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Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

174 points by burlesona 7y ago

burlesona 7y ago
I shared this because it's the best concise summary of many things that are going wrong with housing in the bay area that I've read in a while. I'm on the Strong Towns board (though I didn't write the article). Happy to answer questions if anyone has them.
- aeternus 7y ago
  Is housing "going wrong" simply because it is expensive? Maybe it is overall a good thing that tech companies are now expanding into cities outside the bay area due to high housing costs. At least housing prices are transparent to those thinking about moving in to the bay area, allowing them to make an informed decision. High traffic, insufficient public transit capacity, and over-capacity public services are less transparent. If we build more housing, do we just push problems elsewhere? How do we determine the optimal amount of new housing?
  - deathanatos 7y ago
    > do we just push problems elsewhere? Not necessarily. I'd love to live closer to the Bay; if I could get in walking or biking range of CalTrain I could eliminate much or all of my 40 minute highway commute — thus reducing the congestion on the highway. But it would cost me ~$12k/yr. Similarly, if San Mateo had built adequate housing, 70k people might have shorter commutes, requiring less use of roads, transit systems, etc. Personally, I am also massively for improvements to the various transit systems. If it were easily possible, I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues. We might get the EMUs someday, but I won't be around to see it. The downtown SF transit center finally reopened, I think, but it was a 8? month setback, not to mention it is way over budget. Also, the HOV lanes would be a lot more enticing if there weren't so much traffic in them, and there easily could have been had CA not hadn't out so many HOV stickers. There are SUVs getting stickered that get equivalent gas mileage to my '97. Also, enforcement.
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      > I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues. You can get by with 3 tracks. Metra's busy BNSF line is a 3-track mainline, and they manage to launch 21 outgoing trains in the 125 minutes between 3:57 and 6:02. In addition to the ~80ish commuter trains, there's also another ~20 daily Amtrak and freight trains along the same stretch of rail.
  - burlesona 7y ago
    I would argue housing reaching the current prices is not good for the overall economy because it creates unreasonable pressure on people who aren't in the tech industry and still have a reason to live in the Bay Area. First, this makes it unreasonably difficult to stay in the region you grew up in unless you get into the top end of the local income brackets. Second, it makes it unreasonably difficult for all kinds of important and necessary, but lower paid, workers to live in the area. A city of nothing but high-end tech workers, with no teachers, police, firefighters, etc. would not be a very nice place to live. As far as the "optimal amount of new housing," why not just match the number of new households moving into a region? That seems like a good place to start.
  - mktmkr 7y ago
    Here's an idea we can adopt from literally every other aspect of American society: let the market work. We venerate the free market in all matters except housing, where we've erected a complex system of legal protections for incumbent landlords. The solution to high housing prices is more supply but it is illegal to build housing almost anywhere in the state of California. In SF it is illegal to build a duplex on 90% of the lots. Why? That just exists to enrich incumbents.
    - DrScump 7y ago
      it is illegal to build housing almost anywhere in the state of California. No, it is legal almost everywhere without adjacent neighbors. Most land is unincorporated anyway.
Animats 7y ago
It's being overdone. A solid wall of railroad flats (cheezy "luxury" condos) is going up for miles along the Caltrain tracks. Those wooden multistory buildings are the slums of tomorrow. It's about time for the next Bay Area recession. Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?
- corybrown 7y ago
  > Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001? Aren't those buildings fully occupied today?
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  Haha - only someone in the bay area would say something like this. I used to live in the "slums" of the bay area back in 2008. Trust me - by now even those slum houses are going for at least 2008 prices before crash and better and the neighborhood I lived in in SF is crazy expensive.
- opportune 7y ago
  I am about to move into one of those and the demand seems very high... very crowded open houses and <1 week turnaround time (par for course for bay area but still). You don't have to live there if you don't want. I don't think they're ever going to be slums but probably will become middle class housing in 10-15 years - only because hopefully sometime before then there will be a sort of zoning/regulatory intervention and developers can finally start building highrise luxury condos If you want to see slums I can share some pins of places in the East Bay and the hinterlands of SF, and you can tell me if you think midrise condos on the caltrain/camino real corridor in the peninsula will ever look like that. I'll even take out a 15 year bet with you
  - DrScump 7y ago
    What about Caltrain grade separation, where you suddenly find trains running even with the second floor of your building at many major road crossings?
- 7y ago
matthewowen 7y ago
"Two others (out of five) had recused themselves because they own property within 1000 feet of the proposed project, and those recusals apparently counted as "no" votes." I wonder: did they just not know the rules? Or was this a cowardly way to vote no without _actually_ voting no: it seems like if you really wanted to recuse in this situation, you just agree to do paired voting, one no and one yes.
- asr 7y ago
  Yes, this seems like a critical part of the story. I take it the actual vote was 2-1 in favor of the permit, but you need at least 3 votes to pass something in San Bruno, no matter what? If so, the city council's rules don't deal appropriately with recusal and those should be changed ASAP. At the same time, whether or not this project succeeded or failed, the larger story about how hard it is to build housing remains fundamentally true (and broken).
  - nradov 7y ago
    Every city council has quorum rules for votes. What exactly are you proposing to change?
    - asr 7y ago
      Quorum rules are to make sure you're not holding a sneaky midnight vote with two councilors asleep. Councilors who are present but recused should count toward a quorum. You might still have a rule that at least two votes are required to pass something (to prevent a 1-0 vote with four recusals). But requiring at least thee votes on a five-member council is requiring an outright majority, which means a recusal is the same as a no vote. That seems unfair.
Karrot_Kream 7y ago
I've noticed an increasing trend in West Coast cities where people complain that there's "just too many people". "Tell them to move elsewhere, we're full". It's as if the lessons of Malthusian limits were lost on us. For humanity to continue growing as a species we have to become more efficient with land use.
- CPLX 7y ago
  I mean if they really mean they don't want to build anything then let's talk. It's a policy that can work, it's worked great in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for example. But they'll have to stop building massive office buildings if so.
- esotericn 7y ago
  > For humanity to continue growing as a species I'm pretty young. Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius. The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it. We can't go on like this.
  - Karrot_Kream 7y ago
    > We can't go on like this. What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point? > The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something. Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
    - CPLX 7y ago
      > maybe involving terraforming other planets This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here. Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead? I mean, seriously.
opportune 7y ago
I walked around downtown San Bruno recently and it's honestly pathetic how this city is squandering their potential. Even on el camino real itself a lot of the property is being wasted on auto repair shops and fast food places, 2-3 story buildings, etc. This place could be way, way better given its proximity to the airport and SF.
- CPLX 7y ago
  I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula (including SF) looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense. Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay. In the Embarcadero there are actual motor inns, crappy hotels with one story raised 10 feet off the ground with parking spaces below them. Like a whole bunch of them. You don't even see those in abandoned small towns any more. You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man. Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces. Yet the entire city is dominated by garages at street level. And two story buildings, and mile after mile of awful zero-architecture postwar commercial properties. Yes the painted ladies are pretty, don't bulldoze them. Landmark Lombard street and some of the other charming blocks, Sure why not. But it's a global commercial city willing to build 50+ story office towers, and unwilling to do anything about the dozens of square miles of 1-2 story unredeemable residential surrounding them. It's insane.
  - api 7y ago
    It's quite sane if you bought property in the 60s-90s and are riding property appreciation to fortune.
    - deleted 7y ago
nostrademons 7y ago
> No neighborhood should be exempt from change. > No neighborhood should be subjected to radical change. Is there any dynamic evolutionary system that actually follows these rules? The tech industry is famous for lumbering behemoths that are constitutionally incapable of innovation and then get replaced wholesale by nimble startups. National borders change all at once, in wars or revolutions, rather than incrementally as demographics change. Human beings don't change much after early adulthood; instead they make new humans who replace them when they die. Evolution itself seems to have periods of equilibrium when resources are abundant and nearly every individual survives, followed by abrupt speciation when resources get tight, individuals die off, and populations get isolated from one another. The only positive example I can think of is democracy, which is specifically designed to enable gradual change so that radical change doesn't happen, and yet still frequently gets party realignments, charismatic strongmen, and the occasional revolution. I worry that this philosophy sounds great precisely because it's not how the world works. Human beings are really bad at noticing or reacting to gradual change; it tends to pile up until it becomes too big to ignore, and then rapidly reaches a tipping point and crisis where the newly strong force out the weak. This is undesirable, but also seems largely unavoidable.
- ketzo 7y ago
  I mean, if we're being cynical, you say the second so that people feel comfortable with the first. If you can convince suburbanites that you won't put up a skyscraper next door, you'll have an easier time putting up a 5-story apartment building. Or so my thinking goes, anyway.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    People in my neighborhood object to every change even if it doesn’t seem to affect them. They’re mortified when a 5-story building (commercial OR residential) is built downtown when we are ten minutes away and not on a major traffic corridor.
    - casefields 7y ago
      That's because every time you give an inch they'll take a little bit more. So you out up a huge front and the only thing that can be approved are small nimble changes. Plus it's wildly beneficial economically to keep the status quo when it comes to owning a home in the California.
btilly 7y ago
I have suggested this before, and I'll suggest this again. The whole problem could be solved if we gave people the choice of voting where they work rather than where they live. Currently every city wants all the businesses that they can get because businesses generate lots of tax revenues. Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue, and locals object on the basis of NIMBYism. But when everyone adds businesses and nobody adds homes, we get horrible commutes. With my proposed change, housing developments in cities that have major businesses will get lots of support from people who work there and want shorter commutes. And it seems reasonable to me that someone who spends their waking hours in a city and wants to live there should get the opportunity to have political power there. This would therefore undo the political log jam. And once you start letting people live close to where they work, commutes go down, traffic gets better, and everyone winds up happier.
- rjmunro 7y ago
  The "City Of London" (a small part of central London) has something like this. They have a resident population of <10,000 people, but somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people commute there for work. Companies get to nominate some of their workforce as voters for the council (called "The Corporation Of London"). For historical reasons ("The City" is much older than the UK itself), things are much more complicated than simply "People who work there get to vote", so I'm not sure it's a very comparable situation. The best explanation I've found is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
- markbnj 7y ago
  > Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue The property owners still pay tax on it don't they? I'm sure it is less lucrative per square foot than commercial development, but I assume it is still better than the revenue from the closed furniture store and parking lot, and after all you need people to patronize businesses.
  - i_am_proteus 7y ago
    Perhaps it's something to do with how California has lower property taxes (partially due to Prop. 13) and higher income taxes-- but those income taxes go to Sacramento, not to municipalities. In other parts of the country, municipal treasuries grow as volume and prices of residential units grow.
cryptozeus 7y ago
If you notice how new york and surrounding area is supported by very good transportation. West coast does not have that and on top of that there are no huge building being built outside sf. I wonder if this is due to earthquakes. Either way I think this issues and mixed with tech job demand is going to push remote culture more and more.
- umvi 7y ago
  > I wonder if this is due to earthquakes. Could be, but Japan has lots of earthquakes too, and they don't seem to mind building huge/tall buildings.
throwawaysea 7y ago
It's not peak housing dysfunction, but rather peak entitlement. Why is it important to accommodate people who might want to live in or move to an area despite local incumbents' wishes to not have their neighborhood change? Does everyone have the right to live anywhere they want to live without having to pay the necessary price to be there? For example, does everyone have a right to expect a residence on a Hawaii beachfront? And if not, why is it reasonable to portray a city or state as somehow lacking because it serves existing constituents? It makes sense that the Bay area would be priced high given its tremendous desirability (which may be tapering off now). If people are willing to work there for low wages, then that is their choice - they have opted into a tradeoff they are OK with, and they/others should not demonize those who were already there and want to preserve their culture/way of life/standards of living. There are numerous affordable places to live in the US that are not [New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc.] - you may not have every big city amenity you want, or maybe even be able to do the exact job you want - but such compromises are also just a regular part of life, aren't they? To me the reframing of this issue as a policy problem, or a rich versus poor thing, or through use of pejoratives like "NIMBY" serves to distract from the plain truth, which is simply that people are acting in their own self-interests. And yes, this includes the folks who believe they have an unalienable right to live in the Bay area and demand that local governance be replaced with top-down forceful governance (overriding local zoning policy). And the reality is proposals like the one around the missing middle will not solve the underlying issue - it just shifts the timeline around a bit until population growth brings us back to the same point anyways.
- opportune 7y ago
  >and they/others should not demonize those who were already there and want to preserve their culture/way of life/standards of living. This has a limit, namely, that we who move in are going to vote to change things, and the only way bay area property owners can prevent that is to not get rich off their property by selling or renting it at sky-high prices to new residents. To put their money where their mouth is and not change things, bay area residents need to not be getting rich off the density that they are nominally trying to fight. Otherwise it's just delaying a lost cause - population growth, and a shift in demographics from owners to renters, will inevitably happen barring some big tech recession. Once there are enough renters voting in municipal elections, change will come
jkking 7y ago
This article approaches the issue from the preconception that building housing is the best, obvious and inevitable decision for Bay Area communities. Because of this, any obstacles to it must be due either to a) fossilized regulations from a former age; or b) greed and entitlement. As to a), I find that the democratic process is actually very engaged in making housing decisions. As a resident of Alameda, we are constantly getting new housing approved, because our voting populace happens to support it. In other towns, maybe that's not the case. But the laws and regulations that protect against development are not necessarily byproducts from a former age that are no longer applicable, but in fact still representative of the will of the people. And in any case, the will of the people can change them! As to b), I think there are great reasons why someone would be against development other than greed and entitlement. If rich and powerful interests (such as Big Tech) threaten to change your way of life, don't you have the right as an American to vote your conscience, even if it goes against the tides of change? Or are we only allowed to vote in a way that would ultimately favor Big Tech in some way? People that think in this way remind me of the current situation in Hong Kong - where it's a "democracy," but you're only allowed to vote for the "approved" candidates. In other words, no democracy at all. An objection has been raised that people who don't like the tech industry being here can move somewhere else. Well, the same is true for the tech industry itself. In fact, it appears that Big Tech is playing a game of chicken, and banks on the fact that the Bay Area towns will blink first. We have seen this before, where Uber deliberately broke the law by running a commercial car service without paying for the required licenses and permits. Then, they sicced their lawyers on the towns that tried to stop them until people got so enamored of the service they couldn't imagine life without it, and the political will was decidedly in their favor. All in the name of "disruption." I have no issue ascribing legitimate motives to those who wish not to be "disrupted," and refuse to accept that as an inevitability. What would the answer be to a big corporation belching toxic fumes into the atmosphere? "Well, that's just the march of progress, we all need to adapt?" I didn't think so. Instead, we will continue to put these things to a vote (or fight for our right to do so where we wrongfully can't). That's how we make decisions in America.
jwp23 7y ago
One of the issues is that we, in the US, don't look at other successful cities or countries and consider implementing their solutions. Then in California, we don't look at other cities or states within the US who have solved similar problems. Tokyo has rational zoning rules that has lead to affordable housing in a growing metropolis. This blog post https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoni... describes the differences in Japanese zoning versus North American zoning.
tarr11 7y ago
Would a “technology” answer be to make telepresence technology better and invest in higher bandwidth infrastructure? If we could have high resolution video, audio and even VR for business, would people be required to be colocated as often? That way people could live wherever they want.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  There's dozens of other reasons people want to live somewhere besides work, though. Unless you're planning on living your entire life in VR.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Paradoxically, advances in transport and comms tech seem to increase rather than decrease hub concentration. Greater friction and more need for local presence might reverse the trend.
dmode 7y ago
I am a huge housing advocate who lives in the Bay Area, but I feel like the only pro housing people I meet are online. All my neighbors turn NIMBY as soon as they buy their home
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  That's why some people who don't agree with the YIMBYs deride them as Yes In Your Back Yard.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Are there policies anywhere that compensate people for the externalities brought by change? Like, if Alice buys a sunny place with a great view of wide open sky and a park, then Bob buys the places around her, bulldozes the park, and builds 20 story buildings, Alice is now in the dark looking at concrete 10 feet away. It objectively makes Alice's situation worse. Are there any frameworks that compensate Alice for the worsening of her situation? I could imagine something like making developers pay for blocking views/sky/sun, or for creating noise, or making them pay for the change their development causes in the market value of others' properties. Not exactly that, but something along those lines. I'd bet it could bring some NIMBYs around. They'd no longer lose out when beneficial change happens.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  You don't own the view. It's unrealistic to expect that owning a single parcel of land would grant you broad latitude to stop projects anywhere within sight. If you want a guaranteed good view, go buy a big plot of land way out in the middle of nowhere. You have no right to it in a city; other people's right to have housing is way more important.
  - bwb 7y ago
    I had this same question and I was told by people in the industry surrounding people can sue, and have a case. I was asking them why they can't just rezone my neighborhood to 4 story mixed-use, and I was told they would sue over the changes to the view because their lots although more valuable would be blocked from sunlight unless they built up... Not verified but what I was told by arch.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    Seems like that's ignoring zoning which is how views get protected in practice? Owning a view isn't necessary.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    Yes, of course in this situation Alice doesn't own the view. But she is made worse off by Bob's developments. I really hope we can agree that Alice's situation is being made worse in a real way here. Further, pre-Bob, the city is mostly full of Alices, so if you want them to not vote against Bob's development, like in OP's article, you might want to align Alice's and Bob's incentives. It's pragmatic. It also happens to have the nice property of not making Alice worse off when we improve things for everyone else, which morally feels nice. Either way, the question isn't about the ethics or pragmatics. It's whether this has been tried anywhere.
bwb 7y ago
I'd love to move to CA, but I can't do the housing madness. Just insanity and I don't like that they are hurting other people and their ability to give their kids a better life by pulling up the ladder behind them. My city isn't far behind and it disgusts me. I'd love to see my entire neighborhood rezoned to 4 to 5 stories and get more people in here for the economic boom.
andrewprock 7y ago
There is simply no demand from municipalities for more housing. The logical consequence of Proposition 13 is that housing becomes a liability for governments, instead of an asset. Therefore, they forego developing new liabilities, and instead develop new assets, commercial property use.

174 points by burlesona 7y ago

I shared this because it's the best concise summary of many things that are going wrong with housing in the bay area that I've read in a while. I'm on the Strong Towns board (though I didn't write the article). Happy to answer questions if anyone has them.

aeternus 7y ago
Is housing "going wrong" simply because it is expensive? Maybe it is overall a good thing that tech companies are now expanding into cities outside the bay area due to high housing costs. At least housing prices are transparent to those thinking about moving in to the bay area, allowing them to make an informed decision. High traffic, insufficient public transit capacity, and over-capacity public services are less transparent. If we build more housing, do we just push problems elsewhere? How do we determine the optimal amount of new housing?
- deathanatos 7y ago
  > do we just push problems elsewhere? Not necessarily. I'd love to live closer to the Bay; if I could get in walking or biking range of CalTrain I could eliminate much or all of my 40 minute highway commute — thus reducing the congestion on the highway. But it would cost me ~$12k/yr. Similarly, if San Mateo had built adequate housing, 70k people might have shorter commutes, requiring less use of roads, transit systems, etc. Personally, I am also massively for improvements to the various transit systems. If it were easily possible, I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues. We might get the EMUs someday, but I won't be around to see it. The downtown SF transit center finally reopened, I think, but it was a 8? month setback, not to mention it is way over budget. Also, the HOV lanes would be a lot more enticing if there weren't so much traffic in them, and there easily could have been had CA not hadn't out so many HOV stickers. There are SUVs getting stickered that get equivalent gas mileage to my '97. Also, enforcement.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    > I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues. You can get by with 3 tracks. Metra's busy BNSF line is a 3-track mainline, and they manage to launch 21 outgoing trains in the 125 minutes between 3:57 and 6:02. In addition to the ~80ish commuter trains, there's also another ~20 daily Amtrak and freight trains along the same stretch of rail.
- burlesona 7y ago
  I would argue housing reaching the current prices is not good for the overall economy because it creates unreasonable pressure on people who aren't in the tech industry and still have a reason to live in the Bay Area. First, this makes it unreasonably difficult to stay in the region you grew up in unless you get into the top end of the local income brackets. Second, it makes it unreasonably difficult for all kinds of important and necessary, but lower paid, workers to live in the area. A city of nothing but high-end tech workers, with no teachers, police, firefighters, etc. would not be a very nice place to live. As far as the "optimal amount of new housing," why not just match the number of new households moving into a region? That seems like a good place to start.
- mktmkr 7y ago
  Here's an idea we can adopt from literally every other aspect of American society: let the market work. We venerate the free market in all matters except housing, where we've erected a complex system of legal protections for incumbent landlords. The solution to high housing prices is more supply but it is illegal to build housing almost anywhere in the state of California. In SF it is illegal to build a duplex on 90% of the lots. Why? That just exists to enrich incumbents.
  - DrScump 7y ago
    it is illegal to build housing almost anywhere in the state of California. No, it is legal almost everywhere without adjacent neighbors. Most land is unincorporated anyway.

Animats 7y ago

It's being overdone. A solid wall of railroad flats (cheezy "luxury" condos) is going up for miles along the Caltrain tracks. Those wooden multistory buildings are the slums of tomorrow. It's about time for the next Bay Area recession. Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?

corybrown 7y ago
> Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001? Aren't those buildings fully occupied today?
privateSFacct 7y ago
Haha - only someone in the bay area would say something like this. I used to live in the "slums" of the bay area back in 2008. Trust me - by now even those slum houses are going for at least 2008 prices before crash and better and the neighborhood I lived in in SF is crazy expensive.
opportune 7y ago
I am about to move into one of those and the demand seems very high... very crowded open houses and <1 week turnaround time (par for course for bay area but still). You don't have to live there if you don't want. I don't think they're ever going to be slums but probably will become middle class housing in 10-15 years - only because hopefully sometime before then there will be a sort of zoning/regulatory intervention and developers can finally start building highrise luxury condos If you want to see slums I can share some pins of places in the East Bay and the hinterlands of SF, and you can tell me if you think midrise condos on the caltrain/camino real corridor in the peninsula will ever look like that. I'll even take out a 15 year bet with you
- DrScump 7y ago
  What about Caltrain grade separation, where you suddenly find trains running even with the second floor of your building at many major road crossings?
7y ago

matthewowen 7y ago

"Two others (out of five) had recused themselves because they own property within 1000 feet of the proposed project, and those recusals apparently counted as "no" votes." I wonder: did they just not know the rules? Or was this a cowardly way to vote no without _actually_ voting no: it seems like if you really wanted to recuse in this situation, you just agree to do paired voting, one no and one yes.

asr 7y ago
Yes, this seems like a critical part of the story. I take it the actual vote was 2-1 in favor of the permit, but you need at least 3 votes to pass something in San Bruno, no matter what? If so, the city council's rules don't deal appropriately with recusal and those should be changed ASAP. At the same time, whether or not this project succeeded or failed, the larger story about how hard it is to build housing remains fundamentally true (and broken).
- nradov 7y ago
  Every city council has quorum rules for votes. What exactly are you proposing to change?
  - asr 7y ago
    Quorum rules are to make sure you're not holding a sneaky midnight vote with two councilors asleep. Councilors who are present but recused should count toward a quorum. You might still have a rule that at least two votes are required to pass something (to prevent a 1-0 vote with four recusals). But requiring at least thee votes on a five-member council is requiring an outright majority, which means a recusal is the same as a no vote. That seems unfair.

Karrot_Kream 7y ago

I've noticed an increasing trend in West Coast cities where people complain that there's "just too many people". "Tell them to move elsewhere, we're full". It's as if the lessons of Malthusian limits were lost on us. For humanity to continue growing as a species we have to become more efficient with land use.

CPLX 7y ago
I mean if they really mean they don't want to build anything then let's talk. It's a policy that can work, it's worked great in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for example. But they'll have to stop building massive office buildings if so.
esotericn 7y ago
> For humanity to continue growing as a species I'm pretty young. Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius. The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it. We can't go on like this.
- Karrot_Kream 7y ago
  > We can't go on like this. What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point? > The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something. Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
  - CPLX 7y ago
    > maybe involving terraforming other planets This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here. Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead? I mean, seriously.

opportune 7y ago

I walked around downtown San Bruno recently and it's honestly pathetic how this city is squandering their potential. Even on el camino real itself a lot of the property is being wasted on auto repair shops and fast food places, 2-3 story buildings, etc. This place could be way, way better given its proximity to the airport and SF.

CPLX 7y ago
I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula (including SF) looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense. Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay. In the Embarcadero there are actual motor inns, crappy hotels with one story raised 10 feet off the ground with parking spaces below them. Like a whole bunch of them. You don't even see those in abandoned small towns any more. You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man. Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces. Yet the entire city is dominated by garages at street level. And two story buildings, and mile after mile of awful zero-architecture postwar commercial properties. Yes the painted ladies are pretty, don't bulldoze them. Landmark Lombard street and some of the other charming blocks, Sure why not. But it's a global commercial city willing to build 50+ story office towers, and unwilling to do anything about the dozens of square miles of 1-2 story unredeemable residential surrounding them. It's insane.
- api 7y ago
  It's quite sane if you bought property in the 60s-90s and are riding property appreciation to fortune.
  - deleted 7y ago

nostrademons 7y ago

> No neighborhood should be exempt from change. > No neighborhood should be subjected to radical change. Is there any dynamic evolutionary system that actually follows these rules? The tech industry is famous for lumbering behemoths that are constitutionally incapable of innovation and then get replaced wholesale by nimble startups. National borders change all at once, in wars or revolutions, rather than incrementally as demographics change. Human beings don't change much after early adulthood; instead they make new humans who replace them when they die. Evolution itself seems to have periods of equilibrium when resources are abundant and nearly every individual survives, followed by abrupt speciation when resources get tight, individuals die off, and populations get isolated from one another. The only positive example I can think of is democracy, which is specifically designed to enable gradual change so that radical change doesn't happen, and yet still frequently gets party realignments, charismatic strongmen, and the occasional revolution. I worry that this philosophy sounds great precisely because it's not how the world works. Human beings are really bad at noticing or reacting to gradual change; it tends to pile up until it becomes too big to ignore, and then rapidly reaches a tipping point and crisis where the newly strong force out the weak. This is undesirable, but also seems largely unavoidable.

ketzo 7y ago
I mean, if we're being cynical, you say the second so that people feel comfortable with the first. If you can convince suburbanites that you won't put up a skyscraper next door, you'll have an easier time putting up a 5-story apartment building. Or so my thinking goes, anyway.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  People in my neighborhood object to every change even if it doesn’t seem to affect them. They’re mortified when a 5-story building (commercial OR residential) is built downtown when we are ten minutes away and not on a major traffic corridor.
  - casefields 7y ago
    That's because every time you give an inch they'll take a little bit more. So you out up a huge front and the only thing that can be approved are small nimble changes. Plus it's wildly beneficial economically to keep the status quo when it comes to owning a home in the California.

btilly 7y ago

I have suggested this before, and I'll suggest this again. The whole problem could be solved if we gave people the choice of voting where they work rather than where they live. Currently every city wants all the businesses that they can get because businesses generate lots of tax revenues. Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue, and locals object on the basis of NIMBYism. But when everyone adds businesses and nobody adds homes, we get horrible commutes. With my proposed change, housing developments in cities that have major businesses will get lots of support from people who work there and want shorter commutes. And it seems reasonable to me that someone who spends their waking hours in a city and wants to live there should get the opportunity to have political power there. This would therefore undo the political log jam. And once you start letting people live close to where they work, commutes go down, traffic gets better, and everyone winds up happier.

rjmunro 7y ago
The "City Of London" (a small part of central London) has something like this. They have a resident population of <10,000 people, but somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people commute there for work. Companies get to nominate some of their workforce as voters for the council (called "The Corporation Of London"). For historical reasons ("The City" is much older than the UK itself), things are much more complicated than simply "People who work there get to vote", so I'm not sure it's a very comparable situation. The best explanation I've found is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
markbnj 7y ago
> Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue The property owners still pay tax on it don't they? I'm sure it is less lucrative per square foot than commercial development, but I assume it is still better than the revenue from the closed furniture store and parking lot, and after all you need people to patronize businesses.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  Perhaps it's something to do with how California has lower property taxes (partially due to Prop. 13) and higher income taxes-- but those income taxes go to Sacramento, not to municipalities. In other parts of the country, municipal treasuries grow as volume and prices of residential units grow.

cryptozeus 7y ago

If you notice how new york and surrounding area is supported by very good transportation. West coast does not have that and on top of that there are no huge building being built outside sf. I wonder if this is due to earthquakes. Either way I think this issues and mixed with tech job demand is going to push remote culture more and more.

umvi 7y ago
> I wonder if this is due to earthquakes. Could be, but Japan has lots of earthquakes too, and they don't seem to mind building huge/tall buildings.

throwawaysea 7y ago

It's not peak housing dysfunction, but rather peak entitlement. Why is it important to accommodate people who might want to live in or move to an area despite local incumbents' wishes to not have their neighborhood change? Does everyone have the right to live anywhere they want to live without having to pay the necessary price to be there? For example, does everyone have a right to expect a residence on a Hawaii beachfront? And if not, why is it reasonable to portray a city or state as somehow lacking because it serves existing constituents? It makes sense that the Bay area would be priced high given its tremendous desirability (which may be tapering off now). If people are willing to work there for low wages, then that is their choice - they have opted into a tradeoff they are OK with, and they/others should not demonize those who were already there and want to preserve their culture/way of life/standards of living. There are numerous affordable places to live in the US that are not [New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc.] - you may not have every big city amenity you want, or maybe even be able to do the exact job you want - but such compromises are also just a regular part of life, aren't they? To me the reframing of this issue as a policy problem, or a rich versus poor thing, or through use of pejoratives like "NIMBY" serves to distract from the plain truth, which is simply that people are acting in their own self-interests. And yes, this includes the folks who believe they have an unalienable right to live in the Bay area and demand that local governance be replaced with top-down forceful governance (overriding local zoning policy). And the reality is proposals like the one around the missing middle will not solve the underlying issue - it just shifts the timeline around a bit until population growth brings us back to the same point anyways.

opportune 7y ago
>and they/others should not demonize those who were already there and want to preserve their culture/way of life/standards of living. This has a limit, namely, that we who move in are going to vote to change things, and the only way bay area property owners can prevent that is to not get rich off their property by selling or renting it at sky-high prices to new residents. To put their money where their mouth is and not change things, bay area residents need to not be getting rich off the density that they are nominally trying to fight. Otherwise it's just delaying a lost cause - population growth, and a shift in demographics from owners to renters, will inevitably happen barring some big tech recession. Once there are enough renters voting in municipal elections, change will come

jkking 7y ago

This article approaches the issue from the preconception that building housing is the best, obvious and inevitable decision for Bay Area communities. Because of this, any obstacles to it must be due either to a) fossilized regulations from a former age; or b) greed and entitlement. As to a), I find that the democratic process is actually very engaged in making housing decisions. As a resident of Alameda, we are constantly getting new housing approved, because our voting populace happens to support it. In other towns, maybe that's not the case. But the laws and regulations that protect against development are not necessarily byproducts from a former age that are no longer applicable, but in fact still representative of the will of the people. And in any case, the will of the people can change them! As to b), I think there are great reasons why someone would be against development other than greed and entitlement. If rich and powerful interests (such as Big Tech) threaten to change your way of life, don't you have the right as an American to vote your conscience, even if it goes against the tides of change? Or are we only allowed to vote in a way that would ultimately favor Big Tech in some way? People that think in this way remind me of the current situation in Hong Kong - where it's a "democracy," but you're only allowed to vote for the "approved" candidates. In other words, no democracy at all. An objection has been raised that people who don't like the tech industry being here can move somewhere else. Well, the same is true for the tech industry itself. In fact, it appears that Big Tech is playing a game of chicken, and banks on the fact that the Bay Area towns will blink first. We have seen this before, where Uber deliberately broke the law by running a commercial car service without paying for the required licenses and permits. Then, they sicced their lawyers on the towns that tried to stop them until people got so enamored of the service they couldn't imagine life without it, and the political will was decidedly in their favor. All in the name of "disruption." I have no issue ascribing legitimate motives to those who wish not to be "disrupted," and refuse to accept that as an inevitability. What would the answer be to a big corporation belching toxic fumes into the atmosphere? "Well, that's just the march of progress, we all need to adapt?" I didn't think so. Instead, we will continue to put these things to a vote (or fight for our right to do so where we wrongfully can't). That's how we make decisions in America.

jwp23 7y ago

One of the issues is that we, in the US, don't look at other successful cities or countries and consider implementing their solutions. Then in California, we don't look at other cities or states within the US who have solved similar problems. Tokyo has rational zoning rules that has lead to affordable housing in a growing metropolis. This blog post https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning https://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zoni... describes the differences in Japanese zoning versus North American zoning.

tarr11 7y ago

Would a “technology” answer be to make telepresence technology better and invest in higher bandwidth infrastructure? If we could have high resolution video, audio and even VR for business, would people be required to be colocated as often? That way people could live wherever they want.

CydeWeys 7y ago
There's dozens of other reasons people want to live somewhere besides work, though. Unless you're planning on living your entire life in VR.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Paradoxically, advances in transport and comms tech seem to increase rather than decrease hub concentration. Greater friction and more need for local presence might reverse the trend.

dmode 7y ago

I am a huge housing advocate who lives in the Bay Area, but I feel like the only pro housing people I meet are online. All my neighbors turn NIMBY as soon as they buy their home

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
That's why some people who don't agree with the YIMBYs deride them as Yes In Your Back Yard.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

Are there policies anywhere that compensate people for the externalities brought by change? Like, if Alice buys a sunny place with a great view of wide open sky and a park, then Bob buys the places around her, bulldozes the park, and builds 20 story buildings, Alice is now in the dark looking at concrete 10 feet away. It objectively makes Alice's situation worse. Are there any frameworks that compensate Alice for the worsening of her situation? I could imagine something like making developers pay for blocking views/sky/sun, or for creating noise, or making them pay for the change their development causes in the market value of others' properties. Not exactly that, but something along those lines. I'd bet it could bring some NIMBYs around. They'd no longer lose out when beneficial change happens.

CydeWeys 7y ago
You don't own the view. It's unrealistic to expect that owning a single parcel of land would grant you broad latitude to stop projects anywhere within sight. If you want a guaranteed good view, go buy a big plot of land way out in the middle of nowhere. You have no right to it in a city; other people's right to have housing is way more important.
- bwb 7y ago
  I had this same question and I was told by people in the industry surrounding people can sue, and have a case. I was asking them why they can't just rezone my neighborhood to 4 story mixed-use, and I was told they would sue over the changes to the view because their lots although more valuable would be blocked from sunlight unless they built up... Not verified but what I was told by arch.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Seems like that's ignoring zoning which is how views get protected in practice? Owning a view isn't necessary.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Yes, of course in this situation Alice doesn't own the view. But she is made worse off by Bob's developments. I really hope we can agree that Alice's situation is being made worse in a real way here. Further, pre-Bob, the city is mostly full of Alices, so if you want them to not vote against Bob's development, like in OP's article, you might want to align Alice's and Bob's incentives. It's pragmatic. It also happens to have the nice property of not making Alice worse off when we improve things for everyone else, which morally feels nice. Either way, the question isn't about the ethics or pragmatics. It's whether this has been tried anywhere.

bwb 7y ago

I'd love to move to CA, but I can't do the housing madness. Just insanity and I don't like that they are hurting other people and their ability to give their kids a better life by pulling up the ladder behind them. My city isn't far behind and it disgusts me. I'd love to see my entire neighborhood rezoned to 4 to 5 stories and get more people in here for the economic boom.

andrewprock 7y ago

There is simply no demand from municipalities for more housing. The logical consequence of Proposition 13 is that housing becomes a liability for governments, instead of an asset. Therefore, they forego developing new liabilities, and instead develop new assets, commercial property use.