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"People aren't concerned their cute neighborhood is going to look like Hong Kong. They're concerned they won't see the rapid appreciation of their assets " You

"People aren't concerned their cute neighborhood is going to look like Hong Kong. They're concerned they won't see the rapid appreciation of their assets " You assert this as if it's true for all people. But it's really really not. I actually do not want to live in an urban area. I am worried my cute neighborhood will turn into hong kong. As the article says, we are going from suburban to urban with nothing in between. I don't actually give a crap about rapid appreciation of my home or anything else like that. People who actually can afford multi-million dollar houses can usually can afford to diversify, and with such low mortgage rates, it pretty much makes no sense to tie large amounts of equity in a home and hope for rapid appreciation. It's a very risky investment strategy. When most of the area was orchards, and some of the first development restrictions were passed, it was not about property values. I also don't think acting like yours is the only acceptable viewpoint, and nobody else could possibly have a valid concern, is going to get any of these issues solved. So, rather than just blindly assert what everyone's concerns and views are, and dismiss them out of hand, maybe you should try to have a well-reasoned discussion? (and FWIW, i'm actually not anti-development, i'm anti-people who don't actually want to have a reasoned discussion about things, and instead, just want to assert whatever view they've come up with. I'm honestly surprised at the arrogance in this thread).

muninn_ 10y ago
Good comment and perspective. I don't live in the Bay Area, but I actually hope that the problem gets worse and that non-development continues. It can/does keep some engineers here in areas like where I live. The primary issue the Bay Area has is that, as you mentioned, there is no in-between. It's either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards. What the area actually needs is more mixed-use development neighborhoods.
- eitally 10y ago
  By "gigantic" I'm sure you really mean is the 1200-1800sqft tract ranches from the 1940s-60s that consume the majority of the developed suburban land, right, because there are almost 0 gigantic houses in the region compared to literally every other major metro in the country. And that's one of the problems: too many people stretched their budgets to buy crappy $1m houses, they can't really afford to do it again, and prop 13 (plus impending rising mortgage rates) actively disincentivize anyone from selling after they manage to get into this market, no matter what their house is like.
- rsync 10y ago
  "The primary issue the Bay Area has is that, as you mentioned, there is no in-between. It's either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards. What the area actually needs is more mixed-use development neighborhoods." The Bay Area is a very large, very diverse place and has plenty of the inbetween of which you speak. In fact, right in the epicenter of this particular Silicon Valley - in downtown Mountain View, for instance, there is quite a bit of medium density, two and three story apartment complexes centered around the small downtown. Or take the N-Judah all the way to the beach - that's filled with two and three story apartment buildings. Certainly, many people believe that's the problem - it should be four and five story apartment buildings - but it is really not true at all that the Bay Area is "either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards".
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    The zoning in the Sunset is outrageous. If you take the N Judah, almost the whole neighborhood (except for a few tiny bits) is zoned for very low density residential. Look at all the light yellow on the zoning map: http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf Upzoning a significant percentage of the Sunset and providing faster public transit from there to other parts of town is in my opinion one of the best things SF could do for local housing prices.
shostack 10y ago
Can you explain how low rates make tying up equity in a home risky?
- Retric 10y ago
  People can only pay X mortgage. With rates at 5% that makes the max house they can afford ~20x, at 10% the max house ~= 10x. Thus increasing rates lowers housing prices. Inflation has a role here making everything complicated. But, you are generally better off to buy when rates are high and refinance or sell when rates are low.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    And rates are at historic lows, with the Fed intending to keep moving them up, which means anyone who has been stretching to afford a home is going to be underwater shortly.
    - twelve40 10y ago
      Isn't a typical mortgage rate fixed? If I have a fixed rate that is withing my budget and I like the place, I can keep paying for decades, and the market ups and downs become purely virtual to me in the long run.
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        As long as you're not attempting to buy or sell, correct.
  - scharfstevenm 10y ago
    Yes, it's best to buy when rates are very high, then refinance when they fall. Our last refinance was at 2 5/8%. One big issue with Prop 13 is that people that would normally sell and move to a smaller place, or to another location, don't, because of the property tax consequences. Prop 90 partially addressed this, but most counties opted out because they did not want an influx of new residents paying artificially low property taxes.
rdlecler1 10y ago
The problem is, is that these cities are approving the creation of more office space (local jobs) without increasing housing. If you're building commercial property there should be a plan to create additional housing.
- scharfstevenm 10y ago
  That is the reason for the ABAG housing mandates. It's why Palo Alto capped commercial office space. It's why residents of Cupertino think that 2 million square feet of office space at Vallco is short-sighted. If you look at ABAGs desired jobs/housing ratios, on which they base their mandates, it's clear that it's insane to build so much office space since there is no land on which to build sufficient housing to offset the office space. But of course that's not the problem of the developer of the office space, it's the problem of the city, and the problem doesn't happen for years, or even a decade or two, after the office space is occupied. It's all short-term planning done by city councils that are owned by developers.
jdavis703 10y ago
So would you support building over all the surface parking lots in downtown Palo Alto and replacing then with 4-floor apartments that match the height of the existing office buildings? What about townhomes or row homes a few blocks from downtown? I wasn't advocating for building 50-story behemoths. But in Palo Alto and Menlo Park they won't even build a proper street grid, so all traffic to the East Bay is basically forced down the one lane Middlefield Road. Is having through streets also not suburban? And I don't think it's arrogance when people are wasting 4 hours a day commuting into a city simply because the city refuses to build enough housing for everyone.
woah 10y ago
Either you're the "landed gentry" referred to in an earlier post, or you bought your home recently at an outrageous price and would be way under water if it were priced closer to it's actual value. Either way, you are strongly incentivized to support the system that squeezes renters and newcomers to enrich longtime landowners. Whether or not it was part of a deliberate investment strategy is irrelevant.
chetanahuja 10y ago
"You assert this as if it's true for all people. But it's really really not. I actually do not want to live in an urban area. I am worried my cute neighborhood will turn into hong kong." "As the article says, we are going from suburban to urban with nothing in between." Hey I live in one of said cute neighborhoods too and love it. But that line about "nothing in between" is so much dishonest claptrap. A simple drive down the peninsula will show you every shade of (sub)urbanism. From 2 acre lots of Hillsborough to fairly urban (and still... way way way less dense than HK) Redwood city. There's a right balance to be found somewhere in there. The alarmists in my own neighborhood as well as places like Palo Alto want to freeze the current snapshot of their areas as their sense of "perfection". That's disastrous in the long term if we want to continue being a viable place for "immigrants" (both from inside and outside the country) to come here and keep the area vibrant like it has been until now.
scharfstevenm 10y ago
A lot of people like a house in the suburbs with a two car garage. Should the fact that more people want to live in their town force them to have their house torn down so high-density housing can be built?

muninn_ 10y ago

Good comment and perspective. I don't live in the Bay Area, but I actually hope that the problem gets worse and that non-development continues. It can/does keep some engineers here in areas like where I live. The primary issue the Bay Area has is that, as you mentioned, there is no in-between. It's either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards. What the area actually needs is more mixed-use development neighborhoods.

eitally 10y ago
By "gigantic" I'm sure you really mean is the 1200-1800sqft tract ranches from the 1940s-60s that consume the majority of the developed suburban land, right, because there are almost 0 gigantic houses in the region compared to literally every other major metro in the country. And that's one of the problems: too many people stretched their budgets to buy crappy $1m houses, they can't really afford to do it again, and prop 13 (plus impending rising mortgage rates) actively disincentivize anyone from selling after they manage to get into this market, no matter what their house is like.
rsync 10y ago
"The primary issue the Bay Area has is that, as you mentioned, there is no in-between. It's either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards. What the area actually needs is more mixed-use development neighborhoods." The Bay Area is a very large, very diverse place and has plenty of the inbetween of which you speak. In fact, right in the epicenter of this particular Silicon Valley - in downtown Mountain View, for instance, there is quite a bit of medium density, two and three story apartment complexes centered around the small downtown. Or take the N-Judah all the way to the beach - that's filled with two and three story apartment buildings. Certainly, many people believe that's the problem - it should be four and five story apartment buildings - but it is really not true at all that the Bay Area is "either skyscrapers or gigantic houses with expansive yards".
- jacobolus 10y ago
  The zoning in the Sunset is outrageous. If you take the N Judah, almost the whole neighborhood (except for a few tiny bits) is zoned for very low density residential. Look at all the light yellow on the zoning map: http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf Upzoning a significant percentage of the Sunset and providing faster public transit from there to other parts of town is in my opinion one of the best things SF could do for local housing prices.

shostack 10y ago

Can you explain how low rates make tying up equity in a home risky?

Retric 10y ago
People can only pay X mortgage. With rates at 5% that makes the max house they can afford ~20x, at 10% the max house ~= 10x. Thus increasing rates lowers housing prices. Inflation has a role here making everything complicated. But, you are generally better off to buy when rates are high and refinance or sell when rates are low.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  And rates are at historic lows, with the Fed intending to keep moving them up, which means anyone who has been stretching to afford a home is going to be underwater shortly.
  - twelve40 10y ago
    Isn't a typical mortgage rate fixed? If I have a fixed rate that is withing my budget and I like the place, I can keep paying for decades, and the market ups and downs become purely virtual to me in the long run.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      As long as you're not attempting to buy or sell, correct.
- scharfstevenm 10y ago
  Yes, it's best to buy when rates are very high, then refinance when they fall. Our last refinance was at 2 5/8%. One big issue with Prop 13 is that people that would normally sell and move to a smaller place, or to another location, don't, because of the property tax consequences. Prop 90 partially addressed this, but most counties opted out because they did not want an influx of new residents paying artificially low property taxes.

rdlecler1 10y ago

The problem is, is that these cities are approving the creation of more office space (local jobs) without increasing housing. If you're building commercial property there should be a plan to create additional housing.

scharfstevenm 10y ago
That is the reason for the ABAG housing mandates. It's why Palo Alto capped commercial office space. It's why residents of Cupertino think that 2 million square feet of office space at Vallco is short-sighted. If you look at ABAGs desired jobs/housing ratios, on which they base their mandates, it's clear that it's insane to build so much office space since there is no land on which to build sufficient housing to offset the office space. But of course that's not the problem of the developer of the office space, it's the problem of the city, and the problem doesn't happen for years, or even a decade or two, after the office space is occupied. It's all short-term planning done by city councils that are owned by developers.

jdavis703 10y ago

So would you support building over all the surface parking lots in downtown Palo Alto and replacing then with 4-floor apartments that match the height of the existing office buildings? What about townhomes or row homes a few blocks from downtown? I wasn't advocating for building 50-story behemoths. But in Palo Alto and Menlo Park they won't even build a proper street grid, so all traffic to the East Bay is basically forced down the one lane Middlefield Road. Is having through streets also not suburban? And I don't think it's arrogance when people are wasting 4 hours a day commuting into a city simply because the city refuses to build enough housing for everyone.

woah 10y ago

Either you're the "landed gentry" referred to in an earlier post, or you bought your home recently at an outrageous price and would be way under water if it were priced closer to it's actual value. Either way, you are strongly incentivized to support the system that squeezes renters and newcomers to enrich longtime landowners. Whether or not it was part of a deliberate investment strategy is irrelevant.

chetanahuja 10y ago

"You assert this as if it's true for all people. But it's really really not. I actually do not want to live in an urban area. I am worried my cute neighborhood will turn into hong kong." "As the article says, we are going from suburban to urban with nothing in between." Hey I live in one of said cute neighborhoods too and love it. But that line about "nothing in between" is so much dishonest claptrap. A simple drive down the peninsula will show you every shade of (sub)urbanism. From 2 acre lots of Hillsborough to fairly urban (and still... way way way less dense than HK) Redwood city. There's a right balance to be found somewhere in there. The alarmists in my own neighborhood as well as places like Palo Alto want to freeze the current snapshot of their areas as their sense of "perfection". That's disastrous in the long term if we want to continue being a viable place for "immigrants" (both from inside and outside the country) to come here and keep the area vibrant like it has been until now.

scharfstevenm 10y ago

A lot of people like a house in the suburbs with a two car garage. Should the fact that more people want to live in their town force them to have their house torn down so high-density housing can be built?