> No neighborhood should be subjected to radical change.
Is there any dynamic evolutionary system that actually follows these rules? The tech industry is famous for lumbering behemoths that are constitutionally incapable of innovation and then get replaced wholesale by nimble startups. National borders change all at once, in wars or revolutions, rather than incrementally as demographics change. Human beings don't change much after early adulthood; instead they make new humans who replace them when they die. Evolution itself seems to have periods of equilibrium when resources are abundant and nearly every individual survives, followed by abrupt speciation when resources get tight, individuals die off, and populations get isolated from one another.
The only positive example I can think of is democracy, which is specifically designed to enable gradual change so that radical change doesn't happen, and yet still frequently gets party realignments, charismatic strongmen, and the occasional revolution.
I worry that this philosophy sounds great precisely because it's not how the world works. Human beings are really bad at noticing or reacting to gradual change; it tends to pile up until it becomes too big to ignore, and then rapidly reaches a tipping point and crisis where the newly strong force out the weak. This is undesirable, but also seems largely unavoidable.
I mean, if we're being cynical, you say the second so that people feel comfortable with the first. If you can convince suburbanites that you won't put up a skyscraper next door, you'll have an easier time putting up a 5-story apartment building. Or so my thinking goes, anyway.
People in my neighborhood object to every change even if it doesn’t seem to affect them. They’re mortified when a 5-story building (commercial OR residential) is built downtown when we are ten minutes away and not on a major traffic corridor.
That's because every time you give an inch they'll take a little bit more. So you out up a huge front and the only thing that can be approved are small nimble changes. Plus it's wildly beneficial economically to keep the status quo when it comes to owning a home in the California.
Having some item, totem, or mechanism for producing, securing, or controlling wealth, the cheapest way to grow power further is often to defend that against new advances or competition.
Stern describes both technology and housing in his article.
Banks, healthcare, police forces, and many other municipal services could fit into this criteria. All of these need to change and evolve over time, but a very sudden radical shift is scary, unpredictable, and unpopular.
I walked around downtown San Bruno recently and it's honestly pathetic how this city is squandering their potential. Even on el camino real itself a lot of the property is being wasted on auto repair shops and fast food places, 2-3 story buildings, etc. This place could be way, way better given its proximity to the airport and SF.
I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula (including SF) looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense.
Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay.
In the Embarcadero there are actual motor inns, crappy hotels with one story raised 10 feet off the ground with parking spaces below them. Like a whole bunch of them. You don't even see those in abandoned small towns any more.
You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man.
Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces.
Yet the entire city is dominated by garages at street level. And two story buildings, and mile after mile of awful zero-architecture postwar commercial properties.
Yes the painted ladies are pretty, don't bulldoze them. Landmark Lombard street and some of the other charming blocks, Sure why not. But it's a global commercial city willing to build 50+ story office towers, and unwilling to do anything about the dozens of square miles of 1-2 story unredeemable residential surrounding them.
It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned.
I used to live in NYC, a city that's had its own difficulties adding new housing, corruption in the permitting process, considering too many areas "historic." But the Bay Area is something completely different. It seems that everyone who already owns a single family home is strongly in favor of pulling up the ladder.
Perhaps too much money is riding on the existing "market value" of homes here. If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? Proposition 13 can't be helping, either.
It honestly didn't seem all that insane to me, because Boston is crazier in nearly every dimension. The peninsula at least has 3-lane boulevards with a reasonable road hierarchy and traffic light timings. Boston has cowpaths branching off in every direction, controlled by stop signs that can literally back up for miles. The peninsula has block after block of Eichlers on 1/4 acre lots. Boston has mid-rise row-houses on landfill in the Back Bay, quickly trailing off to historic old houses on 1.5 acre lots 10 minutes outside of the city. The peninsula refuses to let you put in an in-law unit or cut down a redwood tree without going through an extensive permitting process. The Boston area might refuse to let you put in new window panes if you live in a historic house (my computer teacher lived in one from the 1730s, and it still had all the original glass - which back then was hand made and tended to flow like putty - because it was considered a historic property and she couldn't modify it). The peninsula is due for a natural disaster in the next 30 years. In Boston, as my wife puts it, every winter is a natural disaster. BART has a problem with homeless dudes and property crime. The Red Line has a problem with trains losing the 3rd rail and running 20 minutes late. Caltrain electrification is stuck in limbo. The Big Dig has ceiling tiles that fall down and kill people.
Of course, the flip side of this is that Boston hasn't grown since 1950, and is around the same size as its 1910 population. San Francisco will probably meet a similar fate when the tech boom peters out.
FYI, glass doesn't flow. That's a common myth. Modern glass making techniques are much better than older ones, and we can make flat glass panes of constant thickness. Those old screwy panes were just as screwy when they were first put in; that's as good as they could mass produce at the time.
I'm coming from the Boston _area_ because I can't afford to live in Boston or Cambridge. But guess what? There are comfortably sized houses available already under $400k 20 minutes out.
Exactly. Inner Boston and SF are not dissimilar, but the real difference is when you go outside the city. You can get a good house in Waltham (for instance) for relatively cheap. The same isn't true today in East Bay at least (and I don't know what other direction it would be true in).
It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned.
It's actually quite the opposite. So-called soft story buildings are more dangerous in an earthquake and property owners are taking quite a while to bring them up to code. Californians just love their cars.
> If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse?
I don't see how that could be the case. The property value of a plot of land on which a 50, or even 5 story building can be built is much higher than the property value of a single-family home.
There's a substitution effect. If zoning restrictions are relaxed and developer turns an acre into a 50 unit condo complex, that developer reaps a huge windfall. But everyone else who owns an Eichler on a 1/4 acre has fewer buyers competing for their property.
It's sorta like when labor unions go away. The company that hires non-unionized labor at half the price and double the productivity reaps an enormous windfall. So do the employees, who were presumably in other, less well-paying jobs. Everyone else who chooses not to play the new game ends up out of a job.
Or is this correct:
As housing prices rise, it becomes cost effective to replace simplexes with duplexes, threeplexes, etc., causing the value of all simplexes to rise.
The latter is correct. The price per sq ft will be at parity during development. Then buyers will compete for the smaller units that replaced the SFH properties. $/sq-ft will rise and pass over to existing, neighboring SFHs.
> If zoning restrictions are relaxed and developer turns an acre into a 50 unit condo complex, that developer reaps a huge windfall. But everyone else who owns an Eichler on a 1/4 acre has fewer buyers competing for their property.
That's not completely accurate. Yes, demand might fall, but even so price and value will still rise regardless.
If you build a 50 unit complex next door, as long as some of those 50 units sell, then everyone elses 1/4th acre will become more valuable, even if no one ever actually buys them, because land value in the US has very little to do with buyers or demand, and is exclusively valued by whatever property transactions happen to occur nearby it.
land value in the US has very little to do with buyers or demand, and is exclusively valued by whatever property transactions happen to occur nearby it
I don't understand the distinction you seek to make here. Those transaction values are specifically the result of buyers and demand.
Most residential properties here could have been snapped up in 2009 for about 60% of current costs... because demand was lower. (Probably several hundred percent in areas like Mission Bay.)
I'd like to point out this is true only if the developer held the property during the regulatory change. Otherwise the developer makes their customary razor-thin profits and it is the seller of the land who reaps the huge windfall.
Do we care much about the price of land or do we care how much it costs for someone to live there? I believe it's the latter.
So yes the price of land would go up, but the price of livable space would fall. And the cost of livable space is what we care about with regards to affordable housing.
Oddly enough, the housing structure of the SF Bay Area has a certain resemblance to ... the Boeing 737 Max. It's a system where some one parts/aspects/dimensions are kept at a certain backward (but once functional and "good") level while other parts/aspects/dimensions are automated/modernized to the hilt (basically to game regulation and so markets).
Elaborate efforts have been made to adapt the contradictory parts, efforts that worked adequately for a while but which are now coming apart, leaving a situation with no way forward at all.
It's because we're hella young out here. Relative to the East Coast anyway (I mean, London has Roman ruins...)
Do an image search for old timey SF and you'll see: the Sunset was sand dunes until about last Tuesday, etc. Dudes used to pan for gold out by Lake Merced.
Also, this was the weirdo town. Bohemia on the Bay. Serious folk didn't really come here to be serious and sane. The old line was, "All the crazy people move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to San Francisco." To which residents add, "And all the people too crazy for San Francisco move to Berkeley."
So yeah, you've got a young town full of nuts and flakes that no one really paid much attention to until the last ~50 years or so, whadda ya expect, eh?
Things are changing though. I was over in the Inner Sunset the other day and the beautiful people were there casting me in the shade because I look too close to homeless on the hipster/homeless spectrum.
My concern is the weakening of the commitment to keeping the wild areas of the Bay Area wild. SF is the largest city with the most wilderness around it in the world. Marin Headlands, Wildcat canyon et. al., nearly half of the peninsula is forest. I saw a coyote in someone's front yard on Junipero Serra the other day not three blocks from Stonestown Mall! In a neighborhood of single family homes, FWIW.
I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo. On the other hand, it sucks that I can't afford an apartment in my home town, let alone ever own a home, despite making programmer money. I can't imagine what it would be like if I didn't have tech skills. I'd probably be living in a tent under the freeway.
"My concern is the weakening of the commitment to keeping the wild areas of the Bay Area wild. SF is the largest city with the most wilderness around it in the world."
"I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo."
These two sentiments are in direct conflict though. Your options are to either build up or to build out. Building up will preserve the nearby wilderness; building out will see it turned into low density housing, roads, and terrible traffic congestion.
> These two sentiments are in direct conflict though.
I know. Quoting Whitman, "I am large. I contain multitudes."
> Your options are to either build up or to build out.
Or, in a word, arcologies.
> Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated, ecologically low-impact human habitats.
> The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who believed that a completed arcology would provide space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities while minimizing individual human environmental impact. These structures have been largely hypothetical, as no arcology, even one envisioned by Soleri himself, has yet been built.
If I had my druthers, I would roll up the low density stuff into arcologies and rehabilitate the old creeks that ran and still run to the bay. Use Permaculture (applied ecology) and passive design. IIRC the Australians were going to build a huge multi-acre combined solar chimney and greenhouse to generate electricity and grow food. &c.
Your comment about SF being young is really true. Take a look at a 1950's picture of the east side of Twin Peaks and you'll see huge tracks of open land. This is ~2 miles from downtown. A lot of SF was built in the last 60-70 years.
And also the trend of people wanting to live in SF is a pretty recent phenomenon. The population of SF in 2000 was the same as it was in the 1950's. People were leaving SF in droves 40 years ago.
While this is true of SF itself the Bay Area as whole has been growing at a steady million per decade (one and a bit San Franciscos) for the past 70 years.
Other urban areas undergoing growth seem to have done much better by allowing more density. Unfortunately the California tax system incentivizes municipalities to build office space over housing. With the Bay Area's patchwork local organization and no metropolitan level layer of governance local municipalities instead play beggar-thy-neighbour as they promote only development that expands their tax base while the burdens of providing schools etc. falls to the municipality next door.
Speaking of the painted ladies, a clear example of how completely dysfunctional the market is, there's been a vacant lot ON Alamo Square, less than a block for the painted ladies for years.
Who owns it? Why is this still not housing or at least something? Who knows! There's a vacant boarded up mansion/victorian multiunit building on Grove as well that has been that way forever as well.
Also years ago there was a natural grocery store that closed on Divisadero. There was some controversy but the council decided to let it become a Core Power Yoga. That was almost a year ago. Zero progress has been made on building that studio, still an empty shop front.
I don't have a strong opinion on that fight, but it's insane that these things take so long. I don't understand it, I've been meaning to go to a neighborhood meeting to ask, but I've been busy the rare nights they happen.
Funny enough, it seems the vacant Victorian on Grove is making some progress, saw some scaffolding up around it this evening.
http://www.sfweekly.com/news/news-news/entropy-on-grove-stre... (2017) elaborates on why its been vacant, seems like the owner doesn't have the funds/desire to make it habitable. Also mentions how much red tape exists to develop in the neighborhood in the last couple paragraphs, maybe the owner doesn't feel like enduring that adventure.
I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense.
The Peninsula is bland and awful. Plenty of affluent folks that just like to fuck with people (a.k.a. Atherton and the NIMBY's asinine fight against electrifying Caltrain). Plenty of folks (a.k.a. Brisbane) that like to pretend they're rich and only want to develop commercial property and leave the housing to SF.
But... the Bay Area is incredibly provincial. San Mateo county (most of the peninsula) is not San Francisco.
Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay.
Part if it is that there are chain retail bans in many neighborhoods, but the other part is where are you going to put the big stores? Cities in San Mateo county fight tooth and nail over the big box stores (see the Target in Colma directly across the highway from the Target in Daly City). Retail = tax revenue. Middle class jobs = less tax revenue. San Francisco can afford to levy payroll taxes and whatnot, but other cities don't have that prestige.
You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man.
You're starting to see more multi-unit housing in the Sunset, but again SF is not the peninsula. As bad as things are in San Francisco, things are far worse to the south. The garages are often two car sized and likely converted into illegal residential units.
Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces.
Curb cuts make walking in SF worse than it has to be, but try walking in the suburbs where there are sometimes no sidewalks, higher speed limits, and wider roads to cross on foot.
Not just east coasters can subscribe to this thinking. A citizen of pretty much any other country can.
Compare with Hong Kong. Right off the Victoria Peak there are 40+ story apartment buildings. There's forest to one side of them, and more 40+ story buildings to the other side.
You don't need to live outside of the bay area to think this way. I've grown up on the peninsula and think it's absurd. I'm a software engineer and if I ever want to buy a house I feel like I'll be forced to relocate away from family and hometown. My friend's 90 year old grandmother constantly complains about new housing development in the town we live in, but then also questions why my friend has to live with her and his cousin had to move away. Stop voting to make this area too expensive to live in and your younger family won't have to move away.
Every single homeowner I've talked to here has complained about the housing crisis, yet has been opposing development near their house.
Incredible that people can be so willfully blind that they don't see how their own actions are contributing to the crisis. It's a real tragedy of the commons
If there was a law aggressively limiting the property tax rate, skyrocketing demand, and I happened to be in a house I got in the 70s... you better bet I'd be opposing development too.
That's not true! Peninsula voters never got the chance to vote on the November 1962 BART referendum.
Instead, on April 12, 1962 the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors opted out, citing high costs and concerns over shoppers leaving their county for stores in Downtown San Francisco.
Keep in mind that Silicon Valley did not exist yet. There was no support for BART in San Mateo County-grassroots or otherwise. Many Peninsula civic leaders were also against it–including JR Clinton owner of the San Mateo Times (predecessor of San Mateo Daily Journal). Also opposing BART was David Bohannon the developer of the Hillsdale Shopping Mall, Tom Casey of the San Mateo Co Development Associations. They, and the San Mateo Times, published Op-eds arguing that BART was not needed; instead more freeway lanes was the proposed solution to congestion woes.
The neighboring Santa Clara County's obsession with building and publicly financing the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol) didn't help either.
You can read more about it in BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System by Michael C. Healy.
the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol)
Don't forget Southwest Expressway, that sad little stretch from Stokes(?) to 280 south of San Jose City College.
As for San Mateo county, Caltrain already served as an artery through it. San Mateo county residents would have been used as cash cows for SF to Western Alameda county, just like eastern Alameda County has been for five decades.
The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s
BART is a basket case of incompetence on its own. SF residents were largely willing to support an infill station at 30th and Mission, but BART stuck its thumbs up its ass and eventually built a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport (ripping up recent renovations to the street along the way).
San Mateo residents bought into BART in the 90s, but as they've learned public transit (BART especially) is a cost not profit center so the regional (SamTrans) service got gutted to fund BART (whose ridership numbers consistently lag predictions).
And then you what, die in the appreciated property? If you want to make money, it's already very profitable for you to sell the house for condo development but no one is doing that. Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then.
>Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then.
I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majority Southern Californian neighborhood all their life in the same homes they've always been in. Imagine ripping on them for trying to preserve their neighborhood and therefore their culture. And for what? To make it possible for more people to move in and potentially make things worse for the people already there? If it's a minority-majority neighborhood, making it possible for more whites to move in is gentrification. How do you argue for that?
I'm not saying I agree with any of this by the way, just playing devil's advocate.
Btw, the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person and not about SoCal neighborhood.
Regardless, these people are not "natives" who got SF entirely in its current state from God, it was growing up, as prosperous cities do, and neighborhoods were changing. So why should it stop its development in 1976, why are people who moved in to SF back then entitled to this? If you ask me, this is becoming uncannily feudal.
Personally, I am with you and don't believe they are entitled anything.
But essentially this basically comes down to gentrification vs preserving culture. Do we value cities as money-making assembly lines where all the workers are replaceable or do we value cities as a living thing, with the culture(s) as their bloodline that makes those cities what they are and gives them their appeal? Do I want to keep my neighborhood as it is, for my children to grow up as I did, or should I just let anyone come and change it, for better or worse?
The problem is recognizing that appreciation without weathering the crushing taxes. Proposition 5 (portability of Jarvis Gann property tax bases) would have helped, but it was voted down.
Take a single person with $1 million in appreciation. $750K gets hit with (unindexed!) Federal capital gains, full CA income taxes with surtaxes "for the rich" (likewise unindexed), and you'd be starting over with respect to property tax basis (with a few exceptions in 9 counties).
You could eventually do a 1031, but you'd have to move somewhere in the meantime... probably out of state.
I'm sad that the SFCHA proposition [1] could not be petitioned successfully for last year's ballot in San Francisco. I thought it was an interesting one, with a progressive property tax scheme that would be used by the city to acquire housing for people under the median income (among other things).
I agree with almost all of this, but in a city as crime-riddled as San Francisco, there is a huge difference between parking on the street and in a garage. I get that the way the garages are built and arranged is beyond suboptimal, but lets not act as if having those same cars parked on the street would be equally as good.
Apparently the city governments want lots of these. They call it PDR zoning; apparently auto repair shops pay more for non-college-educated workers than other jobs.
I have suggested this before, and I'll suggest this again.
The whole problem could be solved if we gave people the choice of voting where they work rather than where they live.
Currently every city wants all the businesses that they can get because businesses generate lots of tax revenues. Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue, and locals object on the basis of NIMBYism. But when everyone adds businesses and nobody adds homes, we get horrible commutes.
With my proposed change, housing developments in cities that have major businesses will get lots of support from people who work there and want shorter commutes. And it seems reasonable to me that someone who spends their waking hours in a city and wants to live there should get the opportunity to have political power there.
This would therefore undo the political log jam. And once you start letting people live close to where they work, commutes go down, traffic gets better, and everyone winds up happier.
• more municipal revenue means better schools and infrastructure
• better schools and infrastructure would support more development
• higher property taxes would remove the incentive to hang on to property forever making it easier to buy and develop property
• removing the disincentive to sell property also reduces the NIMBY imperative, since home owner can move to another area if they don't like how their neighborhood is developing
It's not a silver bullet; we'd still have to tackle zoning issues, remaining (and still powerful) NIMBYs, and the everyone-has-a-veto problem, but it's a good start.
Expenditures correlate very poorly with school performance. The evidence seems quite overwhelming.
Which isn't to say funding doesn't matter. Just that it's clear that "investing in our children" through school funding was a dead-end, sort of like expecting increased traffic light expenditures to improve school performance. The primary determinants are economic and sociologic factors in the home.
We need decent schools just like we need decent water & sewage, but we're long past the point where such civic infrastructure is capable of transforming our society. Focusing on these things as agents of change is counter-productive if not destructive.
I'd settle for the same performance without constant hysterical fundraising by the PTA, parents being asked to buy and donate basic classroom supplies and teachers buying stuff out of their own pockets just to be able to do their job.
But really, I just mean "neighborhoods more friendly to kids and parents." School quality is a big part of that, but it's also a matter of finding a good school near your home, public spaces where kids can play etc. SF isn't completely devoid of that stuff, but there's a reason new parents move out to the suburbs. The point is that if we want higher density we need more homes, but we also need more of all the other stuff that people want and need nearby.
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s (Illinois, Florida, Alabama) I remember teachers buying supplies out of their own pocket. I suspect it's a perennial issue. Expenditure increases usually go straight to salaries--ideally to teachers but these days increasingly to administrative staff.
Living in California and observing (but soon to be participant) in how parent participation works here it seems to me, pretense and motivations notwithstanding, that the sociologic function is really about keeping parents engaged with their children's school. Private schools are even worse in this regard, both the cheaper Catholic ones and the expensive ones drowning in cash.
My point is that we should stop looking to these things as agents of change. Among other things, it causes us to cyclically attempt to disrupt and revolutionize the system, when what such systems need most are stability and consistency. But education in particular sits at this wierd nexus of public policy where everybody thinks they're an expert, everybody has direct experience with the system, everybody thinks it can do more than it can, and it's a politically neutral subject. And for all our supposed expertise and concern, we invariably have the same ideas--more money, more accountability, etc. Given what we know empirically, the feverish focus seems very counter productive.
I'm not suggesting that we should fund schools because better education will create a better society. I'm suggesting we should fund schools so that people don't have to live far from their jobs in order to send their kids to public school. Fixing the housing crisis implies higher density and higher population in the city, which implies more need for public infrastructure including schools and transit.
> Expenditures correlate very poorly with school performance.
Well yeah, because there's a huge amount of noise combined with active efforts to spend more on worse schools in the past few decades. I'd like to see an example study with "overwhelming" evidence that expenditures doesn't help.
I don't understand this pessimism re: the role of schools. The science isn't anywhere nearly as settled on "schools do not create change" as this comment seems to imply.
More importantly, more revenues could mean more school places, period. If you want all those young freshly minted grads to stay in the area in their new upzoned apartments and condos, eventually they will want to raise kids.
Most cities develop a budget, then set property tax rates to generate revenue. This is why cities with $200k homes have similar per capita budgets as cities with $800k homes.
So if you repealed prop 13, the result would likely be a more equitable approach to property taxes, with those protected by prop 13 paying more and everyone else paying less.
The problem we had in California before Proposition 13 is that city budgets were increasing without bound due to demands by public employee unions. The only way I would support a repeal of Proposition 13 is if some other mechanism is put in place to give voters more direct control over city budget growth.
Was that really the problem? We're grannies really losing their homes to property tax?
There's been so much mythology built up around a common anti-tax movement that I'm not sure what to believe. There is plenty of economic reason to vote for capped taxes even without excessive spending.
I don't know if this would work as well as you might think it does.
1. People don't necessarily want to live immediately next door to where they work. Maybe someone who works in Mountain View wants to live in Palo Alto, but this doesn't help them.
2. A lot of highways bulldozing inner cities were stopped by residents protesting. Under your proposal office workers could just vote in a highway that gets them from A to B quickly while screwing over everyone who lives next to it. I don't know that going back to this model is a good idea.
3. Mixed use housing does not really 'solve' traffic in that people don't actually live close to work even when it is available. Especially if you consider multiple income households. Tokyo is pretty much all mixed use and still people suffer from long commutes.
This is kind of like what New York did in the 1800s by consolidating all the towns around it into a giant metropolis. And that's clearly what many people wish the Bay Area were today - a giant megalopolis from San Jose to Petaluma. The problem with that is that while it would be a great idea for getting one's way on a given issue, there are a lot of people that don't want to live in that kind of place, and are fighting to maintain their towns as the small towns they want them to be.
I don't know if that level of consolidation is necessary but the core area could definitely be consolidated into like 6-8 municipalities or even boroughs:
San Rafael-Sausalito
SF + Daly City + Colma + Brisbane + South SF
San Bruno - RWC
Palo Alto - SV
San Jose + Santa Clara and assorted surrounded munis like los gatos. Honestly you could probably include the Palo Alto-SV area with this one if you wanted.
No idea how to split up the east bay, guessing you will run into issues with nobody wanting to absorb the poor munis.
Anyway, the benefits of this is that it would be easier to align incentives at a regional level rather than creating adversarial, counter productive squabbling fiefs that keep acting optimally at a local level, but very sub-optimally at a regional level. The regions are also big enough that a much larger portion of people would actually live and work in the same area
Put Menlo, Mountain View & Atherton with Palo Alto and keep it separate as the "mid-peninsula" entity.
Move Sunnyvale, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno and Campbell into the San Jose / Santa Clara group as the "south bay" entity.
Then you have your RWC through San Bruno entity for "north peninsula", and everything from South City through SF get lumped into the "SF" entity. That keeps it relatively simple and puts similar NIMBY categories into like groups (I'm mostly looking at the PA / Menlo / Atherton / Los Altos folks here).
Note I said core area, I didn't mean to include most of the east bay. The areas I was thinking were only in 5 (SF, Marin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda) of the 9 counties
You think everything from Berkeley to Patterson should be under unified government? Everything from Palo Alto to Los Banos? That's not obviously wrong but it's not obviously desirable either.
> Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue
The property owners still pay tax on it don't they? I'm sure it is less lucrative per square foot than commercial development, but I assume it is still better than the revenue from the closed furniture store and parking lot, and after all you need people to patronize businesses.
Perhaps it's something to do with how California has lower property taxes (partially due to Prop. 13) and higher income taxes-- but those income taxes go to Sacramento, not to municipalities.
In other parts of the country, municipal treasuries grow as volume and prices of residential units grow.
From what I've read municipalities dislike residential because of the increased costs, not because of the poor tax revenue. Both commercial and residential can bring it windfall revenues at today's market prices, and Prop 13 applies to commercial property, anyhow. Residential simply has higher infrastructure costs--schools, heavier water & sewage usage, etc.
Plus office complexes don't enrage NIMBYs the way residential projects do. Dense office space equates with rich commuters; dense residential space equates with young and poor people. So commercial pencils out better fiscally, and politically there's less pushback.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "those income taxes go to Scaramento"? I mean the state has to coordinate the money it collects, but doesn't it use that money for state-wide projects like roads, dams, and other infrastructure? I live in Los Angeles and pay CA income tax. I'm perfectly fine with the state using some of that money outside of Los Angeles. I often travel outside of Los Angeles, so I'm getting use out of whatever they make with it (assuming it's not just put into politicians' pockets). What is Sacramento doing with the income tax revenue that you don't like?
The difference between paying $9000 to Sacramento and $1000 to LA or paying $5000 to Sacramento and $5000 to LA.
In the latter system, the local government gets direct control over the spending, as opposed to needing to lobby the state government for funds for road improvements, schools, etc.
For instance, in California, the majority of K-12 funding comes from Sacramento. In most of the rest of the country, the majority of K-12 funding comes from local, largely property, taxes-- exceptions being low-performing schools targeted for improvement with state funds.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "those income taxes go to Scaramento"? I mean the state has to coordinate the money it collects, but doesn't it use that money for state-wide projects like roads, dams, and other infrastructure? I live in Los Angeles and pay CA income tax. I'm perfectly fine with the state using some of that money outside of Los Angeles. I often travel outside of Los Angeles, so I'm getting use out of whatever they make with it (assuming it's not just put into politicians' pockets). What is Sacramento doing with the income tax revenue that you don't like?
The big issue is that cities and counties don't typically collect taxes in California. There are a few statewide organizations (Franchise Tax Board, Board of Equalization) that do instead. There are also tight limits on sales tax (cities can levy up to ~2% beyond the base rate for specific things). Essentially what happens is that the state collects taxes and doles the monies out to cities and counties at their discretion.
California does not have low property taxes. Tax = rate * assessed_value. assessed_value is huge if you purchased during last 7 years and goes up 2% every year
Purchased in the last 7 years is pretty recent. Most home owners bought 15+ years ago. If you're buying within the last decade you're probably paying a transplant premium.
From 1985 to 2008 the median tenure of a family in a home was 6 years. This figure only started going up in recent years, due to housing crisis. Americans have traditionally expected to move house 8-9 times in their adult life. It is certainly not true that "most" people have tenure of 15 years or more. That is the 90th percentile tenure.
AFAICT those are the national figures from a National Association of Realtors (NAR) report. I can't find figures for California.
EDIT: The closest I could find was an ambiguous stat in a CNN article, https://money.cnn.com/2017/04/27/real_estate/home-prices-sel..., which cites an average of a little over 4 years (2000-20007) that might be for San Jose. However, there's wording that suggests such figures are computed from the tenure of sellers, not across all homeowners, in which case the statistic seem useless (imagine one guy selling every two years and nobody else--that would be a 2-year tenture average but in fact nobody but him is moving). Would nice if the NAR report was freely available.
Not in CA - Prop13 + corporate shell board of director transfers means the tax rate never increases, and after 40+ years, that means a lot of properties essentially pay a fraction of the taxes they should.
I don’t think anyone back then could have imagined property values going from say, 30,000 to 3,000,000.
Prop 13 was sold to the voters on a "granny is losing her home because of skyrocketing property taxes" argument. So, yes, I think that a 100x increase in value was predictable.
And, yes, I could see $10 million homes becoming the norm within my lifetime.
Yes, true. But it had a lot of hidden consequences that most actual voters didn't think of. The spirit of the law could be sustainably maintained by closing up applicability to businesses, only letting it apply to primary residences, and reassessing on inheritance
Schools are more expensive than residential property tax raises — this is due to state-mandated limits on property tax rates, rate increases and such (prop 13 related.)
Prop 13 makes it so that revenue from residential doesn't keep pace with costs over time. Parking lots don't really add much in terms of city services costs - no schools, parks, water treatment, etc.
correct, however the city now has to support these residents with police, firefighters, hospitals, and the like. everyone who works in an office goes home and a different city has to worry about it.
The "City Of London" (a small part of central London) has something like this. They have a resident population of <10,000 people, but somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people commute there for work. Companies get to nominate some of their workforce as voters for the council (called "The Corporation Of London").
For historical reasons ("The City" is much older than the UK itself), things are much more complicated than simply "People who work there get to vote", so I'm not sure it's a very comparable situation. The best explanation I've found is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
One day, Prop 13 will not be third rail of politics mostly because home ownership has plummeted among young people, and the older generation is dying off. Younger people are more likely to be renters and get 0 benefit from Prop 13.
We are two whole generations of people into Prop 13. And guess what? Support for it largely stays the same because people still age into their homes, or people pass their homes down to their children who also benefit. Young people
are less likely to vote and more able to move to states with better CoL as well.
Yes, there is already a "split roll" initiative on the 2020 ballot. But I guess my point is tautological: those things which are not impossible are being attempted; most of the things are considered impossible.
Land value tax does not solve this issue. The vast, vast majority of property value in the impacted areas of California is land value, nothing would change.
If land is taxed based on value, many homeowners would be forced to sell or replace their houses with apartment blocks that can earn enough revenue to pay the land value taxes.
"Two others (out of five) had recused themselves because they own property within 1000 feet of the proposed project, and those recusals apparently counted as "no" votes."
I wonder: did they just not know the rules? Or was this a cowardly way to vote no without _actually_ voting no: it seems like if you really wanted to recuse in this situation, you just agree to do paired voting, one no and one yes.
Yes, this seems like a critical part of the story. I take it the actual vote was 2-1 in favor of the permit, but you need at least 3 votes to pass something in San Bruno, no matter what? If so, the city council's rules don't deal appropriately with recusal and those should be changed ASAP.
At the same time, whether or not this project succeeded or failed, the larger story about how hard it is to build housing remains fundamentally true (and broken).
Quorum rules are to make sure you're not holding a sneaky midnight vote with two councilors asleep. Councilors who are present but recused should count toward a quorum.
You might still have a rule that at least two votes are required to pass something (to prevent a 1-0 vote with four recusals). But requiring at least thee votes on a five-member council is requiring an outright majority, which means a recusal is the same as a no vote. That seems unfair.
Is housing "going wrong" simply because it is expensive? Maybe it is overall a good thing that tech companies are now expanding into cities outside the bay area due to high housing costs.
At least housing prices are transparent to those thinking about moving in to the bay area, allowing them to make an informed decision. High traffic, insufficient public transit capacity, and over-capacity public services are less transparent. If we build more housing, do we just push problems elsewhere?
How do we determine the optimal amount of new housing?
Here's an idea we can adopt from literally every other aspect of American society: let the market work. We venerate the free market in all matters except housing, where we've erected a complex system of legal protections for incumbent landlords. The solution to high housing prices is more supply but it is illegal to build housing almost anywhere in the state of California. In SF it is illegal to build a duplex on 90% of the lots. Why? That just exists to enrich incumbents.
I would argue housing reaching the current prices is not good for the overall economy because it creates unreasonable pressure on people who aren't in the tech industry and still have a reason to live in the Bay Area. First, this makes it unreasonably difficult to stay in the region you grew up in unless you get into the top end of the local income brackets. Second, it makes it unreasonably difficult for all kinds of important and necessary, but lower paid, workers to live in the area. A city of nothing but high-end tech workers, with no teachers, police, firefighters, etc. would not be a very nice place to live.
As far as the "optimal amount of new housing," why not just match the number of new households moving into a region? That seems like a good place to start.
Not necessarily. I'd love to live closer to the Bay; if I could get in walking or biking range of CalTrain I could eliminate much or all of my 40 minute highway commute — thus reducing the congestion on the highway. But it would cost me ~$12k/yr. Similarly, if San Mateo had built adequate housing, 70k people might have shorter commutes, requiring less use of roads, transit systems, etc.
Personally, I am also massively for improvements to the various transit systems. If it were easily possible, I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues. We might get the EMUs someday, but I won't be around to see it. The downtown SF transit center finally reopened, I think, but it was a 8? month setback, not to mention it is way over budget. Also, the HOV lanes would be a lot more enticing if there weren't so much traffic in them, and there easily could have been had CA not hadn't out so many HOV stickers. There are SUVs getting stickered that get equivalent gas mileage to my '97. Also, enforcement.
> I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues.
You can get by with 3 tracks. Metra's busy BNSF line is a 3-track mainline, and they manage to launch 21 outgoing trains in the 125 minutes between 3:57 and 6:02. In addition to the ~80ish commuter trains, there's also another ~20 daily Amtrak and freight trains along the same stretch of rail.
I've noticed an increasing trend in West Coast cities where people complain that there's "just too many people". "Tell them to move elsewhere, we're full". It's as if the lessons of Malthusian limits were lost on us. For humanity to continue growing as a species we have to become more efficient with land use.
I just spent 3 weeks in the US Midwest. There is plenty of land to use, thousands of square miles of empty rolling grassy plains. (Ex.: South Dakota averages 11 people per square mile.) Apply a little modern technology (solar/wind, water storage/purification, insulation, Starlink satellite internet) and nobody need complain of population density. There's a startup waiting to happen: self-sufficient high-tech prefab homes plus easy land purchase, organized for instant technocommunities; there are many of us "work from anywhere" types who would jump at the chance made easy.
If people are going to live anything resembling a modern American lifestyle, then gathering people together in cities has much lower environmental impact and lower infrastructure costs than spreading them around South Dakota.
People don’t expect just electricity and plumbing, they also expect modern construction techniques, roads, police, fire suppression, emergency response, schools, full-service hospitals, telecommunications, airports, parcel delivery, ....
A big reason that rural / exurban living is cheap in the USA is that we massively subsidize services for people living very spread out.
South Dakota (and other such places) have most of those things up to reasonable standards, except perhaps the (well-connected) telecoms and airports in some cases. All of those things can come together as the population scales up and demands them.
I agree that gathering people into larger population centers is way more efficient for us and the planet, but I don't think anyone's arguing for us all to spread out on 10 acre farmsteads.
The middle ground is just to build more decently-sized cities in all of the vast available land. Why fight for overpriced artificially scarce land in San Francisco when there are 20 other SF-equivalent cities a state or two away (existing ones, or ones that could be hypothetically built). "Location, location, location" has got to stop being the reason people choose a city.
As a side bonus: by moving a bunch of coastal persons back into the flyover country, you're re-exporting newer cultural norms into those backwaters, perhaps enough to cause meaningful cultural and political reform in places that sorely need it!
>"Location, location, location" has got to stop being the reason people choose a city.
Why? I want to live where I get to do the things I enjoy. I would say most people I know prefer temperate, low humidity weather, access to fresh fruits and vegetables, beaches, mountains, lakes, good water quality and security, etc. The places that have these features will cost the most, since more people will be bidding up the price.
Consider the environmental transparency: instead of utterly devastating an environmental region as does cities, encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres, the high-efficiency home sporting solar roof & rainwater collection, wireless/satellite high-bandwidth internet, home & prolific electric car chargers, optimized Amazon/etc delivery, home/neighborhood schooling, work-from-home norm, etc. Environmental impact? between normalizing practically everything environmentalists call for (I'm not one), and there being not much of an environment to impact (have you seen the Dakotas?), the neo-futuristic American lifestyle can be achieved while minimizing environmental footprint/impact without the hideous expense & annoyance of overpopulated cities.
I think you massively overestimate the rural "subsidies". Make it easy to move rural and "go green" with minimal regulations, and you may find the problems nearly solve themselves.
You still need to give those people roads, maybe even sewer rather than having them use a horrible septic tank. They will probably want internet as well...and not the crappy satellite variety. And schools...ya, that’s a lot of bussing.
Western Washington state subsidizes Eastern Washington state greatly, and that isn’t even as sparse as South Dakota (or as I like to call it, Tropical Dakota).
There are 57.5 million square miles of land on Earth, including mountains, deserts, rainforests, national parks, tundra, and Antarctica. There are currently 7.4 billion people. This works out to ~4.9 acres per person of land of any type.
World arable land is ~26.2 million square miles, or about 2.2 acres per person. At 11 billion people (projection world population peak by ~2100, you get about 1.5 acres of arable land per person. There is literally, physically not enough space on Earth to put your plane into action.
I like nature, but I think you underestimate the subsidies given for rural development and infrastructure and just how unsustainable our development style in the US is.
Strong Towns notes that the real cost of spreading out is all the infrastructure you need to maintain.
Running water? Gotta run the pipes further.
Road access? Gotta pave (and maintain) more road
Power? Same thing
Plus having decent response times for emergency services, quick commute to things like groceries as you mentioned.
Not to mention having critical mass for a commercial district with any sort of variety within reasonable distances of each other to compete and cross-pollinate.
But they ignore the risks of infill where infrastructure approaches capacity. And much of the infrastructure dates back a century or more. As you infill, demand for water/sewer/gas/electricity increases.
Roll it out in say Rugby, ND and you'll even have an Empire Builder stop right there, with service to Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago!
Looked. Prolific lakefront opportunities, lots of suitable roads in place. Base town already there. LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). Just need someone to (profitably!) take on making it easy to move there.
I grew up out there. Lots of those 100k+ jobs are oil jobs. It's hard work, even if you aren't working directly on the drilling rigs.
It's incredibly easy to move there. My hometown of ~1,400 has something like a couple dozen vacant properties right now which you could probably buy for $150k or less because all the townies are moving out to the lake. But once you're there, there aren't a lot of good paying local jobs, there is very little to no culture, very few amenities. Not much to do unless you're into hunting and motorcycles. There's a reason it's sparsely populated.
> LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living).
They don't even have to be in the state, right? Because the core concept was that a remote-working code-slinger could live anywhere.
Another neat point about Rugby: it's apparently got gigabit ethernet service through North Dakota Telephone Co, although you'll pay $220/mo for that service.
I gave in-state jobs to show there is a tech environment. Indeed, the goal is to promote remote work, make living there point-and-click easy, and attract a critical mass of introverts who want open spaces and who, by simply being there en masse, attract a growing population.
Absolutely. Part of the solution is to figure out how to disaggregate knowledge economies. Why so many mostly digital companies insist on in-office work is absolutely beyond me.
I'd kind of like to go to rural nowheresville, live cheap, and still make tech money. But my parents are here, my wife has health issues, and my kids need decent colleges.
We're getting to the point where maybe the work part works. College may be able to be fully remote fairly soon (Western Governors University is there already, but only has select majors). Specialized doctors, though... that might be a bit harder.
I mean, yes, you can do "face to face" via Skype. You can't do blood tests that way, though...
I grew up in rural nowheresville and went to a good college across the country, but that's not necessary. Every single state has acceptable state colleges, if your children cannot bear doing their own laundry :)
I think it's because our telecomm tech still sucks. It's not as good as real life and it has bugs.
Until we can smoothly emulate meatspace with VR, I don't think you can replace face-to-face interaction. If you can't do that, then people will still want to be close to jobs and similar businesses, so they'll continue to urbanize in a natural distribution.
And even if you had your new VR tech with enough bandwidth to run it nicely, you'd still need to be able to provide it to your offworld coloni--I mean rural exclaves.
I think that until you're able to emulate meatspace in every aspect with VR, you cannot replace face-to-face.
Economic clusters aren't just valuable for people being in the same office. They produce value because people and ideas meet in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and backyards. All of this is stuff you'd need to replace to "disaggregate the knowledge economy".
This is not something you can accomplish with GitHub and teleconferencing.
Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius.
The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it.
There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.
What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point?
> The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces
I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something.
Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
No that's exactly what I mean, you read "terraforming" and took it too far. The parent was saying that, the general conclusion is making housing smaller and smaller. Today's apartment buildings will be too big as the population grows and we'll have to fit more people in more limited amounts of space. This is assuming several things, that we won't be able to build tall buildings, that we won't be able to go on another planet, or one of the many other things that can come in the far future.
The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.
Whatever "solution" you come up with would obviously be better if shared amongst a reasonable number of humans.
That's my main point, not what the solution looks like.
Tall buildings are inherently communal.
Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader.
We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that.
My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.
Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.
You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK.
For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.
You're not solving the problem. There is no shortage of space for the future 11 billion humans. The big problem is the centralization of companies within few top tier cities without a corresponding increase in housing for the (locally) growing population.
It's fundamentally ridiculous to just have everyone that "matters" live in the same city or small group of cities.
That's what people seem to be talking about here. In the UK it's London, in the US it's SF, NYC and a few others.
If "pack everyone into skyscrapers and have them rent their Logan's Run existence" is the model for the entire economy I'm honestly quite sad about that.
Network effects are real. You can't wish them out of existence; it simply doesn't work that way. Inevitably some cities will be better at some things than other cities, and that advantage snowballs.
A huge amount of US crop land is dedicated to livestock feed. I'm usually skeptical of market based solutions, but an omnivorous diet will probably become a luxury (middle-class people will have a generally herbivorous diet, with occasional meat for special occasions) before factory farming becomes the only way to feed the masses.
While simultaneously snidely implying that these unwashed peasants will never understand our progressive ways while forcing them to live in environments that needs fossil fuel fueled AC and heating instead of somewhere like the coast which needs neither.
I mean if they really mean they don't want to build anything then let's talk. It's a policy that can work, it's worked great in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for example.
But they'll have to stop building massive office buildings if so.
Not only that, the people who say that fail to realize that population control will simply replace a housing crisis with a demographic crisis. We're going to need a lot of people to care for the aging boomers as they enter their retirement years. The boomers don't realize that one of the groups most hurt by their policies will be themselves.
The population physically cannot grow limitlessly so there must be a point at which you level off.
If you wait longer you're increasing the number of people that have to suffer during the transition period and increasing the ecological load of the stable population's lifestyle.
Signs point to the 10 billionth (concurrently living) human being never being born, birth rates have begun to stabilize worldwide as more countries modernize. Remember, more educated populations with better health care reproduce less.
It’s not an issue of limitless growth of the population, it’s an issue of the population consolidating into a smaller footprint (which from an ecological perspective is a Good Thing) and stupid policies blocking it from happening.
Only if they want a first-world lifestyle, though.
Cut out meat, suburban lawns, and the cars that go with them, and the earth could support 10B people right now, at the living standards of a typical Millenial in a cosmopolitan metropolis.
Unfortunately, there's pretty good indications that most people on earth want those meats, suburban lawns, and cars, so I think it's more likely we'll get war instead. But it's totally doable, at a standard of living that people will grumble at but could abide.
If you can get enough of your like-minded friends to settle an area that doesn't have many of the desirable resources that'll be fought over (water, fertile land, nice climate) and doesn't have many people who do want those things, probably. Just be Switzerland.
Debatable, a large issue is land use and for all the land we have here in the US alone large swathes of it are used for single family homes promoting horrible density. We dump carbon into the air, have less arable land, and destroy more natural habitats than necessary because of poor planning and regulation.
There is more issues to be solved, yes - but reversing wasteful land use is a HUGE component of preserving our planet and quality of life.
I don't think people fully understand just what failure of the social safety net actually means. Without population growth, Social Security and Medicare collapse. Even worse, government pensions in the United States are near insolvent already. A steep decline in population growth will bankrupt many states and municipalities.
Because someone is going to have to care for an aging population. You can look at Japan for what happens when you have zero or negative population growth.
A giant ponzi scheme then? When it finally hits a brick wall, there are going to be that many more people on the earth to suffer the consequences. There has to be another way.
Exactly why student loan debts, insufficient housing, and the gig economy are larger problems than they appear at first glance.
Indebted, underemployed people with just a rented bedroom and dysfunctional social safety nets are, for some odd reason, less eager to procreate.
If you don't have enough grandkids, there won't be enough able-bodied people around to wipe the drool off your generation's collective chin and push your age cohort's wheelchair out to the common room. That's the real cost of pulling up the ladder after yourself. You break the generational compact by denying opportunities to young folks, and they not only won't take care of you in your sunset years, but they won't even exist to do anything for you at any price.
Again, why does it need to grow? There seem to be people in this thread expecting that unchecked human population growth is a sure sign of progress. It isn't. And our current population levels are also unsustainable.
Because otherwise the social safety net--Medicare and Social Security included--will collapse.
Maybe we shouldn't have those programs structured as they are now. But we do, and a shock to the system will result in unprecedented economic misery and social instability. If we want to talk about how to deal with demographic change, there's an important long-term conversation to be had about preserving the social safety net. But any solution that wants to avoid a potentially-catastrophic economic crisis must have a serious, realistic answer for this. Not building housing is a fundamentally unserious policy, driven by a preference for the suburban lifestyle and the fear of change more than any realistic concerns about sustainability.
> For humanity to continue growing as a species we have to become more efficient with land use.
This is an interesting contradiction. I agree we need to be more efficient with land use, but listening to some of the climate change predictions, we're going to need as much land as possible to sustain a population living in areas where agriculture may be limited or impossible.
The intuitions about Malthusian limits are basically correct within car culture. Further scalability is of course possible, but it requires lifestyle changes and a lot of expensive infrastructure building, sacrifices incumbents would rather not make.
What about the way that it currently is makes it better? I've lived in the Bay area and visited NYC several times and would vastly prefer to live in a city designed like NYC but with a Bay area climate.
For some concrete examples: NYC has far better public transit than the peninsula. The block layout of NYC means you can live on a purely residential block but generally never be farther than a few short blocks from a busy commercial area with small shops and restaurants.
I am a huge housing advocate who lives in the Bay Area, but I feel like the only pro housing people I meet are online. All my neighbors turn NIMBY as soon as they buy their home
One of the issues is that we, in the US, don't look at other successful cities or countries and consider implementing their solutions. Then in California, we don't look at other cities or states within the US who have solved similar problems. Tokyo has rational zoning rules that has lead to affordable housing in a growing metropolis. This blog post https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoni... describes the differences in Japanese zoning versus North American zoning.
I'd love to move to CA, but I can't do the housing madness. Just insanity and I don't like that they are hurting other people and their ability to give their kids a better life by pulling up the ladder behind them. My city isn't far behind and it disgusts me. I'd love to see my entire neighborhood rezoned to 4 to 5 stories and get more people in here for the economic boom.
Are there policies anywhere that compensate people for the externalities brought by change? Like, if Alice buys a sunny place with a great view of wide open sky and a park, then Bob buys the places around her, bulldozes the park, and builds 20 story buildings, Alice is now in the dark looking at concrete 10 feet away. It objectively makes Alice's situation worse. Are there any frameworks that compensate Alice for the worsening of her situation?
I could imagine something like making developers pay for blocking views/sky/sun, or for creating noise, or making them pay for the change their development causes in the market value of others' properties. Not exactly that, but something along those lines. I'd bet it could bring some NIMBYs around. They'd no longer lose out when beneficial change happens.
You don't own the view. It's unrealistic to expect that owning a single parcel of land would grant you broad latitude to stop projects anywhere within sight.
If you want a guaranteed good view, go buy a big plot of land way out in the middle of nowhere. You have no right to it in a city; other people's right to have housing is way more important.
Yes, of course in this situation Alice doesn't own the view. But she is made worse off by Bob's developments. I really hope we can agree that Alice's situation is being made worse in a real way here. Further, pre-Bob, the city is mostly full of Alices, so if you want them to not vote against Bob's development, like in OP's article, you might want to align Alice's and Bob's incentives. It's pragmatic.
It also happens to have the nice property of not making Alice worse off when we improve things for everyone else, which morally feels nice.
Either way, the question isn't about the ethics or pragmatics. It's whether this has been tried anywhere.
What about in the opposite direction? What if I build something that makes the neighborhood nicer (like buying a burned out building and replacing it with one that is beautiful and matches its neighbors). It seems like the neighbors should pay me their increased home value, right? If Nancy plants flowers, you have to pay her. It's only fair. It's also ludicrous. Your idea is unimplementable.
It would be simpler if everyone just stopped viewing their home as an investment. The meme that 'homes are investments' is a very recent invention. They not investments; they're depreciating assets.
My perspective is that it's not about the investment. It's about wanting to keep the quality of life you bought into. The investment side only comes in when the large building next to you decreases your quality of life, so you want to sell, which you otherwise wouldn't have wanted to do.
I'd totally buy into a system that incentivizes the positives too. If I'm paying for the amount it affects me by, sure. That's why I pay my taxes. On the other hand, ratchet-like systems by which things can't get worse than they started seem fair too. It's okay to be asymmetric.
Specifically, the example that comes to mind as a fair reason to be pissed (or vote against development/rezoning) is changing something like this:
I had this same question and I was told by people in the industry surrounding people can sue, and have a case. I was asking them why they can't just rezone my neighborhood to 4 story mixed-use, and I was told they would sue over the changes to the view because their lots although more valuable would be blocked from sunlight unless they built up...
It's not peak housing dysfunction, but rather peak entitlement. Why is it important to accommodate people who might want to live in or move to an area despite local incumbents' wishes to not have their neighborhood change? Does everyone have the right to live anywhere they want to live without having to pay the necessary price to be there? For example, does everyone have a right to expect a residence on a Hawaii beachfront? And if not, why is it reasonable to portray a city or state as somehow lacking because it serves existing constituents?
It makes sense that the Bay area would be priced high given its tremendous desirability (which may be tapering off now). If people are willing to work there for low wages, then that is their choice - they have opted into a tradeoff they are OK with, and they/others should not demonize those who were already there and want to preserve their culture/way of life/standards of living. There are numerous affordable places to live in the US that are not [New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc.] - you may not have every big city amenity you want, or maybe even be able to do the exact job you want - but such compromises are also just a regular part of life, aren't they?
To me the reframing of this issue as a policy problem, or a rich versus poor thing, or through use of pejoratives like "NIMBY" serves to distract from the plain truth, which is simply that people are acting in their own self-interests. And yes, this includes the folks who believe they have an unalienable right to live in the Bay area and demand that local governance be replaced with top-down forceful governance (overriding local zoning policy). And the reality is proposals like the one around the missing middle will not solve the underlying issue - it just shifts the timeline around a bit until population growth brings us back to the same point anyways.
> Why is it important to accommodate people who might want to live in or move to an area despite local incumbent's wishes to not have their neighborhood change?
Lets accommodate the people who own land, propose building upon it and meet and all relevant zoning codes and regulations but are denied because reasons:
```Marty Medina said he wished an agreement could have been reached which would have allowed the development to advance but he was unable to detail the specific size and scope of a project that he would have supported. “I don’t regret my decision because I have to live with it,” he said. “But I just wished for a different outcome.”```
...
> through use of pejoratives like "NIMBY" serves to distract from the plain truth, which is simply that people are acting in their own self-interests.
The two "selfs" are not the same. The one group is literal millionaires (home owners) while the other is the working poor/middle class who would prefer to avoid 2 hour commutes.
>and they/others should not demonize those who were already there and want to preserve their culture/way of life/standards of living.
This has a limit, namely, that we who move in are going to vote to change things, and the only way bay area property owners can prevent that is to not get rich off their property by selling or renting it at sky-high prices to new residents. To put their money where their mouth is and not change things, bay area residents need to not be getting rich off the density that they are nominally trying to fight. Otherwise it's just delaying a lost cause - population growth, and a shift in demographics from owners to renters, will inevitably happen barring some big tech recession. Once there are enough renters voting in municipal elections, change will come
"This has a limit, namely, that we who move in are going to vote to change things, and the only way bay area property owners can prevent that is to not get rich off their property by selling or renting it at sky-high prices to new residents."
This argument the two of you are engaged in would be more interesting and relevant, I think, if there were not a literal 50% off sale every 7-10 years in the bay area.
The busts will continue to come and the more you think "it's different this time" the closer we are to one. Conversely, I'll bet I could pick up print publications in the alternative press from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s wherein the same lamentations and accusations are leveled during the run-up to each peak.
I quote the lead article from the OP:
"... helplessness pervades many of my conversations with friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for seven years ..."
Your comment doesn’t address people raised in but prices out of a city.
I guess these days such people will have to either get top jobs, live with parents forever or move town away from their family. Or suffer long commutes from faraway suburbs or near but crime afflicted places.
Now arguably there is a sense of entitlement if anyone expects to live in their home town, and there are people with bigger problems. But it’s not necessarily old timers vs new people thing.
I am not certain who you are assigning "entitlement" to. I believe you are talking about non-residents who gripe about the Bay Area's laws and policies which protect the interests of incumbent residents to the effect of excluding non-residents by setting an artificially high (financial) barrier to entry. Please correct me if I am mistaken.
I find this position extremely odd. I am unaware of other examples of non-federal (county, city, etc.) US governments and respective constituents opposing non-local residents relocating, for any reason (including "culture/way of life/standards of living"). I have seen this before in the Bay Area--I was refused an apartment viewing earlier this year in San Francisco because I am from New York.
I think this relates to the Constitution's "Privileges and Immunities Clause" [0], which an 1832 federal court case, Corfield v. Coryell [1], ruled that all US citizens enjoy the right "to reside in any other state...; to take, hold and dispose of property, either real or personal; and an exemption from higher taxes or impositions that are paid by the other citizens of the state." I am not aware of any Bay Area laws which explicitly violate any of these rights. However, I do not see how Prop 13, which "prohibit[s] reassessment of value... except in cases of (a) change in ownership," required for non-renting non-locals, "or (b) completion of new construction," [2] i.e. new housing developments, does not indirectly violate non-residents' "exemption from higher taxes." Note that I have zero law experience, I just googled "discrimination based on state of residence."
Paradoxically, advances in transport and comms tech seem to increase rather than decrease hub concentration. Greater friction and more need for local presence might reverse the trend.
If you notice how new york and surrounding area is supported by very good transportation. West coast does not have that and on top of that there are no huge building being built outside sf. I wonder if this is due to earthquakes. Either way I think this issues and mixed with tech job demand is going to push remote culture more and more.
There is simply no demand from municipalities for more housing. The logical consequence of Proposition 13 is that housing becomes a liability for governments, instead of an asset. Therefore, they forego developing new liabilities, and instead develop new assets, commercial property use.
This article approaches the issue from the preconception that building housing is the best, obvious and inevitable decision for Bay Area communities. Because of this, any obstacles to it must be due either to a) fossilized regulations from a former age; or b) greed and entitlement.
As to a), I find that the democratic process is actually very engaged in making housing decisions. As a resident of Alameda, we are constantly getting new housing approved, because our voting populace happens to support it. In other towns, maybe that's not the case. But the laws and regulations that protect against development are not necessarily byproducts from a former age that are no longer applicable, but in fact still representative of the will of the people. And in any case, the will of the people can change them!
As to b), I think there are great reasons why someone would be against development other than greed and entitlement. If rich and powerful interests (such as Big Tech) threaten to change your way of life, don't you have the right as an American to vote your conscience, even if it goes against the tides of change? Or are we only allowed to vote in a way that would ultimately favor Big Tech in some way? People that think in this way remind me of the current situation in Hong Kong - where it's a "democracy," but you're only allowed to vote for the "approved" candidates. In other words, no democracy at all.
An objection has been raised that people who don't like the tech industry being here can move somewhere else. Well, the same is true for the tech industry itself. In fact, it appears that Big Tech is playing a game of chicken, and banks on the fact that the Bay Area towns will blink first. We have seen this before, where Uber deliberately broke the law by running a commercial car service without paying for the required licenses and permits. Then, they sicced their lawyers on the towns that tried to stop them until people got so enamored of the service they couldn't imagine life without it, and the political will was decidedly in their favor. All in the name of "disruption."
I have no issue ascribing legitimate motives to those who wish not to be "disrupted," and refuse to accept that as an inevitability. What would the answer be to a big corporation belching toxic fumes into the atmosphere? "Well, that's just the march of progress, we all need to adapt?" I didn't think so. Instead, we will continue to put these things to a vote (or fight for our right to do so where we wrongfully can't). That's how we make decisions in America.
It's being overdone. A solid wall of railroad flats (cheezy "luxury" condos) is going up for miles along the Caltrain tracks. Those wooden multistory buildings are the slums of tomorrow.
It's about time for the next Bay Area recession. Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?
I am about to move into one of those and the demand seems very high... very crowded open houses and <1 week turnaround time (par for course for bay area but still). You don't have to live there if you don't want. I don't think they're ever going to be slums but probably will become middle class housing in 10-15 years - only because hopefully sometime before then there will be a sort of zoning/regulatory intervention and developers can finally start building highrise luxury condos
If you want to see slums I can share some pins of places in the East Bay and the hinterlands of SF, and you can tell me if you think midrise condos on the caltrain/camino real corridor in the peninsula will ever look like that. I'll even take out a 15 year bet with you
It's fair to suppose that in the far-off future, midrise high-density housing (the five-over-ones and texas donuts) built cheaply years ago would become some of the least desirable housing around. Unlike with detached housing, rehabilitating the structure is a package deal, so its quality will likely decline until the entire structure is demolished, likely in conjunction with a redevelopment of its lot.
The likely ossification of such midrises shows why incremental, small-scale increases of density, like allowing threeplexes on small lots, is so useful.
We should be building housing for people now though, and heavily discount whatever the heck we think might happen with that housing in 100 years. And what alternative do you think is really guaranteed to age much better anyway?
Haha - only someone in the bay area would say something like this.
I used to live in the "slums" of the bay area back in 2008. Trust me - by now even those slum houses are going for at least 2008 prices before crash and better and the neighborhood I lived in in SF is crazy expensive.
Isn't that where you'd want flats? Nobody wants a SFH next to tracks. Certain types of people (I won't generalise) always seem to want to call apartment buildings "future slums." This almost never materialises. Is it a racial thing for you?
> It's about time for the next Bay Area recession. Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?
Yeah, and every office park that felt empty in the fallout of 2008 is now bursting with businesses and people. Why are you so worried about the threat of a recession and unoccupied land that you don't want to add housing in a region with record homelessness numbers? This feels extremely conservative.
So .. you prefer seeing a derelict furniture store and its empty parking lot in your community than a maybe "cheezy condo" unit, a new grocery store, and some affordable housing units.
Care to explain the motivation for statu quo here?
> No neighborhood should be subjected to radical change.
Is there any dynamic evolutionary system that actually follows these rules? The tech industry is famous for lumbering behemoths that are constitutionally incapable of innovation and then get replaced wholesale by nimble startups. National borders change all at once, in wars or revolutions, rather than incrementally as demographics change. Human beings don't change much after early adulthood; instead they make new humans who replace them when they die. Evolution itself seems to have periods of equilibrium when resources are abundant and nearly every individual survives, followed by abrupt speciation when resources get tight, individuals die off, and populations get isolated from one another.
The only positive example I can think of is democracy, which is specifically designed to enable gradual change so that radical change doesn't happen, and yet still frequently gets party realignments, charismatic strongmen, and the occasional revolution.
I worry that this philosophy sounds great precisely because it's not how the world works. Human beings are really bad at noticing or reacting to gradual change; it tends to pile up until it becomes too big to ignore, and then rapidly reaches a tipping point and crisis where the newly strong force out the weak. This is undesirable, but also seems largely unavoidable.