
To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years - jseliger
http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-area-housing-stock-must-grow-50-percent-20-years/
======
gojomo
_News from 2029:_

Skylynr, the 'Uber of nanoassembled highrises', last night replaced 44 San
Francisco Victorians with apartment buildings.

Reached for comment, SF's Planning Department said the overnight construction
violates a city moratorium, to study displacement issues, now in its 14th
year.

The Board of Supervisors plans to address the issue in an emergency session
next Tuesday. A Skylynr spokesperson says over 4,000 new residents, in the
nearly 2,000 new apartments, will be registered as voters on the San Francisco
Department of Elections blockchain before that meeting.

By November, over half the city's voters may be residents of the on-demand
skyscrapers popping up across the city, most built by Skylynr or its
competitors Instatower and Zipartments.

~~~
flanbiscuit
I believe William Gibson described something similar to the self-building
towers in his book Idoru[1]. I think they were called nanotech buildings[2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru)
[2]
[http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=83](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=83)

~~~
Cerium
Additionally Neal Stephenson describes vertically extruded nanotech buildings
in "The Diamond Age".

~~~
flanbiscuit
I haven't read a sci-fi/cyberpunk book in a long time, I think I'm going to
pick this up. Been meaning to read more of Stephenson's novels

~~~
dgritsko
One of my favorite authors! Reading The Diamond Age right now as a matter of
fact. Favorite of his is probably Anathem or Seveneves.

~~~
aswanson
All of those have been in my kindle over a year. Need time to read.

~~~
passiveincomelg
Find a hammock in Nicaragua. Worked great for me. :)

------
sampo
Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need.

> Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize
> making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing
> we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we
> decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are
> continuing to choose the interests of those who are rich or who already own
> their homes over the interests of the struggling middle and working classes.

~~~
rb808
If density increases the people who will benefit the most are current
landowners. If you have single family home on a big lot, its value will go up
many times if you can suddenly build an apartment building on it.

~~~
TomVDB
Most current home owners have no interest in selling to a developer or
developing ourselves. We just want to continue live in conditions that were
present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street.

Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an
apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state
level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to improve affordable housing.

~~~
sabarn01
You own your land not the conditions that surround that land.

~~~
TomVDB
That is true, and nobody claimed otherwise.

But I can have the _desire_ for the conditions to stay the same.

~~~
dublinben
We have a way for you to express that desire. You can buy the surrounding
properties and keep them exactly the same.

See Zuckerberg's purchases in Palo Alto for example.

~~~
qihqi
Or you can vote municipalities that best aligns with what you desire.

------
weeksie
Just a reminder that the growth rates for SF, SV, Seattle, Portland are all
pretty puny compared to the growth rates of, e.g. Detroit at its peak. Hell
they're not even that crazy compared to growth rates those cities have handled
before.

People just aren't interested in any perceived threat to their property values
so they're strangling growth based on an entitlement mindset. No, sirs and
ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a _right_.

~~~
marcell
> No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a right

Doesn't increased density help property values? If I can build a high rise on
your 1 acre plot of land, its value should go up.

~~~
weeksie
Depends! Increased density should drive up the price of land.

However, if you are in a neighborhood of single family homes and a huge multi
family building is constructed on your block, your home price will go down
because there will be enough supply to meet demand, taking pressure off the
single family homes.

If you are in an already dense city and regulations are relaxed so that more
high rises can be built in more neighborhoods, the price of your condo all
else being equal will be lower because there will be more supply. The land
price may well go up but your individual apartment would likely be worth less.

~~~
CountSessine
_a huge multi family building is constructed on your block_

which is why NIMBYs should at least be in favor of gentle density - duplexes
and triplexes, small walk-ups, etc. But they fight those like the end-of-days
too.

------
pascalxus
I know we'd all love to fix the bay area housing problem here. The most
obvious answer is to increase the supply. But, fixing the zoning laws and
allowing developers to build isn't the only thing that's standing in the way.
The problems are too numerous to fix: NIMBYs sueing developers, CEQA,
Proposition 13, AND don't forget about the underlying labor cost (all our
middle class people's aren't going to come back, after having been forced
out). The bay area has forever lost it's ability to produce cost effective
housing. One article I read, said that San Jose rents would have to increase
another 25% to 4.75$ per sq foot, just to allow developers to break even on
high rise construction! This points to some serious fundamental problem with
our economy here in the bay area and it's not going to fixed with just one or
two adjustments to the above reasons. We've kindof Venezuela'd our bay area
economy here.

Edit: here is the link (4.25 - 4.75$/sq foot to build in San jose!):
[https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/27/construction-costs-
co...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/27/construction-costs-could-hamper-
bay-area-residential-towers/)

By all means, let's work to fix the problem. But, for anyone who wants to get
cost effective housing in the next 30 years: I'm sorry to say it, its time to
bail out. We need to start lobbying software companies to get the heck out of
the bay area and CA in general.

Let's get Elon musk to build one of those hyperTubes to some city like Austin,
Denver, Albuquerkee, or madison, WI. maybe some of us could commute in for 4
days a week or something.

~~~
wahern
High-rise construction is expensive, but high-rises aren't necessary for
density. Wood-built low- and mid-rise is far more cost efficient, especially
when you don't require 1-2 parking spaces per unit.

The reason why we get too many high-rises and too few low-rises is because of
regulatory burden. In particular, the long, drawn-out, and capricious manner
in which the laws are administered and challenged. In that kind of environment
high-rises become more common simply because of the economy of scale--a high-
rise developer has resources and the wherewithal to see the project through
where developers of smaller developments do not.

The most important thing for commerce and especially real estate development
is consistency and predictability. Proposition 13 and the cost of labor can be
dealt because they're known quantities. Zoning boards and CEQA[1] are the real
killers as the unpredictability compounds, many fold, the nominal regulatory
burden.

[1] Compare NEQA to CEQA. The Federal NEQA law isn't much of an impediment to
development anymore because an efficient ecosystem has developed--specialized
assessment agencies that do the work quickly and cheaply, and relatively
efficient administration of the regulatory regime. The cost of a NEQA impact
statement is a known quantity and is easily budgeted. By contrast, under CEQA
it's much easier for NIMBYs to challenge impact statements, which means the
time and budget required for getting over the CEQA hurdle can be indefinite.

~~~
closeparen
>Wood-built low- and mid-rise is far more cost efficient

And also tends to be drastically worse build quality and sound isolation.
Given a mid-rise or a high-rise built in the same year, you definitely want to
live in the high-rise, all else being equal.

Higher quality multi-family buildings that middle-class people could see
themselves living in would go a long way towards changing public opinion.
Unfortunately, our multifamily housing stock is bifurcated between shoddily
built crap for the poor, and ultra-luxury high-rises for oligarchical
investors. If people don't want to live in a building themselves, it's harder
to accept its externalities for the benefit of others. Most people _do_ live
in apartments as students and young adults, and they'd never go back.

------
khazhoux
Or Google, Apple, Facebook could grow the next 200,000 jobs somewhere else?

Everyone talks about housing affordability and NIMBYs and we get into class
warfare and home-appreciation snobbery, but the simple thing I can't
understand is how will the area's transportation infrastructure scale up?
There's no credible solution.

~~~
asdsa5325
This. If Silicon Valley is full, then don't move there! Live somewhere else,
your wallet and your sanity will thank you!

~~~
s73v3r_
Unfortunately, until the big guys and the startup scene decide to move
elsewhere, or at least spread out beyond the Bay Area, that's not very
practical advice. I recently had a couple interviews with Google, and
basically, for the positions they wanted me for, I would be required to move
to Mountain View. So your advice in my situation would boil down to "Don't
work for Google."

~~~
asdsa5325
Google has many offices in other states

~~~
s73v3r_
They do. And I literally live around the corner from one. But the position
they're looking at me for would still require me to move to Mountain View.

------
alexhutcheson
The headline could also be re-stated as "To solve affordability crisis, Bay
Area housing stock must grow 2% per year".

Using a long time period will give you large headline numbers.

------
m0llusk
What is often missing from this discussion is financialization of housing
markets. As long as housing units are chips for a game among banks and wealthy
patrons it is not clear we will be able to build enough homes to satiate
artificially inflated demand.

~~~
rubicon33
This. This. This. This. This.

Absent from the vast majority of these threads is the critical component in
this "crisis":

Property can be purchased and held onto for purely speculative purposes,
thereby draining the inventory pool, and raising the cost of housing for
residents of the city.

This has been happening in the bay area for a very long time. Wealthy Chinese
investors who do not LIVE in the bay area, have purchased an incredible amount
of inventory over the last decade and it has remained vacant / unused.

Of course we need more building, that's obvious. But what we also need is to
immediately disallow the purchase of land by foreign entities that is not used
for habitation. I have yet to hear a constructive argument for why that
shouldn't be banned at a constitutional level. Housing may not be a "right"
per se, but it's certainly in the communities best interest to use available
housing for that communities interest, not the interest of wealthy foreign
investors.

~~~
boreas
You need to provide statistics for extraordinary claims about housing being
purchased by foreign investors and not used. Common sense says it should be a
very marginal phenomenon. After all, renting out property should almost always
be worth it with the high housing prices in the area.

~~~
coccinelle
I’ve been wondering about that when it comes to rent-controlled places like
SF. It seems « tenant occupied » properties sell for less than equivalent
empty places. Then is it worth it to let a tenant in who might just drive down
the price of the place if you decide to sell a couple of years later?

------
redthrowaway
What is far more likely is that people will simply leave the Bay Area, and
demand will fall. It's far easier to create tech clusters in other cities than
it is to convince a bunch of NIMBY boomers that other people need places to
live, too.

~~~
s73v3r_
"It's far easier to create tech clusters in other cities"

Wouldn't it have been done by now if that were the case? Yet SF is still the
Mecca for the tech and startup scenes.

~~~
redthrowaway
Network effects are powerful. But beyond the original secondary tech centres
of Seattle, Boston, and NYC, there are now thriving tech scenes in all sorts
of smaller markets--Portland, Denver, Austin, etc.

It's easy to see every major tech company having a base in SFBA for the
foreseeable future, but it's also easy to see being a working programmer
living in one of those smaller markets and actually being a homeowner being a
much bigger thing going forward.

~~~
s73v3r_
Given how hostile most of those companies have been to remote work, I'm not
too optimistic. I hope to be wrong, though.

And while those other cities do have some tech scene, it's still nowhere near
that of SV, and that's still the first choice of most developers.

------
saosebastiao
The entire current population of the bay area (~9M) would fit within 165 of
the 10,000 square miles of the CSA, if built at Parisian densities. That is
less than 2% of the land.

This is what boggles my mind: despite such a minimal land requirement, nobody
in the entire fucking region will budge. Put it somewhere else, they say. It
has become a game of musical chairs where nobody gets up for the next round.

State intervention is the only thing that will solve this problem.

~~~
shifter
Or, as the calculus on living in the Bay Area shifts [0], top tier talent
starts to direct itself elsewhere. This stems growth in the Bay Area since
founding successful companies in lower cost areas will be possible, housing
investment slows as a result of that, and the market naturally cools down a
bit [1].

[0] Don't fool yourself into thinking that only people without the income or
capital to live well in the Bay Area would leave it. There are intangibles
(culture, traffic, distance to skiing, etc.) that, for _some_ people, are non-
optimal. For others, it's perfect. That's okay, humans are a varied lot (and
it's a good thing).

[1] Nothing major, it will remain expensive due to geography and
talent/creativity/capital density.

~~~
jdtang13
It's not really about tech companies, although the tech companies don't help.
Contemporary conversation about Bay Area housing always makes it sound like
some impossible dream that is hampered by hordes of techies. It seems to me
that most of those concerns are red herrings; it's actually about zoning,
local opposition, and government incompetence. The other HN comment ITT
summarizes it pretty well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970532)

------
njarboe
An amazing amount of land opened up in the Bay Area that could have been used
for housing developement with the closing of many military bases (The
Presidio, Treasure Island, Alameda Naval station, Concord Naval Base, Hunters
Point) and the closing of salt production in the South Bay. While a few of
these areas are finally seeing some construction[1] 20 years later, the
density is often low and the amount of acres set aside for green space seems
excessive to me. Treasure Island, for instance, is 465 acres with 300 of those
acres as parks. Cargill handed over 15,000 acres of salt ponds to state and
federal agencies for wetland restoration in 2002. No housing planned. For
comparison all of San Francisco is 30,000 acres.

[1][https://www.bisnow.com/san-francisco/news/construction-
devel...](https://www.bisnow.com/san-francisco/news/construction-
development/these-5-decommissioned-military-bases-are-the-bay-areas-biggest-
development-opportunities-74375)

~~~
cjensen
Salt ponds being turned into natural wetland is a HUGE win for the
environment, particularly water quality and fisheries. Being entirely mud,
they are literally the worst place to build in an earthquake-prone region.

"Affordability" just means a balance between jobs (which produce people
needing housing) and the supply of houses. There are TWO ways of fixing supply
and demand problems like that. It is insane that the city of Cupertino has
allowed the construction of offices for 26K jobs but only has housing for 58K
people. It is insane that Mountain View has allowed the construction of
offices for 30K jobs but only provided places for 77K people to live. Those
two cities and others collect all the sweet revenue and burden the rest of the
Bay Area with costs of housing and commuting.

Rather than insisting that cities must build housing, we should insist they
balance jobs and homes. I'm angry that my home town, Fremont, had a plan to
reserve space for both homes and jobs, but is forced by the state to accept
home construction and we have no money to build the schools needed to
accommodate the new population.

~~~
khuey
Fremont's jobs/housing ratio is 1.44 which is larger than the regional
average.

------
CodeWriter23
Someone who recognizes the opportunity to develop tech centers between the
coasts is going to cash in big. Zappos and Tesla seem to have had their
fingers on that pulse by settling in the Reno/Sparks area.

~~~
s73v3r_
For the past 20 years or so, every state has tried doing just that. Very few
have been anywhere near successful, and those that have end up with housing
problems similar to (maybe not as severe as) SV.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Difference being, Silicon Valley was not entirely booked up until recently.

------
partycoder
\- World population goes up

\- Global amount of wealthy people goes up

\- Demand for a spot in a city goes up

So if you extrapolate this 100 years, you will end up in a situation where
even the worst cities of 2018 will be unaffordable for the regular person.

~~~
cwkoss
This reminds me of the joke, "If our daughter keeps growing at this rate,
she'll be 12 feet tall by age 18"

~~~
partycoder
Sounds dumb but consider the evolution of world population over time:

\- 1950: 2.5 billion

\- 2000: 6 billion

\- 2018: 7.6 billion

~~~
cwkoss
I don't mean to be dismissive of your general sentiment, I think we agree - I
just think your example is a bit superlative.

I think when viewing exponential trends we need to consider the maximum
'carrying capacity' \- typically when something is growing exponentially there
is some latent 'available energy' that is being consumed to fuel the growth.
Once consumption reaches parity with that energy production - growth may
continue for a bit longer as 'excess reserves' are drained, but a trend
reversal becomes inevitable.

> even the worst cities of 2018 will be unaffordable for the regular person.

In your city example, I'd argue that once a city is too expensive for any
'regular' person it will create a negative feedback loop: if unable to source
enough labor to satisfy the service demands of the wealthy residents, those
residents will begin leaving, reducing housing prices until the problem is at
least somewhat mitigated.

~~~
partycoder
Except that in 2118 those wealthy residents may not need less wealthy
residents because of automation.

~~~
cwkoss
Interesting point. I'm skeptical, but certainly plausible.

------
eecsninja
Let's not forget this article from a month ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501)

The great irony is that there are plenty of people in the SF bay area who
think Tokyo is more expensive than SF just like it was decades ago, even
though it's not true anymore.

~~~
irq11
Tokyo is still very expensive relative to Japanese incomes. Is it more
expensive than SF on an adjusted basis? Hard to say, but it’s not as clear as
you’re asserting.

If anything, magacities like Tokyo and London show us that you can build like
crazy, and still end up a very expensive place to live.

~~~
nerfhammer
here's a thorough cost comparison breakdown: [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-
living/in/Tokyo](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Tokyo)

rent in particular is drastically less expensive

~~~
irq11
Again: _you can’t just compare rent values without adjusting for income._
Japanese people aren’t earning San Francisco salaries.

The number you want there is the the one that says Tokyo is 10% cheaper than
NYC. That’s the adjusted number.

Say what you will about rent, but “10% cheaper than New York” is nobody’s
definition of cheap.

~~~
nerfhammer
the tool has all that in it

according to it, salaries in SF are ~66% higher than Tokyo and rents are ~300%
higher.

------
floatingatoll
How much of San Francisco’s billion dollars of debt would be mitigated by tax
revenue associated with a 50% increase in taxable population? Would the tax
revenue over 20 years make up for the infrastructure buildout costs and the
legal costs of fighting NIMBY folks to increase density?

------
lazyjones
It's the same all over the world. Politicians seem to have too close ties with
developers and real estate investors and they put unhealthy zoning laws in
effect to drive prices into absurd regions and boost tax income as well.
People should contact their representatives and ask them to change this. It
worked in Span (admittedly, they overdid it), it would work anywhere.

Unfortunately, there's no easy workaround for the situation. Perhaps an "Uber
for commuters" would work, together with some sort of coordinated
purchase/rent of affordable housing in areas ~1 hour commute from those
chokepoints? (i.e. get 100 people to move to a small village together, then
fill 2 busses every day with commuters to SF).

~~~
TomVDB
Are you sure that the zoning laws are driven by developers and real estate
investors?

In most Bay Area cities, they are the wishes of the residents who do not want
more development.

My neighborhood in Sunnyvale was recently rezoned to be single story only and
that process is entirely driven by the residents, not the politicians. It was
the 25th neighborhood in Sunnyvale to do so, and it cost around $200 per
resident to file an application. No a single resident was against it.

~~~
rmk
Palo Alto has a 50-ft building height limit. The height of greed, that is!

~~~
TomVDB
50 ft is plenty, 3 stories, and has little to do with greed.

The new zoning rules in our neighborhood limit height to 17 ft.

And greed wasn't the driving factor either.

People are much more concerned about the new neighbor tearing down the single
story house next door and building an ugly two story McMansion from which you
can look straight down in their garden/pool.

------
trumped
It sounds like a small problem if all tech companies want to stay in a small
geographical area and if they work with each other to resolve it... They
should look at what China is doing if they need ideas.

------
089723645897236
Hey maybe some other parts of the world need populating too. This obsession
with location location location is quaint to me in the age of telecom. Maybe
the Bay Area is just Done. It'll turn into every other Rich Person Town and
the people who need to get real s __* done will go somewhere else.

Legacy industry is no excuse to keep cramming more people onto a tiny
peninsula in California. It sucks for people in the middle and lower involved
right now but honestly I encourage them to move at all costs.

The writing is on the wall.

------
Clubber
I would think this could be solved by allowing remote work when viable, and
making sure there is plenty of internet in rural areas. I would love to live
on 5-500 acres somewhere and work on the porch. There's plenty of land to go
around; we're just stuck in the 20th century way of thinking about work in a
digital age. Strange.

------
austincheney
If 60,000 people continue to move from there to Texas every year then 20 years
from now when the area has lost over a million residents the housing prices
might well flatten organically. This madness is causing housing prices to
climb in Texas though.

~~~
tabtab
Tell you what, we'll send all the jerks to TX and keep the non-jerks ;-)

~~~
downrightmike
Then there wouldn't be anyone left.

~~~
justherefortart
But I was told Austin is the SF of Texas?!!?!

I used to laugh my ass off at ignorant Californians that would say that. It's
still fucking Texas.

~~~
seabrookmx
It's not a _terrible_ analogy though. I haven't been to all the major US
cities but I got a bit of a Portland vibe from Austin. It's definitely not
what I expected from my first time in Texas (I'm a West Coast Canadian).

~~~
tabtab
Let's not get into the usual culture wars here. My comment was meant as a
joke. My apologies if it offended anyone. Live and let live.

------
daveguy
Or worded another way: If Bay Area Housing grows slightly more than 2% per
year the affordability crisis will be solved within 20 years. ( 1.5 __(1 /20)
~ 1.0205 )

------
coding123
And the freeways can support this how?

~~~
epistasis
We really need to stop assuming that people are going to make heavy freeway
use, and permit more scalable transit.

Run BART the short way between SF and SJ, build _many_ clusters of high
density along heavy transit routes. Let the current freeway dependent
population continue to use them, but build housing so that people can get to
jobs without using single-occupancy passenger cars.

~~~
hedora
They need to assume people will use transit and also roads, and increase the
capacty of both. The capacity of the bay area road network has been
systematically decreased over the last ten years, even as the population has
grown.

Also, compared to most other places, traffic laws out here are ridiculously
inefficient. For example, light cycles that include a “yield on left turn”
step and then skip the left arrow if the lane has cleared are incredibly rare.
Also, instead of “left lane fast, right lane slow”, the law is “use whatever
lane you’re comfortable in”.

Simply ripping out the “improvements” made in the last decade and bringing
traffic laws in line with the rest of the US would increase road capacity by
double digit percentages.

(The lack of progress on public transit is also embarrassing, especially given
the tax and income levels around here)

~~~
epistasis
I agree, and my phrasing was imprecise; we _do_ need to assume that roads will
be used to some degree, but we also need to allow for types of living that
don't use freeways, or even perhaps allow living without a car.

Right now local regulations require large amounts of parking, which means
large amounts of the most valuable space devoted just to cars, and forcing
people to pay for the car. If you're forced to pay an additional 10% in rent
to cover the space used for parking, then you're probably going to get a car.

If people were allowed to make the decision to not have cars and reap the
financial benefits, we'd see a bigger shift.

As it is, car use is regulated into the way that we build things.

------
chroem-
The housing crisis is fundamentally a transportation problem. The bay area has
intentionally made it impractical to own a car, so everyone is forced seek
housing within walking distance of a limited number of public transit lines.
The "war on sprawl" and lack of affordable housing are two sides of the same
coin.

~~~
chrischen
Forcing people to live near transit is a good thing. The problem is thebat are
doesn’t allow building dense hosuing near transit lines (common sense!) and so
very few people can actually let people live near transit.

~~~
chrischen
*the Bay Area not "thebat"

------
acover
Are there studies that explain the cause of high house prices and what can be
done?

~~~
s73v3r_
Lots of people want to be there, and not enough housing is being built for
them all.

It doesn't help that a lot of the people moving there, are doing so because of
high tech job salaries, meaning they're more able to absorb the high rent
costs.

------
notadoc
Build up, it's the only solution.

------
joeblow9999
Good luck with that

~~~
epistasis
I think it's becoming increasingly apparent that the Bay Area needs a regional
government that can supercede tiny municipalities. Wise governance is
impossible with lots of small outposts preventing sensible planning for the
region, because they are only interested in advancing short-term interests of
a small number of people. Democracy does not function well in that
environment.

If the Bay Area doesn't step up to do that, it's likely that the State of
California will have to start implementing policies, and that's not going to
be as good as a regional government and planning.

~~~
conanbatt
The housing situation is a California wide problem. The bigger government is
the first one messing up housing.

~~~
epistasis
I agree that it's a California wide problem, though I think the cause is
slightly different in different parts of the state. What do you mean by:

> The bigger government is the first one messing up housing.

Do you mean that State policies are the ones messing up housing? I think that
Prop 13 and CEQA get named sometimes for stopping housing development, but a
far bigger hurdle are the local zoning policies, and the veto power of local
communities.

Are you suggesting something like a state-wide policy of by-right development
for plans that meet local code and zoning regulations? That would definitely
help reduce building costs, but it won't be enough to allow the amount of
housing that is suggested in the original article.

~~~
kyledrake
Seconded opinion for strong regional government with zoning control. If the
property owner fiefdoms aren't going to address the problem, it's time to take
solving that problem away from them.

To give an example of how bad this is, the city of Atherton has sued Caltrain
7 times over the electrification project, the latest one related to (wait for
it..) the use of 5 45 foot poles instead of 10 35 foot ones.
[https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2018/03/01/caltrain-and-
ath...](https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2018/03/01/caltrain-and-atherton-
cant-reach-a-deal-on-electrification-poles)

And this despite the fact it comprises less than a mile of the track and
doesn't even stop at the Atherton station during weekdays.

How can anyone expect this problem to get any better without major changes to
zoning control and major revisions to the property tax/rent subsidies? I'm not
holding my breath, and neither are all the other people that are starting to
think about leaving.

~~~
makomk
Wait, the fact that local residents can't even use the big ugly mass transit
line going through their neighbourhood is meant to make them somehow more
sympathetic to it?

~~~
kyledrake
As I understand it, there is discussion to start using the station again after
they finish electrification, which of course assumes the town doesn't try to
stop that somehow. It will also reduce air (and probably noise) pollution to
nearby properties, because the trains will no longer be running huge motors
spewing massive amounts of diesel exhaust while flying through the town.

None of that matters. Atherton is the wealthiest zip code in the country, and
is comprised completely of high-end houses and mansions owned by the super
rich, most of whom couldn't care less about mass transit or regional growth
issues. They've got theirs, the hell with everybody else. Their strategy for
keeping it this way is to fight all change, even if it's mutually beneficial.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
If this is true then I think the Bay will need to let go of it's ideas towards
rezoning. Deregulatory zoning adjustments just won't be able to stimulate this
level of building.

Why not just build out and do greenfield development but put some mandatory
density requirements in place for new building?

~~~
mywittyname
I think it's time for eminent domain. Local landowners are using their wealth
and political influence to deprive others of shelter for personal profit.

The federal government forcing the sale of land for high-density development
would probably be enough to spook landowners into seeing reason.

~~~
refurb
That makes no sense at all. It's gov't policies that created the high prices.
So the gov't then turns around and says "we're taking your property because
the price is too high"?

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rb808
Because big dense cities like NY are affordable?

~~~
manacit
Manhattan (and parts of Brooklyn) != NY. I wouldn't call it "cheap", but there
are plenty of places in NYC where one can rent a bedroom for under $1,000 a
month easily (and maybe closer to $500/m in some places). That, coupled with
not having a car, actually makes quality of life very good if you're someone
who seeks out city living.

I know plenty of people that make $30k-$40k/y in NYC and can afford to live in
Bushwick with a few roommates and live nice lives. Single train commute into
Manhattan, plenty of things to do that don't cost a lot of money, no need to
worry about a car, etc.

Edit: a lot of people are replying that having roommates isn't tenable for $x
or long-term. I agree, and I don't think we disagree.

Solving a housing affordability problem for people making $15/h starting their
careers is part of the overall picture - housing available for people at every
income level. An experienced worker with a family won't be looking to live in
a 3br apartment with two roommates, but that same 3br apartment that was
affordable can also house a family of 4 with two wage-earning parents.

NYC is _filled_ with people in all sorts of jobs who, because there is housing
stock available in many levels, can afford to live alone, with a family in an
apartment in Queens, or in a house in NJ.

It's not panacea - transit is not as reliable as I wish it was, goods are
expensive, but it works for a lot of people

~~~
badpun
> live with (...) a few roommates and live nice lives

Those two together don't compute for most people. I'd say only a minority of
people are fine with living permanently in a dorm-like environment.
Historically, having to share a house/flat with strangers has always been a
sign of poverty.

------
ssalka
inb4 The Seasteading Institute builds "New San Francisco" off the coast

