Or you can zone an area where both commercial and residential development are permitted. Sure, living right next to a metal shop or something isn't the most pleasant thing, but it's really nice if you work at that metal shop.

This is something I saw being developed in my home town before I moved away. Along the main "downtown" strip they built several new 2 story structures where the bottom floors were shops like whole foods and such. On the top floor were various types of apartments. These particular apartments were a bit on the expensive side mostly due to it being a kind of swanky neighborhood right along the beach. That said, the concept can be expanded upon to apply to more affordable areas.

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Interestingly in the mission bay area there's a lot of unused commercial first floor space below residential apartment buildings. Some of it empty since the buildings went up 2012/2013.

Why do you think that is?

Prop 13 is immoral and has not only wreaked havoc on real estate market in the state but has also gutted the state's public education system. It needs to be repealed before any progress on these housing issues can be made. There can be provisions to ensure that people don't lose their homes to rising property taxes...Texas, IIRC, has one that allows property taxes to accrue and only need to be paid when the title of the property changes hands, which seems like a good compromise. But the state's population is going to go up which means we're going to need to build a lot more housing, and our laws need to create an environment where that can happen.

So it's not OK for rising rents to force property elderly owners to sell and move away, but it is OK for rising rents to force elderly renters to move away?

You can't defend property tax deferments for the elderly without also defending rent control for them. Either way you have the same problem of local residents thinking it's OK for everyone else to suffer lower supply and higher costs, as long as they aren't suffering.

That might make rational sense but it is not how homeowners actually behave.

This scales for quite a long time, and is generally how suburbia transforms into, well, east San Jose.

It's not that homeowners make rational choices as a result, it's that over time they are pushed out and the rational choice is made by the larger market.

Bay Area housing supply has been growing less than demand for the last 30 years. New housing is needed, regardless of who is employing whom.

The cost of building probably does have an effect on the margin, but it is so much less of a factor than restrictions on what can be built.

http://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/millbrae-bart-stati...

From the National Association of Home Builders, it looks like "average" is approximately $9,400 per unit in "fees". Not sure if that's apple to apples with the Bay Area, but in either way that fee just seems kind of crazy. Rows A-C, summing fees, on the Construction Costs table here: https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?genericContentID=24...

The other problem is that housing developers in California have a tendency to build huge, sprawling suburban communities. This just increases sprawl.

Imagine a 1 sq. mile tract of land. Assuming a housing developer builds a ton of two story, single family homes here, each on a 1/4 acre of land, we can calculate that they can build 2560 homes +/- 500 based on topography and landscaping etc. There are no reliable numbers as to the average of units in an apartment building. Therefore, we will have to make some assumptions. Let's go ahead and say that that the developer decides to build apartments instead of tract-homes. Each apartment building will be 2 acres in area. Even if the apartments are huge: 1500 sq ft +, we can calculate that a 2 acre apartment building can have about 20 units per floor. Lets say that these apartment buildings are a modest 2 stories tall. 20 * 2 = 40. That means, covering the same 1 sq. mile of land with modest apartment buildings could create 12800 residences. That's a 500% increase in residences.

In urban centers, zoning laws allow for much taller structures. Structures can be hybridized to allow for both commercial and residential tenants.

Building large, hybrid-use, multi-tenant structures will alleviate some of the pressure on the housing market and lead to shorter commutes for most people. This is because you can fit more people into a smaller land area. It's common sense I'm sure. So, why aren't developers building these structures? The short answer is that they can't. City zoning laws, angry property owners, and the lack of open land in desirable areas all get in the way.

Then I looked at the zoning map for the municipality, and read the zoning codes.

From outward appearances, it's to keep the poor people away from the rich people. And not just at night when everyone goes home, either. All the time, everywhere. Jobs, schools, commutes, shopping, entertainment. It's the new age of redlining, with a global substitution of bank account sizes for skin colors.

I couldn't tell what degree of intent was there, but on the ground, the zoning board has reinvented the ghetto. The poor folks get to live next to the railroad tracks. Rich folks get to live next to the zone marked as protected wetland/watershed, so that it can never be developed.

Every year, you'll see parts of the bay area add xx,xxx new jobs but only x,xxx new homes.

Severely limit commercial development in any municipality with less than a certain ratio of houses to jobs.

No-one's saying the $1600/month that she was paying for a 1br in Alameda is "cheap" in any way...

But at $81K salary, her $1000/mo rent is only just touching 20% of her take home, which is in the "very comfortable" range (for reference, most property management companies want you to be "not exceeding 35% of take home income").

1. Live and Work in SF make $80k, and live in small expensive housing

2. Work in SF and make $80k, live in Stockton and get more and pay less for a house, and spend a ton of time commuting

3. Live and Work in Stockton, make way less, live in a place larger than SF but Smaller than #2 and not have to commute

She chose #2 - others make different choices

There may not be which makes option 3 an non starter.

1) Close to retirement age

2) Likely still saving as much as possible so she can retire

3) May have other expenses not detailed in the article, stemming from family needs, health concerns, etc.

Also note that a property management company is evaluating someone from the "risk of non-payment" perspective - not a financial advisor's.

> why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living?

What do you hope to accomplish with this "pressure"? That these companies hire fewer people?

> Lower income housing?

Housing costs are one of those nasty problems where throwing money at it just doesn't work (and I'm saying this as a democratic socialist whose proposed solution to most problems is "tax the rich in order to throw money at it"). Imagine if big tech companies pledged a billion dollars or whatever to build a bunch of housing units. What would happen? This: other developers would pull back on new construction, because the pledge would throw a wrench in the supply/demand, and you'd be right back where you started.

The correct solution is upzoning and, to be blunt, disenfranchisement of NIMBYs.

> If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation?

Most of the big ones do: they offer a lot of incentives to not drive, including paying for employees to take public transport or offering shuttle buses (which at least keep them out of cars).

> move their headquarters out of the city centers?

They aren't in city centers: 4 of the Big 5 (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook) are all headquartered in suburbs. Only Amazon is headquartered in a city center.

> It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages.

Why does that seem crazy? It's just supply-and-demand.

Bay area has a whole bucket of specific problems - but there are general shared trends that extend to other cities with big tech industries.

I think the answer is that with well-managed development, having boosted economies can have few or no negative aspects, but the Bay Area is sorely lacking that right now. As others have said, the lion's share of the blame is not with the tech companies (they're just hiring workers they need), but with the area's terrible NIMBY politics that are blocking the construction of more housing.

I have always imagined the benefit to a city of having big businesses move in was to bring in more tax through boosted economic activity that would allow them to improve the city overall. Perhaps I played too much Sim City.

If it's just left alone, the market will react to this. If a 1BR apt costs $2500/mo, then the price of a sandwich might go to $25 to be able to pay that sandwich-makers $75k/yr wage. And if SFers don't like paying $25 for a sandwich then they can vote for more density.

What we need is a solution that encourages and accommodates success, not one that punishes it.

The benefits of centralization & economic opportunity for you but no one else isn't a stable equilibrium or a coherent policy goal. The only way you could plausibly achieve that over the long term is with border controls and immigration policy, something that's explicitly off the table for the interior of the United States per the Constitution.

That's how Silicon Valley became what it is. If a lot of tech companies moved to other cities, it would probably happen there, too.

Don't you think people are already trying to do this? There is resistance from many sides, which is, you know, the story here in general.

You're going to need some extremely powerful public policy interventions to push back on a force as powerful in human civilization as urbanization.

It's so much better for society and for the individuals who currently don't live in major cities to centralize into them. You're going to need some extreme regulation to reverse the incentives that have driven the push towards cities worldwide and for thousands of years.

And for what? To protect a relatively tiny constituency of people who currently live in cities and want them to stay small, against the giant national/worldwide population that wants economic opportunity, and to use its resources for something other than cars?

Don't they do this already with property and state income taxes?

Locals don't actually want to fix this problem -- ethnic groups are afraid of losing their homes, because historically that's what new housing construction has done.

All of SoMa was built by razing a predominantly black community and replacing it with what is there now. You can go to the SFMOMA and see photos of what it used to look like.

...she's a public health adviser for the United States Department of Health and Human Services. I'm pretty sure she's not selling sandwiches.

https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thw...