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> simply by generating a lot of demand for housing. Oh for fucks sake. You realize this is what happens when a city becomes successful right? If you want to b

by pm90 8y ago

> simply by generating a lot of demand for housing. Oh for fucks sake. You realize this is what happens when a city becomes successful right? If you want to blame someone, its the NIMBYs: scuttling housing projects that would have eased the bubble and helped house a lot more people for reasonable prices, while benefiting from the economic successes of the companies and people moving in.

donkeyd 8y ago
> scuttling housing projects that would have eased the bubble and helped house a lot more people for reasonable prices Exactly this. In and around Amsterdam, housing prices are booming. The number of homeless people on the street has hardly increased, because we spend massive amounts of public funds to keep the homeless off the street and also to help them get a home. The biggest issue is graduates, that have to share houses or move out of the city. Also, it's nearly impossible to buy when you're alone.
- abalone 8y ago
  It sounds like you’re saying something a little different though. You’re saying Amsterdam “spent massive amounts of public funds to keep homeless off the street,” not that they were able to lower market rates through more liberal building. Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.)
  - twblalock 8y ago
    > Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.) The mayor of San Francisco also opposed it. Pumping more money into a broken social services system is a pretty problematic idea and it's not like it was only tech companies opposing it.
    - abalone 8y ago
      It was mostly the tech industry putting in the money against it: Stripe, Lyft, Jack Dorsey. Arguably the mayor of SF is a puppet of the tech industry. It passed with 60%.
      - jtmcmc 8y ago
        It was also the tech industry putting money for it too with Benioff. That of course discounts how the actual tech workers voted. I'd be curious to see polls on that. Anecdotally most tech workers I know supported it.
crdoconnor 8y ago
If I had a $2 million mortgage in SF I'd probably be a NIMBY too. Pretty much anything that increases supply of housing could wipe a million off my net worth. Low property taxes and Howard Jarvis's "taxpayer foundation" are the ultimate villains here by fighting to create this exact situation. The people who are fighting to escape being in $1 mil negative equity by going to town halls and kicking up a fuss arent necessarily deserving but they're simply reacting to incentives put in place by others.
- abalone 8y ago
  The low property tax thing is another favorite of the tech industry to target, to deflect blame from the elephant in the room (massive insatiable demand). There is a lot of validity here: there are cases where rich property owners are not paying their fair share in taxes. But it’s often a disingenuous argument meant just to deflect responsibility. The property tax rules were originally passed to protect senior citizens from losing their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay surging tax rates. A boom happens, their house values go up, but they’re still living in fixed incomes. I literally just read a Twitter exec, on Twitter, openly say that well seniors could just sell their homes. Nice! Great solution. Just leave, old people! Or, they could just do a reverse mortgage. Sweet. Those are totally unproblematic for seniors, right?! I just watched Hell or High Water which is about two guys that become bank robbers because their mom was going to lose their home to a reverse mortgage.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Or seniors could be allowed to defer their property taxes and convert them into a tax lien on their property, to be dealt with by the estate. You know, a simple and obvious solution. But of course, the two guys in Hell or High Water would still ultimately be SOL. That's what privilege (owning a house sitting on highly-desirable land that's probably worth millions of dollars) looks like in real life. Privilege and greed.
    - abalone 8y ago
      Did you see the movie? It was a poor family that put all their money into a house, then lost it through a reverse mortgage. “Privilege and greed” is a slapdash accusation here. Some families struggle to put their life savings into a home and don’t have anything left over for other investments. What you’re proposing is still going to place pressure on seniors to move lest they lose a lot of estate value. Basically I think you’ll find support for doing this go to rich who can afford it. But a blanket shift to liens on cash-poor seniors’ homes could end up disproportionately hurting the less fortunate.
abalone 8y ago
I predicted this response, right? Boomtown economics are tricky. There is just an extraordinary amount of demand that appeared in a very short time. The velocity and magnitude of the surge in demand matters. When you have an entire global population of techies that suddenly want to move to the heart of their industry, you may experience price inelasticity, which basically means you won’t see much downward movement in price. Think of it: before prices come down to affordable levels for the people you see on the street, or even service industry workers and teachers and whatnot, they would first be dirt cheap for tech. How many more tech workers would move to SF or start their companies here if they heard it was cheap now? That’s how deep the demand goes. That’s all the demand that needs to be satiated before market rates come down to where they could reverse homelessness. That’s why tech can’t just pass the buck to NIMBYS or pretend like this is any other city. We are creating some of the most valuable companies in the world here right now and it generally helps your prospects to co-locate. That creates very exceptional demand conditions.
- mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
  Then only build new housing and not new office buildings. The government has control over which building projects are approved. If there are no jobs here, people will not move here. Technology companies do not benefit from sky-high housing prices. They'd be able to pay lower salaries if the housing wasn't so expensive. Only homeowners and landlords benefit from rising house prices.
- pm90 8y ago
  You have good points. In a hypothetical scenario where the housing market was highly elastic, it would certainly lead to a huge movement of tech labor force to the Bay Area. But I feel like that is the way SFBA will grow. Every city has its secret sauce, for SFBA it is tech. Instead of fighting it, I can imagine a scenario where the concentration of Tech leads to a transformation of the area to be more like NYC. Or maybe it will take a different direction. As naive as it sounds, I still believe in Tech as a force for good (not Big Tech necessarily). I moved here from Austin, and folks there talk about how the tech industry is growing, but its still Satellite offices for Big Tech. The kind of talent I see in SFBA is staggering.

by pm90 8y ago

donkeyd 8y ago

> scuttling housing projects that would have eased the bubble and helped house a lot more people for reasonable prices Exactly this. In and around Amsterdam, housing prices are booming. The number of homeless people on the street has hardly increased, because we spend massive amounts of public funds to keep the homeless off the street and also to help them get a home. The biggest issue is graduates, that have to share houses or move out of the city. Also, it's nearly impossible to buy when you're alone.

abalone 8y ago
It sounds like you’re saying something a little different though. You’re saying Amsterdam “spent massive amounts of public funds to keep homeless off the street,” not that they were able to lower market rates through more liberal building. Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.)
- twblalock 8y ago
  > Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.) The mayor of San Francisco also opposed it. Pumping more money into a broken social services system is a pretty problematic idea and it's not like it was only tech companies opposing it.
  - abalone 8y ago
    It was mostly the tech industry putting in the money against it: Stripe, Lyft, Jack Dorsey. Arguably the mayor of SF is a puppet of the tech industry. It passed with 60%.
    - jtmcmc 8y ago
      It was also the tech industry putting money for it too with Benioff. That of course discounts how the actual tech workers voted. I'd be curious to see polls on that. Anecdotally most tech workers I know supported it.

crdoconnor 8y ago

If I had a $2 million mortgage in SF I'd probably be a NIMBY too. Pretty much anything that increases supply of housing could wipe a million off my net worth. Low property taxes and Howard Jarvis's "taxpayer foundation" are the ultimate villains here by fighting to create this exact situation. The people who are fighting to escape being in $1 mil negative equity by going to town halls and kicking up a fuss arent necessarily deserving but they're simply reacting to incentives put in place by others.

abalone 8y ago
The low property tax thing is another favorite of the tech industry to target, to deflect blame from the elephant in the room (massive insatiable demand). There is a lot of validity here: there are cases where rich property owners are not paying their fair share in taxes. But it’s often a disingenuous argument meant just to deflect responsibility. The property tax rules were originally passed to protect senior citizens from losing their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay surging tax rates. A boom happens, their house values go up, but they’re still living in fixed incomes. I literally just read a Twitter exec, on Twitter, openly say that well seniors could just sell their homes. Nice! Great solution. Just leave, old people! Or, they could just do a reverse mortgage. Sweet. Those are totally unproblematic for seniors, right?! I just watched Hell or High Water which is about two guys that become bank robbers because their mom was going to lose their home to a reverse mortgage.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Or seniors could be allowed to defer their property taxes and convert them into a tax lien on their property, to be dealt with by the estate. You know, a simple and obvious solution. But of course, the two guys in Hell or High Water would still ultimately be SOL. That's what privilege (owning a house sitting on highly-desirable land that's probably worth millions of dollars) looks like in real life. Privilege and greed.
  - abalone 8y ago
    Did you see the movie? It was a poor family that put all their money into a house, then lost it through a reverse mortgage. “Privilege and greed” is a slapdash accusation here. Some families struggle to put their life savings into a home and don’t have anything left over for other investments. What you’re proposing is still going to place pressure on seniors to move lest they lose a lot of estate value. Basically I think you’ll find support for doing this go to rich who can afford it. But a blanket shift to liens on cash-poor seniors’ homes could end up disproportionately hurting the less fortunate.

abalone 8y ago

I predicted this response, right? Boomtown economics are tricky. There is just an extraordinary amount of demand that appeared in a very short time. The velocity and magnitude of the surge in demand matters. When you have an entire global population of techies that suddenly want to move to the heart of their industry, you may experience price inelasticity, which basically means you won’t see much downward movement in price. Think of it: before prices come down to affordable levels for the people you see on the street, or even service industry workers and teachers and whatnot, they would first be dirt cheap for tech. How many more tech workers would move to SF or start their companies here if they heard it was cheap now? That’s how deep the demand goes. That’s all the demand that needs to be satiated before market rates come down to where they could reverse homelessness. That’s why tech can’t just pass the buck to NIMBYS or pretend like this is any other city. We are creating some of the most valuable companies in the world here right now and it generally helps your prospects to co-locate. That creates very exceptional demand conditions.

mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
Then only build new housing and not new office buildings. The government has control over which building projects are approved. If there are no jobs here, people will not move here. Technology companies do not benefit from sky-high housing prices. They'd be able to pay lower salaries if the housing wasn't so expensive. Only homeowners and landlords benefit from rising house prices.
pm90 8y ago
You have good points. In a hypothetical scenario where the housing market was highly elastic, it would certainly lead to a huge movement of tech labor force to the Bay Area. But I feel like that is the way SFBA will grow. Every city has its secret sauce, for SFBA it is tech. Instead of fighting it, I can imagine a scenario where the concentration of Tech leads to a transformation of the area to be more like NYC. Or maybe it will take a different direction. As naive as it sounds, I still believe in Tech as a force for good (not Big Tech necessarily). I moved here from Austin, and folks there talk about how the tech industry is growing, but its still Satellite offices for Big Tech. The kind of talent I see in SFBA is staggering.