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Data show rich cities are failing the Bay Area on housing
- olliej 6y agoI mean Palo Alto and Mountain View have sued to prevent more housing. Is it really failing if it’s intentional?
- jhatemyjob 6y ago> Whether it’s to protect their property values, exclude Black people, keep down traffic or protect their city’s physical environment, these cities make it hard to build new housing. Stopped reading at this part. What an ignorant thing to say.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoWhat flaw (other than "ignorant") do you find in what it says?
- throwaway1777 6y agoWell, it’s pretty dumb to suggest that these are the main reasons we don’t build housing. How about government corruption and special interest groups as big factors in the problem? Most of the time housing projects are blocked by people who want to “protect minorities” or “stop gentrification” or get a kickback from some developer. It’s quite the opposite of wanting to exclude minorities or raise property values.
- cammikebrown 6y agoMost of the time? People definitely want to stop gentrification in working class neighborhoods, but if you live in the Marina or Silicon Valley, there’s already been gentrification. Wealthy homeowners absolutely do block new housing in wealthy neighborhoods.
- oh_sigh 6y agoMaybe because it conflates totally legitimate and benign reasons with illegal and shitty reasons without any kind of justification. I don't think it's reasonable to accuse anything that is expensive as being designed to keep black people away. What is the reasoning for you asking this question? Whether it was honest curiosity or it was just because you were taking a break from beating your spouse, we might never know the answer.
- cwp 6y agoIgnorant? Not at all. These cities DO make it hard to build new housing. There's no question about that. It's an ongoing political issue, and all the reasons listed have been used to attack or defend that policy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- teej 6y agoI voted in my Bay Area city's local election in November. Property values, traffic, and environmental concerns were ALL policy justifications for curbing new housing.
- olliej 6y agowhy? they deliberately sue to stop almost any new housing construction. The prevented BART from going down the peninsula to stop "undesirables" coming to their cities. They were historically redlined to explicitly exclude any PoC. They have a deeply ingrained prejudice, which may be less racially motivated now, but to claim that that prejudice isn't present is ignorant. Even San Jose had police trying to stop BART from reaching due to it allowing the "criminals" from Oakland for some reason using one of the least reliable public transit systems to go to SJ and commit crimes, the flee back to Oakland.
- jokethrowaway 6y agoI think the article accusation of racism is misplaced, they just don't want poor people in their fancy city.
- onethought 6y agoOh not racist at all then. Stop a group of people from accumulating wealth then just segregate based on wealth. Not Racist at all. Economics is like the "race by proxy" get out of jail free card.
- rsweeney21 6y agoOr maybe the people that live in low density neighborhoods don't want to live in high density neighborhoods. So they stop developers from changing the density of their town.
- dave5104 6y agoThat's fine if you want to live in low density. But at the same time, these cities, like Palo Alto, are building office space left and right and welcoming businesses into town. (At least that was the MO pre-COVID.) You shouldn't be able to welcome businesses in without building requisite housing units to support the employees.
- d1zzy 6y ago> But at the same time, these cities, like Palo Alto, are building office space left and right and welcoming businesses into town. Because said cities cannot get enough tax money from property tax (blame Prop 13) so they need to get it from businesses. But then those businesses attract people in the area and then those people need a place to live in but they can't get a place because nobody has the incentive to sell when your tax rate is locked in (well, growing up to 2% per year), on the contrary, you don't want to sell and then buy somewhere else and have to pay more taxes than you were paying at the old place, even if the new place is much smaller. One of the countless negative consequences of Prop 13.
- onethought 6y agoAs someone not familiar with Californian/SF local legal matters. What do they need the tax $ for if there aren't many residence?
- dave5104 6y agoI'll go with Palo Alto, since that's what I'm most familiar with. It's still a city with >65,000 residents. You need tax revenue to support a city that large, along with all the services and maintenance that comes from supporting a 3-4x larger daytime (pre-COVID) population of people coming in to the city to work. Prop 13 limits the % you can raise property tax each year, unless they sell the property (at which point the property tax resets to the sale value). That leads to a lot of people not moving and holding onto their old, low tax property.
- ralph84 6y ago> Rich communities should want to welcome more residents, particularly those less fortunate than them. Sadly, in the Bay Area, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Is that the case anywhere in the world? Why single out the Bay Area.
- throwaway1777 6y ago100% agree, the Bay Area isn’t even that bad. If you want to see real exclusion try going to a gated community in Beverly Hills or Miami.
- Decade 6y agoOne difference, as highlighted by the YIMBY Action lawsuit against the California Department of Housing and Community Development, is that both Beverly Hills and San Bernardino are included in the Southern California Association of Governments, and thus they are considered together while planning for housing needs. Whereas Stockton is excluded from the Association of Bay Area Governments. The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not accurately assessed, and not accurately planned for. https://www.sfweekly.com/news/yimbys-sue-for-even-more-housing-via-rhna/ https://www.sfweekly.com/news/yimbys-sue-for-even-more-housi...
- jseliger 6y agoYes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501
- davidw 6y agoI'm particularly fond of this article showing different ways of accomplishing "more housing": https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
- ndiscussion 6y agoBecause the residents are Bad(tm) and need to be punished. These standards only seem to apply to America and Europe. Does anyone have a counterexample outside of America or Europe where the underclass is allowed to live side-by-side with the rich? I've never heard of one but perhaps I'm ignorant. Most countries seem dead-set on rejecting any and all immigrants that don't bring $500k+ along with them.
- joe_the_user 6y agoI'd classify myself as a progressive and I don't see why every Bay Area city has to make some "contribution" to increased housing. An acceptable approach would seem to be to have the "center" becoming more dense over time while the outer rings stay less dense. The problem is that current geography has resulted in natural centers being the ones that refuse to build and that is problematic. Palo Alto and the rest are happy to have Facebook and etc's business but won't make room for Facebook employees. And the apparently illogical behavior comes out of proposition 13's logic. Cities can tax businesses but property values are immune. Which is to say that prop 13 needs to be repealed or annulled before any other sort of sanity is going to happen (and maybe that's not happened but, hey, there you go).
- onethought 6y agoBut has COVID fixed this (we just need time to distribute the fix). Facebook employees don't need to be anywhere near Facebook HQ anymore.
- Arainach 6y agoThis just leads to pronounced NIMBYism. You see it in all of the community groups in the Seattle Suburbs - we have an agreement that each city must build new housing for X thousand residents in each decade. Every single suburb - Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Woodinville, Bothell, and probably ones whose community discussion groups I don't monitor as well - all ask "why does it have to be here? Why can't people just move further out?" People want to live throughout. Not everyone works in the canonical centers. Plenty of businesses are among the other cities too, particularly service workers who can't currently afford to live there. ALL of the cities need to build to keep costs under control. No one has any right to have their town stay small forever.
- olliej 6y agoIf your city requires minimum wage workers for a significant part of basic infrastructure it should be possible for them to live in your city. Otherwise you're getting subsidized by your neighboring cities that have to pay for the infrastructure to support employees of businesses that only pay taxes in your city. That's why every city needs to contribute. The ones that aren't are literally leeching off of neighboring cities.
- phnofive 6y agoClarification for anyone else not familiar with Bay Area geography: There are 101 cites included in this regional study. There’s a lot of data here I think is stitched together in support of a presumption presented as a conclusion, but one question: > According to estimates from the US Census, the Bay Area’s population grew by about 10% from 2010 to 2019 [...] Yet of the ten richest cities of the 101 cities in the Bay Area, not one of them grew faster than 5%. By how much did the area’s population of the richest grow? That is, if it grew at a rate of 10%, did they move elsewhere? If 5% - is there any point to the rest of the article? If less, wouldn’t astronomical property value explain why poorer groups didn’t move to these specific areas? As with so many political issues, this is about economic class - and the differences in characteristics between them: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertility/time-series/household-income/t7.xlsx https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertili...
- LordFast 6y ago> The data show that middle income cities have, on average, grown at a much faster pace than the region’s poorest and richest locales. I'm not a housing expert, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. Middle income cities grow faster because there was more growth in middle income demographics. The most common demographic with a lot of growth is the "senior software engineer" at tech company X. As tech companies exploded, this was the segment that grew the most. As a result, this is the segment that is most competitive when it comes to housing, because that's where all the people are. This "middle class" income bracket for housing in the Bay Area translates roughly to the $1.25m to $2.5m range for single family home purchases depending on whether you have 1 or two tech incomes in the household. There's no getting around it: wherever most of the people are will be the most competitive for housing, and when it comes to essentials like food and shelter, people /will/ compete. Want less competition? Buy a house in Vallejo for under $1m, or go above $3m, and there will be fewer people in those brackets who can compete with you. Either increase the supply or decrease the demand, there's no way around the physical reality of housing. P.S. It never fails to make me pause and think when people accept $200k jobs without asking, or trying to find out: "What's the distribution graph of incomes within a 30-min commute distance of the job, and where do I land on that bell curve?"
- barry-cotter 6y ago> The most common demographic with a lot of growth is the "senior software engineer" at tech company X. This isn’t middle income. Entry level FAANG is already high income, never mind senior software engineer.
- jseliger 6y agoThere's no getting around it: wherever most of the people are will be the most competitive for housing, and when it comes to essentials like food and shelter, people /will/ compete That's not true at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501 We know how to build as much housing as people want to live in. We make building said housing illegal.
- supernova87a 6y agoWell, I think you have 2 factors colliding together. 1) As people moved here and got good jobs, made a life for themselves, they (you and I) inevitably become more sympathetic to and desiring of middle class values. Stability, some measure of comfort, concern about taxation, their local neighborhood. It's understandable, it's natural. Yet this is in conflict (especially when growth needs to happen) with: 2) The people who have not yet moved here (or become voters, or homeowners in particular), don't get to have a say in the policies that govern a place, yet at some point are the ones who have to live within policies that others decide. So, a lot of the policies around here favor those who "got theirs" already, and there's very little incentive to fix this. Because the people who it benefits aren't here yet! I think the question is, what do you do about this conflict, and what do you want a region's population/demographic renewal policy to be? How do you turn over property, wealth, a city/region to the next generation in a way that's sustainable, especially if you want it to grow? Because right now, it's a "here's what I want for me right now" policy landscape. And that favors old people who own houses in the Bay Area to the detriment of young/poor/up and coming people who want to find a place in the area. The only thing to do is wait for the few % of people to die or move out from frustration, and face high housing prices that preserve everyone else's interests. It gets masked in terms like "neighborhood preservation" or "local control" (or even using some minorities as a headline grabber, when in the end it actually favors mostly the rich property owners). It's a big problem.
- ndiscussion 6y agoI think your analysis is spot-on. Those existing NIMBY's bought their house with an expectation, and they vote accordingly. I don't think there's really a way forward without torching rule of law. They don't want the place to be amenable to new/young people, and they make the rules. It's unfortunate that big tech decided to make this place their home, perhaps with covid and remote work it will go back to a dreamy boomer-land.
- davidw 6y agoThe way forward is not to 'torch the rule of law'. There are plenty of ways to do things. Oregon just passed a housing law (HB 2001) that re-legalizes "missing middle" housing for instance, by right, in all our cities. In other words, you take some of the zoning control away from hyper-NIMBY local jurisdictions.
- onethought 6y agoYou don't really need an article to point out the Bay Area is failing people. The crazy amount of "sleeping rough" homeless mixed with people typing on phones inside their auto driving Teslas going by without lifting an eyebrow. If you are not from the US and have learnt to think that is "normal" it's pretty confronting.
- d1zzy 6y agoTo give someone an idea of how bad the difference between neighbours living in the same type of house (same lot size, same floor plan) can be because of Prop 13 in CA, check out this site: https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/ https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/ Feel free to zoom in in any residential neighborhood in San Jose or Palo Alto. You can see 10-20x difference in yearly property taxes payed.