
California lawmakers have tried for 50 years to fix the state’s housing crisis - jseliger
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-housing-supply/
======
ProfessorLayton
Judging by the endless thread on Nextdoor with people in my East Bay
neighborhood complaining about the “Manhattanization” of their small town, due
to _7_ units being built on an empty lot, the housing crisis is going to get a
lot worse before it gets better.

The “FU, I got mine” attitude is going to choke California. How we got here is
a fascinating story, and recommend reading literature on it.

~~~
afpx
I don’t feel like I’m saying FU at all. My perspective is that I spent over 15
years in a house that I initially took a risk on. I helped build the
neighborhood and community and schools that made it a nice place to live. And,
now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. And,
they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up
what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair?

As I’ve said in the past, No one is addressing the demand side of this issue.
Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are
huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of
industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those
places?

I believe that the bulk of the problem starts with the companies in CA. Wages
clearly aren’t high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy
properties. Raise wages, and some companies will naturally move elsewhere.
Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down.

Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax
records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were
owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first?

I’m not sure how one can disagree with my points. So, I’m probably clueless on
this issue. Please educate me.

(Clearly, I’ve angered the mob. Please don’t bring torches and pitchforks to
my door tonight. I just wanted to get an alternative and unrepresented
viewpoint into the discussion.)

~~~
benchaney
This is the exact FU attitude that GP is describing. There is nothing about
"building the community" that entitles you to prevent other people from living
near you.

They aren't trying to use political power to force you to give up what you've
helped build, they are trying to buy land and build homes. It simply isn't ok
for people to prevent other from living near the so they can turn their
"communities" into elitist social clubs.

Foreign buyers are irrelevant. They wouldn't be getting involved at all if
homes in CA weren't so absurdly overpriced.

~~~
afpx
Wait, did public opinion and political thought change somewhere within the
last two decades such that owning property now doesn’t give one rights over
that property and rights to shared governance of the incorporated area? Sorry
if that comes across as flippant, but it’s a really serious question. I kind
of bought this property so that I could enjoy it for at least 30 years. It’s
not my fault that it’s appreciated so much. What do you want me to do?

~~~
khuey
Buying a property gives you the right to your property. It shouldn't give you
the right to tell other people who live nearby what to do with theirs (i.e. to
tell them not to redevelop it at a higher density if they so choose).

~~~
toomuchtodo
Unfortunately not the case. Ownership of your property gives you an effective
fractional ownership interest in your local radius through zoning and
community governance. No amount of state law is going to change that. You can
keep fighting the issue (and you might have some traction in a decade or two)
or move somewhere more accommodating.

~~~
Y7ZCQtNo39
Yeah, but you don't own that other property. Other people do, and they should
be able to do as they please with it, so long as it meets zoning regulations.

I don't think a concept of a fractional ownership exists because, well, it's
not yours.

If you really want some guarantee that your immediate radius will meet some
sort of standards, it sounds like you'd want to be part of an HOA. I
personally would never want to be part of one (who likes being told what to
do?) but they could help protect property values from that one neighbor who
could be a problem.

~~~
millstone
Neighborhoods and communities are real things. Noise, dogs, trees, etc. don't
respect property lines or zoning regulations. That's the sense in which
fractional ownership exists: when you are my neighbor, you necessarily invade
my space. But good neighbors look out for each other.

"Everyone should maximize the income from their property up to the limit of
law" is a recipe for for having no neighborhoods or communities. It's the
usual fallacy of treating people as fungible commodities.

HOAs are terrible, they are inevitably staffed with busybodies. We can agree
on that!

~~~
rayiner
I think that’s pretense. Homeowners use zoning primarily to protect property
values, not build up communities. The suburb where I live now is incredibly
neighborly. There’s also a bar within walking distance and a little corner
store. Part of the reason is that lots are tiny (about 1/12 of an acre) and
there are few cul de sacs so you actually see people walking their dogs, etc.
Today, parking, lot size, traffic management, and other regulations would make
it illegal to build something like our neighborhood. The minimum lot size is
like 1/4 of an acre in our county! You’re basically obligated to build
suburban hellscapes where you can’t even go to a neighbor’s house without
getting in a car.

------
gdne
The problem isn't housing. The problem is transportation and infrastructure.
People need to work for a living. They also don't want to spend a significant
amount of time commuting to said work. California's transportation, road, and
highway infrastructure is completely and utterly inadequate for the population
in the SF and LA areas. This forces people into living situations that are far
from ideal and creates a fight over housing.

Create multiple ways for people to commute from 30 miles away in 30 minutes
and housing will be much less of a problem with people having many more
options.

Proof: If people could instantly teleport between work and home no matter how
far apart they are, do you really think they would still cram into SF Bay Area
or LA housing? Hell no. Housing is the symptom of poor transportation
infrastructure.

~~~
YokoZar
The next best thing to teleportation is living across the street from work and
having an instant commute. No public transit can compete with that.

If you legalize housing next to work, then you reduce the amount of stress on
the transit systems we already have. It's just plain more efficient.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Well how about, at least in IT and S/W development, we encourage remote
working, rather than promoting childish "agile" work practices where people
come in at 9 am for a "daily standup" and mess around by writing tasks on
sheets of paper like in the last century?

------
BurningFrog
This is from June. The bill from Scott Wiener it talks about (SB 35) passed.
We'll see what effect it has in reality.

[http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-
legislatio...](http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-legislation-
deal-impact-20170915-story.html)

------
true_tuna
“We’ve tried everything except building more housing and we’re all out of
ideas!” I’m baffled how local governments can’t seem to connect the supply
side.

30k new jobs + 8k new housing units = higher housing prices

Or for a more hilarious ratio, look at Mountain View over the last 15 years. I
think for a decade there were effectively zero new units created.

~~~
pascalxus
And what makes this even more tragic, is that this is happening in a highly
educated cities. What's so hard to understand about supply and demand? I
think, deep down, they're fundamentally misguided: democrats and liberals
think that they're somehow fighting against capitalism, and by limiting
developers, they're somehow helping humanity.

Red Cities and red states get it, they generally don't have these problems,
even the extremely high growth ones: like Houston.

~~~
closeparen
If they were serious about fighting capitalism, they might do more to resist
the biggest and most profitable companies in the world expanding their own
real estate portfolios and footprint. Instead they have decided to attack the
employees. Relatively privileged employees, but workers nonetheless.

------
megiddo
It all comes down the regulatory hurdles. Even land prices are the result of
rent-seeking behavior among land-holders due to regulatory impediment.

If California would pass legislation radically limiting regulatory burdens
that municipalities and other legislative bodies could pass, this problem
would disappear within a year or two.

~~~
slg
Simply removing regulation is not enough to fix everything. Downtown Los
Angeles is a prime example of that. It has been seeing a construction boom in
recent year and loosened regulation is probably responsible for part of that
boom. However since there is little regulation on the type of housing that is
being built, the new construction is all coming in at the top of the market.
This is because buying land and building a mid-market apartment building is
not much cheaper than buying the land and building a luxury apartment
building. The end result is that Downtown Los Angeles is full of luxury
apartments with some of the areas highest vacancy rates as landlords are
making more money charging high rents at 80-90% occupancy than they would with
lower rents at 100% occupancy. Meanwhile these new buildings are replacing
much more affordable housing which is pushing lower income renters out of
their homes. Eventually those luxury apartments will trickle down to cheaper
rent at the bottom of the market, but often times that means forcing a low
income family out of their home in a gentrifying neighborhood into a less
desirable area that is often farther from amenities the city offers like
public transit which objectively make their lives worse.

~~~
Decade
About 10% vacancy seems to be a healthy amount. If that were over the entire
city, and not only in new developments, then people would have much more
freedom to move. And then prices would go down.

100% occupancy is bad, because it means the city is not flexible to changing
demands. Fill up that new development 100%, and then the next person who needs
to come in would need to double up, or bid higher and displace somebody.

That is my big problem with the Planning process, trying to manage growth.
It’s slow and brittle to unanticipated changes.

~~~
slg
It isn't over the entire city, it is over a small neighborhood within the
city. The vacancy rate in that neighborhood was at 12% while the entire city
rate was at 4%. That plus the rate being at a 17 year high would seem to
indicate a problem. [1]

[1] - [https://la.curbed.com/2017/9/15/16316040/downtown-la-high-
va...](https://la.curbed.com/2017/9/15/16316040/downtown-la-high-vacancy-rate-
rent)

~~~
mjevans
Yes it does. The problem is lack of supply in the overall market to drive the
price to a reasonable point.

------
vorg
> It gives the public a false sense that a step has been taken toward having
> more housing when in fact it’s just an illusion.

This is the same anywhere there's direct democracy. 51% of the people vote in
the government that perpetuates the ponzi scheme of rising house prices
because borrowing from the bank to buy a house then selling it later for a
profit is the quickest path to retirement. Restricting housing supply is one
easy way to keep house prices rising. The government needs to feed a story to
the other 49%, hence these illusions like in California.

Besides restricting supply, another way to keep the prices rising is to boost
demand, so the 51% also vote for the governments that increase immigration,
which has been especially successful recently in the western US, Canada, and
Australia/NZ. Every now and then, a government comes along that attempts to
boost housing supply or restrict demand from immigrants or foreigners, but
they soon get voted out because early retirement is the top criteria of voting
decisions for the 51%. That government's initiative then becomes another
carcass used to fool the other 49%.

~~~
Qwertious
>This is the same anywhere there's direct democracy. 51% of the people vote in
the government

Uh, not quite. 51% of the _voters_. I highlight this because it's incredibly
important to understand that _only voters have power_ , and if you refuse to
vote then you _will_ be screwed by politicians in favour of people who
actually keep them in power.

------
gnarcoregrizz
CA doesn't want more homes or people. The old generation and their heirs are
firmly cemented in place (prop 13 + 58/193). No one is going to fix shit, and
I certainly don't want any more market distorting policies like rent control.
My area hasn't built a new home in 15 years.

~~~
junkscience2017
California has 40 million people. We have renewable water resources for 20
million. At this rate we will utterly obliterate our water resources for good.
No government can fix that...and no, you aren't going to desal that much water
either.

We need to figure out how to get 10 million out of the State.

------
codedokode
Height limits and zoning are a good idea. If you don't have limits then you
will have only high ugly 25-floor apartment buildings. Like the ones they
build in China [1][2] or in Russia.

Look at any old European city like Paris or Amsterdam or Saint-Petersburg. A
historical part of the city with 3-5-7 floor buildings looks so much better
than modern cities with skyscrapers.

And I am not sure that building new houses will solve the problem. New houses
and lower living cost might attract even more people to move to California.

[1]
[https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/09.jpg](https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/09.jpg)

[2]
[https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/11.jpg](https://varlamov.me/2016/china_ray/11.jpg)

~~~
citrin_ru
1\. High-rise building can be build in different styles. I like most Manhattan
buildings from 1920s - 1940s. 2\. There are a log of ugly box building built
in Russia (and China), because it is a race to the bottom. People can't afford
apartments in good looking buildings and can only buy in cheapest ones.

Given how expensive land in California it is unlikely that developers will try
to save every cent on buildings them-self.

------
cobbzilla
Maybe replace "tried" with "failed" in the headline?

------
NTDF9
I mean, just pull something from HongKong's playbook? Or Singapore or even
NYC.

Why does the government have to be incompetent? Maybe just admit that prop 13
was a bad idea?

------
aaaaajkjkjkjk
The Bay Area is an international hotspot. You have people fighting to move in
from the whole world. I would expect it to be one of the most expensive places
on the planet. And given it is an American city, I expect the worst
infrastructure on the planet.

------
ringaroundthetx
So what you’re telling me is that people are going to be paying me $15,000/mo
if I do get that property

------
IncRnd
> _It requires cities and counties to develop plans every eight years for new
> home building in their communities. After more than a year of work and
> spending nearly $50,000, Foster City had an 87-page housing plan that
> proposed hundreds of new homes, mapped where they would go and detailed the
> many ways the city could help make the construction happen. But a crucial
> element was missing: Foster City was never going to approve all the building
> called for in the voluminous proposal, Perez said._

Why would a municipality spend $50,000 on a do-nothing report? Instead keep
the $50,000 and spend $2.00 on a report that says, "It would be best to do
something about housing. Someone should build more houses."

Sure, the law is a failure, but the municipalities that spent that kind of
money willy-nilly are just as limited in their success.

~~~
ajmurmann
To me the most mystifying part is why the city is involved in any of this
planning? I find it utterly appalling that the city is planning housing units.
What bizarre planned economy, communist system is this? Americans tend to be
very pro-market, but as soon as it's about housing we get this bizarre stuff.

~~~
vkou
Our economy is already highly planned. Particular behaviours are tax
advantaged, particular investment in particular industries is centrally
planned through government procurement, healthcare prices are controlled
through Medicaid/Medicare, almost every corporation heavily practices
centralized planning...

The strange part is not that planning happens, its how we are so bad at it
when it comes to land ownership.

------
alexasmyths
There can nary be such a thing as a 'housing crises'.

California does not have one, in general.

If California municipalities 'don't want to enable building' because their
residents don't want it ... well ... then they will have fewer people,
probably higher housing costs and that's their choice.

If the 'average bay policeman' or whatever can't afford to buy a home for 100
miles - then the citizens of Cali are going to have to pay their cops more,
or, those cops will go elsewhere.

It's a fairly fluid and competitive landscape - more so than most places on
earth.

There's a high demand for living in some parts of Cali and it's going to be
like that for a long time, even with some building it won't change.

It's a choice Californians seem to be making, it's their choice.

If town councils are arbitrarily messing things up against the will of the
people - who want to see high rises everywhere ... well that's another story.

~~~
emerged
Is it too much to ask to have an ideal place to live at a price strictly
enforced to be well below its market value but only if you happen to live
there already?

~~~
Qwertious
/s?

~~~
emerged
Yes :)

