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Judging by the endless thread on Nextdoor with people in my East Bay neighborhood complaining about the “Manhattanization” of their small town, due to 7 units b

Judging by the endless thread on Nextdoor with people in my East Bay neighborhood complaining about the “Manhattanization” of their small town, due to 7 units being built on an empty lot, the housing crisis is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The “FU, I got mine” attitude is going to choke California. How we got here is a fascinating story, and recommend reading literature on it.

afpx 9y ago
I don’t feel like I’m saying FU at all. My perspective is that I spent over 15 years in a house that I initially took a risk on. I helped build the neighborhood and community and schools that made it a nice place to live. And, now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. And, they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair? As I’ve said in the past, No one is addressing the demand side of this issue. Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places? I believe that the bulk of the problem starts with the companies in CA. Wages clearly aren’t high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy properties. Raise wages, and some companies will naturally move elsewhere. Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down. Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first? I’m not sure how one can disagree with my points. So, I’m probably clueless on this issue. Please educate me. (Clearly, I’ve angered the mob. Please don’t bring torches and pitchforks to my door tonight. I just wanted to get an alternative and unrepresented viewpoint into the discussion.)
- benchaney 9y ago
  This is the exact FU attitude that GP is describing. There is nothing about "building the community" that entitles you to prevent other people from living near you. They aren't trying to use political power to force you to give up what you've helped build, they are trying to buy land and build homes. It simply isn't ok for people to prevent other from living near the so they can turn their "communities" into elitist social clubs. Foreign buyers are irrelevant. They wouldn't be getting involved at all if homes in CA weren't so absurdly overpriced.
  - afpx 9y ago
    Wait, did public opinion and political thought change somewhere within the last two decades such that owning property now doesn’t give one rights over that property and rights to shared governance of the incorporated area? Sorry if that comes across as flippant, but it’s a really serious question. I kind of bought this property so that I could enjoy it for at least 30 years. It’s not my fault that it’s appreciated so much. What do you want me to do?
    - khuey 9y ago
      Buying a property gives you the right to your property. It shouldn't give you the right to tell other people who live nearby what to do with theirs (i.e. to tell them not to redevelop it at a higher density if they so choose).
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Unfortunately not the case. Ownership of your property gives you an effective fractional ownership interest in your local radius through zoning and community governance. No amount of state law is going to change that. You can keep fighting the issue (and you might have some traction in a decade or two) or move somewhere more accommodating.
        emh68 9y ago
        And for the betterment of society, we should take away some of that power. It's clearly being abused.
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        You will never have as much power as those property owners without a time machine to 30-40 years ago, and in the unlikely event you become a property owner, it’s against your interests to do anything that devalues your investment (ie increasing supply). You’re asking rational actors to make irrational decisions. The results are what you’d expect.
- random314 9y ago
  Me too. I came in 15 years ago and bought a new house. I think that should have been the last home to be built in the bay area. I built this neighborhood every time I ate at sweet tomatoes and shat there. I just don't see why there should be more homes after mine.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    Sweet Tomatoes? Is that a restaurant or did you mean that literally?
    - WWLink 9y ago
      It's a buffet restaurant.
    - mwfunk 9y ago
      It’s basically hell on earth if you’re there at the wrong time. Imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that is pretty much nothing but a big salad bar plus a small selection of soups and sides. That sounds good to me, but the unfortunate reality is that it’s a magnet for very large families with lots of small children, and pathologically cheap people who can’t resist the all-you-can-eat aspects. Imagine a cross between Sizzler, Hometown Buffet, and a middle school cafeteria, but focused on salad. Make it really crowded, but what empty tables exist seem to always be dirty and unbussed. Sprinkle with unsupervised children running around and randomly touching the food in the buffets. Mix in crowds of very slow people who enjoy standing in everyone’s way while they slowly investigate every single item in whichever buffet you’re interested in, and once they finally decide what to get you have to watch them slowly make a salad by painstakingly picking out one piece of lettuce at a time as if they were performing brain surgery. It’s probably OK if you go there during whenever their downtime is, but I have no idea when that is or if such a time even exists in the Sweet Tomatoes dimension. But if you don’t mind crowds and germs and value optimizing your money:mass ratio for food above literally every other possible consideration, it’s great! But even then I wouldn’t dream of using the restrooms there- the person you responded to is clearly far braver than me.
      - 9y ago
- chc 9y ago
  > I don’t feel like I’m saying FU at all. My perspective is that I spent over 15 years in a house that I initially took a risk on. I helped build the neighborhood and community and schools that made it a nice place to live. And, now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. And, they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair? I don't see how this differs substantially from "FU, I got mine." You're going into more detail on how you got yours and you're not cursing, but you're still saying people who have come later than you seeking the same sort of thing you have should be excluded.
- pavanred 9y ago
  Why do you think people will live cheaply if they join the community now? They pay the same taxes as you, and people engage in the community just as much as you for how ever long they choose to live there (perhaps 15 years to come and make it an even better neighborhood than it is now).
  - karthikb 9y ago
    Because of prop 13, the ones who move in today will actually pay a lot more in taxes than the ones there today. Up to 2-3x - which means the newcomers will catch up to the older neighbor’ tax contributions within a few years.
    - afpx 9y ago
      I’m actually for raising all property taxes (edit: including mine) if it helps decrease demand. I’m willing to pay a lot more taxes.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - YokoZar 9y ago
      2-3x? Try 10x. A lot of those living in million dollar homes purchased in the 70s at sub 100k prices, and are still paying based on that valuation. Or their children are, since Prop 13 lets your kids inherit the right to pay 1/10 the property taxes as newcomers.
- austenallred 9y ago
  I have a hunch that the people moving in will be paying a little bit more than you did. Probably 2x+? Not to mention they’ll pay much, much higher property taxes. Do you really think your contribution to the community is worth the increase in the value of your home, or did you just buy in an area that was at the forefront of an economic renaissance, and you capture the value of that, while seeking to prohibit others from participating? You should consider how the people that bought 15 years before you felt. Why does the buck stop with you? Why assume that people moving in won’t contribute to the community?
- foxhedgehog 9y ago
  > Please don’t bring torches and pitchforks to my door tonight Perfect.
- marcell 9y ago
  I used to have this opinion so I know where you’re coming from. I live in Mt View and I bought a condo about ten years ago. Since then traffic has been getting worse, and they put in some fairly ugly developments. A few things changed my mind. First, many people I knew personally had to move out of the area because of the cost of housing. It sucks to have to uproot your life due to rising housing cost you can’t keep up with. Second I came to realize that long term, the area either has to accommodate the inflow, or decline. The Bay Area is full of first and second generation immigrants and people who care from around the country to live her. They built SV and the companies we love/work at. If it’s too expensive for them they will stop coming, and in thirty years we’ll be in a retirement community (albeit a low density one...) So now I say, build build build. It might bring traffic but that’s a small price to pay for the long term health of the area. My bigger concern now, and what I think cities should focus on, is how to build lots of housing while still maintaining high quality of life for everyone. Edit: also remember that in California, you are really protected/subsidized if you are a home owner. Your property value will increase with no change in property tax due to Prop 13. Density and people moving in will generally drive up property values which will benefit you financially.
  - mwfunk 9y ago
    Prop 13 is an excellent point, and specific to California. I can’t imagine how different the housing situation would be without it. Maybe a little different, maybe a lot, but certainly better for almost everyone in the big picture.
    - amacbride 9y ago
      Only if salaries are forced to scale with the increase in property taxes; rapid increases to the point of unaffordability were one of the reasons the law was enacted in the first place.
      - suppressingfire 9y ago
        There were lots of states with similar problems in the 70s. Others solved it better (e.g., NY Star program that helps specific classes of people that need help). Prop 13 was a chainsaw solution to something that needed a scalpel.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- yonran 9y ago
  I think I agree with your argument that we should discourage foreign speculators, but I would go further by adding that we should discourage domestic speculation as well, so I think I disagree with your apparent argument that you deserve your own house’s appreciation. The market should be designed to reward hard work and productive investments. Something is wrong if the rewards to speculation in scarce resources exceed the rewards to work. I believe this is a progressive-era concept from Henry George. This means that hard-working people should be able to find opportunity when they come here, and the market shouldn’t reward speculators for sitting on land without making any improvements. Landlords should be rewarded for maintaining the building, and for constructing new housing, but not for appreciation on the land. But the Bay Area housing market has seemingly been designed to do the opposite. Proposition 13 protects land speculation by limiting property taxes to a little over 1% of assessed value and rewards seniority through the the acquisition value pyramid scheme. It also encourages localities to raise funds through counterproductive development fees instead of broad-based taxes. And despite the strong economy, our rate of housing construction is far below past times and other cities. We have a housing market that rewards holding onto properties, allows landlords to capture wage growth, and discourages development. I would like to see this system change. For your points about discouraging demand, I think I would agree at the national level but not at the local level. The federal government should encourage companies to locate in other cities. But localities have little power to do so. What local governments can do to discourage housing speculation is to increase land taxes and allow developers to flood the market with more housing.
  - pascalxus 9y ago
    Prop 13 is very regressive. The guy who gained 2 million dollars on his house's value, pays 2k in taxes, whilst the poor guy neighbor with the same exact house, who bought recently, has to take out 5 mortgages to buy that 2 million$ house and then, thanks to prop 13, is paying 10 times more taxes. Millennials have been in a very poor position to start with, but Prop 13 really drives the last nail into the coffin.
- kelnos 9y ago
  You may have taken a risk in moving to a place that was less desirable 15 years ago, but part of that risk is that the neighborhood continually changes, maybe not always according to your ideal plan. Land (especially desirable land) is a scarce good. Allowing incumbent landowners absolute say in what happens to the surrounding area is not in the overall public's best interests. I absolutely object to your view that people want to live here "cheaply". People want to live in SF _affordably_. As in, not having to put 75% of their income toward housing, which is an insane thing to have to do. I've been living in the bay area since 2004, the last 8 years of which have been in SF. I've been working hard to get to the point where I could buy my own place, but every year it becomes harder to justify buying over renting. At this point I do have the money, but it feels financially irresponsible to buy. But I love this city and want to put down long-term roots, and perpetually renting just doesn't seem to be the way to do that. Why don't I get a shot at helping to build the community? It's not just me. I'm fairly well-off at this point, and many people, some who have lived in SF far longer than I have, are getting hurt by all this. Take service workers, who have been all but priced out of the city. More likely than not the cashier ringing up your groceries, the barista making your coffee, the person who comes to clean your house, the waiter at your favorite restaurant... they used to get to work by hopping on Muni or BART, but now they have to drive over an hour to get to work. How is that ok? So yes, this is why I and others point fingers at you and say you embody the "FU, I got mine" attitude. You got in at a good time. I don't doubt that you put work into community building over the years, or that you took on some risk. But it absolutely floors me that people like you don't get how much of your current situation is completely down to pure dumb luck. And that's what this is all about: leveling the playing field for everyone, not just people who have money, or were lucky enough to be born at the right time or move in at the right time. To be clear, I'm not raising up my pitchfork here or coming at you angrily. At this point I'm just extremely frustrated, disappointed, and sad. To echo your sentiments, I find it hard to believe that people on "your side" don't see the obviousness of what I'm saying. I mean, does SF seem like a healthy city to you? Do you really think that just ignoring these housing issues is going to make everyone leave and everything will go back to normal? To address some of your points directly: > Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places? Two reasons: 1) for a company, betting on an untried/untested job market to fill your needs is a ridiculously risky proposition. A company like Toyota (moved from Torrance, CA to Plano, TX) can take risks like that because they're a more mature business with a large margin for error and can absorb that pain. Most SF and bay area companies can't take that risk. 2) People such as myself just don't want to live in those places. I'm in my mid-30s right now, and I don't have the desire to spend 15 more years building a community as you claim to have done. I'm fine paying more than you did back then to enjoy the benefits of a more-established community, but the current situation is just ridiculous, untenable, and unsustainable. > Wages clearly aren’t high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy properties. Raise wages, and some companies will naturally move elsewhere. Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down. That's easy to say, but, again, similar to my point above, that's an incredibly risky proposition, way too risky for many (most?) bay area companies to take. And there's an inherent chicken-and-egg problem there: if the talent is in the bay area, no one wants to be the first to move to a new area and try to attract talent. And that's completely understandable. Large companies that have a need for low- or medium-skill workers can get away with that sort of thing, but most others can't. Beyond that, whose job is it to raise wages? Why on earth would any company voluntarily do that? And good luck legislating that; this isn't just a minimum wage hike you're talking about. Do we really want the city to legislate the minimum salaries for salespeople, marketing people, developers, customer support, etc.? That's madness. Even if it was a min wage hike, if you push too hard on that lever, the service jobs are the ones that disappear, and that's not what you want. Who wants to live in a city with no ability to staff restaurants, bars, museums, and even grocery stores? > Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first? I do agree that this is a problem, absolutely. It's unclear to me, though, how much of this ends up being vacant, or does get rented out. Obviously in my position I'd prefer that more housing stock be up for individual buyers, and not be locked into the rental stock, but I'm not sure legislating who can and can't buy property and whether or not that property can be used as rental property, or if it needs to be occupied a certain percentage of the year (how would you even enforce that?) is a great use of legislative power. (Also, your sampling methodology is flawed: for a statistically significant result, you'd need to pick a representative sample of lots across the city, not just one random street.) > ... they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair? No one is forcing you to "give up" anything, but we are asking you to accept that cities and neighborhoods and communities are not static things that are etched into stone. They weren't when you moved in; the fact that you admit that you've worked to build a community is clear evidence of that. Why do you get to decide when that change stops? Just because you put some money down? Nope, sorry, I'm not buying that. People are just asking you to share the bounty of the region with them. No one is looking for a free ride; I expect new people to participate in the community just as you have. Obviously they'll be coming in at a different time, with different pluses and minuses, different challenges, but that's just how life is.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  No, you were born on third base, you didn't got a triple.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Unless in those 15 years you bought all the property around you, then your “investment” doesn’t give you the right to say what happens to that property. That’s the default: people (including developers) get to do what they want with the property they own. You’re the one trying to use the coercive power of the state to prevent them from doing that.
- cameldrv 9y ago
  Guess what? You didn't build anything. You bought a house. The building of the neighborhood over the past fifteen years is totally attributable to Facebook and Google etc. They created the explosion of jobs. People wanting to live near work is what built your neighborhood.
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  While I agree with your overall idea, they've been doing a great job of making San Francisco less attractive these days. BART and the feces-plagued sidewalks to name a couple examples.
- Lazare 9y ago
  > And, now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. No, they want to pay market rates. And people want to use the power of government to stop them. > And, they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. No one is trying to get you to give up what you own. What's being asked is that you stop trying to take from other people what they own. One of your neighbours who also helped build this community wants to build some apartments on their land. If you pass laws that stop him, then you are using political power to make someone give up what they've helped build. You are not the victim here, come what may; you are either the villain or a bystander. > No one is addressing the demand side of this issue. [...] Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places? Sure, great idea. But 1) it can happen in parallel with addressing the supply side and 2) if it's such a great idea, why don't you do it? The reasons why you don't want to apply to everyone else too. That "hey, I like it in SF, but you should move to Topeka" attitude is the exact "FU attitude" you claim not to have. > Wages clearly aren’t high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy properties. Raise wages... First off, that'll do nothing to actually fix anything; you'll just have more money chasing the same number of houses. That's a recipe for inflation. If I had a magic wand I could wave that would instantly double every salary and hourly wage in SF, all waving it would do is also double the rent. Second, that'll actually make the problem worse by drawing more workers into the area chasing the higher wages. If you are trying to fix this by tinkering with wages (a bad idea!) it would make more sense to cut wages, or institute some extremely eye-watering tax rates at higher bands. The second an 80% tax rate on incomes over 80k is instituted, you're going to see a massive clear-out of tech workers from SF, followed by a collapse in rent and housing prices. Again, not a good idea, but at least it'd work...unlike your idea. > some companies will naturally move elsewhere. Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down. That's not how markets work, incidentally. Wages and jobs and house prices do not exist in a vacuum. > I’m not sure how one can disagree with my points. Easily. :)
- namlem 9y ago
  You are saying FU to people. You are exactly the type of person who is the problem, and who is causing countless low income people to suffer high rent. All because you want to live in an upper middle class bubble isolated from the real world.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  > I don’t feel like I’m saying FU at all. My perspective is that I spent over 15 years in a house that I initially took a risk on. I helped build the neighborhood and community and schools that made it a nice place to live. And, now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. And, they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair? You are not the owner of the community you help produce. In fact, every renter that lived in your area also contributed to that community and for their favor they were slapped with higher rents. Are you personally going to pay renters for their contributions to the community? > As I’ve said in the past, No one is addressing the demand side of this issue. Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places? Why not encourage landlords to leave, by the same logic? Renters in the end are actually more people that landlords, so by simply trying to benefit the majority might as well punish landlords, right? > Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first? You can stop all things together buy allowing to build more. Not only that, you could also use Land Value Tax to replace income tax, and eliminate income tax and sales tax. You could remove prop 13, rent control and mortage interest deductions from income, and it would make taxes simpler, easier and would stop speculation, would stop landlords wanting to keep 100 year old unsafe houses with mold, etc.
nugget 9y ago
When perverse incentives divide constituents and create paralysis then the solution can only come from a higher level of Government, in this case either State referendum or Federal action.
Finch2193 9y ago
Any recommended literature on the matter? 19 from bay area, lived here all my life and the "FU, i got mine" attitude is absolutely real, but i wasn't aware that this was a well known phenomenon, let alone that there were books on the matter.
- ProfessorLayton 9y ago
  Yes, I highly recommend the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. It goes into depth behind the laws now used for NIMBYism, which have a shameful past that must not be forgotten, lest these mistakes be repeated. The book begins by taking a look at the Bay Area in particular.
mancerayder 9y ago
In NYC we have something of the opposite problem. California folks are always asking, why not upzone. Sometimes they say that in reference to the NYC much-publicized housing issues too. The problem is that the infrastructure around it needs massive improvements to scale. A suburban density increase is a good thing, because the denser housing leads to denser income flow to local governments, which go to things like water/sewer, road, and other improvements that need to be paid for. Economies of scale mean that suburbs are terribly inefficient. An increase of density in NYC has had the opposite result. It's false to claim that there's no housing being built - there's plenty of it, and it's dense, and often times 20+% of it is legally affordable (rent stabilized due to developer tax breaks). Yet more people keep moving here. The issue is that one of the main infrastructure bottlenecks never kept up and it has become one of the topmost, if not the topmost quality of life issue in NYC: the public transport system. It's all well and good to build density, but the municipalities need to move lockstep with housing increase. Unfortunately, I think that the decentralized nature of American political life makes this quite difficult. How can one of dozens or hundreds of city agencies keep tabs on one of dozens or hundreds of various other factors.

afpx 9y ago

I don’t feel like I’m saying FU at all. My perspective is that I spent over 15 years in a house that I initially took a risk on. I helped build the neighborhood and community and schools that made it a nice place to live. And, now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. And, they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair? As I’ve said in the past, No one is addressing the demand side of this issue. Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places? I believe that the bulk of the problem starts with the companies in CA. Wages clearly aren’t high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy properties. Raise wages, and some companies will naturally move elsewhere. Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down. Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first? I’m not sure how one can disagree with my points. So, I’m probably clueless on this issue. Please educate me. (Clearly, I’ve angered the mob. Please don’t bring torches and pitchforks to my door tonight. I just wanted to get an alternative and unrepresented viewpoint into the discussion.)

benchaney 9y ago
This is the exact FU attitude that GP is describing. There is nothing about "building the community" that entitles you to prevent other people from living near you. They aren't trying to use political power to force you to give up what you've helped build, they are trying to buy land and build homes. It simply isn't ok for people to prevent other from living near the so they can turn their "communities" into elitist social clubs. Foreign buyers are irrelevant. They wouldn't be getting involved at all if homes in CA weren't so absurdly overpriced.
- afpx 9y ago
  Wait, did public opinion and political thought change somewhere within the last two decades such that owning property now doesn’t give one rights over that property and rights to shared governance of the incorporated area? Sorry if that comes across as flippant, but it’s a really serious question. I kind of bought this property so that I could enjoy it for at least 30 years. It’s not my fault that it’s appreciated so much. What do you want me to do?
  - khuey 9y ago
    Buying a property gives you the right to your property. It shouldn't give you the right to tell other people who live nearby what to do with theirs (i.e. to tell them not to redevelop it at a higher density if they so choose).
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Unfortunately not the case. Ownership of your property gives you an effective fractional ownership interest in your local radius through zoning and community governance. No amount of state law is going to change that. You can keep fighting the issue (and you might have some traction in a decade or two) or move somewhere more accommodating.
      - emh68 9y ago
        And for the betterment of society, we should take away some of that power. It's clearly being abused.
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        You will never have as much power as those property owners without a time machine to 30-40 years ago, and in the unlikely event you become a property owner, it’s against your interests to do anything that devalues your investment (ie increasing supply). You’re asking rational actors to make irrational decisions. The results are what you’d expect.
random314 9y ago
Me too. I came in 15 years ago and bought a new house. I think that should have been the last home to be built in the bay area. I built this neighborhood every time I ate at sweet tomatoes and shat there. I just don't see why there should be more homes after mine.
- nasredin 9y ago
  Sweet Tomatoes? Is that a restaurant or did you mean that literally?
  - WWLink 9y ago
    It's a buffet restaurant.
  - mwfunk 9y ago
    It’s basically hell on earth if you’re there at the wrong time. Imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that is pretty much nothing but a big salad bar plus a small selection of soups and sides. That sounds good to me, but the unfortunate reality is that it’s a magnet for very large families with lots of small children, and pathologically cheap people who can’t resist the all-you-can-eat aspects. Imagine a cross between Sizzler, Hometown Buffet, and a middle school cafeteria, but focused on salad. Make it really crowded, but what empty tables exist seem to always be dirty and unbussed. Sprinkle with unsupervised children running around and randomly touching the food in the buffets. Mix in crowds of very slow people who enjoy standing in everyone’s way while they slowly investigate every single item in whichever buffet you’re interested in, and once they finally decide what to get you have to watch them slowly make a salad by painstakingly picking out one piece of lettuce at a time as if they were performing brain surgery. It’s probably OK if you go there during whenever their downtime is, but I have no idea when that is or if such a time even exists in the Sweet Tomatoes dimension. But if you don’t mind crowds and germs and value optimizing your money:mass ratio for food above literally every other possible consideration, it’s great! But even then I wouldn’t dream of using the restrooms there- the person you responded to is clearly far braver than me.
    - 9y ago
chc 9y ago
> I don’t feel like I’m saying FU at all. My perspective is that I spent over 15 years in a house that I initially took a risk on. I helped build the neighborhood and community and schools that made it a nice place to live. And, now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. And, they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair? I don't see how this differs substantially from "FU, I got mine." You're going into more detail on how you got yours and you're not cursing, but you're still saying people who have come later than you seeking the same sort of thing you have should be excluded.
pavanred 9y ago
Why do you think people will live cheaply if they join the community now? They pay the same taxes as you, and people engage in the community just as much as you for how ever long they choose to live there (perhaps 15 years to come and make it an even better neighborhood than it is now).
- karthikb 9y ago
  Because of prop 13, the ones who move in today will actually pay a lot more in taxes than the ones there today. Up to 2-3x - which means the newcomers will catch up to the older neighbor’ tax contributions within a few years.
  - afpx 9y ago
    I’m actually for raising all property taxes (edit: including mine) if it helps decrease demand. I’m willing to pay a lot more taxes.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - YokoZar 9y ago
    2-3x? Try 10x. A lot of those living in million dollar homes purchased in the 70s at sub 100k prices, and are still paying based on that valuation. Or their children are, since Prop 13 lets your kids inherit the right to pay 1/10 the property taxes as newcomers.
austenallred 9y ago
I have a hunch that the people moving in will be paying a little bit more than you did. Probably 2x+? Not to mention they’ll pay much, much higher property taxes. Do you really think your contribution to the community is worth the increase in the value of your home, or did you just buy in an area that was at the forefront of an economic renaissance, and you capture the value of that, while seeking to prohibit others from participating? You should consider how the people that bought 15 years before you felt. Why does the buck stop with you? Why assume that people moving in won’t contribute to the community?
foxhedgehog 9y ago
> Please don’t bring torches and pitchforks to my door tonight Perfect.
marcell 9y ago
I used to have this opinion so I know where you’re coming from. I live in Mt View and I bought a condo about ten years ago. Since then traffic has been getting worse, and they put in some fairly ugly developments. A few things changed my mind. First, many people I knew personally had to move out of the area because of the cost of housing. It sucks to have to uproot your life due to rising housing cost you can’t keep up with. Second I came to realize that long term, the area either has to accommodate the inflow, or decline. The Bay Area is full of first and second generation immigrants and people who care from around the country to live her. They built SV and the companies we love/work at. If it’s too expensive for them they will stop coming, and in thirty years we’ll be in a retirement community (albeit a low density one...) So now I say, build build build. It might bring traffic but that’s a small price to pay for the long term health of the area. My bigger concern now, and what I think cities should focus on, is how to build lots of housing while still maintaining high quality of life for everyone. Edit: also remember that in California, you are really protected/subsidized if you are a home owner. Your property value will increase with no change in property tax due to Prop 13. Density and people moving in will generally drive up property values which will benefit you financially.
- mwfunk 9y ago
  Prop 13 is an excellent point, and specific to California. I can’t imagine how different the housing situation would be without it. Maybe a little different, maybe a lot, but certainly better for almost everyone in the big picture.
  - amacbride 9y ago
    Only if salaries are forced to scale with the increase in property taxes; rapid increases to the point of unaffordability were one of the reasons the law was enacted in the first place.
    - suppressingfire 9y ago
      There were lots of states with similar problems in the 70s. Others solved it better (e.g., NY Star program that helps specific classes of people that need help). Prop 13 was a chainsaw solution to something that needed a scalpel.
deleted 9y ago
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yonran 9y ago
I think I agree with your argument that we should discourage foreign speculators, but I would go further by adding that we should discourage domestic speculation as well, so I think I disagree with your apparent argument that you deserve your own house’s appreciation. The market should be designed to reward hard work and productive investments. Something is wrong if the rewards to speculation in scarce resources exceed the rewards to work. I believe this is a progressive-era concept from Henry George. This means that hard-working people should be able to find opportunity when they come here, and the market shouldn’t reward speculators for sitting on land without making any improvements. Landlords should be rewarded for maintaining the building, and for constructing new housing, but not for appreciation on the land. But the Bay Area housing market has seemingly been designed to do the opposite. Proposition 13 protects land speculation by limiting property taxes to a little over 1% of assessed value and rewards seniority through the the acquisition value pyramid scheme. It also encourages localities to raise funds through counterproductive development fees instead of broad-based taxes. And despite the strong economy, our rate of housing construction is far below past times and other cities. We have a housing market that rewards holding onto properties, allows landlords to capture wage growth, and discourages development. I would like to see this system change. For your points about discouraging demand, I think I would agree at the national level but not at the local level. The federal government should encourage companies to locate in other cities. But localities have little power to do so. What local governments can do to discourage housing speculation is to increase land taxes and allow developers to flood the market with more housing.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  Prop 13 is very regressive. The guy who gained 2 million dollars on his house's value, pays 2k in taxes, whilst the poor guy neighbor with the same exact house, who bought recently, has to take out 5 mortgages to buy that 2 million$ house and then, thanks to prop 13, is paying 10 times more taxes. Millennials have been in a very poor position to start with, but Prop 13 really drives the last nail into the coffin.
kelnos 9y ago
You may have taken a risk in moving to a place that was less desirable 15 years ago, but part of that risk is that the neighborhood continually changes, maybe not always according to your ideal plan. Land (especially desirable land) is a scarce good. Allowing incumbent landowners absolute say in what happens to the surrounding area is not in the overall public's best interests. I absolutely object to your view that people want to live here "cheaply". People want to live in SF _affordably_. As in, not having to put 75% of their income toward housing, which is an insane thing to have to do. I've been living in the bay area since 2004, the last 8 years of which have been in SF. I've been working hard to get to the point where I could buy my own place, but every year it becomes harder to justify buying over renting. At this point I do have the money, but it feels financially irresponsible to buy. But I love this city and want to put down long-term roots, and perpetually renting just doesn't seem to be the way to do that. Why don't I get a shot at helping to build the community? It's not just me. I'm fairly well-off at this point, and many people, some who have lived in SF far longer than I have, are getting hurt by all this. Take service workers, who have been all but priced out of the city. More likely than not the cashier ringing up your groceries, the barista making your coffee, the person who comes to clean your house, the waiter at your favorite restaurant... they used to get to work by hopping on Muni or BART, but now they have to drive over an hour to get to work. How is that ok? So yes, this is why I and others point fingers at you and say you embody the "FU, I got mine" attitude. You got in at a good time. I don't doubt that you put work into community building over the years, or that you took on some risk. But it absolutely floors me that people like you don't get how much of your current situation is completely down to pure dumb luck. And that's what this is all about: leveling the playing field for everyone, not just people who have money, or were lucky enough to be born at the right time or move in at the right time. To be clear, I'm not raising up my pitchfork here or coming at you angrily. At this point I'm just extremely frustrated, disappointed, and sad. To echo your sentiments, I find it hard to believe that people on "your side" don't see the obviousness of what I'm saying. I mean, does SF seem like a healthy city to you? Do you really think that just ignoring these housing issues is going to make everyone leave and everything will go back to normal? To address some of your points directly: > Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places? Two reasons: 1) for a company, betting on an untried/untested job market to fill your needs is a ridiculously risky proposition. A company like Toyota (moved from Torrance, CA to Plano, TX) can take risks like that because they're a more mature business with a large margin for error and can absorb that pain. Most SF and bay area companies can't take that risk. 2) People such as myself just don't want to live in those places. I'm in my mid-30s right now, and I don't have the desire to spend 15 more years building a community as you claim to have done. I'm fine paying more than you did back then to enjoy the benefits of a more-established community, but the current situation is just ridiculous, untenable, and unsustainable. > Wages clearly aren’t high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy properties. Raise wages, and some companies will naturally move elsewhere. Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down. That's easy to say, but, again, similar to my point above, that's an incredibly risky proposition, way too risky for many (most?) bay area companies to take. And there's an inherent chicken-and-egg problem there: if the talent is in the bay area, no one wants to be the first to move to a new area and try to attract talent. And that's completely understandable. Large companies that have a need for low- or medium-skill workers can get away with that sort of thing, but most others can't. Beyond that, whose job is it to raise wages? Why on earth would any company voluntarily do that? And good luck legislating that; this isn't just a minimum wage hike you're talking about. Do we really want the city to legislate the minimum salaries for salespeople, marketing people, developers, customer support, etc.? That's madness. Even if it was a min wage hike, if you push too hard on that lever, the service jobs are the ones that disappear, and that's not what you want. Who wants to live in a city with no ability to staff restaurants, bars, museums, and even grocery stores? > Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first? I do agree that this is a problem, absolutely. It's unclear to me, though, how much of this ends up being vacant, or does get rented out. Obviously in my position I'd prefer that more housing stock be up for individual buyers, and not be locked into the rental stock, but I'm not sure legislating who can and can't buy property and whether or not that property can be used as rental property, or if it needs to be occupied a certain percentage of the year (how would you even enforce that?) is a great use of legislative power. (Also, your sampling methodology is flawed: for a statistically significant result, you'd need to pick a representative sample of lots across the city, not just one random street.) > ... they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair? No one is forcing you to "give up" anything, but we are asking you to accept that cities and neighborhoods and communities are not static things that are etched into stone. They weren't when you moved in; the fact that you admit that you've worked to build a community is clear evidence of that. Why do you get to decide when that change stops? Just because you put some money down? Nope, sorry, I'm not buying that. People are just asking you to share the bounty of the region with them. No one is looking for a free ride; I expect new people to participate in the community just as you have. Obviously they'll be coming in at a different time, with different pluses and minuses, different challenges, but that's just how life is.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
No, you were born on third base, you didn't got a triple.
rayiner 9y ago
Unless in those 15 years you bought all the property around you, then your “investment” doesn’t give you the right to say what happens to that property. That’s the default: people (including developers) get to do what they want with the property they own. You’re the one trying to use the coercive power of the state to prevent them from doing that.
cameldrv 9y ago
Guess what? You didn't build anything. You bought a house. The building of the neighborhood over the past fifteen years is totally attributable to Facebook and Google etc. They created the explosion of jobs. People wanting to live near work is what built your neighborhood.
Nuzzerino 9y ago
While I agree with your overall idea, they've been doing a great job of making San Francisco less attractive these days. BART and the feces-plagued sidewalks to name a couple examples.
Lazare 9y ago
> And, now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. No, they want to pay market rates. And people want to use the power of government to stop them. > And, they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. No one is trying to get you to give up what you own. What's being asked is that you stop trying to take from other people what they own. One of your neighbours who also helped build this community wants to build some apartments on their land. If you pass laws that stop him, then you are using political power to make someone give up what they've helped build. You are not the victim here, come what may; you are either the villain or a bystander. > No one is addressing the demand side of this issue. [...] Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places? Sure, great idea. But 1) it can happen in parallel with addressing the supply side and 2) if it's such a great idea, why don't you do it? The reasons why you don't want to apply to everyone else too. That "hey, I like it in SF, but you should move to Topeka" attitude is the exact "FU attitude" you claim not to have. > Wages clearly aren’t high enough to give workers salaries that allow them to buy properties. Raise wages... First off, that'll do nothing to actually fix anything; you'll just have more money chasing the same number of houses. That's a recipe for inflation. If I had a magic wand I could wave that would instantly double every salary and hourly wage in SF, all waving it would do is also double the rent. Second, that'll actually make the problem worse by drawing more workers into the area chasing the higher wages. If you are trying to fix this by tinkering with wages (a bad idea!) it would make more sense to cut wages, or institute some extremely eye-watering tax rates at higher bands. The second an 80% tax rate on incomes over 80k is instituted, you're going to see a massive clear-out of tech workers from SF, followed by a collapse in rent and housing prices. Again, not a good idea, but at least it'd work...unlike your idea. > some companies will naturally move elsewhere. Jobs will go with them, and demand will go down. That's not how markets work, incidentally. Wages and jobs and house prices do not exist in a vacuum. > I’m not sure how one can disagree with my points. Easily. :)
namlem 9y ago
You are saying FU to people. You are exactly the type of person who is the problem, and who is causing countless low income people to suffer high rent. All because you want to live in an upper middle class bubble isolated from the real world.
conanbatt 9y ago
> I don’t feel like I’m saying FU at all. My perspective is that I spent over 15 years in a house that I initially took a risk on. I helped build the neighborhood and community and schools that made it a nice place to live. And, now people who didn’t have to do all that work want to live here cheaply. And, they’re trying to use government and political power to force me to give up what I’ve helped build. Why is that fair? You are not the owner of the community you help produce. In fact, every renter that lived in your area also contributed to that community and for their favor they were slapped with higher rents. Are you personally going to pay renters for their contributions to the community? > As I’ve said in the past, No one is addressing the demand side of this issue. Make places less attractive, demand goes down, and prices go down. There are huge swaths of the US other than San Francisco that are in dire need of industry and people. Why not encourage companies and people to move to those places? Why not encourage landlords to leave, by the same logic? Renters in the end are actually more people that landlords, so by simply trying to benefit the majority might as well punish landlords, right? > Also, the elephant in the room is foreign buyers. I looked through SF tax records the other day. I picked a random street, and most of the homes were owned by foreign trusts. Why not try to stop that first? You can stop all things together buy allowing to build more. Not only that, you could also use Land Value Tax to replace income tax, and eliminate income tax and sales tax. You could remove prop 13, rent control and mortage interest deductions from income, and it would make taxes simpler, easier and would stop speculation, would stop landlords wanting to keep 100 year old unsafe houses with mold, etc.

nugget 9y ago

When perverse incentives divide constituents and create paralysis then the solution can only come from a higher level of Government, in this case either State referendum or Federal action.

Finch2193 9y ago

Any recommended literature on the matter? 19 from bay area, lived here all my life and the "FU, i got mine" attitude is absolutely real, but i wasn't aware that this was a well known phenomenon, let alone that there were books on the matter.

ProfessorLayton 9y ago
Yes, I highly recommend the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. It goes into depth behind the laws now used for NIMBYism, which have a shameful past that must not be forgotten, lest these mistakes be repeated. The book begins by taking a look at the Bay Area in particular.

mancerayder 9y ago

In NYC we have something of the opposite problem. California folks are always asking, why not upzone. Sometimes they say that in reference to the NYC much-publicized housing issues too. The problem is that the infrastructure around it needs massive improvements to scale. A suburban density increase is a good thing, because the denser housing leads to denser income flow to local governments, which go to things like water/sewer, road, and other improvements that need to be paid for. Economies of scale mean that suburbs are terribly inefficient. An increase of density in NYC has had the opposite result. It's false to claim that there's no housing being built - there's plenty of it, and it's dense, and often times 20+% of it is legally affordable (rent stabilized due to developer tax breaks). Yet more people keep moving here. The issue is that one of the main infrastructure bottlenecks never kept up and it has become one of the topmost, if not the topmost quality of life issue in NYC: the public transport system. It's all well and good to build density, but the municipalities need to move lockstep with housing increase. Unfortunately, I think that the decentralized nature of American political life makes this quite difficult. How can one of dozens or hundreds of city agencies keep tabs on one of dozens or hundreds of various other factors.