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The Great American Single-Family Home Problem

• Clubber 9y ago
  All of this could be solved if most companies embraced remote workers. I mean how old fashioned does it seem for a tech company to require most employees to move everything they own so they could waste weeks of the year driving back and forth to a building and mostly sit by themselves not talking to anyone the vast majority of every day? In 100 years, it will seem as silly as archaic as making your own clothes rather than buying them.
  • doctorless 9y ago
    There is value in face-to-face conversation, and while software solutions like Google Hangouts help bridge the gap to some extent, they don't eliminate it entirely. There may be some advantages to yield with VR, but even at its current state, it can't replicate the real world. It's likely we'll start to see direct neural interfaces before we actually have means to replicate the face-to-face aspect that remote work sorely misses out on.
    • Clubber 9y ago
      Yes, there is value, but IMO, it's nowhere near what it costs directly in dollars not only the employer, but all the employees. I mean they are essentially doubling everyone's salary in the big SV companies, just so they can meet "face-to-face," on rare occasions.
      • doctorless 9y ago
        I definitely agree there is a negative ROI in areas like SV, but I would argue rather than trying to solve the problem with remote work, tech companies should seek cheaper cities. There are states with major metro areas that are in desperate need of new industry, like Kansas, where Wichita’s economy is hurting due to the aircraft industry’s shakeups.
        • Clubber 9y ago
          I would say for the company, there is a negative ROI regardless of location; but it would be nice to see companies build or rent work centers and whatnot rather than force all national employees into a single location. Of course that costs more AND yields less available face-to-face communication in that it limits that communication to employees in the satellite office. Without remoting, for the entire organization, it gets a lot more expensive and most of the cost is deferred to the employees who have to do the moving and the transportation and the time loss, etc.
      • usaar333 9y ago
        From my experience, remote work can easily be less than half as productive as non-remote work (if done over many weeks). I doubt every valley company is wrong in trying to maximize same office time.
        • Clubber 9y ago
          It's the opposite for me.
        • badpun 9y ago
          I have similar experiences. Try to have a design whiteboarding session remotely...
    • Shorel 9y ago
      Yes, but once a week face-to-face is enough. It definitely doesn't need to be everyday.
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  • TulliusCicero 9y ago
    Companies could already save money this way, since they could pay people less than bay area salaries. So ask yourself: why aren't they? Do they just hate money? Are Google and Apple logistically incompetent companies?
• davidw 9y ago
  Join your local YIMBY group! There are so many extremely polarized, "trench warfare" issues in politics. I feel this is one where there's room for real, bipartisan progress. https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regulations/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regula... "Reforming local land use controls is one of those rare areas in which the libertarian and the progressive agree. The current system restricts the freedom of the property owner, and also makes life harder for poorer Americans. The politics of zoning reform may be hard, but our land use regulations are badly in need of rethinking."
  • ProAm 9y ago
    YIMBY should be YIYBY
    • jimktrains2 9y ago
      And NIMBY should be niyby, what's your point? That decisions affect many people with different ideas?
    • TulliusCicero 9y ago
      It's more like YIEBY. YIMBYs want more housing pretty much everywhere there's high demand. It's like they want the market to be able to match demand with...supply, or something weird like that.
• jseliger 9y ago
  If you're interested in this issue, Vox has a good explainer on it: https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained. This problem has substantial costs throughout the U.S., too: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/new-hsieh-moretti-paper-land-use-restrictions-economic-growth.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/new... : "Using a spatial equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by more than 50% from 1964 to 2009."
• hellofunk 9y ago
  > The house at 1310 Haskell Street does not look worthy of a bitter neighborhood war. That often happens to people unfamiliar with Haskell.
• eecc 9y ago
  Right, American Sprawl has to be put out of its misery. The Nuclear Family - as in born under the angst of MAD - and it’s millions of little castles and fake porticos is over, but beware the European madness of the likes of Courbusier, the banlieues, and the speculative investments aiming at stuffing millions with expensive mortgages and lifetime obligations.
  • Turing_Machine 9y ago
    > Right, American Sprawl has to be put out of its misery. Don't want a single-family suburban home? Don't buy one. Your tastes are not those of others, and you don't get to tell them how they should live.
    • davidsawyer 9y ago
      I would argue that is it still in everyone's best interest to curb sprawl. Taxpayers are still paying for highways and infrastructure to go out into suburbs where we could instead be spending it in a more efficient manner: in an urban environment. I could go on and on about the negative externalities of sprawl (pollution, obesity, etc.), but money is typically at the top of the list of motivating factors for the voting public.
      • Turing_Machine 9y ago
        "Taxpayers are still paying for highways and infrastructure to go out into suburbs" You mean highways that go to where they want to go? "could instead be spending it in a more efficient manner: in an urban environment" Well, we could be spending it all on barracks where we all sleep in bunks and eat in military-style chow halls. That would be even more efficient, right? "Efficiency" is not the primary purpose of human life. It's probably not even in the top ten.
        • dradtke 9y ago
          The real problem is that people don't realize how expensive all that infrastructure actually is: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... The suburban lifestyle needs to be subsidized in order to be sustainable, but good luck getting people to keep up with proper infrastructure investment. Even cities are failing at it (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...), but suburbs have even more infrastructure to maintain with a much smaller tax base.
• optimusclimb 9y ago
  > Other objections were particular to Berkeley — like a zoning board member’s complaint that shadows from the homes might hurt the supply of locally grown food. Bay Area housing woes summed up in one sentence.
  • Justsignedup 9y ago
    When a statement so stupid is argued, you know you have a major problem...
    • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      It depends on the priorities of the people living there. If economic growth maximization for corporations is your priority, then high-density housing is incredibly important. If, however, your priority is greenhouse gas emission control and mitigation, then solid locally grown food production would be seen as more important.
      • eckmLJE 9y ago
        High-density housing does more to mitigate energy use than growing food in your back yard instead of in the plentiful land throughout California.
      • davidw 9y ago
        If you want to curb greenhouse gas emissions, you want to fight sprawl and all the huge car commutes it entails. The easiest way to do that is to allow denser living - including daily necessities withing walking or biking distance. When I lived in Italy, we had withing walking distance: kids schools, grocery store, a few cafes and bars, a barber, a pastry shop and a few other things. A few urban gardens do not a serious supply chain make: better to preserve real farmland outside of cities.
        • toomuchtodo 9y ago
          I prefer my sprawl and an electric car over dense urban living. The US has an enormous amount of farmland (915 million acres; two thirds of all land is farmland) [1], able to provide food for many times our current population. The problem with housing is "What do you want to be near, and how much will you pay to do so?" Try mandating or financially incentivizing remote work to employers, thereby disconnecting geography to income before dictating housing density. San Francisco's problem, for example, is that too many people want to live in the same place. You will never be able to satiate demand to be there (similar to how more roads begets more traffic). [1] https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Farms_and_Farmland/Highlights_Farms_and_Farmland.pdf https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resou...
• tabeth 9y ago
  I don't see how this problem can be solved in the short-run with anything other than money. Just buy out the entire neighborhood, raze all the houses, put up huge complexes and bake in the price of the beforementioned behavior into the new rent. Doing this a house at a time is a fruitless effort. The neighbors will crush you -- rightfully so (why shouldn't the people who own propery have a say?). It sucks, but it seems like that's how it is. EDIT: The only interesting thing here is that people are so fixated on just a few spots in this country. You'd think the natural conclusion of this would be employers going to the cheaper areas and this problem would solve itself.
  • ohazi 9y ago
    > It sucks, but it seems like that's how it is. But maybe not how it should be? You own your plot of land... I don't see how it's reasonable for you to claim any control over how other owners use their plot(s) of land, within reason. If a building proposal fits within the current zoning, the default should be approval. I don't think it's reasonable for neighbors to be able to kill a project over shadows on their vegetables.
    • tabeth 9y ago
      The problem with this is that zoning is inherently political. Even if it fits into the "current zoning" the neighbors will just change it.
      • ohazi 9y ago
        So let them! I want to see them put vegetable garden shadows into the zoning code. This is the only way to reasonably fight this - put it all out in the open and let voters decide what is and isn't reasonable. There are enough reasonable people who will think it's ridiculous and vote to change it. It shouldn't be tied up in individual lawsuits with individual developers. Nobody has enough money to fight like that, and this is why nothing gets built.
        • tabeth 9y ago
• myroon5 9y ago
  "Kurt Caudle, a neighbor of 1310 Haskell, grows tomatoes, squash and greens outside his back door. He worries that denser development on the adjoining lot could obstruct sunlight for his garden." Oh, the horror!
  • TomV1971 9y ago
    As an outsider, it’s easy to dismiss this. But now think if you happen to live on just that one plot of land in the street, right next to the development, that will now be in the shadow of the new building. Would you be happy about it? I wouldn’t, and neither would you.
    • forgotmysn 9y ago
      you're right. better to let the housing crisis continue than to support a solution that slightly inconveniences me.
      • TomV1971 9y ago
        Yes, I think about it this way as well. In general. Until it happens to impact me personally. I’m not proud of it, but I haven’t seen anyone who doesn’t react the same way. Nobody like to give up good things that they already have (especially if they paid $1M+ for it.)
        • mywittyname 9y ago
          People are assholes (you and me included). That's why we have so many laws (and lawsuits) about this kind of thing.
          • TomV1971 9y ago
            Exactly. :-) And it’s great progress if people at least realize that they are, or would be in the same situation as that Berkeley neighborhood.
      • 9y ago
• TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  I would care about this issue more if it wasn't just a handful of cities in the country experiencing economic growth. However, there are probably hundreds of cities in the midwest declining while the remaining jobs continue to be centralized. Instead of finding ways to pack more people into those handful of cities, why not spread the economic development out a bit? That would improve quality of life for the people of an area while reducing regional inequality at the same time.
  • Turing_Machine 9y ago
    > why not spread the economic development out a bit? An interesting idea. Maybe this could be done by lottery -- choose 10% of people who live in the trendy coastal areas at random and force them to move to, say, Detroit, or Akron, Ohio. (note: not a serious proposal)
    • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      If it's not a serious proposal, then why did you say it? Is there some criticism of my comment implied in your comment that I'm missing?
      • Turing_Machine 9y ago
        How are you proposing to "spread the economic development out a bit"?
        • dredmorbius 9y ago
          Bad hygiene. https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/36518392 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/36518392
      • eberkund 9y ago
        Yes, clearly. You made a suggestion but provided no reasonable explanation towards implementing it. If people one to live in one area how do you suggest spreading out the economic development without something similar to the sarcastic suggestion you're replying to?
• ryandrake 9y ago
  I guess I need to be the contrarian again, but unless I was forced to due to financial woes, I would never again willingly live in dense urban housing. Or dense suburban housing. Or even these "townhomes" which is really just a nice upscale-sounding word for "apartments". I've lived enough of my life sharing a wall or two with neighbors. Smelling their soup. Listening to them have sex. Wondering if their meth cooking was going to burn down our whole building. Having to go for a long walk to find some green space for a kid to play in. Having everyone knowing when I'm coming and going. Screw that. Let me keep the option of living in a single family home. Build more of them so I'm not confined to a tiny few 1960's-era neighborhoods. I'm fine with having to pay through the nose for a little privacy and a backyard, given the alternative. Go build your apartments and town-homes over in apartment-land. Being able to reach out my window and touch my neighbor's house is NOT a selling point.
  • ng12 9y ago
    That's totally fine and dandy. I encourage you to do so. What I don't suggest is moving to a dense urban area and then complaining about it being a dense urban area.
    • ryandrake 9y ago
      But that's what all this YIMBY stuff is: People wanting to drive bulldozers into existing suburban neighborhoods with 1/2 acre lots and single-family homes, and urbanize them with apartments and townhomes. But you got yourself a deal: I won't argue for building single family homes in downtown San Francisco (really, who is?) and you don't argue for building apartment complexes in Tracy and Gilroy.
      • ng12 9y ago
        Who's talking about bulldozing Tracy? The article is about a three-unit condo in the already dense Berkeley/Emeryville area.
        • ryandrake 9y ago
• ProfessorLayton 9y ago
  I live in a neighborhood built in the early 40s in the East Bay, and is marked red in the NYT article. This crisis is one of those "You reap what you sow" moments caused in large part by institutionalized racism. It is not hyperbole, I have seen the old covenants included with my parent's house, also in the East Bay, that literally said no POC could live there. These covenants are of course now invalid, but thats where zoning comes to into play. The rules now latched on by NIMBYs, such as minimum lot sizes, low lot occupancy, low heights etc. were precisely implemented to keep POC from being able to afford to move into largely white suburban neighborhoods. Depending on the racial composition of certain neighborhoods, they would be zoned to allow denser development, or restrict them to SFH. All this combined with lending practices where banks "redlined" neighborhoods that were deemed too full of POC has brought us where we are today, even in the progressive Bay Area [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/books/review/richard-rothstein-color-of-law-forgotten-history.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/books/review/richard-roth...
  • DoreenMichele 9y ago
    Of the first 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill, fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites. * It is a figure that makes me want to throw up, and I'm not even black. I feel like this country owes blacks (as a group) probably a few billion dollars in some sense. Barriers to home buying for African Americans constitutes actively preventing them from creating savings and financial security. Homeownership has historically provided half or more of the value of the nest egg for most ordinary (aka not rich) Americans. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I._Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I....
    • mercutio2 9y ago
      Much more than single digit billions. This, and redlining, are the core of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s very compelling argument for reparations on the order of trillions in 2017 dollars. We’ll never do it, of course, but it would be the moral and just thing. It’d probably have a positive effect on the economy, too, but Trump voters wouldn’t stand for it.
• rb808 9y ago
  Yeah I'm on the side of the residents that have lived there for a long time and want to keep it low density single family. Surely they have more rights that people moving to the bay area. If they want to keep things as they are that should be all that counts. Yes replacing these suburbs with medium or high density housing will temporarily reduce prices and allow more people to move there but why should current residents have to sacrifice their lifestyle?
  • erwtuif 9y ago
    Because the Bay Area holds opportunities for people that other places don't (Google Raj Chetty et al's work). Barring people from the area because you can't take change - not cool.
  • aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    Do you feel the same way about national or state level immigration? > If they want to keep things as they are that should be all that counts. I'm of many minds about both your original statement as well as, to me, the obviously related immigration issues. There's no obvious right answer, to me. Conflict is inevitable!
  • closeparen 9y ago
    Why should rich people have to pay taxes? If people who have had money for a long time want to keep things as they are, that should be all that counts. Yes raising taxes might let us build some public infrastructure that will be useful for a little while, but why should rich people have to sacrifice their lifestyle?
  • TulliusCicero 9y ago
    "Why should I have to live near a homeless shelter? Gross, homeless people." "Why should I have to recycle? The environment? Pffff." "Why should we let in immigrants and compromise our lifestyle? Build the wall!"
  • TulliusCicero 9y ago
    America: "We need more decent jobs! There are hardly any good jobs these days!" Also America: "Why do people keep trying to move to where the few good jobs are?? Ugh, stupid entitled millennials!"
• DoreenMichele 9y ago
  Around the country, many fast-growing metropolitan areas are facing a brutal shortage of affordable places to live, leading to gentrification, homelessness, even disease. Nice to see someone say that there is an actual connection between insane housing prices and homelessness. Most discussions of homelessness frame it as if it is merely a personal problem, like people on the street are merely junkies and losers and not in any way, shape or form victims of something gone bad wrong with the fabric of society. And most discussions of housing problems in the US don't really acknowledge that this issue is pertinent to the folks on the street.
• perseusprime11 9y ago
  I never understood the density issue. If remote work becomes a default hiring practice, this will not be a problem. Nobody is going to fight to stay close to work. I see this in Manhattan, people struggle commuting from NJ/Connecticut/PA to come to the city for work. Why not address it in a different way?
  • pascalxus 9y ago
    Remote work is extremely difficult to get. There are few remote positions available.
    • krisroadruck 9y ago
      ^^ So many companies are managed by people that seem to absolutely require you to be butt-in-seat or else they assume you will turn into an island or not get any work done, despite all evidence to the contrary. About a year ago I decided I was going to stop moving around the country chasing opportunities and move to a place I actually wanted to live, assuming I'd be able to get reasonable remote work. My salary fell from $180K to $60K because it was impossible to find suitable remote work after 6 months of looking and I got stuck at a local small-time outfit. Hell just take a look at the "Who's Hiring" post on the homepage, even in the tech space remote work is basically non-existent.
      • perseusprime11 9y ago
        That’s really sad state of affairs. Thank you for sharing your story and good luck with your gigs.
• acover 9y ago
  Zoning and housing development affect a large portion of household spending. Municipal elections typically have terribly turnout. Would a prize for tweeting your photo at polling place improve turnout? Change policies?
  • asabjorn 9y ago
    In the bay area renters vote in lockstep with landlords/homeowners. Breaking that by helping educating renters on how developers interests largely align with theirs and that landlord/homeowner interests often doesn't is by far the biggest impact we can make. In politics it is all about the coalitions.
• leggomylibro 9y ago
  People are selfish; if they make a big investment and you're about to reduce its value, they will fight tooth and nail. Any conversation about 'right', 'wrong', 'moral', it all goes out the window. It really sucks that so much of peoples' value is often tied up in a single property. It would be a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision, if you didn't need shelter to live reasonably well. So let's be clear. These people are being incredibly selfish, and that is reprehensible. But they also don't really have a good alternative that wouldn't lose them a lot of money in a time where, if they're not in the class that owns multiple houses, they're already struggling. And that is sort of ameliorating imo.
  • Erik816 9y ago
    It's not always clear the selfishness is strictly financial. If your land gets zoned for higher density development (or similar regulations/barriers are removed), and there is strong demand, then the value of your property can go way up. What they generally want is to enjoy the current character of their neighborhood (big lots, green space, still close to the city, walkable, etc.), but also realize substantial gains in housing value by keeping new housing off the market. They might gain even more money if their particular land could be developed and they moved, but then they woud have to move.
    • ddlatham 9y ago
      Many people don't care about the potential monetary value change, it's only about the character of their neighborhood that you mention. They just enjoy the way of life in a low density, single family home neighborhood - the gardens, space, easy parking, low traffic, kids playing in the street. That's why they chose to live there.
      • Retric 9y ago
        I think their is a strong bias that people which free time tend to care more about the neighborhood. Most people may not agree, but we rarely hear from an unbiased same.
      • 9y ago
• hudibras 9y ago
  As an aside, I love how the one picture of the new construction just randomly includes a guy zooming by in the foreground on a cargo bicycle, as if the photographer didn't sit there for a while waiting for one to go by so he could snap his picture. Gotta throw all the Berkeley stereotypes in there while you can, I guess.
  • pzone 9y ago
    Waiting for 15 minutes for a cyclist to go by is pretty minor in terms of what a professional photographer will go through to snap a good picture.
• rubidium 9y ago
  HN really loves their housing problems of california (or new york) articles... I'm surprised everyone's not tired of the same news over and over again.
  • el_benhameen 9y ago
    I pay the same absurd rent over and over again, so no, I’m not tired of talking about how it’s a problem.
    • dbkelly 9y ago
      And it sounds like you are quite willing as well as able to pay that high rent over and over again. If it was really so unaffordable and so absurd, you'd be living in a more affordable area.
• danans 9y ago
  This sort of thing happened to friends in Berkeley who wanted to add a second floor to a home they bought in a neighborhood already full of 2 story homes. The main neighbor opposing also had a 2 story home, but felt that the proposed second story would take away the visual privacy of their own backyard. The friends prevailed but not without a lot of delays and added costs. In the end they asked that neighbor why they did it, and turned out that the neighbor obstructed just because they could, as a sort of last stand for their generation in the neighborhood. On the other hand, places like Portland have made the opposite mistake of extreme (vs incremental) upzoning [1] which also causes housing market problems. 1. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/9/revisiting-whats-the-matter-with-portland https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/9/revisiting-what...
  • diN0bot 9y ago
    this article made the author’s point more clear to me https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-rising-tide https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-ris... incremental zoning increases is important for actually realizing developments. or at least that is the argument.
• pcurve 9y ago
  You cannot just take all the single family home zones and subdivide them into 3, because the infrastructure needs to expand with it. If you're familiar with Edgewater, NJ, you know what I'm talking about. There is one main road that runs through this town, and you're essentially trapped if something happens to that road. Seoul tried to address by going to outskirts of the city where land price was much cheaper and essentially built high rise clusters with parks, stores, and modern amenities. They took the, "build it and they will come" approach, with good success. Now some people in city center are kicking themselves in their undeveloped, old residential zones with tight ally. It took well over 10 years to fully build out subway systems, but you have to start somewhere (literally and figuratively).
• sillypog 9y ago
  Berkeley recently made it easier to build accessory dwelling units on a residential lot http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/03/20/new-laws-make-even-easier-build-backyard-cottages-berkeley/ http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/03/20/new-laws-make-even-ea.... I think people are pricing this in when they're buying property in Berkeley now - people who have the cash to invest in building these structures are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the next best offers if the property has a good sized yard. Sonja Trauss sure gets mentioned in a lot of articles for her work at the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation. No surprise to see she's running for Supervisor now.
• mjevans 9y ago
  Zoning laws more like Japan's would be useful here... (former submission) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845 http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html My take on staying low impact would be to encourage single-story //above// ground development, and require underground spaces for each building (potentially shared), including parking.
  • clairity 9y ago
    building underground is much more expensive (developers like to say 10X more, but that's probably a gross exaggeration to make us feel sorry for those poor developers), but i'm all for building parking underground in urban areas, even potentially for single family homes. put a good chunk of powered transportation underground and you could create more green space (for people and pets, to walk, exercise, play, bike, etc.). to make that happen, cities should price in the cost of street parking (one of the externalities that developers try to take advantage of, in their arguments about the high cost of parking ordinances). for instance, require every car parking on the street to have a neighborhood permit (many municipalities do this, but not widely). price the permits progressively. make each additional permit per household more expensive. use the funds to maintain both roads and public green space. as LA did in the 50's(?) in downtown bunker hill, on major thoroughfares, you could have two levels of streets, one at ground level and one underground. underground streets could have direct access to underground parking structures. in higher density areas, you could even build single family homes on top of mixed-use, multi-story buildings. it wouldn't be quite the same, but for many, it would be the best of both worlds. ps - i saw the japanese zoning article the first time around and thought it was intriguing.
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• scythe 9y ago
  When I first started reading about housing affordability, I was all for the kinds of upzoning this article (among many others like it) is advocating. Today I still believe it would be an effective approach to improving housing affordability, but some recurrent gaps in logic have started to bug me, so today I avoid the debate rather than take part, or rather stand on the sidelines and cast aspersions, like this: - there's a lack of deep investigation and analysis into why people prefer single-family neighborhoods so strongly; the few articles that do go into the social and psychological picture tend to be ultra-leftist and include such themes as "anti-privacy" which I'm obviously against - the debate over housing types is tied to the debate over transportation types, and there's no representation for people who agree modern houses are too big but still prefer to own a car (even if we don't use them all the time) - the whole conversation is pretty much set up and run (on both sides) by people who aren't severely affected by any of the policies they're advocating, and who will be able to afford the lifestyle they want regardless of what policy passes, even if it might force them to take two annual trips to Jackson Hole instead of three - truly unique ideas have a tendency to get lost in the fray, like even if you run the one of most popular blogs in urban planning and propose a solution to housing prices in (e.g.) Portland [1], the typical voter will never ever hear about your idea, nobody will ever turn it into a workable policy or perform a serious analysis of what it might do, and legislators won't give it a moment's thought, so why are we even posting about this (I'll throw in my $0.02 -- green roofs should count at least partially towards open space requirements) - the fact that some people just don't like certain kinds of people, motivated by race, religion, lifestyle, politics, aesthetic sensibilities, or even vocation, is always bubbling beneath the surface - it's not clear how we're going to modify political, legal, and educational systems so that if people ever DO accept sensible growth policies, they're doing it because they understand it will improve their lives and not because they've been threatened or bribed or shamed into genuflecting in the presence of economists 1: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-rising-tide https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-ris...
• calimac 9y ago
  Nothing new but click bait NYT headline. This is basic Zoning law. Nothing has changed. Zoned A single structure either SFR or single 1-4 units, not 3 structures. The developer should know that minimum lot size has been a hard rule for a century plus. Don't play with facts to bend reality and cry victimization or ordinance. By the way I don't live in Berkeley. I do visit friends who own homes there.
• ZainRiz 9y ago
  So what's stopping the Bay Area from growing out onto uninhabited land instead of trying to pack the existing areas even more densely?
  • cobbzilla 9y ago
    The uninhabited land you speak of is: * mountains: expensive to build on, definitely not a good place for affordable housing * water: in the past 100+ years there has been substantial build-out onto the Bay. Any further encroachments are met with stiff resistance. * far: to get past the above 2 difficulties, you're looking at an hour+ to get to SF. Things are (relatively) affordable in Sacramento, if you're willing to deal with that commute. It's a beautiful but cursed geography, this SF Bay area. And then there's this, from the article: "Neighborhoods in which single-family homes make up 90 percent of the housing stock account for a little over half the land mass in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles metropolitan areas", so there is an understandable urge to increase density in some of those SFH areas.
  • stevenwoo 9y ago
    A large percentage of the remaining open space in the peninsula at least is either state / county park land / public park land ala Midpeninsula Open Space or Santa Clara Water/San Francisco Water District land like Crystal Springs Reservoir.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    Sprawl itself is a significant part of the problem. The traffic jams for Bay Area traffic extend to Sacramento, Stockton, and even Modesto. To the north and south: Santa Rosa/Windsor, and Gilroy. During the 1990s and 2000s building booms, housing was built in Solano County, Sacramento, and San Joaquin counties, as well as along the delta (Antioch, Pittsburg) and along the Livermore/580 corridor. Those are now hellish commutes, most in toward the urban core. See this Google Maps view, roughly 100km on an edge: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7938826,-121.9739388,10.66z https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7938826,-121.9739388,10.66z And even that cuts off Sacramento, which does see a fair bit of commuting to the Bay Area. Compare a roughly similar region around London: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5645481,-0.0649439,10.33z https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5645481,-0.0649439,10.33z Google Maps doesn't show you densities, but through much of the SF Bay Area those are low. Going from SFD simply to duplexes would be a huge progress. Multi-storey rather than single-storey dwellings. Denser localised urban cores rather than spread-out development in the various cities throughout the region. This is before considering the suitability (or lack) of undeveloped lands to development.
• yuhong 9y ago
  The fun thing is that it increased adoptions of EVs in the short term. It is easier to design a building for them in the beginning than to add it after it is constructed.
  • astrange 9y ago
    Is putting in a 240V outlet that hard? It seems easy if the house has room to park next to it. Meanwhile in San Mateo County, everyone parks on the street for free when that land should be just as valuable as their $2 million houses.
    • yuhong 9y ago
      I am talking about apartments not houses, which was my point.
      • cesarb 9y ago
        It's still not hard, one can use apparent ducts and sockets (instead of embedding both in the walls and ceilings). The main difficulty with apartments is social: since the garage is a shared space, it has to be approved at a meeting.
• joejerryronnie 9y ago
  How about legislating a carrot rather than a stick - e.g. every housing unit within a given radius gets an annual $1000 rebate on their property tax if new, affordable housing is built within their neighborhood? As it stands today there is no perceived short-term benefit for home owners to support new development. No matter how many well heeled YIMBY groups sprout up, they will always be far outnumbered by local homeowners.
  • matchbok 9y ago
    Subsidized "affordable" housing does more harm than good. We need more housing, period. Removing market-rate places for these subsidized ones just raises the price for everyone.
    • himlion 9y ago
      The problem is that if the housing supply is already too small there is little incentive to build anything other than luxury homes, since the margin is inevitably highest on those.
      • afarrell 9y ago
        And yet many of the cities where this is true, politicians celebrate adding high-paying jobs but not adding housing to accommodate the highly-paid workers. Whenever a new office building is approved, housing construction permits should be issued until there is at least 1 bed for every desk.
      • ajmurmann 9y ago
        That's OK though isn't it? Even having more luxury housing will eventually drive all prices down if we build enough housing. I don't care which end of the spectrum we want to tackle first. We need a huge amount of additional housing. If there is more incentive to build luxury housing first, so be it. But let's just start to actually build significant(!) amounts of any housing. Of love to see a lot of high rise buildings added all over the bay area. The avenues in SF for example are very low density and the houses aren't historically significant or anything either. Let's build a dozen or so 60+ floors apartment or condo buildings there and the prices are gonna come down.
• deleted 9y ago
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• harmlessposter 9y ago
  Boomers have wrecked our nation.
• Chiba-City 9y ago
  Think schedules, skills and resources against relocation patterns and not just proportions abstracted from schedules. Think of the housing industry as a CPU. Think of babies as data coming across buses and switches. Never forget mortgage deductions were never states of "American dream" grace but subsidized and still subsidize wealthier purchasers. Tons of Americans purchased and are still purchasing depreciating "Levittown" type assets all over the USA. We are not just cutting ribbons for bad purchases. All the policy details matter where and when they matter. Rentals are just as important as purchases. Many Americans move quite frequently and do not enjoy corporation relocation bonuses.
• branchless 9y ago
  Tax land and smoke the boomers out their oversized houses. Voila.
• deleted 9y ago
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• thomas_howland 9y ago
  Single family homes are historically how populations insulate themselves from the consequences of the policies the NYT advocates. On a macro scale, they're a defensive architecture. They make your neighborhood expensive enough that the population is (by selection) wealthy enough to ensure sufficiently low crime rates and sufficiently Good Schools, with enough geographic buffer to survive natural population movements.
  • prklmn 9y ago
    You should touch up on your history.
  • astrange 9y ago
    Single family suburbia was partly created to spread out the population in case of nuclear attacks, but mostly so you wouldn’t have to see any black people.
• joejerryronnie 9y ago
  I guess the bottom line is that homeowners are never going to stop fighting growth in their neighborhoods and are never going to be swayed over to the YIMBY viewpoint. And people who can't afford housing are going to continue trying to implement measures that might make housing more affordable for them and will never give credit to the NIMBY viewpoint. This is not a problem that can be solved by piecemeal legislation or random lawsuits. It is also inextricably tied to effective mass transportation and needs regional planning, legislation, and funding over the next couple of decades. We should be designating major swaths of the Bay Area as urban corridors with high density housing, world class rail service, and highly incentivized job centers. We would also need to overpay the existing residents in the path of these new urban corridors with either shiny new digs in the luxury high rises or well above market buyouts. We need a regional leader who can articulate and sell this vision to all the residents and politicians of the Bay Area, not just the young, professional city dwellers. The approach has got to be a win-win investment that every type of person sees some benefit with (even if that benefit is "great, focus all the city folk to those corridors and stop bugging me about changing my neighborhood").
  • junkscience2017 9y ago
    Whenever people fantasize about some mysterious fourth "regional" level of government in the Bay Area, it is always assumed that this plays to their advantage...that someone from San Francisco will hold sway over the suburbs and impose their will. But San Jose is larger by population...if you propose that this same layer of government instead be centered in San Jose, all of a sudden people lose interest. If three levels of government can't get anything done, how will four help? In any case this "regional" government already exists in the form of transit agencies, utilities, waste and water districts, etc....I see very few people clamoring to give the bureaucrats of BART any more power.
    • joejerryronnie 9y ago
      By all means, I'd love to see this regional leadership emanate from the South Bay. It's where the real money, power, and future growth reside in the Bay Area anyway.
• tnt128 9y ago
  This might be an unpopular opinion here. It seems a general sentiment here in HN is that building more houses will result in a lower home price. I'm not so sure if that's always going to be the case. Increased supply could very well turn San Francisco into cities like Hong Kong or New York - More houses but just as expensive. If you think the current San Francisco as a small bucket full of water, will increase the size of the bucket stop the water from being full? well, that will depend on out how much water out there that wants to flow in right? If there are more water wants to come in than the size increase, you will just end up with a bigger bucket full of water.
  • junkscience2017 9y ago
    They thought that in Vancouver too. They didn't bank on wealthy foreigners who would gladly keep condos vacant. You will see the same thing happen in the Bay Area...there is no law that requires new construction to be allocated to "locals". The YIMBY crowd will still be locked out.
    • closeparen 9y ago
      Vacancy tax that's aggressive enough to convince absentee owners to take on renters will need to be part of any solution to the housing crisis, and may even be a solution by itself. (San Francisco has more vacant units, which could be returned to the market overnight, than it could build in years).
  • closeparen 9y ago
    I don't understand. Are you asserting that the set people who are willing to move to San Francisco and pay $X/mo grows and shrinks with San Francisco's housing supply? By what mechanism? Certainly the set of people who are willing to move to SF and pay $Y < $X is larger, but then SF is not "just as expensive" anymore if it achieves rent $Y. If rents start to rise up towards $X again, then the pool of people willing to move here shrinks accordingly.
    • closeparen 9y ago
• anovikov 9y ago
  50 units a megaproject? Several thousands in one building would be a megaproject. 50 units is what's considered a boutique low-rise development in Europe.
• conanbatt 9y ago
  If you are truly interested in the moral and economic arguments around this topic, i strongly recommend Progress and Poverty from henry george from before the 1900's. With that in your arsenal you understand that this is a political issue.
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    The more appropriate as George was from and writing about San Francisco, in large part.
    • conanbatt 9y ago
      "Land in New York is more valuable than in San Francisco; and in New York, the San Franciscan may see squalor and misery that will make him stand aghast."
• ilaksh 9y ago
  Here is my current thinking as an alternative to regular large single family homes: https://i.imgur.com/7Gx4MMb.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7Gx4MMb.jpg . I explain the picture at the bottom of this comment. My take on this is to compare the types of proposed lot layouts in the article where they have three almost normal sized buildings per plot instead of one, with the "tiny house" concept. If people aren't aware, "tiny house" is a really interesting concept that you may want to google. I would argue the sustainability of tiny homes is more of a plus than a primary reason for most people really, but since people are sustainability-minded and for practical purposes, some of these homes do not have wet toilets and instead have composting toilets. The reason people are going for tiny homes is because of the lack of affordable "normal-size" housing. So, if people are willing to buy a house that is actually tiny and does not have a flush feature, maybe the next step up is a quite small but not tiny two-story house that has normal features like flush toilets. ---------------------------------------------------- Details on picture: So I have been thinking for awhile along the lines of the article, but my buildings are two stories, fairly small but not quite "tiny", and have more space between them, which is explicitly dedicated to something like permaculture in order to be more sustainable. They are built with space-saving furniture and designed somewhat similarly to tiny-homes, except they have two full floors. As noted in the picture, I am proposing much more living space than is available in tiny homes. The permaculturish part means that the landscaping is designed to produce food. So the large circles on the picture are dwarf fruit or nut trees, the smaller circles berry and nut bushes (like American filbert for example). The rectangular strip is something like walking onion or maybe another perennial like yam. Around the entire property is an artificial raceway stream/pond with paddles to keep the water moving. This artificial stream/pond is used to farm a few fish. There are also one or two chickens on the property to produce eggs. The furniture can be things like wall beds that convert to sofas for downstairs, wall beds that convert to desks for upstairs. The construction would use SIPs and HRV/ERV. The raceway pond could also have a pipe at the bottom for purposes of geothermal cooling/heating for the buildings. The buildings would have solar panels on the top of course.
• jpao79 9y ago
  Its much more likely about the degradation in the quality of life if you were not thinking about moving in the near future than improving your investment. Its likely not about the one bungalow getting converted to 3 townhouses its the 10 more bungalows on the same block (that already has minimal parking) that will get converted once the first 3 townhouses sell for $1.5M each. And then your house will get re-appraised for higher and your property taxes will go up, all while you were busy planting tomatoes. Here's an example of what happens when there is a rapid increase in density in a formerly suburban town with minimal transit options: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/12/02/traffic-mess-gridlocks-palo-alto-for-hours https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/12/02/traffic-mess-... 'The number of exhaust-spewing vehicles lined up in front of Downtown North and the Crescent Park homes was stunning, even to residents who endure heavy traffic in those neighborhoods. "Last night was similar what happens most weeknights on Middlefield, just on steroids and over a wider area. There were double lanes of traffic on the four blocks of Middlefield north from about 3:30 to after 7:30 p.m. I did not see exactly when it cleared," said John Guislin, who has been working for years on traffic-calming measures along Middlefield. "I had planned to go out to do errands but was completely blocked from leaving my driveway. Remember, Middlefield has two lanes in each direction, so backing out is extremely difficult because even if a car in the curb lane stops for you, the center lane can't see you until it's too late." he said.' Silicon Valley VCs and YCombinator need to encourage growth where there is existing mass transit and the infrastructure/city services can support 20 story residential. They should definitely look south toward San Jose (BART, High Speed Rail). Watch this PBS news hour segment starting at minute 7. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ever-growing-tech-giants-have-changed-the-pace-and-price-of-life-in-silicon-valley https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ever-growing-tech-giants-h...
• rukittenme 9y ago
  Replace state and/or federal income taxes with a LVT (land value tax). Its egregious that a single family home in downtown Portland cost $5000 a year in property taxes. You'll deduct that amount in interest every year. Its essentially free for people to take up space.
• dmurthy 9y ago
  Having grown up in a large single family home that was built in the 60's, I've enjoyed great freedom thanks to the privacy in the large garden surrounding our house. After marriage I moved cities and live in a small duplex with a really tiny private garden and a common community space. I must say I do not miss the space of the large independent house. The need of the hour today is functional living for everyone.
• biztos 9y ago
  > What [the press] says is important usually isn't. Really? I know a certain President who emphatically agrees, but in my experience what the more serious parts of the press say is important very much is.
• _ph_ 9y ago
  I am wondering why there are no laws forcing cities to add residental capcity for every new job created/office building built. It should be obvious, that if the number of jobs in a city grows significantly, you have to have more residental space, or you will have a real estate price hike and a traffic problem at your hand. In many places, building permits could be limited to mixed office/appartment buildings, or alternatively, the permits should be possible only if the city can show corresponding residental developments (it would be up to the city how much they would charge the office space developer for this).
• muninn_ 9y ago
  This is the quote that gets me: "“The smaller the unit of government, the harder it is to solve this problem,” Mr. Friedman said." This is incredibly arrogant and destructive. First, do you know why, Mr. Friedman, it's harder to "solve" this "problem" at the local level? It's because you're dealing with the actual residents who are involved in their community and government and they can't just be greased up like state politicians. Second, it's only a 'problem' from your perspective, but I don't think anything here is a problem, it's a feature. It should be difficult to get approval for a new building in a community and it should be difficult to convince the residents of the community that what you're doing will benefit their community - the one that they live in. I can't fathom how people don't understand that it should be expensive to live in California right next to one of the best universities on the planet. California (and the United States) cannot afford to continue to add people (either by reproduction or immigration), and you are delusional if you think you're going to keep adding people and somehow everything is going to be affordable and great like it was in the 60s or something. The fact of the matter is that more people will mean higher prices, and those who live in desirable communities have every incentive (and rightfully so) to not see their community turned into a dystopian skyscraper land. Instead of trying to move to Berkely, move somewhere else. There's plenty of planet out there.
• varelse 9y ago
  Well, given the Trump tax plan has passed both houses, I expect it to affect any state with high taxes, be they income (California/NY) or property (Texas). Who needs a double-taxed carrying cost like this? House prices will likely drop IMO.
• conanbatt 9y ago
  A rental-proportionate value tax might make all of these problems dissapear. As time passes I find Henry George's idea to be better and better everyday.
• CodeWriter23 9y ago
  Talk about treating the symptoms. The root cause is the sprawl of business insisting on locating themselves in The Bay Area / Silicon Valley. Want to solve the housing problem? Limit commercial space.
• baron816 9y ago
  Why is it that people think new construction needs to be affordable? Of course new construction is going to be expensive, it's new. You can still increase the number of affordable housing by only building "luxury" apartments through filtering. Rich people move to the new apartments, then less rich people move to their apartments...and so on.
• afpx 9y ago
  There is another whole side to prices, and that is demand. Decrease the demand, and you decrease the prices. I haven't researched the issue in depth, but what I did research seemed to show that demand has at least as much effect on prices as supply. So, how do you decrease demand? For one, prevent non-citizens from purchasing property. That is common in the rest of the world. But, if you're not a fan of that, you can still decrease demand by encouraging growth in other urban areas - give out grants, economic development, tax incentives, education funding, infrastructure funding, etc. And, if that doesn't work, then just make high-demand areas less attractive. Some of that would just work out naturally as wages increase and services become more expensive. I respect the NYT, but I can't help but wonder if the building and development industry influenced this.
  • ktothemc 9y ago
    The author is a homeowner whose parents have also owned a house in Noe Valley kitty corner to one of Airbnb founders. He’s a massive beneficiary of the status quo system who also happens to think that it needs to change given that more and more Californians are being born every day and that we should change our land-use and infrastructure to be even more inclusive, not less.
• deleted 9y ago
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