5 ms·

Can anyone seriously use the term "Affordable housing" in Berkeley with a straight face? The median home value has just crossed 1 million dollars, which buys yo

Can anyone seriously use the term "Affordable housing" in Berkeley with a straight face? The median home value has just crossed 1 million dollars, which buys you a single floor 2 bedroom bungalow. It is very clear that the current homeowners of Berkeley are just fine with the way things are.

osdiab 9y ago
Unfortunately, the young people who are subject to the rental market are also very politically inactive when it comes to local politics. Berkeley residents - how about next time you protest, focus not only on national politics but also on your own city's issues!!
- jstalin 9y ago
  It's a lot more fun to dress in all black, scream at people, and riot.
- aphextron 9y ago
  And thus we are left to renting out a baby boomer's garden shack for the cost of a mortgage.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    This is their retirement plan.
  - seanp2k2 9y ago
    This is, for those unfamiliar with the situation there, not actually an exaggeration, but literally what one of my friends was doing. It had been converted to a "cottage" and it was one room with a bathroom in the corner. FWIW it was pretty cute, but it was about $2k a month and had no dedicated parking. Climate control was "it gets hot in the sun, open the windows to cool it down" plus a space heater she had. The people living there bought the house decades ago and paid less on the mortgage for the entire property than what they rented out the cottage for. How do we fix this?
    - zipfle 9y ago
      We could try to regulate away the good fortune of the people who bought the house, or we could try to convince the tech industry that they actually don't all need to be colocated, alleviating competition for resources in that area. What I've observed about human nature suggests that neither would be very popular.
      - justin 9y ago
        Or we could build more housing
        WillPostForFood 9y ago
        Or you could move somewhere cheaper
        Decade 9y ago
        That actually does happen. And then we have the twisted situation where the economists say the economy is great, practically zero unemployment, even construction workers are scarce in California; and at the same time workforce participation rates for working-age males is the lowest it has ever been. Given how terrible idle males tend to be, this is worrisome. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-labor-force-men-20161121-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-labor-force-men-201611... People used to move to cities for the opportunities. Now it's increasingly difficult to do so. For lots of reasons we need to make it possible for people to move to the cities and thrive.
        seanp2k2 9y ago
        Suburbs in most places = medium-low pay but fairly cheap housing country = cheap housing, no [tech] jobs Metro areas (more dense than suburbs, less dense than cities...e.g. most of the Bay Area) = expensive housing, medium or high pay Cities = extremely expensive, high pay (for tech jobs) Pretty much every scenario seems to be "optimized" to have techies paying 30-50% of their monthly income to housing. You can't really win, but you can attempt to maximize the real dollar amount you end up left over with with each month. Working remotely is "cheating the system" and is therefore largely disallowed, or "work from home" is allowed only to quell some degree of outrage. Literally the industry that invented video chat doesn't [want to] understand how to use it to work remotely.
- Mz 9y ago
  But then when they fail, they would have to feel incompetent. It is generally more gratifying to rage against the machine in a way that is unlikely to accomplish something so you don't have to take it personally when it doesn't work, because no one expected it to anyway.
- mjevans 9y ago
  How are you supposed to gain representation within an area that you literally cannot live within (even though you work / receive education there) due to a lack of (affordable) housing?
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    Take a look at drivers license address requirements [1], and figure out how to game it. Or some other form of identification. The system generally assumes that if you can reliably receive mail address to you at a particular residential address and you tell institutions that you live there, then you live there - at least until more detailed probing happens. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/dl/residency_requirement https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/dl/residency_requir...
    - mjevans 9y ago
      My point was more that in the modern world people's interests likely cover a span or several spans of regions. Not just one single locality. Sometimes (near state lines in the US) not even /state/ level laws would provide adequate representational coverage. A more accurate way of providing representation might be to identify areas of major expenditure. Employment, Education, Living, etc. Aside from residency should be either by some absolute threshold of transaction value or possibly by percentage of income. A significant economic interest in an area should be related to representation in that area (as you are being taxed for your activity there). Corridors that connect those areas should also apply (you do have to traverse them for your interests); transit and transit related laws should thus probably be at a major metro or higher level.
  - yonran 9y ago
    You can get involved in regional planning (such as Plan Bay Area and the RHNA) and support state bills (such as Scott Wiener’s SB-35) that put more power in regional commissions that have more equal representation. Some Berkeley NIMBYs actually have the gall to claim that cities’ rights over zoning is pro-democratic (such as Zelda Bronstein (https://48hills.org/2016/11/28/17209/ https://48hills.org/2016/11/28/17209/) and Thomas Lord (http://48hills.org/2017/05/19/why-housing-quotas-lead-to-displacement/) http://48hills.org/2017/05/19/why-housing-quotas-lead-to-dis...), whereas as you point out it, hyper-local zoning disenfranchises commuters (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/06/18/a-theory-of-zoning-and-local-decisionmaking/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/06/18/a-theory-of-zo...). When people say that cities’ rights are pro-democracy, call them out on it. Edit: Also add public comment on zoning decisions that affect you even if you cannot vote.
- jedberg 9y ago
  > Unfortunately, the young people who are subject to the rental market are also very politically inactive when it comes to local politics. Quite true. Also, they don't actually care all that much, because most of them have their housing subsidized by federal loans or their wealthy parents or both.
  - taysic 9y ago
    From what I understand, they are squeezed like sardines to a room though. I would imagine they care - or maybe they don't know how good it can be. I was lucky to have easy access to a single room in college in the middle of an east coast city.
    - jedberg 9y ago
      > they are squeezed like sardines to a room though Yeah but that's been true for a long time. When I attended I had a friend who rented a piece of wood suspended above the laundry room of a frat house for $150/mo (while I paid $400/mo to share a one bedroom unit).
Decade 9y ago
There's affordable housing, and then there's Affordable Housing. Some of the restricted Affordable Housing actually is pretty expensive, while still being too scarce for the demand. https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/market-rate-housing-isnt-a-bad-word-and-we-won-t-solve-the-housing-crisis-without-it-ce67c06aff4d https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/market-rate-housing-isnt-a-...

osdiab 9y ago

Unfortunately, the young people who are subject to the rental market are also very politically inactive when it comes to local politics. Berkeley residents - how about next time you protest, focus not only on national politics but also on your own city's issues!!

jstalin 9y ago
It's a lot more fun to dress in all black, scream at people, and riot.
aphextron 9y ago
And thus we are left to renting out a baby boomer's garden shack for the cost of a mortgage.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  This is their retirement plan.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  This is, for those unfamiliar with the situation there, not actually an exaggeration, but literally what one of my friends was doing. It had been converted to a "cottage" and it was one room with a bathroom in the corner. FWIW it was pretty cute, but it was about $2k a month and had no dedicated parking. Climate control was "it gets hot in the sun, open the windows to cool it down" plus a space heater she had. The people living there bought the house decades ago and paid less on the mortgage for the entire property than what they rented out the cottage for. How do we fix this?
  - zipfle 9y ago
    We could try to regulate away the good fortune of the people who bought the house, or we could try to convince the tech industry that they actually don't all need to be colocated, alleviating competition for resources in that area. What I've observed about human nature suggests that neither would be very popular.
    - justin 9y ago
      Or we could build more housing
      - WillPostForFood 9y ago
        Or you could move somewhere cheaper
        Decade 9y ago
        That actually does happen. And then we have the twisted situation where the economists say the economy is great, practically zero unemployment, even construction workers are scarce in California; and at the same time workforce participation rates for working-age males is the lowest it has ever been. Given how terrible idle males tend to be, this is worrisome. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-labor-force-men-20161121-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-labor-force-men-201611... People used to move to cities for the opportunities. Now it's increasingly difficult to do so. For lots of reasons we need to make it possible for people to move to the cities and thrive.
        seanp2k2 9y ago
        Suburbs in most places = medium-low pay but fairly cheap housing country = cheap housing, no [tech] jobs Metro areas (more dense than suburbs, less dense than cities...e.g. most of the Bay Area) = expensive housing, medium or high pay Cities = extremely expensive, high pay (for tech jobs) Pretty much every scenario seems to be "optimized" to have techies paying 30-50% of their monthly income to housing. You can't really win, but you can attempt to maximize the real dollar amount you end up left over with with each month. Working remotely is "cheating the system" and is therefore largely disallowed, or "work from home" is allowed only to quell some degree of outrage. Literally the industry that invented video chat doesn't [want to] understand how to use it to work remotely.
Mz 9y ago
But then when they fail, they would have to feel incompetent. It is generally more gratifying to rage against the machine in a way that is unlikely to accomplish something so you don't have to take it personally when it doesn't work, because no one expected it to anyway.
mjevans 9y ago
How are you supposed to gain representation within an area that you literally cannot live within (even though you work / receive education there) due to a lack of (affordable) housing?
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Take a look at drivers license address requirements [1], and figure out how to game it. Or some other form of identification. The system generally assumes that if you can reliably receive mail address to you at a particular residential address and you tell institutions that you live there, then you live there - at least until more detailed probing happens. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/dl/residency_requirement https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/dl/residency_requir...
  - mjevans 9y ago
    My point was more that in the modern world people's interests likely cover a span or several spans of regions. Not just one single locality. Sometimes (near state lines in the US) not even /state/ level laws would provide adequate representational coverage. A more accurate way of providing representation might be to identify areas of major expenditure. Employment, Education, Living, etc. Aside from residency should be either by some absolute threshold of transaction value or possibly by percentage of income. A significant economic interest in an area should be related to representation in that area (as you are being taxed for your activity there). Corridors that connect those areas should also apply (you do have to traverse them for your interests); transit and transit related laws should thus probably be at a major metro or higher level.
- yonran 9y ago
  You can get involved in regional planning (such as Plan Bay Area and the RHNA) and support state bills (such as Scott Wiener’s SB-35) that put more power in regional commissions that have more equal representation. Some Berkeley NIMBYs actually have the gall to claim that cities’ rights over zoning is pro-democratic (such as Zelda Bronstein (https://48hills.org/2016/11/28/17209/ https://48hills.org/2016/11/28/17209/) and Thomas Lord (http://48hills.org/2017/05/19/why-housing-quotas-lead-to-displacement/) http://48hills.org/2017/05/19/why-housing-quotas-lead-to-dis...), whereas as you point out it, hyper-local zoning disenfranchises commuters (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/06/18/a-theory-of-zoning-and-local-decisionmaking/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/06/18/a-theory-of-zo...). When people say that cities’ rights are pro-democracy, call them out on it. Edit: Also add public comment on zoning decisions that affect you even if you cannot vote.
jedberg 9y ago
> Unfortunately, the young people who are subject to the rental market are also very politically inactive when it comes to local politics. Quite true. Also, they don't actually care all that much, because most of them have their housing subsidized by federal loans or their wealthy parents or both.
- taysic 9y ago
  From what I understand, they are squeezed like sardines to a room though. I would imagine they care - or maybe they don't know how good it can be. I was lucky to have easy access to a single room in college in the middle of an east coast city.
  - jedberg 9y ago
    > they are squeezed like sardines to a room though Yeah but that's been true for a long time. When I attended I had a friend who rented a piece of wood suspended above the laundry room of a frat house for $150/mo (while I paid $400/mo to share a one bedroom unit).

Decade 9y ago

There's affordable housing, and then there's Affordable Housing. Some of the restricted Affordable Housing actually is pretty expensive, while still being too scarce for the demand. https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/market-rate-housing-isnt-a-bad-word-and-we-won-t-solve-the-housing-crisis-without-it-ce67c06aff4d https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/market-rate-housing-isnt-a-...