
SF YIMBY Platform - jseliger
http://www.sfyimby.org/platform/
======
karma_vaccum123
Governor Brown is trying to move legislation that would allow developments
that meet a minimum below-market allocation to bypass local approval
completely.

If this becomes law, NIMBYs will become extinct quickly as developers will
just bite the bullet and include a lower-cost component to get fast-track
approval to build directly from the State. And they'll get it.

Personally I feel that we are really getting close to killing the golden
goose. At some point, companies will leave or grow large satellite offices
elsewhere if housing becomes unattainable even to well-paid employees. We need
to _inform_ change, not fight it.

~~~
100k
I support this change, but it applies to the zoning that exists. If it passes,
NIMBY efforts will shift to down zoning. Down zoning has already happened in
many cities (including San Francisco), but it could be taken further.

~~~
raldi
_> If it passes, NIMBY efforts will shift to down zoning._

For once, CEQA would actually _protect_ the environment: Nowadays, downzoning
requires an impact study. There's no way any credible study could conclude
that promoting sprawl is good for the planet.

~~~
jcranmer
Unfortunately, environmental review is often a vehicle for ensuring that
people get as many chances to complain and obstruct as possible, even if the
environmental impacts are minimal. An example of absurd objections in this
vein can be found in the Virginia Avenue Tunnel replacement project, where
residents objected because:

a) It would lower their home values (note that the railroad tunnel predates
the houses by a few decades, and the railroad has talked about doing this
project for 2 decades)

b) Extra train traffic means more pollution. Seems reasonable, until you
realize that the tunnel is almost literally in the shadow (it's on the south
side, not north, so not quite literally) of an interstate. Guess who's
responsible for most of the air pollution.

c) The project calls for railroad to temporarily run in a exposed trench while
building the tunnel. Residents are worried about what would happen if an oil
tanker car caught fire. Unfortunately, a glance at the map indicates that this
is not on the routes between oil supply centers and oil demand centers, and,
as Baltimore found out (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Street_Tunnel_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Street_Tunnel_fire)
), fires in tunnels are much worse than fires in the open air.

~~~
dcposch
> Unfortunately, environmental review is often a vehicle for ensuring that
> people get as many chances to complain and obstruct as possible, even if the
> environmental impacts are minimal

Yes, but this time instead of an _individual development_ being up for CEQA
obstruction (which favors NIMBYs), _proposed rezoning_ would be subject to
environmental review. This means pro-growth people could use the NIMBYs' own
favorite tool against them, preventing down zoning. Poetic justice.

------
smallnamespace
The more supply is restricted, the higher property prices rise.

The higher property prices are, the more homeowners will do to protect their
economic interests by voting to restrict supply.

It's a vicious cycle.

> therefore public policy should be based on viewing homes as places to live,
> not as investments.

This sounds all well and good, but can you really expect people to support
diluting their >$1mm property investment?

~~~
derefr
Naive question: how much would it distort the market if prices were allowed to
rise on _undeveloped_ land, but there was a sort of "land-value control"
equivalent to rent-control on _developed_ land, preventing its value from
rising? (Maybe implemented in terms of a tax at time-of-sale that takes away
however much profit was made due to property-price inflation and just hands it
to the city instead.)

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Maybe implemented in terms of a tax at time-of-sale that takes away however
> much profit was made due to property-price inflation and just hands it to
> the city instead.

Apart from being unjust, that approach would completely break the market and
put people out on the street. You buy a house for $200k; its value increases
to $400k; you sell it, and the city takes $200k, leaving you with $200k. You
now cannot afford any of the houses currently for sale for $400k, even though
the additional $200k you don't have would just go to the city, and the seller
just gets the $200k you actually have.

Typical price controls affect both sides of the transaction, so the house
value can't increase, or doesn't increase faster than a certain limit. That at
least doesn't directly prevent people from selling one house and buying
another comparable house.

To answer your original question, though: to what extent do the areas in most
dire need of housing have any undeveloped land? Those areas don't have much
_undeveloped_ land; they have _underdeveloped_ land. If you had price controls
on undeveloped land but not on developed land, at some point you'd end up with
a price inversion where a given property with a house on it has less value
than the same property without the house. At which point someone wanting to
extract the increased value could demolish the house and then sell the land at
market value.

~~~
derefr
> You now cannot afford any of the houses currently for sale for $400k

Why would the houses continue to be for sale for $400k? I can't see why people
would bother to charge any more than the price they bought the house for, once
they realized that the government would pocket any profit. If selling for
either $400k or $200k gives you either way $200k, it's in your interest as a
seller to sell for the lesser amount, because you get more buyers more quickly
that way.

> At which point someone wanting to extract the increased value could demolish
> the house and then sell the land at market value.

That was actually partly the point! It incentivizes property-management
companies to try to lobby to remove the NIMBY barriers in the way of tearing
down old buildings.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Why would the houses continue to be for sale for $400k? I can't see why
> people would bother to charge any more than the price they bought the house
> for, once they realized that the government would pocket any profit. If
> selling for $400k or $200k just gives you $200k, it's in your interest as a
> seller to sell for $200k.

That sounds like a plausible (but not certain) outcome, assuming a 100% tax
with no way around it. I wouldn't underestimate creative (legal) solutions,
though. A structure like this creates major incentives for under-the-table
sales, fees, or anything that doesn't qualify as "part of the sale price". For
instance, it would create an incentive for "buyer pays" transactions, where
the buyer directly pays for all associated services involved with a sale
without paying the seller directly, including those costs typically paid by
the seller or split between the two.

> That was actually partly the point! It incentivizes property-management
> companies to try to lobby to remove the NIMBY barriers in the way of tearing
> down old buildings.

Interesting notion. What stops them from tearing down those old buildings
today, though? It seems like the bigger problem is that they can't build _new_
buildings that aren't just as sparse and under-developed as the old.

~~~
smallnamespace
As an side note, this is almost the same as proposing price controls for the
entire real estate market, since the price of land and housing are closely
linked (at least in SF).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls)

Let's say we implement full controls tomorrow in SF, where _all_ real estate
appreciation is capped at, say, inflation.

As demand for housing continues to grow, you'll find that the government-
mandated capped price will rapidly diverge from what the free market price is,
e.g. someone is willing to pay $1mm for a house but it can only be sold for
$600,000.

Since the seller is essentially being forced to take a bath, property owners
will simply not sell. The market becomes extremely illiquid and everyone
loses.

The key to understanding the seller's behavior, by the way, is because under
price controls the market becomes extremely asymmetric. An excess of demand
means that every potential seller has MANY potential buyers who are all
willing to pay the asking price, so buying becomes a huge lottery. So if you
own a property and you sell, there's very little chance you can change your
mind later on and buy a different property, whereas in a normal market you
just pay the normal transaction fees.

~~~
derefr
To go fully into la-la land here: what if, after imposing the price controls,
you also imposed a slow-start exponential-growth land-value tax based on how
long you've held a given piece of real estate—which would start sooner the
higher-aggregate-worth of property you owned—such that it was then higher-ROI
for property-management companies to flip properties before the tax started
applying, but not generally higher-ROI for individual homeowners to flip their
homes except perhaps after ~20 years?

(In other words: a roundabout mechanism to do to "land under your mattress"
what inflation does to "cash under your mattress.")

~~~
smallnamespace
> you also imposed a slow-start exponential-growth land-value tax based on how
> long you've held a given piece of real estate

Since the growth is exponential, if the pain becomes too great after N years,
then everyone is forced to sell after N years. Looks suspiciously like a
fixed-term lease, no?

So instead of price controls on real estate, now we've gotten rid of real
estate altogether and just have price controls on rental rates.

This is one reason why mixing a command economy with markets is tricky, btw.
Once you start down the rabbit hole of using coercion instead of price signals
to get people to do things, you'll find you need to use more and more coercion
(whether strange taxes or more draconian measures) to make things work.

~~~
derefr
I do agree with everything you're saying here. It just seems to me that
"people holding onto things that are serving them no use, making a market
illiquid" is exactly the sort of thing a government would want to
disincentivize, and taxes are how governments disincentivize things.
(Sometimes without thinking about that consequence, like with income tax, but
I digress.)

The interesting thing here, to me, is that the government wouldn't want to
control allocation as in a command economy; instead, they merely want to
punish people for _making the market inefficient_. They want the market to
clear, so that they don't _have_ to figure out how to centrally allocate
anything. We already have a lot of government regulations with this explicit
goal. I'd be shocked if we couldn't work one out for real estate.

~~~
smallnamespace
I think it's wise to distinguish between _efficiency_ and _fairness_.

The SF real estate market right now is quite efficient; houses and condos sell
quickly at the going market rate, but you might find the effect on the
allocation of housing to be very unfair in that some people have much easier
access to housing than others.

Price controls favor fairness over efficiency; e.g. selling bread below market
price means everyone waits in line, which is by definition inefficient. It is
_fair_ , however, in that both rich and poor wait equally.

> They want the market to clear

That's what I mean by compulsion begetting compulsion -- the market clears
just fine _right now_ , but price and/or rent controls will probably make it
not clear, at which point you need to add other taxes to force it to clear
again.

------
raldi
If you live in the Bay Area and you'd like to get a voter guide emailed to you
right before the election detailing which candidates and propositions are best
for increasing the housing supply, you can sign up here:
[http://www.sfbarf.org/pages/vote.html](http://www.sfbarf.org/pages/vote.html)

~~~
erehweb
Wary of non-https page.

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eridius
Why does pressing Escape on this page cause it to switch to a Squarespace
login page?

~~~
RyJones
It's a feature[0] of Squarespace

[0] [https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-
us/articles/205815858-...](https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-
us/articles/205815858-Disabling-the-Escape-key-login)

~~~
eridius
Wow, that's kinda stupid. Aren't there better ways to make login available but
out of the way?

~~~
RyJones
I only know about it because some podcast I was listening to included a rant
on the topic.

------
rspeer
Is this the same group that was going to call themselves BARF (Bay Area
Renters' Federation)? Seems good. This is probably a better name and more
generalizable to all the other cities that need it.

~~~
raldi
SF YIMBY is an umbrella group that includes BARF and several other similar
organizations from around the Bay Area.

~~~
etjossem
Yep! [http://www.sfyimby.org/members/](http://www.sfyimby.org/members/)

------
hiphipjorge
Any insights into what the YIMBY position is on rent-control? They don't even
mention it in their platform, which seems like a big omission (and obviously
not accidental).

While I fully support this movement, I do believe rent control has been an
effective way of slowing down gentrification and forcing residents out of the
area (although there are exceptions to this, of course). As an engineer who
should not have rent control but still does I do recognize the system does
have its limitations.

------
juyvova
this is such an important subject and I'm happy it's finally getting attention
in larger tech community. while housing is a regional issue, it also all
starts at home with each city committing to housing policy changes. in Palo
Alto Adrian Fine is leading that change - he works for nextdoor.com, he was
born and raised in Palo Alto, he is a young, urban planner, govtechy and
cyclist. let's start paying attention and start small - if you live in Palo
Alto or know someone who does - check out www.votefine.com and support him any
way. housing is a social equality issue

------
Rapzid
I wonder how many new houses would need to be built to reduce prices to what I
would consider affordable.

I wonder why developers would want to sell houses at that rate when new
townhomes in Dublin are going for 700k and your looking at 1m+ for a new home.

I wonder how people with high home values, especially those who bought in
high, will feel about losing so much of their home's value.

I suspect homes in SF won't become "affordable" again until another economic
crash of some sort.

~~~
pessimizer
Prices won't lower at all. This is a movement by large SF landowners to raise
the worth of the land they already own, using credulous tech kids as patsies.
They will use new units as tax writeoffs and collateral for loans to scarf up
land in gentrifying neighborhoods in other cities and other countries, so
they'd rather let them sit vacant than let rents or prices drop by a penny.

This is the same as when pharmaceutical companies set up and fund patient
advocacy organizations.

~~~
Rapzid
I'm not sure I'm that much of a conspiracy theorist, but I definitely don't
buy what's being sold; making housing affordable. Affordable to me doesn't
mean you can physically locate yourself in SF, it means you can own a home
while growing your wealth and saving for retirement. The old wisdom was 1/3
your take home for housing, max.

If people really want to talk about making housing affordable lets here what
affordable means to them and how many new homes at what price would be
required to get us there. Yes, I KNOW if you build enough homes prices will
drop. Tell me what the target is and how many homes are enough. Otherwise,
yeah, it smells like people with some sorta ulterior motive selling snake oil.

------
muzz
The largest distortion to the housing market in California is Prop 13, and its
effect is statewide not just confined to SF. This is a large reason why
escaping SF's rules by going to bordering/nearby cities doesn't result in
significantly lower housing costs.

More new supply is great, but doubt it would be enough to significantly offset
the much larger effect of Prop 13.

------
CalRobert
Remember that a lot of the issue isn't zoning, it's parking minimums. Forcing
every studio apartment to have at least two parking spots is an effective
(albeit horrific) way to force low density.

~~~
muzz
Your example is theoretical, this particular constraint does not appear in San
Francisco. New buildings (even huge ones) are being built with little to no
parking.

~~~
CalRobert
Fair point. I actually was thinking more of the bay as a whole (its own basket
case with regards to getting housing built) than SF, which was an error
considering that the article is focused on SF.

------
gravypod
Saying "more homes", "more zoning control", and "stop treating homes as
investments" are all crazily opposite ideals from my perspective.

These demands are not very well scoped.

~~~
tyre
Not to take a stance one way or the other, but I can provide background on why
(in SF at least) these aren't mutually exclusive.

More homes means either building on new land or adding density to existing
land. There isn't much "new" land available in SF, but knocking down existing
buildings is still very risky. Even if your proposed development meets every
existing zoning regulation, it can be shot down.

So "more zoning control" here means putting more control in the actual zoning
regulations, as opposed to allowing anyone to try and stop the process via
ballot measure or legal challenge.

Increasing supply (building more or denser housing) will naturally decrease
prices, which is where the investment bit comes in.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> So "more zoning control" here means putting more control in the actual
> zoning regulations, as opposed to allowing anyone to try and stop the
> process via ballot measure or legal challenge.

The phrase "more zoning control" sounds like increasing the amount and
complexity of zoning regulations, rather than, as you suggest, removing
unwritten rules.

~~~
derefr
It sort of does increase the amount and complexity of the (explicit)
regulations, though; it's forcing unwritten rules to be written down. (At
which point we would then have _control_ over keeping or removing them.)

"Make the re-zoning process more predictable" would maybe be a better slogan.

