It's been a massive windfall to people who have been homeowners for 40 years in California. High rents due to the fact that you're not allowed to build new housing, high property taxes paid by new residents, while old residents pay nothing, high income and sales taxes to paper over the gap in the budget left by the lack of property tax paid by longtime residents.
The whole system has been optimized to milk as much money as possible from newcomers. The people in power in California even scapegoated the newcomers for a long time, and pretended that they were unwanted. Now that the system has finally become unsustainable, we get these ridiculous takes about how somebody "extracted wealth" from California.
If you don’t build luxury housing, affordable housing becomes luxury housing. San Francisco is a perfect example of NIMBY extremism and the damage it does to communities.
It's worse than that: The entire concept of "luxury housing" is a lie.
The words "luxury housing" are designed to make you think that it is taking up space that could be used by non luxury housing. Like the only reason a new apartment is so expensive is because it has a gold-plated toilet or something, and if only the developer had built an apartment without a gold plated toilet you could afford it. But in Minneapolis, for example, a 2 bedroom apartment in the nicest building in the city, with a built in pool, car wash, and cigar lounge, is $2000 per month. That barely gets you a spot in someone's living room in SF.
This proves that it is not luxuries that make "luxury apartments" expensive in SF. The only luxury is having a roof over your head.
Minneapolis has had it's waves of pricing over the years. The hay day of build happened starting in 2005 and ran for the last 15 years leading up to where it is now. I lived in the Northloop on the front of the trendiness (pre-Target Stadium) and Uptown was still the land of said "hipsters" (such an unfortunate moniker). I can tell you that in 2010 I was paying more than $2000/month for a 2 bedroom there because supply was much more constrained. Now there's easily 20x availability of options. The downside is it's become much more crowded, the upside is it draws a lot of new food/entertainment options. Ultimately I'm glad I don't live downtown anymore. I think prices in Minneapolis will drop again as people spread back out if large organizations continue to dry up in the city. Don't get me wrong, I love Minneapolis and very much my time living in the city. But - things have definitely changed a lot in the last few years and I wouldn't say for much, if any, gain.
The gain is that a lot more people get to live there now, which benefits all of those people. It no longer being for you is more than made up for by the fact that it is now for so many more other people.
In my opinion it's a stretch to say that an oversubscription on housing "benefits all of those people". I enjoy Minneapolis, but it's in a very odd state right now.
Huh? If all the housing is occupied then how is it possibly an oversubscription? If anything it sounds like an undersubscription -- even more people would live there if there were more housing, but there isn't, so they can't.
If you consistently get the choice between paying $2000 for that or $2000 for a dingy basement suite with no windows, then yes it is luxury and will stop the price of those less desirable homes from rising. The key is to ensure supply outpaces demand. Meaning: let developers build luxury developments. The more the merrier.
This, a thousand times. Housing advocates often call for building “affordable housing” but the problem of high prices is solved by building any housing. As you suggested, if new luxury housing comes on the market, then some older apartments can’t charge luxury prices anymore. The same effect works all the way down to the lowest priced units. Also people don’t increase their consumption when prices go down (housing is an inelastic market). So, new supply at the top of the market pushes down the prices of everything.
In practice, "pushes down the prices" is an overstatement, and what actually happens is that once demand pressure reaches a certain point new luxury supply only opens up higher pricing tiers. It potentially stabilizes older construction, which is not bad, but doesn't seem to provide downward pressure. The only thing that seems to do that is non-marginal demand dropping out of the market.
And if you follow it through that's how the incentives seem to be aligned. Capital examining opportunity in construction will want to chase the highest return it can and if you have capital the marginal cost on luxury construction over non-luxury at the same unit scale is usually less than the return. On top of that, at certain scales of operation vacancy is apparently less of a drag on nominal property values involved in the accounting and financing, which means prices tend to float down when the fall rather than plummet. Though of course, any potential developer doing the math is going to look at vacancy rate and will make their decision about whether/what to build targeting points short of outright surplus.
There are some types markets where I think you can drive down pricing market-wide by coming in from the top (consumer tech sure seems to work that way) and that's my guess why so many seem think the same must apply to housing. Perhaps housing could indeed work the same way if the actual manufacturing techniques and costs were being iterated with the same speed and scale.
But that's why there are specific drives for affordable housing: building at the top slows/stops price increases but only lets people on the verge of being priced out tread water.
Personally I think there needs to be vacancy taxes proportional to the market segment being operated (probably also correlated to tightness of supply) so that prices clear on the falling side more easily, but who knows how that would change people's construction calculations.
Minnesota isn't "cheap". I'd say - depending on where you want to live in the city can influence your results. Ultimately it's what you're after. I think, today, you can live there very reasonably. We have better than average access to health care, but taxes are also an impediment in Hennepin county (Minneapolis metro). The metro is very conveniently laid out - so if you're looking to move there you should broaden your search as commuting isn't horrible, public transport is decent and there's a lot of option for reasonably priced rentals - but definitely not "cheap" compared to other metro areas. The area does have a lot to offer, however.
I liken it to the California of the Midwest. Its nots the cheapest, its more middle of the road (though, I think in absolute terms there are places around Chicago that outpace the cost of the highest cost parts of Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro last time I looked, granted that was a few years ago).
Its culturally though, very liberal (from my own experience, tends to also be very much a democrat state). One thing I will say is Minnesota's public school system is great, and the collegiate system is both affordable and high quality, on average.
It's still cheaper than California, New York, Seattle, Portland etc. paying 2000 a month for a place to live in Minnesota is still very much not the norm, even in nice parts of the Twin Cities.
If you're willing to live up North a bit, Duluth is amazing, its mostly a college town now, and you can surf in the summers!
The downside is always the snow, though if you live in the Twin Cities there are upscale parts of downtown that have miles of indoor walkable paths that take you all over the city.
I really love the state. I've contemplated moving back several times. I just don't think my tech industry connections would carry over as well, so it would limit some of my job opportunities, even with this big push to work from home by a lot of companies. That will have to shake out for me personally first before I would consider moving back.
Though, they've done a decent job netting progressive employers and have in large part been able to avoid the economic collapse that hit much of the Midwest (the rust belt, in places like Ohio). I know a lot of people out there employed in highly trained manufacturing jobs (highly skilled CNC work, maintain automated manufacturing facilities etc.) and those jobs are the only ones in that sector that aren't leaving the USA in droves yet, plus there are a lot of medical technology companies there. Also, a lot of enterprise software companies have HQ or large presence in the cities as well.
It's not a startup scene like SF, but its changing. When I was a kid the state had these huge policy pushes to try and get people entering college to focus on technical degrees (be it 2-year technical school at a community college doing CNC machining and the like or 4-year degrees in engineering/cs). It's also one of the most educated populations in the country [0][1]
Now I just feel like I'm selling it. Though I want to mention one quirk about the population that stands up to everyone I know who has visited. Minnesota Nice [2] is alive and well still. People tend to just be more friendly there than anywhere else I've lived or travelled, and I've been through more than a dozen states from coast to coast. It's just a general demeanor thing. Thats not to say that everyone is nice all the time though, of course. I'd say on average you're less likely to have small confrontations though, than anywhere else I've been.
Just the opposite, every community has a right to decide their future.
If a community says 'we'd rather be homes and don't want to turn everything in to high-rises' then that's entirely their discretion.
It's definitely not any individual townships moral or civic responsibility to change their community to accommodate either state/national strategic planning, especially for the benefit of people who do not even live there.
There's plenty of physical space in Cali, if anything, the opportunity might be in Sacramento and in-between. If the FAANGs having trouble with salaries and bringing in people want, they can be part of this strategy.
I bet there are thousands of G staffers who'd live to live somewhere south of Morgan Hill, away from the city.
It is. The government is expected to prevent tragedy-of-the-commons troubles, spite houses, and other anti-social troubles. This is largely why we even have a government.
Suppose a person buys a house to retire in, on a peaceful quiet little street with plenty of room to park. The neighbors then build: an 80-story apartment tower, a supervised injection place for IV drug users, an organometalic peroxide production plant, a hog farm, and a tire recycling plant.
Maybe we overdo it, but yes, we're going to curtail private property rights.
If this is financially viable, that land must be worth a ton. Retiree should sell the property and stop monopolizing such valuable land. They'll have plenty of funds to use to move elsewhere
> a supervised injection place for IV drug users
Very few people want one of these built near them, which itself causes huge societal problems. We'd be better off in aggregate if more services for the poor could be built.
>an organometalic peroxide production plant, a hog farm, and a tire recycling plant
Unlikely to be built on expensive residential land, but if they were it would help fight climate change by reducing commute times, since employees can now live nearby. The existence of actual property rights allows ample housing to be built in this high-demand area
Wait for gas stations to be built on either side of your home in 'no zoning laws' suburb, wherein you lose 50% of your house price and can't afford to move out, and have to live with that as you become enlightened with respect to zoning laws.
The real prospects of the lack of zoning is something that nobody wants, which is why literally every civil place in the world has zoning.
The failure in the 'property rights' argument is that what's built on one property affects the other - there are externalizations.
What is built on one plot, affects the materiality (and value) of the others.
These arguments exist only on HN and other boards, thankfully.
Yes, zoning is used to insulate and even inflate the local property market and preserve home values; no that doesn’t make it morally justifiable to tell your neighbors how they can use their property.
> The real prospects of the lack of zoning is something that nobody wants, which is why literally every civil place in the world has zoning.
Calling Houston uncivil is a subjective judgement I can’t objectively falsify, and so is calling its residents “nobody”, but the latter act strikes me as ironically uncivil, and IMO not in line with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments.
What about people who would on purpose devalue land- buying a plot and putting say garbage recycling. In order to buy up local area that would plummet in value.
Philosophizing about why we have governments, self-executing organizations which can write new laws which become reasons for their existence, is a fools errand.
But there are good reasons we ought to have governments, and fewer reasons we ought to have a State. I would sum those up as keeping the four horsemen at bay, adjudicating disputes and delivering justice. A few decent reasons too, such as accelerating R&D with their justifiable actions, but pretty much everything else is an abuse of power and tax authority.
Also your examples are ridiculous. There are few places in the world where you can just throw up an 80 story apartment building, and even fewer people who can afford to to spite their neighbors. A world where police powers are not abused to the extreme that they are is also not one without a quiet place to retire without an organometallic peroxide plant nearby, nor one without remedies if a neighbor chooses to break ground on such a project.
What's 'ridiculous' is this notion that the state is using police powers to force people into zoning - or any other laws.
Zoning is an important and foundational aspect of civil governance, and works well for the most part.
If SF residents in any clear majority wanted to have zoning laws changed, they probably could, there's a fair component of democratic impetus here.
Most importantly - it's essential to recognize that points of property are not fundamentally discrete from one another.
The value of one piece of property depends a lot on what's around it. Large buildings vs small ones, noise vs quiet, density vs. green, sun vs shade, - there are major externalizations to every property, and zoning helps establish parameters for those things.
Go ahead and put a 50 ft flag pole on our front lawn with a flag on it and see how your neighbours react.
There are innumerable situations wherein tall towers would go up beside homes - they exist in droves in literally every city. Go to any North American city, go to where there are tall buildings - and find homes nearby. Those homes are likely there due to zoning.
There are even more instances wherein homes would be knocked down to put up all sorts of other things - office buildings, industrial facilities, retail outlets, clinics - whatever.
There is in general, no interest in that. Not even the folks wanting to build 80-story towers want it really, lets the autoplant be built across the street and destroy their own property value.
A democratic mandate to abuse State police powers to unjustifiably curtail private property rights is still an abuse of State police powers.
Where we disagree is whether it is an abuse, not the mechanism by which it is justified by the State.
We don’t disagree that what is around is a factor in our purchase and selling decisions, but to be frank, when the developer of your hypothetical skyscraper bought the land to build the skyscraper, he didn’t buy the lot across the street with it that would one day become this hypothetical autoplant, nor the use rights for the lot across the street. In fact, the developer probably didn’t buy across an empty lot because someone that is building an 80 story apartment building wants to attract tenants, and tenants want neighborhood amenities if they’re living in an apartment building.
You could still build across from an empty lot that might be an auto plant in the future, but you don’t build that big without a business case. Property doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we’re agreed on that, and I’m not even 100% against zoning, just maybe 99% of how it is used.
When you buy property, you buy property, not the rights to limit the development and use of all the other properties around you. That “right” comes from a simple tyranny of the majority using the State as their vehicle of power.
"Abusing police powers to curtail private property rights isn’t the high ground."
It has nothing to do with police powers, it's called zoning and it's absolutely a legitimate part of our governing structure.
If the residents of SF wanted to go Hong Kong style full on skyscrapers everywhere, they would have.
Bulldozing communities to create utopian/dystopian hyper density is one of the most short-sighted urban concepts going.
There's plenty of space, go elsewhere.
Also, I'll be even a hyper fast public transport system that connected the Bay Area with surrounding regions: imagine the Bart/Caltrain being 'one thing' running in a really fast loop around the bay, with quick buses LTRs as spokes - and then fast communter trains connecting them out to Sac, Modesta, Santa Rosa, that might work.
Especially if they build smartly around slight more dense centres instead of just pure suburban homes.
> It has nothing to do with police powers, it's called zoning and it's absolutely a legitimate part of our governing structure.
Zoning is a mechanism of economic suppression to appease the haves and separate them from the have-nots. They de-diversify and oppress.
> If the residents of SF wanted to go Hong Kong style full on skyscrapers everywhere, they would have.
Yes my point is that they didn’t, and now they’re paying the ridiculous cost: $3000 for a bachelor. Do anything other than work for FAANG? Sorry, you don’t get to live here. Please bus an hour so you can serve me coffee.
> Bulldozing communities to create utopian/dystopian hyper density is one of the most short-sighted urban concepts going.
Bulldozing exclusive communities and replacing them with inclusive ones, which create more local business opportunities and reduce dependence on transportation. Calling high density planning short sighted in favour of single family dwellings is absurd.
> There's plenty of space, go elsewhere.
This mindset is what causes suburbia, which has an absolutely disastrous impact on the environment and local economies. And leads to class segregation (which is a proxy for racial segregation in the US.)
"Zoning is a mechanism of economic suppression to appease the haves and separate them from the have-nots. They de-diversify and oppress."
The above sentence could be said about building codes.
I sort of jest but also shudder to think: How soon will progressive SFBA thought leaders call out building and health and safety codes as pushing up costs and excluding homeowners (and potential homeowners) that cannot comply with them ?
Because they absolutely do that. God help us if we act on that knowledge ...
> The above sentence could be said about building codes.
Dezoning is not an argument for deregulation, it’s about creating new economic opportunity in a very direct way. You don’t have to sacrifice building safety as a next step. Sure, you could. And you might be right that it is economically positive to do so. But that’s a sort of deregulation extremism.
"Zoning is a mechanism of economic suppression to appease the haves and separate them from the have-nots. T"
This is a ridiculously false statement.
Everyone wants zoning laws, you can't put up a gas station or an industrial facility right in the middle of xyz residential neighbourhood, nobody wants that.
"Yes my point is that they didn’t, and now they’re paying the ridiculous cost"
So you're saying that people are making a choice, but because you're not happy with the choice, they should change?
Are you arguing for rights or not? Which is it?
SF residents wanting to keep zoning laws intact are making their own choices, and that's fine.
"Calling high density planning short sighted in favour of single family dwellings is absurd."
Just the opposite when in fact the citizens are adamant that their city not turn into Hong Kong.
"This mindset is what causes suburbia, which has an absolutely disastrous impact on the environment and local economies"
Total rubbish. Suburbs are some of the most peaceful, plentiful, conscientious, and safe places in civilization ... which is exactly why those types of people move there. They are downright boring in their concientiousness.
That they lack trendy cafes, and hipster fentanyl needle clinics is not a problem for some.
> Everyone wants zoning laws, you can't put up a gas station or an industrial facility right in the middle of xyz residential neighbourhood, nobody wants that.
That’s not reality. It doesn’t make economic sense for a an industrial business to set up shop in a supposedly “residential area” - there will still be commercial clusters because that makes sense economically. And you can still define environmental regulations and build infrastructure where you want industrial commerce to happen. Zoning laws are mostly abused.
> So you're saying that people are making a choice, but because you're not happy with the choice, they should change?
The people who are making the choice are the ones who can afford to make the choice. Everyone else is forced out. So what you end up with is a bunch of entitled rich people who forced everyone else out of the market, bleeding the city of its charm and diversity.
> Just the opposite when in fact the citizens are adamant that their city not turn into Hong Kong.
You don’t reach the density of Hong Kong without need. For HK that need is to be included in the region of (former) autonomy. Naturally things aren’t going to get that dense. You can double the density of SF and it still won’t look anything near like HK. And once again, the people who are adamantly against densifying the city are not the ones who have to commute an hour by transit to work in it. They are the stakeholders because they forced their way in. What about people who used to work in SF but got forced out by rising rent, but who still work in the city. They don’t deserve a say?
> Suburbs are some of the most peaceful, plentiful, conscientious, and safe places in civilization
This is so painfully ignorant it’s hard to unpack. Do you understand the toll it takes on small business owners to not be able to buy commercial land where people live? Do you recognize the damage that daily mass commuting into and out of the city has on both the global and local environment? Do you understand that the “peace” is actually just economic segregation? Take a drive outside the gated communities and go on down to the economically segregated “suburbs” of the less fortunate. I believe they call those “ghettos” in the US. Not sure you’ll find much peace or safety there.
> That they lack trendy cafes, and hipster fentanyl needle clinics is not a problem for some.
> If a community says 'we'd rather be homes and don't want to turn everything in to high-rises' then that's entirely their discretion.
Nobody is arguing it’s not their discretion. I’m just saying it makes you a bad actor in the larger community of people who would like to benefit from the opportunity of living in a city that they otherwise might not get if they weren’t living in the city.
> especially for the benefit of people who do not even live there.
They don’t live there because they’re being systematically and economically excluded from living there by people of means who are unaffected by the damage they’re doing to their own local economy.
> There's plenty of physical space in Cali, if anything, the opportunity might be in Sacramento and in-between.
> There's plenty of physical space in Cali, if anything, the opportunity might be in Sacramento and in-between.
It’s the places that everyone want to live in that are crowded, and there are good reasons apartment blocks aren’t going up in farmland (this isn’t China where people are told to live outside the fifth or sixth ring road just because).
"It’s the places that everyone want to live in that are crowded"
So if SF goes 'Hong Kong' style i.e. tears down all those homes and puts full on sky-scrapers everywhere, will the 'current' residents be happy, and will future residents want to be there as much?
'Everyone wants to live there' - which is why it's so expensive - this is an inevitability of a good culture whereupon the physicality is usually critical.
If SF went Hong Kong it simply wouldn't be SF.
Pay the price or live elsewhere - California is vast and beautiful.
Also - if some areas on the peninsula put their minds to it, they could be as cool and fun as SF.
That is a very succinct way to put it. I doubt it will be fixed in our lifetimes as there isn't enough willpower or trust in the state government to make the needed change.
People who want change are free to leave. Only when there are no other places to leave to will there be change.
> The people in power in California even scapegoated the newcomers for a long time, and pretended that they were unwanted.
I feel like the average HN poster sits in a pretty air-tight STEM bubble and doesn't realise how bad life for most people in the Bay Area who are not in STEM. To them, tech workers can leave and the industry can tank and it would be a welcome change. The tax revenue the cities have made during this "boom" have not affected them at all. Building more houses just means more traffic, more crowded hiking trails and beaches, more crowded and trashed natural parks, and for what?
> The tax revenue the cities have made during this "boom" have not affected them at all
They think it has not affected them, but if they stop, the house of cards that is underfunded ultra-generous defined benefit state/municipal pensions tumbles like a house of cards. When the munis start going bankrupt, only then will people notice...
> the house of cards that is underfunded ultra-generous defined benefit state/municipal pensions tumbles like a house of cards.
Who benefits from these exactly?
Tax revenue is up ten fold from where it was at in 2008 and yet the quality of life for most of my connections not working in tech in the bay area is much worse. Everything is more expensive, taxes are much higher, traffic is 10x as bad, homelessness is more severe... Who's this "house of cards" supporting?
The minimum wage is up, that's the only thing, but it doesn't matter. Since a couple making minimum wage could actually have an apartment in 2008, which is not the case now.
Not only that, but there's often comments about how people moving from CA to TX are fleeing the results of a presumably left wing tax code to enjoy the benefits of a presumably right wing tax code, but it's not that simple.
CA is as expensive as it is in large part because of NIMBYs and tax schemes that were absolutely the product of right-wing ballot initiatives for the most part. OTOH, a large part of the appeal of TX is that it doesn't have a state income tax, but the state is absolutely on the dole. IIRC TX takes in ~$150b from the Federal government, but only pays ~$100b into the system. CA (like NY) pays more into the system then it takes out, so about ~$50b of the annual budget of TX is literally bumming money from other states, albeit indirectly.
Which is a roundabout way of saying, the narrative about people moving from CA to TX often makes it sound like a narrative about left-wing economic policies vs. right-wing economic policies, but the reality is that CA is expensive in large part because of right-wing economic policies and TX is cheap in large part because it's basically on welfare from the Federal government. Which is fine, the system should allow economically healthier states to help the less successful states get by (looking at you KY), but it's so counter to the narrative that usually surrounds these stories that people tend to sweep it under the rug. And also TX is hardly an economically unhealthy, depressed state in need of assistance from the rest of the country. It should step up and stop being being a bum, because AFAICT it's not a bum but rather a state with well above-average prospects.
> IIRC TX takes in ~$150b from the Federal government, but only pays ~$100b into the system. CA (like NY) pays more into the system then it takes out, so about ~$50b of the annual budget of TX is literally bumming money from other states, albeit indirectly.
This isn't true. According to the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government report dated Jan 8, 2019 (which used the data from the Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2019) the fifty states all had differing Federal expenditures vs Federal receipts but Texas and California were close. See page 15 at [1].
On a per capita basis, here are the federal expenditures per dollar of receipts for a few states:
Connecticut 0.74 50th
New Jersey 0.82 49th
Massachusetts 0.83 48th
New York 0.86 47th
North Dakota 0.94 46th
Illinois 0.97 45th
New Hampshire 0.98 44th
Washington 0.98 43rd
Nebraska 0.98 42nd
Colorado 0.99 41st
California 1.00 40th <=== CA
Texas 1.03 39th <=== TX
Utah 1.04 38th
Wisconsin 1.06 37th
Wyoming 1.06 36th
Minnesota 1.09 35th
Iowa 1.13 34th
Nevada 1.14 33rd
South Dakota 1.15 32nd
Kansas 1.23 31st
Florida 1.24 30th
...
Virginia 1.97 6th
Alabama 1.99 5th
West Virginia 2.17 4th
Mississippi 2.19 3rd
New Mexico 2.34 2nd
Kentucky 2.35 1st
"Other states are high or low for various reasons: the outliers Maryland and Virginia, for example, both have dramatically higher Federal spending per capita than the average state, as they are near the physical headquarters for most of the Federal government and have significantly disproportionate Federal spending for procurement and Federal wages."
So, while Virginia is a relatively high-income state and contributes a lot of Federal income tax, they also have a lot of Federal employees, grants, contracts, etc.
Holy shit! Just an example I found, 230 Atherton Ave, Atherton, CA 94027 vs 234 Atherton Ave, Atherton, CA 94027, both absolute mansions with pools looking at them on google maps and the former even has a tennis court. Property taxes paid: 8,000 for the former and 200,000 for the latter. Absolute insanity!
You're both right. Property taxes can increase by up to 2% per year, and new owners frequently pay far more than old owners because property has appreciated significantly in coastal metros with limited space for new construction.
This had been especially obvious because historically low interest rates have enabled a lot of asset appreciation, with real estate being one example. High real estate prices lead to high property taxes, which makes the difference in taxes paid much more obvious.
NIMBYism also plays a part, but I think people routinely overlook that developers often don't improve local facilities in line with local housing projects, which can lead to all kinds of awfulness. That new 1000 unit apartment complex also needs 1000+ parking spaces, along with other improvements in local infrastructure in proportion to the increase in population, but a developer won't care about that unless someone forces them to care.
1. You're implying that increased housing density makes it harder to find infrastructure.
This is just false since high density makes infrastructure cheaper per person.
2. Why should it be the developers jobs to build out new infrastructure that isn't directly needed by their building. It's their job to build housing which brings people, those people bring taxes and those taxes pay for upgrades to infrastructure.
I'm not implying it's harder to find infrastructure. I'm arguing that developers don't want to pay for any infrastructure improvements needed to keep services operating in the same manner with more people. Like everyone else, they're self interested and will act in ways that maximize their own interests, even if it externalizes certain costs to the surrounding community. I suspect it's also more expensive per person to upgrade existing infrastructure compared to building it new.
In terms of who should improve infrastructure, it doesn't really matter who does it, but I think either local government or the developer should be required to do it and not be allowed to let things slide. I focus on the developer because they're the first in the process, but it doesn't matter if instead the city requires the developer to build in the infrastructure improvement costs and does it themselves. The only position I have is that it should get done.
I gotcha. I'm also thinking of mass transit, parking, retail, and probably a few more things I've forgotten about. Even the local geography/weather can play a part in terms of pollution. If we go from a subdivision with 40 houses to apartments with 4,000 units and update the existing infrastructure, 4,000+ cars starting up every day could result in a significant increase in exhaust pollution that we may not be able to design around. The climate/geography are going to be the climate/geography.
They do pay. Major developments get slapped with a mello-roos tax which leads to even larger disparity in taxes paid between long term resident and new residents. It’s huge, you could be paying $20k in taxes while the person down the street is paying $5k.
Mello Roos doesn't make the developer pay, they make the people in the special district pay. The developer gets to sell the units without any concern for what more people will do to local infrastructure.
I guess they could be $15k/year, but I've never seen an example that high. My mom lives in Yucca Valley and has two or three Mello Roos items (water district, local community college, and something else), and I think maybe pays about $600 total for them.
Of course it's false. Old residents don't pay "nothing", they pay "next to nothing". Look up any house that changes hands after 40 years. The old owners were paying a tax liability an order of magnitude less than the new one.
It’s simply amazing how allowing to build 50 high rise condos would bring the entire bubble down but the CA (or most American) cities or the state won’t. It will obviously fail on the ballot due to NIMBYism but I’m not sure why would that even need to be on ballot.
So allll the people who sit hours and hours each day in traffic, pay a fortune for a shack don't outweigh those that just want to preserve the neighborhood's character?
Because of it's size and market influence, California laws can effect the rest of the country, should the rest of the country vote in California elections?
The people who _choose_ to sit in the traffic are getting what they signed up for. I could be that person and I choose not to be in no small part to that situation.
What do you mean they don't live there? The folks who live in CA and commute all day (BART or cars or whatever), or are priced out of their old neighborhood, or sleep in their car? Or pay a fortune for a room illegally sublet? Can't they vote on CA elections?
We're talking about local (county or city) regulations that prevent the building of high density structures in a lot of these cities. Those regulations exist because the residents want them. Non-residents don't vote on those regulations because they don't live there, just like non-CA residents don't get to vote on CA laws even though those people are affected by them.
This is not completely true, as the cost to build high rise condos is extremely high and the land is very expensive. Every place in the USA that has kept housing affordable has done so with sprawl, which California's government doesn't allow.
The land is very expensive, shouldn't that be good enough of a reason to build high rises? It works in NYC and most of Europe, the only reason there are few high rises in SF is because of the government that prefers artificial scarcity.
Building sky scrapers is way more expensive than building single family homes on empty grassland, where the land is also cheaper. Of course the city should build up, but building out is the real way every US city has kept housing affordable (look at the study I linked above)
Luckily, earthquake-resistant structures have come a long way since then. For example, Tokyo is home to the second-tallest structure in the world, and they're not exactly unfamiliar with earthquakes
It doesn't go on the ballot directly, it goes on the ballot in the form of voting in local city officials (specifically the city council) who set the zoning laws/rules.
Many properties I’m looking at are assessed at a value in the $50-200k range but sell around $1mm. Long time residents in such cases Pay less than 1/5 the property taxes new residents pay.
The whole system has been optimized to milk as much money as possible from newcomers. The people in power in California even scapegoated the newcomers for a long time, and pretended that they were unwanted. Now that the system has finally become unsustainable, we get these ridiculous takes about how somebody "extracted wealth" from California.