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This is one of those things that sounds nice at first - especially as a soundbite. But, it's clearly a NIMBY move to protect existing home owners financial asse

This is one of those things that sounds nice at first - especially as a soundbite. But, it's clearly a NIMBY move to protect existing home owners financial asset. It's a clever trick to protect existing home owners even more by making new development even more difficult and expensive while making it look like it's an environmental move. Tack on $30k in expense to any new home development and (probably) some lovely legislation about how it has to be installed. On top of this, now they're "encouraging" all-electric homes. What does that mean?! No gas range?! Please, god, no. Why not enforce this legislation on existing home owners, raising the property tax to fund solar farms, enforce better building standards on existing homes, or /something/ that would actually have a substantial effect on the environment? Cause, that ain't helping existing home owners or helping push their home prices even higher. As a renter who wishes to have a home /somewhere/ in the bay area, this is killing me inside. The existing home owner lobby is so ridiculously strong here. California has the Superman of home owner lobbies. Each day, it's nailed into me that Prop 13 will never go away and home prices are just gonna keep climbing so that non-1% income outsiders cannot get them. Meanwhile, estates will be passed down generation by generation tax free and with no reassessment.

jogjayr 9y ago
> But, it's clearly a NIMBY move to protect existing home owners financial asset. It doesn't apply to new construction over 3 stories. Especially for the Bay Area, building up seems like the only way out of the current morass, so is it really that clear-cut? Also most of the house price in high-demand areas is the land cost. $30k sounds like a lot but is less than 5% of the median house price. People pay that much over asking quite regularly.
- pzone 9y ago
  Dismissing large sums of money like that in terms of percentages can really get you into trouble. Sure, it's "only" 5% more for a $1.5M property. Another way to think of it is as a 30 thousand dollar roadblock facing anyone who wants to move to California.
  - jogjayr 9y ago
    Err...30k is 5% of $600k which is the going rate for a townhome in Fremont. I'm sorry but when the sums are that astronomical it really is a rounding error - especially for a home improvement that saves the homeowner money in the long term. If someone can't afford $630k they almost certainly couldn't afford the $600k it would've cost otherwise. Like I mentioned above, because of space constraints the Bay Area has little choice but to densify if it wants to add significant new housing, and the new regs wouldn't apply to buildings taller than 3 stories. Things like parking minimums, low-density zoning, and fragmentation of public transit have done and continue to do, most of the damage to housing affordability. Requiring solar is peanuts in comparison and has otherwise beneficial effects also - namely, reduction of carbon emissions.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - asah 9y ago
      AND... it pays for itself!
- djrogers 9y ago
  It's actually a little more than 5% of the median house price ($515,000), but setting that quibble aside that's a median* - meaning half of the homes are below that price. I know a lot of us Bay Area folks tend to forget this, but there are a lot of people living in California where $515k would buy the biggest house in town, and new home prices are closer to the 250k. This legislation is clearly a regressive burden on the less wealthy home buyers. [1] median list price from https://www.zillow.com/ca/home-values/ https://www.zillow.com/ca/home-values/
jhpriestley 9y ago
Adding $30k to your mortgage would cost like $150 a month extra or so. It will produce about 15,000 kWh per month, which is about $150 off your electric bill.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Why isn't everyone installing then? There is a net cost somewhere.
  - jhpriestley 9y ago
    A ton of people are installing them! Only on hacker news is rooftop solar some kind of horrible socialist boondoggle. edit: to answer your question more directly: many people just won't be bothered to install them or don't think of it, or can't get the financing easily. For some people the numbers don't work out, because their roof is old or they don't get enough sun or their electric bill is already low.
    - killjoywashere 9y ago
      On the flip side, if you bought a house from an old engineer who converted the entire house to electric appliances, and you bring your own electric dryer, and you have a family of 4, and a/c, in California, rooftop solar is dead obvious.
    - FooHentai 9y ago
      So then I guess we've hit QED - If all that is true why is a legislative mandate desirable?
  - 3pt14159 9y ago
    Same reason most people in Canada weren't installing geothermal until the federal government started subsidizing them: Inertia. Despite what they may teach you in Econ 101, the efficient market hypothesis isn't an actually useful way of looking at human behaviour. It might work for modelling some of the actions of Goldman Sachs, but actual people are squishy and irrational.
jrs95 9y ago
Here’s an idea: make solar mandatory, but require it to be funded in part by a property tax increase
- propman 9y ago
  That's extremely counter productive. The most bang from your buck for solar is for utilitity plants. So raising taxes just to put solar on SOME new homes which benifits only the new home purchasers (majority of whom are quite wealthy) with their electricity bill and house value is dumb. Basically you're taxing everyone rich and poor equally (landlords pay property tax too) just for a soundbyte headline which accomplishes literally nothing. If you're taxing everyone, at least make it efficient and build utility plants but even that is dumb because it subsidizes solar and likely puts the money into the wrong person's pocket. If you were taxing everyone and wanted to help the environment, building public infrastructure, transportation, roads, bridges, trains is the best option even if it doesn't look as catchy. It'll produce a hell of a lot more benifits than a few MW of super expensive solar. If you still want a headline, build transmission lines. Texas in 6 years went from dead last in renewables to first with over double California because the governor invested $7B in transmission lines making renewable energy an economic decision not a subsidized one
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ojbyrne 9y ago
    How is the $7b invested in transmission lines not a subsidy?
    - propman 9y ago
      The same reason why building a road isn't a subsidy. Is building a bridge from Oakland to a San Francisco a subsidy for Uber and Twitter? You are expanding the infrastructure, without transmission lines there is no economic viability for most of our renewable energy.
atomi 9y ago
Some people think we're getting too many transplants and that regulating the development of new housing will somewhat curb that. There are some areas I've seen here that have grown in population so much that just getting across town takes an hour or more. I'm personally all for more growth. I'd love to have more representatives and I think people are going to be very surprised at the results of the 2020 census. But we do need to do something about housing and traffic.
- rxhernandez 9y ago
  > Some people think we're getting too many transplants and that regulating the development of new housing will somewhat curb that. Those people are either idiots or don't care about anyone but themselves. Not everyone born and raised in California has parents who are well off enough to pass down a house to them (in fact I doubt most have parents that can). What happens when our teachers and every low paid worker get fed up with the quality of life (which includes lining their landlords' coffers instead of building equity) and decide to move elsewhere? Are the home owners suddenly going to pick up the slack and do the jobs of the 99%? "Snap decisions that sound good to my tribe but ultimately lead to long term problems for everyone" should be the motto of a certain group of people here. It's also disconcerting that some tech people fall into that group of people because you would think tech people of all people would have basic enough skills to look beyond the first consequence of a solution.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    Tech people are also hyper "rational" which some read as "cold".
- downandout 9y ago
  >Some people think we're getting too many transplants Those people would be wrong. California lost a net of approximately 1 million residents between 2007 and 2016 [1]. Chalk it up to over-regulation (like the issue we are discussing here), high state income taxes, overcrowded/underfunded public schools, expensive housing, etc., but anyone complaining about too many transplants arriving in CA simply doesn't know the statistics. [1] http://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 http://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265
pishpash 9y ago
They don't want you there. Let them die slowly with no growth, or they are right and can sustain it, then who's to argue otherwise?
noonespecial 9y ago
Seems easy to fix. The solar upgrade must be done to existing homes the next time they change hands. Either its a good idea that existing homeowners are willing to pay for with a bit of their equity, or its a dick move dressed in the moralizing of environmentalism.
sologoub 9y ago
Seattle doesn’t have an equivalent of prop. 13, yet without enough supply, prices still have skyrocketed. With the current supply problem in Bay Area, realistically all you are going to get is marginally more displacement of people who anchored themselves to a super expensive area in the past, but could not sustain a 10x increase in tax. Building enough supply can work: https://la.curbed.com/2018/5/2/17311992/los-angeles-how-much-to-rent-apartment-cost https://la.curbed.com/2018/5/2/17311992/los-angeles-how-much... And it doesn’t take long for things to stabilize either, once you increase supply.
- nojvek 9y ago
  Seattle is not alone. Vancouver, Sydney, London and other cities all have experienced the same boom. The global economy is currently booming, wealth is shifting from middle class to upper class. Building homes have become cheaper but since transportation services are still outdated, more and more people want to stay in the same place. The super wealthy are leveraged by the banks and think housing is a great investment so they squat on swaths of buyable property and rent it out. If a City implements a solid transportation system that gets you in the burbs within an hour, then the prices drop. Prices are simply a matter of demand and supply, and supply is artificially capped. The truth is, humans are terrible long term decision makers for the good of a large population. Personal agendas always get in the way.
- elgenie 9y ago
  Prop 13 is the coup de grace that exacerbates all the other issues that contribute to demand outstripping supply by removing the tax pressure that should've been incenting more density and liquidity in the housing market. Seattle's real estate market has some but not all of the same pressures: too prescriptive of zoning that requires single family homes for no good reason and booming economies adding jobs at a faster rate than housing stock. But Seattle builds faster and taller in the median case; though the tall building seems to go through waves of either being all apartments or all condos. Seattle has built enough housing supply that rents actually dropped earlier this year (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-area-rents-drop-significantly-for-first-time-this-decade-as-new-apartments-sit-empty/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...) and the median clearing price is less than half of the San Francisco rate.
usaar333 9y ago
Doesn't this hurt their property values though? Now anyone that wants to do a tear down needs to pay to add solar. If the buyer must pay more to build, they logically will be willing to pay less for land.
- phamilton 9y ago
  > they logically will be willing to pay less for land Only when there's restricted demand. Because we're in a restricted supply market, pricing is mostly established in based on alternatives. If every property tear down has the same additional cost, then it's probably not going to affect the price.
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  Or look into other options, such as building taller or re-furbishing and expanding the existing building to meet their needs instead of tearing it down to rebuild.
xbmcuser 9y ago
30k though is current price when installed separately. Currently solar panel + equip are already just 40% of the cost. When solar panel will be build into the design of the new construction and done by the contractor the installation cost will come down a lot. Plus as solar panel are in the design of the construction they could be better placed for optimal efficiency increasing the rate of return. My guess is by 2020 when it becomes mandatory it will actually cost maybe around 15k and save the owner a lot more over it's lifetime.
jwr 9y ago
> What does that mean?! No gas range?! Please, god, no. Serious question: why is that a problem? Most modern apartment buildings here in Warsaw, Poland are built without gas. Nobody has problems with it: in fact, people would rather not have a potentially dangerous gas infrastructure in their building. I've been cooking on electric for more than 10 years now and would never think of switching back. Why would you want to have gas?
- astebbin 9y ago
  Gas allows for more precise and responsive heat control per burner. To the average homeowner, this doesn’t make much of a difference, but I understand it to be of great importance for professional chefs and passionate hobbyists.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I'm not sure on that. Our electric heating can control the heating very precisely and hold the boiler at a specific temperature within the tolerance of the temperature gauge. The heatpump and gas burner that are external are much different beasts as they require some windups and unlike a solid heating rod you can't flip them on and off rather rapidly (about once every 5 minutes). An induction heater should also be able to heat a pot much more precisely than a gas burner (again down to instrument precision if it has one)
    - asah 9y ago
      I cook 2-3 times per day: electric/induction isn't even close to gas. I even get annoyed by less powerful gas. FYI this is a common sentiment among people who cook. I'm not some master chef or anything and don't get excited by $5000 appliances. Has is simply better. I'd sooner consider moving to a house without heat, A/C, parking etc - than one without gas (and if fact have). Even broadband can usually be added for enough money. But gas stoves are really hard to retrofit, and camp stoves are ghetto and unstable/dangerous esp with heavy dishes.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I actually had propane put in for my stovetop during a remodel a while back. I much prefer cooking on a good gas stovetop. More responsive and more high end output.

jogjayr 9y ago

> But, it's clearly a NIMBY move to protect existing home owners financial asset. It doesn't apply to new construction over 3 stories. Especially for the Bay Area, building up seems like the only way out of the current morass, so is it really that clear-cut? Also most of the house price in high-demand areas is the land cost. $30k sounds like a lot but is less than 5% of the median house price. People pay that much over asking quite regularly.

pzone 9y ago
Dismissing large sums of money like that in terms of percentages can really get you into trouble. Sure, it's "only" 5% more for a $1.5M property. Another way to think of it is as a 30 thousand dollar roadblock facing anyone who wants to move to California.
- jogjayr 9y ago
  Err...30k is 5% of $600k which is the going rate for a townhome in Fremont. I'm sorry but when the sums are that astronomical it really is a rounding error - especially for a home improvement that saves the homeowner money in the long term. If someone can't afford $630k they almost certainly couldn't afford the $600k it would've cost otherwise. Like I mentioned above, because of space constraints the Bay Area has little choice but to densify if it wants to add significant new housing, and the new regs wouldn't apply to buildings taller than 3 stories. Things like parking minimums, low-density zoning, and fragmentation of public transit have done and continue to do, most of the damage to housing affordability. Requiring solar is peanuts in comparison and has otherwise beneficial effects also - namely, reduction of carbon emissions.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - asah 9y ago
    AND... it pays for itself!
djrogers 9y ago
It's actually a little more than 5% of the median house price ($515,000), but setting that quibble aside that's a median* - meaning half of the homes are below that price. I know a lot of us Bay Area folks tend to forget this, but there are a lot of people living in California where $515k would buy the biggest house in town, and new home prices are closer to the 250k. This legislation is clearly a regressive burden on the less wealthy home buyers. [1] median list price from https://www.zillow.com/ca/home-values/ https://www.zillow.com/ca/home-values/

jhpriestley 9y ago

Adding $30k to your mortgage would cost like $150 a month extra or so. It will produce about 15,000 kWh per month, which is about $150 off your electric bill.

pishpash 9y ago
Why isn't everyone installing then? There is a net cost somewhere.
- jhpriestley 9y ago
  A ton of people are installing them! Only on hacker news is rooftop solar some kind of horrible socialist boondoggle. edit: to answer your question more directly: many people just won't be bothered to install them or don't think of it, or can't get the financing easily. For some people the numbers don't work out, because their roof is old or they don't get enough sun or their electric bill is already low.
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    On the flip side, if you bought a house from an old engineer who converted the entire house to electric appliances, and you bring your own electric dryer, and you have a family of 4, and a/c, in California, rooftop solar is dead obvious.
  - FooHentai 9y ago
    So then I guess we've hit QED - If all that is true why is a legislative mandate desirable?
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Same reason most people in Canada weren't installing geothermal until the federal government started subsidizing them: Inertia. Despite what they may teach you in Econ 101, the efficient market hypothesis isn't an actually useful way of looking at human behaviour. It might work for modelling some of the actions of Goldman Sachs, but actual people are squishy and irrational.

jrs95 9y ago

Here’s an idea: make solar mandatory, but require it to be funded in part by a property tax increase

propman 9y ago
That's extremely counter productive. The most bang from your buck for solar is for utilitity plants. So raising taxes just to put solar on SOME new homes which benifits only the new home purchasers (majority of whom are quite wealthy) with their electricity bill and house value is dumb. Basically you're taxing everyone rich and poor equally (landlords pay property tax too) just for a soundbyte headline which accomplishes literally nothing. If you're taxing everyone, at least make it efficient and build utility plants but even that is dumb because it subsidizes solar and likely puts the money into the wrong person's pocket. If you were taxing everyone and wanted to help the environment, building public infrastructure, transportation, roads, bridges, trains is the best option even if it doesn't look as catchy. It'll produce a hell of a lot more benifits than a few MW of super expensive solar. If you still want a headline, build transmission lines. Texas in 6 years went from dead last in renewables to first with over double California because the governor invested $7B in transmission lines making renewable energy an economic decision not a subsidized one
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ojbyrne 9y ago
  How is the $7b invested in transmission lines not a subsidy?
  - propman 9y ago
    The same reason why building a road isn't a subsidy. Is building a bridge from Oakland to a San Francisco a subsidy for Uber and Twitter? You are expanding the infrastructure, without transmission lines there is no economic viability for most of our renewable energy.

atomi 9y ago

Some people think we're getting too many transplants and that regulating the development of new housing will somewhat curb that. There are some areas I've seen here that have grown in population so much that just getting across town takes an hour or more. I'm personally all for more growth. I'd love to have more representatives and I think people are going to be very surprised at the results of the 2020 census. But we do need to do something about housing and traffic.

rxhernandez 9y ago
> Some people think we're getting too many transplants and that regulating the development of new housing will somewhat curb that. Those people are either idiots or don't care about anyone but themselves. Not everyone born and raised in California has parents who are well off enough to pass down a house to them (in fact I doubt most have parents that can). What happens when our teachers and every low paid worker get fed up with the quality of life (which includes lining their landlords' coffers instead of building equity) and decide to move elsewhere? Are the home owners suddenly going to pick up the slack and do the jobs of the 99%? "Snap decisions that sound good to my tribe but ultimately lead to long term problems for everyone" should be the motto of a certain group of people here. It's also disconcerting that some tech people fall into that group of people because you would think tech people of all people would have basic enough skills to look beyond the first consequence of a solution.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Tech people are also hyper "rational" which some read as "cold".
downandout 9y ago
>Some people think we're getting too many transplants Those people would be wrong. California lost a net of approximately 1 million residents between 2007 and 2016 [1]. Chalk it up to over-regulation (like the issue we are discussing here), high state income taxes, overcrowded/underfunded public schools, expensive housing, etc., but anyone complaining about too many transplants arriving in CA simply doesn't know the statistics. [1] http://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265 http://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265

pishpash 9y ago

They don't want you there. Let them die slowly with no growth, or they are right and can sustain it, then who's to argue otherwise?

noonespecial 9y ago

Seems easy to fix. The solar upgrade must be done to existing homes the next time they change hands. Either its a good idea that existing homeowners are willing to pay for with a bit of their equity, or its a dick move dressed in the moralizing of environmentalism.

sologoub 9y ago

Seattle doesn’t have an equivalent of prop. 13, yet without enough supply, prices still have skyrocketed. With the current supply problem in Bay Area, realistically all you are going to get is marginally more displacement of people who anchored themselves to a super expensive area in the past, but could not sustain a 10x increase in tax. Building enough supply can work: https://la.curbed.com/2018/5/2/17311992/los-angeles-how-much-to-rent-apartment-cost https://la.curbed.com/2018/5/2/17311992/los-angeles-how-much... And it doesn’t take long for things to stabilize either, once you increase supply.

nojvek 9y ago
Seattle is not alone. Vancouver, Sydney, London and other cities all have experienced the same boom. The global economy is currently booming, wealth is shifting from middle class to upper class. Building homes have become cheaper but since transportation services are still outdated, more and more people want to stay in the same place. The super wealthy are leveraged by the banks and think housing is a great investment so they squat on swaths of buyable property and rent it out. If a City implements a solid transportation system that gets you in the burbs within an hour, then the prices drop. Prices are simply a matter of demand and supply, and supply is artificially capped. The truth is, humans are terrible long term decision makers for the good of a large population. Personal agendas always get in the way.
elgenie 9y ago
Prop 13 is the coup de grace that exacerbates all the other issues that contribute to demand outstripping supply by removing the tax pressure that should've been incenting more density and liquidity in the housing market. Seattle's real estate market has some but not all of the same pressures: too prescriptive of zoning that requires single family homes for no good reason and booming economies adding jobs at a faster rate than housing stock. But Seattle builds faster and taller in the median case; though the tall building seems to go through waves of either being all apartments or all condos. Seattle has built enough housing supply that rents actually dropped earlier this year (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-area-rents-drop-significantly-for-first-time-this-decade-as-new-apartments-sit-empty/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...) and the median clearing price is less than half of the San Francisco rate.

usaar333 9y ago

Doesn't this hurt their property values though? Now anyone that wants to do a tear down needs to pay to add solar. If the buyer must pay more to build, they logically will be willing to pay less for land.

phamilton 9y ago
> they logically will be willing to pay less for land Only when there's restricted demand. Because we're in a restricted supply market, pricing is mostly established in based on alternatives. If every property tear down has the same additional cost, then it's probably not going to affect the price.
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
Or look into other options, such as building taller or re-furbishing and expanding the existing building to meet their needs instead of tearing it down to rebuild.

xbmcuser 9y ago

30k though is current price when installed separately. Currently solar panel + equip are already just 40% of the cost. When solar panel will be build into the design of the new construction and done by the contractor the installation cost will come down a lot. Plus as solar panel are in the design of the construction they could be better placed for optimal efficiency increasing the rate of return. My guess is by 2020 when it becomes mandatory it will actually cost maybe around 15k and save the owner a lot more over it's lifetime.

jwr 9y ago

> What does that mean?! No gas range?! Please, god, no. Serious question: why is that a problem? Most modern apartment buildings here in Warsaw, Poland are built without gas. Nobody has problems with it: in fact, people would rather not have a potentially dangerous gas infrastructure in their building. I've been cooking on electric for more than 10 years now and would never think of switching back. Why would you want to have gas?

astebbin 9y ago
Gas allows for more precise and responsive heat control per burner. To the average homeowner, this doesn’t make much of a difference, but I understand it to be of great importance for professional chefs and passionate hobbyists.
- zaarn 9y ago
  I'm not sure on that. Our electric heating can control the heating very precisely and hold the boiler at a specific temperature within the tolerance of the temperature gauge. The heatpump and gas burner that are external are much different beasts as they require some windups and unlike a solid heating rod you can't flip them on and off rather rapidly (about once every 5 minutes). An induction heater should also be able to heat a pot much more precisely than a gas burner (again down to instrument precision if it has one)
  - asah 9y ago
    I cook 2-3 times per day: electric/induction isn't even close to gas. I even get annoyed by less powerful gas. FYI this is a common sentiment among people who cook. I'm not some master chef or anything and don't get excited by $5000 appliances. Has is simply better. I'd sooner consider moving to a house without heat, A/C, parking etc - than one without gas (and if fact have). Even broadband can usually be added for enough money. But gas stoves are really hard to retrofit, and camp stoves are ghetto and unstable/dangerous esp with heavy dishes.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I actually had propane put in for my stovetop during a remodel a while back. I much prefer cooking on a good gas stovetop. More responsive and more high end output.