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California Has the Jobs but Not Enough Homes
- pmiller2 8y agoClickbait title. 99% of the article is about the Bay Area, where we already know there’s a housing crisis.
- SubiculumCode 8y agoIts in Sacramento too. Just saying. Sure, not Madera, Visalia, Fresno, or Stockton.
- scruple 8y agoWhat is the housing crisis in Sacramento? I only ever read about the Bay Area and occasionally Southland.
- SubiculumCode 8y agohttp://www.capradio.org/enewsletters/notes/2018/06/sacramentos-housing-crisis-lets-talk-about-it/ http://www.capradio.org/enewsletters/notes/2018/06/sacrament...
- PhoenixReborn 8y agoIt's a housing crisis by spillover - all the people in the Bay Area who can't afford houses there are going to Sacramento instead. Here's a particularly pointed and opinionated editorial on the subject: https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/erika-d-smith/article174139716.html https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/erika-d-smi...
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoCalifornia also has fixed borders. And limited resources like water and crumbling infrastructure. Failing public education. 40 million people. How many more homes can we build? More homes = more infrastructure, shrinking land, loss of habitat and nature, strained water, over crowding, more schools, more support jobs(low pay), more cars on the same roads, more consumption, more pollution. 45 percent of the state budget goes to public education and it is one of the highest tax collecting states. If we don’t think of a way to hack this situation, California will become a failed state and bankrupt. Sooner than most of us fear.
- cheath 8y agoSF has a population density of 18,679 per square mile. NYC has 27,000. There is plenty of room, you'd just have to scale everything along with it. Also, for what it's worth, > population density = < net pollution. mass transit etc. are great optimizations of resources. these humans already exist - it's just a matter of where they exist.
- fuckyah 8y agoThe problem in SF is that nobody wants to live in the fog. I wonder what’s the density east of divisadero!?
- stcredzero 8y agoSF has a population density of 18,679 per square mile. NYC has 27,000. There is plenty of room, you'd just have to scale everything along with it. The problem isn't space. It's NIMBY. It's groupthink disconnected from reality.
- cheath 8y agowell, that I completely agree with. :)
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoReality is self interest.
- stcredzero 8y agoReality is self interest. When self interest cuts the next generation off at the knees, it's no longer so well connected to reality.
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoHow does it cut the next generation off at the knees? You are asking those who work hard to avail a certain standard of life to be altruistic? How is this logical? Why do you think someone would work 10-12-14 hours a day? Spend 2 hours commuting..take no vacations..take enormous risks with low pay for a start up to maybe hit the big leagues? They are risk takers. Risk takers and A types are not altruistic. And yet..these are the people who made Bay Area desirable. And immigrants. These are people who were so unhappy with their native countries(not coincidentally, in the Bay Area..this is majority from high population countries) that they were willing to double down and work hard and deal with immigration and leave family, language and culture behind to start a new life in a strange country. You are asking these immigrants to say YES IN MY BACKYARD? Do you see the irony and/or the humour in that expectation? If one wants someone to unclench their fists and give up something, then there has to be an incentive for them to do it. You are looking for altruism amongst the crushed middle class. What do they get back in return? Convert NIMBYs with community benefits or better roads or recreational spots in the city or better schools or just about anything that would make their quality of life better. What kind of negotiation is it to ask someone to sacrifice their deeply held beliefs and fond desires for the promise of WORSENING quality of life? How will this tactic even work?
- evo_9 8y agoHow about allowing remote workers? I don't get the resistance to it. I pay for my computer. I pay for my own coffee/tea. I pay the electrical bill. I pay for my phone/internet. My quality of life goes up massively. God forbid we work remote and avoid traffic and all the headaches of commuting.
- downrightmike 8y agoEmployers want you under their thumb so they can squeeze you harder.
- tathougies 8y agoI'm not sure what this comment means. California obviously allows remote workers.
- vtange 8y agoHighly depends on the team. I've seen teams where most members are remote but most teams I've been on shun working-from-home regularly. That and most companies pay based off "cost of living" and you cannot expect Bay Area pay outside of the Bay Area. Asking for work-anywhere-in-the-world remote work basically feels like shooting yourself in the foot if you value compensation.
- colordrops 8y agoMore like depends on the boss. I've been at my current company to see remote work come and go based on leadership.
- tathougies 8y agoRight, but California and California corporations are two completely different entities. California cannot legislate remote work, anymore than a california corporation can legislate the property tax.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
- notTyler 8y agoAnother article about how San Francisco is prohibitively expensive! I think more mid to big companies should consider investing in moving to some of these areas where there's little to nothing else. If you look at something like Epic in Madison WI, they basically own that town in that sector, so a lot of people end up working there a lot longer than they want to because they've invested in that area (whether economically, emotionally, or something else).
- Xcelerate 8y ago> a lot of people end up working there a lot longer than they want to I’m not sure that’s a good thing—for them or the company
- notTyler 8y agoIt's certainly not, but I think the company wants it like that because, largely, working in healthcare sucks. If you had C# experience and were tired of jumping through hoops and constantly having fires because of the demands of the medical industry, you probably wouldn't keep doing it if you could take those skills somewhere else. That said, I was more referring to the bigger companies noted for how they treat employees well. Having a 20k employee building for, say, google, in one of the more sparsely populated areas of California, Oregon, or Washington would solve at least part of the problem, but then I'm guessing that whatever population lives there now would absolutely hate the company for coming in and taking over everything.
- rubicon33 8y agoThe problem is nobody wants to live in Madison WI. If you're a top performing engineer you're likely to want to head straight to the epicenter of tech innovation. You want to knock heads with the best of 'em, and that isn't in Madison WI or any other small town.
- malvosenior 8y agoIf that's the case they should absolutely stop complaining about housing prices. It's self inflicted pain. If you must live in the most expensive city in the world due to your own desires, you have no right to complain that it's expensive. The option to live somewhere cheaper exists, you just choose not to take it.
- baxtr 8y agoWhen I visited SF and the valley a while back I wondered about all the low rise buildings in many areas. Homes with 2 stories max. While I think it’s an essential part of the areas’ culture I wondered why the space above is left unused. Because of geological reasons? Esthetic reasons?
- kortilla 8y agoNIMBYs stop it because they “don’t want the feel of the city to change”. That is the excuse I’ve heard in Mountain View and Palo Alto to shoot down any high density apartments.
- koboll 8y agoWhat we need is a federal law that zoning must scale with employees needed locally. You really don't want the feel of the city to change? Fine, then keep out employers.
- mywittyname 8y agoI'd argue that lots of people are trying to keep out employers. See: Amazon & NYC.
- almost_usual 8y agoThat's their excuse, the real reason is they don't want to their home they paid $1.5m+ for to depreciate.
- zanny 8y agoIf their homes were rezoned for skyscraper development their quarter acre that could host a hundred apartments vertically on it alone would go from 1.5m to 150m overnight. The NIMBYs are going against their own economic self interest by resisting density, they are just petrified with fear that their house is the one just outside the criticality zone where developers would buy all the land for exorbitant money to build a metro and their area would become some sort of forsaken blight or be bulldozed at "fair market rate" via eminent domain to build the infrastructure to support that density.
- melling 8y agoNothing that futuristic mass transit couldn't fix. Fortunately, China is already building it. Something that travels around 100 mph should do the trick. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-trains/index.html https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-t...
- neonate 8y agohttps://outline.com/hkanFb https://outline.com/hkanFb
- almost_usual 8y agoIt'll continue being a problem. Housing has become the gold of California and those who have the gold don't want more of it otherwise the value drops. There is no incentive right now for California home owners to want more housing.
- thorwasdfasdf 8y agoWhat about when they realize their children and Grand children are all moving out of state? only to be seen once per year again.
- almost_usual 8y agoFrom what I've seen the parents stay around, the kids move out of state, eventually inherit their homes, and then either rent the homes or cash out but face a huge tax penalty. Older people have a community and time invested living in a place, it's hard to motivate them to move or want change. They would also rather their kids get their financial investment (gold) and have comfort knowing they'll be taken care of when they're gone.
- skybrian 8y agoHmm, which tax penalty do you mean?
- almost_usual 8y agoCapital gains. It adds up when your home is worth millions..
- skybrian 8y agoNot a tax accountant, but my understanding is that the cost basis gets reset when the property is inherited. If the home was already worth millions there wouldn't be any capital gains tax on it. (There only would be if prices go up more after inheritance.) https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/073115/how-cost-basis-calculated-inherited-asset.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/073115/how-cost-bas...
- andrewprock 8y agoThis is the natural effect of the passage of Proposition 13. When you cannot raise real estate taxes to keep up with inflation, residential real estate becomes a liability for governments, not an asset. California has had to turn to business development to make up for the short fall. From an economic perspective, the government has a high demand for commercial development, and a low demand for residential development.
- pthomas551 8y ago(Not) looking forward to CA millennials turning into NIMBYs when they inherit properties with super low Prop 13 tax assessments. Passive rental income with minimal property taxes is a hell of a drug..
- Bhilai 8y agoAnd yet somehow silicon valley companies are oblivious to this. I have had so many recruiters disappear on me when I mentioned upfront that I cannot move to the bay area. It was surprising because some of these companies have small or satellite offices in the city I live in and yet they want "co-located" team members only.
- thorwasdfasdf 8y agooutside the valley, recruiters aren't really needed (or at least not so much as to warrant the enormous bonuses they get for SF/PA). Recruiters get paid big bucks in Palo Alto and SF precisely because there's no housing there, thus it's much harder to convince people to move there and work there. companies don't care because it's easier to pay recruiters big bonuses than it is to ask VCs or CEOs to get on an airplane a few times a year.
- UweSchmidt 8y agoOne of the symptoms of communism as experienced in Eastern Germany and other countries was the scarcity of many things. People formed long queues when rare goods (e.g. bananas) happened to be available and spent a lot of effort to procure necessary items (parts and materials to repair a vehicle or fix their appartment). Occasionally we find this kind of queue-forming scarcity in western market based economies, even though the laws of supply and demand handle most situations quite well. To me this is not just an irrationality, it's a bit of a disgrace. With all of the shortcommings of capitalism, at least it ensures that a good substitute product is always available. Be it a job market with affordable housing, a mobile phone or a movie, or a restaurant with friendly service and fair prices: Whenever I spent a few moments to look around, I never fail to find an excellent choice of suitable products and services. On the other hand, outside of communism, a horde of irrational customers who insist on having a certain scarce thing cannot possibly be satisfied. Prices go up and/or the provided value goes down. I wish for everyone to recognize the workings of the laws of supply and demand, and a happy life in any of the great tech/startup cities of the world.
- epistasis 8y agoThe scarcity problem is well understood in the Bay Area: government works hard to disallow new housing. Cities here zoning for lots of jobs, but they do not allow residences for those who work at those jobs. The irrationality is simply bad planning by local governments. They are extremely strict in what they allow, and they do it in a way that maximizes profits for current residents, at the expense of anybody who comes along later (through birth or migration). This is pure regulatory capture.
- conanbatt 8y agoThis is not the result of market dynamics, its the result of state intervention.
- jerf 8y agoAs others have noted, this is because of governments telling developers they can't build, not a lack of developers wanting to build. And there are other substitute products. You only need one great job at a time, and there are plenty of other markets in the US where one can make a living that under any other circumstances would get everyone telling you to count your blessings and stop whining so much about how you're only upper middle class. There's startup hubs, industry hubs, places that may not be anything in particular but still have plenty of jobs of various types, things closer to nature, places with decent weather (even if SV is the epitome of weather for some people), all sorts of other choices. Really, if you don't want to "work for a startup" (including starting one), and even then, a rather particular sort of startup, you don't need to be in Silicon Valley. It's an option, yes, and I'm neither surprised some people choose it nor particularly criticizing them. But it's not the only option.
- eweise 8y agoRandom house in Concord CA easily commutable by bart to SF under $600K https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/18386554_zpid/globalrelevanceex_sort/37.950642,-122.033351,37.947034,-122.038335_rect/17_zm/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/18386554_zpid/globalre...
- sudosteph 8y agoI wouldn't consider 1.5 hours each way an easy commute. Also, 600k for that kind of house is still really expensive compared to the rest of the country. Houses like that sell for $250k in Raleigh, and that would be a 10 minute drive or 20 minute bus ride into downtown. https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Raleigh-NC/pmf,pf_pt/6419903_zpid/54047_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/35.797192,-78.587329,35.77331,-78.625181_rect/14_zm/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Raleigh-NC/pmf,pf_pt/6...
- moorhosj 8y agoGoogle maps says it’s about 1.5 hours to Market Street arriving at 9am. $600k for a 1,000 sqft house with 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom in a horrible school district with that commute isn’t really a good deal.
- Balgair 8y agoHorrible School District!? MDUSD isn't all that bad, is it? Granted it's been a while since I was there. YV isn't College Park, sure, or De La Salle, but it ain't Mount Diablo. I guess things have changed then. Also, 600 for that house is a bit of a steal. My folks live across 680 in PH, and the house next door just went for 950 a year ago. In the end, all these comments are just dancing around the real issue: Prop 13. Nothing will make sense in CA housing until Prop 13 is revoked and the inevitable wild swings in the housing stock then settle down. EDIT: Ok, that's right, I forgot. YV is like 4 blocks from De La Salle. So, they take all the good students and leave all the rest of the 'poor' students to go to YV. I forgot. If you look at all the other High Schools in the area, they're all 8/10 or 9/10.
- moorhosj 8y ago
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y agoThere are currently 50 development projects in the city of Santa Clara, population ~130,000. Most are residential. Many residential development projects that are active are tearing down light industrial and replacing with apartments and condos. For example, this 347 unit project described as follows: "Project Description: SummerHill Apartment Communities proposes to demolish three existing light industrial buildings on a 3.06-acre site within the Tasman East Specific Plan area and replace them with one 347-unit apartment building and dedicate 0.4178 acres to be a City of Santa Clara park, which will include a dog park and children's play area. The proposed park also includes walking and bicycling paths which will connect into the broader Tasman East bicycle and pedestrian network. The proposed apartment building will include two stories of above-ground parking, seven stories of residential units with associated building amenities and a community garden. SummerHill proposes a total of 275,000 square feet of new residential area with 396 vehicular parking spaces and 24 bicycle parking spaces. The proposed project will include street and utility improvements and a lot line adjustment and merger to create two new parcels (one for residential and one for city park)." http://santaclaraca.gov/Home/Components/BusinessDirectory/BusinessDirectory/263/2495?npage=3 http://santaclaraca.gov/Home/Components/BusinessDirectory/Bu... Here is the full list: http://santaclaraca.gov/businesses/development-projects-story-map/development-projects-list/-npage-1 http://santaclaraca.gov/businesses/development-projects-stor...
- pthomas551 8y agoHaving a project in the city database means little until shovels get put in the ground. Plenty of zombie projects are on the books in my town. Even if the project is active, it often takes years to get all the permits.
- DrScump 8y agoThey're about to plop over 2000 people in that new development at Kifer abd Lawrence that is one city block square... which is already gridlocked during commute hours.
- curtis 8y agoThe biggest problem I saw with the High-Speed Rail plan wasn't the outrageous cost, but rather that it was a plan to spend 60+ billion dollars to solve the wrong problem. The state should have been working on some plan to give high-speed access from the SF Bay, where property is really expensive, into the Central Valley where it's really cheap. Not many people need to travel the 400 miles between LA and SF at 220 miles an hour. On the other hand, if you can travel 60 miles or so from San Francisco (or the mid-peninsula or even San Jose) at 120 miles an hour, that's a big deal, because that opens up a bunch of low-cost real estate for local workers.
- true_tuna 8y agoOr speed and augment existing infrastructure. Spend a billion dollars on feeder light rail to Caltrain. Run twice as many cal trains. Oops, neighbors complain about traffic wait times. Bury five of the crossings. Now you can speed up the cal train. Nice. Now run more trains, connect the stops to the places people actually live and work. Do the same in and around Sacramento and LA. But don’t build a bullet train to nowhere. There’s so much more good we could have done with billions in transportation funding.
- deathanatos 8y ago> Run twice as many cal trains. My understanding of this is that CalTrain is already running at capacity. Trains are, essentially, back to back. Part of the electrification project is that the electric engines should have better acceleration than the current diesel ones, allowing tighter packing of trains on the tracks. (And thus, more trains, and thus, more capacity.) We really, IMO, need 4 rails from SF to SJ, but if Atherton doesn't want to give up a few trees, I can only imagine the hell that would get raised for more space. That, and funding. > Bury five of the crossings. AIUI, Mountain View considered this (grade separation) w/ the Castro/Moffett/Central intersection, but decided against it, opting instead for simple removing the crossing. (The wrong decision, IMO. I'd bury the train, but I think the (canned) plan was to bury the road, as it would be less disruptive.)
- 8y ago
- tzs 8y agoIf more companies would let people work at home 3 or 4 days a week, there would be a lot more housing options. There are plenty of affordable homes in the San Joaquin valley, close enough to San Francisco to do a round trip on one Tesla charge. Every time I check Redfin, for example, Merced has plenty of 3 or 4 bedroom houses in the 1700 sq ft range for under $300k. Modesto also has plenty under $300k, and is even closer to San Francisco. Merced or Modesto doesn't have anywhere near the cultural offerings San Francisco has for your off work time, but again, San Francisco is close enough that a weekend trip is not a big deal.
- seattle_spring 8y agoI'm sorry but suggesting a 5-6 hour commute round-trip, even once a week, is absolutely not a reasonable solution.
- charliebrownau 8y agoCalifornia Has the Jobs but Not Enough Homes I call utter Bullshit The TRUTH about comifornia is people have been leaving in DROVES in the last few years The issue with MOST of Western Society is they outright REFUSE to build affordable 1 bedroom units or tiny homes instead its typically 1 story 3 bedroom 1 car park