Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need.
> Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are continuing to choose the interests of those who are rich or who already own their homes over the interests of the struggling middle and working classes.
At what point though can we declare the choice has been made and just lean in to whatever conclusion has been decided?
It seems like we’re always stuck in an indecisive state of choosing between the interests of the wealthy and the interests of the struggling, and we can never get out unless we make the “right” choice (which is always implied to be the interests of the struggling)
Maybe the choice has already been made, and people just don’t like the outcome. What then? Barring a massive catastrophe or economic downturn I don’t see the Bay Area housing problem getting better in my lifetime.
> The homeowners aren’t selfish, they are motivated. Why would they act against something that would clearly devalue them?
That isn't actually what happens -- and the misunderstanding is what causes so much of the conflict.
If you rezone for high density, the price per square foot goes down, but the price per acre goes way up -- because suddenly developers will pay you a mint for your land so they can knock down your house and build a high rise there.
The people who theoretically lose out are the people who own property way out in the suburbs, because most people won't want to live there and spend two hours in traffic every day once they can afford to live in the city. But even they don't really lose out because now they can afford to live in the city and the value of not having to sit in traffic every day is worth more than what they're losing on their house.
The whole thing is just a huge misunderstanding. A cynic might suggest the narrative was devised by the banks to drive up mortgage loan principal amounts. Or the car companies to keep people from living in places with viable mass transit.
It's a death spiral waiting to happen. Companies will move away from areas where their employees can't get hosting. Not many have to move before the rest start to follow, and the speculative part of the home valuations disappear.
Either they let the pressure out gradually or the thing is going to pop.
> Companies will move away from areas where their employees can't get hosting.
And if that happens in even a small degree, housing prices will drop, relieving the problem. It's only a problem if their is a sharply threshold where below which no one moves out, but just above which lots of companies do. That's not entirely implausible, but it's not all that probable.
> Not many have to move before the rest start to follow
That right there is the highly speculative part; if it's true, you have an out of control positive feedback loop, but otherwise it's a self-controlling negative feedback loop.
They have been saying that for years, and instead the opposite has happened. Most IT work could be done remotely, yet the vast majority of companies want staff on site. Almost every job I have had has involved distributed teams yet I am still expected to be in an office most of the time.
Has that ever panned out in practice? I mean, has a city economy in the US or somewhere else in the world ever popped because of too high housing prices?
The future of the Bay Area will be outsourcing lower waged jobs that also includes software engineers, QA staff, administrative, etc. to other areas of the state or country where cost of living is less expensive. It's already happening, just ask around.
Again, because the value turned around by SWE peeps etc. for tech companies has an actual cap. You can't pay a QA/SW engineer $500k/year just so they can afford live in the Bay Area. They'd have to be one hell of a QA/SW engineer if that was the case. I just don't think it's worth it for tech companies at some point.
After all that happens, the jobs left here will be primarily managerial; c-level execs, product managers, business analysts etc.
Those too, if the housing situation doesn't improve, will be outsourced to lower cost of living areas as well.
Again, it's inevitable given the numbers.
Much of the wealth being generated in this area is being sunk back into real estate. The high wages in tech in the Bay Area are high because they're subsidizing a corrupt housing market.
Eventually the only people left in the Bay Area will be executives and really high-paid lawyers.
Those are not all executives and high-paid lawyers.
One of the biggest reasons why a 1300 sq.ft. house in Sunnyvale now sells for $2M is because a lot of engineers are perfectly capable of paying for it.
In my tract, 5 houses out of 35 have changed owners in the past years (it's a neighborhood with lots of first owners who are now in their eighties). I've talked to all the newcomers.
Without exception, they are dual income engineering families who work for Google, Facebook, Apple and some other tech giants.
That's $400k income per year and plenty to cover a $1.725M 30 year 4.1% mortgage payment of $8500 per month.
Right, and the parent was specifically pointing out that it's unsustainable to pay that median (the parent used $500k as a made-up but plausible future value).
I'm pretty happy with the salary that I make as a SF-dwelling/working software developer, but I recognize that it's absolutely insane when compared to same-industry salaries in locations with less ridiculous housing markets.
At some point, companies are going to throw in the towel and decide it just doesn't make financial sense to pay their employees that much just for the privilege of being located in the bay area. Then the jobs move away and you end up with a local recession. This will be hard to do initially for companies sized like Google or Facebook, but a ton of smaller companies can open offices elsewhere and slowly transition staff away. They're already doing it, even.
So, Google pulled down 9.9B in profits last quarter. That means if they've got 88k employees, they could hand out somewhere around an EXTRA $450k to every single employee every year and still be in the green.
Facebook looks roughly the same.
The leverage of a software engineer to produce money is really quite astounding when you get them in large herds.
I'm pretty sure the Bay Area is going to be just fine.
> Eventually the only people left in the Bay Area will be executives and really high-paid lawyers.
I don't think that's sustainable. This is called working your way so far up the supply chain that you pop off the top and fall out.
Eventually the entire supply chain below you collectively asks the question: "Why are we paying these people? What do they do anyway?" Then the supply chain starts looking for ways to wiggle out from under you.
If density increases the people who will benefit the most are current landowners. If you have single family home on a big lot, its value will go up many times if you can suddenly build an apartment building on it.
Most current home owners have no interest in selling to a developer or developing ourselves. We just want to continue live in conditions that were present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street.
Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to improve affordable housing.
The conditions do change though, even if the buildings don't: you'll gradually be surrounded by different people as prices climb and climb. Perhaps, sooner or later, they'll look down on you as the undesirable they don't want nearby.
No, it frequently does have to do with the inhabitants. That's why you saw Forest Hill homeowners kill an affordable housing development because "the new development would house 'severely mentally ill' and 'severely drug addicted' people" [1].
You buy a house in a nice neighborhood with nice single family houses and well kept gardens and very little traffic. You like it that way. You pay a lot for that.
You don't like it when some of those houses are replaced by an apartment complex.
The part where the person thinks they have some right to tell others what to do with their properly-zoned property while simultaneously refusing to pay for that right?
Woah. Someone said "all homeowners benefit from increased density in their neighborhood". Tom replied that as a homeowner he didn't feel he benefited from increased density, and explained why.
He didn't tell anyone what to do. What are you so upset about?
> All homeowners benefit when the teachers, police officers, nurses, librarians, postal workers, garbage collectors, mechanics, plumbers, construction workers, retail clerks, gym trainers, restaurant servers, hairdressers, taxi drivers, artists, etc. etc. etc. can afford to live somewhere within a reasonable commute distance.
No, they don't. All homeowners don't have the same utility function. Not living near people of different socio-economic strata is a very important factor in some people's utility function.
> When the only people who can afford to live within 40 miles are senior software engineers, surgeons, hedge fund quants, corporate executives, and large landowners, the whole community becomes a fake and lifeless place.
The features you see as “fake and lifeless” are what many people actively desire and seek out. Aesthetics are highly subjective.
Changing zoning would only directly impact a tiny fraction of current home owners. High rises allow for vastly increased density so only 1-5% of the city could change to cover a 50% population increase.
> We just want to continue live in conditions that were present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street.
Speak for yourself. Not all homeowners want less density. I wouldn't have become a homeowner if the only houses available had yards with picket fences.
The problem with the SF and the Bay Area is that home owners actually have fairly strong ownership rights to the land surrounding their home. At least in the sense of being able to stop anything being constructed there.
You can think of it as an interesting experiment in collective land ownership.
I think the parent was referring to: homelessness on the rise, lower-income residents being forced out, the need for many service workers to transport themselves to the city because they can't afford to live here anymore, housing speculation and foreign investment leaving units empty and driving up prices, etc. All of that "changes the character of the city", IMO for the worse. One reason (of many) for these changes is obstructionist behavior toward building housing and increasing density.
At least that's what I'd be referring to if I were to make the parent's argument.
You'd think it wouldn't take so much effort to defend the claim "if you build enough housing, people won't be homeless", but it does. So let's go with a prominent example: Tokyo.
Neighborhoods in Tokyo have no local control over zoning, and houses are widely understood to be a depreciating asset, not an investment. So Tokyo builds enough housing and homeowners can't pull up the ladder behind them.
The homelessness rate in Tokyo is astonishingly low and decreasing: just 1600 people in a metropolis of 13.6 million. Almost everybody can afford to live somewhere, because there is enough housing for everybody to live somewhere.
You may think I'm saying that your neighborhood has to look like the Ginza area, and I'm not saying that at all. Tokyo contains some calm, beautiful, residential-focused cities such as Setagaya. (If this is confusing: a metropolis can contain a city.)
Japan culture is very different than US. There is inherent respect obtained from having a job, any job, and dedicated yourself to it no matter how small. Being without a job or worse, homeless, brings much shame to that person and their family. There is strong social pressure to maintain your career and pour many many hours into it.
There's strong social pressure to maintain your career and pour many hours into it in the US, too.
That doesn't have very much to do with whether there are enough places to live. If the places where the careers are have fewer available places to live than they have people, it doesn't matter how dedicated you are, you can still fall out the bottom of the market.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're implying that homeless people in the US are homeless because they aren't ashamed enough of their situation to work harder and find a job, any job. That's... a gross misunderstanding of the problem, if so.
I think Tokyo is a good counter to the nonsense perpetuated in SF that the law of supply and demand doesn’t somehow apply to housing.
Homelessness however is more a multi-headed beast, and Japanese culture likely plays as much into a lack of people on the street as does housing availability.
I am pretty sure if the price was high enough they would be interested. "Everyone is a bit coin operated" as Ed Zander said when I worked at Mortorola.
No, not at all. But I don't see why wanting things to stay similar to when you bought the house is any more selfish than wanting to barge yourself into an area that may not be able to absorb the additional population.
I think it's a bit obtuse to suggest that someone who had the luck to be born a little earlier and move into an area somehow has some sort of a natural right to keep others out through obstructionist policies, and expecting them to act with compassion is somehow selfish.
But I suppose that's par for the course for the US, where individual expression and selfishness is valued over collective good.
You keep talking about "natural right", but nowhere did I mention that. I just said that I don't believe what they're doing is any more selfish than what the people moving in are doing.
Not saying my opinion one way or another, but there is definitely a “natural right” just in the simple sense of physically being present before others.
How so? All "rights" are manufactured by humans. We would like to say that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are "natural rights", but they're not: a bunch of people just agree that they should be, so they are. (And imperfectly, at that! We wouldn't have capital punishment or prisons if we actually believed in these rights.)
And if we recognized "physically being present before others" as a natural right, I imagine the Native Americans would have a much better situation than they do. Thinking that's a right for some but not for others is the height of hypocrisy, but that seems to be what a lot of incumbent property owners here seem to believe.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say "right" as in the kind manufactured by humans. I just meant that two people can not be in the same place at once. It's a right in a very literal sense, I.e. it's "right".
I agree with you about housing but natural rights exist regardless of legal recognition. Rape, murder, genocide, and slavery are all wrong regardless what a bunch of people agree about. That's what natural rights are. They are things that can be violated by an all powerful dictator. But the dictator would be wrong and terrible for doing so.
That being said, I'm hard pressed to call desired housing density a natural right.
You're correct: the most important right, if you follow NIMBY conversations, is the god-given right to a free parking spot for your dockless automobile wherever you may happen to go with it.
Yes, in the short term, there are two things that happen: 1) land values go up, 2) housing costs go down.
The first may benefit current land owners a lot, but the second is absolutely essential for lower incomes to succeed at all.
This is not a zero-sum move, and is fact hugely beneficial to everyone. When there's fixed housing supply, that's when things are closer to a zero-sum economic game.
The reality is that the apartment building goes up and you house is worth nothing unless the government allows an eminent domain for your property or a developer with the bucks to buy out the neighborhood shows up.
Until that happens, your house lost a third of its value because there's an apartment next door. If you're unlucky, rates go up and you're stuck.
Is it really controversial to say that a regular single family house in a single family house neighborhood will go down in value when somebody decides to plant an apartment complex right next to do?
Honestly? I appreciate your willingness to engage in this thread, but I have to say I really don’t care if it does or if it doesn’t.
Making a real estate purchase is a risk. Making a huge one is a huge risk. Right now, the Bay Area is prioritizing rewarding the obscenely wealthy and rewarding massive risk-taking by the moderately wealthy.
If those risks don’t pan out, but people can afford to live here, I’m not that upset.
The counter-point is that if I was a homeowner in the Bay Area, I want to protect my property as much as possible, and I'll use my political power to do that.
People who are disrupted by this can build character by living in a van or move to any of the hundreds of metro areas that are more affordable -- it's not my problem. If you work for some tech company, you should appreciate that controlling a resource like a technology or real property has benefits.
FWIW, I chose the latter option and live in a mid sized urban core. I make about half of what I'd make in the Bay Area, but my costs are probably about 80% less, even factoring in private school. So if you make a choice to live in a van as a rational actor, that's your choice. Own it.
> The counter-point is that if I was a homeowner in the Bay Area, I want to protect my property as much as possible, and I'll use my political power to do that.
I totally get that, but it's a) unfortunate that when one buys a home, their financial self-interest becomes immediately opposed to the needs of the overwhelming majority in this city who rent, and b) ridiculous that city politics safeguards the value of these risky bets by homeowners at the expense of literally everyone else.
> city politics safeguards the value of these risky bets by homeowners
Mainly because homeowners are more engaged in the city politics? If renters or would-be homeowners were more engaged, this would have been a totally different situation.
You might be surprised to find that most renters have jobs, and can’t get away from those jobs during the day to attend neighborhood and city council meetings.
> If those risks don’t pan out...I'm not that upset.
But see, now you have introduced an "us vs them" mentality to this discussion with homeowners on one side and non-homeowners on the other. If I, a homeowner with 800K mortgage, is going to face people like you who want to act in a way that will reduce the price of my home below 800K thus wiping out my equity in my home and saddling me with an underwater mortgage, then I am going to fight tooth and nail against any new housing.
Figuring out how to add new housing without affecting the value of existing homes would go a long way towards getting buy-in from existing homeowners.
The us-vs-them situation exists whether you like it or not. I have the means to purchase in SF and have not done so, not in small part because it would position my self-interest counter to so many in this city who aren’t as lucky as I’ve been. Every act of public policy creates winners and losers. Not acting just preserves the status quo of homeowners as winners and everyone else as losers. Feel-good-yet-practically-impossible suggestions like yours are effectively arguments in favor of an unlimited extension of this status quo.
You took a large gamble with a massive sum of money—what is literally a lifetime of earnings for most families in the US—and are now arguing that the city should continue to prioritize the positive outcome of your gamble over the needs of the hundreds of thousands in this city who are struggling to get by.
This leveraged gamble has been growing at a rate of 8–9%, and with typical mortgages here it’s reasonable to guess you’re seeing over a 12% return on that gamble annually as a result, after mortgage interest and property taxes. Pardon my complete lack of empathy for the hardship you might endure should your gamble only return 5%, were we to consider the needs of the rest of this city over your own.
I think the downvotes are unwarranted, but the point being made is that in a land-scarce environment like SF, a developer would pay out the nose to buy your single-family home, tear it down, and build something with higher density... if the land was zoned for it.
Sure, once this happens enough times, and supply starts to meet demand, you're absolutely right in that a single-family home's value will drop when it's adjacent to an apartment complex.
(Then again, it could also be quite valuable to someone who wants a single-family home when the norm becomes larger complexes.)
Also note that the current value of your home is driven almost entirely by artificial scarcity. There's nothing intrinsic about it that makes it worth so much.
I think the reason is that people living in places like SFO are effectively locked out of the market. They are angry and passionate about it, and I sympathize.
The problem from my perspective is that the "crisis" of housing is really a boomtown phenomenon. The problem exists because companies can afford to pay people enough, which won't last forever.
Wait, so do you think single family housing prices will go up if the city bulldozes all of the high density housing downtown and south of market street?
You're saying that if you have the only single family house in a high density area that house will actually be worth less?
I think it's very unlikely either of those things would be true.
Even the first few help. You have rich people taking up houses and apartments made for middle class (or possibly even working class), as only rich people can now afford to live in them. If there’s more housing stock, even “luxury” units, they can vacate the lower end units, making room for middle class.
You're correct, but this goes against the idea that it's greedy house owners that are causing all the problems. Maybe they're selfish (I would argue most people are), but it's in their best financial interest for the Bay Area population to increase. The land value will go up, and the relative supply of houses/people goes down. Let's say that right now only 10% (made up number) of the people in the Bay Area can own a house (because of supply, not price). In general that means that the houses are purchased by the wealthiest 10%. If the population goes up 50% now you have to be in the top 7% to afford a house. Yeah, it's a little more complex than this, but in general housing prices aren't going down by building apartments. No one buys a house because they can't find an apartment for sale.
If people really want to address the housing issues, they need to start actually listening to people who object to more housing instead of just calling them names. There are legitimate downsides to more housing and higher population that will need to be addressed.
Actually no, or not the way you mean. This is a legitimate moral trap: the "policy" at hand is construction permitting and land zoning, and those are almost exclusively local laws and regulations set at the city and county level.
Those governments, by design, serve the interests of their local citizens. That is, the population they serve is inherently skewed toward existing property owners. You can't fix this by complaining about money in politics or whatever, that's not why it's happening.
The solution has to be at the broader government level (i.e. in Sacramento in this case), wrenching back some of the control that has traditionally been local in the interests of the broader population and not just, say, Palo Alto residents.
While there's no denying there's a strong bias towards property owners, it doesn't have to be this way. Renters can and should vote to change policies to favor them. SF is 63% renters!
It is unfortunate that the most disenfranchised demographics are the ones least likely to vote/organize.
That's true, but potentially not enough. The fraction of the population that is renting now is still (by definition in the case of a hot market!) much smaller than the fraction of the demographic that wants to move to the area and needs to be served by a just housing policy.
The renters - if they would vote (they typically don't) however have it in there interest to have more development: more places to rent places downward pressure on rent prices and thus limits their costs. Unlike homeowners (who benefit form prop 13), a renter faces the potential of their costs increasing yearly. If the large group that wants to move in can find a a place without having to displace someone else that limits landlords ability to raise rent. Renters now have to take rent increases because if they don't someone else will, but if the renter can respond by moving elsewhere instead...
Of course this assumes renters actually vote. As noted before, most do not. Thus the tyranny of the minority situation.
It sounds like you may have missed one of the GP's points when you're blaming renters for not voting. I'll reiterate it with a specific example, although I am on the east coast.
Lots of people want to live in Cambridge, MA. Cambridge is lovely, walkable, and bursting with jobs. But not everyone who wants to can live in Cambridge, because Cambridge has large areas of inappropriately low density that homeowners fight to preserve.
Many people who work in Cambridge live in Everett. Everett is kinda shitty. It doesn't even have good transit to and from Cambridge.
People who live in Everett and want to live in Cambridge can't vote on Cambridge housing policy. They can only vote in Everett.
Local control of zoning sounds so democratic, but it's a tool of rent-seeking, exclusion, and discrimination.
GP made the claim that 63% of SF is renters. While you are correct that there are those who wish they had a vote who cannot, the power is actually in the hands of current renters if they would vote.
This assumes that the claim that 63% of SF is renters is correct. I don't know the truth of that.
As a renter who has lived in the bay area for 14 years (last 8 in SF), my interests absolutely align with those of the newcomers who want to move into the area or city. I would love for more supply which would lower the rent I pay, and also make it more financially safe for me to purchase property.
Btw, European Union lets every resident vote in local (city and town) elections. Only for the parliamentary and presidential elections, you need to be a citizen to vote.
At this point I'm strongly in favor of the nuclear option: a state-level proposition to implement uniform pro-density zoning reforms.
It should also include at least a selective repeal of proposition 13 for non-occupant residences and a re-assessment of all such residences to tax those who are using our real estate as a financial instrument rather than a place to live.
I'd also be in favor of an extra tax on out-of-state residences held by non-occupants and on out-of-state non-occupant purchases.
I'd be in favor of this applied federally and being based on amount (percent, not dollar) of property taxes paid on the property even though it would hurt me personally.
Non-residents cannot hold governments accountable (by voting) for how they use the money which allows the towns to side step one of the core principals of democracy (not to mention that non residents don't have as good information on which to evaluate the performance of local government since many local issues will not affect non-residents). I would have no problem taxing people who enable this by having income or vacation properties in towns they don't live and taxing local property owners who vote for the people who do it.
A complete repeal is politically impossible, but there are two changes that should be made. One, as mentioned above, is to restrict it to owner-occupied residences only. The other is to change the 2% annual increase limit from a limit on the amount of tax assessed to a limit on the amount due in a given year. If the assessed tax exceeds that limit, the locality would receive a lien for the difference, this lien becoming due only when the property is sold.
This accomplishes the original goal of the initiative — to keep fixed-income seniors in their homes — without starving localities of property tax money and disincentivizing them from allowing new housing to be built.
Politically, passing these changes would still be hellishly difficult, particularly the second one, which is not so easy to understand. One way of putting the problem is that Prop. 13 represents a massive transfer of wealth from future California residents to present ones. Of course, the future ones can't vote against it since they don't live here yet.
Personally I think we should just go for the first one, which is why I didn't mention anything else. Proposition 13 limits should be for owner occupied residences only. This would go a long way to fixing the financialization of real estate problem, which is an often under-discussed contributing factor.
You'd get a lot less resistance there. You're not messing with cost of living for owner occupied homes, just second properties, investment properties, and of course all those foreign cash buyers using our real estate as a money laundering vehicle.
As a renter, that would be very painful for me, as my landlord would simply pass the cost of higher property taxes directly to me. (My building isn't subject to rent control.) For buildings subject to rent control, I would expect this would just cause landlords to spend less on improvements to the properties.
If your landlord gets a property tax cut, would they pass on the savings to you? No.
They are leasing you your place at market rate. The market rate is affected by supply / demand of rental units, not landlord costs. The only way they could pass the extra tax onto you is if you are not market rate and there is a law that allows them to do this, or if increasing property taxes on apartment buildings decreases the supply of rental units - an unlikely scenario.
> The only way they could pass the extra tax onto you is if you are not market rate and there is a law that allows them to do this
Not sure what you mean by this: my landlord can raise my rent for whatever reason (or no reason), by any amount they desire.
I can choose whether or not I want to pay it, of course. But I imagine moderate increases to cover at least some (and maybe all?) of the cost of a property tax increase would be swallowed by most renters, given that moving is also a cost, and often a large one.
> If your landlord gets a property tax cut, would they pass on the savings to you? No.
In fact, we have empirical evidence for this. The campaign for Prop. 13 claimed that landlords would pass on the savings, but after it was passed, no corresponding drop in rents was observed.
They are. The caveat here is that in the long run, the attractiveness of owning rental property is affected by the ROI, which is affected, to some extent, by property tax rates. A case could be made that Prop. 13 has expanded the rental supply by increasing the returns to property owners. So even though rents at any given time are determined by supply and demand, over time there should be some tendency for the system to self-correct.
The question, though, is the magnitude of this effect compared to the other forces acting on supply. I think it's small. The value appreciation being enjoyed by rental property owners greatly outweighs the small increase in property taxes they would pay without Prop. 13.
One of the reasons Prop 13 happened was to go hand in hand with rent control and help offset the negative costs of rent control. (An advantage for the owner and renter). So I think you'd need to get rid of rent control to get rid of Prop 13 for a large group of people and that would be very hard.
That's how I heard it. Turns out Berkeley got rent control in 1972 while Prop 13 was passed in 1978. But generally you're right.
It's still my understanding that landlords of multiple units who have tenants in rent control would have a massive problem with the repeal of Prop 13. It's one of the things that go hand in hand with rent control and keep costs low. They would have a strong argument for being unable to maintain their buildings and run a business without Prop 13.
A number of landlords skimp on maintaining their buildings when they have a number of people on rent control. The buildings become quite dated and unkempt. However Prop 13 does make the business sustainable for those receiving very little rent from tenants of 30+ years.
They should change the 2% limit to change according to the CPI. Interest rates were crazy high in the years when it passed, now that rates are low it's rewarding those who bought when rates were high (and prices were low). Prop 13 just defies all sense
Repeal 13 and lower the property taxes from 1.3% to 0.6%.
Of course, about 80 to 90% of the existing homeowners (in many neighborhoods most people bought they're homes more than 20 years ago, you can verify this for yourself on zillow) won't like that, as they're currently paying about 0.1 to 0.05%! So, it's a pretty hard sell.
This will never happen. If you want to see a single issue unite hard right wing conservatives and far left wing liberals or single handedly bring down a political party, try taking on Prop 13. Just about every homeowner in the state views this as an existential threat and will bring hellfire and damnation down on any politician that so much as mentions repealing Prop 13. Plus, there are so many other options that have a better chance at making an actual impact.
I'm much more in favor of incentivizing people to support positive change than just bringing out the big sticks. How about giving everyone in the neighboorhood a property tax credit if they vote to upzone? Or giving companies big tax breaks if they allow 50% of their workforce to work remotely (tackling both housing and transportation issues)?
That's correct, so I think the only chance we have is phased approach. Not repealing prop 13 as of now but start with excluding new homeowners from it (or at least increase limits on annual reassessments for them (from current no more than 2% a year)).
There is an idea of excluding commercial properties from Prop 13 too (I think they shouldn't have to be covered to begin with, the whole idea of prop 13 was to "keep that old lady in her house when she has retired and cannot keep up with raising expenses").
Also props 58 and 193 allow to inherit Prop 13 tax assessment by children and grandchildren (again against original idea of prop 13 to just help elderly with living in their places when retired) so Prop 13 expanded that way to became multi-generational.
We can consider excluding non-primary residences from it too.
Also in this case if you want to help someone to keep property they cannot afford then maybe tax assessment reduction should be based on new owner's income level and not on a year deceased relatives bought place
Why? I'm totally fine with a measure that helps keep fixed-income residents in their homes when property taxes would otherwise eat them alive. I see no reason why we need to keep that property tax burden affordable when that resident passes away and the property goes to their heirs, who presumably already live somewhere else, paying taxes they can afford. If they can't cover the newly-assessed property tax on their relative's residence, then they should sell it and stay where they are.
Maybe grandfather in existing property owners, but expire it when it sells. At some point the narrative has to flip to the Granny in her 1.5m home paying $1200/yr in taxes vs. the young family next door struggling with kids, student loans, and a $16k/yr property tax bill. Where's the fairness in that?
Unfortunately doing so will just reintroduce the problem it was meant to combat: People being forced out of their homes because of property tax. That's definitely not a desirable thing, either.
I hope that housing gets built. SoCal needs as much housing built as possible, and even with SB35 what is possible is limited. At least NIMBY towns and residents can't permanently block projects anymore, that is a huge improvement (which will reduce development lag & stoppage).
>The solution has to be at the broader government level (i.e. in Sacramento in this case), wrenching back some of the control that has traditionally been local in the interests of the broader population and not just, say, Palo Alto residents.
The current hole was dug by local governments being very involved in telling property owners what they could and couldn't do over many decades.
Why will recursion fix the problem?
The bay area is rich enough and enough of that is tied up in property that if it perceives it needs to buy influence in government in order to keep it's wealth it will probably be able to do so then the problem will be even more entrenched because it will be entrenched at the state level.
> policy makers that serve the hand that feeds them?
More like, California and Federal level policymakers have been too lenient and let town and city level politicians make too much selfish policy that hurts the state and country level economy and progress.
The economic powerhouse areas don't belong only to their current residents. Everyone in the country has a right to strive for wealth and a better life by moving to economically active regions. We shouldn't create a society where your economic class is determined by where you happened to be born.
Slamming the door behind you and looking down on the poors is a common neoliberal philosophy though, its really disconcerting how many people are apt to blame those below them in earnings/stature for being in said situation. No leniency is given, nor help. Very un-Christian, but most of those who claim to be Christian/Catholic do not follow the core teachings of said religion, instead choosing to follow neoliberalism ideology.
Its wretched, but that is the society we live in today! Why haven't you picked yourself up by your bootstraps yet? /s
> Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are continuing to choose the interests of those who are rich or who already own their homes over the interests of the struggling middle and working classes.