7 ms·

While not to the exact same scale, rents in NYC and Boston have been doing similar. In Somerville, apartments are roughly double what they were 10 years ago by

• evanpw 11y ago
  Increase supply (e.g., build more housing) or reduce demand (e.g., find a way to make it less important for people who want to work together to live nearby). Those are really the only two choices.
  • tibbon 11y ago
    In Camberville, we're increasing supply... of luxury condos. So far, I haven't seen it make a dent in the market. Fort Point in Boston went from having almost no housing to hundreds of new units... yet I called one of the buildings and found their 1BRs to be $3,200/month. The public transit infrastructure, and road infrastructure, in Boston and SF is insufficient to make living further away ok for most people. But again, that basically just creates neighborhoods of software/biotech people and nothing else, which feels terrible.
    • rhino369 11y ago
      Even luxury places increase supply in general. People flock to the newest most luxurious places. So when a new one opens up, it decreases demand elsewhere. It might also push the rent up in your neighorhood/suburb, but across the metro area as a whole, adding luxury housing lowers prices.
  • Tiktaalik 11y ago
    The one other thing is to dramatically improve public transportation connections so that areas of the region that are currently not convenient for many people to live in become viable neighbourhoods.
    • tibbon 11y ago
      In the Boston area, building a few miles of subway is a 30+ year project (see: Green Line Extension) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_Extension
      • timdierks 11y ago
        In NYC, it takes 87 years and $4.5 billion to build 1.5 miles of transit: the 2nd Ave subway was originally approved in 1929 and the first phase won't open until 2016 at the earliest.
  • shimon 11y ago
    Transit improvement is catastrophically stalled. Improved rapid transit options could plausibly expand the area where Boston-area workers can live and have a reasonable commute by 100 to 300%. But these require approval from (especially in MA) dozens of towns. Plus we can barely keep the subways operational.
• nosuchthing 11y ago
  Vertical space, and or sedan sized mobile homes. ala Volkswagen's Westfalia Honda Element conversions Toyota's old mini-van (MasterAce ?) http://www.designboom.com/design/cornelius-comanns-bufalino/ http://www.designboom.com/design/cornelius-comanns-bufalino/ http://eliomotors.com/ http://eliomotors.com/ but in camper form?
  • tibbon 11y ago
    I do think building up is a pretty good idea. I just wish it all currently in the Boston area wasn't luxury condos. And the existence of those luxury condos hasn't seemed to deflate the demand on other housing yet. Maybe in time?
    • BostonEnginerd 11y ago
      It's amazing how many luxury units are going in. Who the heck is living in them?
      • nosuchthing 11y ago
        Derivatives.
    • nosuchthing 11y ago
      Luxury condos unfortunately don't produce long term jobs, so I'm not too sure what the plan is with the SF/NYC/LA/Boston/London/etc luxury condo building boom that's going on right now.. If I am to believe the self fulfilling prophecy of "the market cycle", it's just a game of hot potato.
• nilkn 11y ago
  Cities are expensive for a relatively simple reason: the number of people who want to live there exceeds the number of open spots. Two immediate solutions: (1) Create compelling reasons for someone to not want to live in this one particular city. For instance, allow one to work remotely. There are hundreds if not thousands of amazing cities to be enjoyed, not to mention the vast stretches of rural land for those who don't want to live in a city at all. (2) Build more housing units in the city. Eliminate zoning restrictions. Stop worrying about protecting the existing homeowners and pay more attention to everyone else. Note that both of these are mostly matters of just convincing people to jump on board the plan. People in general are resistant to remote work (especially outside the software world, but even inside it), and some cities like San Francisco are extremely hostile towards a vast number of proposals to just build more housing. When you combine the desire to compress an entire industry into one city with a refusal to build more housing units, what result could you possibly expect?
  • seizethecheese 11y ago
    > (1) Create compelling reasons for someone to not want to live in a city. For instance, allow one to work remotely. A lot of folks who work remotely prefer the city since it gives them all the amenities that an office usually would like food (restaurants), gyms, cafes and an environment with a lot of people.
    • nilkn 11y ago
      And there are thousands of cities in the world in which they can enjoy all those amenities. (I edited the above quote now to reflect this.)
      • seiji 11y ago
        NYC is the only city in the world with a 24 hour subway system every day. Many people enjoy not having a car: especially the very poor (can't afford car anywhere), so NYC is full of very poor; and they very middle (can't afford car in NYC), so NYC is full of very middle and everybody fights for the same resources.
• jhpriestley 11y ago
  A stiff land tax within major cities would probably be the most comprehensive solution. It would incentivize intensive use of land, leading to denser housing (compared to a property tax, which incentivizes the opposite); it would also make urban land a less compelling investment, leading to lower prices.
  • nosuchthing 11y ago
    Taxing used property in dense areas would likely just increase the costs further, although I assume that might be intended in the long run to push for more use of vertical space. More useful would be a tax which increases the longer a vacancy exists on unused lots, vacant or secondary apartments/housing, and property sales that have been unsold for X number of days. Real estate speculation and housing as financial instruments are basically contemporary feudalism.
    • tibbon 11y ago
      I like a tax on vacant property. Especially commercial property.
• bradleyjg 11y ago
  If you have a limited amount of area and many many people that want to live there, something has to give. You can build up (which SF largely refuses to do) but even that has its limits and its costs. The larger answer is changing things so not everyone wants to live in the same place. Figuring out how more people could work remotely while remaining productive would have a huge payoff in this area. But I don't think that's particularly amenable to a wholly technical solution. It's more of a problem of applied psychology in the form of management techniques. From a different direction, considerably better urban and regional mass transit would help. In the bay area, that's made much more difficult by the relatively small geographic size of SF proper as compared to the metro area. Compare NYC which incorporated its inner suburbs a century ago. Though on the upside at least all of the bay area is in one state.
  • sampo 11y ago
    > You can build up (which SF largely refuses to do) but even that has its limits and its costs. To be honest, San Francisco is nowhere near any reasonable density limits. Population densities: San Francisco 7 000/km² Paris 21 000/km² Manhattan 27 000/km² Kowloon Walled City 1 255 000/km² Building with Manhattan density, SF could have 4 times its current population. If it wanted to.
    • Tiktaalik 11y ago
      You don't even have to build up by much. Paris largely tops out at about 6 stories high. They just build a lot of 6 story buildings.
    • tracker1 11y ago
      I think you've hit the nail on the head... they really don't want to. The people that live there like it there, and don't want it to become a city of sky scrapers. I wish someone would wake up and try to build out from a nice city somewhere else with room to grow. Boise, ID and Reno, NV come to mind... For that matter grow existing cities with infrastructure and room for growth. Some of the latter is happening but not nearly to the extent that it has in SF. There are plenty of cities that have room, and would appreciate seeing hundreds of thousands of tech jobs move into the area in a couple decades, without the population constraints SF is seeing.
• bbcbasic 11y ago
  1. Live and work somewhere sane. 2. Buy some popcorn. 3. Wait for the bubble to burst. 4. Actually you don't care if the bubble will burst because you are not living in SF.
  • rconti 11y ago
    Today it doesn't matter. As long as money remains cheap (and the Fed keeps insisting on it), it will fuel property prices in SF and other desirable places. If you buy a place in San Francisco in 2 years, THEN maybe you'll go negative for a bit. After the last bubble "burst", you think you could scoop up some cheap property in SF? Nope. Maybe prices dropped 10-15%, and now they're higher than they ever were. People are flocking to cities, which means the suburbs are the ones that get hammered when prices drop.
    • bbcbasic 11y ago
      Don't get me wrong - I am not betting against property (real-estate) investment. Always a good bet for the long term in great cities. What I am saying is why bust a gut as a sub $150k coder to see all your money burned up as rent in SF when you can go to a.n.other city have a better quality of life, more expendable income, the chance to buy instead of rent, etc.
    • aliston 11y ago
      Prices in SF fell by more than 40%: https://us.spindices.com/indices/real-estate/sp-case-shiller-ca-san-francisco-home-price-index https://us.spindices.com/indices/real-estate/sp-case-shiller... In established neighborhoods, it was probably more like 20%, but there were still foreclosures and a lot of deals to be had. Even 4-5 years ago, there were condo foreclosures near the Caltrain station at 4th and king going for around 300-400k. Granted, SOMA has improved as a neighborhood more than pretty much anywhere else in the city, but it is a myth that property values don't fall in SF. They do and have every 7-10 years (91, 01, 08...), though the long-term trajectory is obviously up.
• sampo 11y ago
  > quickly create scalable affordable housing in major cities? Even in Finland, with relatively good salaries for construction workers, and high quality buildings insulated to withstand Finnish winters, building an apartment building usually costs under 2000€/m2 ($165/sq-ft). It is not the construction that makes apartments expensive, it is the price of land in a good location. So the problem is mostly political. Existing residents usually strongly oppose building new homes for new people in their neighborhoods. Especially if you'd like to build higher and denser than the area previously was. And the potential future residents do not have a right to vote, only the existing residents can vote. And even if you can buy a piece of land, city politicians/bureaucrats may not give you permission to build as much square footage as you might want. Because the want to "preserve the character of the neighborhood". So usually cities do all kind of kicking and screaming to resist growth.
  • trhway 11y ago
    >Especially if you'd like to build higher and denser than the area previously was. because typical "higher and denser" coupled with bottom-line optimization by the developer results in making crappy, less livable environment. More people means need for more transportation, more parks ... - the developer in cooperation with the city could build parks inside/on-top the new high-rise, build new transportation options, etc.., yet it would cut into the bottom-line. Classical tragedy of commons. So existing residents resist more load on the existing commons, yet i think it would be different if new construction was creating more commons and/or really improving existing.
  • tracker1 11y ago
    Is that to own, or rent? If that's rent, then that's insanely high... If it's to own (assuming modest mgt fees), that's not too bad. Right now my rent in a fairly nice place in Arizona (Tempe) is $1400/month. Similar places in SF/NYC are 3-4 times that much.
    • sampo 11y ago
      > Is that to own, or rent? To own. Apartments in central areas of Helsinki typically sell between 4000€/m2 to 8000/m2. So the cost of just constructing the building would be something between 20% to 40-50% of the total price. It is the land price, not the construction, that dominates apartment prices in any city.