Instead of increasing commute times, more typically it involves simply not taking jobs that are further away.
Restricting labor mobility is really bad for obvious reasons: people not being able to move where the jobs are means jobs not being filled even as unemployment increases. There is overwhelming evidence that labor mobility has gotten drastically worse in recent decades, and local NIMBYism is one of the major causes: http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-l...
Compare this to China, which has had tens of millions of people flock to brand new megacities for the new job opportunities there.
It is an extreme example of a place where labour mobility is so valuable it happens in spite of restraints. In fact it is so extreme that it is hard to draw lessons for modern western countries (although it has obvious resemblances to urbanisation in Europe a few centuries ago).
Many American state universities discriminate against students based on where their parents live (e.g. charging in-state vs out-of-state tuition).
B. Yes, but you easily get residence by living there for less than a year. Also,public K12 schools can’t discriminate like they do in china.
i.e. I'm comparing the lower labour cost of the west in general vs the west before the 70s. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
If you want to deep dive into a present county per county labour cost specifically, then I'd argue yes as well http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/teacher-pay/
Anaheim teachers make ~50% more than SF teachers and spend 4 times less proportion of their income on rent.
I live in San Jose, I commute to SF 3 days a week (super thankful for the chance to work remote 2x a week). My current apartment (a 1BR I live in by myself) costs a bit less than 1k a month and is rent-controlled. The equivalent in SJ is probably worth 2-2.5x as much per month, and in SF (or somewhere in-between) it can be worth anywhere from 2.5-4x as much.
I've been hunting for an apartment more on the peninsula since I don't necessarily need or want to live right in the city, just closer (especially in case I switch jobs eventually), but I definitely want to halve the commute time at least (Caltrain plus door to door is nearly 1.75hrs each way).
But why would I want to leave my rent-controlled steal and be spending over half my monthly income for the equivalent? It's ridiculous.
So now it's a matter of figuring out the cost analysis of moving into a better area that's closer to work, and therefore an increased quality of life, or stay where I'm at where I can save much more money and have a rather crappy quality of life (I don't care for where I live now strictly other than the cheap price of the rent).
The more interesting question is, why are the 50 miles between SF and SJ reserved for sparsely packed single family homes and one story strip malls?
Redwood City is also nicely positioned as a mid-point between SF and South Bay.
Beyond that, it seems the entire El Camino corridor is being heavily developed with retail and high-density condos and apartments.
Some of these areas (Redwood City in this case) are next to major Caltrain stations with Baby Bullet stops. But they're also convenient (technically speaking) for going on 101S/N to work, etc.
That's part of why I'd prefer living on the peninsula than in downtown SF. Weather is consistently better in the summer months. More space/less people (except for rush hour traffic). More parks for recreation. Pools aren't necessarily a deal breaker for me, but it's a nice extra.
A shiny high-rise is nice but unless you can afford a penthouse or similar you're probably looking at a small unit. Less space, fewer parks, more people everywhere (tourists, homeless, etc.)
The downtown has a solid layout though and lots of room for growth. The RWC downtown has the potential for offering a lot more than some neighboring downtowns that are less dense and could be a nice hybrid between SF and more "suburban" Peninsula cities.
In case you want me to answer, there are myriad advantages: the chance to work with your most preferred tools, on a product that's more interesting you, with maximally compatible coworkers, etc. All the normal reasons people go somewhere besides where they were born for a job.
That's the only way you're going to come anywhere near your current rent. As a bonus you'll get more space generally and some community.
My unit is rent-controlled. However, the owner of the building has only increased rent twice, both being the max they could under the rent control limit. They just haven't continually increased it on an annual basis because apparently they haven't needed to.
still, an annualized 8% is quite a bit (over 5 years it would be 46%)
It's starting to feel like articles and posts like this aren't driven by discussion or curiosity but just political fights.
Thus the underlying issue is that there has not been proper correction and guidance from the governance structures established by the people in the area; mostly because the rising home prices and status-quo of neighborhoods generally benefit those people.
It's going to take state or federal level correction to fix this issue and the "best" way of doing that would be to sour the use of housing as an investment.
It might help to think of it in a "top down" fashion. Imagine laying out housing for everyone in a metro area as an optimization problem, where you're trying to maximize a value function over things like amount of space, proximate to peoples' workplaces, quality of schools, affordability, etc.
Housing restrictions add additional constraints that make the solutions worse for everyone. E.g. say some group of people with kids are willing to live in a duplex on 1/8 of an acre rather than a detached home on 1/4 of an acre in order to reduce their commutes and see their kids more often. But they're not willing to live in a city apartment with their kids and pets. Housing restrictions basically eliminate that part of the solution space by making it illegal to construct such housing. That group of people get punted to their less-preferred alternatives, and the resulting solutions are worse for everyone.
That doesn't exclude the cost scenario outline further up, and the relative strength of these effects vary from person to person.
And no argument will "win" such debates for either side. These are complex issues, and even if everyone can agree on the mechanisms at work, you'll get widely different results based on differing importance for the conflicting goals you're trying to optimise for.
Rent control, as shown above, might legitimately add to traffic. But it's also cruel to force elderly people to leave their remaining friends, and their familiar neighbourhood, just because they can no longer afford rent.
Anyone claiming "it's so easy: just..." is invariably wrong. California's legislators aren't stupid. The main contributor to housing problems happens to be the unparalleled economic success of the state, plus a few geographic quirks.
Simplifying to the tired old "free market" vs "regulation" debate is only exchanging one set of problems for another. The US happens to have other locales that dabbled in an ideology-driven "free market" approach. The result are the suburban hell-holes that are Atlanta, or parts of Houston: Low-density clone cities totally reliant on cars, with much longer commutes and huge environmental footprints, almost devoid of street life.
What's usually needed is neither more nor less regulation, but smarter: encourage high-density mixed zoning, create public transport that can compete with cars, encourage companies to adopt telecommuting, flexible hours, distributed workplaces instead of central campus etc...
I assume because that's what people want?
HNers seem to think a downtown core existence is the best and apparently aren't aware there is a big group of people who don't want that.
Yes and no: Given the choice, people will prefer a single-family home with a large garden, to the same home without a garden, or a smaller apartment.
But rephrase it and the answer changes: People prefer to life in (nice) apartments if others do so as well, and the resulting increase in density cuts a 60min car commute into 15min on a bike, or even 30 in public transportation.
In any case, I would consider mixed zoning more important than density. It's not just metropolitan city centres that provide higher quality of life than the suburbs. Another winning model is that of the classic "Small Town USA".
It's perfectly possible to have suburban-style homes with gardens clustered around a city centre providing everything you need in a typical week, plus schools/medical care/sports/you kids' friends all within a radius of about 3 miles, making it easily accessible by bike, and even on foot.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2013/1/14/its-so-much-mo...
And yet in those places there are no housing shortages and normal people can actually buy a house without waiting for the equity fairy.
That rent control is bad is not exactly a new finding. This has been known to economists across the political spectrum for decades.
If someone is currently on $25k and gets a $10k basic income, their employer can lower their salary to $20k and they'll still be getting $5k more than they were before. (This won't happen immediately because people will be reluctant to take pay cuts, but I think it will in the longer term.)
Exactly how much of this difference the employee and employer capture in the longer term is a concern, but I think giving people the option to quit without starving will go a long way towards empowering them to insist on fair pay. I also think a result would be an increase job quality, because I think a lot of people would take a pay cut to work somewhere less awful if they could afford it.
Of course that money comes from taxes, so there's still a cost somewhere, but I'm not as convinced progressive taxes on the wealthy will have quite as big an impact on the costs to produce basic goods.
This is basic economics. (Seriously, this is in the easy stuff like Hazlitt.)
For an example, see joe's response.
If a would-be producer cannot source materials that would cost him less than the sale price, he just won't build the product.
[1] has more details on the subject.
I absolutely agree, and I think these justifiable and yet ill-defined concerns are shared by a lot of UBI opponents.
I just hope anyone trying to come to an informed decision remembers to include unrestrained capitalism's second-order effects on the pro/con list.
It sounds scary when put like that but it just means people free to interact, while secure from other social actors in their person and property. By the nature of voluntary configuration, interactions have a tendency toward being mutually beneficial, and there are corrective feedback loops that naturally exist in a voluntary society to reduce those that aren't (e.g. scammy operators increasingly excluded by increasing consumer vigilance and growing reputation markets).
And you can still have governments provisioning economic resources that qualify as public goods, like basic research, public information resources, policing and national defense, in such a setting, so there is no fundamental deficiency in unrestrained capitalism, aka an absolute free market.
Except a tendency toward consolidation and monopolies. And, inherent in the word "unrestrained", a tendency to use corporate money to unduly influence politics to benefit the corporation at the expense of the public interest.
> it just means people free to interact, while secure from other social actors in their person and property
It's kind of irrelevant anyway, all I really meant was UBI should be evaluated in comparison to "the status quo", whatever you choose to label it.
That assumes no government provisioning of public goods that can counteract capture of natural monopolies, but there's nothing inherent to a free market to prevent such government intervention.
>>And, inherent in the word "unrestrained", a tendency to use corporate money to unduly influence politics to benefit the corporation at the expense of the public interest.
The term here is "unrestrained capitalism", meaning people in possession of their right to contract and secure in their person/property, not "unrestrained society". An absolute free market doesn't mean anarchy. It doesn't preclude checks within the electoral and political process itself to prevent corruption. It doesn't prevent laws from being passed to place restrictions on those in public office, like, to give an extreme example, a lifetime ban on receiving any compensation from the private sector.
>>It's kind of irrelevant anyway, all I really meant was UBI should be evaluated in comparison to "the status quo"
Fair enough. I just take issue with the connotations of "unrestrained capitalism", where it implies malevolent behavior is legalized. A less biased term would be "free market".
Not sure if anyone pointed this out, but this problem of labor mobility exists for all of those who own their home as well.
Here is where the analysis should happen. All of the "significantly more money" aspect boils down to transactional costs. Transactional costs in rentals will always, always be higher than transactional costs of ownership. Ownership's transactional costs get offset, (to only a small extent in the Bay area, but it is not nothing), by the equity the owner has accumulated.
Renters never accumulate equity to offset their transactional cost of "trading". The paper (and all of the anti rent control camp) constantly misconstrues lower-than-market rent as "savings". It is not savings; it's merely delaying the inevitable transactional cost of "trading".
So does:
* good quality schools, rather commute long distances than change schools;
* a really good city with a nice downtown;
* a spouse's job location;
* friends' location;
* ... point is there are many reasons for someone to not want move closer to the current job.
End of the day, short term leases make rents float at the cost of making renters second class citizens who cannot stay in any one place or area.
Rent control is a way to deal with that. It exists because voters care deeply about it.
You've got to address a moral judgement you've implicitly made: What makes the current renters of a city more deserving than the future renters who might move to the city?
The high value of property in San Francisco is a lot to do with its proximity to amenities and services provided for by the very people suffering because of continually rising property prices. This is a highly parasitic dynamic.
If moral judgements are really your primary concern why are you advocating for eliminating a policy that allows a tiny bit of clawback from the pre-existing titanic wealth transfer that goes from renter to landlord?
Moreover, it's a policy that by and large keeps people who do necessary work.
There's a fair, economically efficient solution to all of this, of course: the 100% land value tax.
Rent control is merely a hack that offsets some of the gargantuan harm done by leeches extracting value from the communities surrounding them via untaxed land. I'd be fine with seeing it go... after implementing a 100% land value tax.
But I totally see how this is kind of hypocritical. I just want things my way, everywhere. :-] idk!
I suppose that the next-best thing is to have local control with freedom of movement. The United States and cities are kind of like this--- it allows for states and cities to try out different policies, and compete based on policy.
So, because you cannot trade apartments without spending significantly more money, there's a couple of hour-long commutes instead. This is part of a general pattern - messing with prices doesn't help, since the market still has to clear. You just start paying in things other than money. Paying for things with money is great in general, since then someone else has the money. Paying for things with a longer commute is terrible, since there's no beneficiary.