10 ms·

If you care about places like Silicon Valley or New York, or if you care about social justice across (and within) generations, it's time to research and underst

If you care about places like Silicon Valley or New York, or if you care about social justice across (and within) generations, it's time to research and understand why housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable in the most dynamic areas of the world. It's not due to lack of land. In California, we have a chance to fix things. SB-827 is a new bill that prevents local governments from banning density near public transit. It is the most radical housing bill in decades, because it rebalances zoning control from the local to the state level. It could result in 3 million new units being created in California, a state that builds <100k per year. https://standupcalifornia.com https://standupcalifornia.com (this is a website i set up to support this issue, which i see as the most important political issue for myself and my friends, and our ability to stay in our communities)

davidw 9y ago
What's interesting is that you can make a very libertarian argument for a lot of this stuff too: http://marketurbanism.com/ http://marketurbanism.com/ although that probably doesn't play quite as well in much California. Still though, it's one issue where we all ought to be able to find some common ground and fix things.
- krausejj 9y ago
  absolutely. this is both liberal and libertarian. it's a massive social justice issue. it's also a policy-failure that can be addressed by simply reducing regulations, which this bill does (by preventing local governments from banning density near public transit, the exact place it needs to go).
  - rsync 9y ago
    "absolutely. this is both liberal and libertarian" ... but not necessarily democratic. I am open minded about the housing policy debate in CA (and in Marin, where I live) but I am dismayed at the rejection of democratic outcomes when those outcomes are found to be inconvenient.
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      CA is also a democracy, so it's just one democratic outcome overriding a different democratic outcome.
      - sokoloff 9y ago
        Two wolves and one sheep can also have a vote about what's for dinner and the outcome be democratic. I don't know why people in San Diego or NorCal should have a vote about what happens with respect to zoning in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Why not let people in Butte, Montana put in their vote as well?
        wwgg715 9y ago
        Does Broadmoor have a right to override Daly City? Or Piedmont, Oakland? Both are donut holes within larger cities. Rich neighborhoods protecting their interests against those of the community. Local governments in CA are convoluted and corrupt. Have a committee of experts draw the lines based on actual geography and common sense, and then we can let them decide what is right for their own “communities”
        manfredo 9y ago
        Because housing availability seriously impacts economic and social mobility. It's hard to work one's way out of poverty as it is. It's even harder when the cities with the Lion's share of the jobs hardly build any housing and cause rents to skyrocket as a result. > I don't know why people in San Diego or NorCal should have a vote about what happens with respect to zoning in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Why not let people in Butte, Montana put in their vote as well? I'd be totally okay with nation wide housing policies (and I have lived in one of those cities you mentioned, and I currently live in Silicon Valley so I'd be impacted by this change). I think poor housing policies are big drivers of economic immobility, and people everywhere in the country are affected by it. Someone in Montana may not live in San Francisco, but if they have to turn down a job in SF due to insane rents then they are impacted by SF's housing policies. Consequently, if there was a push to ban nativist policies like rent control, proposition 13, or other barriers in the housing market nation wide I would both think it is fair and I'd support it.
  - davidw 9y ago
    Speaking of that, and Glaeser, who wrote that paper you linked to, this piece is pretty good: https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regulations/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regula... Which comes back to that: "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." Edit: For many more articles, I have a list here: https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/ https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/
- gnarcoregrizz 9y ago
  Yeah. If nimbys don't want stuff built, imo they should buy the land themselves. I don't know what happened to property rights in CA.
  - davidw 9y ago
    Somewhere, there are probably some reasonable positions like "it'd be great if they didn't build a fireworks factory right next to my house", but we've gone so far beyond those in the US.
    - phil21 9y ago
      We've gone so far we've went into the opposite direction - "it'd be great if there wasn't a fireworks factory next door to the house I'm building". As someone who has spent close to the last decade trying to figure out where to put down "roots" it's utter insanity to me. It's clear as day that one of the most evil parts of American society is tying what is typically far and away your largest "investment" to housing. It creates insanely perverse incentives. It seems to me that most folks have lost their collective minds and forgot the reason we needed housing in the first place.
    - dionidium 9y ago
      It's important to see that it's not a mere case of taking an existing principle and extending it too far; it's an entirely new principle. What is NIMBYism? NIMBYism is opposition to necessary structures (that we all want) being built in specific places (e.g. near me). NIMBYism is saying that, while you understand that we need a water treatment plant -- you agree that we should build one -- you want to locate it on the other side of town (i.e. not in my backyard). That's not what this is. This is the desire to limit building entirely. It's the desire to prevent certain areas from growing, getting bigger. It's an opposition to density. It's a reactionary, conservative, nostalgic preference for the past. It's the belief that San Francisco should look like it did on the day you bought your house for the rest of all time. And it's an attempt to lock in enormous housing gains. These are not the same thing. One is not "taking the other too far." It's a totally different thing.
  - 9y ago
gnarcoregrizz 9y ago
Since that's a marketing page for SB827, can someone explain to me how it doesn't ultimately create an incentive against public transit? All it would take to get around the zoning override would be to remove transit... I assume removing a bus stop (or even an entire route) is trivial. I could definitely foresee more homeowners blocking development of new routes/stations. With those considerations, it's possible we could end up with less transit, and the same amount of housing. I actually got banned in /r/california for asking about this I'm afraid it may be one of those 'short term gain, long term consequence' type bills that CA has a history of cough prop 13. However, at least it's looking in the right direction, since the housing situation couldn't be much worse
- krausejj 9y ago
  It's not a marketing page, really. I made it. Did you see my vlog? It's too bad it looks so pro... it looks like a real estate developer built it :) But Senator's Wiener's FAQ answers the question you ask: https://extranewsfeed.com/my-transit-density-bill-sb-827-answering-common-questions-and-debunking-misinformation-226eaa7e1653 https://extranewsfeed.com/my-transit-density-bill-sb-827-ans... he says "First, most cities and towns don’t operate their own transit systems, given that transit agencies are typically separate from cities or regional in nature. Thus, very few cities even have the power to reduce transit service, even if they wanted to do so in order to avoid SB 827. Second, while communities could organize to fight new transit stations or to reduce bus service, let’s also be real: people already fight transit expansions in their neighborhoods."
  - cag_ii 9y ago
    It's definitely a "marketing page" in that it's only purpose is to convince people to support sb-827.
- scentoni 9y ago
  The plan is to pin the requirements to 'transit routes at a specific date' not float them to 'what is the transit route today', so changing the routes can't be used to manipulate the legislation.
- 9y ago
Spooky23 9y ago
I'd suggest that you research why it's necessary for companies to cram so much demand for housing in a few areas. It's seems absurd in this day and age that we're still concentrating business to such an extent in places like the NY Metro Area and the Bay Area. IBM in the olden times leveraged locating facilities in nowheresville as a competitive advantage. I'm surprised it isn't catching on now that engineers are being so highly compensated.
- techenthusiast 9y ago
  Because there are numerous network effects* for specialized concentration of labor. *Network effects are unfortunately only understood as a handwavey buzzphrase in tech, but they have been researched and defined in extreme detail by economists. Think non-ergodic math.
  - nerfhammer 9y ago
    network effects from specialized labor = civilization perhaps for a reason, civilization has something to do with cities
- eldavido 9y ago
  The problem is that nobody is thinking long-term. Think about how startups work today. Rather than leasing a commercial office at half the price, they pay exorbitant premiums for WeWork. Nobody does proper capacity planning on AWS (let alone physical infrastructure), everyone only hires the most senior people, everyone pays exorbitant premiums to recruiters rather than building inbound candidate flow. It's incredible how far we've pushed the time premium for money. I'm honestly not sure whether it's rational or not. But I think there are two good lessons from this. #1: Patience is a massive advantage if you can pull it off. You can get out of the environment that's pushing senior level dev salaries to 200k or higher, pay less for everything, etc. #2: There is good money in selling time to financed startups. If you can do anything that would conceivably let young, cash-rich startups trade time for money, that's a business.
- imtringued 9y ago
  If physical distance to customers is no longer a significant problem companies will switch their priorities to other aspects like physical distance to potential investors.
snomad 9y ago
Every time I see this posted, I ask about noise. Dense housing near rapid-transit, particularly rail, has led to lots of people getting exposed to massive volumes of noise, even at night. This is the type of long-term negative that get people to move out to the suburbs (e.g. self-defeating the policy) or call for more construction such as sound walls. You can see Reno for a perfect example of this. Everyone moved out to the burb, traffic sucks, then they ended up just building sounds walls anyways. Does any piece of this legislation deal with the inherent problem of rapid-transit noise + dense housing?
- davidw 9y ago
  We should upzone everything! Noise sucks, but for some people it's the right tradeoff. We should allow people to choose that if they want.
- ng12 9y ago
  > inherent problem of rapid-transit noise What inherent problem? Rapid transit is certainly quieter than vehicle traffic. Noise pollution comes from sirens and heavy trucking, not public transportation.
  - nolliebs180 9y ago
    When they re-route the rapid transit bus 1 block so it ends up going down my street during street repairs, my kid and my wife and myself get regularly woken up starting at 4:45am. Then the bus keeps going till midnight. Yippee what fun!
    - ng12 9y ago
      If a bus is your noise threshold you should be living on a farm, not one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country.
    - Retric 9y ago
      If you can notice people at a bus stop outside your house then you need better sound insulation. If you want to keep your windows open at night and have that be quite then move the the middle of nowhere. I say this as someone that lived near an airport, even guests did not notice unless the windows where open.
dogruck 9y ago
Social justice?
deathanatos 9y ago
First, thanks for taking the time to put that together; it's always reassuring to see someone take the time for democracy. Quick question: why does "Tell me how they vote" require my email address? Couldn't that information just appear when the area is clicked on, or am I misinterpreting that feature?
- wwgg715 9y ago
  i believe the bill hasn’t been voted on yet
Gibbon1 9y ago
If you care about the rest of the country you should ask why the fire hose of investment money is directed at SF and New York and not elsewhere. Instead of asking what's wrong with San Francisco. Why not ask what's wrong with the rest of the US? Sure I can name a bunch of reasons why little housing is built in California, we can start with the Libertarian wet dream that is Prop 13. Prop 13 does two things, removes any incentive for muni's to approve new housing. And starves the government of funding to pay for public goods like schools and mass transit. The zoning restrictions Libertarians bitch about are partly the direct result of that. Okay fine. But then still the question is, even if we admit California has issues, why is it that corporations which are totally free to locate elsewhere aren't doing so? You would think with a large cost differential corporations would move. Why not? Because neoliberal conservative dominated governments in the rest of the US means that VC's, engineers, and mangers don't want to live in those places at all. So they and their companies are paying a large premium not to. No workers don't want to work in 'right to work state' They don't want to send their kids to schools that teach creationism and abstinence only sex education. They don't want to live in communities with bad family planning.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  The vast majority of the US (by landmass) sucks to actually live in, and the economies of those areas are also awful. This is why many who can move to the coast do. Even within “the coasts”, outside of NYC, the east coast doesn’t have a comparable economic area to the Bay Area + LA + Seattle + Portland.
- manfredo 9y ago
  I don't really follow what message you're trying to convey, but it sounds a lot like that you're starting the problem is with the demand for real estate in Silicon Valley, not the supply. This isn't the case. Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. are just on the leading edge of a larger tend towards greater urbanization. It's a pattern that's also happening in Austin, Portland, and more cities just to less extreme degrees. The simple fact is that in a developed country dense population centers are more efficient - both economically and environmentally.
  - 9y ago
sAuronas 9y ago
Transit-oriented development is great but not quite radical enough. It’s usually focused at rail nodes and if you take Oakland, as an example, you would barely move the needle on housing supply. One problem is that there is already some dense housing around these, and other nodes, in the Bay Area. The other is that these locations can only accommodate so much of the area’s housing supply. To address the housing crunch, there needs to be ubiquitous up-zoning of any — no EVERY — parcel, in any zoning category — by right. What that means is if you own a burger stand by the lake (using Oakland as an example again) and that burger stand is a one-story building with a big lot out front that is 90-percent empty virtually 100% of the time (if my memory serves me correctly) and you want to sell your lot to me and I can justify 50 units based on precedent of adjacency alone, then I should be able to supply those 50 dwelling units (60 with an affordable density bonus, 150 with a high rise even) and not have to litigate the local NIMBYISM for 5 years to do it. The cost of land in Oakland (my example again) is not that high on a per-unit, land basis cost. The issue is that people will come out of the woodwork (read: other parts of the Bay) to fight you and then the cost to litigate, the time value of money and the entitlement fees kill the desire to even start a project. If you could up-zone every single family lot to 3-flats, you could dramatically increase supply. Hell, you can focus on just one and two-story neighborhood commercial and rapidly decrease price pressure. And SV is not approaching $1500/sf without all the barriers to redevelopment of underutilized land (parking lots or otherwise). To be fair, not everyone wants Manhattan so density, and even change, can be terrifying. But, to be fair, there were special and specific circumstances that created Manhattan that just don’t exist in SV or Oakland. So, that fear may not be justified. Still, is a step in the right direction...
closeparen 9y ago
Upzoning creates multifamily housing. To many, that is not really housing, it's something for other people. The younger, the poorer (in suburban areas), the richer (in gentrifying urban neighborhoods), the transient, the childfree. Upzoning will encourage the demolition of single-family detached homes, which in their mind is the only kind that real families care about. Even if you can get someone to acknowledge that greater supply will make condos cheaper, affordable condos don't offset the increasing cost and scarcity of backyards. To be forced into a tower is as bad as being displaced entirely. Developers aren't helping the matter. Multifamily buildings in America are too often cheap and hastily-built crap polluting the suburban landscape, or gleaming ultra-luxury alien invaders menacing vulnerable urban neighborhoods. It might help with sentiment if we had more multifamily buildings that were pleasant to live in and that middle-class voters could actually identify with. I'm as YIMBY as anyone, but the actual recent condo buildings I can point to are making it hard to challenge the preference for single-family homes. Anything that looks as good costs twice as much, or more with HOA fees.
- ocschwar 9y ago
  WHo exactly is being forced into a tower? I have a detached house with a small yard, a short walk from a block lined with condo buildings and one rental building. Nobody's being forced into my neighborhood. The working class homeowners have been pushed out of the houses by yuppies like me long ago. Now they're being pushed out of that one rental building, which has been remodeled, and where they've stopped taking Section 8. And they're pushed out by people who for whatever reason are quite happily packing themselves into these buildings.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I think this is in the very least partially a result of a broken market. Due to regulations and zoning you can barely call development a market. It takes lots of effort and ideally connections to build something. Meanwhile it's largely a seller's market. If we dramatically reduced zoning restrictions we could get much closer to the market doing its work and maybe have some real competition. For example where I live so malls get built by the same developer. Even if someone wanted I'm sure it would be nigh impossible to get permits etc. to build a competing mall next door and try to drive them out of business like in a real market. I'd love to see real, break neck, free market competition for all projects and no schmoozing with the major.
axau 9y ago
SB-827 is great, but I’m assuming its chance of passing is about zero. Am I wrong? What else can be done?
- krausejj 9y ago
  The only people who know about SB-827 are housing policy wonks and homeowners associations. If the people who it really affects—like Millennials—knew what was happening, it would have a much better chance.

davidw 9y ago

What's interesting is that you can make a very libertarian argument for a lot of this stuff too: http://marketurbanism.com/ http://marketurbanism.com/ although that probably doesn't play quite as well in much California. Still though, it's one issue where we all ought to be able to find some common ground and fix things.

krausejj 9y ago
absolutely. this is both liberal and libertarian. it's a massive social justice issue. it's also a policy-failure that can be addressed by simply reducing regulations, which this bill does (by preventing local governments from banning density near public transit, the exact place it needs to go).
- rsync 9y ago
  "absolutely. this is both liberal and libertarian" ... but not necessarily democratic. I am open minded about the housing policy debate in CA (and in Marin, where I live) but I am dismayed at the rejection of democratic outcomes when those outcomes are found to be inconvenient.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    CA is also a democracy, so it's just one democratic outcome overriding a different democratic outcome.
    - sokoloff 9y ago
      Two wolves and one sheep can also have a vote about what's for dinner and the outcome be democratic. I don't know why people in San Diego or NorCal should have a vote about what happens with respect to zoning in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Why not let people in Butte, Montana put in their vote as well?
      - wwgg715 9y ago
        Does Broadmoor have a right to override Daly City? Or Piedmont, Oakland? Both are donut holes within larger cities. Rich neighborhoods protecting their interests against those of the community. Local governments in CA are convoluted and corrupt. Have a committee of experts draw the lines based on actual geography and common sense, and then we can let them decide what is right for their own “communities”
      - manfredo 9y ago
        Because housing availability seriously impacts economic and social mobility. It's hard to work one's way out of poverty as it is. It's even harder when the cities with the Lion's share of the jobs hardly build any housing and cause rents to skyrocket as a result. > I don't know why people in San Diego or NorCal should have a vote about what happens with respect to zoning in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Why not let people in Butte, Montana put in their vote as well? I'd be totally okay with nation wide housing policies (and I have lived in one of those cities you mentioned, and I currently live in Silicon Valley so I'd be impacted by this change). I think poor housing policies are big drivers of economic immobility, and people everywhere in the country are affected by it. Someone in Montana may not live in San Francisco, but if they have to turn down a job in SF due to insane rents then they are impacted by SF's housing policies. Consequently, if there was a push to ban nativist policies like rent control, proposition 13, or other barriers in the housing market nation wide I would both think it is fair and I'd support it.
- davidw 9y ago
  Speaking of that, and Glaeser, who wrote that paper you linked to, this piece is pretty good: https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regulations/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regula... Which comes back to that: "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." Edit: For many more articles, I have a list here: https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/ https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/
gnarcoregrizz 9y ago
Yeah. If nimbys don't want stuff built, imo they should buy the land themselves. I don't know what happened to property rights in CA.
- davidw 9y ago
  Somewhere, there are probably some reasonable positions like "it'd be great if they didn't build a fireworks factory right next to my house", but we've gone so far beyond those in the US.
  - phil21 9y ago
    We've gone so far we've went into the opposite direction - "it'd be great if there wasn't a fireworks factory next door to the house I'm building". As someone who has spent close to the last decade trying to figure out where to put down "roots" it's utter insanity to me. It's clear as day that one of the most evil parts of American society is tying what is typically far and away your largest "investment" to housing. It creates insanely perverse incentives. It seems to me that most folks have lost their collective minds and forgot the reason we needed housing in the first place.
  - dionidium 9y ago
    It's important to see that it's not a mere case of taking an existing principle and extending it too far; it's an entirely new principle. What is NIMBYism? NIMBYism is opposition to necessary structures (that we all want) being built in specific places (e.g. near me). NIMBYism is saying that, while you understand that we need a water treatment plant -- you agree that we should build one -- you want to locate it on the other side of town (i.e. not in my backyard). That's not what this is. This is the desire to limit building entirely. It's the desire to prevent certain areas from growing, getting bigger. It's an opposition to density. It's a reactionary, conservative, nostalgic preference for the past. It's the belief that San Francisco should look like it did on the day you bought your house for the rest of all time. And it's an attempt to lock in enormous housing gains. These are not the same thing. One is not "taking the other too far." It's a totally different thing.
- 9y ago

gnarcoregrizz 9y ago

Since that's a marketing page for SB827, can someone explain to me how it doesn't ultimately create an incentive against public transit? All it would take to get around the zoning override would be to remove transit... I assume removing a bus stop (or even an entire route) is trivial. I could definitely foresee more homeowners blocking development of new routes/stations. With those considerations, it's possible we could end up with less transit, and the same amount of housing. I actually got banned in /r/california for asking about this I'm afraid it may be one of those 'short term gain, long term consequence' type bills that CA has a history of cough prop 13. However, at least it's looking in the right direction, since the housing situation couldn't be much worse

krausejj 9y ago
It's not a marketing page, really. I made it. Did you see my vlog? It's too bad it looks so pro... it looks like a real estate developer built it :) But Senator's Wiener's FAQ answers the question you ask: https://extranewsfeed.com/my-transit-density-bill-sb-827-answering-common-questions-and-debunking-misinformation-226eaa7e1653 https://extranewsfeed.com/my-transit-density-bill-sb-827-ans... he says "First, most cities and towns don’t operate their own transit systems, given that transit agencies are typically separate from cities or regional in nature. Thus, very few cities even have the power to reduce transit service, even if they wanted to do so in order to avoid SB 827. Second, while communities could organize to fight new transit stations or to reduce bus service, let’s also be real: people already fight transit expansions in their neighborhoods."
- cag_ii 9y ago
  It's definitely a "marketing page" in that it's only purpose is to convince people to support sb-827.
scentoni 9y ago
The plan is to pin the requirements to 'transit routes at a specific date' not float them to 'what is the transit route today', so changing the routes can't be used to manipulate the legislation.
9y ago

Spooky23 9y ago

I'd suggest that you research why it's necessary for companies to cram so much demand for housing in a few areas. It's seems absurd in this day and age that we're still concentrating business to such an extent in places like the NY Metro Area and the Bay Area. IBM in the olden times leveraged locating facilities in nowheresville as a competitive advantage. I'm surprised it isn't catching on now that engineers are being so highly compensated.

techenthusiast 9y ago
Because there are numerous network effects* for specialized concentration of labor. *Network effects are unfortunately only understood as a handwavey buzzphrase in tech, but they have been researched and defined in extreme detail by economists. Think non-ergodic math.
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  network effects from specialized labor = civilization perhaps for a reason, civilization has something to do with cities
eldavido 9y ago
The problem is that nobody is thinking long-term. Think about how startups work today. Rather than leasing a commercial office at half the price, they pay exorbitant premiums for WeWork. Nobody does proper capacity planning on AWS (let alone physical infrastructure), everyone only hires the most senior people, everyone pays exorbitant premiums to recruiters rather than building inbound candidate flow. It's incredible how far we've pushed the time premium for money. I'm honestly not sure whether it's rational or not. But I think there are two good lessons from this. #1: Patience is a massive advantage if you can pull it off. You can get out of the environment that's pushing senior level dev salaries to 200k or higher, pay less for everything, etc. #2: There is good money in selling time to financed startups. If you can do anything that would conceivably let young, cash-rich startups trade time for money, that's a business.
imtringued 9y ago
If physical distance to customers is no longer a significant problem companies will switch their priorities to other aspects like physical distance to potential investors.

snomad 9y ago

Every time I see this posted, I ask about noise. Dense housing near rapid-transit, particularly rail, has led to lots of people getting exposed to massive volumes of noise, even at night. This is the type of long-term negative that get people to move out to the suburbs (e.g. self-defeating the policy) or call for more construction such as sound walls. You can see Reno for a perfect example of this. Everyone moved out to the burb, traffic sucks, then they ended up just building sounds walls anyways. Does any piece of this legislation deal with the inherent problem of rapid-transit noise + dense housing?

davidw 9y ago
We should upzone everything! Noise sucks, but for some people it's the right tradeoff. We should allow people to choose that if they want.
ng12 9y ago
> inherent problem of rapid-transit noise What inherent problem? Rapid transit is certainly quieter than vehicle traffic. Noise pollution comes from sirens and heavy trucking, not public transportation.
- nolliebs180 9y ago
  When they re-route the rapid transit bus 1 block so it ends up going down my street during street repairs, my kid and my wife and myself get regularly woken up starting at 4:45am. Then the bus keeps going till midnight. Yippee what fun!
  - ng12 9y ago
    If a bus is your noise threshold you should be living on a farm, not one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country.
  - Retric 9y ago
    If you can notice people at a bus stop outside your house then you need better sound insulation. If you want to keep your windows open at night and have that be quite then move the the middle of nowhere. I say this as someone that lived near an airport, even guests did not notice unless the windows where open.

dogruck 9y ago

Social justice?

deathanatos 9y ago

First, thanks for taking the time to put that together; it's always reassuring to see someone take the time for democracy. Quick question: why does "Tell me how they vote" require my email address? Couldn't that information just appear when the area is clicked on, or am I misinterpreting that feature?

wwgg715 9y ago
i believe the bill hasn’t been voted on yet

Gibbon1 9y ago

If you care about the rest of the country you should ask why the fire hose of investment money is directed at SF and New York and not elsewhere. Instead of asking what's wrong with San Francisco. Why not ask what's wrong with the rest of the US? Sure I can name a bunch of reasons why little housing is built in California, we can start with the Libertarian wet dream that is Prop 13. Prop 13 does two things, removes any incentive for muni's to approve new housing. And starves the government of funding to pay for public goods like schools and mass transit. The zoning restrictions Libertarians bitch about are partly the direct result of that. Okay fine. But then still the question is, even if we admit California has issues, why is it that corporations which are totally free to locate elsewhere aren't doing so? You would think with a large cost differential corporations would move. Why not? Because neoliberal conservative dominated governments in the rest of the US means that VC's, engineers, and mangers don't want to live in those places at all. So they and their companies are paying a large premium not to. No workers don't want to work in 'right to work state' They don't want to send their kids to schools that teach creationism and abstinence only sex education. They don't want to live in communities with bad family planning.

seanp2k2 9y ago
The vast majority of the US (by landmass) sucks to actually live in, and the economies of those areas are also awful. This is why many who can move to the coast do. Even within “the coasts”, outside of NYC, the east coast doesn’t have a comparable economic area to the Bay Area + LA + Seattle + Portland.
manfredo 9y ago
I don't really follow what message you're trying to convey, but it sounds a lot like that you're starting the problem is with the demand for real estate in Silicon Valley, not the supply. This isn't the case. Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. are just on the leading edge of a larger tend towards greater urbanization. It's a pattern that's also happening in Austin, Portland, and more cities just to less extreme degrees. The simple fact is that in a developed country dense population centers are more efficient - both economically and environmentally.
- 9y ago

sAuronas 9y ago

Transit-oriented development is great but not quite radical enough. It’s usually focused at rail nodes and if you take Oakland, as an example, you would barely move the needle on housing supply. One problem is that there is already some dense housing around these, and other nodes, in the Bay Area. The other is that these locations can only accommodate so much of the area’s housing supply. To address the housing crunch, there needs to be ubiquitous up-zoning of any — no EVERY — parcel, in any zoning category — by right. What that means is if you own a burger stand by the lake (using Oakland as an example again) and that burger stand is a one-story building with a big lot out front that is 90-percent empty virtually 100% of the time (if my memory serves me correctly) and you want to sell your lot to me and I can justify 50 units based on precedent of adjacency alone, then I should be able to supply those 50 dwelling units (60 with an affordable density bonus, 150 with a high rise even) and not have to litigate the local NIMBYISM for 5 years to do it. The cost of land in Oakland (my example again) is not that high on a per-unit, land basis cost. The issue is that people will come out of the woodwork (read: other parts of the Bay) to fight you and then the cost to litigate, the time value of money and the entitlement fees kill the desire to even start a project. If you could up-zone every single family lot to 3-flats, you could dramatically increase supply. Hell, you can focus on just one and two-story neighborhood commercial and rapidly decrease price pressure. And SV is not approaching $1500/sf without all the barriers to redevelopment of underutilized land (parking lots or otherwise). To be fair, not everyone wants Manhattan so density, and even change, can be terrifying. But, to be fair, there were special and specific circumstances that created Manhattan that just don’t exist in SV or Oakland. So, that fear may not be justified. Still, is a step in the right direction...

closeparen 9y ago

Upzoning creates multifamily housing. To many, that is not really housing, it's something for other people. The younger, the poorer (in suburban areas), the richer (in gentrifying urban neighborhoods), the transient, the childfree. Upzoning will encourage the demolition of single-family detached homes, which in their mind is the only kind that real families care about. Even if you can get someone to acknowledge that greater supply will make condos cheaper, affordable condos don't offset the increasing cost and scarcity of backyards. To be forced into a tower is as bad as being displaced entirely. Developers aren't helping the matter. Multifamily buildings in America are too often cheap and hastily-built crap polluting the suburban landscape, or gleaming ultra-luxury alien invaders menacing vulnerable urban neighborhoods. It might help with sentiment if we had more multifamily buildings that were pleasant to live in and that middle-class voters could actually identify with. I'm as YIMBY as anyone, but the actual recent condo buildings I can point to are making it hard to challenge the preference for single-family homes. Anything that looks as good costs twice as much, or more with HOA fees.

ocschwar 9y ago
WHo exactly is being forced into a tower? I have a detached house with a small yard, a short walk from a block lined with condo buildings and one rental building. Nobody's being forced into my neighborhood. The working class homeowners have been pushed out of the houses by yuppies like me long ago. Now they're being pushed out of that one rental building, which has been remodeled, and where they've stopped taking Section 8. And they're pushed out by people who for whatever reason are quite happily packing themselves into these buildings.
ajmurmann 9y ago
I think this is in the very least partially a result of a broken market. Due to regulations and zoning you can barely call development a market. It takes lots of effort and ideally connections to build something. Meanwhile it's largely a seller's market. If we dramatically reduced zoning restrictions we could get much closer to the market doing its work and maybe have some real competition. For example where I live so malls get built by the same developer. Even if someone wanted I'm sure it would be nigh impossible to get permits etc. to build a competing mall next door and try to drive them out of business like in a real market. I'd love to see real, break neck, free market competition for all projects and no schmoozing with the major.

axau 9y ago

SB-827 is great, but I’m assuming its chance of passing is about zero. Am I wrong? What else can be done?

krausejj 9y ago
The only people who know about SB-827 are housing policy wonks and homeowners associations. If the people who it really affects—like Millennials—knew what was happening, it would have a much better chance.