality.
Sounds like the plight of poor people from developing/poor nations who have to contend with people from developed/rich nations.
Nothing. Might makes right is the way nature works. People that harvest cocoa in Africa can't afford to eat chocolate. It's the same situation between rich/poor in the US.
It is bad and yet is one of the only housing types that satisfies a lot of needs.
Multi-unit housing has the following list of annoyances:
1. Far more available to rent than to own. Some states such as CO have some weird insurance related laws that makes selling condos more of a liability than leasing apartments.
2. Often not cheaper on a sqft basis so you are paying more for less.
3. If it is for sale, there is often a hefty monthly HOA or Condo fee that increases with inflation/time.
4. Small parking lots*
5. Often up a few stories which make even moving groceries a hassle and moving furniture a real pain.
6. Noise from neighbors and rules/limitations when you can do noise generating things.
7. No garage/workshop area means repairing bikes and cars is a real hassle or you are paying someone else a lot of money to do it for you.
8. Dramatically less privacy and legal rights as far as what you are allowed to do to your property.
9. Almost always closer to roads and other noise producing things.
10. Neighbors are a far greater presence/annoyance in your life than even just living in the suburb. This has the added effect of reinforcing affluence/poor areas; buying a house in a poor/bad area is not nearly as risky as living in an apartment in a poor/bad area.
Really the only advantage of living in higher density housing is the access to public transport, city centers, and the lack of maintenance you have to do to maintain the property. The good news is that a lot of people don't mind the above annoyances so building more high density housing has the benefit of making every type of housing cheaper. Its also possible that in large enough cities, apartments can be found larger & more noise insulated than in suburb/low density areas (at least I sure hope so).
Essentially, does a single family home replacement exist? Town-homes are pretty close to satisfying the above list and are a lot more dense than SFH but are they dense enough to solve the scarcity problem?
* Convincing those who can afford vehicles to get rid of them seems really difficult. e.g Anyone know how people travel for ski trips in Europe? I really can't imagine using American public transport when I need to transport luggage. Sure flying and trains are OK for traveling large distances but buses and local rail systems are difficult to use with luggage. It would be a comical attempt for a family of 4 to transport themselves & their stuff on a local bus yet an SUV makes this an (bi)weekly occurrence for people near ski resorts.
I don't know that townhomes really satisfy that -- not any of the ones I've seen built recently. The ones I'm thinking of are those 10-to-a-lot townhomes that get squeezed into previously unused spaces or a handful of parcels that the developer managed to buy up next to each other. They usually have little to no land (no front yard and a meager backyard), restricted parking (I have seen two-car garages where you would need to go out through the sunroof if you actually parked two small cars in there.) and are often built as cheaply as possible at the lowest cost.
Basically, a lot of the townhomes that I see being built here are effectively apartments and share many of the same annoyances you mentioned. With that said, it could very well be due to the same single family zoning issues -- it's very possible that getting permits for an apartment building in a predominantly SFH zone would be difficult. Getting permits for townhomes (which end up functionally apartments) is likely far more doable.
To the question you pose about the SFH replacement -- I don't think that there is one. Even if homes weren't an investment vehicle, I think to a lot of people the appeal of a SFH is the whole package; By the time you satisfy all the desires with something else, you've arrived back to a SFH.
The Midwesterner shouldn't fear the Californian. That's a boogyman. The Midwesterner however, should have a real fear of their fellow wealthy Midwesterners, who will go from one house to 2.5 on average after their children come of age and outbid the middle class midwesterner for the limited housing stock available in predominantly single family home cities.
There's half a dozen or so big east coast cities that are expensive. Nevertheless you can find $200-400k houses 1-1.5hr out (half that if you're willing to sacrifice having a big yard) and rents are blue collar levels of affordable despite those cities being some of the most expensive (basically second to CA).
The "housing crisis" is unique to California and markets that are jacked up by California money that wants off the sinking ship. I know a lot of those people want to believe that everyone is doing it just as wrong as they are but if you fire up zillow and start looking at the suburbs of Cleveland, Buffalo, Montgomery, and all the other places that wealthy people leaving places like CA like to deride as dead or dying it becomes immediately apparent that they're affordable.
Edit: I was a moron to even reply to you. Based on everything else you've said on this topic we will not see eye to eye and nothing productive will come of this.
Having people drive til they qualify is a sign you have a housing crisis. Give me the name of some cities where home prices have tracked inflation in the last decade. Even better, tell me how Cleveland's suburbs have a land use regime that's any better than California?
Why would you expect home prices to track inflation in an environment where mortgage rates went from 4.76% to 2.74%?
I'd expect home prices to be bid up by an incremental amount over inflation in such an environment, as the monthly principal and interest payment for $100K borrowed at 4.76% is the same as for $128K borrowed at 2.74%. That's an additional 2.5% of house price inflation per year.
Fair enough. For the reason you pointed out, prices of ownership are not the right metric. Replace "home prices" with "rent index" and my point still stands.
The challenge you have is that people view housing as an investment. Americans expect their home values to keep pace with inflation. And because housing values are so expensive, there's a tremendous amount of psychological pressure to "preserve" what they've purchased beyond their own property line (eg: "Neighborhood character"). For these reason, they're going to oppose any new supply entering the market.
The only way you're going to fix this problem for good is to have the government step in and force new housing supply into markets, which is going to be extremely unpopular with everyone, including most YIMBYs who would favor removing market barriers. So it's a political impossibility - you can blame it on Boomers but truth is Americans aren't ready to decomodify the housing market.
In California, the only reason people can oppose new projects is because the government enables them to have a say in someone else's property. So you don't have to force development, but you do have to remove NIMBY's ability to veto projects.
That starts with reforming permitting processes and zoning regulations.
‘Having a say in someone else’s property’ is really ‘voters voting for the rules and laws they want’.
As long as the rules benefit most people who vote, why would they want to change it?
And right now, that is exactly what is happening - it isn’t changing because most people who vote are benefitting from it. It’s a pretty fundamental part of a democracy.
Until either 1) more people who don’t benefit from the current rules change the rules through voting, or 2) some non-democratic (in the sense of not directly answerable to an election) institution such as the courts change some rules, or 3) someone manages to convince the voting bloc to vote against their interests and change the rules, it is what is is.
All the handwringing about the situation is just hot air.
San Francisco did not make a law about how much housing to have and then enforce it. It crafted a system of discretionary reviews, lawsuits, and other project-level activism that turns each building permit into its own little lawmaking exercise. A major pro-housing goal is to shift the system towards one that's more law-governed, where the requirements are written down in advance and a building that meets the requirements must be approved.
The accusation "NIMBY" does not even properly apply to a consistent, principled stance against development (that would be BANANA). It applies to e.g. people who agree in principle that a city needs apartment buildings, but grab onto any straw they can find to block the actual apartment building proposed on their block. San Francisco offers very many of these straws.
The democratic solution is to shift decision-making to larger polities (e.g. state government) where the balance of interests is different, where you can get people dealing with the system of housing in abstract rather than only about their own block. Scott Wiener has already had some successes with this approach and I think we will see more. See also several municipalities responding to the YIMBY push by eliminating their single-family zoning categories and allowing duplexes everywhere.
That system at city hall exists because the Mayor (elected) and Board of Supervisors (elected) wish it to be so, and they wish it to be so, so they stay elected.
All the measures you’re talking about are about point #3 - talking about housing abstractly so they don’t notice how it will impact them on their block, for instance, or shifting the ‘balance of interest’ to state wide so they don’t/can’t connect the laws they are voting for to their local impact.
It might work - locals will be angry when they figure it out though, and there will be a backlash.
The reality is, if the people living in San Francisco wanted development, they’d get it. If they don’t, you can try to trick, cajol, force, or ignore them until you get development - but don’t expect them to go along quietly.
This sort of “efficient markets” claim is fully general: you can use it to discourage any kind of activism. If voters wanted things to be a certain way, they would already be that way!
In practice we’re seeing engagement from people who weren’t previously engaged. NIMBYs are more loud and tenacious than they are numerous. Also support from people who perhaps thought (and perhaps still think) that developers are kind of slimy, but are now weighing housing supply effects as well. None of this was happening when only project sponsors and reactionaries cared.
Are activists making some inroads? Sure. Things change! The generation with the largest vested interest is dying out and the changes snuck in during the last election that neuters a lot of the longer term prop 13 issues is going to help with some of the transition. I’m looking forward to when it happens.
Until one of those 3 items I talk about happens though, it ain’t, and this is still hot air - I’ve been in California nearly 30 years, and this hasn’t changed yet. I’m hoping sometime before 50 it will, but I’m not holding my breath.
Resorting to voting in legislation to force your neighbours and, on a broader scale, the rest of the municipality to conform to some arbitrary rules should be considered a failure. It means that whoever the concerned group of people are were unable or unwilling to negotiate a reasonable compromise that suits all parties and have fallen back to using force to get their own way, so to speak. I think this is at the heart of the exodus from California, there is no common good will towards resolving disputes equitably. Everything is decided at the ballot box and so everything becomes a divisive issue with close to half the population being on the losing end no matter what the result. It's not surprising that people would up stakes to get away from this.
If you are referring to the propositions as a failure of the state, I tend to agree. It’s also the only way to directly address other propositions (like Prop 13).
One thing I’ve seen in full force with for instance Prop 19 (which rolled back some of the egregious prop 13 issues such as broadly inheritable grandfathered property taxes), is that the easily accessible descriptions were all (charitably) misleading marketing fluff to sell the majority of the public on significant impacts to taxation on property that they would almost certainly not have passed if they had known the implications - people were scrambling even in Jan/Feb to figure out what it even meant for inherited real property. In most cases, it means it doesn’t actually make sense to do anything but sell it now; which is a huge shift from before, and will cost many children of regular middle class families hundreds of thousands of dollars long term (but correspondingly give 100’s of billions to the state, and close loopholes related to some commercial property or large family landlords)
The renters do - but they often don’t vote. And realistically, would you want to be subject to the laws passed by someone who doesn’t live in your area? Even if they say they’d like to?
It’s bad enough with things like federal marijuana laws vs state ones, and those don’t control where you can live or what gets built next to where you already do.
So you’re saying people who don’t live in an area...... don’t get to vote on the laws in that area?
What else do you propose should happen? Should California allow Texans to vote on state propositions? Should Marin county voters decide on who the Santa Clara County Sheriff is?
Since they haven’t moved there, how could you even decide which hypothetical future residence county they were voting for or eligible in? Would I get to vote in Vail, CO because I’ve always wanted to move there? What if I decide that’s actually silly, and change my mind - are my prior votes now invalid? What if I have 10 different places on my want to move list?
I'm saying it's silly to say that it's the law is the reflection of the will of the people with regards to new residence when they have had no say in crafting the law.
It explicitly is though - the reflection of the will of the people living there right now (or at least those of them that get out and vote, which definitely isn’t everyone, but what else can you do?).
You seem to be trying to include the will of a hypothetical future set of people that may or may not arrive - practically though, how would that even work?
You're being very unfair here. When you choose a place to live you are not only choosing the structure in which you reside, you are choosing the surrounding environment as well. People's desire to keep the environment from changing too much extends beyond financial interests. I live in a quiet suburban neighborhood, and I want it to remain a quiet suburban neighborhood even if the value of my house drops.
In fact, I would love to see the value of my house drop, along with the value of all the houses around me, because that would make it easier for me to move locally and improve some of the sub-optimal features of my current situation, not least of which is that my house is much too big for my needs. But I can't move to a smaller house because the tax hit I would take makes it cost more than I can justify. The smaller houses around me now cost more than our house did when we bought it, so if we move we take both a one-time capital gains hit and an ongoing property tax hit. None of that would happen if houses depreciated like cars.
UPDATE: Please take note that I am not saying I have any kind of right to keep my neighborhood from changing, only that my desire to keep it from changing is not purely financial. (In fact, in my case, it is the exact opposite!)
>You're being very unfair here. When you choose a place to live you are not only choosing the structure in which you reside, you are choosing the surrounding environment as well.
The expectation that one can settle down and expect their city to be built to a finished state which is kept frozen in time is an incredibly damaging mindset. City planners have to predict what is going to happen in the future decades ahead.
People didn't do this 100 years ago. They didn't do this thousands of years ago. They did something far simpler. They built their city and then they rebuilt their city, house by house, incrementally, one step at a time over decades to match changing needs.
> City planners have to predict what is going to happen in the future decades ahead.
Current trend: single family houses have shot up in demand due to remote work.
So is the prescription "tear down single family houses"? Seems like cities that do that are just going to push people even faster towards other areas which aren't so saturated.
If this trend continues some sort of balancing between not just SF/NY but even Dallas/Austin and smaller, more rural areas, is inevitable. There just isn't enough land for more single family houses in the most popular cities! But reacting as if consumer preferences for housing type doesn't matter seems like a recipe for putting yourself into an even worse position long-term.
Looking at the listings in the Bay Area, condos are more expensive than homes, with the same square footage, since they're new and "luxury". I question if tearing down houses for something high density would make anything cheaper.
Unfortunately (for you), your desire for a quiet suburban neighborhood should not give you the ability to immiserate other people who want to live there by prohibiting the construction of homes for them. Do you value your quiet suburban neighborhood enough to buy and pay property taxes on the whole block or subdivision? If not, I recommend you look for estates on acreage in remote areas.
Perhaps true, but what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks?
Why do you not recommend those people to look for acreage in remote areas?
Building apartments is not a pox on a community. In fact, the most valuable real estate on the planet has lots of apartments. And are you seriously asking why people may want to live someplace for reasons other than it being an undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community?
> Building apartments is not a pox on a community.
This is an opinion which is not universally agreed with.
> are you seriously asking why people may want to live someplace for reasons other than it being an undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community?
No. If you look at the comment you are replying to, you’ll see that the question I asked was:
> what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks?
And what right do they have to impose on others to change and take damaging consequences so they can be happier or their life easier without compensating them for it?
Views are not protected and neither is zoning. If you want to have the right to exclude apartments from a neighborhood, go ahead and buy all the land. I’d be surprised if single family zoning survived a legal challenge.
> what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks?
That's what money is for. The issue is that local landowners use regulatory capture to penalize newcomers as much as possible
> your desire for a quiet suburban neighborhood should not give you the ability to immiserate other people
Of course not. I'm not saying I have any kind of right to keep my neighborhood from changing, only that my desire to keep it from changing is not purely financial. (In fact, in my case, it is the exact opposite!)
This is not as divorced from property values as you believe. The features of suburbs you like such as low-crime (usually coded as "quiet"), amenities, good schools, access to jobs through a quick commute etc. are exactly what give them their high value. However, the single family home subdivision suburban form cannot scale provisioning these amenities to many people. That is exactly why suburbs are exclusionary whereas cities need not be.
Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live. The detached houses probably have little to do with what you like about your community; there are plenty of places in Central California with detaches homes, high crime, bad schools, etc.
In my case, quiet is not code for low-crime. I meant it literally. I lived for a long time (20+ years) in loud neighborhoods with lots of traffic noise and screaming kids (literally -- one place I lived was next to a house that was used as a day-care center) and mockingbirds which kept me up at night because our house had no A/C so we had to keep the windows open at night. My mantra, literally for decades, mumbled through the mental fog of chronic sleep deprivation, was "I want to live someplace quiet".
> Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live.
That is far from clear. I don't live in a cookie-cutter-house suburb. I live in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in what used to be (in the late 1800s) a vacation destination for San Franciscans. If all of Silicon Valley were depopulated I think my neighborhood would still be a perfectly fine place to live.
> I live in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains...If all of Silicon Valley were depopulated I think my neighborhood would still be a perfectly fine place to live.
Humboldt Country is a beautiful and high poverty part of the state with poor municipal services. I have no reason to believe the Santa Cruz wouldn't be the same without expensive urban infrastructure, not to mention the money we do and need to continue spending to minimize the risk of fire to your property.
> I have no reason to believe the Santa Cruz wouldn't be the same without expensive urban infrastructure
Like I said, my neighborhood began as a vacation destination for rich San Franciscans in the late 1800s. It has been affluent for over 100 years, long before Silicon Valley was a thing, in fact, before electricity was a thing. There are rich urban areas and there are poor urban areas, and there are rich rural areas and there are poor rural areas. There is absolutely no correlation in general between housing density and quality of life. There is, however, a strong and obvious correlation between per-capita wealth and quality of life. But housing inflation does absolutely nothing to promote that.
You can't both say "I would be happy if home prices in my neighborhood went down" and "I am confident that my area will always be one where rich people want to visit." The former will only happen if the types of amenities which make rich people want to visit go away, at which point you likely will want to go away as well.
> The former will only happen if the types of amenities which make rich people want to visit go away
No, the former will happen when fewer people, for whatever reason, want to buy real estate here. This was a nice place to live even (perhaps especially) back when the main industry in the surrounding area was orange farming.
The people who found it a nice place to live when it was undeveloped thought it was so nice that they decided to build a university with a huge endowment nearby which then decided to attract funding from the Department of Defense which then...
You’re trying to express your preferences for lower home values with an all else equal argument which is not very meaningful in a dynamic system. The realistic alternatives where fewer people want to settle in the Bay Area all involve hypotheticals where it is simply a less attractive place to live in ways that likely impact you as well.
Yes, they did all those things. They also set aside large parcels of open space, so that only half the surrounding area became a suburban hellhole.
In between the wilderness and Hoboken NJ there is a broad range of possibilities. Somewhere in between those two extremes is a nice middle-ground where things are not too sparse and not too crowded. The San Francisco peninsula has been close to that happy medium for a long time, so I'm pretty sure it could stand to lose a few people and still stay in the desirable range.
Yes, density has all kinds of societal benefits. The problem is, not everyone wants to live that way.
> If all of Silicon Valley were depopulated I think my neighborhood would still be a perfectly fine place to live.
I've never understood why mountain people think that those little towns would be able to fund their own infrastructure without the support of Californias actual economy.
It's not cheap maintaining roads up every canyon and electrifying all corners of the redwoods. Maybe it's because you all have leaching septic tanks that destroy the San Lorenzo that you think you're truly fronteirsman?
By the same token, nobody living in a residential neighborhood should oppose construction of an oil refinery in it - The industry would contribute tax revenue, jobs etc. to the community and opposition based on nebulous "quality of life" concerns is selfish
Residential land is far too valuable for someone to ever propose an oil refinery or manufacturing on it. The separation between industrial uses and residential uses were already underway before residential zoning was invented, and there is no reason to believe single family residential - which is a particular and extremely restrictive form of residential zoning - is necessary to enforce this kind of basic planning distinction.
There's a big difference between a power substation and an oil refinery. And depending on how that substation was built and the decisions made it can really negatively impact someone's use of their property. In my case the substation our PUD built across the street involved denuding the entire area of trees. This is mainly a problem because the freeway is right behind the trees they removed. So removing the trees made our front yard very difficult to inhabit for long periods of time because it's so loud. I'm not the only person affected either. And I wouldn't object had they built any kind of sound isolation.
I wouldn't object to an oil refinery either if they can guarantee they won't suddenly explode and kill me while I sleep.
The fact remains that we all have to be good neighbors to each other, and that cuts both ways.
You could reframe the opposition as "your money shouldn't mean you can just come into our area and remake it however you want." Neither side is purely unsympathetic here.
Was one’s single family home a naturally occurring building? What gave one the right to build it? Your both sides argument sounds plausible but it’s not-sensical.
That's sorta just how private property works. At some point, land was unowned, structures were unbuilt, etc. Ever since then, we've put the "rights" in the hands of the current owners and/or the government they live under...
Short of arguing from a purely socialist or communist approach, saying the current owner's preferences matter less than the hypothetical would-be future occupants of the area is the non-sensical part, I think.
And who was compensated when those rights were taken away from property owners by the invention of zoning in the early 1900s and down zoning in the mid 1900s? In addition, you are confusing owning a particular plot of land with rights over all neighboring plots. The latter is distinctly not your private property.
Yes, that's where the government aspect comes in. But again, what you decry as "non-sensical" instead seems like it could also just be called "response of a community towards potential market failure modes." You are ascribing moral blame to just one side of a more complicated situation. It would be like if all I was talking about is how big developers bribe local governments to get permits to build their shit - neither side is blameless, both sides are understandable, there isn't a clear easy answer to "reduce harm."
I really don't understand your both sides argument. One side takes advantage of the fact that zoning is a local matter to advantage incumbents at huge expense to society at large. It also creates the bureaucratic infrastructure that favors large developers who can pay bribes informally (literal bribes) or formally (impact fees).
The other side is all future residents who might want to live in a quadplex where a SFH exists today. Those people usually pay a large percent of their income in rent and "commute til they qualify."
How are both sides understandable? My claim is simply that a private individual should be able to buy a lot of land in almost any American city and build a quadplex on it. This was legal until very recently in our history. How will this be the end of the community as we know it?
If you want to change their minds, and change housing policies in major US cities... you may want to try harder to understand why people want single family homes, and why they don't see zoning as evil. You've got a lot of minds to change!
Both sides are understandable to me because those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from. I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want. Yes, it's what they want versus what other people want... that's unavoidable! It's the other side of the "if you want to continue living in a less dense area, go move somewhere more rural (until we pick it for densification too)" coin.
Some folks think the tiebreaker here is that cities are more sustainable, but that doesn't avoid the problem that if you want to move more people into denser housing, some people aren't going to be able to get what they want.
I find both sides understandable because I don't expect anyone to be happy when people more powerful than them tell them they can't have what they want.
Can you really not understand why someone would be unhappy with someone else coming in and saying "I have the right to change your life?" Why "well you better be rich enough to own the land for the entire neighborhood" is a hollow response?
Yes, because I think it's absurd to claim that someone building a small apartment building on property they own down the street is changing my life. In fact, in your last claim, the property owner who is exercising control over their neighbor's building is the one unfairly "changing lives." In addition, developing on my own property has little to do with relative power imbalances. Who really holds power when I have to bribe my neighbors to get a variance to build an ADU in my backyard?
> those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from
This is kind of a silly claim because it suggests that the country is an undifferentiated landmass and there are no relative benefits of a particular geographic location. There are clearly relative advantages to living in a place, so telling people they can choose anyplace else is not really a choice!
> I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want.
This is only barely a coherent argument at the international levels ("Middle Eastern refugees shouldn't be able to decide where to settle in Europe!"). When you live within a country with freedom of movement, this is a very difficult argument to make. Should I only be allowed to vote in places where I am a property owner?
For what it's worth, there are plenty of developing legal arguments _against_ local zoning, and California is on track to solve its housing issues by having the state take control of zoning away from cities.
I'm not aware of this. I thought it was a huge expense to people who wanted to move to an area at any price, and the absence of a huge windfall to people who want to build massive apartment buildings in neighborhoods where the vast majority of the residents don't want them.
When government takes away our property it must pay us for the property. this right is recognized in the 4th amendment. "Zoning" is just a sneaky way of taking
This only works if you slice and dice the polity. Who says zoning in the Bay Area should be decided by current residents? The super commuter service workers from Modesto should certainly have a say. So should the families displaced to Phoenix or Las Vegas.
In addition, it is not a fair characterization to describe apartment buildings as "a shot in the nuts."
Why should Modesto have a say in what gets built in San Francisco? I’m pretty sure the folks in Modesto would be pretty pissed if San Francisco was dictating building rules to them!
And Phoenix or Las Vegas aren’t even in the same states or legal jurisdictions. If you told them San Francisco was going to be able to tell them what to build or how, you’d just get laughed at.
If you think building a high density apartment complex in the middle of a single family zoned subdivision against the residents wishes wouldn’t be taken as a ‘shot to the nuts’ of someone who had bought and lived there for years, you probably don’t know too many people who have?
Fair or not, you can’t walk in and dictate to someone in that situation how they are going to take it, or what is reasonable and expect anything but well deserved anger.
1. The people in Modesto are pissed! San Francisco’s housing prices have been spilling over into their city for years! And San Francisco imports almost its entire population’s worth of people during the day to work in and contribute payroll taxes to the city. It’s not the great argument you think it is to claim that none of these people have a stake in its land use.
Additionally, Nevada and Arizona share a jurisdiction with California: the United States of America. The state is already taking land use out of city hands through SB35 et al., and this will only become more acute as each city loses credibility as a good faith actor. The federal government also dictates what can be built through mortgage policy. The subdivision itself was a policy invention to make it easy to guarantee federal mortgages.
2. Most residents do not give a crap about apartment buildings. Surveys prove this over and over. SB50, an upzoning bill, polled quite well with the general population. The ones who do will quickly get over themselves when it becomes clear that apartments aren’t a “shot to the nuts.” Honestly, this sentiment is extremely weird and endemic to America; most countries with great standards of living manage to live in varied urban topologies just fine.
That’s nice and all, but none of those things but SB35 actually matters in any real way that I can tell - and SB35 passed in ‘17 and so far hasn’t changed anything important, or we wouldn’t still all be bitching about the exact same thing we have been since well before then!
SB50 never passed, Modesto can ‘be pissed’ (why exactly?) at the higher property values and income all their residents who work in SF are benefiting from - they don’t seem to be trying to change that equation much! Sure someone is complaining about it, but when is THAT not the case about... everything?
I’m also curious what standing or stake they could claim (you assert they have one) - are they all paying property taxes in SF, or City residents who aren’t being allowed to vote because they commute to their second homes in Modesto? Or are they just driving in and out for jobs, and have as much claim to authority on how the city should run it’s business as a UPS driver dropping off a package?
I’m also curious what legal standing Phoenix or SF could claim for a suit against each other for.... people moving of their own free will between those cities for economic reasons? That would be quite an interesting lawsuit at the federal level for sure! Who would end up paying whom anyway? The city that was too expensive for otherwise qualified labor; so they moved to somewhere cheaper and are now contributing, tax paying, members of society there? Or the evil ‘good citizen’ stealing city luring productive (but maybe not 7 figure earning) folks away with bribes like affordable housing?
1. You are naive about how this process works. SB35 has already led to thousands of new units of construction, including - finally - the construction of 2k units at what was formerly Vallco mall, despite lawsuits and general objections by Cupertino city council. That is only the beginning, because it was paired with reforms to the Regional Housing Needs Allocation process which has 10x'd the planned minimum requirement of new homes. Beverly Hills and Palo Alto are both quite upset about having to let people build homes or lose local control. Some more information here: https://www.sfweekly.com/news/bay-area-takes-step-toward-maj...
These changes take years to make their real impact felt, and the crisis is half a century in the making. The future is _more_ state pre-emption of zoning, not less.
The funny thing is: the ignorance of local voters to the larger systems at play lead to lots of recent decisions that will soon backfire. For example, San Mateo recently re-affirmed city-wide height limits which more or less guarantee that their RHNA requirements will require their planning department end single family zoning in large parts of the city; there's no place for them to shove apartment towers!
2. SB50 failed due to conservative state reps from SoCal, in particular LA. It had plenty of support with reps in NorCal, and in any case its mere existence disproves your point that there is no basis for states short-circuiting local control.
3. I'm not going to explain how delegation works to you in detail, since I assume you are intelligent enough to get it. There are many powers that are delegated to city governments which can be taken away if cities prove themselves incompetent at administering it. City departments go under conservatorship of the state all the time.
4. I'm not sure why you assume the legal remedy is a lawsuit. Changes to how federal mortgages are backed; removal of subsidy on home insurance which makes sprawl math workout (albeit in the short term); a shift away from federally mandated highway spending; changes to how housing assistance programs are managed and qualified for at the federal level could all manifest as land use changes in cities without explicitly being about zoning. There are probably individual bureaucrats at the DOT or FHWA who are deciding which expansions of 101 or 880 are worthwhile to fund and which aren't. Federal law could easily let them prioritize funding for BART instead.
I missed that you specifically asked for legal standing. The basis of SFH zoning was created in Euclid, which required it be necessary to uphold safety and be reasonable. There are strong arguments against it on both grounds: https://ij.org/sc_podcast/148/
In that case, standing was any landowner holding land zoned single family. A Phoenix landowner of a SFH subdivision could screw it for the whole country.
Not narrowly zoning, but the viability of single family zoning also depends on property tax stabilization regimes, which themselves can be challenged under the equal protection clause.
Near as I can tell, your counter-argument seems to be 'but there is stuff that could change it!' which.... could be?
Your arguments don't really seem cohesive or coherent enough to me to indicate how realistic or likely any of those would materially impact our current situation more than say the generation currently benefitting the most from this situation (boomers) slowly dying out. For instance the Phoenix vs SF argument seemed to go from a 'Phoenix has the right to demand SF change what it's doing' (not trying to strawman, that's what I read) to 'sfh rezoning is entirely possible!' and 'we can change conforming mortgage rules!' - which hey maybe - but why should they, and why should anyone with the power to do it care right now?
Let's play this back, because I think it's you whose position keeps changing with no engagement with my responses. You started by claiming that if enough people want something (e.g. SFZ), they should be able to vote it into law:
> if enough others agree that is what they want, why shouldn’t they be able to? That’s literally what democracy is!
(For starters, that is not how American democracy works. There are plenty of policies that are not allowable and should not be allowable merely because they have popular support. I'm sure you can name a few.)
I pointed out that "enough" people only want SFZ if you control who the relevant population is. In aggregate, Californians are perfectly happy with ending SFZ, and policies to do so like SB50 poll quite well. You are simultaneously claiming: if a cul de sac by popular vote prefers SFZ, it should be able to impose it on any objecting landowner in the cal de sac, but if the residents of California by popular vote prefer that San Francisco zone for more housing, they shouldn't. These are inconsistent at face unless you specify and defend a distinction between immediate and regional neighbors, which you haven't.
Next, I pointed out that the residents of California are already dictating what gets built in the SFBA. I gave you an example of a law supported by the state legislative representatives from Modesto that forced Cupertino to increase its housing stock by nearly 10% with a single project, over the long-standing objections of Cupertino city council members and voters (the Vallco project went to the city ballot in 2018 and was voted down). Your response to this was that a 10% increase in Cupertino's housing stock does not solve a 50 year shortage so it's not a meaningful example of state policy dictating what is built locally. Not only is this irrelevant (your argument is invalidated by an existence proof, which I provided), but wrong: I gave you a reference for how state policy on land use will be increasingly more important than local policy in coming years.
You also asked why it's fair for "all the citizens of California (or the USA)" to have a stake in local land use. I pointed out that: (i) they interact with the local economy (ii) they have a stake in the consequences of those policies (iii) they may even _want to_ live locally but cannot because they are priced out (iv) SFZ is justified legally in Euclid by its ability to mitigate a small set of very specific issues, none of which include "neighborhood preference." These are all separately great arguments for why they should. You have not engaged with any.
I went ahead and made a stronger claim that land use is a national matter. You asked how that's the case. I pointed out that suburban subdivisions are Federal policy, and anyone who can influence how Fannie and Freddie guarantee loans implicitly dictates what type of home is built locally. You responded by saying that is a future hypothetical even though this policy is the status quo.
Given all that, I think it's reasonable to conclude that you're the one who has strayed from defending the your original point (which was, roughly, "the immediate neighbors of a property should have the exclusive right to decide what can be built on it - that's democracy!").
Using your logic, you should never immiserate people that want to live in your house, maybe even in your bed just because you think you paid for it.
Wanting to live in a place that is already occupied does not give the right to force people there to rebuild their houses into high density places. There is a lot of free land in that country where people can build skyscrapers with millions of cheap, small living pods inside.
I didn't make a single claim about coercing owners of private property. In fact, I ended by saying that if you want to maintain total control, you should go ahead and buy the neighborhoods you want to prevent from changing!
If your gains are less than $250K (single) or $500K (married-filing-jointly), you've owned it for 2 years, and you've lived there 2 of the last 5 years, your gains are excluded federally.
In general, the structure does depreciate very slowly (in real dollars) and the land appreciates in value (at least in desirable areas), typically more than swamping the slight depreciation on the structure.
We live in Northern California. We bought this house at the bottom of the 2008 crash. Our gains are considerably more than the exclusion limit. (One of the many stupid things about the tax code is that the exclusion limit is not indexed to time.)
Commercial structures often appreciate as an area gentrifies and starts using legislation to kick out industrial activity in favor of coffee shops and other consumer facing stuff. So the facilities (and permission to operate them) appreciate like there's no tomorrow.
Sure, but the structure and the land are tightly bound. I can't buy or sell a structure without also buying or selling the land that it sits on, so this is kind of irrelevant.
That's not the big challenge. Upzoning and higher density increases the value of the land. That's why developers want to do it in the first place. Cashing out when someone wants to buy up your neighborhood's land, and getting something nicer somewhere else, would be the purely-financial play.
The big challenge is that people chose to live in a certain place because it had certain features. And people don't want to have to move constantly. So folks pushing to change the nature of the areas will always cause opposition ("why do we have to leave or change, why can't they go somewhere else?").
That's a very short curve that quickly inverts. Density of commercial land is what converts the sprawl to an unprecedented explosion of high-rises in an epicenter. The residential density decreases the value of the land after it's been fully developed, which is then purchased for commercial use and "redeveloped". This happens in most cities at some point, where downtown is converted to the new "hip" redevelopment of the previous slums.
> The big challenge is that people chose to live in a certain place because it had certain features
In Germany, the most sought-after features are quality mobile ans landline internet, as well as decent public transit.
The problem is that our Conservative politicians outright sabotaged (Kohl with fibre vs cable TV, Schröder with the UMTS frequency auction) or, at best, simply sat doing nothing (Merkel) any efforts to improve this situation.
The result? Everyone who can flees for the cities, while the rural areas generally only house those "left behind".
And then politicians complain about exploding rents in cities or people leaving rural areas... well, d'oh, who would have thought young people and modern jobs require Internet.
It's really impossible to not view your house as an investment when you've been paying for it for 30 years and have hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in it.
This goes double if your plan is to work till retirement, then sell the house and move to someplace more laid back.
So really the local government needs to be willing to tell people to pound sand when they hold up new construction. But since the local government is made up of those same people that's not going to happen.
It is interesting watching movies and TV just how often the "evil developer" trope appears. Always trying to buy the almost-failed gym/ski slope/TV station/etc... until the plucky underdogs win the contest to save their small business. Developers are never the good guys. They're always the evil gentrifiers who want to let hundreds of families invade the quaint little neighborhood with their high rise eyesore.
> For these reason, they're going to oppose any new supply entering the market.
Nobody is opposed to new supply entering the market. The opposition is 100% about the devaluation of the area, which is not about the supply per se. If you wanted to build a block up with 500 units which had adequate parking and everyone's homes/land would increase in value 5%, you would have widespread support. The problem of density is solved with substandard buildings that cut corners, alongside the increased density in Southern California.
> The challenge you have is that people view housing as an investment.
Is there any source to this claim? "View as investment" would mean people buy the house with the specific aim of making a profit.
As a middle aged homeowner in suburbia where all my acquaintances are in the same demographic, I can't think of anyone ever saying they bought a house with the goal to make a profit.
People buy a house so the kids have a place to play and to stabilize the housing expenses to make budgeting easier. Whether it can be sold for a profit or not in 40 years is not a consideration.
>> The challenge you have is that people view housing as an investment. Americans expect their home values to keep pace with inflation.
Because real estate appreciation is one of the few ways left for people to be able to retire somewhat comfortably after working in jobs that pay garbage salaries and having to deal with medical costs that are sky high even with what people call “insurance”.
> Thesis of the article: Californians are fleeing California and causing the same housing pressure in the spots they flee to.
Anecdotally, it seems true. Utah housing used to be cheap, but now in Salt Lake valley the prices are just exploding as tons of Californians move to the tech hubs near Lehi and SLC and buy up all the houses with cash
If your housing market's affordability depended on everyone living in the area having low incomes, maybe it's not any better than California's housing market.
>>> That’s because as bad as California’s affordable housing problem is, it isn’t really a California problem. It is a national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who’ve been locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They’ve already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more widespread as remote workers move around.
The thesis is that the problem is not limited or caused by California, it' a national problem. California and Californian expat-related growth are just a particularly glaring example.
People focus on the supply side, which is important, but has anyone looked at the demand side? How do people have so much money to drive up these prices?
I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house, built in 1950, my parents bought for $175,000 in 1989. Today Redfin has it at $660,000. Its a drab house in a drab suburb of DC. It's no boom town--the population of the town has grown just 10% in 30 years. But everyone just has so much more money now (and I guess interest rates are low, so people have a lot of credit).
The access to cheap credit drives up the price of the underlying asset.
You can see it in auto loans, where the average price of a new vehicle has ballooned to over $40,000 in recent years while loan payment periods stretch to 5, 6 and even 7 years.
Part of the increase is no doubt because new cars are getting larger, safer, and more technologically complex — but I think that part of it is that auto-makers have less of an incentive to control costs if their margins increase.
this isn't quite the same. if you compare like-for-like as much as possible (eg, base 2000 honda civic vs 2020 civic), msrp for new cars has not kept pace with inflation. adjusted for inflation, the price of an entry-level car has fallen in the last twenty years (even as the lowest end cars have become far more capable, safe, and efficient).
easy access to credit may have increased the average price paid for a new vehicle (by shifting buyers up-market), but unlike in the case of housing, this does not deprive buyers of the chance to buy a cheap car. people buying bmws on 84 month loans doesn't mean you can't get a brand new versa for $15k OTD.
Everyone talks about the billionaires soaking up the windfall for the last 40 years, but really it's the upper middle class that's leading the charge here.
Massive wealth inequality in this country is being driven by an increasingly prosperous upper middle class [0].
I think you are still talking about a supply side issue there.
If a drab suburb only has 10% population growth but massive increase in home prices that is because the town council has only increased the available lots by 10%. There are a lot more people in the DC metro area now so the increase of people who want to live in your suburb has probably doubled in that 30 years.
Of course if a town issues no new building permits as the surrounding areas grow of course demand per unit will go up.
It’s true it’s less than some other places, but it’s almost double the headline rate of inflation over that time. For a town that—let me tell you—truly has nothing going on.
I don't know what town this is but the DC Metro area has a ton going for it. The population has almost doubled over that time period. If your town only approved minimal zoning increases during that time then of course prices will shoot up.
What was the mortgage interest rate in 1989? As rates go down, prices go up, so unless the interest rate environment of 1989 was similar to 2021, I don't think it's fair to compare only the home sale price.
I would argue this isn't a California problem or a national problem. It's a global problem. Example: Hong Kong. In Hong Kong the government funds itself in large part through property ownership. They are therefore incentivised to make housing as expensive as possible. The result is predictable. I would argue that in democracies this will remain a problem as long as the majority of voters benefit from high housing prices. When combined with rent control you don't need to own property to benefit from high housing prices, since you are likely paid as if you where paying market rate rent. I don't really see any practical solutions. Work from home might change things a bit but I'm pessimistic, since lots of people want to live near stuff, which requires living near other people, which means someone has an inventive to raise prices. Perhaps boomers cashing out all there housing at once might help things.
I’ve been looking at housing prices periodically and it’s discouraging to find people wanting 200k-300k for mid-century houses in places you’d never find another job if the telecommuting trend ever reversed and so far it is just a trend driven by forced circumstances. Companies may be all for remote working while the alternative is shutting down, but what happens after the pandemic? Does everyone get recalled to the nearest office the first down quarter? Does your New York salary turn into a New Mexico salary to prop up profits?
> Does everyone get recalled to the nearest office the first down quarter?
No. The habits of the past were only viable because everyone was indulging them. Those habits have been broken. Whether it's the lower cost of operation due to not squandering money on unnecessary facilities or the greater pool of talent available to those that accommodate remote workers or the business continuity advantages of a workforce that can continue to function despite this and inevitable future infectious disease problems remote work is here to stay. Those businesses that can leverage remote work will outcompete those that might but don't.
we are living in a volatile time right now. I too am considering buying a house and/or finding a different job. but unless you have a large appetite for risk, the prudent move is to wait for things to stabilize a bit. I think within a year or so we should have a better picture of where the remote trend is going.
Affordable housing is a misleading term used for a few different situations: unless the problem is well defined, there is no proper solution.
if affordable means anyone should own a house, no matter the income or lack of - that is utopia. If affordable means cheap enough that lower third income bracket can still afford a house, there are solutions - high density blocks of flats like we have all over in Europe. But if you want cheap houses in the middle of an upscale neighborhood, that is nonsense.
The size of the house is an inverse of the income even in Europe: people who can afford live in single homes or lower density constructions, the people that cannot afford that live in high density places, but you cannot build a couple of towers in the middle of a low density neighborhood, it was tried in UK and failed miserably for everyone.
You're not supposed to build towers. You're supposed to incrementally upzone neighborhoods over time. detached single family housing to row houses, row houses to 2 story apartment buildings, 2 story apartment buildings to 3-4 story apartment buildings and so on.
Building big towers does work, but only if they are surrounded by other, slightly smaller towers.
We are so behind the eightball in regards to how much housing capacity has been built that we really need to drop the 2-3-4 story apartment and go straight to 40 story towers in a lot of places. I think people on this board think we are at some comfortable stasis in housing right now; we are not. Working class families in cities like LA might be cramming five bodies and three incomes in a one bedroom apartment. The tenement conditions made famous by 1800s NYC have never really gone away for the working poor.
Take an R-1 neighborhood. Don't necessarily allow 10 floor buildings, though that wouldn't be the end of the world. Maybe allow 25% of houses to be turned into duplexes, even less of a change than row houses. That alone would increase units available.
Humor: The famous Painted Ladies, a block of Victorians in San Francisco, one end of the block has a 7 floor apartment building.
A normal home will have 1 to 3 cars, but most likely they go in a garage or driveway. The street is mostly left for visitors. There is room for a friend, a grandma, a kitchen renovator, a pool cleaning service, and so on. Spill-over happens when somebody has a big party or when the SWAT team shows up, but those are rare occurrences.
Add the apartment complex though, and spill-over becomes a daily occurrence. Every single day, the apartment dwellers claim most of the street parking. They didn't pay the other people in the neighborhood for grabbing an abnormal share of the community asset.
Maybe in a single-family zoned, suburban community. Density allows for more efficient transportation modes, like walking, biking, and public transit.
To cite one of the most extreme examples in the US, fewer than half of households in New York City have a car. In some neighborhoods like Hell's Kitchen, as few as 11% of households have a car.[0]
Yes, in a single-family zoned, suburban community. The proposal was to add more people there, presumably without also adding a 24x7 subway system. It would be immensely unfair to the people who purchased homes with the expectation that plenty of free parking would always be available.
Also, not that it matters for the fairness issue, I disagree that those other transportation modes are more efficient. They are definitely not acceptable alternatives.
They work for some people. Those people are the only people willing to live in cities. Thus it seems that "they work in dense cities" but that is only with the exclusion of many people.
As long as money is relatively cheap (to borrow) for those qualified to borrow unaffordable housing is going to be a problem.
Cheap and easy loans increase demand. Increased demand increases prices. More and more are left out of the market (as buyer), are left to become renters (covering the cost of the inflated mortgages). Rinse and repeat.
In short: the problem with unaffordable housing is not simply solved by raising the minimum wage. In fact, that'll raise housing prices further by allowing the market to bear more.
Note: The same can be said of student loans and the cost of housing, sans the mortgage/lease bit.
This anti-NIMBY astroturfing on HN is fascinating. There is a repetitive hammering of a short list of talking points.
I am from the East Coast which is very built up. We largely don't have this weird NIMBY anger. In a lot of places here there are tons of tall buildings being built. The whole angry discourse is alien to me.
No one moving to New York is angrily ranting about "NIMBYS" undermining their supposed right to cheap housing. Or not when I moved to NYC.
> This anti-NIMBY astroturfing on HN is fascinating. There is a repetitive hammering of a short list of talking points.
I'm not sure it's reasonable to call something "astroturfing" for this reason. Astroturfing specifically refers to inorganic discourse, there's plenty of organic anti-NIMBY anger
> I am from the East Coast which is very built up. We largely don't have this weird NIMBY anger. In a lot of places here there are tons of tall buildings being built. The whole angry discourse is alien to me.
Speak for yourself, there's plenty of YIMBY types in Boston, because the urban core is plenty dense but many of the surrounding towns and cities (which aren't in Boston proper) are low density, despite having rail lines straight to downtown Boston, which has contributed to our awful rent costs.
Frankly I had heard that it's the same issue in the outer boroughs in New York but maybe I was mistaken.
Renting sucks. There's no stability, the expectation that you'll be priced out of a place, and none of the money or time you invest in anything there is truly yours.
'Single family' dwellings tend to have a small bit of yard space (not directly a plus for me), an air-gap with other units that helps with some noise abatement, and sometimes a choice of utilities (like Internet). There's room to park the nomad-mobile (the car that's required for efficient traversal of the many suburban wastelands and the gaps between cities).
If you own, rather than rent, you're able to change and modify many things.
There are still issues of BBQs, intense dryer scent bombs, and smokers. Parties, loud vehicles, and other annoyances too.
+++ my own ideal solution criteria +++
* Able to own
* Able to modify inside the walls
* Privacy of noise isolation
* Privacy of fresh air
* Internet choice (#1)
* Parking included (#2)
The privacy issues I see most easily resolved by requiring mechanical isolation spaces, similar to the old wetwalls, between units, above and beneath as well. My ceiling should not be directly hanging off of someone else's floor. The extra mechanical space also allows room for proper ducting of intakes and exhausts to allow a building intake of fresh air through a common filtration unit, and exhaust through a similar scrubber unit to remove particulate matter and minimize ecological pollution.
#1 Internet choice would happen after the last mile. The last mile being municipal fiber to ethernet links, and transit at high speed for base taxpayer cost to 2-3 peering points out of the local set. Real choice would be offered by competition at those locations. Peering points might be likely at government command and control centers (city hall, police hq, fire stations), or temples of information worship (libraries, schools, post offices?).
#2 Parking is the terminus of the inter-city and inter-state interlink that currently exists. This doesn't have to be per building. A 'cave of steel' like city could have interfaces (parking garages) at the edges, ideally with monitored space, even small storage boxes (garages) for cars. Naturally these would also be cargo terminals and there'd be a good transit system between them and everyplace within the city. This would require urban planning, mass transit and/or people-mover belts, and maybe an electric cargo drone delivery system. BTW, wouldn't an electric cargo drone delivery system be a lovely civic infrastructure aid? Completely eliminates the most annoying aspects of all current delivery services.
Sort of a counterpoint to renting vs. owning housing, I've rented for the last 8 years. I don't have to worry about the constant home-ownership surprises my parents have had to deal with (renovations, pests, upkeep), I've been able to move to improve my commute with each job change, and I've made friends with each successive move.
I have given up stability, but the price to rent ratio in my city points far in favor towards renting, and I've mostly been able to invest the income that would have gone towards a mortgage in the stock market.
Edit:
I've moved 5 times in the last 8 years not including a temporary move back to my parents' during the pandemic.
It strikes me as a simple solution to turn abandoned malls into homes. Many malls are centrally located, near transit, and have plenty of parking. For the ones that are indoor style, you could even have easily accessed amenities like a gym or something. I wonder what the issue is besides zoning laws?
Industrial buildings are built to very different codes and requirements than residential buildings. Off the top of my head, I think that a dearth of insulation and water pipes would be an issue, along with the ratio of exterior to interior space (no windows leads to depression fast).
It reminds me of industrial loft apartments that sprung up when Midwestern small manufacturing died. I knew some people who lived in one and their quality of life was pretty terrible compared to purpose built residential housing. Their place was cold and all mechanicals had to be run in exterior conduit which was ugly and hard to keep clean. Better than being homeless though.
Oh 100% would need a retrofit. But millions of square feet of space and walls shouldnt go to waste either. I'm mostly suggesting that a rezone + retrofit is probably better than finding bare land and build new or than to tear down the mall and build again.
That unless the density demands residential towers.
California is uniquely messed up because of Prop 13. There's way too much regulation to getting anything built, unless somehow less land starts to exist in States like Texas which don't cripple housing developers, it'll always be much cheaper to leave the Golden State.
From my time in LA I found there to be a very nasty spiral. Whereas young adults will never be able to get their own places to live, this impedes their maturing, and then you end up with 30 something year old brats who feel entitled to everything.
I don't even want these people as friends, nonetheless romantic partners. Once I left La I found it much easier to find amazing, hard-working folks.
This comment is pretty gross, even by HN standards. Me and my friends are all in our twenties living just outside LA (Pasadena). They are some of the kindest and hardest-working people I know. Don't blame the city for your poor choice in acquaintances.
I don't blame the kids who can't move out. California should have a better housing policy. I came from a very very bad home and luckily I was able to find a place for 600 or so.
No one is short of space in bumfuck, nowhere. The jobs are all in cities. Workers need to be in cities. Commuting by car isn't viable on a large scale. Other forms of commuting require investment (building rail etc) and governments won't do that.
> The jobs are all in cities. Workers need to be in cities.
This is beginning to change and the pandemic quickened the pace. If Starlink comes online and works as promised it will further speed up the process.
I think there are many people who live in a crowded city only because that's where the office is and would chose to live elsewhere if it were possible.
There are also plenty of people who spend way more than they should on a home in a good school district. In fact, a lot of people opt to trade a good commute to work just for that. It's not as simple as "move to the middle of nowhere." School from home clearly doesn't work for a lot of children, given how many private schools have been skirting the rules and how many parents were/are desperate to find an in person tutor during this pandemic.
Where I live used to be bumf*ck, nowhere. Hardly anyone could point it on the map, usually thinking it was in an entirely different part of the country. Even if someone did know of the town, the normal respone was "why would anyone want to live there". Now it is the city featured in this article, and has doubled in size since I've lived here. Even the big town where I grew up, Twin Falls, ID, whose only actual claim to fame is a failed jump by Evil Knievel, has more than doubled in size over the last 20 years.
I agree that availability of jobs is the driving factor of migration. There are lots of decaying towns with no hope of recovery. However, the children that were born there did go to college. Their best option is to go somewhere else and it would be foolish of them to not set their aim high and to at least try their luck in one of the bigger cities.
When we do that, we try to replace the title with representative language from the article itself (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). There's nearly always something—if not a subtitle, then a sentence in the article body—that neutrally summarizes the article. (The latter was the case here.) Doing this rather than making up titles ourselves lets the content speak for itself, and in the case of big media articles is probably closer to the author's intent, since authors don't write headlines.
I moved to SF for a job. I'm not the one who decided to not build enough new housing for 30 years. I'm not the one who decided to approve all those new office buildings. Yet I was the problem for renting an overpriced apartment from an SF native who bought in the 90s, and now pays less than $8K/yr in taxes on a place worth over $1M. And now I'm still the problem if I decide to leave?