
Finally, some good news about the Silicon Valley housing crisis - Futurebot
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/7/11173750/google-silicon-valley-housing-crisis
======
davidw
I think in some ways that this is one of _the_ issues facing the US right now.

Economists generally suggest that easing the shift from low productivity areas
to high productivity areas is very beneficial, but NIMBY housing policies
stand in the way.

And these things have repercussions all throughout the country. Here in
Oregon, there is a steady stream of people who are bailing out of California
in part because of the housing prices. This causes resentment here, because it
is pricing locals out of certain markets (Portland and Bend, likely others).
Ultimately, without dealing with the root causes of the issue, the process
will just keep repeating itself elsewhere.

My view is that there should be a wider range of densities, and more walkable,
bikeable neighborhoods. Ultimately, it is a supply issue - you cannot keep
that steady and increase demand without forcing people out. Granted, maybe not
everyone can have a ranch house with a large yard and a two car garage, but...
not everyone _needs_ that, either.

Here are some sites I'm fond of:

[http://marketurbanism.com/](http://marketurbanism.com/)

[http://missingmiddlehousing.com/](http://missingmiddlehousing.com/)

[https://clubnimbyblog.wordpress.com/](https://clubnimbyblog.wordpress.com/)

and of course Matt Yglesias' book:
[http://amzn.to/21hwbb6](http://amzn.to/21hwbb6)

~~~
mmanfrin
Portland, Bend, Boulder, Austin. People are looking for the same young, urban,
progressive environment that the Bay Area has provided since the Gold Rush, it
seems.

There is something innate the Bay Area that has nothing to do with tech, but
tech is in the middle of it and has become the boogeyman of ails to those
currently living in SF. It's a misdirection for NIMBYs to focus the agitation
towards because the more they deny, the more valuable and scare the homes in
this special market become.

I think fighting NIMBYism is a sisyphean obligation for the Bay Area. People
will always want to live here -- tech jobs or not.

------
oppositelock
I live in Mountain View and follow some of the city council discussions here.
While the city council approved high density housing, many residents are doing
their best to stifle any development up there.

This city's home owners, especially the older ones, are very active
politically and also very anti-development. There's this attitude, which I
consider to be very selfish, that "I bought into Mountain View for how it
currently looks, and I don't want it to change", all the while, these same
residents bemoan the high prices of housing and everyone except techies being
priced out.

As of today, we're probably going to see a decade of environmental review
challenges before a single unit gets built, since this is the most effective
way to block development with red tape in California.

~~~
dmitrygr
To play devil's advocate, protecting one's (likely) most significant
investment is not selfish - it is reasonable. The fact that you do not like
their actions doe snot make them any less reasonable and sane.

~~~
davidw
> protecting one's (likely) most significant investment

Because some additional housing is going to completely crater house prices in
the area?

I don't buy it.

~~~
sliverstorm
You can get more out of a house than resale value, and thus "protecting"
doesn't pertain only to resale value.

If you buy a house because it has a nice view of the mountains, fighting
billboards that obstruct your view is "protecting your investment".

~~~
davidw
I can understand protecting genuinely historic stuff, but Silicon Valley? The
area is all about change. If there weren't constant change, the area would
still be rural.

I can understand wanting to channel it to some degree, too, but it's
ultimately an iron triangle where something has to give. Right now, it's the
less economically fortunate who are getting turfed out and losing access to an
area that generates a phenomenal amount of wealth.

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jasondc
With 3 miles between Google <-> Caltrain, maybe a light-rail project could
also help push a project like this forward (connecting the new densely
populated Google housing with the rest of the area).

~~~
ihaveajob
This so much. Public transit doesn't stand a chance if it's not accompanied
with sensible zoning that favors high density near the stations. Very often I
was the only rider in my VTA lightrail on my commute to Intel, passing by
block after block of office parking lots.

~~~
nradov
We'll never get significant ridership on VTA light rail unless they find a way
to speed it up. It's just so _slow_. That would require buried or elevated
tracks separated from cars and pedestrians so that it can safely run at higher
speeds. But building grade separated light rail tracks would take years and
cost tens of billions, so politically it's a non-starter.

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wpietri
As a San Franciscan, I heartily approve. A lot of the conflict in San
Francisco is driven not by people who work in the city, but by people who
reluctantly commute to places like Mountain View. One study of corporate bus
commuters said about half would rather live closer to work.

I think the next step is to create more urban life down there. I frequently
hear of people who hate the commute but think the areas near their office
might as well be in a desert.

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nwah1
Those who understand the Law of Rent know that artificially increasing supply
is not a real solution to the problem. Rent is set by the differential between
the locational value over and above the best available rent-free land.

The most effective policy for housing affordability is to exempt improvements
from taxation and heavily tax the value of the land, thus encouraging idle
speculators to sell it off cheap.

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Shivetya
It is good they are going to support the building of more housing. However the
requirement to sell twenty percent at below market value is simply going to
pass that cost on to everyone else who cannot qualify for the lower priced
housing. As in, everyone else pays more. It might be better to work otherwise
as those moving into the new housing would surely be vacating other housing.
Yes there will be people totally new to the area moving into the new housing
but the majority should be local movers.

Before some throw out the idea that its needed to have the developers sell
below market it will push some out of the market as well as the cost of the
market value homes have to increase to pay for the subsidized homes. In other
words, politicians do this to gain votes all the while hoping those who are
adversely affected are not annoyed enough to vote against them

~~~
wpietri
> However the requirement to sell twenty percent at below market value is
> simply going to pass that cost on to everyone else who cannot qualify for
> the lower priced housing.

That's not necessarily true. Future purchasers are one source of money, but
others include builders, investors, and landowners. If the 20% requirement is
typical and historically consistent, then presumably that has already been
priced in by the property market. In other words, the parcel value may already
be discounted from your alternate-universe value to reflect the below-market
requirement. In that case nobody really pays more; it's just that whoever held
the parcel when the requirement was created wasn't able to sell it for as much
as they might have.

Even if it were 100% true, I don't think anybody involved would be shocked to
hear it. If you have a limited commodity that you sell at auction, the richest
people will get the commodity. With housing, that means you may in effect
create a community of only rich people. Presumably the citizens of Mountain
View want a different outcome. If you just don't like the mechanism, you
should suggest a different one. But if you're disagreeing with their goal,
then the mechanism's mostly irrelevant.

~~~
Aeolos
Beautifully written.

------
baron816
Looks like bus rapid transit (BRT) could be a great solution for SV. If they
could get dedicated bus lanes (which is probably politically impossible) you
could really clear up a lot of traffic and establish a way for people to forgo
owning a car.

~~~
cbhl
The problem with BRT is that according to California's definitions, it has an
unavoidable negative environmental impact. It took six years to do the
environmental assessment for the Van Ness BRT in SF.

[http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/07/transit-projects-
are-...](http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/07/transit-projects-are-about-to-
get-much-much-easier-in-california/374049/)

~~~
r00fus
So essentially this 2013 environmental report says that it'd make traffic
tougher - assuming the same number of cars and no decrease due to bus
ridership.

Note: "The encouraging news is that this law is about to change. California
will soon reform traffic analysis under CEQA by replacing "level of service"
with another metric more in line with its environmental and urban mobility
goals. "

Does anyone know if this has indeed changed?

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benzofuran
What're the legal requirements if Google chooses to make a "company town" \-
ie all the other benefits are included already, perhaps they'll start throwing
in a 1BR apartment within spitting distance of the campus and a tram /
peoplemover connection between the two. Would they still be required to meet
the Section 8 / Affordable provisions if the units were only available to
employees?

~~~
cbhl
I imagine the city would pick who gets to stay in the affordable units through
a lottery or similar; IIRC, Facebook has a similar development next to their
"1 Facebook Way" building.

10k housing units might be enough to give one or two years' worth of Google
new hires an apartment; there's no way that it's sustainable to just throw it
in as a benefit (plus the tens of thousands of existing employees would be
outraged). I imagine they'd use it for temporary new-hire housing and/or
intern housing.

------
vram22
The "city" of Magarpatta outside Pune, India, seems to have worked out a good
option of "walk to shop, walk to work" (though vehicles are still allowed).
I've been there a bit.

Google the name and check the first few results.

I'm not saying that their model can be a solution for the SV issue, just
mentioning it as an interesting related story.

What makes it more interesting is that the people behind it are from a farming
family (but educated), not city types.

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lostmsu
That's not a real solution, because its not scalable. They should literally be
scaling horizontally rather than vertically. There's a lot of less densely
populated space around.

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hellofunk
>The city approved a new planning document for its North Bayshore district
that envisions the creation of up to 10,250 units of high-density housing.
Mountain View only has about 32,000 households total, so that would be a
substantial 32 percent increase.

It's a little disappointing when the only solution to housing prices is to
cram thousands of new dwellings together in a pile. My experience has been
that quality of life suffers in such "developments" but maybe it will surprise
us all to the contrary.

~~~
davidw
If the population increases in an area, how _else_ are you going to deal with
it besides density, or simply telling them 'GO AWAY', which most economists
agree is a terrible idea, given that adding people in highly productive areas
is such a win.

Population density is generally very low in most of the US. It can go higher
without too many problems.

~~~
ghaff
Modulo the load on transportation and infrastructure--which seems likely to be
substantial--to the degree that you're going to add that much housing, this
seems a pretty sensible way to do it. It's generally impractical to bulldoze a
large tract of low-rise housing to build slightly higher housing. So just
about the only solution is to put high-rise housing somewhere that it has a
minimal [EDIT: the least] impact.

That said, I wonder how well it will work to build a bunch of high-rise
suburban housing while making it difficult for residents to have cars and
without great transportation options.

~~~
crzwdjk
If anything, the load on transportation would actually go down. One of the big
problems in Silicon Valley is that many of the cities (Palo Alto, Mountain
View, Cupertino) are adding tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of housing
units. Which means that the only option is for people to either commute ever
longer distances or crowd ever more people into the existing housing. And
while it's not practical to bulldoze housing for even a 100% increase in
density, there are plenty of single family houses that can be replaced with
6-10 unit apartment buildings. Even in SF itself.

------
ArtDev
There is a whole country full of beautiful affordable places to live.

Silicon Valley? Yuck. I will never live there again (thank goodness).

------
trhway
i only wish the federals followed the suit and let 100M (1/3 of the US
population, about the same as MV new allowed units ratio to existing) new
immigrants into the country

