It honestly didn't seem all that insane to me, because Boston is crazier in nearly every dimension. The peninsula at least has 3-lane boulevards with a reasonable road hierarchy and traffic light timings. Boston has cowpaths branching off in every direction, controlled by stop signs that can literally back up for miles. The peninsula has block after block of Eichlers on 1/4 acre lots. Boston has mid-rise row-houses on landfill in the Back Bay, quickly trailing off to historic old houses on 1.5 acre lots 10 minutes outside of the city. The peninsula refuses to let you put in an in-law unit or cut down a redwood tree without going through an extensive permitting process. The Boston area might refuse to let you put in new window panes if you live in a historic house (my computer teacher lived in one from the 1730s, and it still had all the original glass - which back then was hand made and tended to flow like putty - because it was considered a historic property and she couldn't modify it). The peninsula is due for a natural disaster in the next 30 years. In Boston, as my wife puts it, every winter is a natural disaster. BART has a problem with homeless dudes and property crime. The Red Line has a problem with trains losing the 3rd rail and running 20 minutes late. Caltrain electrification is stuck in limbo. The Big Dig has ceiling tiles that fall down and kill people.
Of course, the flip side of this is that Boston hasn't grown since 1950, and is around the same size as its 1910 population. San Francisco will probably meet a similar fate when the tech boom peters out.
https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/how-does-...
Housing prices in Boston aren't Bay bad or even close to it.
That sounds like a really easy problem to solve ...
"Yes, children - of course you may play baseball in my front yard ..."
It's actually quite the opposite. So-called soft story buildings are more dangerous in an earthquake and property owners are taking quite a while to bring them up to code. Californians just love their cars.
I don't see how that could be the case. The property value of a plot of land on which a 50, or even 5 story building can be built is much higher than the property value of a single-family home.
It's sorta like when labor unions go away. The company that hires non-unionized labor at half the price and double the productivity reaps an enormous windfall. So do the employees, who were presumably in other, less well-paying jobs. Everyone else who chooses not to play the new game ends up out of a job.
Or is this correct: As housing prices rise, it becomes cost effective to replace simplexes with duplexes, threeplexes, etc., causing the value of all simplexes to rise.
That's not completely accurate. Yes, demand might fall, but even so price and value will still rise regardless.
If you build a 50 unit complex next door, as long as some of those 50 units sell, then everyone elses 1/4th acre will become more valuable, even if no one ever actually buys them, because land value in the US has very little to do with buyers or demand, and is exclusively valued by whatever property transactions happen to occur nearby it.
land value in the US has very little to do with buyers or demand, and is exclusively valued by whatever property transactions happen to occur nearby it
Most residential properties here could have been snapped up in 2009 for about 60% of current costs... because demand was lower. (Probably several hundred percent in areas like Mission Bay.)
Land value in the US obviously has to do with buyers and demand.
So yes the price of land would go up, but the price of livable space would fall. And the cost of livable space is what we care about with regards to affordable housing.
Elaborate efforts have been made to adapt the contradictory parts, efforts that worked adequately for a while but which are now coming apart, leaving a situation with no way forward at all.
It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned.
I used to live in NYC, a city that's had its own difficulties adding new housing, corruption in the permitting process, considering too many areas "historic." But the Bay Area is something completely different. It seems that everyone who already owns a single family home is strongly in favor of pulling up the ladder.
Perhaps too much money is riding on the existing "market value" of homes here. If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? Proposition 13 can't be helping, either.