3 ms·

At this point, #2 almost certainly won't help, but merely draw population from parasitical cities where jobs far exceed housing (mountain view, palo alto, menlo

by x0x0 11y ago

At this point, #2 almost certainly won't help, but merely draw population from parasitical cities where jobs far exceed housing (mountain view, palo alto, menlo park, etc.) In this way, housing activists in SF are right to fight private buses: they enable companies located on the peninsula to dump their housing problem on SF. I also think this is part of the reason people in SF (rationally, in a purely self-interested sense) oppose building: the amount of increased housing on offer won't help them. So they bear the costs of living in a construction zone with zero benefits. Building 200k homes over the next 5 years would help, but no-one is in any way contemplating that. And even beyond the housing fight itself, the infrastructure here can't handle it.

randycupertino 11y ago
Totally agree with your comments about the Bay Area screwing over people with Prop 13. I'm just amazed at how much better quality of life you get on the east coast vs the Bay Area- way more bang for the buck and also easier commutes and better public transit. My friends who live in NYC metro area all have gorgeous estately 4bedroom 5 bathroom houses for between 500-700k in nice little commuter towns close to NYC like Rye and Stanford with simple commutes to NYC on the trains. Whereas we make more than they do we are stuck scraping together 1.4 million for an ugly crack shack in redwood city. Seriously my wife and I looked at this piece of crap last weekend: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Redwood-City/3452-Page-St-94063/home/1808636 https://www.redfin.com/CA/Redwood-City/3452-Page-St-94063/ho... Not only was it a mold filled fucking dump, it was located in the hood with no public transit nearby. meanwhile my friends who work in NYC are able to get something gorgeous like this for way less $$ and can walk to downtown and a train station: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Norwalk/15203-Sylvanwood-Ave-90650/home/7790162 https://www.redfin.com/CA/Norwalk/15203-Sylvanwood-Ave-90650... or even if you want to get more expensive, this is still cheaper than the Redwood City dump, you get two stories, a deck and giant yard and you are right next to MetroNorth: https://www.redfin.com/NY/Rye/200-Highland-Rd-10580/home/20115889 https://www.redfin.com/NY/Rye/200-Highland-Rd-10580/home/201...
tptacek 11y ago
Multiplying the growth of new housing units in SF by some low integer multiple won't decrease the cost of housing in SF? Can you go into more detail about the logic there? The infrastructure in San Francisco (you mean, I assume, the roads and the public transit system) are abysmal, but they've been that way for a long time. It's possible that the Muni has actually improved since the second dot-com boom; when I lived there, it was a joke.
- x0x0 11y ago
  Cities up and down the peninsula -- MV, PA, etc -- have far more jobs than housing supply and that ratio continues to grow. viz MV approving 3+ million square feet of office space for linkedin, palantir, and google -- and then maybe, possibly, potentially authorizing up to 5k homes. Maybe. It's being discussed. So whenever SF builds housing, some goes to people from SF, and a lot of it goes to people previously renting in very supply constrained markets on the peninsula. Because of the foreign-to-sf buyers, and because new condos are generally of higher quality than much of sf's existing housing stock, and because these new buildings are cheaper than available houses on the peninsula, building more increases demand by bringing in such exogenous buyers. Much of the increase in supply is in condos costing $1.2k +/ft2, ie more than $1mm, which exacerbates the above effects. They also don't help for people who can't afford to spend the roughly $5.5k or so that a $1mm property costs (after $200k downpayment, inclusive of tax and hoa fees.) If you want to bring down house prices in sf, you have to build enough to satisfy pent-up demand from the peninsula, and outrun continued population movement from the whole US into SF. Or force the peninsula to build housing. 5k or 10k homes isn't going to to outrun demand, particularly after years of building virtually no housing in sf.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    The "foreign to SF buyers" (most people who have lived in SF in the past 30 years were probably at some point "foreign to SF") are buying up leases whether SF makes more of them or not. How does increasing the supply of leases do anything but lower prices?
    - 11y ago

by x0x0 11y ago

randycupertino 11y ago

Totally agree with your comments about the Bay Area screwing over people with Prop 13. I'm just amazed at how much better quality of life you get on the east coast vs the Bay Area- way more bang for the buck and also easier commutes and better public transit. My friends who live in NYC metro area all have gorgeous estately 4bedroom 5 bathroom houses for between 500-700k in nice little commuter towns close to NYC like Rye and Stanford with simple commutes to NYC on the trains. Whereas we make more than they do we are stuck scraping together 1.4 million for an ugly crack shack in redwood city. Seriously my wife and I looked at this piece of crap last weekend: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Redwood-City/3452-Page-St-94063/home/1808636 https://www.redfin.com/CA/Redwood-City/3452-Page-St-94063/ho... Not only was it a mold filled fucking dump, it was located in the hood with no public transit nearby. meanwhile my friends who work in NYC are able to get something gorgeous like this for way less $$ and can walk to downtown and a train station: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Norwalk/15203-Sylvanwood-Ave-90650/home/7790162 https://www.redfin.com/CA/Norwalk/15203-Sylvanwood-Ave-90650... or even if you want to get more expensive, this is still cheaper than the Redwood City dump, you get two stories, a deck and giant yard and you are right next to MetroNorth: https://www.redfin.com/NY/Rye/200-Highland-Rd-10580/home/20115889 https://www.redfin.com/NY/Rye/200-Highland-Rd-10580/home/201...

tptacek 11y ago

Multiplying the growth of new housing units in SF by some low integer multiple won't decrease the cost of housing in SF? Can you go into more detail about the logic there? The infrastructure in San Francisco (you mean, I assume, the roads and the public transit system) are abysmal, but they've been that way for a long time. It's possible that the Muni has actually improved since the second dot-com boom; when I lived there, it was a joke.

x0x0 11y ago
Cities up and down the peninsula -- MV, PA, etc -- have far more jobs than housing supply and that ratio continues to grow. viz MV approving 3+ million square feet of office space for linkedin, palantir, and google -- and then maybe, possibly, potentially authorizing up to 5k homes. Maybe. It's being discussed. So whenever SF builds housing, some goes to people from SF, and a lot of it goes to people previously renting in very supply constrained markets on the peninsula. Because of the foreign-to-sf buyers, and because new condos are generally of higher quality than much of sf's existing housing stock, and because these new buildings are cheaper than available houses on the peninsula, building more increases demand by bringing in such exogenous buyers. Much of the increase in supply is in condos costing $1.2k +/ft2, ie more than $1mm, which exacerbates the above effects. They also don't help for people who can't afford to spend the roughly $5.5k or so that a $1mm property costs (after $200k downpayment, inclusive of tax and hoa fees.) If you want to bring down house prices in sf, you have to build enough to satisfy pent-up demand from the peninsula, and outrun continued population movement from the whole US into SF. Or force the peninsula to build housing. 5k or 10k homes isn't going to to outrun demand, particularly after years of building virtually no housing in sf.
- tptacek 11y ago
  The "foreign to SF buyers" (most people who have lived in SF in the past 30 years were probably at some point "foreign to SF") are buying up leases whether SF makes more of them or not. How does increasing the supply of leases do anything but lower prices?
  - 11y ago