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Unfortunately, the young people who are subject to the rental market are also very politically inactive when it comes to local politics. Berkeley residents - ho
by 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 agoIt's a lot more fun to dress in all black, scream at people, and riot.
- aphextron 9y agoAnd thus we are left to renting out a baby boomer's garden shack for the cost of a mortgage.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThis is their retirement plan.
- seanp2k2 9y agoThis 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 agoWe 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 agoOr we could build more housing
- WillPostForFood 9y agoOr you could move somewhere cheaper
- Decade 9y agoThat 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 agoSuburbs 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.
- taysic 9y agoI agree with building more housing. There are a decent amount of empty lots in Berkeley... and a smallish downtown area that could be revamped. However, even in best case scenario with a bunch of new housing, unless people start selling their single family houses to get replaced by higher density housing, I don't see housing prices going down a ton.. it won't be cheap but it may be more accessible to the middle class.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoNot need housing where it's expensive. If you cannot increase supply, you must destroy demand.
- koolba 9y agoCan you use student loans to pay for housing? If so, fuck that!
- toomuchtodo 9y agoNot that I'd suggest it, but you could use personal loans or credit cards instead; at least those debts can be defaulted on and wiped clean.
- seanp2k2 9y agoFWIW in almost 10 years of living in half a dozen apartments between 2 states, I've never had the option to pay by CC. It's always check or money order, and if you miss a payment, cashier's check.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoBalance transfer, usually provided as a paper check or cash directly deposited into your checking account at a teaser interest rate for 12-18 months.
- taysic 9y agoI agree. I don't see Berkeley growing too much outside of the downtown simply because it has a lot of character that people are attached to - and lots of wealthy people that are retired or just aren't looking for change. Still, there are still empty lots around so loosening the process to get housing approved would help. However, the long term fix I think should be that UC should stop annually increasing the number of students it accepts to UC Berkeley. I know this probably would never happen - but I don't see another solution. Why not benefit another aspiring area of California? Berkeley will not grow so where will the students go? Similarly, if the Bay area has decided it doesn't want to grow upwards, then there should be more incentive to grow outwards. There should be a cap on the amount of office space growth in any given city unless housing grows equally... again I doubt this will happen. But I think it would be smart. People go where the money is, then comes the infrastructure, then comes other small businesses, etc.
- koolba 9y agoRaise property taxes and allow people to build low rise apartments. That will both provide money for local schools and force the increase in efficient usage of land.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago>Raise property taxes That's difficult in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
- koolba 9y agoI didn't say it was easy or politically viable. It's almost funny how bad that law is for young people.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoIt was voted in by Boomers, what do you expect?
- dragonwriter 9y ago> It was voted in by Boomers, what do you expect? Boomers weren't the politically-dominant generation at the time Prop 13 was passed. I know people like to pretend all of history is divided between "Boomers" and "Millennials", but at the time of Prop 13, leading edge Boomers were in their late 20s and trailing edge Boomers were tweens. It's less accurate to say that Prop 13 was voted in by Boomers than to say Trump was elected by Millennials. Prop 13 was voted in largely by the “Silent” and “Greatest” generations. Insofar as Prop 13 is unfair to young people, Boomers were the first young people that were on the recieving end of the unfairness.
- icantdrive55 9y agoI'm getting tired of defending prop 13. I guess it's a combination of projection, and our poor educational system? (Yes--I wish they talked about housing, property taxes, and political fiscal waste in school--any school? Repeal Prop 13. See what happens. Watch the politicians spend that money on everything other than housing. Hell--west Marin in California would be loaded with housing units if not for the millions of dollars Supervisor Gary Giacomonni spent fighting for his cause. He wanted to change the zoning to 100 acres per home. And with that big piggy bank of tax payer money, he pulled it off. In his last interview, he admitted if not for prop 13, that area would have highways, and thousands of homes, and apartments. We need to encourage developers to build apartments. Not luxury condos, but apartments. I actually given up on housing. I think we are at the point we need to make being homeless not a crime. We need to open up federal, state, local parks, and county land to camping, until we figure out this housing problem. I guarantee we will be talking about housing in ten years, and most of our income will be paying enormous amounts of rent.
- Spooky23 9y agoMove. I own a 2,000 square foot home with spacious city lot for 1/3 of that shed. The Bay Area is cool if you bought a house in 1996. Now? You're crazy.
- Mz 9y agoBut 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 agoHow 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 agoTake 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 agoMy 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 agoYou 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 agoFrom 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).