[HN Gopher] California's affordable housing problem is really a ...
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California's affordable housing problem is really a national one
Author : bryan0
Score : 75 points
Date : 2021-02-15 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| As long as money is relatively cheap (to borrow) for those
| qualified to borrow unaffordable housing is going to be a
| problem.
|
| Cheap and easy loans increase demand. Increased demand increases
| prices. More and more are left out of the market (as buyer), are
| left to become renters (covering the cost of the inflated
| mortgages). Rinse and repeat.
|
| In short: the problem with unaffordable housing is not simply
| solved by raising the minimum wage. In fact, that'll raise
| housing prices further by allowing the market to bear more.
|
| Note: The same can be said of student loans and the cost of
| housing, sans the mortgage/lease bit.
| nutshell89 wrote:
| The problem is that not only is there zero appetite to phase out
| housing-as-investment boosting policies like the mortgage
| interest deduction, imputed rent exemption, and cap gains
| exemption at the federal level, en vogue affordable housing
| strategies have focused on keeping interest rates low, providing
| 1st time home-buyer tax credits, and strengthening fair lending
| regulations.
|
| The U.S.(western nations with high housing costs really) are
| drunk on the housing-as-investment model, and zoning increases
| and / or social housing positive policies will always take a back
| seat when speculative profits are involved.
| opportune wrote:
| I think removing many of these housing discounts would only
| partially impact housing costs, since these affect the majority
| of buyers and most home purchasing decisions are made on the
| basis of the monthly payment. That is, after removing some of
| these policies, people would probably still end up paying the
| same monthly payment, just with lower nominal housing costs.
|
| The bigger issue to me is the constriction of supply. The
| suburban development pattern in many areas is simply unable to
| support the densities needed to manage regional issues well,
| causing traffic issues and forcing people to live very far from
| their places of work. I also have more unpopular opinions that
| there is too much "protected" land in areas like the bay area
| (specifically in the North Bay). Regardless of that, California
| needs to do better to fix the supply problem, because these
| housing policy failures are slowly beginning to affect more and
| more areas outside of just the bay area and SoCal, and the
| measures passed so far just don't cut it.
|
| Also, prop 13 has essentially removed much of the "carrying
| costs" which penalize undeveloped land usage (prop 13 isn't the
| only thing here, IIRC there are also lots of state/federal tax
| deductions you can get from not using land, oddly enough). And
| the low property tax rates across the board really penalize
| young high earners since the low taxes are made up for with
| income/sales taxes.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I think both you and OP have a point. The way it ties
| together is that "owner-occupied housing as a retirement
| plan" creates the political demand for NIMBY supply
| restrictions.
|
| When people have 500% of their net worth tied up in a single
| piece of property, that created _very_ strong incentives to
| lobby for policies that prop up the value of that asset. You
| take away the tax incentives, and the mortgage subsidies.
| People probably still wind up with similar monthly payments.
| But now as a percentage of their wealth, housing becomes much
| less important. A 10% decline in home prices no longer leads
| to a global financial crisis. That makes it a lot easier to
| build a political coalition to increase housing supply.
| nly wrote:
| In the UK mortgage interest deductions were eliminated from
| income tax but it just pushed professional landlords to move to
| holding property in more elaborate incorporated structures
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Thesis of the article: Californians are fleeing California and
| causing the same housing pressure in the spots they flee to.
|
| The real question is whether these other locations can avoid the
| high-density housing NIMBY response that became entrenched in
| California.
|
| It isn't just a matter of income disparity, which the article
| pivots to. It's also a matter of density and demand.
| spamizbad wrote:
| The challenge you have is that people view housing as an
| _investment_. Americans expect their home values to keep pace
| with inflation. And because housing values are so expensive,
| there 's a tremendous amount of psychological pressure to
| "preserve" what they've purchased beyond their own property
| line (eg: "Neighborhood character"). For these reason, they're
| going to oppose any new supply entering the market.
|
| The only way you're going to fix this problem for good is to
| have the government step in and force new housing supply into
| markets, which is going to be _extremely_ unpopular with
| everyone, including most YIMBYs who would favor removing market
| barriers. So it 's a political impossibility - you can blame it
| on Boomers but truth is Americans aren't ready to decomodify
| the housing market.
| majormajor wrote:
| That's not the big challenge. Upzoning and higher density
| increases the value of the land. That's why developers want
| to do it in the first place. Cashing out when someone wants
| to buy up your neighborhood's land, and getting something
| nicer somewhere else, would be the purely-financial play.
|
| The big challenge is that people chose to live in a certain
| place because it had certain features. And people don't want
| to have to move constantly. So folks pushing to _change the
| nature of the areas_ will always cause opposition ( "why do
| we have to leave or change, why can't _they_ go somewhere
| else? ").
| Supermancho wrote:
| > higher density increases the value of the land.
|
| That's a very short curve that quickly inverts. Density of
| commercial land is what converts the sprawl to an
| unprecedented explosion of high-rises in an epicenter. The
| residential density decreases the value of the land after
| it's been fully developed, which is then purchased for
| commercial use and "redeveloped". This happens in most
| cities at some point, where downtown is converted to the
| new "hip" redevelopment of the previous slums.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The big challenge is that people chose to live in a
| certain place because it had certain features
|
| In Germany, the most sought-after features are quality
| mobile ans landline internet, as well as decent public
| transit.
|
| The problem is that our Conservative politicians outright
| sabotaged (Kohl with fibre vs cable TV, Schroder with the
| UMTS frequency auction) or, at best, simply sat doing
| nothing (Merkel) any efforts to improve this situation.
|
| The result? Everyone who can flees for the cities, while
| the rural areas generally only house those "left behind".
|
| And then politicians complain about exploding rents in
| cities or people leaving rural areas... well, d'oh, who
| would have thought young people and modern jobs require
| Internet.
| jandrese wrote:
| It's really impossible to not view your house as an
| investment when you've been paying for it for 30 years and
| have hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in it.
|
| This goes double if your plan is to work till retirement,
| then sell the house and move to someplace more laid back.
|
| So really the local government needs to be willing to tell
| people to pound sand when they hold up new construction. But
| since the local government is made up of those same people
| that's not going to happen.
|
| It is interesting watching movies and TV just how often the
| "evil developer" trope appears. Always trying to buy the
| almost-failed gym/ski slope/TV station/etc... until the
| plucky underdogs win the contest to save their small
| business. Developers are never the good guys. They're always
| the evil gentrifiers who want to let hundreds of families
| invade the quaint little neighborhood with their high rise
| eyesore.
| lisper wrote:
| You're being very unfair here. When you choose a place to
| live you are not only choosing the structure in which you
| reside, you are choosing the surrounding environment as well.
| People's desire to keep the environment from changing too
| much extends beyond financial interests. I live in a quiet
| suburban neighborhood, and I want it to remain a quiet
| suburban neighborhood even if the value of my house drops.
|
| In fact, I would _love_ to see the value of my house drop,
| along with the value of all the houses around me, because
| that would make it easier for me to move locally and improve
| some of the sub-optimal features of my current situation, not
| least of which is that my house is much too big for my needs.
| But I can 't move to a smaller house because the tax hit I
| would take makes it cost more than I can justify. The smaller
| houses around me now cost more than our house did when we
| bought it, so if we move we take both a one-time capital
| gains hit and an ongoing property tax hit. None of that would
| happen if houses depreciated like cars.
|
| UPDATE: Please take note that I am _not_ saying I have any
| kind of _right_ to keep my neighborhood from changing, only
| that my _desire_ to keep it from changing is not purely
| financial. (In fact, in my case, it is the exact opposite!)
| cltby wrote:
| The structure itself does depreciate (ask any landlord!).
| It's the land value that's surging.
| lisper wrote:
| Sure, but the structure and the land are tightly bound. I
| can't buy or sell a structure without also buying or
| selling the land that it sits on, so this is kind of
| irrelevant.
| shuckles wrote:
| One of the advantages of non-single family zoning is
| exactly that it allows us to decouple the two.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Commercial structures often appreciate as an area
| gentrifies and starts using legislation to kick out
| industrial activity in favor of coffee shops and other
| consumer facing stuff. So the facilities (and permission
| to operate them) appreciate like there's no tomorrow.
| shuckles wrote:
| Unfortunately (for you), your desire for a quiet suburban
| neighborhood should not give you the ability to immiserate
| other people who want to live there by prohibiting the
| construction of homes for them. Do you value your quiet
| suburban neighborhood enough to buy and pay property taxes
| on the whole block or subdivision? If not, I recommend you
| look for estates on acreage in remote areas.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Using your logic, you should never immiserate people that
| want to live in your house, maybe even in your bed just
| because you think you paid for it.
|
| Wanting to live in a place that is already occupied does
| not give the right to force people there to rebuild their
| houses into high density places. There is a lot of free
| land in that country where people can build skyscrapers
| with millions of cheap, small living pods inside.
| shuckles wrote:
| I didn't make a single claim about coercing owners of
| private property. In fact, I ended by saying that if you
| want to maintain total control, you should go ahead and
| buy the neighborhoods you want to prevent from changing!
| majormajor wrote:
| You could reframe the opposition as "your money shouldn't
| mean you can just come into our area and remake it
| however you want." Neither side is purely unsympathetic
| here.
| shuckles wrote:
| Was one's single family home a naturally occurring
| building? What gave one the right to build it? Your both
| sides argument sounds plausible but it's not-sensical.
| majormajor wrote:
| That's sorta just how private property works. At some
| point, land was unowned, structures were unbuilt, etc.
| Ever since then, we've put the "rights" in the hands of
| the _current_ owners and /or the government they live
| under...
|
| Short of arguing from a purely socialist or communist
| approach, saying the current owner's preferences matter
| less than the hypothetical would-be future occupants of
| the area is the non-sensical part, I think.
| shuckles wrote:
| And who was compensated when those rights were taken away
| from property owners by the invention of zoning in the
| early 1900s and down zoning in the mid 1900s? In
| addition, you are confusing owning a particular plot of
| land with rights over all neighboring plots. The latter
| is distinctly not your private property.
| majormajor wrote:
| Yes, that's where the government aspect comes in. But
| again, what you decry as "non-sensical" instead seems
| like it could also just be called "response of a
| community towards potential market failure modes." You
| are ascribing moral blame to just one side of a more
| complicated situation. It would be like if all I was
| talking about is how big developers bribe local
| governments to get permits to build their shit - neither
| side is blameless, both sides are understandable, there
| isn't a clear easy answer to "reduce harm."
| shuckles wrote:
| I really don't understand your both sides argument. One
| side takes advantage of the fact that zoning is a local
| matter to advantage incumbents at huge expense to society
| at large. It also creates the bureaucratic infrastructure
| that favors large developers who can pay bribes
| informally (literal bribes) or formally (impact fees).
|
| The other side is all future residents who might want to
| live in a quadplex where a SFH exists today. Those people
| usually pay a large percent of their income in rent and
| "commute til they qualify."
|
| How are both sides understandable? My claim is simply
| that a private individual should be able to buy a lot of
| land in almost any American city and build a quadplex on
| it. This was legal until very recently in our history.
| How will this be the end of the community as we know it?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > huge expense to society at large.
|
| I'm not aware of this. I thought it was a huge expense to
| people who wanted to move to an area at any price, and
| the absence of a huge windfall to people who want to
| build massive apartment buildings in neighborhoods where
| the vast majority of the residents don't want them.
| shuckles wrote:
| One cost estimate of restrictive zoning is almost $9k per
| American worker: https://www.nber.org/papers/w21154
| majormajor wrote:
| If you want to change their minds, and change housing
| policies in major US cities... you may want to try harder
| to understand why people want single family homes, and
| why they don't see zoning as evil. You've got a lot of
| minds to change!
|
| Both sides are understandable to me because those
| hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the
| country to choose from. I don't know why the current
| residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules
| they want. Yes, it's what they want versus what other
| people want... _that 's unavoidable!_ It's the other side
| of the "if you want to continue living in a less dense
| area, go move somewhere more rural (until we pick it for
| densification too)" coin.
|
| Some folks think the tiebreaker here is that cities are
| more sustainable, but that doesn't avoid the problem that
| if you want to move more people into denser housing,
| _some people aren 't going to be able to get what they
| want._
|
| I find both sides understandable because I don't expect
| anyone to be happy when people more powerful than them
| tell them they can't have what they want.
|
| Can you really not understand why someone would be
| unhappy with someone else coming in and saying "I have
| the right to change your life?" Why "well you better be
| rich enough to own the land for the entire neighborhood"
| is a hollow response?
| shuckles wrote:
| Yes, because I think it's absurd to claim that someone
| building a small apartment building on property they own
| down the street is changing my life. In fact, in your
| last claim, the property owner who is exercising control
| over their neighbor's building is the one unfairly
| "changing lives." In addition, developing on my own
| property has little to do with relative power imbalances.
| Who really holds power when I have to bribe my neighbors
| to get a variance to build an ADU in my backyard?
|
| > those hypothetical future residents have the entire
| rest of the country to choose from
|
| This is kind of a silly claim because it suggests that
| the country is an undifferentiated landmass and there are
| no relative benefits of a particular geographic location.
| There are clearly relative advantages to living in a
| place, so telling people they can choose anyplace else is
| not really a choice!
|
| > I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be
| able to expect to make the rules they want.
|
| This is only barely a coherent argument at the
| international levels ("Middle Eastern refugees shouldn't
| be able to decide where to settle in Europe!"). When you
| live within a country with freedom of movement, this is a
| very difficult argument to make. Should I only be allowed
| to vote in places where I am a property owner?
|
| For what it's worth, there are plenty of developing legal
| arguments _against_ local zoning, and California is on
| track to solve its housing issues by having the state
| take control of zoning away from cities.
| lisper wrote:
| > your desire for a quiet suburban neighborhood should
| not give you the ability to immiserate other people
|
| Of course not. I'm not saying I have any kind of _right_
| to keep my neighborhood from changing, only that my
| desire to keep it from changing is not purely financial.
| (In fact, in my case, it is the exact opposite!)
| shuckles wrote:
| Fair enough. Steve Waldman described about this mentality
| pretty well here:
| https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html
|
| This is not as divorced from property values as you
| believe. The features of suburbs you like such as low-
| crime (usually coded as "quiet"), amenities, good
| schools, access to jobs through a quick commute etc. are
| exactly what give them their high value. However, the
| single family home subdivision suburban form cannot scale
| provisioning these amenities to many people. That is
| exactly why suburbs are exclusionary whereas cities need
| not be.
|
| Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property
| values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be
| a nice place to live. The detached houses probably have
| little to do with what you like about your community;
| there are plenty of places in Central California with
| detaches homes, high crime, bad schools, etc.
| lisper wrote:
| > low-crime (usually coded as "quiet")
|
| In my case, quiet is not code for low-crime. I meant it
| literally. I lived for a long time (20+ years) in loud
| neighborhoods with lots of traffic noise and screaming
| kids (literally -- one place I lived was next to a house
| that was used as a day-care center) and mockingbirds
| which kept me up at night because our house had no A/C so
| we had to keep the windows open at night. My mantra,
| literally for decades, mumbled through the mental fog of
| chronic sleep deprivation, was "I want to live someplace
| quiet".
|
| > Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property
| values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be
| a nice place to live.
|
| That is far from clear. I don't live in a cookie-cutter-
| house suburb. I live in the foothills of the Santa Cruz
| mountains in what used to be (in the late 1800s) a
| vacation destination for San Franciscans. If all of
| Silicon Valley were depopulated I think my neighborhood
| would still be a perfectly fine place to live.
| shuckles wrote:
| > I live in the foothills of the Santa Cruz
| mountains...If all of Silicon Valley were depopulated I
| think my neighborhood would still be a perfectly fine
| place to live.
|
| Humboldt Country is a beautiful and high poverty part of
| the state with poor municipal services. I have no reason
| to believe the Santa Cruz wouldn't be the same without
| expensive urban infrastructure, not to mention the money
| we do and need to continue spending to minimize the risk
| of fire to your property.
| lisper wrote:
| > I have no reason to believe the Santa Cruz wouldn't be
| the same without expensive urban infrastructure
|
| Like I said, my neighborhood began as a vacation
| destination for rich San Franciscans in the late 1800s.
| It has been affluent for over 100 years, long before
| Silicon Valley was a thing, in fact, before electricity
| was a thing. There are rich urban areas and there are
| poor urban areas, and there are rich rural areas and
| there are poor rural areas. There is absolutely no
| correlation in general between housing density and
| quality of life. There is, however, a strong and obvious
| correlation between per-capita wealth and quality of
| life. But housing inflation does absolutely nothing to
| promote that.
| shuckles wrote:
| You can't both say "I would be happy if home prices in my
| neighborhood went down" and "I am confident that my area
| will always be one where rich people want to visit." The
| former will only happen if the types of amenities which
| make rich people want to visit go away, at which point
| you likely will want to go away as well.
| lazide wrote:
| He isn't- but if enough others agree that is what they
| want, why shouldn't they be able to? That's literally
| what democracy is!
|
| It's not their responsibility - not anyone's! - to take a
| shot in the nuts so someone else can be happy, despite
| any guilt tripping.
| shuckles wrote:
| This only works if you slice and dice the polity. Who
| says zoning in the Bay Area should be decided by current
| residents? The super commuters from Modesto should
| certainly have a say. So should the families displaced to
| Phoenix or Las Vegas.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| By the same token, nobody living in a residential
| neighborhood should oppose construction of an oil
| refinery in it - The industry would contribute tax
| revenue, jobs etc. to the community and opposition based
| on nebulous "quality of life" concerns is selfish
| shuckles wrote:
| Residential land is far too valuable for someone to ever
| propose an oil refinery or manufacturing on it. The
| separation between industrial uses and residential uses
| were already underway before residential zoning was
| invented, and there is no reason to believe single family
| residential - which is a particular and extremely
| restrictive form of residential zoning - is necessary to
| enforce this kind of basic planning distinction.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| There's a big difference between a power substation and
| an oil refinery. And depending on how that substation was
| built and the decisions made it can really negatively
| impact someone's use of their property. In my case the
| substation our PUD built across the street involved
| denuding the entire area of trees. This is mainly a
| problem because the freeway is right behind the trees
| they removed. So removing the trees made our front yard
| very difficult to inhabit for long periods of time
| because it's so loud. I'm not the only person affected
| either. And I wouldn't object had they built any kind of
| sound isolation.
|
| I wouldn't object to an oil refinery either if they can
| guarantee they won't suddenly explode and kill me while I
| sleep.
|
| The fact remains that we all have to be good neighbors to
| each other, and that cuts both ways.
| zepto wrote:
| "immiserate other people who want to live there"
|
| Perhaps true, but what right do the people who don't live
| in his neighborhood but want to have the right to
| immiserate the people who already live there by building
| high density blocks?
|
| Why do you not recommend those people to look for acreage
| in remote areas?
| shuckles wrote:
| Building apartments is not a pox on a community. In fact,
| the most valuable real estate on the planet has lots of
| apartments. And are you seriously asking why people may
| want to live someplace for reasons other than it being an
| undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community?
| zepto wrote:
| > Building apartments is not a pox on a community.
|
| This is an opinion which is not universally agreed with.
|
| > are you seriously asking why people may want to live
| someplace for reasons other than it being an
| undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community?
|
| No. If you look at the comment you are replying to,
| you'll see that the question I asked was:
|
| > what right do the people who don't live in his
| neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the
| people who already live there by building high density
| blocks?
| lazide wrote:
| And what right do they have to impose on others to change
| and take damaging consequences so they can be happier or
| their life easier without compensating them for it?
| imtringued wrote:
| > but want to have the right to immiserate the people who
| already live there by building high density blocks?
|
| We should start by tearing this building [0] down,
| otherwise everyone surrounding that property will live in
| misery.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/KuFKIfLHhgY
| imtringued wrote:
| >You're being very unfair here. When you choose a place to
| live you are not only choosing the structure in which you
| reside, you are choosing the surrounding environment as
| well.
|
| The expectation that one can settle down and expect their
| city to be built to a finished state which is kept frozen
| in time is an incredibly damaging mindset. City planners
| have to predict what is going to happen in the future
| decades ahead.
|
| People didn't do this 100 years ago. They didn't do this
| thousands of years ago. They did something far simpler.
| They built their city and then they rebuilt their city,
| house by house, incrementally, one step at a time over
| decades to match changing needs.
|
| Here's a talk by Charles Marohn regarding this topic:
| https://youtu.be/Em7nqDqQ8oM
| majormajor wrote:
| > City planners have to predict what is going to happen
| in the future decades ahead.
|
| Current trend: single family houses have shot up in
| demand due to remote work.
|
| So is the prescription "tear down single family houses"?
| Seems like cities that do that are just going to push
| people even faster towards other areas which aren't so
| saturated.
|
| If this trend continues some sort of balancing between
| not just SF/NY but even Dallas/Austin and smaller, more
| rural areas, is inevitable. There just isn't enough land
| for more single family houses in the most popular cities!
| But reacting as if consumer preferences for housing type
| doesn't matter seems like a recipe for putting yourself
| into an even worse position long-term.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If your gains are less than $250K (single) or $500K
| (married-filing-jointly), you've owned it for 2 years, and
| you've lived there 2 of the last 5 years, your gains are
| excluded federally.
|
| In general, the structure does depreciate very slowly (in
| real dollars) and the land appreciates in value (at least
| in desirable areas), typically more than swamping the
| slight depreciation on the structure.
| lisper wrote:
| We live in Northern California. We bought this house at
| the bottom of the 2008 crash. Our gains are considerably
| more than the exclusion limit. (One of the many stupid
| things about the tax code is that the exclusion limit is
| not indexed to time.)
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> The challenge you have is that people view housing as an
| investment. Americans expect their home values to keep pace
| with inflation.
|
| Because real estate appreciation is one of the few ways left
| for people to be able to retire somewhat comfortably after
| working in jobs that pay garbage salaries and having to deal
| with medical costs that are sky high even with what people
| call "insurance".
| Supermancho wrote:
| > For these reason, they're going to oppose any new supply
| entering the market.
|
| Nobody is opposed to new supply entering the market. The
| opposition is 100% about the devaluation of the area, which
| is not about the supply per se. If you wanted to build a
| block up with 500 units which had adequate parking and
| everyone's homes/land would increase in value 5%, you would
| have widespread support. The problem of density is solved
| with substandard buildings that cut corners, alongside the
| increased density in Southern California.
| rhino369 wrote:
| In California, the only reason people can oppose new projects
| is because the government enables them to have a say in
| someone else's property. So you don't have to force
| development, but you do have to remove NIMBY's ability to
| veto projects.
|
| That starts with reforming permitting processes and zoning
| regulations.
| lazide wrote:
| 'Having a say in someone else's property' is really 'voters
| voting for the rules and laws they want'.
|
| As long as the rules benefit most people who vote, why
| would they want to change it?
|
| And right now, that is exactly what is happening - it isn't
| changing because most people who vote are benefitting from
| it. It's a pretty fundamental part of a democracy.
|
| Until either 1) more people who don't benefit from the
| current rules change the rules through voting, or 2) some
| non-democratic (in the sense of not directly answerable to
| an election) institution such as the courts change some
| rules, or 3) someone manages to convince the voting bloc to
| vote against their interests and change the rules, it is
| what is is.
|
| All the handwringing about the situation is just hot air.
| jandrese wrote:
| Of course the people who want to move in don't get a
| vote.
| shuckles wrote:
| Single family zoning, though invented in Berkeley, is a
| national phenomenon.
| [deleted]
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| >>> That's because as bad as California's affordable housing
| problem is, it isn't really a California problem. It is a
| national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development
| sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who've been
| locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing
| issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They've
| already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and
| many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more
| widespread as remote workers move around.
|
| The thesis is that the problem is not limited or caused by
| California, it' a national problem. California and Californian
| expat-related growth are just a particularly glaring example.
| [deleted]
| umvi wrote:
| > Thesis of the article: Californians are fleeing California
| and causing the same housing pressure in the spots they flee
| to.
|
| Anecdotally, it seems true. Utah housing used to be cheap, but
| now in Salt Lake valley the prices are just exploding as tons
| of Californians move to the tech hubs near Lehi and SLC and buy
| up all the houses with cash
| shuckles wrote:
| If your housing market's affordability depended on everyone
| living in the area having low incomes, maybe it's not any
| better than California's housing market.
| asdff wrote:
| Nowhere is building enough housing for growth. In low cost of
| living places, chances are if you look at population data, the
| metro region has been stagnant for decades which has alleviated
| pressure on supply. In any area with growth at all, prices rise
| because we don't build actual dense housing like we did before
| WWII (when row houses and mixed use development in walking
| distance to frequent public transit were the norm everywhere from
| Manhattan to Los Angeles to downtown Boise, Idaho). We build
| either tracts of single family homes by clearcutting wildlands
| adjacent to freeways, or far too little apartments in a single
| 4-5 story building spanning an entire city block.
|
| In comparison to a block of 4-5 story row homes, these apartment
| builds are a compromise and will come back to bite planners in
| the coming decades as construction costs continue to rise. Since
| it's a single building, you can't redevelop this structure
| without leveling the entire block. That makes it impossible to do
| unless you are a deep pocketed development corporation, versus a
| row house that could be owned outright by an individual and
| redeveloped by that individual to meet the market demand of the
| growing city.
| rustybelt wrote:
| As you say some places are growing and others are stagnating or
| shrinking. If every place has a certain capacity to grow given
| the necessary pressure to do so, wouldn't more evenly
| distributed growth reduce the problems caused by the current
| uneven distribution of growth/stagnation/shrinkage?
|
| In other words, how can you say we're not growing fast enough
| when so many places aren't growing at all?
| asdff wrote:
| Because growth isn't even nor can it be, it depends on
| connectivity of an area to relevant features that spur
| further growth, such as industry, jobs, education. There are
| highly specific reasons for growth to happen where it
| happens, and 9/10 it's due to some piece of immovable
| necessary infrastructure that supports a wider region. For
| example, Chicago is the size it is because it is a confluence
| point of freight, first from the Mississippi and the Great
| Lakes, now freight rail. Los Angeles is the size it is
| because the Port of Los Angeles/Port of Long Beach is the
| mouth of all east Asian trade coming into the continent,
| which started a century of industrialization and job growth
| in the area. San Francisco and Boston are innovation centers
| due to the number of high quality universities in these areas
| that continually feed the local talent pool by the year.
| There are plenty of places that are zoned for growth but it
| hasn't happened yet, either. For instance, just across the
| Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles, you have the
| Antelope Valley, which remains relatively depopulated in
| comparison to Los Angeles due to a lack of connectivity to
| very many job centers or much industry, even with roads
| having long been laid for eventual development (1).
|
| 1. https://www.google.com/maps/@34.5617689,-117.9209187,5165m
| /d...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Prices climb because real estate is a vehicle for financial
| speculation, tax tricks, and the exfiltration of pilfered
| wealth by world oligarchs.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > we don't build actual dense housing like we did before WWII
|
| Because that's not what is profitable for new construction.
| Builders will build what they can make the most money on. It's
| not a bad thing -- it's still an increase in housing and every
| new home sold or rented opens up an older home somewhere for a
| (probably) less wealthy person, and so on down the line.
| asdff wrote:
| Builders will build what they are allowed to build, and often
| what is zoned are variances for these massive structures with
| expensive parking structures and requirements like a
| mandatory 100sqft balcony for every single unit, and not
| piecemeal small lot apartments like what was built decades
| ago. Los Angeles in 1920 had a higher zoning capacity than it
| does today. I mean, it was a celebration when the city
| recently let you convert your garage into a tiny studio
| apartment (after a byzantine permitting process), in
| neighborhoods where 50 years ago homeowners were tearing down
| their single family home to be a landlord of a 6 unit dingbat
| apartment spanning the entire 90ft parcel, which is probably
| illegal today according to the zoning code.
|
| If we loosen zoning code, builders would be able to turn a
| profit on a lot more types of housing and would be able to
| meet a lot more market demand. Instead, what they are able to
| make a profit on with the current review and permitting
| process is that bog standard 4 floor apartment above a
| subterranean parking lot with a balcony for each and every
| unit.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Banks are part of the problem too. In Atlanta the city has
| loosened up many of the density restrictions and parking
| requirements only to find developers unable to build dense
| pedestrian focused housing because the banks won't make
| construction loans for those types of properties.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's handy to say "nowhere is building" but it's not really
| supported by the data. Look at Dallas and Houston compared to
| San Francisco. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6Tc
| kwk1 wrote:
| Your quote chopped off an important qualifier present in the
| original comment.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Explain? The fact that the population of greater Houston
| has more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea
| that they are building enough for growth. They've got a
| city the size of Berkeley that didn't even exist 50 years
| ago.
| asdff wrote:
| That's not the case, unless you consider tenement
| conditions acceptable. The working class in these cities
| aren't suddenly affording $2000 in rent, they are simply
| cramming more people and more incomes into smaller
| apartments (1). In Houston over the last 10 years alone,
| some neighborhoods rate of overcrowding has gone up well
| over 100% (2). No, Houston is not building enough either,
| and paying for the population increase by sacrificing the
| quality of life of the overcrowded working poor, and
| pushing the middle class out of the city and elsewhere.
|
| 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/us/los-angeles-
| crowded-co...
|
| 2. https://kinder.rice.edu/sites/default/files/documents/
| KI%20R...
| fossuser wrote:
| > The fact that the population of greater Houston has
| more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea
| that they are building enough for growth.
|
| This isn't enough to support the idea unless prices have
| also not climbed.
|
| The Bay Area population has dramatically increased and
| prices have too because building to support this growth
| has been fought by NIMBYs via bad policy.[0] As a result
| houses on the peninsula have reached insane prices and
| there is little available for new people, see:
| https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-
| Blvd-94306/hom...
|
| Myself and many of my friends (~30yrs old) rent with
| multiple roommates.
|
| The only people that can buy experienced some sort of
| exit event or have a lot of FAANG equity with two FAANG
| incomes. Even then they have to pay property tax on that
| insane value that the NIMBYs don't pay.
|
| Maybe Houston has done a better job, but population
| increase itself isn't much evidence.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_
| shortage
|
| Bad incentives for existing owners to restrict growth
| exist everywhere, but they're particularly bad in
| California because of Prop 13.
|
| The most frustrating bit to me, is that the NIMBYs that
| won the housing lottery and leverage their political
| power to screw everyone else also play victim. I hope one
| day we can pass something that corrects a lot of these
| bad incentives. The new RHNA housing policy and things
| like Sacramento's elimination of single family zoning are
| the way. SB50 and related policy would help too.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I mean, population _is_ pretty good evidence of growth.
| 20 years ago Houston MSA was 15% larger than SF MSA and
| today it's 50% larger. What other evidence of "building
| for growth" can you demand?
| fossuser wrote:
| A ratio of new housing vs. new population.
|
| You can expand sprawl via single family homes and still
| not build nearly enough housing to meet population growth
| requirements.
|
| You can have a lot more population and still build
| little. It just forces people to live in shared housing
| with roommates at very expensive rents.
|
| I'm not arguing that you're wrong about Houston - maybe
| they did build enough. I'm just saying that population
| growth itself doesn't tell you too much.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Here you go: new housing units per 1000s of new
| population for Houston MSA, 2000-present.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6Yd
|
| I exist to serve.
| fossuser wrote:
| That's a cool site, I made a graph that I think
| illustrates my point more clearly:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6ZP
|
| It's the change in population vs. the change in new
| housing with a separate line for each.
|
| It's not super easy to understand because the population
| change is in thousands of people and housing is just in
| individual units, but I think it's clear from the graph
| (if I'm reading it correctly) that Houston is not
| building enough to meet demand. When you mouse over you
| can see the amount of new people and compare it to the
| amount of new housing. There's a lot more new people than
| new housing.
| Thaxll wrote:
| 2M for an ugly house from 1940...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It's $2M for the land, not the house.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Are you actually able to demolish the house?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The only reason one wouldn't be able to demolish the
| house in the US is if it was designated a historical
| landmark, that I know of.
|
| Otherwise, if it's still zoned for a single family home,
| then the owner of the land has the right to deconstruct
| and construct a single family home, per the updated
| building codes and whatnot.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It doesn't sound like you've ever been to California at
| all.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would like to be educated if there's something I'm
| missing. Is there a legal maneuver in CA that can prevent
| people from using their real estate for whatever it's
| zoned for, excluding frivolous lawsuits?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, many jurisdictions in California require city
| permits for demolition and the process for getting those
| permits is by no means guaranteed. In my city after you
| apply for a permit you have to post public notice for 90
| days so your nosy neighbors have a chance to go to the
| "landmarks preservation commission" to argue that your
| dilapidated shack in which nobody has lived for 50 years
| is, in fact, a priceless treasure and an irreplaceable
| piece of the city's identity, an event for which you'll
| need to hire an expensive land use attorney, a historian,
| and a forensic architect. Assuming you miraculously get
| through that part of the process, it certainly is by no
| means assured that you'd get a permit to build another
| home because the development standards are written in
| such a way that "by right" permits don't exist. You need
| a use permit from the city for everything, and for that
| you'll need to go through more public hearings at the
| zoning adjustments board and the design review committee.
| Meanwhile, you and your lawyers and architects will
| probably have to appear again before the full city
| council multiple times because each of the LPC, ZAB, and
| DRC decisions can be appealed to the full council by
| anyone, even if they don't live in the city.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That's sad. The whole use permit thing is confusing:
|
| https://www.sccgov.org/sites/dpd/Iwantto/Permits/Pages/Us
| ePe...
|
| On initial reading, I don't see why land zoned for a
| house would even need a use permit. But then the linked
| "more" website (which goes to blob.core.windows.net?)
| says:
|
| >What is a Use Permit?
|
| >A Use Permit is a discretionary land use approval which,
| under certain circumstances, may authorize a use that is
| not allowed as a matter of right in a particular zoning
| district.
|
| >Is a Use Permit Required?
|
| >Each zoning designation has certain uses which are
| allowed subject to the securing of a Use Permit. These
| discretionary uses are listed in the Use Table ofArticle
| 2 of the zoning ordinance.
|
| The first answer says use permits are for authorizing
| something that's not zoned, and the second answer says
| all uses require securing a use permit, even for the
| zoned designations? Looks like a lot of local corruption.
| Redoubts wrote:
| https://www.sfweekly.com/news/why-a-laundromat-might-be-
| cons...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It's unfortunate that such blatant corruption on the
| local level is allowed to fester. One would hope a court
| somewhere up the chain in the state would come down the
| right side.
| davidw wrote:
| BTW, for people looking for other examples of how to grow,
| who might not like the idea of Houston's sprawl, I've always
| liked this article:
|
| https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-
| your-...
| wonder_er wrote:
| That is a lovely article! Thanks for sharing.
|
| I feel like the US would be better off looking at cities
| around the world that are pleasent, and pattern-matching
| off of that.
|
| Vienna is beautiful. We should do more of what Vienna does.
|
| Clearly tweaking the US's "process" is just moving deck
| chairs on the titanic.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| I've never been to Vienna so I can't speak to it but my
| experience in traveling around the world is that many
| cities have incredible central cities but also have
| sprawling medium to high density suburbs that everyone
| turns a blind eye to. The low density automobile focused
| suburbs of North America might not exist around those
| cities but the denser suburbs still have poor livability,
| especially compared to the central cities they surround.
| davidw wrote:
| Yeah, Vienna is very nice! It doesn't feel like a "Big
| City" at all. I'm partial to the Montreal example in the
| article - it feels the most 'human scale' to me - but
| everyone has different tastes.
| desert_boi wrote:
| Is there a similar source that would let you compare MSAs for
| building of housing units? I'd be interested to see how
| Boise's MSA lines up with the Bay Area. Most Californian
| transplants I'd met growing up in the area were from
| Sacremento/SoCal though.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Does this get you started? Population-adjusted new housing
| starts for both Boise and San Francisco MSAs since 2000.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6Uf
| mpg33 wrote:
| Texas is also a good example of that density only matters if
| there is a land scarcity problem.
|
| There are areas in Canada where building massive towers has
| been premature and also led to increase in costs.
| jandrese wrote:
| Density also matters if you're trying to avoid sprawl. A
| city like Houston basically requires you to own a car and
| drive everywhere, because public transit will never be able
| to keep up with the construction nor will the density be
| high enough to make it economically viable.
| Naac wrote:
| Why did the title get changed from the original NYT title?
|
| "The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis."
| dang wrote:
| We changed it because it was baity. This is in the site
| guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| When we do that, we try to replace the title with
| representative language from the article itself (https://hn.alg
| olia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). There's
| nearly always something--if not a subheading, then a sentence
| in the article body--that neutrally summarizes the article.
| (The latter was the case here.) Doing this rather than making
| up titles ourselves lets the content speak for itself, and in
| the case of big media articles is probably closer to the
| author's intent, since authors don't write headlines.
| Naac wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation, and for the all the effort you
| guys put in moderating the site.
| rayiner wrote:
| People focus on the supply side, which is important, but has
| anyone looked at the demand side? How do people have so much
| money to drive up these prices?
|
| I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house, built in 1950, my
| parents bought for $175,000 in 1989. Today Redfin has it at
| $660,000. Its a drab house in a drab suburb of DC. It's no boom
| town--the population of the town has grown just 10% in 30 years.
| But everyone just has so much more money now (and I guess
| interest rates are low, so people have a lot of credit).
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| Everyone talks about the billionaires soaking up the windfall
| for the last 40 years, but really it's the upper middle class
| that's leading the charge here.
|
| Massive wealth inequality in this country is being driven by an
| increasingly prosperous upper middle class [0].
|
| [0] https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-dangerous-
| separation-...
| harryh wrote:
| 175k to 660k in 32 years is only a 4.25% increase per year.
| That's really not much at all.
| nutshell89 wrote:
| The access to cheap credit drives up the price of the
| underlying asset. You can see it in auto loans, where the
| average price of a new vehicle has ballooned to over $40,000 in
| recent years while loan payment periods stretch to 5, 6 and
| even 7 years.
|
| Part of the increase is no doubt because new cars are getting
| larger, safer, and more technologically complex -- but I think
| that part of it is that auto-makers have less of an incentive
| to control costs if their margins increase.
| leetcrew wrote:
| this isn't quite the same. if you compare like-for-like as
| much as possible (eg, base 2000 honda civic vs 2020 civic),
| msrp for new cars has not kept pace with inflation. adjusted
| for inflation, the price of an entry-level car has fallen in
| the last twenty years (even as the lowest end cars have
| become far more capable, safe, and efficient).
|
| easy access to credit may have increased the average price
| paid for a new vehicle (by shifting buyers up-market), but
| unlike in the case of housing, this does not deprive buyers
| of the chance to buy a cheap car. people buying bmws on 84
| month loans doesn't mean you can't get a brand new versa for
| $15k OTD.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I feel like I got served an appetizer and a small dessert, with
| no main course in between.
|
| California has a housing crisis in some cities. Californians are
| moving out of those cities. The cities that they're moving into
| are experiencing an increase in demand (directly restating the
| previous). That's pushing up prices (not shocking), which is
| preventing some people with less money from outbidding people
| with more money (also not shocking).
|
| Conclusion: Single Family Zoning is bad, but only a few places
| have been enlightened enough to limit or ban it.
|
| OK, maybe, but strikes me as an argument from declaration of
| opinion rather than a logical conclusion from the priors.
|
| The only thing new I learned from this article is a rough
| estimate of how much higher an ex-Californian's budget is on
| average, which was novel but hardly surprising.
| kodah wrote:
| > The only thing new I learned from this article is a rough
| estimate of how much higher an ex-Californian's budget is on
| average, which was novel but hardly surprising.
|
| My story related to this: Californians (and other comparatively
| rich people) moved to Dallas, TX in droves and outpriced an
| already saturated housing market. This was happening far before
| COVID but I think it was really mostly talked about in the
| circles of state to state income inequality which is largely
| ignored. When you have loans like the FHA or VA loan this means
| while you may be qualified for a loan, you'll never actually
| get a house _near where you work_ in big cities. Instead, you
| 're forced to buy in towns that are increasingly far away from
| these cities.
|
| As someone who has been through this nightmare I don't think
| "Single Family Zoning is bad, but only a few places have been
| enlightened enough to limit or ban it" is the right conclusion
| or even near it. Generally speaking, remote work can help
| alleviate this problem because then you remove the problem that
| I experienced which is that I was driving 2.5 hours to and from
| work every day.
|
| Some other things that I've read is that these people also
| destabilize the cost of goods in enough quantity. The outcome
| is that communities that have seen decades of development will
| soon price out the resident who paid for its development in
| taxes only to reward people who are taking advantage of
| inequality.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > The outcome is that communities that have seen decades of
| development will soon price out the resident who paid for its
| development in taxes only to reward people who are taking
| advantage of inequality.
|
| Sounds like the plight of poor people from developing/poor
| nations who have to contend with people from developed/rich
| nations.
| kodah wrote:
| > Sounds like the plight of poor people from
| developing/poor nations who have to contend with people
| from developed/rich nations.
|
| Could be. What's your suggestion?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Nothing. Might makes right is the way nature works.
| People that harvest cocoa in Africa can't afford to eat
| chocolate. It's the same situation between rich/poor in
| the US.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| > Single Family Zoning
|
| It is bad and yet is one of the only housing types that
| satisfies a lot of needs.
|
| Multi-unit housing has the following list of annoyances:
|
| 1. Far more available to rent than to own. Some states such as
| CO have some weird insurance related laws that makes selling
| condos more of a liability than leasing apartments. 2. Often
| not cheaper on a sqft basis so you are paying more for less. 3.
| If it is for sale, there is often a hefty monthly HOA or Condo
| fee that increases with inflation/time. 4. Small parking lots*
| 5. Often up a few stories which make even moving groceries a
| hassle and moving furniture a real pain. 6. Noise from
| neighbors and rules/limitations when you can do noise
| generating things. 7. No garage/workshop area means repairing
| bikes and cars is a real hassle or you are paying someone else
| a lot of money to do it for you. 8. Dramatically less privacy
| and legal rights as far as what you are allowed to do to your
| property. 9. Almost always closer to roads and other noise
| producing things. 10. Neighbors are a far greater
| presence/annoyance in your life than even just living in the
| suburb. This has the added effect of reinforcing affluence/poor
| areas; buying a house in a poor/bad area is not nearly as risky
| as living in an apartment in a poor/bad area.
|
| Really the only advantage of living in higher density housing
| is the access to public transport, city centers, and the lack
| of maintenance you have to do to maintain the property. The
| good news is that a lot of people don't mind the above
| annoyances so building more high density housing has the
| benefit of making every type of housing cheaper. Its also
| possible that in large enough cities, apartments can be found
| larger & more noise insulated than in suburb/low density areas
| (at least I sure hope so).
|
| Essentially, does a single family home replacement exist? Town-
| homes are pretty close to satisfying the above list and are a
| lot more dense than SFH but are they dense enough to solve the
| scarcity problem?
| shuckles wrote:
| California has a statewide housing crisis. Most cities in the
| country also have their own housing crises.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >Most cities in the country also have their own housing
| crises.
|
| No they don't. The ones that do are the ones who's housing
| market is all jacked up by California money that wants off
| the sinking ship.
| asdff wrote:
| The Midwesterner shouldn't fear the Californian. That's a
| boogyman. The Midwesterner however, should have a real fear
| of their fellow wealthy Midwesterners, who will go from one
| house to 2.5 on average after their children come of age
| and outbid the middle class midwesterner for the limited
| housing stock available in predominantly single family home
| cities.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I specifically said "california money" on purpose.
| shuckles wrote:
| "If you ignore all the cities people want to live in, the
| remaining don't have a housing crisis."
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| There's half a dozen or so big east coast cities that are
| expensive. Nevertheless you can find $200-400k houses
| 1-1.5hr out (half that if you're willing to sacrifice
| having a big yard) and rents are blue collar levels of
| affordable despite those cities being some of the most
| expensive (basically second to CA).
|
| The "housing crisis" is unique to California and markets
| that are jacked up by California money that wants off the
| sinking ship. I know a lot of those people want to
| believe that everyone is doing it just as wrong as they
| are but if you fire up zillow and start looking at the
| suburbs of Cleveland, Buffalo, Montgomery, and all the
| other places that wealthy people leaving places like CA
| like to deride as dead or dying it becomes immediately
| apparent that they're affordable.
|
| Edit: I was a moron to even reply to you. Based on
| everything else you've said on this topic we will not see
| eye to eye and nothing productive will come of this.
| shuckles wrote:
| Having people drive til they qualify is a sign you have a
| housing crisis. Give me the name of some cities where
| home prices have tracked inflation in the last decade.
| Even better, tell me how Cleveland's suburbs have a land
| use regime that's any better than California?
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| Why would you expect home prices to track inflation in an
| environment where mortgage rates went from 4.76% to
| 2.74%?
|
| I'd expect home prices to be bid up by an incremental
| amount over inflation in such an environment, as the
| monthly principal and interest payment for $100K borrowed
| at 4.76% is the same as for $128K borrowed at 2.74%.
| That's an additional 2.5% of house price inflation per
| year.
|
| [0] - http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/pmms30.html
| shuckles wrote:
| Fair enough. For the reason you pointed out, prices of
| ownership are not the right metric. Replace "home prices"
| with "rent index" and my point still stands.
| majormajor wrote:
| Demonizing single family houses seems rather dated in 2021.
| Single family home prices are surging in much of California too
| (while apartment prices and condo prices... not so much!), it's
| not just "everyone is fleeing!"
|
| California was short on both types of housing - what has
| changed is that it is in _even higher demand_ now! And if
| remote work continues after COVID, that will continue.
|
| Add to that more efficient electric cars + more self-driving
| capabilities, and I think the demand pendulum will continue to
| swing back towards sprawl.
|
| You also have a bunch of millennials still in child-bearing age
| ranges who are getting around to that.
|
| You won't fix a single family home demand surge by replacing
| single family homes with other things.
|
| "How will we make sprawl work better than it has in the past"
| seems a more useful question.
| Guest42 wrote:
| From my observations it seems as though many houses and
| apartments are intentionally left empty and one possible
| approach towards improving housing availability is to
| disincentive this practice by increasing property taxes on
| those.
| dorchadas wrote:
| Not necessarily California specific, but more in touristy
| spots: They're also being let out on AirBnB to short term
| tourists. It's done a huge number on available housing in
| many markets. Dublin, for instance, say the long-term
| rental supply _double_ from August of 2019 to August of
| 2020 because of all the AirBnB residences looking to keep
| making money and thus returning to the long-term rental
| market. Hopefully they 'll stay on that market (and more
| will follow), and AirBnB can disappear.
| jeffbee wrote:
| People don't buy houses because they have children, they
| gather both children and houses because they are prosperous.
| Millenials (some of whom are now past their child-bearing
| years) and younger generations won't just get houses because
| of the inexorable march of time. First they'll need money.
| subpixel wrote:
| Actually, there is an inverse relationship between
| prosperity and child-bearing.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Only if you make improper global comparisons. Within
| comparable American populations, wealth is positively
| associated with fertility.
|
| "Examining data from 1985 to 2007, Lovenheim and Mumford
| use short-run home price variation over time within
| cities as their shock to family wealth. They find that a
| $100,000 increase in the value of one's home results in a
| 16% increase in the probability of having a child."
|
| https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_0
| 026...
| sokoloff wrote:
| So, among the slice of the population wealthy enough to
| own a home and have a difference of +$100K in equity vs a
| control group, there's a modest positive correlation of
| having _at least one child_.
|
| That's not entirely rejecting that across Americans the
| curve could rise at the lower end of "prosperity" as
| well. Which, according to this study, it does and average
| number of children decreases almost perfectly steadily
| with increasing decile of lifetime earnings (see Table
| 2): https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~scholz/Research/Kids%20and%
| 20Wealt...
| sokoloff wrote:
| Houses are linked to prosperity. I have doubts that
| children are overall linked to prosperity.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you believe that fertility is negatively associated
| with prosperity, then the idea that people will buy these
| houses because they have children is _especially_ wrong.
| majormajor wrote:
| But will they _want_ those houses, though...
|
| The crisis described here is that more people want them
| than can get them. So if the trend is that more people
| will want standalone houses _specifically_ , versus just
| any sort of housing unit, proposed solutions that reduce
| the supply of them are bound to backfire for areas that
| implement them.
|
| Basically: is this the start of a different era in terms
| of demand profiles, driven by remote work, or is this
| just a short-term bubble?
| jeffbee wrote:
| But why are we treating fertility as exogenous, rather
| than as a choice? Fertility is not exogenous.
| Demographers are predicting a 15% decline in live births
| in 2021 in the US, because women are choosing against
| pregnancy. It is long-studied and well-known that
| unemployment also depresses fertility. The idea that
| people will have children and buy houses just because
| they turn 30 is silly. They will not have children and
| they will not buy houses unless the environment in which
| those appear to be rational choices is established.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I do believe that (see my other response to you). I don't
| believe that people buy houses because of children. I do
| believe they _want to buy them_ because of children. I
| believe they actually buy them because /when they can
| afford them and prefer to live in a house they own over a
| rental. (Plenty of people have kids in rental housing, of
| course.)
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| I've been looking at housing prices periodically and it's
| discouraging to find people wanting 200k-300k for mid-century
| houses in places you'd never find another job if the
| telecommuting trend ever reversed and so far it is just a trend
| driven by forced circumstances. Companies may be all for remote
| working while the alternative is shutting down, but what happens
| after the pandemic? Does everyone get recalled to the nearest
| office the first down quarter? Does your New York salary turn
| into a New Mexico salary to prop up profits?
| topspin wrote:
| > Does everyone get recalled to the nearest office the first
| down quarter?
|
| No. The habits of the past were only viable because everyone
| was indulging them. Those habits have been broken. Whether it's
| the lower cost of operation due to not squandering money on
| unnecessary facilities or the greater pool of talent available
| to those that accommodate remote workers or the business
| continuity advantages of a workforce that can continue to
| function despite this and inevitable future infectious disease
| problems remote work is here to stay. Those businesses that can
| leverage remote work will outcompete those that might but
| don't.
| leetcrew wrote:
| we are living in a volatile time right now. I too am
| considering buying a house and/or finding a different job. but
| unless you have a large appetite for risk, the prudent move is
| to wait for things to stabilize a bit. I think within a year or
| so we should have a better picture of where the remote trend is
| going.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| It's an urban problem.
|
| No one is short of space in bumfuck, nowhere. The jobs are all in
| cities. Workers need to be in cities. Commuting by car isn't
| viable on a large scale. Other forms of commuting require
| investment (building rail etc) and governments won't do that.
|
| So house prices spiral.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > The jobs are all in cities. Workers need to be in cities.
|
| This is beginning to change and the pandemic quickened the
| pace. If Starlink comes online and works as promised it will
| further speed up the process.
|
| I think there are many people who live in a crowded city only
| because that's where the office is and would chose to live
| elsewhere if it were possible.
| asdff wrote:
| There are also plenty of people who spend way more than they
| should on a home in a good school district. In fact, a lot of
| people opt to trade a good commute to work just for that.
| It's not as simple as "move to the middle of nowhere." School
| from home clearly doesn't work for a lot of children, given
| how many private schools have been skirting the rules and how
| many parents were/are desperate to find an in person tutor
| during this pandemic.
| [deleted]
| cwbrandsma wrote:
| Where I live used to be bumf*ck, nowhere. Hardly anyone could
| point it on the map, usually thinking it was in an entirely
| different part of the country. Even if someone did know of the
| town, the normal respone was "why would anyone want to live
| there". Now it is the city featured in this article, and has
| doubled in size since I've lived here. Even the big town where
| I grew up, Twin Falls, ID, whose only actual claim to fame is a
| failed jump by Evil Knievel, has more than doubled in size over
| the last 20 years.
| imtringued wrote:
| I agree that availability of jobs is the driving factor of
| migration. There are lots of decaying towns with no hope of
| recovery. However, the children that were born there did go to
| college. Their best option is to go somewhere else and it would
| be foolish of them to not set their aim high and to at least
| try their luck in one of the bigger cities.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| Long ago: let's go West
|
| Now: let's go East
| mmaunder wrote:
| If you could animate it the flow might look like it bounces off
| the west coast and heads back inland. Technically, cities are
| infestations of humans.
| tqi wrote:
| Why is this always framed as a problem caused by people looking
| for a place to live?
|
| I moved to SF for a job. I'm not the one who decided to not build
| enough new housing for 30 years. I'm not the one who decided to
| approve all those new office buildings. Yet I was the problem for
| renting an overpriced apartment from an SF native who bought in
| the 90s, and now pays less than $8K/yr in taxes on a place worth
| over $1M. And now I'm still the problem if I decide to leave?
| Guest42 wrote:
| I find it pretty ironic that in Idaho they would oppose a
| scenario that is aligned to "free market" principles and that
| Oregon would oppose immigration. I once took a job in Portland
| and had stuff thrown at my car because of the CA license plate
| along with screaming "go back to your own state."
|
| Opinions change very quickly once they involve people
| personally.
| zippergz wrote:
| I've lived in several US cities over the course of my life, and
| the only constant is that whoever you talk to, the problems are
| caused by the people who moved there after them.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Affordable housing is a misleading term used for a few different
| situations: unless the problem is well defined, there is no
| proper solution.
|
| if affordable means anyone should own a house, no matter the
| income or lack of - that is utopia. If affordable means cheap
| enough that lower third income bracket can still afford a house,
| there are solutions - high density blocks of flats like we have
| all over in Europe. But if you want cheap houses in the middle of
| an upscale neighborhood, that is nonsense.
|
| The size of the house is an inverse of the income even in Europe:
| people who can afford live in single homes or lower density
| constructions, the people that cannot afford that live in high
| density places, but you cannot build a couple of towers in the
| middle of a low density neighborhood, it was tried in UK and
| failed miserably for everyone.
| imtringued wrote:
| You're not supposed to build towers. You're supposed to
| incrementally upzone neighborhoods over time. detached single
| family housing to row houses, row houses to 2 story apartment
| buildings, 2 story apartment buildings to 3-4 story apartment
| buildings and so on.
|
| Building big towers does work, but only if they are surrounded
| by other, slightly smaller towers.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Incremental:
|
| Take an R-1 neighborhood. Don't necessarily allow 10 floor
| buildings, though that wouldn't be the end of the world.
| Maybe allow 25% of houses to be turned into duplexes, even
| less of a change than row houses. That alone would increase
| units available.
|
| Humor: The famous Painted Ladies, a block of Victorians in
| San Francisco, one end of the block has a 7 floor apartment
| building.
| asdff wrote:
| We are so behind the eightball in regards to how much housing
| capacity has been built that we really need to drop the 2-3-4
| story apartment and go straight to 40 story towers in a lot
| of places. I think people on this board think we are at some
| comfortable stasis in housing right now; we are not. Working
| class families in cities like LA might be cramming five
| bodies and three incomes in a one bedroom apartment. The
| tenement conditions made famous by 1800s NYC have never
| really gone away for the working poor.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/4OI1H
| pirocks wrote:
| I would argue this isn't a California problem or a national
| problem. It's a global problem. Example: Hong Kong. In Hong Kong
| the government funds itself in large part through property
| ownership. They are therefore incentivised to make housing as
| expensive as possible. The result is predictable. I would argue
| that in democracies this will remain a problem as long as the
| majority of voters benefit from high housing prices. When
| combined with rent control you don't need to own property to
| benefit from high housing prices, since you are likely paid as if
| you where paying market rate rent. I don't really see any
| practical solutions. Work from home might change things a bit but
| I'm pessimistic, since lots of people want to live near stuff,
| which requires living near other people, which means someone has
| an inventive to raise prices. Perhaps boomers cashing out all
| there housing at once might help things.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Hong Kong has a very limited territory to build on, while most
| of the USA is free space. Yes, you are right on the bad
| government incentive.
| pirocks wrote:
| > Hong Kong has a very limited territory to build on, while
| most of the USA is free space. Yes, you are right on the bad
| government incentive.
|
| Hong Kong has limited space but aren't utilizing it well.
| Tons of it is empty. See the pie chart here:https://www.pland
| .gov.hk/pland_en/info_serv/statistic/landu....
| mjevans wrote:
| Renting sucks. There's no stability, the expectation that you'll
| be priced out of a place, and none of the money or time you
| invest in anything there is truly yours.
|
| 'Single family' dwellings tend to have a small bit of yard space
| (not directly a plus for me), an air-gap with other units that
| helps with some noise abatement, and sometimes a choice of
| utilities (like Internet). There's room to park the nomad-mobile
| (the car that's required for efficient traversal of the many
| suburban wastelands and the gaps between cities).
|
| If you own, rather than rent, you're able to change and modify
| many things.
|
| There are still issues of BBQs, intense dryer scent bombs, and
| smokers. Parties, loud vehicles, and other annoyances too.
|
| +++ my own ideal solution criteria +++
|
| * Able to own * Able to modify inside the walls * Privacy of
| noise isolation * Privacy of fresh air * Internet choice (#1) *
| Parking included (#2)
|
| The privacy issues I see most easily resolved by requiring
| mechanical isolation spaces, similar to the old wetwalls, between
| units, above and beneath as well. My ceiling should not be
| directly hanging off of someone else's floor. The extra
| mechanical space also allows room for proper ducting of intakes
| and exhausts to allow a building intake of fresh air through a
| common filtration unit, and exhaust through a similar scrubber
| unit to remove particulate matter and minimize ecological
| pollution.
|
| #1 Internet choice would happen after the last mile. The last
| mile being municipal fiber to ethernet links, and transit at high
| speed for base taxpayer cost to 2-3 peering points out of the
| local set. Real choice would be offered by competition at those
| locations. Peering points might be likely at government command
| and control centers (city hall, police hq, fire stations), or
| temples of information worship (libraries, schools, post
| offices?).
|
| #2 Parking is the terminus of the inter-city and inter-state
| interlink that currently exists. This doesn't have to be per
| building. A 'cave of steel' like city could have interfaces
| (parking garages) at the edges, ideally with monitored space,
| even small storage boxes (garages) for cars. Naturally these
| would also be cargo terminals and there'd be a good transit
| system between them and everyplace within the city. This would
| require urban planning, mass transit and/or people-mover belts,
| and maybe an electric cargo drone delivery system. BTW, wouldn't
| an electric cargo drone delivery system be a lovely civic
| infrastructure aid? Completely eliminates the most annoying
| aspects of all current delivery services.
| nutshell89 wrote:
| Sort of a counterpoint to renting vs. owning housing, I've
| rented for the last 8 years. I don't have to worry about the
| constant home-ownership surprises my parents have had to deal
| with (renovations, pests, upkeep), I've been able to move to
| improve my commute with each job change, and I've made friends
| with each successive move.
|
| I have given up stability, but the price to rent ratio in my
| city points far in favor towards renting, and I've mostly been
| able to invest the income that would have gone towards a
| mortgage in the stock market.
|
| Edit: I've moved 5 times in the last 8 years not including a
| temporary move back to my parents' during the pandemic.
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