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Which is to say that prop 13 needs to be repealed or annulled before any other sort of sanity is going to happen (and maybe that's not happened but, hey, there you go).
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.
That's why every city needs to contribute. The ones that aren't are literally leeching off of neighboring cities.
Why does only the center have to take on the burden of becoming 10% more dense? Why can't every city increase its housing supply by 10%?
That's literally not true. Human density can go far beyond what SF has. In fact, you could fit a lot more people in SF with only part of the city getting higher density.
The idea that each city should "do it's part" has no basis in sane urban planing. We know the current distribution of density isn't useful and this more or less just makes it permanent.
What beats me is why Prop 13 applies to commercial properties and investment homes.
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.
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.
Same story for global warming. The current developed nations got rich (and still getting richer) by burning fossil fuels. But the ones that are trying to grow now are stuck.
Four options: 1. We’re doomed and stuck where we are, 2. Power struggle, 3. New tech provides an out, 4. Voluntary improvement via negotiation.
I’m hoping 3 and 4 work fast.
http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
Very depressing take on things, but ultimately I believe it proves that #1 is the only possibility. When it was written perhaps #2 was possible.
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.
Currently, not only does the existing homeowner have to pay less taxes (if prices increase over 2% YoY), but later when they sell their house they can cash in the entire difference. That doesn't seem fair if the entire point of Prop 13 was to protect retirees from being kicked out of their house. So instead, make it so that when the house is sold they have to pay in backtaxes all the difference between the FMV based tax and what they actually payed from any profit they are making on the house. Also stop all means of being able to pass the house between generations without re-assessment (that is currently possible in many states in CA).
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.
Big Tech was established when much of that area was literally little bits separated by fields and farmland.
I think our living spaces are more important than industry, if we need more housing for Googlers etc. well, there's tons of room in Cali. There are even many areas amenable to more density, it's just not SF or Palo Alto.
I'll bet that in Oakland it's much more possible to build semi-high buildings and fairly dense, modern 4 story buildings for the middle class, it's just that fewer people want to live there.
I wonder if Apple and Google get together and bought a large plot of land south of Morgan Hill, they could build a mini city to house 500K people and frankly run the gauntlet of whatever they wanted in terms of setting the rules, and there are at least 500K migrants who'd be happy to live there.
Imagine 'Facebook Campus' but now, your home as well. What's Orwellian to you and I would probably be fine for others. And of course, less cynically, it wouldn't need to be like that either.
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/fertili...
Is that the case anywhere in the world? Why single out the Bay Area.
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-housi...
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
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.
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.
Is it really failing if it’s intentional?
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.
Stopped reading at this part. What an ignorant thing to say.
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.
Economics is like the "race by proxy" get out of jail free card.
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.
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?"
That's not true at all: 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.
This isn’t middle income. Entry level FAANG is already high income, never mind senior software engineer.
