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Demolishing the California Dream: How SF Planned Its Own Housing Crisis
- api 8y agoHigh housing prices and the economic inequality they help feed are the great hypocrisy of the "blue states." Most predominantly Democratic or liberal states have unaffordable housing, at least in urban centers, with flagship "blue states" like New York, Massachusetts, and California being among the worst. These high prices are a direct result of anti-development zoning laws and a general mindset that opposes construction. I think an argument can be made that Texas, Oklahoma, or Kansas are actually more liberal than California because in those states a working class person can afford a place to live.
- Ar-Curunir 8y agoLiberal doesn't imply that they care for the working class; in Marxist terms, they're still bourgeoisie, just with a somewhat socially liberal bent. Money is still more important than anything else.
- geoalchimista 8y agoSure. But do you think Marxists care for the working class and the poor?
- romed 8y agoSure those places are “liberal” unless a working class person is also a gay man who is afraid of being beaten to death in the streets. I associate the housing crisis not really with liberal hypocrites but rather with ineffectual old ways of being “green”. Tons of Boomer environmentalists think you can save the planet by recycling, driving a Prius, and not wearing furs. That’s why the hot issue in Berkeley is plastic straws when they are undergoing a severe housing shortage. The fact is that installing a family in an existing dense, walkable city is the greenest thing that can be done. Being a NIMBY and having your Prius serviced by a mechanic who commutes three hours each way from Turlock is not green at all.
- bluGill 8y agoYou won't be beaten to death in Red states. They will make you feel unwelcome/uncomfortable, but they are not so violent as to beat you to death. Yes some people are that violent. However such people are everywhere. You are more likely to find them in the blue states just because the population density is higher.
- bobthepanda 8y agoEven if homophobes are just as present, blue states have a more accommodating legal framework to prosecute them. LGBT persons are not a protected class at the federal level: look at a map of states that include it as a protected class, and nearly all the states that don't include it are red. http://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws http://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws
- komali2 8y agoThe FBI seems to disagree. https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/tables/table-11 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/tables/table-11 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/tables/table-12 https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/tables/table-12 Note that the tables seem to differentiate between The state with the most hate crimes was California, at 931. California's population is 40 million. Next up is New York, at 595 incidents over 20 million citizens. Pretty close per person to California. (.000023 vs .000029, someone check my math). Next up... Ohio, 442 incidents to 10 million citizens. .000044. Michigan, 399 to 10 million. Kentucky, oh Kentucky, 206 to 4.4 million.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- romed 8y agoI'm sorry but I am from Oklahoma and you are incorrect. Gay people are regularly beaten, threatened, have their houses burned, and are even murdered. It has been less than a year since drive-by shootings at LGBT organizations in both Tulsa and Oklahoma City. "In March, the Tulsa headquarters of Oklahomans for Equality was the victim of a similar incident. Security camera video caught a white truck drive by and fire more than a dozen times at the center early in the morning on March 6."
- bluGill 8y agoWhile there is some truth in what you say, it isn't very strong. The Red States typically have just as much zoning. They just have a smaller population and a much larger undeveloped area. (An ocean next to your city cuts the amount of land near your city in half. Mountains on the other side do the same to a lesser extent.)
- pascalxus 8y agoYup, when it comes to housing, nothing has caused more harm than terribly planned regulations and zoning.
- francisofascii 8y agoWhile ineffective zoning is part of the problem, I would argue insufficient land taxing (Prop 13) is more to blame.
- pascalxus 8y agoI agree. it creates a lot of very perverse incentives.
- francisofascii 8y agoNIMBYism, greed, and hypocrisy can be found everywhere, regardless of political party. It is consistent throughout human history. Combating injustice is an everlasting struggle.
- sol_remmy 8y agoRegardless of if theres a equivalence there or not, he's right that Texas and Georgia are in the unusual position of both having a ton of jobs and very reasonable housing market. Granted SF is space constrained, but there is no excuse for other parts of Cali to be so expensive.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pmiller2 8y agoSF is not currently space constrained, only area constrained. They could build upwards if they wanted, but most of the city doesn’t allow buildings over 4 stories. Building up and having a functioning public transportation system would at least allow more people to live in SF, if not solve the housing price problem.
- soundwave106 8y agoThere's enough exceptions to this broad constraint though that partisan lean may not be a terribly relevant factor. As an example, Kalamazoo, Michigan is one of the cheapest cities according to several surveys, and the city is a modest left lean in a modest left state. (I actually can't think of too many hugely expensive cities in the Midwest, to be honest...) Basically, without data comparing several possible relevant variables along with the actual statistical correlation the factor represents, these types of discussions are IMHO useless.
- sampo 8y ago> SF is space constrained Paris has a population density 3 times that of SF. Manhattan has 4 times.
- komali2 8y agoI disagree, intent matters a great deal. My conservative friends in Texas don't actually want poor people / immigrants / etc housed, it's a part of their value system - "If they want housing, they should work for it!" thinking. My liberal friends in San Francisco hold the opposite mindset, they want everyone housed, working or otherwise, even if it's done in their own neighborhood. Policy needs work, I agree. My conservative friends like to mock me, blame the Democrats, or just the entire concept of liberalism, for every problem in San Francisco. Maybe they're right, but I've heard strong arguments that many problems we face are hangovers from old-guard republican policy: http://www.sfweekly.com/news/the-great-eliminator-how-ronald-reagan-made-homelessness-permanent/ http://www.sfweekly.com/news/the-great-eliminator-how-ronald... I've also heard arguments that a lot of this boils down to just Prop 13, sponsored mostly by Republicans, particularly anti-tax activist Howard Jarvis but also Paul Gann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978)#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Jarvis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Jarvis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gann Anyway, I think finger pointing is boring and useless, and as someone who's social circle is split in third between the deep south, the not so deep south, and the capital of liberalism in America, I've learned to address these kinds of discussions with "point your finger at what you think the solution should be instead." Saying "blue states suck at building cities" is just another form of Ad Hominem - what specifically is the problem, and what specifically do you think the solution should be?
- silotis 8y ago> My liberal friends in San Francisco hold the opposite mindset, they want everyone housed, working or otherwise, even if it's done in their own neighborhood. That may be true for your friends, but the revealed preference of SF residents as a whole does not agree.
- komali2 8y agoPerhaps, then, SF is not as liberal as people assume?
- sctb 8y agoGeneral political comments like this, even if they're meant to be insightful, have a completely predictable effect of sparking political flamewars. Since this is completely predictable and this isn't a political flamewar site, please don't.
- pokemongoaway 8y agoCommon tactic here on HN is to call politics you disagree with "political." I was even banned for this reason: for leaving "political" comments in political threads. Why not just be honest about it being different from your politics? One way to prevent all "flamewars" is to prevent all opinions that can be deemed offensive - and doesn't a quick appraisal of history reveal the issues with this oppressive strategy? Even in tech companies, you silence opposing opinions about how a technology should work and you potentially ruin the company. I've seen this in startups many times - the problems that we read about after a startup has failed were raised early on by certain members, often who were ignored, fired, and ridiculed for having such opinions.
- dang 8y agoIt's a common tactic to declaim grandiloquently about why one was banned but never supply the links so people could make up their own minds (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linkless%20martyr&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linkless%20martyr&sort=byDate&...). If we were really as arbitrary as you claim (edit: or whatever it is you claim), the pattern would be the opposite: people would be rushing to post their links, revealing how badly they were treated. You were banned for posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17491521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17491521 and ignoring our requests to stop. Any fair-minded reader can see that comments like "who brainwashed you bro" violate the site guidelines independently of your political views. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pokemongoaway 8y agoI'm not claiming that it is arbitrary; quite the contrary. There is a very narrow range of acceptable views on HN - and your reply only underscores that fact. People call posts "political" in a political thread when they disagree - and rarely feel the need to present evidence for their own views. And since you brought it up - in a manor so truncated - that post of mine that got me banned was 90% about how biological gender does exist. This emphasizes my point about how narrow the range of acceptable opinions are here on HN. None of the words composing the portion that you've quoted are even mean or offensive - and yes, I was implying that propaganda must be used to make someone argue so confidently without evidence against what even establishment biologists overwhelmingly believe (that biological gender exists). And furthermore, since you bring it up, another post of mine on a similarly "political" topic was met with with this supportive reply: "Speaking as a gay minority, I totally agree with your comment." So within the code of conduct, I assume you are referring to, "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." I started off sarcastically, but you ignore the rest of my post which is substantive. The comment I replied to began with the words, "race does not exist." If you search on scholar.google.com for the terms 'race' and 'biological' you get 2,640,000 results. And is it really so radical that I met a comment dismissive of the discussion within 2,640,000 peer-reviewed search results with sarcasm? But admins decided to cherry pick support or lack thereof for my comments, and then censored me. I don't know if this will be seen either since I am shadow banned - and the commenter who alerted me to the fact that I was shadow banned was then banned as well (for making that comment). After being banned I Googled for other people banned from HN from posting outside of the acceptable range of opinions and I found a load of them - and I don't think HN audience would appreciate that you're deciding to follow this censorship tread that we're seeing on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and many more. HN is framed as a more open community, but my experience here reveals a safe-space of increasing proportions.
- jayd16 8y agoLets just completely ignore the Republican governors in California's history to set a narrative. How can you simultaneously blame New York, Massachusetts and California for housing prices when they all have different housing strategies? You're clearly just pushing an anti-liberal message with no substance.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoTheir strategies all have a common component: lots of government involvement in what people build and do on their property (the presence of regulation is but one aspect of involvement, how that regulation is implemented matters a lot, see TFA for examples). Not wanting lots of government management of something is only anti-liberal because modern "liberals" in the US have hitched their horse to the big government wagon.
- gamblor956 8y agoCA and NY don't have more significantly regulations about what people can build and do on their property than Texas and Oklahoma. We simply have more reasonable zoning restrictions, like not allowing housing in areas designed as floodplains, or schools and housing within a few hundred feet of an oil refinery or fertilizer plant or other industrial facility susceptible to explosive accidents. Parts of California, like the SF Bay Area, have more restrictive zoning laws. This is not true of the state as a whole, and generally the restrictiveness of zoning laws is highly correlated with the per capita household income of an area, not with its political leanings. (In LA, for example, the most restrictive zoning laws are found in Palos Verdes, the most conservative part of the city but also one of its wealthiest. Commercial buildings are generally limited to 2 stories in the few areas where they even allow commercial development. Contrast that to Beverly Hills, an equally wealthy neighborhood that leans significantly leftward that allows for significant commercial and mixed-use developments. )
- hfdgiutdryg 8y agolots of government regulation of what people build and do on their property. That's an inevitable result of population density.
- darawk 8y agoThe only reason those states have affordable housing is that nobody wants to live there.
- emaginniss 8y agoReally? https://www.texastribune.org/2017/12/20/texas-population-grew-283-million-2017/ https://www.texastribune.org/2017/12/20/texas-population-gre...
- darawk 8y agoCalifornia has a density of 241 people per square mile. Texas is 105. I'd say my point stands just fine.
- hueving 8y agoI don't think you even know what your point is. Population density of an entire state has absolutely nothing to do with "nobody" wanting to live in the state. If Alaska decided to merge with California the population density would plummet and would fail your criterion despite the fact that no people actually moved.
- darawk 8y agoI was responding to the link. The link talked about the population of Texas.
- gamblor956 8y agoLA has been building a lot of housing the past few years; DTLA itself nearly 50,000 units built/being built over a 3 year window. The problem wasn't zoning. Unlike Texas, Oklahoma, or Kansas, we have these things called "earthquakes" that can cause significant amounts of damage and death and our building codes are more rigorous to minimize those risks. This also makes it more expensive to build housing--but that's a good thing. You don't want a ton of people living in shoddy houses that will collapse and kill them.
- bgorman 8y agoIf you look at Los Angeles you can clearly see that the problem is zoning. The only high rises are in the downtown area. It looks almost comical. The vast majority of the city is zoned for single family homes.
- gamblor956 8y agoThat's FUD. LA has no single center of gravity. We have high rises in Downtown, along Wilshire in Korea Town, in MidCity/Beverly Center, Beverly Hills, Century City, Culver City. LA has hundreds of multi-unit apartment and mixed use buildings. Between downtown and the beach, most of the area is zoned for multi-unit residential with multi-unit buildings scattered between single-family blocks. Only a few neighborhoods are entirely single-family homes.
- khuey 8y agoPer the ACS, Los Angeles County had 3.49 million homes in 2016, and 3.45 million homes in 2013. If your numbers for DTLA are accurate then nowhere else in the county is building anything. (Just to keep up with US population growth Los Angeles County needs to build over 30k homes every year.)
- gamblor956 8y agoI was not aware that it was still 2016... While a few notable buildings opened up in downtown during that 2013-2016 time period (i.e., 8th and Grand, One Santa Fe in the Arts District, the Whole Foods Lofts, the Last Italian Fortress), most of the units in downtown have only recently come onto the market, i.e., in 2017 and 2018. Some of the biggest developments in the Arts District and South Park are still under construction, and the biggest developments only broke ground this summer.
- mikeash 8y agoThey’re a direct result of being places where people want to live and can make a lot of money.
- jiveturkey 8y agoA lengthy but fantastic read. Apparently 1954 was the real turning point (a series of minor ones earlier), and here we are 60+ years later. Not an insightful, opinionated piece as might be implied by the title. It's a well done historical piece with just enough analysis so as to provide some color yet still appear unbiased. Not sure if the problem is fixable at this point. It seemingly would require more political will than is available. Too many vested parties.
- gnu8 8y agoThe article mentions the now unenforceable racially restrictive home deeds and I am curious to know, does anyone who has bought a house in SF recently have a document with such a clause? It would be interesting to see how such an anachronism survives today.
- TomVDB 8y agoI'm pretty sure that my current house, built in the sixties, in the South Bay has a covenant that has all kinds of restrictions, including one on race. (It might have been a covenant on a different house that we bid on, but got rejected.) It definitely also has a restriction where we are prohibited from replacing our current house with a new one that has a value of less than $10k. :-) I was told that removing these kind of restrictions from the covenant is a pretty heavy procedure so nobody goes through the trouble of doing so.
- lostapathy 8y agoModifying covenants is really hard - but with good reason. You don't want a heavy-handed HOA to drastically change the rules after you're heavily invested in a property. Historically, some states have passed laws that allow racial restrictions to be amended out without the usual process, and without the usual filing fees, but even then nobody wants to take on the work (or their own legal fees).
- village-idiot 8y agoLooking in as a renter, HOAs just look like a giant pile of petty corruptions and abuses. I’m amazed anyone puts up with them.
- mjevans 8y agoI can see situations where they'd be helpful; mostly in areas where local ordinances are either insufficient or not sufficiently enforced. They also make things like neighborhood "taxes" for fixing infrastructure issues more likely to happen - at least for things everyone agrees are a useful priority (like paved roads).
- 40acres 8y agoIf you look deep enough into the history of any modestly large Amercian city (pop. 250,000 +) and it's surrounding suburbs, you will see a metro area that was and still is being shaped by race. It's not a surprise that SF's first zoning law was a veiled attempt at curbing Chinese immigrants, it's not a surprise that when the highways were built in Portland, OR the mostly black neighborhoods in NE Portland were razed to make room for cars. Here is a quote from a recent Cupertino City Council meeting where new apartments, with a % allocated to affordable house, were up for discussion: “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.” American urban policy is filled with slight of hand comments and maneuvers just like this. A poster has been down-voted to oblivion for pointing out the hypocrisy that the bluest states have the most un-affordable housing, but I do think there is a thread here which highlights the hypocrisy of those who virtue signal for equality but advocate for policies that secure their wealth and make it almost impossible for lower income folks to survive.
- sol_remmy 8y ago> If you look deep enough into the history of any modestly large Amercian city Sadly this is true for any multicultural city in any country of the world
- badpun 8y ago> “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.” > American urban policy is filled with slight of hand comments and maneuvers just like this. How do you know they don't actually mean it? People can be as biased against low income neighbors as against neighbors of races different than their own.
- 40acres 8y agoOn an individual basis, you really don't know, this is why to come to a conclusion that policy methods are discriminatory you need to look at large scale patterns. This shows a bit with regard to voter rights in America. If you look at the history, most state level voter laws are designed in a way to suppress the vote -- but these laws are championed as ways to "stop voter fraud" among other things. The individual who made this comment may or may not have racial bias, but I'd love to see how the Cupertino city council has dealt with other policies which may change the racial make up of the city in the past.
- toast0 8y agoI think the unfortunate thing is that by preventing almost all change for so long, by the time change is going to happen, it no longer makes sense to try to make a gradual change, you have to make a dramatic change. In less tightly zoned areas, it's pretty common for single family homes to be replaced with two or three story apartment buildings over time. But there's no point in building a three story apartment building in SF, you need to build a 6-10 story building. A 6-10 story building is going to be out of character in a neighborhood of small single family homes; but a smaller building wouldn't necessarily be. In a block that had most of the single family homes replaced with small apartment buildings, a 6-10 story building would probably be OK. I don't know how to make fair rules that allow for that, though. Nobody can build anything bigger, and everybody can build whatever they want are both easy to apply in a fair manner, but lead to bad results. Maybe allowing to build up to double the median size could work.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tmh79 8y ago> But there's no point in building a three story apartment building in SF, you need to build a 6-10 story building Strong disagree. I would love the city to be covered in 6 - 10 story apartments at 10.0 FAR with no setbacks, but right now, SF bans apartment construction in 70% of the city, which is largely SFHs currently. Transforming this entire landmass from mostly SFHs to 3 floor 4 - 8 unit buildings would have an enormous impact on the housing crises here. Additionally, there is a deadzone in building construction between about 6 floors and 12 floors where the costs don't pencil out due to construction costs (changing fromm wooden to steel framing, changes to HVAC, enhanced fire safety requirements etc). The lowest cost buildings to build in cost/unit are "missing middle" housing, of 3 - 6 storeys. Construction costs are ultra high right now (900k+/unit), so building less expensive topoligies is a neccessary part of lowering costs.
- romed 8y ago"Four floors and corner stores" on every block of the Sunset would make a significant dent in San Francisco's housing crisis.
- Animats 8y agoRemember how SF emptied out after the last dot-com crash? That may happen again. Real estate investors I know in SF say things have peaked. Outside the Bay Area and some coastal areas near LA, California's population is not increasing much.
- cft 8y agoMy 85,000 sq ft class C office building in SF peaked to 7 series A startups in 2014. Now it's down to one.
- quantgenius 8y agoWe are 10 years into an expanding economy into one of the longest expansions ever. Interest rates are near all time lows and despite this the US it’s starting to spend more on interest than the military. Commercial real estate loans amortize over 30 years but need to be refinanced every 5-10 years so if rates go up.... Is it a good idea for SF to accommodate the tech bubble? There have been other tech bubbles and many country level and regional single industry bubbles in the past. Why is this bubble different? Not changing zoning and reducing the risk of SF turning into a sea of unfinished projects seems like the rational thing to do.
- bfrog 8y agoWouldn't larger buildings cost inordinate amount to build in SF to deal with inevitable quakes and fires?