San Francisco has more than twice the area of Manhattan, with half the population.
The San Francisco Bay Area CSA has about the same population as Switzerland, with 2/3 of the area of Switzerland.
Both have similar GDPs.
If someone wanted to live in Germany, and commute to work in Zurich, with Swiss salaries and German cost-of-living, their commute would be about 1h15min.
The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.
San Francisco is surrounded by cities which are not San Francisco. Manhattan is part of New York City, and is surrounded by more of New York City.
If someone lived 80 miles away from Zurich, in a German town such as Sankt Märgen, Google is telling me that it would take 2h 51m [1]. This tells me that if the woman in the Article made that same distance commute in German/Switzerland with, say, 30 minutes of slack, she would have to leave her house at 3:40am to arrive at work at 7am.
Let me now quote the article:
When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 — a reminder to leave
for the train in 15 minutes — her morning shifts from
leisure to precision.
in less than 1.5 hours you can be in Zurich from Konstanz without a transfer (if you insist on 7am sharp then it's one transfer taking less than five minutes). Just in case you want to live in a nice university city and not a little village. And it's way, way cheaper than Zurich https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
New York is also surrounded by New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, Westchester, etc., etc., etc., and people commute into the city with reasonable travel times.
i live in europe and dunno anyone who would be commuting more than 90-100km daily which is like 1hr by train, although most of the people are lazy to do even that even with decent public transport, so 80mi is very extreme example for europe
I feel that it's misleading to say that the problems are self-inflicted. People who work in SFBA or rent there are suffering from the housing and infrastructure problems that are (to certain extent) caused by residents and homeowners in SFBA - these are two different populations with only a partial overlap, so the problems aren't self-inflicted, they're inflicted by one group onto the other.
Been doing that for a couple of years. Works well. No need to switch the train between Waldshut/Koblenz and Zurich.
Allows me 2h of coding each day during the train ride.
> The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.
That's true, but the implication that these decisions are inarguably stupid ("self-inflicted") is unfair. It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here: we would prefer to deal with the problems caused by insufficient housing than by the problems caused by overly dense population.
I never claimed them to be stupid. Your words, not mine.
But the Stanford professor writing about the plight of the poor workers commuting for 2 hours lives in a multi-million dollar home in Atherton and votes for anti-poor-people zoning laws.
The young, billionaire, startup CEO who wants to cause a positive impact in the world lives in Los Altos Hills, where zoning laws forbid lot sizes smaller than 1 acre, and bans multi-family housing or more than one dwelling per lot.
And the progressive tech worker who advocates for low-income-housing and makes $250k per year lives in a rent-controlled apartment in the Mission paying half of the market rates.
The Bay Area housing situation is a tragedy of the commons.
> I never claimed them to be stupid. Your words, not mine.
The adjective "self-inflicted" has an undeniable negative connotation. Why didn't you say, "deliberately chosen" instead?
> The Bay Area housing situation is a tragedy of the commons.
No, it's not. It is neither a tragedy, nor does it have anything to do with commons. Yes, it is a case of the rich making life harder for the poor, but that's only a tragedy for the poor. It's not a tragedy for the rich. It's not a tragedy for tourists who can enjoy the distinctive nature of the SFBay area while it still has redwood trees instead of being paved over with high-rise apartments. It's not a tragedy for the wildlife that lives in the privately owned open space on the Peninsula. And none of this has anything to do with "the commons." All that open space is privately owned, and all of the governments who won't change the zoning laws (including the state government, BTW) are democratically elected.
If you turn the San Francisco Bay into another Manhattan or Hong Kong that would not make it any less of a tragedy. It would just be a different kind of tragedy.
> The Bay Area housing situation is a tragedy of the commons.
For those who don't appear to know what "Tragedy of the commons" is, it's an economic concept[1] that doesn't necessarily involve a "tragedy" and "the commons" can include private property.
A recent example of "tragedy of the commons" was during the recent California extended drought, Wall Street firms were buying up struggling pistachio farms in California, drilling wells deeper than nearby farmers did, and were undercutting those farmers by siphoning the aquifer from below, encouraging those competing farmers to dig deeper wells and use water faster. "The commons" would be the aquifer / water rights that the farmers commonly depend on. The tragedy was that in the depths of the drought, other pistachio farmers were unable to afford to dig deeper, their harvests were scant, and the price of pistachios worldwide had tripled -- all of which further incentivized well funded outsiders to do the same and buy out farmers.
You can argue that SF MTA management and SF building / zoning policy isn't in the best interest of SF citizens, but pedantically arguing the semantics of "tragedy of the commons" won't win you any intellectual arguments.
Completely agree. Nonetheless, I stand by my position that the SFBA housing situation is NOT an example. In the case of the pistachio farmers there was a common resource (the aquifer) that was available on a first-come-first-served basis, so deep drillers were rewarded. I don't see any analogous mechanism at work here.
It is a choice. The San Francisco Bay Area is already denser than the entire country of Switzerland and has a similar GDP. However, the Swiss have incomparably better public transit. And their taxes are lower than the US.
There's no need to become Manhattan or Hong Kong. Just invest in infrastructure.
Your statement is exactly right and strengthens my argument. Switzerland has absolutely fabulous public transit while having low density. Therefore, the argument that you have to be incredibly dense to support good public transit is false.
Switzerland has excellent public transit. Therefore, if there is a density threshold to offering good public transit, an area would need to be at least less dense than Switzerland in order to argue that it isn't possible.
The SF Bay Area is denser than Switzerland. Therefore, the reasons for not having good transit are not to do with density, but with something else (politics, zoning, public support, etc.). But density is not the issue.
I don't know the details but Antwerp seems comparible. It seems to have amazing public transportation with a density only 1/6th of SF. Why they can do it an SF can't I don't know.
The area of Antwerp includes the entire harbor and several empty areas. Looking at the map, it seems to include islands of high density surrounded by empty areas.
That works very, very well for public transportation. The issue with transit and density is not about distances, is actually about the number of people living and working within walking distance of a transit stop.
If you increase density by 5X, that number increases by 5X.
So two cities with the same density, one spread out evenly and the other in high-density islands surrounded by low density seas, have very different viabilities for public transit.
If that's the point, why does Switzerland have a lower density than the SF Bay Area but a transit system that is orders of magnitude better?
I lived in Switzerland for 9 months last year. They have arguably the best transit infrastructure in the world, with a passenger rail system that is 100% electric.
According to Wikipedia, the density of Zurich is ~4600 people/km^2. The density of San Francisco is ~7170 people/km^2. So what excuse does SF have for being so very, very much worse?
First, there's just the willingness to invest in infrastructure, which is nearly non-existent in the US. Swiss people LOVE infrastructure, they are proud of their tunnels, railroads, bridges, dams, etc.
Take a look at the referendums over the past few years: universal basic income? No. More vacation days? No. Forbid speculation on food products? No. Define marriage as man/woman? No. Build a new tunnel across the Alps? Hell yeah!
But it isn't just about density. You can have mid to low average density, but still have a viable transit system.
Public transit doesn't just depend on the overall average density, but on the density of the area surrounding the transit stops.
Switzerland has reasonably dense cities and towns, with very-low-density areas in between. The SFBA has evenly-distributed low density (except for a few areas).
Increasing the distance between dense cores doesn't have as much negative impact on transit viability as spreading people out has.
The SFBA could easily solve this by changing the zoning laws around Bart, Caltrain, VTA and Muni stations.
> First, there's just the willingness to invest in infrastructure, which is nearly non-existent in the US. Swiss people LOVE infrastructure, they are proud of their tunnels, railroads, bridges, dams, etc.
I totally agree with you here. This is the crux of my argument.
Your statement about Switzerland having reasonably dense cities and towns compared with the Bay Area I'm interested in learning more about - can you cite your source? Having lived in Switzerland for almost a year and in the Bay Area for almost 4, this doesn't ring true to me, but I don't have a heat map of population density to check against; if I get more time at some point I'll try to find more data.
Regardless, we do have some areas of sufficient population density that it would make sense to connect efficiently and we don't. That's the choice I'm talking about. At the very least, it should be easy to get between Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose without needing a car. Within San Francisco, you should be able to go from the east side to the west side without using a system that suffers from being delayed at least 50% of the time.
Also - regarding more vacation days? The government already mandates 4 weeks of vacation (5 if you're under 20) and you are supposed to take at least two of those weeks in a row.
Basically every Swiss city has the transit I'm talking about. I lived in Switzerland for 9 months last year. Zurich is less dense than SF. Geneva is more dense but the density of the country as a whole is less than the SF Bay area.
I had some Swiss friends and we were on a train once that was delayed by 15-20 minutes. They were all complaining because this happens once in a blue moon. They mentioned that if the train is delayed by more than 3 minutes it has to be posted on signage and if it's delayed more than 6 minutes or would cause someone to miss a connection it results in fines to the operator. I haven't been able to find a written source to back this up but personally I almost never experienced delays on Swiss transit.
Swiss media are abuzz with the news of the country’s faltering rail system. Last year, the state-run rail operator missed its target for punctuality; only 87.5% of trains arrived within three minutes of their scheduled arrival.
A national transit system runs like clockwork, every single gear must be turning in sync for the system to work.
> Yes, it is a case of the rich making life harder for the poor, but that's only a tragedy for the poor.
No, all parties take part in it. Rent control, mandating low-income units, preventing new developments, preventing gentrification, etc. all constrain supply. And it isn't just the rich doing it.
A more proper description would be a conflict between the insiders and the outsiders, with the insider being anyone who already rents or owns a place. Insiders don't want change, and want outsiders to be punished and taxed.
The commons in this case isn't the land, it's the government and laws.
Yes, but you're just saying the same thing as the parent, which is that this is a question of values. It's not a natural disaster. It's the expected result of deliberate policy.
On the one hand you have more access for more people to one of the most important and dynamic urban areas in the United States. On the other you have the "distinctive nature of the SFBay area" and redwood trees.
I think it's pretty obvious that the first is more important than the latter, but it's fair of you to want to make that tradeoff explicit.
San Francisco will always be a distinctive and attractive place, with or without density. And by building more housing and improving transit, it will become less distinctive in negative ways (homelessness for one). NYC has multiple tourist attractions that have almost 3 times as visitors as those in San Francisco.[1]
> tragedy for the wildlife
It is a tragedy for the wildlife worldwide for people who work in cities to have to spend countless hours commuting and expending carbon emissions.
True, rich land-owners may have to pay more tax and some may see slightly lower appreciation rates, but many other rich people and almost all poor and middle class will benefit. No doubt someone of it is "self-inflicted" at the state-level (Prop 13 for one, and "environmental" approvals used to drag down new development), but there are actionable ways to fix some of this --
passing sales tax, easing rigid zoning laws, and using new funds for transit measures like Measure M in Los Angeles, and Measure B in San Jose.
I live in a rent controlled unit and still feel we need to eliminate Prop. 13 (prevents property tax increases caused by property asset increases) and eliminate rent control. Both are removing people from having skin in the game when it comes to housing policy. If everyone can feel the pain, maybe everyone can figure out a way to stop the pain.
Are there any concrete plans on how to implement this?
In the densely populated parts of the Netherlands we've had an unhealthy housing market for decades, partly because of government subsidized mortages through tax breaks.
"Everyone" kind of agrees that is should be abolished, but the polical and popular will is laking, and people won't be able to pay their mortages anymore if it happened too sudden. Also it would cause homes to deflate 10-30% which would be a serious issue for current owners who want to move.
I would start by reducing it bit by bit and avoiding large voting blocks that would be hurt by the changes.
- So for example, prop 13 would only apply if your above retirement age for example. (Avoiding old people)
- Or prop 13 only applies to somewhere where you live as a homeowner. (Not a lot of people have second homes)
- No secondary residences or rental properties would get prop 13 benefits.
- Prop 13 benefits cannot apply to corporations / LLCs. (Many people don't have their own house under a corp since they lose a big capital gains tax break if they do)
- Prop 13 benefits cannot be passed on to your children through a trust or whatever else.
Even when everyone thinks something should happen, it can still not happen because of individual incentives.
Everyone thinks the market would be better off without the mortgage subsidy, but no-one wants his house to lose value because of a resulting market slump or make higher mortgage payments every month.
But the thing is that you (Bay Area landowners) are not really bearing the cost of insufficient housing. In fact, you're benefiting through increasing home values (for which you are not taxed due to Prop. 13). It's renters and others like Ms. James who are being hurt. The particularly cruel aspect of this is that once these people have been forced to the edges of the Bay Area, they no longer get to participate in the future decisions that will either exacerbate or alleviate this problem. Ms. James no longer gets to vote in Alameda, and thus has no say in the decisions that keep housing costs high and her commute long.
That's why I believe housing policy needs to be decided at the Bay Area or CA state level. When these decisions are made at the local level, it's people like your friends who selfishly vote to inflict the high costs of housing on to others. Hopefully this NIMBY-ism can be averted by making sure that all stakeholders get a say in the housing policy of a incredibly interconnected region.
> But the thing is that you (Bay Area landowners) are not really bearing the cost of insufficient housing.
That's not true. It makes it hard to find good help. (That was intended to be humorously ironic, but there's a serious point behind it: everything in the SFBA is more expensive than it would be if housing were more plentiful.)
> you're benefiting through increasing home values
Not really. You only benefit from this if you sell, and if you sell two bad things happen if housing prices are up. First, you take a big hit on capital gains, and second, you lose your prop 13 benefits. So rising prices make it really hard to move within the SFBA even for people who already live here.
Yes, you can sell and move away, but people don't want to do that because everyplace else sucks by comparison. If that weren't true, there wouldn't be so many people wanting to move here driving up our prices!
Are you actually complaining that the higher house price wouldn't be good for you, because you'd have to pay tax when selling? I'm still not sure this isn't all sarcastic.
Nope, not sarcastic at all. I live in a house that is much too big for me. I bought it during the crash when prices were low. I would like to move to a smaller house, but I don't because it's too expensive. I can't just trade my house for one of equal value and come out even. It would be very expensive for me to move to a house of equal value, and the higher prices go the more expensive it gets.
I have no objections to paying taxes. Quite the contrary.
First you're complaining about "huge" capital gains, which is literally a tax on profit you made for doing nothing. A tax, might I add, that is much less than income tax. Second, you're complaining about Prop. 13, which just means you're upset about the prospect of paying the property taxes you actually owe, as opposed to the wildly deflated ones from when you purchased.
I don't think you understand just how out of touch you're coming across, and nothing in your statement suggests you have anything but objections to paying your fair share of taxes.
I'm not complaining about having to pay taxes per se. I'm mainly just pointing out that rising house prices are not an unalloyed good even if you own. In fact, appreciating house prices ONLY help you if you sell and don't buy another house in the same market. In all other situations, rising house prices actually hurt you, at least in California.
Specifically: the house I own is too big for me. I'd like to downsize. If housing prices were flat I could sell my house, buy a smaller house for less, reduce my property taxes, and only pay the transaction costs. But because my house and all the others around have appreciated, I can't do that. The smaller house I want to move in to costs more than the house I'm in when I bought it, so if I downsize my property taxes go up. Also, I have to pay transaction costs on a much bigger transaction plus pay the capital gains tax on a gain which I don't get to realize. The only way I win is if I move out of the area. But I don't want to do that. I like it here.
None of this would be a problem if prices were flat. It costs me more (a LOT more!) to downsize because the market is up. Hence an appreciating market is not necessarily good for you even if you own.
No, this is a very real sentiment. I recently saw some folks on /r/nyc complaining that their relatives had to sell their Brooklyn home for millions of dollars more than they paid for it because they could no longer afford the property taxes. They were presented (un-ironically) as victims of gentrification.
I don't know how to rebut this, because it's such an absurd sentiment on its face.
> (That was intended to be humorously ironic, but there's a serious point behind it: everything in the SFBA is more expensive than it would be if housing were more plentiful.)
No, except for housing, most things are less expensive, because more housing would mean more population but not proportionally more infrastructure (at least, without higher maintenance costs per unit, because the cheap choices are already built) for imports to the region, which means supply increases less than demand for anything with external inputs, which means prices go up.
This effect is even worse for things that are limited and local in supply, like unique local features, where you get increased demand with no increased supply, not merely supply increase less than proportional to demand. So prices on those go way up.
Home equity is a benefit. You can borrow against it or otherwise use it as an asset on paper.
> if you sell two bad things happen if housing prices are up. First, you take a big hit on capital gains
Wait, what? You're arguing that it's a "bad thing" if you have to pay a percentage of additional profits? Most primary residences aren't subject to capital gains if you hold them for > 2 years, assuming the gain is less than $0.5million (married, co-owning).
I do not object to paying taxes. In fact, I'm very politically active in trying to get taxes raised on rich people like me. But if I want to sell my house and buy the house next door and those two houses cost the same, then the higher those prices are the higher my actual cost of moving is, notwithstanding that I am theoretically trading like for like. That's bad for everyone because it makes me less likely to move, which reduces the liquidity of the housing market, which drives prices up even further.
Without Prop 13, if you were paying the taxes you actually "should" on the true market value of your house, you would most likely be forced to move out of your current house.
If that happened to enough people, prices would stabilize closer to reality.
Yes, I would totally support the repeal of prop 13. What most people don't realize is that it was a colossal scam by business interests. It was sold as "let granny stay in her house" but it also applies to commercial properties, which don't change hands nearly as often as residences. California has vast tracts of prime real estate that are still being taxed at 1970s assessments.
At the very least prop 13 should have been restricted to owner-occupied principal residences. But that ship sailed long before my time.
> In fact, you're benefiting through increasing home values (for which you are not taxed due to Prop. 13)
This is completely untrue. I have a house in 94087 where I live about 7 months/year (the other 5 months are in Tel Aviv, where it's also very expensive!) I own the house, bought in in 1989. I don't benefit at all from increased house prices. It just makes everything more expensive.
And even under Prop 13, my property tax goes up 2% a year. That's more than inflation.
I don't benefit at all from the "increased value" in my house. If I could, I'd tear down the house and build a 2-family house on the property. But even if zoning laws allowed it, the house would be reassessed at current market value, and it wouldn't be worth it to pay $32,000/year in property taxes alone. (I've looked into this to the extent of hiring a real-estate lawyer to see if it's feasible).
If there were no prop 13, people would be forced out of their homes because specu-vesters would drive the prices up making just the taxes affordable.
The solution is to BUILD MORE HOUSES. Build apartment buildings. Close by so people can walk or take existing mass transit to work. And allow people with single family homes to tear them down and build 2-family homes without being reassessed.
Prop 13 makes houses a net negative on city budgets, so there is a financial incentive for cities to reject new housing units, while encouraging development of hotels and commercial properties which are net positives.
Prop 13 also induces people to not sell their property, or convert properties into more units like you, so there are less available units on the market, which increases prices even further.
For example go look at SF or LA vs Miami on Redfin and see the stark difference in how many units are for sale at one time.
Higher property taxes encourages people to sell their properties if it's not economically worth it anymore to hold the property and give it to people who would actually use it. And it also encourages them politically to build more housing so their property tax bill does not go up too much.
So your saying that they don't lose money on new housing units, but gain it?
If the city doesn't make enough money, then it become bankrupt. Roads, schools, sewers and police can't function properly anymore. The money has to come from somewhere!
Speaking personally, the value of my house means little to me. I plan to live in this region for a long time - when my house goes up, other houses in the region go up. When my house goes down, other houses in the region go down. My house may be worth $1million, but selling it and buying another will get me the same house as when it was worth $500k.
It only matters if I decide to sell it AND move somewhere else. Which probably isn't going to happen.
I just want to make it clear that this is a choice you're afforded because of the value of your home.
You (quite literally) have a million-dollar offer on the table to move to, say, Austin, TX (or dozens of other great cities). The fact that you choose not to accept that offer does not negate the existence of the offer. The offer is always there. And this is a very real asset that you have (that, I hope it's clear, most people don't have), whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
I'm sorry, but no. If you have a million-dollar gold statue of a pig that you're unwilling to sell, your unwillingness doesn't even enter into it. You still have the million-dollar statue and it's still worth a million dollars. It doesn't matter what rationale you provide for not selling it. It just doesn't matter. Those reasons seem important to you. But they aren't important in assessing the value of the statue.
Speaking of moving - a downside of prop 13 is that people used to upgrade / downgrade their houses. Have kids? Get a little bigger house. Retire? Downsize.
IIRC you can usually transfer your tax advantaged status to the same county if you buy a smaller place. It's a little restrictive but it still enables you to downgrade.
It is elected officials that make these decisions, and until people with your point of view start running for office and getting elected things won't change. As of right now it looks like the majority, however slim, of the voters in SFBA are not choosing to change. At least not as quickly as the problem seems to be progressing.
The problem is that the people impacted by the problem wind up with long commutes, and therefore do not live in the places whose policies would have to change.
If you could choose to vote where you work instead of where you live, this problem would go away very quickly.
NIMBY is actually a very vocal minority. A lot of them are retired folks who have a lot of time to engage in City and County politics. I do a little bit and write to City, State, and County officials. But between a long commute and a kid and a dog, I just don't have time to dedicate on this. And that's the problem with local politics.
>It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here...
This statement smells really, really bad.
As the article stated, she had to leave the SFBA because she was evicted and the housing prices had gone up too much. She lived there, and didn't chose that. As with all gentrification, the population that lived there didn't chose for affluent (typically white) people to move in and raise their rents forcing them further and further away from what had been a home to them for generations.
Then she and other likeminded people should have organized politically and pressured the government to change the zoning laws before it was too late. Everything going on in the SFBA is the direct result of capitalism and democracy in action. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but I don't see any principled way you could object to it.
[UPDATE] Let me clarify: I can see how you could object to various aspects of our political system. I myself am active in trying to tackle the problem of income inequality and getting Citizens United repealed. But the housing problems in the SFBA are just symptoms of this much larger overlying problem. You can object to those, and I'll be right beside you. What I'm talking about is focusing on the high cost of housing in the SFBA in isolation as if it's a standalone problem that has a simple and obvious solution that the Powers That Be are just too dim to see or too corrupt to implement. That is not the case.
What you are saying, is after her building was bought out and she and her neighbors were then about to be homeless, they should have formed a political organization? Where, exactly? I mean, she went to one town, who knows where the other 5/10/50 people went.
That kind of argument comes from a very privileged position of a person who hasn't been gentrified out of their neighborhood.
This is a direct result of greed; not capitalism or democracy (I mean, we aren't even a democracy, but a representative republic).
> after her building was bought out and she and her neighbors were then about to be homeless, they should have formed a political organization?
No. By then it's obviously too late. You have to act before laws are passed that drive your constituency out of town. But there are a lot of places where this has happened and renters have a lot of rights. And, BTW, the city of San Francisco is one of them. I am not a landlord, but I am told that it is nearly impossible to evict someone in SF.
The constitution allows the federal government to regulate interstate commerce because local interests don't line up with national interests. Saying, group X voted for it thus it's OK stops working when group X impacts group Y.
Because of this, I don't think local governments should have control over zoning. The impacts are at least state wide so they should be regulated at the state or national level.
Or vice versa. What we have is a small committee of people you've never heard of deciding to reject deals that both renters and contractors are desperate to make. If we had a plebiscite on housing density, the outcome would be much better for most people.
Right. Because the ease of political influence is evenly distributed between people making 150k+ and people that have to have multiple jobs to stay above water. Even leaving the influence of money in politics aside, sheer availability of time is a significant factor.
Politics in the US are controlled by the rich, so the idea that "the people" are choosing to deal with the consequences of this housing crisis is absurd.
What's happening is that the wealthy are externalizing all the suffering caused by their voracious rent-seeking onto those beneath them, including middle class developers who think their interests align with them (they don't).
I don't understand why you're being downvoted because I think your comment is perfectly valid and you are entirely correct. Nonetheless, this is the system that we have, and the housing situation in the SFBA is a product of that system. If you think it's a problem you need to change the system, not the symptom.
But a non-political solution to affordable housing could be coming soon in the form of rapid transit via Hyperloop. Hyperloop could put deflationary pressure on housing prices.
If Hyperloop actually materializes, and their route transit times are anywhere near what they say they will be, then real estate prices should decline in the bay area, or at the worst level out.
I doubt people will continue to pay crazy prices in SF when you can commute from almost anywhere on the west coast to SF within an hour on Hyperloop.
Hyperloops are a promising whizz-bang idea, but it's not like we haven't developed technology for mass transit. Subways, light rail, and dedicated bus ways all work rather well. The California high-speed rail is obscenely expensive mostly for political reasons, not logistical ones.
Furthermore, a Hyperloop might get you from city to city, but then local transit is needed for those last couple miles.
Soon? When has a major infrastructure project that hasn't even broken ground ever realistically promised to deliver for any reasonable value of soon? And Hyperloop is far from even being proven feasible, much less breaking ground.
It's basically impossible to get a job in Zurich though. In San Fransisco, a coding bootcamp grad can get 140K out the door. This is how capitalism works. We take the bad with the good. Politics reflect the will of the people and the people in San Fransisco on both sides of the aisle want to make as much money as they can, any way they can.
Not really a bad thing, just maybe disappointing. I've been a professional coder for 10 years, and now am at an "executive"-level at a small startup, and I make the high end of that. In my area, that is a very strong upper-middle-class salary, though 180 would be better.
It's sad at first to see that someone who is simply in a different area geographically is afforded so much for so little effort. However when you factor in the cost of living there, it feels (slightly) better. I say slightly, because every time I've visited SF the actual costs of things has not been significantly different. I haven't had to pay rent or mortgage there, though.
Edit: And I don't live somewhere off in the woods, either. The county I live in is in the top 10 wealthiest counties in the country. There is something wrong in SF that is not just cost of living.
Your small startup is probably why you're making that. Startups don't actually pay well, and it's not a small difference.
Regarding cost of living here, I just did some basic research using Portland as an example and it looks like I could reduce my mortgage by anywhere from 25-50% pretty easily without giving up anything in terms of bedrooms, square footage, location, etc. In terms of rentals, it looks comparable. Of course I probably couldn't get a job earning what I do in SF either. I haven't looked at relocating because (surprise!) we actually like it here and with kids you get pinned down unless things are pretty bad.
It's worth noting that I live in Alameda, the island/town the woman in the article was living in when she got evicted. We are literally having riots (two now) at city hall when tenant-friendly changes to local law have been discussed. They keep passing the ballot, though!
Alameda passed an anti-density measure in the early 70's in response to developers demolishing old Victorians in order to build crappy apartment buildings. That measure has in turn kept high density development from being done _anywhere_ on the island, including the old naval base where there is nothing historic to be preserved (except the ships floating on the water). Current anti-density arguments primarily come from people who don't want additional commute-hours congestion and landlords who are perfectly happy to rent a 2-bedroom apartment for $2200/mo. (Cheap compared to SF!)
For the Canton of Zurich (can't find city-specific info), financial services accounts for 21% of GVA, telecommunications accounts for 27%, industry and mining for 14%, entertainment for another 14%.
While the rising cost of housing is an easy target, why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living?
If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of the city centers? It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages.
This example is a bit on the fringe, but it does illustrate the daily struggle of many normal people. 2+ hour commute is insane. And before someone comes in with the "why doesn't she get a new job closer to home?", you know it's not that easy - not to mention unfair to suggest that someone should change their entire life because their profession isn't flavor of the month.
This isn't an issue of tech companies forcing anyone out. Bay area municipalities and NIMBY property owners have created a hostile regulatory environment for property developers, leading to a lack of new housing coming onto the market and driving rents upward.
That's not the full story. Commercial property is much more profitable for a city than housing, so every city in the peninsula is trying to build office space, and trying to offload the cost of actually housing those new workers onto other cities. The tax code needs to be fixed to realign incentives. One proposal I heard was to make it so that the state shares the income tax of the employees that live in the city with the city. That might disincentivize low income housing, though.
This is why I've always been in favor of Hybrid zoning. Hybrid structures are even better in my opinion. You can have a building where the bottom floors are commercial space and the upper floors are residential space.
Or you can zone an area where both commercial and residential development are permitted. Sure, living right next to a metal shop or something isn't the most pleasant thing, but it's really nice if you work at that metal shop.
This is something I saw being developed in my home town before I moved away. Along the main "downtown" strip they built several new 2 story structures where the bottom floors were shops like whole foods and such. On the top floor were various types of apartments. These particular apartments were a bit on the expensive side mostly due to it being a kind of swanky neighborhood right along the beach. That said, the concept can be expanded upon to apply to more affordable areas.
In Japan, zoning is hybrid (includes all zones up to a given level, so you can have mixed residential/commercial), and height limits are based on shadow projection instead of some city commissioner. It seems to work better than America's obsession with suburbanization and having all your housing in a giant clump a 10 minute drive from all your shops.
> This is why I've always been in favor of Hybrid zoning. Hybrid structures are even better in my opinion. You can have a building where the bottom floors are commercial space and the upper floors are residential space.
Interestingly in the mission bay area there's a lot of unused commercial first floor space below residential apartment buildings. Some of it empty since the buildings went up 2012/2013.
San Francisco, sorry, should have mentioned that. I've really no clue, I'm kinda curious. They're still building new buildings with commercial ground level floors. Besides being empty and presumably not making money that way, they're also not particularly pretty...
Yes prop 13 is basically the reason behind the differential. And because it is a political non-starter it's misplaced incentives are baked into the CA real estate market.
A repeal is hugely unpopular amongst many, since it would destroy house values and immediately make houses unaffordable for many owners on borderline incomes. You could try phasing it in, but housing values would take the change into account quickly, depending on how it's structured. Would be great for renters looking to buy, but catastrophic for recent buyers. That said, property taxes are very important as a feedback loop to discourage nimbyism that drives up prices.
Keep going up the chain of causality. Property Owners are so NIMBY because there's an economic incentive to behave that way. This is only the case because Prop 13 caps their property taxes. If California had property taxes that, like other states, could increase as the assessed value of your home increases, the incentive to oppose new building would be significantly lessened and it would then be in everyone's best interest to keep housing costs low, not just those who rent or are looking to buy.
Prop 13 is immoral and has not only wreaked havoc on real estate market in the state but has also gutted the state's public education system. It needs to be repealed before any progress on these housing issues can be made. There can be provisions to ensure that people don't lose their homes to rising property taxes...Texas, IIRC, has one that allows property taxes to accrue and only need to be paid when the title of the property changes hands, which seems like a good compromise. But the state's population is going to go up which means we're going to need to build a lot more housing, and our laws need to create an environment where that can happen.
> There can be provisions to ensure that people don't lose their homes to rising property taxes...Texas, IIRC, has one that allows property taxes to accrue and only need to be paid when the title of the property changes hands, which seems like a good compromise.
So it's not OK for rising rents to force property elderly owners to sell and move away, but it is OK for rising rents to force elderly renters to move away?
You can't defend property tax deferments for the elderly without also defending rent control for them. Either way you have the same problem of local residents thinking it's OK for everyone else to suffer lower supply and higher costs, as long as they aren't suffering.
> If California had property taxes that, like other states, could increase as the assessed value of your home increases, the incentive to oppose new building would be significantly lessened and it would then be in everyone's best interest to keep housing costs low, not just those who rent or are looking to buy.
That might make rational sense but it is not how homeowners actually behave.
I'v seen this extensively in multiple upper-middle income communities on the east coast. Houses that have tripled in relative value force their now retired owners to sell because they can't afford the higher property tax. Developers can buy above market because they demo the house and put down 2 houses that each sell for 75% the original home's value.
This scales for quite a long time, and is generally how suburbia transforms into, well, east San Jose.
It's not that homeowners make rational choices as a result, it's that over time they are pushed out and the rational choice is made by the larger market.
The Texas approach does sound like a good compromise. I'd be curious to know if this was proposed during the Prop 13 debate and what the public reaction was.
I wonder if a deal that removes Prop 13 but reduces state income taxes can be put on the ballot. That way you keep overall revenues same, but just change how it is collected.
Perhaps income and sales taxes could go down...California has some of the highest rates in the nation for both. But it would be a good idea to not have it net to zero considering Prop 13 originally resulted in deep cuts to public education in the state and the quality of schools has dropped significantly from pre-Prop 13 levels.
True, but new housing wouldn't be needed if there wasn't such a high influx of people moving into the Bay area. Sure tech isn't the only player in the game, but they're surely one of the biggest. If less people were moving there for high paying jobs - rent wouldn't rise as quickly or as drastically.
California building codes are pretty extreme from what I've seen, they go as far as measuring the pull force required to open a door for example. This seems like a place where a little deregulation would go a long way.
Building codes aren't the problem, it's zoning. If a developer had an empty acre in SF or Palo Alto, or permission to replace low rise housing with skyscrapers, they'd build.
The cost of building probably does have an effect on the margin, but it is so much less of a factor than restrictions on what can be built.
A recent article about building in Millbrae mentions developer fees of 26k per unit being build. I'm all for deregulation to make it easier to build, but the code compliance and fees are also part of the problem.
From the National Association of Home Builders, it looks like "average" is approximately $9,400 per unit in "fees". Not sure if that's apple to apples with the Bay Area, but in either way that fee just seems kind of crazy.
Rows A-C, summing fees, on the Construction Costs table here: https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?genericContentID=24...
The price of land dwarfs the cost of construction. Outside of the Bay there are huge housing developments underway and although I am sure property developers would rather have less regulation they do not seem to be struggling to build homes.
In a state with active fault lines and environmental pressures from much of it being in the desert deregulation is not going to help our long term prosperity or safety.
This is kind of part of the problem. Housing developers are enabling large hub cities to offload the cost of housing to smaller outlying towns. Of course, the developers aren't doing this willingly.
The other problem is that housing developers in California have a tendency to build huge, sprawling suburban communities. This just increases sprawl.
Imagine a 1 sq. mile tract of land. Assuming a housing developer builds a ton of two story, single family homes here, each on a 1/4 acre of land, we can calculate that they can build 2560 homes +/- 500 based on topography and landscaping etc. There are no reliable numbers as to the average of units in an apartment building. Therefore, we will have to make some assumptions. Let's go ahead and say that that the developer decides to build apartments instead of tract-homes. Each apartment building will be 2 acres in area. Even if the apartments are huge: 1500 sq ft +, we can calculate that a 2 acre apartment building can have about 20 units per floor. Lets say that these apartment buildings are a modest 2 stories tall. 20 * 2 = 40. That means, covering the same 1 sq. mile of land with modest apartment buildings could create 12800 residences. That's a 500% increase in residences.
In urban centers, zoning laws allow for much taller structures. Structures can be hybridized to allow for both commercial and residential tenants.
Building large, hybrid-use, multi-tenant structures will alleviate some of the pressure on the housing market and lead to shorter commutes for most people. This is because you can fit more people into a smaller land area. It's common sense I'm sure. So, why aren't developers building these structures? The short answer is that they can't. City zoning laws, angry property owners, and the lack of open land in desirable areas all get in the way.
I didn't really understand zoning until I witnessed a bunch of Southern middle-class white moms agreeing with their middle-class black mom neighbor about how they all hoped that the new construction on the [formerly agricultural] lot next to the subdivision would be restaurants instead of apartment buildings, because the latter attracts "the wrong kind of people".
Then I looked at the zoning map for the municipality, and read the zoning codes.
From outward appearances, it's to keep the poor people away from the rich people. And not just at night when everyone goes home, either. All the time, everywhere. Jobs, schools, commutes, shopping, entertainment. It's the new age of redlining, with a global substitution of bank account sizes for skin colors.
I couldn't tell what degree of intent was there, but on the ground, the zoning board has reinvented the ghetto. The poor folks get to live next to the railroad tracks. Rich folks get to live next to the zone marked as protected wetland/watershed, so that it can never be developed.
The kind of behavior is the status quo everywhere not just the south. It's a byproduct of people only getting involved in these things when they think it's going to affect them in a negative way. I.e. Only the people who associate apartments with black people and don't like black people care about the issue.
A very similar thing is happening here in Los Angeles. Luckily, the Mayor and city officials are fighting back to push through more multi-family housing. It's still going to take a while before housing prices stabilize though.
On the other hand, I feel that she's over-compensating a little.
No-one's saying the $1600/month that she was paying for a 1br in Alameda is "cheap" in any way...
But at $81K salary, her $1000/mo rent is only just touching 20% of her take home, which is in the "very comfortable" range (for reference, most property management companies want you to be "not exceeding 35% of take home income").
Minor note, because my thoughts were along similar lines - she was evicted from her $1600/month apt, and presumably would pay significantly more for it now.
> why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living?
What do you hope to accomplish with this "pressure"? That these companies hire fewer people?
> Lower income housing?
Housing costs are one of those nasty problems where throwing money at it just doesn't work (and I'm saying this as a democratic socialist whose proposed solution to most problems is "tax the rich in order to throw money at it"). Imagine if big tech companies pledged a billion dollars or whatever to build a bunch of housing units. What would happen? This: other developers would pull back on new construction, because the pledge would throw a wrench in the supply/demand, and you'd be right back where you started.
The correct solution is upzoning and, to be blunt, disenfranchisement of NIMBYs.
> If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation?
Most of the big ones do: they offer a lot of incentives to not drive, including paying for employees to take public transport or offering shuttle buses (which at least keep them out of cars).
> move their headquarters out of the city centers?
They aren't in city centers: 4 of the Big 5 (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook) are all headquartered in suburbs. Only Amazon is headquartered in a city center.
> It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages.
Why does that seem crazy? It's just supply-and-demand.
I'll admit I'm not a city planner. I don't have the answers to the problems. It's just frustrating to see what's happening with these mega-cities and how it's affecting the lives of so many people negatively. Surely the benefit of having these boosted economies doesn't outweigh the negative aspects - or do they?
Bay area has a whole bucket of specific problems - but there are general shared trends that extend to other cities with big tech industries.
> Surely the benefit of having these boosted economies doesn't outweigh the negative aspects - or do they?
I think the answer is that with well-managed development, having boosted economies can have few or no negative aspects, but the Bay Area is sorely lacking that right now. As others have said, the lion's share of the blame is not with the tech companies (they're just hiring workers they need), but with the area's terrible NIMBY politics that are blocking the construction of more housing.
You assume that everyone working for a tech company is a 6 figure programmer. There are plenty of secretaries, social media coordinators, sales people etc. That likely make less than what a sanitation worker, cop firefighter, etc. make. It isn't so clear cut.
Would that be the purpose of property tax and state corporate taxes? Genuine question.
I have always imagined the benefit to a city of having big businesses move in was to bring in more tax through boosted economic activity that would allow them to improve the city overall. Perhaps I played too much Sim City.
I think in theory this is how it should work - but I think part of the issue is the multi-city sprawl that's happening. When an area of influence grows that big, who is held responsible? I'm sure no one is volunteering to pick up the slack and shoulder the burden of all the improvements.
Why should taxpayers subsidize unsustainable prices for the restaurants/shops/services?
If it's just left alone, the market will react to this. If a 1BR apt costs $2500/mo, then the price of a sandwich might go to $25 to be able to pay that sandwich-makers $75k/yr wage. And if SFers don't like paying $25 for a sandwich then they can vote for more density.
Nah, there are much more viable market solutions. There will be 4 sandwich makers sharing that apartment, or they will commute for hours, or the sandwiches will be made somewhere else and shipped in, or the sandwich shop will make you build your own sandwich, or it will understaff and you'll have to wait 30 minutes for your sandwich...
Why punish companies for being successful enough to create attractive, high-paying jobs? The consequences of doing that won't be very good for anyone. A slower economy will hurt the low-income workers a bit more than the high-income workers.
What we need is a solution that encourages and accommodates success, not one that punishes it.
Why not punish companies for creating jobs in an already crowded area? How many attractive, high-paying jobs in SF are tied to the city by any physical necessity? If companies want to avoid being punished, all they have to do is move their offices to a less crowded city.
Crowding is the whole point of cities: get lots of people and jobs together in a small space and let them benefit from each other. If lack of crowding is more important to someone than economic opportunity, they can go live in the countryside.
The benefits of centralization & economic opportunity for you but no one else isn't a stable equilibrium or a coherent policy goal. The only way you could plausibly achieve that over the long term is with border controls and immigration policy, something that's explicitly off the table for the interior of the United States per the Constitution.
If they move to a less-crowded city, and offer good jobs there, that city will become crowded, especially when former employees leave to start other companies in the same area.
That's how Silicon Valley became what it is. If a lot of tech companies moved to other cities, it would probably happen there, too.
I think there's a problem of congregation. i.e. Real network effects reinforcing labor concentration - to the exclusion of support business. Companies want their employees close at hand. Those same employees attract further, similar businesses nearby. I don't know how to change that. Tele-presence doesn't seem as in demand.
If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing?
Don't you think people are already trying to do this? There is resistance from many sides, which is, you know, the story here in general.
>why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living?
You're going to need some extremely powerful public policy interventions to push back on a force as powerful in human civilization as urbanization.
It's so much better for society and for the individuals who currently don't live in major cities to centralize into them. You're going to need some extreme regulation to reverse the incentives that have driven the push towards cities worldwide and for thousands of years.
And for what? To protect a relatively tiny constituency of people who currently live in cities and want them to stay small, against the giant national/worldwide population that wants economic opportunity, and to use its resources for something other than cars?
The SFMTA Commuter Shuttle Program is only allowed to recover costs of the program itself, for regulatory reasons.
Locals don't actually want to fix this problem -- ethnic groups are afraid of losing their homes, because historically that's what new housing construction has done.
All of SoMa was built by razing a predominantly black community and replacing it with what is there now. You can go to the SFMOMA and see photos of what it used to look like.
Just yesterday I was commenting here on this very situation, but she has already moved her home out of the city in search of less expensive rent. She really should find a job out of the city as well. If the highly paid workers in the city want to buy coffee or sandwiches or whatever, they can pay prices that reflect the true cost of living in the city and not some indirect subsidized price.
She presumably provides a service to those in the area where she works. Whether she makes sandwiches or gives life advice, the price paid by the consumers of her service should be somewhat correlated with the cost of living in the area.
The same thing is happening in most other cities albeit perhaps more slowly, most of which have no particular industry to blame it on. It's a shortage caused by zoning.
...because these companies can just go somewhere else that won't pressure them, so when cities are faced with a billion dollar tech campus or none at all they often feel like they have to bend. Cities often even cut taxes to see big companies come into town. Capitalism will always win against public infrastructure.
It's not really "winning" so much as finding an economic equilibrium (unless that's what you mean by "capitalism"). I think the problem here is the regulation that prevents the construction of new homes. If you remove that artificial barrier, housing costs could decline. Alternatively, the municipalities could tax the real estate developers who are profiting from the regulation, but if you can get that resolution to pass muster then there probably wouldn't be any regulation to begin with.
Reporters keep trying to find profiles of the housing crisis but this seems disingenuous. A lot of what this woman is doing is a choice; waking up hours before the train, huge house in Stockton vs condo/apartment closer. She makes $80k/year meaning post-tax $4600/month. She could easily afford a nice 1 or 2 bedroom in Pittsburg or Pleasanton for ~$2k a month, and her door-to-door commute would be well under 80 minutes.
In the article she can work from home some days a week (I know for feds in DC, it's mandatory 5 days out of 10, so maybe at least that many for her) and she has a government job which (for many in the non-tech, non-startup world) is the Holy Grail of jobs- incredibly stable, great benefits, pension, etc. She's 61, so in her mind the trade-off might be worth it if she plans on retiring at 65 (and perhaps even earlier if she's got a ton of time in her PTO bank). Coming at the angle of a young tech person raising a family, the trade-off might not be worth it, but for an older person with retirement coming soon, the priorities are different.
People are required to work from home 5 days out of 10? I'm for encouraging working from home, but that policy assumes that everyone can spare the space in their home to have some sort of home office. (And since it's not a fully remote job, you still have to live near DC.)
Mandatory minimum allowed remote-work days. It's a quality-of-life measure for the employees - not some way to save money/office space on the employer's part.
Probably. They mentioned apartment sizes in the article. The other quality of life improvements would be pretty massive since her commute puts her somewhere her dollars go much farther because she's not competing with the SV crowd for goods and services.
I was going to come in here and talk about how this strikes me more as a personal choice than a symptom of a systemic problem (i lived well in SF on $60k, and I mean for fucks sake Stockton? that is aggressively far. There are many great closer options.), but who cares.
This woman seems to have a really peaceful existence. It would be nice to have such relaxing routines in my own life, especially in the face of stressful realities like a long commute on public transit. It makes me want to develop the fortitude that this woman exercises every single day.
Eh. It's reasonable to point out that even a < 1 hr. car commute can be a bigger money leak than a lot of people appreciate. And I also believe that anyone commuting 2 hours each way daily needs to give serious thought to alternatives; it doesn't seem sustainable.
That said, selling and buying houses (or changing jobs) on an ongoing basis so you're right next to your job doesn't seem like a great strategy either. And likely not a plausible one, at least outside of a city, if you have a partner who also goes into an office.
When choosing between jobs I try to calculate the true hourly wage I'd receive. I include transportation costs, travel time, expected unpaid overtime etc and pick not the highest salary but the highest hourly rate all things considered.
Unfortunately, in most cases the base salary is the only part of compensation that is 'guaranteed'. Overtime requirements could change after a few months, a job with a longer commute might allow work from home, etc. Your 'true rate' is an interesting piece of information to consider during job search, but I do not think it should have this much weight.
Do you calculate life lost as well? I'm being serious. There is a MASSIVE difference between a five minute commute, and an hour commute when you add it up over a lifetime. That's a stupid amount of your life wasted doing nothing.
I do, a job with an hour one way commute will have ten hours weekly of additional work time as opposed to 50 minutes for the 5 minute example. Thus if salaried at the same rate the 5 minute commute is the better deal (and that's before calculation of travel costs)
I was referring to literal life time lost. If you're salaried better with a 3 hour commute, it's still not worth it in my opinion. There is a definite maximum commute time, no matter the price.
But note that the vast bulk of that is an imputed value of his time which, unless you're turning down work you can't do because you're in a car commuting, isn't something you can pay the bank with.
One way to make this better is to support the plan to inline the Capitol Corridor and ACE trains with Caltrain via the unused and abandoned Dumbarton rail bridge [0]. Make sure to tell your elected officials you support this.
Well, for one thing, Beijing is miles and miles of 20+story apartment highrises. I don't know why San Francisco is so resistant to that, seems inevitable to me.
Also, as our nation's metro areas become more dense, we need to make sure we have train connections that are co-located. For example, Pleasanton ACE and Pleasanton BART, or in San Francisco Caltrain and Muni/BART, which they are doing with the multi-year Downtown Extension project. These little things make a huge difference. Commuters eliminate an additional connection and get a small walk in.
Diesel trains will eventually be replaced as well and then we can begin inlining but we should at least plan cities and stations to make public transit easier.
It appears that when local cities have control over housing, they make decisions that are good for them, but bad for the state that needs higher paying jobs that generate tax revenue. Plus low density housing is bad for the environment when compared to high density: http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html
Other places would move heaven and earth to have a place like Silicon Valley and it seems like California is shooting itself in the foot with this self inflicted housing shortage.
If a municipality decides to open 100 seats of office space, they should be required to zone and approve 100 beds for said workers to sleep in. Otherwise you have the situation where towns like Brisbane can build office complexes for the tax revenue and entirely pass the buck to their neighbors for the cost of housing the new workers.
This is a major major part of problem and one of the simpler legislative solutions. The extreme example is Cupertino and Palo Alto which have approved 10000s of office desks but resist building any meaningful housing whatsoever. Peninsula towns also need incentives/mandates to upzone around Caltrain. SF also does a huge desks to beds imbalance in approvals.
>Ms. James pays $1,000 a month in rent for her three-bedroom house, compared with $1,600 for the one-bedroom apartment she had in Alameda.
She was forced out of her original apartment but unless she had a new situation that required her to have more bedrooms with a lower budget, some part of this extremity was her choice. I think NYT should've chosen a better example if the point they were trying to get across is "tech boom forcing workers out".
This really stood out for me too. Her commute is awful, but it seems more like a conscious compromise that she herself opted for (Larger house, cheaper budget, longer commute), given her work situation (able to work from home) and personal lifestyle choices (likes to take her time, takes the stairs at the station, gets off the train a stop early to have a leisurely walk on her commute).
Maybe it was the style of writing in the article, but it didn't give me the impression that Ms. James is unhappy with her choice to move.
It's misleading because the title makes it sound like a 5 hour commute, when in reality, 2 hours of it are her spending time leisurely around the house in the morning before leaving.
The article says she gets up at 2:15 but doesn't have to leave home until 4:00. As it's generally possible to get ready for work in less than 105 minutes, the "2:15 Alarm" bit highlighted in the headline is a little misleading.
This is a pretty amazing example. It raises more questions than it answers however. The big one is "Why continue working in SF with this horrible commute?"
Market dynamics suggest that in a 'free' market, on an individual basis, a person seeks to maximize their value received. So in this case, if this was an open market, the (commute + $81K/year) > any other option that she might choose.
So what are we missing that there isn't at least an equal paying job available in the Central Valley that would cut her commute by 80 - 90% ? I can imagine lots of things that might contribute like pension eligibility, or specialization. But "Public Health Advisor for DHHS" seems to be a position that is available in many cities in the state. I would have liked to read what about this job in this city was so important.
And all of that is to the meta question of salary growth has been flat for a long time, but for a long time people felt they had to keep their job at all costs. A what point does the advantage change? 3% unemployment? 2%? What needs to happen so that people are confident enough to say "pay me more or I'll work somewhere else." ?
As a result of the stuff I wonder about, I feel like there might a tremendous amount of tension in the economy that isn't as visible as one might hope. And I wonder what happens when it snaps. Do we get the 10 - 15% stag-flation of the 70s?
I immediately searched for the word "pension" in the comments, and your comment was the only one to have it. She's 62 years old, and commuting to this job so that she can maximize her pension.
> I feel like there might a tremendous amount of tension in the economy that isn't as visible as one might hope.
Seattle, by any number of metrics, is one of the Boomtowns in America today.
But when you walk down almost all the major streets, there are usually at least one boarded up storefront. House prices are > 10x annual US median salary, and 5-7x the median Seattle salary. Homeless people are everywhere downtown. The "family size" apartments are nearly non-existent until you get a solid 30+ minutes away (everything is being aimed at rich people or young singles); single family houses are (comfortably) priced to people with a solid 200k+ combined salary (you CAN stretch it of course, but memories of prior bubbles suggest stretching it on living situations is a poor choice). This isn't making sense: it does not seem sustainable as a system.
Haven't dug into the numbers for Seattle, but the blue collar factories in the US etc are being pinched by a lack of entrants: no one wants to work for $12/hr and be at the bottom of the totem pole, but the employers claim they can't pay more. I read newspaper stories about this periodically.
Structurally, of course, there is significant financial inequality between municipalities/states/cities and more rural areas, and the concentration of wealth (jobs, culture, hope) in these metro areas is generating salt lake effects in many rural areas.
I think there's a definite snapping point in the economy that the current direction doesn't seem to be changing. I think, frankly, the US economy has metaphorical 'toxic' areas that haven't been honestly addressed and it's generating a lot of resentment.
I paid about 30% of my salary in 2014 for a SRO [0] in San Francisco with a 10 minute commute. I decided that the quality of living was not worth the potential future earnings for staying in the bay area. In Tulsa I pay about 14% of my salary to rent a large apartment with a 4 minute commute.
But you make a lot less in the absolute terms. So you save less, you can afford less of cool stuff. Most people in the world want to move in the opposite direction.
The way you should look at it: Take your savings. If you suddenly could get no income, no welfare, etc: How many months/years can you maintain your current standard of living before you run out of money?
Being paid more in absolute, and even saving more in absolute, doesn't guarantee a longer time till you go broke. It's the ratio of your savings to the monthly cost of living.
I could move to the Bay area and get paid enough to save, say, $5K more per year than I do now, I'm still in worse shape because of the COL. Effectively, even though I'm saving more in absolute terms, I'll not be able to retire as early as I can now.
But is 70% of SF salary < 86% of Tulsa salary ? Even after we account for other expenditures (travel and food), it looks like a net benefit in SF (compared to Atlanta).
The only down side would be buying an actual house. A house in Atlanta would be 3-5x my yearly Atlanta salary. A similar house in SF would cost 7-8x my yearly SF salary.
I am making 75% of my SF salary in Tulsa, so it is a 5.5% reduction in pay after rent. The lower state taxes probably make it break even and I have a considerably higher quality of living.
What's to stop San Francisco from creating a lot more high-density housing? Doesn't that solve many issues with housing supply? Looking at wikipedia, the density is crazy low even compared to other major cities in the US.
> What's to stop San Francisco from creating a lot more high-density housing?
Entrenched residents who oppose new construction, primarily. Look at the recent kerfuffles involving residents opposing the replacement of parking lots with housing.
Lack of infrastructure as well. Despite the low density, it is pain to get around SF and bay area generally unless you are luck enough to have a trip that starts or ends near one of the few rail lines. Double the density, and getting around would go from bad to worse.
Even in dense cities (Manhattan), most people don't live walking distance to work. But they have a great public transportation system, so it works. The Bay Area has a terrible public transit system, and if you add density without improving it will get a lot harder to get around.
Also, the big tech jobs centers (apple/facebook/Google) are in the south bay, and many of their employees (especially those without kids) choose to live in San Francisco because it is a much more interesting vibrant interesting place than Mountain View, Menlo Park, or Cupertino. Someone living in Noe Valley and working at Apple could already live closer to work, for much less, if that's what they wanted.
So adding high density housing will allow some people to live closer, and some to live farther, but it will add incrementally more traffic. That's fine, but let's at least address the infrastructure in tandem, if not first.
Why isn't there a good, inexpensive bus? You can fit almost one hundred passengers on a single bus. Buses are pretty fuel-efficient per passenger, easy to reroute if you have more/less demand, and you can go directly to where you need to go. They scale very well - if there are only 20 people or so you can send a small bus, if there are thousands you can send multiple large buses.
Sure, traffic can be an issue, but I'd imagine train delays are roughly as big of a problem.
In this case, it looks like her 3hr 20min commute could become 1hr 30min with a bus that goes from Stockton.
You're vastly underestimating how bad rush hour traffic is. Also, the longer the bus is on the road the more likely it will be to be in it. Then you run into the same problem where you're getting a 5am bus for a 9am job even though it's only a 1hr drive on paper
So why do we keep commuting for jobs that don't really require our physical presence?
It was a long hard battle for me to be able to work from home, and yes, I sometimes do miss out on face-to-face interaction, but going to the office 2 instead of 5 days a week is still a huge win - I'm not in a car out there, making traffic worse for you. You're welcome.
Can we please solve the supposed "interaction" problem with some nice digital pens and white-boards and web cams and just .... work from anywhere?
because in some cases, it's me that requires the physical presence - not the job. Working physically with the team is amazingly better for my productivity. Unfortunately, I have to take the jobs where they are. Since public transit is so bad, that's brutal commutes.
My company is 100% remote, but it is not without it's challenges. As you mention, the whiteboard is a big one. There isn't a good digital equivalent yet that isn't a fortune.
But not everyone wants to work remotely. I asked my friend, and he said he would never work at a remote company because, "I enjoy having face to face conversations with my coworkers about work."
This seems like the most logical solution. I think the issue is that the people who are impacted the most by these long commutes are workers who can't physically work remotely. The people who work for companies that could implement it, generally live close enough that the commute doesn't bother them in the first place.
Me too - which is why I still go to the office - just not 5 days a week. If we could stagger people's schedules somehow - you go on Monday, I go on Tuesday - and do that on a massive scale - it should help traffic congestion quite a bit.
Or we could actually build some nice mass transit in this country. But now I'm just talking crazy.
The thing is we are not there yet. But this will eventually happen either by VR-like presence or just async style work (culture requiring less realtime interactions by design)
As the article says, she could sleep 90 minutes longer. And if she drove to work, she does have a car, she could easily leave at five.
She could also get a 3200 dollar apartment where she used to live, have at least two rooms, sleep late and still have 3550 left every month.
Maybe medical insurance and such things that we europeans don't need to buy are very expensive, but apart from that it doesn't seem very difficult to live on 3500 after rent for a single person. My whole family spends less than that after rent, four people in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Copenhagen.
Take-home salary after taxes could be a lot less than $6,750 per month. Health insurance is probably reasonably priced given that she seems to have a government job.
But I do see your point - she could (and many do) live closer, pay more, and sleep more.
Good point about the tax, American salaries are quoted pre tax of course! I've spendt the whole afternoon with my nose in P&Ls, where the quoted salary is pretty much what is interesting.
In any case, I feel the headline is pretty sensationalistic, even if she wants to live where she lives, she could probably get up at 5 and drive to work.
I don't dispute that Bay Area housing is very expensive, and there are plenty of issue it needs to address, but this person seems so have made a personal choice to have that commute, which I commend if thats the lifestyle she wants.
Perhaps her personal circumstances didn't allow for it (Or she chose not to, which is fine too), but a home can be purchased for as little as 3.5% down (FHA) + closing costs. For someone with an 81K salary, their borrowing limit is around ~460k (@43% FHA DTI Limit [1]), and in 2014 (When the person in the article was evicted) there were plenty of homes in that price range in the East Bay. That DTI won't be easy, but neither is a 6-8hr daily commute.
In fact, there are homes/condos right now [2] still in that price range. The crisis is for those making the median household income of say, 52.9K in Oakland, thats the income where one is basically shut out of the housing market.
It's odd this article doesn't mention what time she goes to bed or how much sleep she gets. I found that was all I wanted to know first reading the headline to the end of the article. It mentions people sleep on the train but never really confirms if she does (the one photo of her in the train she is looking at her phone so I assume not).
Just playing the devils advocate by posting some themes discussed on the article's comment section.
- She apparently can't relocate as she makes $81K as a federal employee. Most commenters seem to point out they make far less for equally brutal commute, and don't even complain.
- She also works from home every now and then. Something which most other people like Chefs, Janitors, Barbers who are paid way less, don't even have an option to do by very occupational design.
- She qualifies for pension after some time. There fore it's not too much to expect somebody to make a little sacrifice for a few decades worth of getting paid without doing anything at all.
- Most other commenters seem to point out that they would love to have a job which pays $81K, with benefits and a pension even at that commute time. Therefore this is not a problem, this is actually an opportunity.
Most comments seem to have a 'Cry me a river' kind of a sentiment.
Makes me appreciate what I have in Rochester. 5 minute commute if I don't hit the lights correctly. Drive home for lunch in silence, take a nap. Cost of living where I have more money than I know what to do with. The grind a lot of you put up with chasing money, is paid for with your life, literally.
AS I've gotten older and more experienced I realized my commuting circle has shrunken. When I was dumb and young I was willing to commute 3 counties for work. Gas was cheap and apparently my time (1 hr each way) was cheaper. If it's not close by (<30 min) and I can't telecommute than I don't really care for it. I live in the city so there are plenty of other opportunities.
1. I wonder what her commuting cost are + having to have a car is a month?
2. Stockton has a median income of $45k vs $81k in SF [factfinder.census.gov] - so in SF she is right in the middle, in Stockton she is at twice the median income (for households) is it really surprising to anyone that she can get more for her housing $ in Stockton?
And sit in traffic for an hour instead of relax on a train for 2? Ew.
What this lady needs is a sweet GSXR-1000 to split all the way to paradise. I don't know why more people don't take advantage of the fact that lane splitting is legal here, it's a fantastic way to cut commute time in half. Plus you get free or super cheap parking pretty much wherever you want.
My dear, Bikes aren't cheap if you factor in the funeral costs!
Seriously though, the amount of additional risk of life/limb/etc you'd be taking by biking to work isnt worth saving an extra hour given the raised attentiveness you have to be on throughout the commute.
What we all really need is cheap selfdriving vanpool networks that dynamically optimizes routes based on traffic flows. or better yet hub-to-hub VTOL human transport drones. In all honesty I think we'll see those before we'll see legislative action helping the housing crisis.
I hear getting a superbike after you hit 30 pretty much guarantees you'll be dead within 18 months...if we required this for older commuters think of the pension costs that could be saved...seriously these discussions all seem to revolve around "how can we penalize someone to incentivize some solution?"
I'm happy this lady found a solution she was happy with. It's not like she's commuting to the salt mines in death race 2000...living in the Bay Area is a tangled web for anyone who doesn't have high 6 figures in disposable income. I gave up in disgust and voted with my feet.
Is that really good sleep, though? I've slept on trains, buses, planes, cars where I wasn't driving, and that sleep is never the same quality as sleep in a bed.
Someone will make one that's comfy, like an RV that is a moving bedroom. The modes you mention either have to accommodate a driver who can't sleep or they have to squish a lot of people in to make it cheap.
My dad has been doing an hour and a half (each way) commute for the better part of the last decade.
I ended up doing the same commute when I started a new job last week. I'm already dying to move into my new apartment. I don't know how these people do it.
And to be clear, the hour+ commute wouldn't be so bad if it were just driving. But stop-and-go traffic does not a relaxing drive make.
The odds are that in WWIII it will be lost and then will be able to be rebuilt like a actual modern city with proper infrastructure. All those amazing buildings that we see in the Star Trek movies and shows probably weren't built while Nimby's were still there. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/21st_century
Liberals like to talk big about the public transportation, but when it comes time to deliver they follow the unions' script that results in exuberant costs (to build the system and to run it) and extremely poor performance. And as a result the average folks and the poor suffer the most.
Furthermore, unions in Europe are much more powerful than they are in the US. It must not be unions holding the US back if Europe can manage to build better transit with much stronger unions.
Or, traveling a 100 miles takes a couple hours even if it isn't public transit, because of things like safety, traffic, and the laws of physics. Also, a click-bait headline (she leaves at 4 am).
The San Francisco Bay Area CSA has about the same population as Switzerland, with 2/3 of the area of Switzerland.
Both have similar GDPs.
If someone wanted to live in Germany, and commute to work in Zurich, with Swiss salaries and German cost-of-living, their commute would be about 1h15min.
The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.