8 ms·

A better rule than SB827 would be a rule for every office worker employed in the city, there must be an equivalent housing unit provided by that same city such

by jpao79 8y ago

A better rule than SB827 would be a rule for every office worker employed in the city, there must be an equivalent housing unit provided by that same city such that the jobs per resident ratio is maintained. If Menlo Park wants to allow Facebook to build an office complex to support 2,000 more Facebook employees than it needs to create 2,000 more residential options for those employees. Otherwise Redwood City and East Palo Alto have to shoulder the burden of housing, education and other services for those new residents without the benefit of the tax basis. Or if San Francisco wants to build 5 more Salesforce Towers, San Francisco should be required to present a plan to build 5 neighboring residential towers to support those office towers. Or pass on the opportunity and encourage Salesforce to take a look at Oakland/San Jose/Sacramento/Fresno. Let's put it this way, if Wiener really had concerned about housing, then the really good solution would be to let Brisbane build the Salesforce/Uber office towers in Brisbane and then for Wiener find a transit rich location within San Francisco for the housing development to support those office towers. From an outsider perspective, it just seems like SF is perfectly happy to scoop up the office/commercial rent tax revenue and let Brisbane do the heavy lifting of housing those office workers [1]. [1] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/16/16897174/brisbane-city-council-silicon-valley-land https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/16/16897174/brisbane-city-counc...

ryanx435 8y ago
Lol only in California would this be suggested. Why not just repeal the stupid housing laws you have now instead of adding more complexity to the situation?
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  The main reason why not is political viability. Voter ballot initiatives are required to ammend or revise the state constitution. The problem is that voters are selfish and expecting that to change is unreasonable. Not only because of the scale needed but because the degree of selflessness required in exchange for no guarantees is unreasonable to expect. Existing owners gave a sweetheart deal and are reluctant to raise their own taxes or allow the rate of tax assessment to rise faster, especially when much of the population is in a high desirability high cost area. Their property value is a considerable store of value and they are incentivised to be against further housing. Renters fear that changing the situation would open up further gentrification as if true value is assesed there is no reason not to upscale the property, indeed it would be required to make the value sustainable. It might make things better long term afterwards but when they don't want to stomach the risk in the short term. Add to the love of keeping the area after they moved in and things get deeply personal. It seems to be a nasty democratic deadlock resulting from the fundamentals of the rules and how they may be changed resulting in the can getting kicked down the road. Prop 13 isn't viable long term nor wise. There are only three ways it can end really, four if we get really fantastic. First is the unlikely result of a supreme court ruling that invalidates a lesser state constitution. Not likely to make it there and there would be few arguments as to why it is not allowed. It would likely cause a real estate crash in the short term. Even if the legislature holds a paniced mass tax cut much of the damage would already be done un reaction to the explosive real estate tax growth. The second is if voter balances change to repeal Prop 13. This would likely call for a substantial change to voter populations or things getting bad enough to change minds. It would cause real estate prices to get very unpredictable and volatile but the panic would be lessened by time to prepare for the possibility. Third would be if the real estate disaster hits first such that there is little resistance to a repeal or it becomes unnecessary as the actual accessment now matches the frozen prices largely. Prior real estate bubbles didn't do it so this would be huge and have global financial ramifications. Fourth is in the realm of science fiction, reducing housing demand technologically and beyond any ability to restrict to preserve the status quo. Extradimensional living spaces, widespread teleportation, alternate universe copies of California, antigravity houses floating over international waters or other things possible only in imagination.
Lazare 8y ago
So rather than repeal laws so that people can build housing... ...we should pass more laws mandating that the housing we can't build should be built anyhow, apparently by magic? > If Menlo Park wants to allow Facebook to build an office complex to support 2,000 more Facebook employees than it needs to create 2,000 more residential options for those employees. And when you say Menlo Park "needs to create", you mean, they need to relax the zoning laws in the way SB827 would have mandated so that those houses can be built? Because otherwise, how is this meant to happen?
- oceanghost 8y ago
  "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail."
- candiodari 8y ago
  You have just come across the frustration every lawyer has starting from the 2nd week of law school. It never ends, I'm afraid.
- sfnrm 8y ago
  The lurking issue here is Prop 13. It forces cities into a tragedy of the commons type scenario where it's not rational for any individual city to build new housing, as property taxes are limited, while they can more easily raise revenue by bringing in jobs and retail. >...we should pass more laws mandating that the housing we can't build should be built anyhow, apparently by magic? Unfortunately, it seems like Prop 13 is not going to get repealed anytime soon. Given that, then in this case, yes, more regulations could help. It's called a Pigouvian tax [1]. Whenever a city like Menlo Park brings in 2,000 more Facebook employees while allowing for zero new housing, they impose a negative externality on their neighbors, who suffer in the form of higher housing costs. To counter that, cities should be made to bear the social cost of exacerbating the housing crisis. If every time a city like Menlo Park adds thousands of new employees without any new housing, they had to pay large fees into a state affordable housing fund, they'd have less incentive to contribute such a large housing imbalance in the first place, and everyone would be better off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
kqr2 8y ago
Or allow people who work in a city to also vote in that city on housing matters.
pcwalton 8y ago
This is more or less what the existing RHNA laws try to do, though they don't have enough teeth. SB 828 is designed to improve the situation a bit.
almost_usual 8y ago
How about police, firefighters, teachers, and construction workers building these homes. I’m assuming they would get the same treatment and residences as these Facebook workers.
Karishma1234 8y ago
Central planning is almost assured to fail miserably tiling the power more into the hands of rich people while screwing up small people. There is nothing wrong in some cities specialising in industrial buildings while other cities focus on residential projects. Cities should have all this freedom. The best solution is to relax zoning laws so that the average rents go down till they reach a point where they meet the average. The real problem with California is that the politicians have put ridiculous elitist objectives such as climate change over sensible and practical objectives such as roof over the head of working middle class people. Somehow some godforsaken fish needs conservation but the minorities in most cities are forced to live in petty ghettos with conditions worse than animals. P.S. Note that the real victims of these policies have been minorities. I rarely see blacks of hispanics living in better areas of any bay area town. In fact you can guess a neighbourhood is hispanic by just looking at the school ratings. They live in ghettos and their schools tend to be the worst as a result they are perpetually trapped in poverty.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  There is no trade off between climate change and housing. Those are entirely separate things. SFO is way too hung up on its past and the citizens living within need to get over themselves and allow “evil” developers to tear down all the old crap and build up. They live in a city. Shit changes. It is astonishing how many two or three level buildings exist even within the most dense part of the city. Even more amazing is how even 5 minutes away from market street exists two story houses with garages in front. Seriously. It isn’t historic. It’s just old crap. Tear it down. Build up. Only gonna work if government can tell all the existing residents to fuck off and allow more development.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    I'd actually argue that it is the opposite of a trade-off. The more houses that are built down town, the less urban sprawl will exist. One of the biggest contributors to climate change is everything that comes with urban sprawl, and high density housing fixes that. A basic example of the problems that urban sprawl causes is more transportation pollution. (IE, people who live near work are less likely to drive. Total average driving could be cut in half)
drawkbox 8y ago
> If Menlo Park wants to allow Facebook to build an office complex to support 2,000 more Facebook employees than it needs to create 2,000 more residential options for those employees. Careful, the solution might be to make work kingdoms in the future. Google, Facebook, Apple castles, the Apple spaceship is already ready for a moat around it. My guess is a requirement like that will lead to residential/apartments being build on campus like at Foxconn or in company cities like in the past, essentially work dorms. I also feel like this would be horrible for ageism and family life impacts. In places like that it is a work/life balance problem and they'll just work you til you are dead in their kingdom and then bring out the cart and yell "Bring out your dead!" [1] When you have companies that are in cities, you need to find a way to get that revenue and income dispersed around the city/community, not just a walled off kingdom. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDnS4pkmzis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDnS4pkmzis
- jpao79 8y ago
  Definitely didn't mean to advocate for campus based housing or worker warehouses. The proposal was that Mountain View (Google), Menlo Park (Facebook), Cupertino (Apple) are all big enough such that equivalent high density housing could have been built within those cities at the same time of the construction of the high density open office space. Instead, the Apple Campus was built across the street from single family homes and Cupertino got to get the big tax increase without any additional city services or having to share that tax base with San Jose which now has to house and educate all those additional employees. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3378192,-122.0061169,3a,75y,243.27h,84.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1soZjdEIRep792t9bp06Z_ow!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3378192,-122.0061169,3a,75y,...
  - Redoubts 8y ago
    > and Cupertino got to get the big tax increase without any additional city services or having to share that tax base Simple, dissolve every municipality smaller than a County in the Bay Area.
- stale2002 8y ago
  Why would I be opposed to the option of on campus housing? If I don't want to live near work, I wouldn't be required to. An OPTION is never bad, especially when we are talking about engineers making 200k+. I'm sure that these high paid engineers can negotiate their own preferences for work environment, or at the very leaast, go work at places that share their values.
jack9 8y ago
> 2,000 more residential option That the vast majority can't afford, leaving the current status quo.
- lajhsdfkl 8y ago
  >That the vast majority can't afford, leaving the current status quo. is this a comment on how new housing is supposedly "luxury" housing that is only available to the richest? As someone currently living in a "luxury" apartment in San Francisco and has lived in normal apartments in several other cities across the US for significantly less money. The only thing luxurious about San Francisco apartments is their price. Build enough houses and the prices of these supposedly luxury apartment buildings will fall. Then they will begin to offer real luxury amenities like a 24/7 doorman, heated floors, etc.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  If only wealthy employees can buy the 2000 new housing units close to the big corporate campus, then that means those 2000 workers are moving out of housing that's farther away, lowering prices (or at least slowing price rise) in those farther suburbs. So yeah, maybe the company janitor can't afford the $1.2M luxury apartment next to campus, but maybe he can afford a $600K house 15 miles away instead of living in his $400K house 30 miles away.
  - jack9 8y ago
    There's some misunderstanding about housing markets illustrated by this comment which seems intuitive to me. Given the luxury pricing, not all the units will be rented (or not for long) because they don't need to be to keep the property profitable. Of those individuals that could afford the price, a large amount will move into the more affordable housing out of personal self-interest. The trickle down doesn't work in the manner described, in any meaningful way. Historically (rather than regionally) it has been working out this way for at least my lifetime.
    - _ph_ 8y ago
      One could of course tax empty housing. In Hamburg, Germany, you can leave an appartment empty for up to 3 months after that, you are taxed on the base of its rental value, whether you get that paid or not.
moultano 8y ago
I'd like to see SB827 for office space instead of transit. The density of residential zoning near these big suburban campuses should at least equal the density of the campuses themselves.
DrScump 8y ago
it needs to create 2,000 more residential options for those employees But that's not how it works because they can't discriminate in housing that way. If they build 2,000 homes and put them on the market, most won't go to employees, especially given that they'll be extorted into designating 20% or more as "affordable". The rest would just join the general inventory. Look at the protests trying to pressure Google in this direction for land in San Jose between 280 and the SAP Arena that they don't even own yet. (The same parcels that San Jose offered to the Oakland A's at considerable losses). The big developments proposed in Menlo and Mountain View are both on parcels trapped between 101 and the Bay with few connections to the rest of civilization... and no access to rapid transit. They are not a panacea.
_ph_ 8y ago
I have to agree soo much with this. I find it completely baffeling that popular cities are still growing business space at a high pace, but are not required to increase the residental space at an according pace which would allow to keep the prices under control.

by jpao79 8y ago

ryanx435 8y ago

Lol only in California would this be suggested. Why not just repeal the stupid housing laws you have now instead of adding more complexity to the situation?

Nasrudith 8y ago
The main reason why not is political viability. Voter ballot initiatives are required to ammend or revise the state constitution. The problem is that voters are selfish and expecting that to change is unreasonable. Not only because of the scale needed but because the degree of selflessness required in exchange for no guarantees is unreasonable to expect. Existing owners gave a sweetheart deal and are reluctant to raise their own taxes or allow the rate of tax assessment to rise faster, especially when much of the population is in a high desirability high cost area. Their property value is a considerable store of value and they are incentivised to be against further housing. Renters fear that changing the situation would open up further gentrification as if true value is assesed there is no reason not to upscale the property, indeed it would be required to make the value sustainable. It might make things better long term afterwards but when they don't want to stomach the risk in the short term. Add to the love of keeping the area after they moved in and things get deeply personal. It seems to be a nasty democratic deadlock resulting from the fundamentals of the rules and how they may be changed resulting in the can getting kicked down the road. Prop 13 isn't viable long term nor wise. There are only three ways it can end really, four if we get really fantastic. First is the unlikely result of a supreme court ruling that invalidates a lesser state constitution. Not likely to make it there and there would be few arguments as to why it is not allowed. It would likely cause a real estate crash in the short term. Even if the legislature holds a paniced mass tax cut much of the damage would already be done un reaction to the explosive real estate tax growth. The second is if voter balances change to repeal Prop 13. This would likely call for a substantial change to voter populations or things getting bad enough to change minds. It would cause real estate prices to get very unpredictable and volatile but the panic would be lessened by time to prepare for the possibility. Third would be if the real estate disaster hits first such that there is little resistance to a repeal or it becomes unnecessary as the actual accessment now matches the frozen prices largely. Prior real estate bubbles didn't do it so this would be huge and have global financial ramifications. Fourth is in the realm of science fiction, reducing housing demand technologically and beyond any ability to restrict to preserve the status quo. Extradimensional living spaces, widespread teleportation, alternate universe copies of California, antigravity houses floating over international waters or other things possible only in imagination.

Lazare 8y ago

So rather than repeal laws so that people can build housing... ...we should pass more laws mandating that the housing we can't build should be built anyhow, apparently by magic? > If Menlo Park wants to allow Facebook to build an office complex to support 2,000 more Facebook employees than it needs to create 2,000 more residential options for those employees. And when you say Menlo Park "needs to create", you mean, they need to relax the zoning laws in the way SB827 would have mandated so that those houses can be built? Because otherwise, how is this meant to happen?

oceanghost 8y ago
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail."
candiodari 8y ago
You have just come across the frustration every lawyer has starting from the 2nd week of law school. It never ends, I'm afraid.
sfnrm 8y ago
The lurking issue here is Prop 13. It forces cities into a tragedy of the commons type scenario where it's not rational for any individual city to build new housing, as property taxes are limited, while they can more easily raise revenue by bringing in jobs and retail. >...we should pass more laws mandating that the housing we can't build should be built anyhow, apparently by magic? Unfortunately, it seems like Prop 13 is not going to get repealed anytime soon. Given that, then in this case, yes, more regulations could help. It's called a Pigouvian tax [1]. Whenever a city like Menlo Park brings in 2,000 more Facebook employees while allowing for zero new housing, they impose a negative externality on their neighbors, who suffer in the form of higher housing costs. To counter that, cities should be made to bear the social cost of exacerbating the housing crisis. If every time a city like Menlo Park adds thousands of new employees without any new housing, they had to pay large fees into a state affordable housing fund, they'd have less incentive to contribute such a large housing imbalance in the first place, and everyone would be better off. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

kqr2 8y ago

Or allow people who work in a city to also vote in that city on housing matters.

pcwalton 8y ago

This is more or less what the existing RHNA laws try to do, though they don't have enough teeth. SB 828 is designed to improve the situation a bit.

almost_usual 8y ago

How about police, firefighters, teachers, and construction workers building these homes. I’m assuming they would get the same treatment and residences as these Facebook workers.

Karishma1234 8y ago

Central planning is almost assured to fail miserably tiling the power more into the hands of rich people while screwing up small people. There is nothing wrong in some cities specialising in industrial buildings while other cities focus on residential projects. Cities should have all this freedom. The best solution is to relax zoning laws so that the average rents go down till they reach a point where they meet the average. The real problem with California is that the politicians have put ridiculous elitist objectives such as climate change over sensible and practical objectives such as roof over the head of working middle class people. Somehow some godforsaken fish needs conservation but the minorities in most cities are forced to live in petty ghettos with conditions worse than animals. P.S. Note that the real victims of these policies have been minorities. I rarely see blacks of hispanics living in better areas of any bay area town. In fact you can guess a neighbourhood is hispanic by just looking at the school ratings. They live in ghettos and their schools tend to be the worst as a result they are perpetually trapped in poverty.

spookthesunset 8y ago
There is no trade off between climate change and housing. Those are entirely separate things. SFO is way too hung up on its past and the citizens living within need to get over themselves and allow “evil” developers to tear down all the old crap and build up. They live in a city. Shit changes. It is astonishing how many two or three level buildings exist even within the most dense part of the city. Even more amazing is how even 5 minutes away from market street exists two story houses with garages in front. Seriously. It isn’t historic. It’s just old crap. Tear it down. Build up. Only gonna work if government can tell all the existing residents to fuck off and allow more development.
- stale2002 8y ago
  I'd actually argue that it is the opposite of a trade-off. The more houses that are built down town, the less urban sprawl will exist. One of the biggest contributors to climate change is everything that comes with urban sprawl, and high density housing fixes that. A basic example of the problems that urban sprawl causes is more transportation pollution. (IE, people who live near work are less likely to drive. Total average driving could be cut in half)

drawkbox 8y ago

> If Menlo Park wants to allow Facebook to build an office complex to support 2,000 more Facebook employees than it needs to create 2,000 more residential options for those employees. Careful, the solution might be to make work kingdoms in the future. Google, Facebook, Apple castles, the Apple spaceship is already ready for a moat around it. My guess is a requirement like that will lead to residential/apartments being build on campus like at Foxconn or in company cities like in the past, essentially work dorms. I also feel like this would be horrible for ageism and family life impacts. In places like that it is a work/life balance problem and they'll just work you til you are dead in their kingdom and then bring out the cart and yell "Bring out your dead!" [1] When you have companies that are in cities, you need to find a way to get that revenue and income dispersed around the city/community, not just a walled off kingdom. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDnS4pkmzis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDnS4pkmzis

jpao79 8y ago
Definitely didn't mean to advocate for campus based housing or worker warehouses. The proposal was that Mountain View (Google), Menlo Park (Facebook), Cupertino (Apple) are all big enough such that equivalent high density housing could have been built within those cities at the same time of the construction of the high density open office space. Instead, the Apple Campus was built across the street from single family homes and Cupertino got to get the big tax increase without any additional city services or having to share that tax base with San Jose which now has to house and educate all those additional employees. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3378192,-122.0061169,3a,75y,243.27h,84.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1soZjdEIRep792t9bp06Z_ow!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3378192,-122.0061169,3a,75y,...
- Redoubts 8y ago
  > and Cupertino got to get the big tax increase without any additional city services or having to share that tax base Simple, dissolve every municipality smaller than a County in the Bay Area.
stale2002 8y ago
Why would I be opposed to the option of on campus housing? If I don't want to live near work, I wouldn't be required to. An OPTION is never bad, especially when we are talking about engineers making 200k+. I'm sure that these high paid engineers can negotiate their own preferences for work environment, or at the very leaast, go work at places that share their values.

jack9 8y ago

> 2,000 more residential option That the vast majority can't afford, leaving the current status quo.

lajhsdfkl 8y ago
>That the vast majority can't afford, leaving the current status quo. is this a comment on how new housing is supposedly "luxury" housing that is only available to the richest? As someone currently living in a "luxury" apartment in San Francisco and has lived in normal apartments in several other cities across the US for significantly less money. The only thing luxurious about San Francisco apartments is their price. Build enough houses and the prices of these supposedly luxury apartment buildings will fall. Then they will begin to offer real luxury amenities like a 24/7 doorman, heated floors, etc.
Johnny555 8y ago
If only wealthy employees can buy the 2000 new housing units close to the big corporate campus, then that means those 2000 workers are moving out of housing that's farther away, lowering prices (or at least slowing price rise) in those farther suburbs. So yeah, maybe the company janitor can't afford the $1.2M luxury apartment next to campus, but maybe he can afford a $600K house 15 miles away instead of living in his $400K house 30 miles away.
- jack9 8y ago
  There's some misunderstanding about housing markets illustrated by this comment which seems intuitive to me. Given the luxury pricing, not all the units will be rented (or not for long) because they don't need to be to keep the property profitable. Of those individuals that could afford the price, a large amount will move into the more affordable housing out of personal self-interest. The trickle down doesn't work in the manner described, in any meaningful way. Historically (rather than regionally) it has been working out this way for at least my lifetime.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    One could of course tax empty housing. In Hamburg, Germany, you can leave an appartment empty for up to 3 months after that, you are taxed on the base of its rental value, whether you get that paid or not.

moultano 8y ago

I'd like to see SB827 for office space instead of transit. The density of residential zoning near these big suburban campuses should at least equal the density of the campuses themselves.

DrScump 8y ago

it needs to create 2,000 more residential options for those employees But that's not how it works because they can't discriminate in housing that way. If they build 2,000 homes and put them on the market, most won't go to employees, especially given that they'll be extorted into designating 20% or more as "affordable". The rest would just join the general inventory. Look at the protests trying to pressure Google in this direction for land in San Jose between 280 and the SAP Arena that they don't even own yet. (The same parcels that San Jose offered to the Oakland A's at considerable losses). The big developments proposed in Menlo and Mountain View are both on parcels trapped between 101 and the Bay with few connections to the rest of civilization... and no access to rapid transit. They are not a panacea.

_ph_ 8y ago

I have to agree soo much with this. I find it completely baffeling that popular cities are still growing business space at a high pace, but are not required to increase the residental space at an according pace which would allow to keep the prices under control.