The development obstruction is real. If you don't believe me then join Nextdoor for a neighborhood that's in the bay. You will find a group of highly dedicated and organized individuals who's sole purpose in life is to prevent any new high capacity zoning or construction.

I've lived in Paris where it is the same, or even worse because there are historic buildings everywhere. Now I live in Japan where it is the polar opposite. I live in a very dense area of Osaka in a building built in 2013 for the same price than my way smaller and very old place in Paris. If only Europe and North America could be like that...

Interesting, any insight to why the Japanese body politic expresses a stronger preference for new and denser construction? I've heard anecdotally that Japanese culture specifically (and Asian culture more loosely) tends to shun "used" housing far more than the US market, but haven't been able to find any reference to support that hearsay.

That is broadly true -- used houses have negative value here in Japan, as you need to first tear the thing down so that you can build whatever it is that you want.

In Japan, things shake. A lot. Earthquake damage adds up pretty quickly, and is stupidly expensive to engineer against, so most houses are built with an expected lifespan of probably somewhere around 50 years.

They're certainly safe, but there is a strong expectation that a family will live there until the kids move out and the parents retire.

Highrises are economically preferable for a number of reasons. Japan has both an excellent rail transit network and sane zoning laws. So you end up with a cluster of highrises around a train station, where the bottom 1-3 levels are devoted to shopping, recreation, and everything else that you would see in a typical shopping mall.

Life revolves around the rail network, at least in Tokyo. You don't as much go from the Ikebukuro Ward to the Shinjuku Ward as you go from Home to Ikebukuro Station to Shinjuku Station to Where It Is You Want To Go.

I don't see this ever happening in the US, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Personally, I would much prefer a larger number of slightly smaller cities, with companies either going fully-remote, or establishing a federated group of (drastically cheaper) offices in multiple cities. You end up with a lot more local flavor, but without the SF or NYC rents.

... but Paris is one of the densest cities in the world? Nearly twice the density of Osaka.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...

The problem with those listings is they count by the city's full area and not just the urban area. So for example Hong Kong is often listEd low. Go to HK and you'll quickly understand why that way of measuring is wrong.

It's not really a fair comparison because Osaka has twice the area of Paris. My ward has the same density than Paris.

The scarcity of housing in cities is not entirely artificial. Sooner or later you hit infrastructure limits. Remember that article about parts of New York City literally running out of space on the streets for pedestrians?

There are still neighborhoods in Queens, Jersey, and Brooklyn that are under 20m from Manhattan and still woefully underdeveloped. Also, that article was specifically about FiDi which is like that because it's so old so the streets aren't wide enough.

"Woefully underdeveloped" is an exaggeration though. There aren't many underdeveloped neighborhoods under 20min from Manhattan, and even then, they're still denser than just about anywhere else in the US.

On the NJ side, Hudson County is very high-density, aside from the Meadowlands which aren't suitable for construction. For one extreme example, Guttenberg NJ technically is the municipality with highest population density in the entire US! Or for a more mundane example, Newport in Jersey City is pretty much all high-rises.

Similar story in Brooklyn for the parts closest by subway to Manhattan. Downtown Brooklyn added so many new giant rental towers that rents actually dropped the past year. Williamsburg got a bunch of waterfront towers last decade and now doesn't have the infrastructure to support more housing. DUMBO is all large buildings that have been converted to lofts. Brooklyn Heights is lower in density, still very few single-family buildings in the first place, and largely landmarked/historic.

Queens is the one place where I'd partially agree with you, but even then, Long Island City has a ton of high-rises. Slightly further out, Sunnyside, Woodside, and Jackson Heights are relatively lower density, yes. But still denser than many major US cities.

I lived in a 1 bdrm in a nice neighborhood in Queens walking distance from the subway, <20m to Manhattan, for quite a bit less than I would pay for a 1 bdrm in Boston. NYC's extensive housing stock and transit network do yield results.

Short term, close the street to non-human powered transportation. Long term, add a new subway line or station.

I'd be curious what is the source of the claim that "most cities have a class of elderly landowners..."

I suspect these are cities which employ controls to cap the taxes on the property owned by elderly people.

If the city employs an age-blind property tax, then elderly people on fixed incomes get taxed out of their residences, which is an equally problematic phenomenon.

Most people are on fixed incomes, full stop. If you are in a home that you can't afford the taxes on, you should sell said home.

Anything else is how you end up with 60 thru 90 year olds living in housing that was never designed for them, both in that it is too large, and is missing elderly friendly features such as a single story layout. Sure, you can add these things on after the fact if its a single family home, but it often would make more sense to dump the 3 to 4 bedroom home (that you are expanding to 4 or 5 bedrooms with this reno) and get a place with a much lower maintenance burden and way fewer rooms.

Sadly, we often distort reality here in the US with subsidies that incentivize poor decisions such as living out retirement in the home you raised your kids in, despite the burden that puts on those living there, their family, and the community around them.

We should encourage the best possible outcome for everyone involved, by getting rid of tax deductions for having a mortgage against your home, or being over a certain age, as that will commoditize housing and allows people to live closer to where they need to be at a much lower cost. Otherwise, subsidies like this drive up housing costs and you end up like many American Cities.

If I were 80 years old I would be very upset if I were forced to move from my home where I had spent the last forty odd years because of rising taxes.

I think we can find ways to deal with this problem without forcing people to sell their homes. Problems related to old people can often be solved by making sure that they don't perpetuate and waiting.

Michigan has Proposal A, which limits property tax rise to inflation (or something close), until sold when it reverts to the current valuation. IIRC, it is exactly to counter throwing older people out of their homes, and other people who do not wish to lose their homes because of sometimes crazy increases in property value.

It's not too difficult to allow the elderly to defer the tax until they die or choose to sell.

If the house is passed on to a child, they are forced to sell whether they can afford the taxes or not because now they have decades of built of tax debt they need to pay off out of the estate. If you defer until sale and the elderly person sells when they can't take care of themselves anymore, they have less money with which they can get a new residence.

Sure, I wasn't suggesting that a special tax break created for elderly who wish to avoid moving out of a house they were fortunate enough to buy for far less than its current market value should continue to apply when they no longer need the house.

Why wouldn't you organise things so that property-owning dynasties aren't able to freeload off the appreciation in their property values accruing from the work and taxes paid by others?

What's wrong with saying "you could afford this when it was taxed at x% and valued at $y, but now it's taxed at 1.5x and 2y, and you can't afford it, and you should move?"

I'd much rather sell a $500k house and move because the monthly tax bill is too much for my cash flow than stay there and have the thing repossessed because I owe $15k, then I get nothing.

This is more of the "I'm entitled to ___________" mindset coming out of the baby boomer generation. Yes you paid for your house, but there is a monthly tax requirement to keep it. If you paid the house off in full but can't pay the monthly taxes, you can't afford that house.

What's right with government spending continuously increasing, necessitating the increase in taxes such that people are forced to sell their possessions to pay for it?

>I'd much rather sell a $500k house and move because the monthly tax bill is too much for my cash flow than stay there and have the thing repossessed because I owe $15k, then I get nothing.

You might feel differently if you spend the last 40yr there and intend for your children to inherit it.

I can move into a small place and give my kids $400k plus a house they can rent out, or I can refuse to accept reality, go many tens of thousands of dollars into debt to the state, get my home taken away with no remuneration, have that debt attached to my estate to further eat into their inheritance, and my kids have to then house me and they get nothing.

Owning a home is not a right, it is a privilege, and a privilege that is based in part on you paying your fair share of taxes as determined by the government you help elect.

Many people feel a strong connection to the place where they spent a large part of their life. I think it is a reasonable goal for a society to enable people to build a home and stay there for the rest of their lives. Forcing people to move seems wrong to me.

Especially for old people it is very hard to get ripped out of their neighborhood. You don't easily relocate your live at 80 (or even at 65) and form new bonds to your neighbors, find new places where you spent your time etc.

Sure, many old people feel a deep connection to their place of abode, but often it would make much more sense for them to relocate within their community, or move to where their friends are moving.

I've seen this scenario play out many times, you can either stay put and deal with the large maintenance burden of an older house, while all your friends move or die off, or you can join them and move to a more central location where you don't need to worry about the roof leaking, or the sump pump not working.

Is this OK if you were 35 years old?

I don't see why this is an issue. Are the elderly so populous that they can force tax benefits for only themselves?

If more young people move into an area, rentees or not, they're eligible to vote and should be a large voting block all their own.

I'm surprised than in San Fran, supposedly a tech mecca, there isn't a strong opposition coming from young, able bodied tech workers, with oodles of money on their hands.

>Are the elderly so populous that they can force tax benefits for only themselves?

They didn't call it a baby boom for nothing.

>If more young people move into an area, rentees or not, they're eligible to vote and should be a large voting block all their own.

Young people can't move in if you ban building more housing, now can they?

>I'm surprised than in San Fran, supposedly a tech mecca, there isn't a strong opposition coming from young, able bodied tech workers, with oodles of money on their hands.

Once they buy, they, too, benefit from these laws. Also: they make up a small portion of the population

> They didn't call it a baby boom for nothing.

Perhaps, but young people are the children of baby boomers so there ought to be more of them.

Statistics seem to show that intuition is correct:

"Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation's largest living generation, according to population estimates released this month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Millennials, whom we define as those ages 18-34 in 2015, now number 75.4 million, surpassing the 74.9 million Baby Boomers (ages 51-69)" [1]

That still doesn't mean that there isn't a greater than expected share of elderly citizens in San Fran. Parts of Florida are quite like that.

Were you saying that there are more elderly citizens (51+) in San Fran than young?

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/25/millennials-...

Tech is only 10% of the SF workforce. The rest of the area gets way too much out of inflating housing prices and potential job competitors' rents while being immune to the downsides due to rent control or Prop 13.

Also, what tends to happen is that the young folks move into commuting distance of the centralized jobs. If you BART into SF from the East Bay because you can't afford an apartment in SF, you can't vote for housing policies that would build apartments that you'd be able to move into.

Young people don't vote; they're busy working, and too cynical.

Retirees vote en masse. Thus the host of government programs taking money from the youth and unborn and giving it to the elderly.

Which makes the "FYIGM" mindset all the more dangerous. I've seen plenty of people even on HN say some version of "well it was tough when I was younger but it all worked out so we shouldn't change things to my detriment now"

It's like hazing. "Pay your dues" is just going through initiation.

One of my favorites was hearing my professor say, "Now that I have tenure, I think it's a wonderful system!" He had been complaining about the tenure system as capricious, foolish, etc. for a while. He's a great guy, so it's not that he changed his mind, exactly. He knew all his past criticism was still relevant, but he was acknowledging his strong disincentive to fight the system.

When I was renting apartments in Cambridge, MA, there was always a clause inserted that the tenant was responsible for tax increases, to ensure that tenants also carefully considered the costs of potential tax increases against the possible upside of the increased spending.

I thought that was fairly clever, and should I ever become a landlord, you can be sure that I'll include that clause if legal in the area I'm renting. (The reality is that the tenant is the one bringing the money that pays the property tax anyway; this clause just makes it explicit and helps align the landlord and tenant's interests.)

Language was similar to this (found on the web):

However, if in any tax year commencing with the fiscal year ____________ the real estate taxes on the land and buildings, of which the leased premises are a part, are in excess of the amount of the real estate taxes thereon for the fiscal year ____________, (herein called the “Base Year”, and being the most recent year in which the Lessor has actually received a real estate tax bill for the leased premises) Lessee will pay to Lessor as additional rent hereunder, when and as designated by notice in writing by Lessor, ___________ per cent of such excess that may occur in each year of the term of this Lease or any extension or renewal thereof and proportionately for any part of a fiscal year. The Lessor represents to the Lessee that the term rent set forth in the immediately preceding paragraph (A) does not reflect any real estate tax increase subsequent to the said Base Year. Notwithstanding anything contained herein to the contrary, the Lessee shall be obligated to pay only that proportion of such increased tax as the unit leased him bears to the whole of the real estate so taxed, and if the Lessor obtains an abatement of the real estate tax levied on the whole of the real estate of which the unit leased by Lessee is a part, a proportionate share of such abatement, less reasonable attorney’s fees, if any, shall be refunded to said Lessee.

And money creation infinite, only held back by demand.