8 ms·

Well, before we get into the moral/immoral dimension, the fact is that these areas are growing from net migration in, rather than internal population increase.

by titzer 4y ago

Well, before we get into the moral/immoral dimension, the fact is that these areas are growing from net migration in, rather than internal population increase. So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents (and not bringing their own extended families anyhow). So the atomization of intra-family bonds that seems so immoral to you is actually caused by the migration, driven by underlying economic opportunities and not some NIMBY anti-growth mindset. > It enriches homeowners at the expense of other's misery. This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too?

throw8383833jj 4y ago
and we could solve this problem by creating new cities/towns. Why on earth, can't we do that anymore? for most of human history we were able to do that, now all the sudden everyone needs to be in the same exact geographical area. People follow the jobs. Give companies a subsidy for starting in a new town/city/village and the people will certainly follow it. And you'll get all the benefits of starting with a clean slate: you could make it walkable, bikable, keep land costs low by not limiting it(enough supply to keep costs low)
- triceratops 4y ago
  > Give companies a subsidy Who's paying for that? And why?
  - adamw2k 4y ago
    It's actually common practice in many parts of the country. The practice is called Economic Development. Rarely used for residential purposes, but does finance commercial development and promote hiring. The funding typically comes from the calculated/expected incremental tax revenue to the area (State, Local, etc). Newark, CA in the Bay Area did this for a while (may still?).
    - jxramos 4y ago
      I'd be curious the inner workings surrounding the development of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starbase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starbase in Boca Chica, TX and what the backstory was around that. Kind of a different use case with needing distance and dangerous stuff being deployed but still probably a worthy bit of development history and municipal dynamics to be shared there.
    - triceratops 4y ago
      Ok but why spend that money at all? Companies are happy to create jobs and hire people in existing cities. And we can build housing at the cost of 0 tax dollars, for all those people, by easing zoning. It'll also cost a lot less to upgrade infrastructure for higher density that to build it wholecloth for new communities.
- prottog 4y ago
  > Give companies a subsidy Probably very difficult to get this right.
- Clubber 4y ago
  People want to live in this area because it's closer to work, which requires them to be in the office. Take out that variable and our population would start to be more evenly distributed over time. I personally don't like living in a city, too much traffic, too many assholes and I don't trust modern police, of which cities have an abundance of. Hopefully, if this remote working sticks and we don't go back to driving to an office everyday, it will be a net positive for a lot of problems we are facing: overcrowding of cities, skyrocketing rents, pollution, unnecessary carbon emissions, etc.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I'm not sure how common pure remote is going to be. I see a lot more hybrid, which gives greater flexibility, but still involves being within an hour or two drive of an office. Furthermore, for people already living in, say, the Bay Area, they probably have friends and/or family there and it's not like the Bay Area is a hellhole so the default for a lot of people is to stay there, in spite of the high housing prices, rather than move to a cornfield in Iowa.
- cellis 4y ago
  There are rent seeking local “mafias” in every pocket of the globe you would try this. Companies would rather negotiate with the devils they know ( large cities ) than end up dealing with e.g. unknown, possibly corrupt and rent seeking commissioners,protection agencies,judges,sheriffs,mayors,councils,unions,etc.
- pas 4y ago
  new cities? where? why? there's plenty of space right there in the bay area, no, not the parks, look up. negative density tax is the way. unfortunately new suburbs are an unsustainable addiction in this regard. it incentivizes everyone for optimizing for cars and backyard-driven life-development.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  People want to live near other people, not in empty towns. Other people start businesses they want to work at, cook at restaurants they want to eat at, and play basic at bars they want to frequent. Starting an empty town doesn’t do that. Why doesn’t everyone just stay at home with their parents and just commute into a meta verse version of the Bay Area where everyone can have a fake home?
- marssaxman 4y ago
  > Why on earth, can't we do that anymore? We used up all the good places.
- jxramos 4y ago
  I was contemplating something in this direction once. That this concentration in the bay area could very well be driven by the tastes and desires of the CEOs and other execs who are pleased to live in the comfy parts of the bay area regardless of the outcomes of their employees and how much blood is squeezed out of them by the high cost of living and time sunk on commutes. I think it was Elon Musk who made me ponder this. Somewhere he blasted the notion that most of the Silicon Valley venture capital gets blown on housing costs. That made me ponder what other alternatives could be found and what other productive uses that money could have been spent on. It's a fascinating train of thought with big directions it could go. That's an interesting idea about encouraging the subsidization of a town, I'd like to see that experiment tried if it hasn't yet.
- ghaff 4y ago
  You seem to be asking companies to create company towns--probably with company housing and stores. There's already tons of cheap housing around the US. It's just that a lot of it isn't where many people most want to live.
- jwagenet 4y ago
  We've been creating new "towns" in the form of subdivisions and planned communities for the better part of a century. They are fine for a generation or two, but the astronomical costs of maintaining their government subsidized services (utilities, sewer, roads, schools, fire, police) stretched thin into a low density area inevitably leads to their decline.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    The costs of suburbs aren’t astronomical in the Bay Area. There is a reason Strong Towns and the like always talk about suburbs in Missouri. The suburbs that are unaffordable are the $150K home owned by the household making $40k/year. You can’t charge that person the $8k in property tax you need to upkeep a suburb. Charging $8k on a $2 million home in the Bay Area is a lot more doable. It’s a 0.4% property tax rate which should be achievable. The only barrier to Bay Area suburbs paying for things is California’s neo-feudal property tax laws.
- CountSessine 4y ago
  Give companies a subsidy So we give existing house owners a subsidy by creating artificial housing scarcity, and then we give companies a subsidy to fix the house owner subsidy by starting new towns? Who pays for this? Productive young people earning income? Again?
- pkulak 4y ago
  We have run out of flat land along the coasts, and housing everywhere else is already dirt cheap.
- rcpt 4y ago
  Fordlandia was already tried
- philsnow 4y ago
  You know the VC question that they ask founders, "why now?"? For any particular location you might want to create a city, ask "why here?". Successful towns have historically been built near some natural resource (rivers, deltas, lakes, mines, forests, etc). Jobs / corporate mini-HQs are not a natural resource.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  We stopped building real cities when people decided it was more important to be able to park everywhere forever for free than to have nice places.
nouveaux 4y ago
This might be true in an area with gentrificiation but this is unlikely to be true in wealthy areas. Cupertino, as an example, is struggling with the last generation not moving out. The end result is a lower population of kids. https://patch.com/california/cupertino/cupertino-councilmembers-make-unusual-request-school-board https://patch.com/california/cupertino/cupertino-councilmemb...
- yongjik 4y ago
  This. Many of those vilified "high-paying tech jobs" are young and have school-age kids. I am one of them (well, except I'm not that young), and almost all my friends in the SV area are the same. I go to work and half of the team have a kid or two. It's not tech workers pushing out parents: they want to be parents and settle down. It's old grandmas in three bedroom single houses refusing to move out.
  - kspacewalk2 4y ago
    To be clear, the grandmas can refuse to move out, and it's their right to refuse. What's not their right is to have veto powers over what is built on adjacent properties they don't own.
- jxramos 4y ago
  Wow, this bit was pretty surprising > The school board had cited declining enrollment, funding issues and voters’ rejection of a parcel tax as reasons for closing the two schools. I'm very intrigued that the Cupertino voters rejected a parcel tax, I've seen so many of those in my town and they all pass. They typically go something like "shall the City of Cupertino collect a parcel tax at rate XYZ for the next ZZZ years to replace aging air conditioning and plumbing and other aging building facilities?".
  - rcpt 4y ago
    It's possibly because of Prop 218. One of Howard Jarvis's more insidious laws which requires that local taxes get 2/3 of votes to pass.
kilgnad 4y ago
>Well, before we get into the moral/immoral dimension, the fact is that these areas are growing from net migration in, rather than internal population increase. So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents (and not bringing their own extended families anyhow). How would net migration in push out existing residents? This makes no sense. >This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too? This is true. I would say 1% of the population shares your subjective view, while 99% don't. Literally the OVERALL majority wants cheaper houses while 1% are worried about their rich enclaves having crime go up and getting messier. Yeah as a minority of the population YOU would love to have your imitation-of-the-country-side suburbia stay the same and have good nature and all that but keep in mind it exists because an UNFAIR advantage to a small minority of rich people: YOU. The overall quality of your living standards must go down if you want to be fair. The luxuries you fight to preserve is a literal crime against humanity. This is the only way. But keep in mind if you own a home it's not like you LOSE any part of your home. It's just your neighborhood becomes more populated, that's the main difference.
medler 4y ago
> new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents It is the refusal to build housing that pushed up prices and pushes out parents and grandparents. It’s not the migrants’ fault. Would you rather the migrants simply stay poor where they are rather than seek a better life for themselves and their families. I believe freedom of movement is a fundamental human right. > This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners Nothing is happening “at the expense of the homeowners.” The homeowners are the ones getting rich.
- dixie_land 4y ago
  > The homeowners are the ones getting rich. If it's not an investment property then homeowners don't get any benefits from higher home value other than a larger tax bill.
  - rcpt 4y ago
    How do I buy a house that's not an investment?
    - jonathanlb 4y ago
      Be poor. At least in California, Habitat for Humanity as well as several counties offer BMR (Below Market Rate) housing for people and families just scraping by. The way it works is you purchase the house a certain percentage below market rate, and when you sell, it also has to be a certain percentage below market rate.
      - recursive 4y ago
        If you sell for the same percentage BMR that you bought, the investment attributes remain unchanged. It's all proportional.
        km3r 4y ago
guardiangod 4y ago
>So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents No one is forcing grandpa to sell his house by rezoning the land (the property tax won't go up due to pro 13). If your argument is that the house will appreciate in value and that grandpa is "forced" to sell his house because he likes money, well I have no argument.
- notch898a 4y ago
  Grandpa's groceries, medical care, and everything else go up due to increased cost of labor associated with cost of living.
- runsWphotons 4y ago
  eh these developments often ruin neighborhoods. a few people sell and then a development comes in that ruins the street etc.
  - kspacewalk2 4y ago
    "Ruins" in what way?
    - bagels 4y ago
      Crime, traffic, noise, blight.
      - kspacewalk2 4y ago
        Hire more cops[0], build sane public transit, invest in acoustic insulation and adjust your notions of what 'blight' is, to focus on blight-by-design of cookie-cutter suburbia. [0] https://thecrimereport.org/2022/09/14/the-u-s-is-under-policed-study/ https://thecrimereport.org/2022/09/14/the-u-s-is-under-polic...
        bagels 4y ago
rmk 4y ago
Communities have rights, and they can be overridden by larger communities that include them. Just as a majority can override the wishes of a minority. In this case, the state of CA, a larger community, has overridden the wishes of pricey Bay Area towns. Los Altos Hills, Atherton et. al. are not sovereigns.
- hd95489 4y ago
  The people with the majority in money get majority voice.
ambrozk 4y ago
> the atomization of intra-family bonds that seems so immoral to you is actually caused by the migration, driven by underlying economic opportunities and not some NIMBY anti-growth mindset The point is that we have to make a trade-off between free internal migration and NIMBY. If you mix those two ideas together, you get misery. In deciding which is worth prioritizing, perhaps you should consider that free internal migration is a literal bedrock principle of the American state, dating back prior to the Constitution, enshrined legally in the Constitution, on which huge quantities of American legal and economic life have been built for the last 250 years, whereas NIMBY is an ad-hoc political coalition of wealthy homeowners and crotchety neighborhood activists who'd rather no one new get to live in their city.
jcfrei 4y ago
> So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents (and not bringing their own extended families anyhow) Assuming they are renters, how does that happen? Increase in housing will decrease rents, so even if their current apartment / house gets replaced with a bigger one they can just rent something in the same neighborhood? Unless the only reason they can still afford to live in said neighborhood is because of rent control. Having rent control plus very strict zoning laws is the most asinine housing policy. It basically means that after a new neighborhood has been built you just freeze its state eternally - only allowing new people in when one family dies and their kids or some friends move in. The privilege to live in a neighborhood isn't then determined by wealth but by kinship - a harmful form of socialism that calcifies communities.
CydeWeys 4y ago
These areas are only growing from net migration in because the housing there is so expensive that the people from there can no longer keep up, and most of their kids have to move away in early adulthood to establish their own household because they can no longer afford it at early career salary levels like their parents once could. What you are painting as the cause is actually the effect.
ocschwar 4y ago
I'm one of those people who moved to an urban area for a tech job, and yes, my presence here is a part of the problem that drives working class, local born people either out of the region or on to the streets. But I did nothing wrong. The people who actively prevent Boston from building more housing are the reason my presence here is at someone else's expense.
poof131 4y ago
You miss a big piece. These cities all allow new office spaces and thereby new jobs, since that brings in tax revenue. They just don’t allow new housing, so people pay astronomical prices, commute from far away, or live with entire families sharing spaces designed for single people. For an area that claims to care about the environment and the welfare of immigrants, the lack of building is selfish, greedy, and immoral and one of my biggest disappointments about where I grew up. I’m glad to see this being fixed at the state level and state law superseding local law.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  So how moral is the behavior of the companies building/renting offices there, knowing in advance that housing is unaffordable? Only because their investors live nearby?
  - syzarian 4y ago
    Instead of talking about morality I think it’s best talk about incentives and try to determine what incentives ought to be in place in order to achieve a desired outcome. For whatever reason, it is the case that building high density housing is not allowed in many locations and the accompanying expense of that is unsustainable. I use “expense” to encompass financial, economic, societal, and environmental costs.
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  From the article: > Its (Los Altos) zoning prohibits multifamily housing, whether apartments, townhomes or condos, along with commercial stores and shops in the entirety of its city limits. The asymmetry of how cities/neighborhoods interact with each other is what creates the need for interventions like this. Some cities are more than happy to open up commercial and office spaces without allowing additional housing, eating up all the tax revenue, all the while pushing the burden of housing and other infrastructure on others. Meanwhile cities like Los Altos make any commercial development not possible in their neighborhood but will have its residents happily go to other neighborhoods to fulfill their need of a $7 artisanal coffee. Cities like Oakland will try to push high density housing in areas that don’t really add any value, simply because these are rich neighborhoods and you get election votes for doing it, meanwhile, plenty of medium/low income neighborhoods would benefit more from new high density housing with commercial space and the infrastructure upgrades that come from it. There’s all kinds of selfish interests and there needs to be a check on them.
CalRobert 4y ago
For what it's worth I grew up in Northern California. Grandparents lived (one still does!) in Vallejo and worked at Mare Island naval base. My cousins and I grew up in a band from Monterey to Sacramento. Our parents all still live in the homes they had decades ago. But None of our generation live in northern California any more, except for my sister who bought in Sacramento during the recession (she had a state job which made it a lot easier to get a mortgage!) I think that's bad. I'd like to be able to afford to live in norcal. I moved away from California for multiple reasons but one of them was affordability. Also, I hate traffic too! It's a good thing I am not a car! Ideally we could build places like culdesac.com or bloommerwede.nl and allow people to live completely car free. And no, in my view, "communities" do not have rights.
chelical 4y ago
I don't see why "migration, driven by economic opportunities" is a bad thing. Socioeconomic mobility is tied heavily to where you live (proximity to economic centers). I doubt all or even most of the new residents are tech workers. Plenty of working class people come from all around the country move to California or New York. I think the failure to build housing not only disenfranchises those people but also lower / middle income families already living in the area. I find it odd how people can be pro-immigration and anti-migration. Keeping people out of your community is similar to keeping people out of your country.

by titzer 4y ago

throw8383833jj 4y ago

and we could solve this problem by creating new cities/towns. Why on earth, can't we do that anymore? for most of human history we were able to do that, now all the sudden everyone needs to be in the same exact geographical area. People follow the jobs. Give companies a subsidy for starting in a new town/city/village and the people will certainly follow it. And you'll get all the benefits of starting with a clean slate: you could make it walkable, bikable, keep land costs low by not limiting it(enough supply to keep costs low)

triceratops 4y ago
> Give companies a subsidy Who's paying for that? And why?
- adamw2k 4y ago
  It's actually common practice in many parts of the country. The practice is called Economic Development. Rarely used for residential purposes, but does finance commercial development and promote hiring. The funding typically comes from the calculated/expected incremental tax revenue to the area (State, Local, etc). Newark, CA in the Bay Area did this for a while (may still?).
  - jxramos 4y ago
    I'd be curious the inner workings surrounding the development of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starbase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starbase in Boca Chica, TX and what the backstory was around that. Kind of a different use case with needing distance and dangerous stuff being deployed but still probably a worthy bit of development history and municipal dynamics to be shared there.
  - triceratops 4y ago
    Ok but why spend that money at all? Companies are happy to create jobs and hire people in existing cities. And we can build housing at the cost of 0 tax dollars, for all those people, by easing zoning. It'll also cost a lot less to upgrade infrastructure for higher density that to build it wholecloth for new communities.
prottog 4y ago
> Give companies a subsidy Probably very difficult to get this right.
Clubber 4y ago
People want to live in this area because it's closer to work, which requires them to be in the office. Take out that variable and our population would start to be more evenly distributed over time. I personally don't like living in a city, too much traffic, too many assholes and I don't trust modern police, of which cities have an abundance of. Hopefully, if this remote working sticks and we don't go back to driving to an office everyday, it will be a net positive for a lot of problems we are facing: overcrowding of cities, skyrocketing rents, pollution, unnecessary carbon emissions, etc.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I'm not sure how common pure remote is going to be. I see a lot more hybrid, which gives greater flexibility, but still involves being within an hour or two drive of an office. Furthermore, for people already living in, say, the Bay Area, they probably have friends and/or family there and it's not like the Bay Area is a hellhole so the default for a lot of people is to stay there, in spite of the high housing prices, rather than move to a cornfield in Iowa.
cellis 4y ago
There are rent seeking local “mafias” in every pocket of the globe you would try this. Companies would rather negotiate with the devils they know ( large cities ) than end up dealing with e.g. unknown, possibly corrupt and rent seeking commissioners,protection agencies,judges,sheriffs,mayors,councils,unions,etc.
pas 4y ago
new cities? where? why? there's plenty of space right there in the bay area, no, not the parks, look up. negative density tax is the way. unfortunately new suburbs are an unsustainable addiction in this regard. it incentivizes everyone for optimizing for cars and backyard-driven life-development.
vineyardmike 4y ago
People want to live near other people, not in empty towns. Other people start businesses they want to work at, cook at restaurants they want to eat at, and play basic at bars they want to frequent. Starting an empty town doesn’t do that. Why doesn’t everyone just stay at home with their parents and just commute into a meta verse version of the Bay Area where everyone can have a fake home?
marssaxman 4y ago
> Why on earth, can't we do that anymore? We used up all the good places.
jxramos 4y ago
I was contemplating something in this direction once. That this concentration in the bay area could very well be driven by the tastes and desires of the CEOs and other execs who are pleased to live in the comfy parts of the bay area regardless of the outcomes of their employees and how much blood is squeezed out of them by the high cost of living and time sunk on commutes. I think it was Elon Musk who made me ponder this. Somewhere he blasted the notion that most of the Silicon Valley venture capital gets blown on housing costs. That made me ponder what other alternatives could be found and what other productive uses that money could have been spent on. It's a fascinating train of thought with big directions it could go. That's an interesting idea about encouraging the subsidization of a town, I'd like to see that experiment tried if it hasn't yet.
ghaff 4y ago
You seem to be asking companies to create company towns--probably with company housing and stores. There's already tons of cheap housing around the US. It's just that a lot of it isn't where many people most want to live.
jwagenet 4y ago
We've been creating new "towns" in the form of subdivisions and planned communities for the better part of a century. They are fine for a generation or two, but the astronomical costs of maintaining their government subsidized services (utilities, sewer, roads, schools, fire, police) stretched thin into a low density area inevitably leads to their decline.
- TimPC 4y ago
  The costs of suburbs aren’t astronomical in the Bay Area. There is a reason Strong Towns and the like always talk about suburbs in Missouri. The suburbs that are unaffordable are the $150K home owned by the household making $40k/year. You can’t charge that person the $8k in property tax you need to upkeep a suburb. Charging $8k on a $2 million home in the Bay Area is a lot more doable. It’s a 0.4% property tax rate which should be achievable. The only barrier to Bay Area suburbs paying for things is California’s neo-feudal property tax laws.
CountSessine 4y ago
Give companies a subsidy So we give existing house owners a subsidy by creating artificial housing scarcity, and then we give companies a subsidy to fix the house owner subsidy by starting new towns? Who pays for this? Productive young people earning income? Again?
pkulak 4y ago
We have run out of flat land along the coasts, and housing everywhere else is already dirt cheap.
rcpt 4y ago
Fordlandia was already tried
philsnow 4y ago
You know the VC question that they ask founders, "why now?"? For any particular location you might want to create a city, ask "why here?". Successful towns have historically been built near some natural resource (rivers, deltas, lakes, mines, forests, etc). Jobs / corporate mini-HQs are not a natural resource.
CalRobert 4y ago
We stopped building real cities when people decided it was more important to be able to park everywhere forever for free than to have nice places.

nouveaux 4y ago

This might be true in an area with gentrificiation but this is unlikely to be true in wealthy areas. Cupertino, as an example, is struggling with the last generation not moving out. The end result is a lower population of kids. https://patch.com/california/cupertino/cupertino-councilmembers-make-unusual-request-school-board https://patch.com/california/cupertino/cupertino-councilmemb...

yongjik 4y ago
This. Many of those vilified "high-paying tech jobs" are young and have school-age kids. I am one of them (well, except I'm not that young), and almost all my friends in the SV area are the same. I go to work and half of the team have a kid or two. It's not tech workers pushing out parents: they want to be parents and settle down. It's old grandmas in three bedroom single houses refusing to move out.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  To be clear, the grandmas can refuse to move out, and it's their right to refuse. What's not their right is to have veto powers over what is built on adjacent properties they don't own.
jxramos 4y ago
Wow, this bit was pretty surprising > The school board had cited declining enrollment, funding issues and voters’ rejection of a parcel tax as reasons for closing the two schools. I'm very intrigued that the Cupertino voters rejected a parcel tax, I've seen so many of those in my town and they all pass. They typically go something like "shall the City of Cupertino collect a parcel tax at rate XYZ for the next ZZZ years to replace aging air conditioning and plumbing and other aging building facilities?".
- rcpt 4y ago
  It's possibly because of Prop 218. One of Howard Jarvis's more insidious laws which requires that local taxes get 2/3 of votes to pass.

kilgnad 4y ago

>Well, before we get into the moral/immoral dimension, the fact is that these areas are growing from net migration in, rather than internal population increase. So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents (and not bringing their own extended families anyhow). How would net migration in push out existing residents? This makes no sense. >This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too? This is true. I would say 1% of the population shares your subjective view, while 99% don't. Literally the OVERALL majority wants cheaper houses while 1% are worried about their rich enclaves having crime go up and getting messier. Yeah as a minority of the population YOU would love to have your imitation-of-the-country-side suburbia stay the same and have good nature and all that but keep in mind it exists because an UNFAIR advantage to a small minority of rich people: YOU. The overall quality of your living standards must go down if you want to be fair. The luxuries you fight to preserve is a literal crime against humanity. This is the only way. But keep in mind if you own a home it's not like you LOSE any part of your home. It's just your neighborhood becomes more populated, that's the main difference.

medler 4y ago

> new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents It is the refusal to build housing that pushed up prices and pushes out parents and grandparents. It’s not the migrants’ fault. Would you rather the migrants simply stay poor where they are rather than seek a better life for themselves and their families. I believe freedom of movement is a fundamental human right. > This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners Nothing is happening “at the expense of the homeowners.” The homeowners are the ones getting rich.

dixie_land 4y ago
> The homeowners are the ones getting rich. If it's not an investment property then homeowners don't get any benefits from higher home value other than a larger tax bill.
- rcpt 4y ago
  How do I buy a house that's not an investment?
  - jonathanlb 4y ago
    Be poor. At least in California, Habitat for Humanity as well as several counties offer BMR (Below Market Rate) housing for people and families just scraping by. The way it works is you purchase the house a certain percentage below market rate, and when you sell, it also has to be a certain percentage below market rate.
    - recursive 4y ago
      If you sell for the same percentage BMR that you bought, the investment attributes remain unchanged. It's all proportional.
      - km3r 4y ago

guardiangod 4y ago

>So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents No one is forcing grandpa to sell his house by rezoning the land (the property tax won't go up due to pro 13). If your argument is that the house will appreciate in value and that grandpa is "forced" to sell his house because he likes money, well I have no argument.

notch898a 4y ago
Grandpa's groceries, medical care, and everything else go up due to increased cost of labor associated with cost of living.
runsWphotons 4y ago
eh these developments often ruin neighborhoods. a few people sell and then a development comes in that ruins the street etc.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  "Ruins" in what way?
  - bagels 4y ago
    Crime, traffic, noise, blight.
    - kspacewalk2 4y ago
      Hire more cops[0], build sane public transit, invest in acoustic insulation and adjust your notions of what 'blight' is, to focus on blight-by-design of cookie-cutter suburbia. [0] https://thecrimereport.org/2022/09/14/the-u-s-is-under-policed-study/ https://thecrimereport.org/2022/09/14/the-u-s-is-under-polic...
      - bagels 4y ago

rmk 4y ago

Communities have rights, and they can be overridden by larger communities that include them. Just as a majority can override the wishes of a minority. In this case, the state of CA, a larger community, has overridden the wishes of pricey Bay Area towns. Los Altos Hills, Atherton et. al. are not sovereigns.

hd95489 4y ago
The people with the majority in money get majority voice.

ambrozk 4y ago

> the atomization of intra-family bonds that seems so immoral to you is actually caused by the migration, driven by underlying economic opportunities and not some NIMBY anti-growth mindset The point is that we have to make a trade-off between free internal migration and NIMBY. If you mix those two ideas together, you get misery. In deciding which is worth prioritizing, perhaps you should consider that free internal migration is a literal bedrock principle of the American state, dating back prior to the Constitution, enshrined legally in the Constitution, on which huge quantities of American legal and economic life have been built for the last 250 years, whereas NIMBY is an ad-hoc political coalition of wealthy homeowners and crotchety neighborhood activists who'd rather no one new get to live in their city.

jcfrei 4y ago

> So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents (and not bringing their own extended families anyhow) Assuming they are renters, how does that happen? Increase in housing will decrease rents, so even if their current apartment / house gets replaced with a bigger one they can just rent something in the same neighborhood? Unless the only reason they can still afford to live in said neighborhood is because of rent control. Having rent control plus very strict zoning laws is the most asinine housing policy. It basically means that after a new neighborhood has been built you just freeze its state eternally - only allowing new people in when one family dies and their kids or some friends move in. The privilege to live in a neighborhood isn't then determined by wealth but by kinship - a harmful form of socialism that calcifies communities.

CydeWeys 4y ago

These areas are only growing from net migration in because the housing there is so expensive that the people from there can no longer keep up, and most of their kids have to move away in early adulthood to establish their own household because they can no longer afford it at early career salary levels like their parents once could. What you are painting as the cause is actually the effect.

ocschwar 4y ago

I'm one of those people who moved to an urban area for a tech job, and yes, my presence here is a part of the problem that drives working class, local born people either out of the region or on to the streets. But I did nothing wrong. The people who actively prevent Boston from building more housing are the reason my presence here is at someone else's expense.

poof131 4y ago

You miss a big piece. These cities all allow new office spaces and thereby new jobs, since that brings in tax revenue. They just don’t allow new housing, so people pay astronomical prices, commute from far away, or live with entire families sharing spaces designed for single people. For an area that claims to care about the environment and the welfare of immigrants, the lack of building is selfish, greedy, and immoral and one of my biggest disappointments about where I grew up. I’m glad to see this being fixed at the state level and state law superseding local law.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
So how moral is the behavior of the companies building/renting offices there, knowing in advance that housing is unaffordable? Only because their investors live nearby?
- syzarian 4y ago
  Instead of talking about morality I think it’s best talk about incentives and try to determine what incentives ought to be in place in order to achieve a desired outcome. For whatever reason, it is the case that building high density housing is not allowed in many locations and the accompanying expense of that is unsustainable. I use “expense” to encompass financial, economic, societal, and environmental costs.
darth_avocado 4y ago
From the article: > Its (Los Altos) zoning prohibits multifamily housing, whether apartments, townhomes or condos, along with commercial stores and shops in the entirety of its city limits. The asymmetry of how cities/neighborhoods interact with each other is what creates the need for interventions like this. Some cities are more than happy to open up commercial and office spaces without allowing additional housing, eating up all the tax revenue, all the while pushing the burden of housing and other infrastructure on others. Meanwhile cities like Los Altos make any commercial development not possible in their neighborhood but will have its residents happily go to other neighborhoods to fulfill their need of a $7 artisanal coffee. Cities like Oakland will try to push high density housing in areas that don’t really add any value, simply because these are rich neighborhoods and you get election votes for doing it, meanwhile, plenty of medium/low income neighborhoods would benefit more from new high density housing with commercial space and the infrastructure upgrades that come from it. There’s all kinds of selfish interests and there needs to be a check on them.

CalRobert 4y ago

For what it's worth I grew up in Northern California. Grandparents lived (one still does!) in Vallejo and worked at Mare Island naval base. My cousins and I grew up in a band from Monterey to Sacramento. Our parents all still live in the homes they had decades ago. But None of our generation live in northern California any more, except for my sister who bought in Sacramento during the recession (she had a state job which made it a lot easier to get a mortgage!) I think that's bad. I'd like to be able to afford to live in norcal. I moved away from California for multiple reasons but one of them was affordability. Also, I hate traffic too! It's a good thing I am not a car! Ideally we could build places like culdesac.com or bloommerwede.nl and allow people to live completely car free. And no, in my view, "communities" do not have rights.

chelical 4y ago

I don't see why "migration, driven by economic opportunities" is a bad thing. Socioeconomic mobility is tied heavily to where you live (proximity to economic centers). I doubt all or even most of the new residents are tech workers. Plenty of working class people come from all around the country move to California or New York. I think the failure to build housing not only disenfranchises those people but also lower / middle income families already living in the area. I find it odd how people can be pro-immigration and anti-migration. Keeping people out of your community is similar to keeping people out of your country.