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Would like to say: If you would like to reverse these trends, or live in the SFBA and would like to be able to afford a home or condo without needing to commute

Would like to say: If you would like to reverse these trends, or live in the SFBA and would like to be able to afford a home or condo without needing to commute from Stockton or hit the startup lottery, please pay attention to your local City Council and their zoning/land use decisions. Local decisions frequently don't get that many comments; your voice makes a difference. - Brisbane may approve 4400 units of housing, or zero. 4400 units would be close to how many the Bay Area typically produces in a year. - Cupertino and Sunnyvale residents frequently oppose new housing. - San Francisco has a strong contingent of people that oppose large projects. There is one project near Glen Park BART, and another one with 1200 units at 700 Innes, that could use support in the coming months. If you're not sure where to get started getting involved, contact me and I can point you in the right place. One good place to start would be to push your executives and VC's to actually work towards making housing affordable here in the Bay Area; for too many it's an afterthought.

innesinnes 9y ago
Re: 700 Innes https://twitter.com/SFyimby/status/921454648044666880 https://twitter.com/SFyimby/status/921454648044666880 https://twitter.com/SFyimby/status/921438475554918400 https://twitter.com/SFyimby/status/921438475554918400
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
Will building more units / appartments/ houses bring the price down? Have other cities seen home prices move toward affordability when more housing has been built? I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, just that the logic seems flawed.
- rspeer 9y ago
  I'm not up on the sources, but a moderately pro-development candidate for Cambridge City Council has often quoted a statistic saying that there are only two ways to bring down house prices: 1. Make the city suck 2. Get the housing vacancy rate to 5.5% And of course he says this to encourage everyone to work toward #2, and the way to do that without displacing anyone is to build new housing. I don't really understand the opposite logic, which the NIMBYs like to use, saying that building new housing will drive the price up. I mean, I am not some kind of libertarian free-market cheerleader, but it shouldn't be that controversial to say that a market exists, that the way to bring down the price in the face of overwhelming demand is with supply. People point to how expensive newly-built market-rate housing is, but that's a symptom of the shortage. People want to live in good cities. If there's not a new home for them, they'll pay even more for a home someone lives in, so prices go up and a community gets displaced.
  - kurthr 9y ago
    Actually, you get double bonus wherever you add housing, because you'll never add enough transportation or parking as necessary so that neighborhood will also start to suck! Also, housing people is a net drain on the tax base so the city services get worse or taxes increase. Win, win! Yeah, that's why NIMBY... on the other hand add transit, jobs, or retail somewhere and house prices go up locally with it because people want to live there (reduce their commute and buy $#&+) and it pays enough taxes. Retail moves where people flow. It takes planning and not just building.
    - Brotkrumen 9y ago
      So people move to reduce their commute, effectively their use of roads, but that shorter commute will not reduce their use but increase it? Tough proposition. You also posit that people hold parking at a premium and that new house will not try to capture that premium. Mhhhh
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      > Also, housing people is a net drain on the tax base so the city services get worse or taxes increase I'm not sure what you're talking about here. It's far cheaper to provide services at higher density, far cheaper. You need fewer meters of sewer, conduit, etc. Transit lines can be shorter with fewer connections. Additionally, if you bring more people into a municipality, you generate more taxes through increased property values, increased sales tax revenue, and income taxes if you municipality does that.
    - kevinburke 9y ago
      This is actually not true in California where new housing pays property taxes at 2017 rates. Thanks to Prop 13 there are a lot of homes worth more than a million dollars that are still paying $5,000 or less per year in property taxes.
  - bhickey 9y ago
    You probably remember a few years back when the well-heeled Green candidate ran on a platform of bussing in homeless. https://www.reddit.com/r/CambridgeMA/comments/3pd9k3/my_notes_on_the_abc_forum_thursday_oct_15/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CambridgeMA/comments/3pd9k3/my_note...
- dtech 9y ago
  > Will building more units / appartments/ houses bring the price down? Ballooning housing prices are a prime example of demand exceeding supply leading to increased prices. Increasing supply will decrease prices or at least limit further price increase.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    But it's not like demand is inelastic. Do we know how much additional supply would have to be built to saturate demand? Is that even freasible? It seems like an intractable problem to me because it's not like anything we do, in these big popular cities, is going to have much of an effect in the next 12 months to 5 years. Personally, I solved the problem for myself by moving away from the big city I was in to a sub 100k population centre. There's no way I was going to be able to afford to buy a place within an hours drive of where I worked, not in the foreseeable future.
    - kevinburke 9y ago
      You’d need 5,000 units a year in San Francisco to keep rents steady. This is the goal SF’s mayor just set for the city, google “Ed Lee Medium” to find it. It is definitely not an intractable problem given SF built 5,000 units in 2016. Upzoning, lowering impact fees, speeding housing approvals for things like ADU’s, making discretionary review tougher (it currently costs $700 to delay a project by three months), electing pro-housing candidates, having places like Brisbane choose apartments over another office park - all of these will help, it’s not intractable by any stretch.
      - jacobolus 9y ago
        If we just slightly upzoned the whole western half of the city, and added public transit to go with it (even better if streets were narrowed a bit and street parking reduced), San Francisco could fit a whole heck of a lot more people without ever needing new buildings taller than 4 or 5 stories. San Francisco zoning through huge swaths of the city is restricted to single-family houses and scattered duplexes, with only a few mixed-use areas. It’s supposed to be a booming city, but more than half of it is zoned to be a sleepy beach town. (And a lot of the Bay Area is even worse.) Here’s the SF zoning map. All the pale yellow part is very low density; If it were up to me we would change half or more of that pale yellow area to some mix of darker yellow, orange, and purple. http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf
- kevinburke 9y ago
  Broadly, yes, for the same reasons that destroying housing (as happened in Santa Rosa) increases competition for existing apartments and increases rents. Here's a report from the state LAO about the effects of building more housing on displacement: http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345 http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345 In 2016 SF built 5,000 units, a record, and rents and owner move-in evictions both fell for the first time in a while. (They are not going to repeat that production in 2017 or 2018, in large part due to Prop C). Across all 50 states, areas where population growth exceeded housing supply growth saw price increases: https://twitter.com/lenkiefer/status/871785655164182529 https://twitter.com/lenkiefer/status/871785655164182529 Austin, Houston, and Dallas don't have very restrictive zoning or rules around new home construction, and they lap California in home building and have seen rents hardly rise at all.
  - cat199 9y ago
    > Austin, Houston, and Dallas don't have very restrictive zoning or rules around new home construction, and they lap California in home building and have seen rents hardly rise at all not exactly true.. in htx new construction is all luxury, and many people are moving in from out of state; those that can afford it and want to can go to the luxury units and those have had price 'reductions' (from overpriced initial prices) but the 'regular' apts have seen rents rise quite a bit because the newcomers have squeezed the existing people into more competition for the cheaper units.. i posit that subsequently the emptier, overprovisioned high end buildings will start to fail, and become a glut of relatively high price condos, which will then cause the regular housing prices to go up..
    - kevinburke 9y ago
      Are new cars on average more “luxury” than used cars? If for some reason we didn’t produce any new cars, would the price of used cars rise or fall?
- rsynnott 9y ago
  In a rational market, yes, absolutely; if prices are driven by a supply deficit then increasing supply cuts prices (or at least reduces price growth, if a smaller deficit remains). Housing markets tend not to be all that rational, though; there's often an aspect of speculative mania to them. It's likely that increasing supply would cut prices, but it's not actually certain, as it may just increase speculative 'investor' demand from the "house prices always go up" crowd. The Irish property bubble in the late 90s to late noughties was originally driven by supply shortages, but even as supply started to meet demand prices kept going up for a couple of years due to property "investors" (before crashing spectacularly).
  - AznHisoka 9y ago
    what differentiates a real estate investor from a speculator?
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Diversification? Although drawing the line there would put plenty of big time "investors" on the speculator side. Maybe it's just a distiction without a difference.
    - rsynnott 9y ago
      The speculator buys property because they expect it to go up in value; the rent is just covering part of their costs. For instance, if you have an "investment" property, but the rent doesn't cover the interest component of the mortgage, but you think that's okay because you expect it to go up in value, you're a speculator, not an investor.
      - AznHisoka 9y ago
        Ok, so anyone who invests in stocks with no dividends is also a speculator too by your definition? Or is the criteria different for stock investors?
  - kevinburke 9y ago
    Sure there is bubble like behavior at times but there’s also 68 years of data in SF showing that a 1% increase in supply leads to a 1.7% decrease in rents, http://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html?m=1 http://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employmen... In the vast majority of places low supply is causing high prices, not speculation.
- pc86 9y ago
  It does if the new units surpass demand, even in the short term. If there are 5k available units but there is demand for 15k over the next 90 days, of course building 1500 won't affect prices much, if at all. You need to build until there is some vacancy, then landlords are forced to lower rent to prevent their units from being vacant, unless they have the means to hold out for someone who really wants that particular location.
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    Supplying more of something always reduces the price of that thing. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that it doesn’t reduce the price that people actually pay; it reduces the price that people would have paid.
- lg 9y ago
  home price increases in my neighborhood of manhattan have substantially slowed their rise in the past couple years as a bunch of new construction has come on the market. this will probably continue through next year as stuff in progress finishes up, and then probably rise again because homebuilders don't start projects when prices are flat.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  For a more skeptical viewpoint: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/10/on-cutting-house-prices.html http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
  - kevinburke 9y ago
    I guess SF’s recent experience, where years of rent and owner move-in eviction increases ended the same year we built a record number of housing units, belies this. Sure we may run into other problems, but right now a third of California renters are paying more than half their salary in rent. I’d take my chances with a lot of other crises to help with that one.
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      >I guess SF’s recent experience, where years of rent and owner move-in eviction increases ended the same year we built a record number of housing units, belies this. Care to link me? I'm interested in this. But mainly I agree with the article that increasing building is only a long-term solution, to fix the ridiculous prices of housing in the short-term different measures are needed - there's just no way to build enough housing in the short term.
      - kevinburke 9y ago
        http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Eviction-Notices-San-Francisco-Residents-Drop-418409993.html http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Eviction-Notices-San-Fr... In the short term, building more housing will still result in lower rents relative to not building more housing; its the right thing to do for both time frames.
m0llusk 9y ago
The Brisbane proposal is a great example of the need for public input. Instead of expanding the town the idea is to build high density development on swampland far from town and services in a location so clearly undesirable that it has escaped even proposals for development since the Gold Rush. Reasonable expansion of existing towns is a good answer to this crisis while building large apartment buildings in fetid swamps far from transit, towns, and services is responding to one set of errors with even worse errors.
- kevinburke 9y ago
  > "far from transit" The proposed development is literally next door to a freeway (101), a Caltrain stop - Bayshore Caltrain - and a Muni stop. SF has proposed extending Muni into the new development for free. "The public" largely wants new housing in the Baylands, if the city meetings were any guide, where a large majority of the speakers wanted to approve the housing proposal. You may have seen the signed letter from 40 different tech CEO's asking for housing on the Baylands, as well. The people who oppose it are Brisbane homeowners, because they have no incentive to add new housing. > so clearly undesirable that it has escaped even proposals for development since the Gold Rush. The choices are to build an office park and new apartments, or an office park; something is going to get built there. As part of the plan, the developer is proposing to spend $200 million cleaning industrial waste in the area. The only reason that pencils out is because of the new development.
  - m0llusk 9y ago
    You got lost somewhere. The land near the Bayshore CalTrain station is the old factory, has already undergone extensive remediation and decontamination, and is having an entire new high density community build right there. The Brisbane proposal is for the ponds and swamp well down the line from there and several big blocks from town. The core issue remains: Will we expand these towns as we should or will we in desperation put a lot of high density uses out on fringes that have far more value ecologically than economically? The real fight isn't for the fringes.

innesinnes 9y ago

Re: 700 Innes https://twitter.com/SFyimby/status/921454648044666880 https://twitter.com/SFyimby/status/921454648044666880 https://twitter.com/SFyimby/status/921438475554918400 https://twitter.com/SFyimby/status/921438475554918400

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago

Will building more units / appartments/ houses bring the price down? Have other cities seen home prices move toward affordability when more housing has been built? I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, just that the logic seems flawed.

rspeer 9y ago
I'm not up on the sources, but a moderately pro-development candidate for Cambridge City Council has often quoted a statistic saying that there are only two ways to bring down house prices: 1. Make the city suck 2. Get the housing vacancy rate to 5.5% And of course he says this to encourage everyone to work toward #2, and the way to do that without displacing anyone is to build new housing. I don't really understand the opposite logic, which the NIMBYs like to use, saying that building new housing will drive the price up. I mean, I am not some kind of libertarian free-market cheerleader, but it shouldn't be that controversial to say that a market exists, that the way to bring down the price in the face of overwhelming demand is with supply. People point to how expensive newly-built market-rate housing is, but that's a symptom of the shortage. People want to live in good cities. If there's not a new home for them, they'll pay even more for a home someone lives in, so prices go up and a community gets displaced.
- kurthr 9y ago
  Actually, you get double bonus wherever you add housing, because you'll never add enough transportation or parking as necessary so that neighborhood will also start to suck! Also, housing people is a net drain on the tax base so the city services get worse or taxes increase. Win, win! Yeah, that's why NIMBY... on the other hand add transit, jobs, or retail somewhere and house prices go up locally with it because people want to live there (reduce their commute and buy $#&+) and it pays enough taxes. Retail moves where people flow. It takes planning and not just building.
  - Brotkrumen 9y ago
    So people move to reduce their commute, effectively their use of roads, but that shorter commute will not reduce their use but increase it? Tough proposition. You also posit that people hold parking at a premium and that new house will not try to capture that premium. Mhhhh
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    > Also, housing people is a net drain on the tax base so the city services get worse or taxes increase I'm not sure what you're talking about here. It's far cheaper to provide services at higher density, far cheaper. You need fewer meters of sewer, conduit, etc. Transit lines can be shorter with fewer connections. Additionally, if you bring more people into a municipality, you generate more taxes through increased property values, increased sales tax revenue, and income taxes if you municipality does that.
  - kevinburke 9y ago
    This is actually not true in California where new housing pays property taxes at 2017 rates. Thanks to Prop 13 there are a lot of homes worth more than a million dollars that are still paying $5,000 or less per year in property taxes.
- bhickey 9y ago
  You probably remember a few years back when the well-heeled Green candidate ran on a platform of bussing in homeless. https://www.reddit.com/r/CambridgeMA/comments/3pd9k3/my_notes_on_the_abc_forum_thursday_oct_15/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CambridgeMA/comments/3pd9k3/my_note...
dtech 9y ago
> Will building more units / appartments/ houses bring the price down? Ballooning housing prices are a prime example of demand exceeding supply leading to increased prices. Increasing supply will decrease prices or at least limit further price increase.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  But it's not like demand is inelastic. Do we know how much additional supply would have to be built to saturate demand? Is that even freasible? It seems like an intractable problem to me because it's not like anything we do, in these big popular cities, is going to have much of an effect in the next 12 months to 5 years. Personally, I solved the problem for myself by moving away from the big city I was in to a sub 100k population centre. There's no way I was going to be able to afford to buy a place within an hours drive of where I worked, not in the foreseeable future.
  - kevinburke 9y ago
    You’d need 5,000 units a year in San Francisco to keep rents steady. This is the goal SF’s mayor just set for the city, google “Ed Lee Medium” to find it. It is definitely not an intractable problem given SF built 5,000 units in 2016. Upzoning, lowering impact fees, speeding housing approvals for things like ADU’s, making discretionary review tougher (it currently costs $700 to delay a project by three months), electing pro-housing candidates, having places like Brisbane choose apartments over another office park - all of these will help, it’s not intractable by any stretch.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      If we just slightly upzoned the whole western half of the city, and added public transit to go with it (even better if streets were narrowed a bit and street parking reduced), San Francisco could fit a whole heck of a lot more people without ever needing new buildings taller than 4 or 5 stories. San Francisco zoning through huge swaths of the city is restricted to single-family houses and scattered duplexes, with only a few mixed-use areas. It’s supposed to be a booming city, but more than half of it is zoned to be a sleepy beach town. (And a lot of the Bay Area is even worse.) Here’s the SF zoning map. All the pale yellow part is very low density; If it were up to me we would change half or more of that pale yellow area to some mix of darker yellow, orange, and purple. http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf
kevinburke 9y ago
Broadly, yes, for the same reasons that destroying housing (as happened in Santa Rosa) increases competition for existing apartments and increases rents. Here's a report from the state LAO about the effects of building more housing on displacement: http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345 http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345 In 2016 SF built 5,000 units, a record, and rents and owner move-in evictions both fell for the first time in a while. (They are not going to repeat that production in 2017 or 2018, in large part due to Prop C). Across all 50 states, areas where population growth exceeded housing supply growth saw price increases: https://twitter.com/lenkiefer/status/871785655164182529 https://twitter.com/lenkiefer/status/871785655164182529 Austin, Houston, and Dallas don't have very restrictive zoning or rules around new home construction, and they lap California in home building and have seen rents hardly rise at all.
- cat199 9y ago
  > Austin, Houston, and Dallas don't have very restrictive zoning or rules around new home construction, and they lap California in home building and have seen rents hardly rise at all not exactly true.. in htx new construction is all luxury, and many people are moving in from out of state; those that can afford it and want to can go to the luxury units and those have had price 'reductions' (from overpriced initial prices) but the 'regular' apts have seen rents rise quite a bit because the newcomers have squeezed the existing people into more competition for the cheaper units.. i posit that subsequently the emptier, overprovisioned high end buildings will start to fail, and become a glut of relatively high price condos, which will then cause the regular housing prices to go up..
  - kevinburke 9y ago
    Are new cars on average more “luxury” than used cars? If for some reason we didn’t produce any new cars, would the price of used cars rise or fall?
rsynnott 9y ago
In a rational market, yes, absolutely; if prices are driven by a supply deficit then increasing supply cuts prices (or at least reduces price growth, if a smaller deficit remains). Housing markets tend not to be all that rational, though; there's often an aspect of speculative mania to them. It's likely that increasing supply would cut prices, but it's not actually certain, as it may just increase speculative 'investor' demand from the "house prices always go up" crowd. The Irish property bubble in the late 90s to late noughties was originally driven by supply shortages, but even as supply started to meet demand prices kept going up for a couple of years due to property "investors" (before crashing spectacularly).
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  what differentiates a real estate investor from a speculator?
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Diversification? Although drawing the line there would put plenty of big time "investors" on the speculator side. Maybe it's just a distiction without a difference.
  - rsynnott 9y ago
    The speculator buys property because they expect it to go up in value; the rent is just covering part of their costs. For instance, if you have an "investment" property, but the rent doesn't cover the interest component of the mortgage, but you think that's okay because you expect it to go up in value, you're a speculator, not an investor.
    - AznHisoka 9y ago
      Ok, so anyone who invests in stocks with no dividends is also a speculator too by your definition? Or is the criteria different for stock investors?
- kevinburke 9y ago
  Sure there is bubble like behavior at times but there’s also 68 years of data in SF showing that a 1% increase in supply leads to a 1.7% decrease in rents, http://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html?m=1 http://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employmen... In the vast majority of places low supply is causing high prices, not speculation.
pc86 9y ago
It does if the new units surpass demand, even in the short term. If there are 5k available units but there is demand for 15k over the next 90 days, of course building 1500 won't affect prices much, if at all. You need to build until there is some vacancy, then landlords are forced to lower rent to prevent their units from being vacant, unless they have the means to hold out for someone who really wants that particular location.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  Supplying more of something always reduces the price of that thing. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that it doesn’t reduce the price that people actually pay; it reduces the price that people would have paid.
lg 9y ago
home price increases in my neighborhood of manhattan have substantially slowed their rise in the past couple years as a bunch of new construction has come on the market. this will probably continue through next year as stuff in progress finishes up, and then probably rise again because homebuilders don't start projects when prices are flat.
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
For a more skeptical viewpoint: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/10/on-cutting-house-prices.html http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
- kevinburke 9y ago
  I guess SF’s recent experience, where years of rent and owner move-in eviction increases ended the same year we built a record number of housing units, belies this. Sure we may run into other problems, but right now a third of California renters are paying more than half their salary in rent. I’d take my chances with a lot of other crises to help with that one.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    >I guess SF’s recent experience, where years of rent and owner move-in eviction increases ended the same year we built a record number of housing units, belies this. Care to link me? I'm interested in this. But mainly I agree with the article that increasing building is only a long-term solution, to fix the ridiculous prices of housing in the short-term different measures are needed - there's just no way to build enough housing in the short term.
    - kevinburke 9y ago
      http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Eviction-Notices-San-Francisco-Residents-Drop-418409993.html http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Eviction-Notices-San-Fr... In the short term, building more housing will still result in lower rents relative to not building more housing; its the right thing to do for both time frames.

m0llusk 9y ago

The Brisbane proposal is a great example of the need for public input. Instead of expanding the town the idea is to build high density development on swampland far from town and services in a location so clearly undesirable that it has escaped even proposals for development since the Gold Rush. Reasonable expansion of existing towns is a good answer to this crisis while building large apartment buildings in fetid swamps far from transit, towns, and services is responding to one set of errors with even worse errors.

kevinburke 9y ago
> "far from transit" The proposed development is literally next door to a freeway (101), a Caltrain stop - Bayshore Caltrain - and a Muni stop. SF has proposed extending Muni into the new development for free. "The public" largely wants new housing in the Baylands, if the city meetings were any guide, where a large majority of the speakers wanted to approve the housing proposal. You may have seen the signed letter from 40 different tech CEO's asking for housing on the Baylands, as well. The people who oppose it are Brisbane homeowners, because they have no incentive to add new housing. > so clearly undesirable that it has escaped even proposals for development since the Gold Rush. The choices are to build an office park and new apartments, or an office park; something is going to get built there. As part of the plan, the developer is proposing to spend $200 million cleaning industrial waste in the area. The only reason that pencils out is because of the new development.
- m0llusk 9y ago
  You got lost somewhere. The land near the Bayshore CalTrain station is the old factory, has already undergone extensive remediation and decontamination, and is having an entire new high density community build right there. The Brisbane proposal is for the ponds and swamp well down the line from there and several big blocks from town. The core issue remains: Will we expand these towns as we should or will we in desperation put a lot of high density uses out on fringes that have far more value ecologically than economically? The real fight isn't for the fringes.