Too much local democracy: "I don't want someone in Sacramento deciding for me" is how you end up with this expression of pure individualism, where Atherton residents who have never taken public transportation in their life can block Caltrain development used by the working mass.
The whole every urban area of North America is a NIMBY nest. Pretty much every city is stuck with swathes of land zoned only for single family homes, with any density needing development agreements and land use change hearings and etc. Some cities are less geographically constrained (more sprawl is possible) or slower growing (the zoning changes can accommodate the growth) but the issue is the same everywhere.
A cookie-cutter, mass-produced home that has no clear architectural style and prizes superficial appearance and size over quality.
Sorry for being facetious, I sound like a jerk, but there must exist a threshold in willingness to devalue what is typically one's greatest asset and more importantly decrease your quality of life. By all means be as selfless and altruistic as you would like but do not expect everyone else to follow suit.
Your argument boils down to "if you allow anything more than a single family home this worst-case scenario is what will come of it".
Most of those issues are issues caused by current zoning practices. If moderate density was allowed almost everywhere, then there wouldn't be this stark divide between the 99 lots that are single family homes and the 1 lot that the developer has spent 12 years getting a development agreement for and needs to build a high rise to recoup the cost. If you can build more housing almost everywhere, you eliminate much of the housing and homelessness crisis. If there are specific land uses that are incompatible with residential areas, that can be addressed.
No one who is pushing for more development wants a chemical refinery in your back yard. But maybe your the house on the corner might get turned into a modest 8 unit apartment building, same as happened widely before the 1970s.
I don't see the point of adding homeless encampments. We already have those. What I want is a Housing First model as it's proven to effectively address homelessness in multiple countries around the world.
But yes, I would love public transit coming closer to my house, I would love a dense living situation that's walkable with cafes, pubs, and shops underneath. I want to live in a so-called "5 minute neighborhood" and/or "15 minute city". I hate having to drive 20+ minutes through traffic lights to do anything.
I wanted these things before I bought my house, but it's too expensive to buy a large enough space for my needs in a place that has all of these things nearby. Not because it has to be, but because zoning laws enforced by NIMBYs enforce it.
It doesn't have to. Housing can be affordable while going up in nominal terms.
Neither do I think most San Francisco homeowners think about housing supply strategically. They're pissed off about a specific view being blocked. Or construction noise. Or their area's average rent going up. (?!?) Alternatively, they're comfortable and can't imagine someone might be better off housed in worse conditions, cheaply, than struggling to make rent in a decked-out flat.
Housing cannot be affordable if it goes up in real terms though. In an ideal world house prices would increase 1:1 with wage growth from an affordable baseline.
There are 2 ways to fix it: either crash the market or introduce policies which will cause either stagnation or below inflation growth in housing prices for at least 20 or 30 years.
There's only one way to do that - a command economy, with all housing owned and doled out by the government. That just doesn't work, anywhere, ever.
You have to work very hard to ignore the fact that some places are more desirable than others to live in, and sometimes those desirable places change. Also, different people have different priorities, desires, and ability to afford both for their housing. How do you accommodate that pressure without 100% control over the entire real estate market?
Nobody's trying to realistically get to the "ideal world". What you want is an "improved world".
House prices and appreciation were basically the same throughout the US until something like the 1950s, when places like CA began to far outstrip other parts of the country. I don't think that CA became a desirable place to live suddenly in the 50s, but perhaps it did?
This is also ignoring sheer population growth, and the unrivaled economic behemoths that have come out of California since the 1950s and produced a ton of wealth for Californians.
Supply and demand, combined with “rugged individualism” valued so highly in the states. That individualism is largely what drives NIMBY mentalities.
Not necessary. A land value tax provides a market-based solution to this problem.
We need a shared definition of "working" then. There are plenty of ways to disincentivize low-density real estate development and incentivize high density and affordable housing, and all of them involve regulation and tax reform to control the market to some degree.
This post apparently assumes any non-free-market structure that "doesn't work" would be a worse outcome than we have currently, where there are more vacant homes than homeless people.
Except for Vienna.
The real underlying problem is a lack of new housing stock, at least partly due to the decade long neglect in the construction trade following the housing bubble collapse.
Yes it can. It just cannot be better than other comparable investments. If single family housing appreciated, on average, 0.25% per year in real terms, we'd likely be looking at an entirely different housing market.
For how long? If housing is a good investment, eventually the cost of housing will outpace the ability of new entrants to the market to afford it. If you're already "in the market", you might be OK. But if you're not, even the down payment may be completely out of reach.
Infinitely. Wages go up in nominal terms, too. What matters is the real housing price hovering around zero. (Slightly above, localized, is also fine if balanced by migration.)
House, as in structure, yes. Home, as in structure + land, probably not. Real wages are higher today than they were in the 80s [1]. One would expect some of that to filter into land value.
While I do get your point, it also has been generally true, for most modern cities for a long time (excluding short term fluctuations). Prices will go up as, as long as city is desirable to live in.
It holds true, long as cities don't collapse, which policies that lead to increasing prices of housing also can contribute to, by making city not desirable to live in.
Maybe when all of this commercial real estate dies they'll rezone/remove zoning and allow people to build where they can.
Sure residents can be NIMBYs but FAANG doesn't want to have their beautiful campuses flanked by the poors either.
I once spoke with a general manager of a large hotel that explained to me how certain levels of vacancy were targeted for this reason. I feel as though the methodology would be somewhat analogous.
Further, there is statistical modeling for sale that indicates what can be afforded in geographic locations. I’d claim that additional housing would be priced to what’s affordable rather than attempting to outbid the lowest listing as housing is a price-inelastic good.
We can then reason backwards on what's the minimum sized landlord that would benefit from artificially restricting supply.
"Investment", VCs are all around the US now and those who refuse to invest outside of city boundaries are going to have a bad time. At this point even setting shop in LA might be cheaper and give you a nicer scenery.
"Talent", hire remotely for the most talent-sensitive positions. Your react app is not rocket science.
The NIMBYs are right, we should stop moving there and stop paying them those extortionate rents.
I wonder how much of this is renters who feel they are just one IPO or acquisition away from being owners.
I don't think they're the ones protesting. One, it's irrational: if a windfall is around the corner, you want prices temporarily depressed. Two, political nihilism and detachment have been fashionable among San Francisco's political middle class for a few decades now. They are more likely to be proudly refusing to vote than attending town halls, speaking to their electeds or participating in protests. (I say this with sardonic affection for dear friends.)
The second point is starting to change. But culture has inertia. It will take time.
Maintain a ratio of residential to commercial and you don't have housing crunches and can keep your city at the density your residents choose.
Eh, San Francisco's voters have been drinking crazy water for some time. New developments blocked by renters. Stringent building codes and environmental reviews defended by those who think they're being compassionate to the poor. Scolding tech companies for hiring in the city and then panicking when they stop hiring in the city. This obviously isn't all of them. But it's not like this wasn't predictable over the past decade.