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.
