Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe.
But the NIMBYs aren’t totally in the clear. Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that contains units with lots of bedrooms. Wandering around those developments and the new 3-story developments in California, the ones in Taiwan are much, much, much nicer, even from the outside. The NIMBYs should take note.
That statement is the problem.
Nobody wants to rent. There are too many rental properties, and not enough affordable housing. The reason you need rental properties is because you're already trying to make a living from families having a home. You're not supposed to do that. That's supposed to be the prize for the family for assimilating with capitalism. By buying it and renting it back to them you're disincentivizing the working class from working.
But by all means, keep privatizing the shit out of 3 bedroom family homes and see what happens. Take every drop of value out of the housing market and bank it. That's what pitchforks are for.
The landowners in this case happen to think of themselves as middle class.
I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on capitalism, but even Marx would agree with me that it's better than feudalism.
Sure dude. Now where have I heard that before?
https://x.com/TheOmniZaddy/status/1559949666543878151
Georgism is better though, and the homeownership market isn't about "capitalism".
Our forefathers would be baffled to see that we've coerced crops into tenfold their natural yield, conquered lightning, the wind, and the sun itself, and yet, millions of people are still working 40+ hours a week to not starve or go homeless.
Those are downstream of housing restrictions to a large extent. From "Housing theory of everything" [0]:
Consider a cleaner living in Alabama. In 1960 they could move to NYC and earn wages 84% higher, and still end up with 70% higher income after rent. In 2010, they could move to New York City and become 28% more productive, and earn a wage 28% higher – and reduce the surplus of workers back home, letting them demand higher pay. But since housing costs are so much higher, the net earnings and living standards of someone like this would fall if they moved today, and wouldn’t be worth it. The same would be true for plumbers, receptionists and other professions that allow other people to specialise at what they’re best at and minimise the time they spend on things like DIY and answering the phone. By contrast, top lawyers get wage boosts that are still sufficiently higher to justify a move in both 1960 and 2010, even after the higher rents they’ll have to pay.
[0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
Right now manufacturers should be considering other states. Florida, Tennessee and Texas all are income-tax-free and have business friendly regulatory climates. Several states like Alabama and West Virginia offer extremely low cost-of-living and property costs and likely would negotiate tax abatements.
I grew up in Texas. I've lived in 5 states and a Canadian province.
My sisters house in Fort Worth is assessed a little lower than my house in WI. But her property tax is more than my property tax plus WI state income tax so.....
I can see why even a deep blue liberal might hold their nose and move to FL or TX. I can’t see why you’d do so for AL or WV.
Most of Texas and Florida is a lot more alike to WV and Alabama when you take out some of the cities which the state very much hates. Both states are very much local control when it comes to the Federal government, but exactly the opposite when it comes to their cities.
> as well as comparatively high tax levels and a complex regulatory environment for businesses.[8] Texas is the leading destination of California's former residents
Texas has higher tax levels than California because property taxes are higher. People are leaving pretty much entirely because of housing costs because California refuses to build anything.
It’s not perfect but neither is SFBA, NYC, or Seattle.
I am not blaming the government for that. It’s just life when you live in an area with frequent hurricanes
This has ripple effects: it’s not just women suffering permanent injuries or death but also growing problems in many red states with doctors leaving to avoid the high likelihood of being charged for exercising what is standard medical judgement in the free world.
Even getting pregnant is at risk for couples who need to use IVF. Those attempts can go wrong which are easily resolved if you can get medical care which is increasingly under legal threat. IVF patients tend to be richer and whiter so the GOP is trying to carve out exceptions but that’s far from a given and you’ll still have a nightmare if you get the wrong DA.
Yes, there are ways that people can cope with that but just because it’s possible doesn’t mean people won’t try to avoid being in a bad situation in the first place, as was the topic of this thread.
Doctors in anti-abortion states are afraid to do medically necessary abortion and getting questioned by the judicial system.
I can’t take her to another state. My best friend and his wife were on the brink of making that choice. Instead they had their son delivered 2 months early and let the chips fall where they may (he’s healthy with some slight learning disabilities now). But he was not about to let his wife die and he later on got a vasectomy so he wouldn’t risk getting his wife pregnant
Alabama has beautiful beaches...and Huntsville. Birmingham is actually quite nice.
Florida has amazing beaches.
Nothing on Houston though. Houston all day.
Desirable urban areas of California are expensive because we don't have enough housing.
The tax thing is just something I hear in the California reddit groups when people discuss the never ending claims of a "California exodus". Allegedly, people have moved to Texas and discovered that they aren't actually saving money compared to California, and the weather is way worse.
If you're renting, it's not like your landlord isn't baking that I to your rent.
In addition to being fewer dollarbucks out of my pocket, I had confidence that that money was going to be used closer to my own community.
(All of this is to say nothing of TX having no capital gains tax, which pushed the move from being kind of a wash to being a slam dunk.)
I didn't end up actually moving there for personal reasons, and having done all this analysis makes the California taxes all the harder to stomach.
I hear this a lot about California and other places. But I also know lots of people look to buy a 2nd, 3rd, etc property for rental income. For those homeowners, buying more property is rational because it's an investment they already understand. They can reap economy of scale benefits, even at a low multiple like 2-3 properties: water heaters, dishwashers etc become easier to maintain. The incentives are strong for homeowners to buy rental property. And they're in a stronger position to buy than renters.
My gut tells me that 7-8 of every 10 new houses built are bought with the intention to rent it out. It seems like "build more homes" will result in current property owners owning more property to rent out, and most renters will still be renters.
The main reason anyone would own two SFHs is that you need to do this in order to move. If you sell your first home before moving you're homeless. And after that it can take a long time to find a buyer.
They're a bad rental investment though because it's way too risky to own one; one bad renter or one roof replacement means you've lost money.
Cost of construction also matters - it reduces the renter's BATNA which reduces bargaining power.
Florida is my current home state.
You would be much better off moving to GA, TN, AL or almost any other southern state with more traditional business friendly Republicans.
And this isn’t meant to be a Republican vs Democrat thing. More so a “business friendly traditional Republican” vs “culture warrior Republicans”.
I have no opinion of how Democrats run their states. I’ve only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL. I don’t keep up with state politics in other states.
Yes, and abortion is illegal in those states, the schools are terrible, and they're full of MAGAts. You're not going to attract top talent to these places, especially women. There are very good reasons that knowledge industries are mostly concentrated in blue states.
That's also an obstacle to a lot of cities densifying and intensifying. Built out cities have a model that lets them operate, but not capital or land to build and expand in areas of high growth and demand. That's just one of many factors that are freezing our cities in amber.
Parcel taxes are known to be a poor funding mechanism for this reason, but they were the only viable way for districts to raise extra money while working around the toxic side effects of Proposition 13 (https://ed100.org/lessons/parceltax), which illustrates its long shadow in California state law. Prop 13 is of course responsible for multiple other self-reinforcing anti-growth incentive loops.
It actually is mostly at the state level, namely fire codes and condo defect laws. America has building codes designed not for safety but to make single family homes cheaper and apartments more expensive. One of the things they do is require double stairways for tall enough buildings, with the result that all apartments must be built like hotels. That plus the requirement for a window on bedrooms makes it hard to fit them in.
From what I read housing price to income ratio has increased ~2.5 times from 6.5 to 15.8 in last two decades in Taiwan. And it seems to be worse in new developments in city like Taipei.
At a top echelon of Taiwan society or as a tourist it must be nice live, roam around in pleasant urban environments compare to US suburbia but I am not sure average Taiwanese are finding life great with stagnating wages and unaffordable housing.
I won't enumerate them because it would be sure to offend somebody (everybody?).
The only thing that's unlikely to happen is all good things one like to become available at a place one likes to live.
That's not true. The minimum wage has increased every year for the last 8 years at least for quite a decent amount. Wages have increased, maybe even more so than the US.
> And it seems to be worse in new developments in city like Taipei
If you're looking at Taipei then you have to compare it to NYC or some other expensive city and NYC isn't much better in terms of pricing.
But presumably you'll never be able to buy and will have to rent forever? Real estate is significantly more expensive in Taiwan relative to income than in SF/etc.
How so? Supposedly house prices increased by 50% in 5 years there. So obviously it does not meet demand...
> Why would you want to buy if renting is cheaper?
Because it's usually considerably cheaper long-term? Rent prices go up all the time, so you'd lose a very significant amount of money over 10-20+ years.
Say rents are >6% of the equivalent cost of ownership, then a mortgage at 6% will be cheaper than renting. So renting can't get that out of control relative to house prices in the long term, they have to go crazy together in a way that favours people who always lived in an area.
In Taipei it seems to be about 50x.
So if you live there and want to have children it's certainly not cheaper (you can't afford it anyway) and you end up paying already very high and continuously increasing rent payments all your life. By the time you retire you have no equity and very little savings.
Situation is the the same in a lot of major cities. It's just that rents are naturally caped at some proportion of median income (that leaves you with very little disposable income) while real estate prices have become almost completely detached from it.
That doesn't change the loss of voting power. Further, value to who? I agree a 20 story high-rise has more value than a single-family home, but how does that help the single-family homeowner or the homeowners that live around the lot that gets rezoned?
That's the problem. The existing homes and their owners seem mostly downsides to rezoning even though the city as a whole would benefit greatly from them.
That's only part of the problem, though. Homeowners are voting in their interest, and selfish or not, that's democracy. The other side of the coin is that the people who stand to benefit the most don't vote for policies or politicians that have their interests in mind.
SF shows up in HN all the time for its NIMBYsm, but the city is mostly renters, whom could vote as a block like homeowners, and easily get more housing built. But they don't.
Long ago the people that lived in the area realized that they liked where they lived and how it was, and voted to put in place rules to keep it that way. It sucks now, I and all my friends the grew up there were forced to move somewhere affordable, but it's not pure selfishness. They didn't take something away from someone else, no one else ever had it. And to expand it does inherently change the nature of what 'it' is and opens a genie that can NEVER be put back.
Ignoring that there were probably Indians there - that wasn't "long ago", residential zoning was mostly introduced in the 30s-60s. America hasn't had zoning for most of its life!
Most other countries have never had it and still don't.
(Except every other Anglo country has an even /worse/ planning system than American residential zoning.)
Zoning was introduced in the USA in 1904. The USA was 'urbanized' in 1920 the first time more Americans lived in cities than the rural countryside. Our zoning laws fit with the time period when we would develop things like... zoning laws.
When my family moved to the Bay Area huge parts of it was fruit trees (with another large part being future superfund toxic waste dumps).
If you were to drive (because they aren't designed for walking) along the 'Walmart strip' of any town in the USA I can't see how you can argue 'the USA has too strong of city planning'. Our growth is the stuff of ugly, out of control, unwalkable, car requiring nightmares.
You're wrong about when it started. It's a lot more recent than that. We didn't build this way in 1904; we couldn't have afforded to live like this because we didn't have cars. A lot of places in the US were actually bulldozed since then to replace them with streets and parking.
American zoning specifically was introduced in California for the sole reason of keeping Chinese immigrants out of white neighborhoods - the idea was that if you banned running a business out of your home, they wouldn't be able to afford the neighborhood. (See "The Color of Law"… or you can read the city council minutes because, like, that's why they said they did it.)
But it's been kept since then mainly because of the assumption that everyone will own a car; cars cause traffic, so you can't attract them or strangers will make noise and park in front of your house.
Funny enough, another reason it's been kept in California is that 70s environmentalists read "Urban Growth Engines" and "The Population Bomb" and decided it was good because more expensive housing would stop people from having children. This is probably the inspiration for that Thanos guy.
> If you were to drive (because they aren't designed for walking) along the 'Walmart strip' of any town in the USA I can't see how you can argue 'the USA has too strong of city planning'.
Those are entirely caused by city planning. For one thing, no developer would want to build this way because it's not profitable - all that concrete for surface parking spaces is super expensive and nobody is using it. Parking minimums, stroads, federal highway funding, height limits and NIMBYs all come together to create sprawl. (See "Strong Towns".)
Oh, and fear that denser housing would lead to everyone dying in a nuclear war, that too.
We agree the USA didn't have relevant zoning laws until the population needed zoning laws. I don't think that changes anything (other than maybe we both agree that first passes often turn out to be poor and need revision).
70s environmentalists didn't decide more expensive housing would stop people from having children. I'm a child of these people. I remember the discussion. I remember my parents talking about prop 13. Driving up the cost of housing had zero discussion. The little old lady down the street driven from her home over property taxes did. The rapid changes with no planning did. The loss of the local field where people played. The loss of access to beaches people were used to going to. That's why laws like The California Coastal Act of 1976 were added at this time as well to guaranty public access back to these beaches. It wasn't just 'no building houses and no property tax for boomers' there is a whole body of law created at this time trying to keep California what it had been such as a place where you can go to the beach (up until 1976 that wasn't a given).
While they have been used for racist reasons zoning laws are not defacto racist. Buying a home is the largest purchase most Americans will make. It is also a long term purchase. Guaranteeing that what you buy will stay what you bought for the lifetime of the purchase seems reasonable. Just because outside people don't like the guaranty that the government made doesn't mean that it should be taken away from the people it was made to. I had to fight hard to prevent an temporary (it was not temporary just because it was movable) asphalt plant from being put in across from my neighborhood. I was able to stop it because of zoning laws and all the meetings they had to have to get an exception. I was able to motivate enough people to go to those meetings that they finally gave up. My house was good for 1 thing, raising my children. Allowing an asphalt plant made the largest purchase I will ever make in my life useless for the reason I bought the house. Zoning laws are the government guaranteeing me my purchase will be usable. If the government wants to take away that guaranty they should have to buy me out.
Please remember I was driven out of where I grew up. I understand it sucks. I would have loved to be able to afford to stay and raise a family where I grew up. To have taught my kids to surf. Shown them the cool discoveries I made in Nisene Marks. But I also understand the reasons it ended up this way weren't nefarious, racists, trying to create a hellscape for $$$. It was people making what they thought were the right choices because they didn't like the rapid changes that were happening. Things can turn out bad without having premeditated evil intentions.
Edit: I am so tired of these attacks. My mom was the kindest gentlest person I have ever known. Her and her friends may not have made perfect choices but stop with the 'they were evil'. They were basic, fallible human beings. The results didn't end up great, so fix them. But stop blaming. It helps nothing. They tried. They got access to their beaches back as part of this same movement, something I don't hear all this 'older Californians just suck and are evil' complaining about. Stop attacking people like my dead mother, they don't deserve the attacks. Stop character assassinating these people whose motivations you know nothing about just because you are angry/frustrated.
And it's because of zoning. Cities allow density construction but then it's almost exclusively 0 and 1 bedroom apartments because you can charge more per sq ft. Zoning laws should force apartment construction to include multiple bedroom units but that would lower the cost of 1br units. So NIMBYs don't want density construction, and the people who build density don't want big units.
So cities are unlivable if you're not young and single or happy living in relative squalor. So people either don't have children or have to move to have children and you get cities that push out a big chunk of the demographic and then force people to commute.
We can't. Certainly not until people stop being self-oriented, and stop being willing to sacrifice others for their own benefit. Recorded history says this is not going to happen. Even the one (as far as I understand) religion concerned with transforming human nature to love others sacrificially, Christianity, says this requires divine help. (There is even a book, "Critical Journey" that identifies the stages of spiritual life, with the life of sacrificial love as the sixth and last. Given the difficulty and slowness that even people who are committed to the journey find, getting to the life of sacrificial live probably requires multiple decades. So even within Christianity this quality is rare.)
Also, since Communism builds on Marxist ideas, which are founded on the idea of power, a Communist utopia is impossible, since the asserting of of power is the opposite of loving others sacrificially. And, indeed, 100% of the Communist states resulted in totalitarian dictatorships.
People try this thing on a fairly regular basis.
You're thinking "wouldn't it be great if there was a community led by an absolute authority which agrees with me" and, uh, that kind of thing doesn't scale, last, or continue agreeing with you for a particularly long amount of time.
>I really think this is not possible without it being a private parcel where there aren't thousands of individual property owners in the loop for decision making.
This is just saying democracy is bad. Ok, but go find me an example of something else that has actually worked.
It's troubling how people think dictatorship is the solution to their problems these days. It's not even one particular viewpoint that falls into this, people of all positions are increasingly advocating for authoritarian solutions.
The majority party has the full opportunity to get rid of the fillibuster, and yet does not. (pick a year to determine which party is assigned to which role)
The lack of activity is just as much the Democrats' fault, they have had plenty of opportunity to try to change procedure but they have not.
It's more subtle than that, because it depends on the scope. Democracy is already not applied in many contexts today, such as most private corporations. In fact I think large companies have many analogous features to communist governments what with the central control and absolute authority.
There is certainly no suggestion that a whole state or country should be switched over to an authoritarian regime; of course we all know the classic "we tried this already and it didn't work" line.
There are a lot of cult-ish or vaguely religion-based communities out there. But that's not what I have in mind.
You tend to see a lot of lament in here on HN or other similar forums about things like car-centric suburban hellscapes, poor walkability, bike paths, what have you. Meanwhile in urban settings where these things are better solved there is the problem that property values are sky high, and create an elite environment that turn away support roles and cause a new set of problems.
I would love to see some tech billionaire drive an innovative design over a metro-sized zone. Maybe don't have roads and cars except for deliveries, use roads for cycles and pedestrians? Have a subway built before anything else? High-rise mixed-use buildings with important services like free child-care and urgent care? Have golf-cart-like EVs easily available for short-term rent. Free stupid-fast WiFi/Internet etc.
Kind of like a college campus but scaled up? Maybe the crazy sheiks in Dubai will manage it.
You're advocating for local government to be a dictatorship. Private enterprise is not the same as a government with power over people and land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telosa
>Telosa is a proposed utopian planned US city conceived by American billionaire Marc Lore and announced in September 2021.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/23/marc-andreessens-family-pl...
>California Forever is a proposed master-planned community, to be carved from over 60,000 acres of land that several members of Silicon Valley’s elite have quietly been buying in Solano County since 2017.
Here's some more: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/32166...
>There are a lot of cult-ish or vaguely religion-based communities out there. But that's not what I have in mind.
Honestly, people and their zoning/walkable/anti-car/density/environmental ideals and desire for a little dictatorship to create it is pretty indistinguishable from all the other cult community efforts. The hippies wanted free love and drugs or whatever, the luddites wanted no technology, everybody wanted their set of things. Nobody thinks their cult is a cult, they think they have great ideas, only what those other people are doing is a cult.
Seriously it's troubling how folks think billionaires and dictatorships are going to save them and can't even conceive of a community built on a strong foundation of well executed differing opinions compromising to achieve the best outcome.
Folks just want their opinions and only their opinions made real by force and absolute power. It's insane that people don't recognize how many people have tried before and the awful things that happen when it fails.
> It's insane that people don't recognize how many people have tried before and the awful things that happen when it fails.
I think it's just human nature, perhaps even more so in an engineering community. Look at how much of scientific progress follows that pattern, and even worse with the participants fully recognizing the immense amounts of preceding failures.
If you actually want higher-density, what you actually want is national or state laws that restrict what zoning can restrict. Japan is a good model for this: they have a nationalized zoning plan. Individual city councils can only pick specific zones from a list of varying densities of mixed commercial/residential zones and industrial zones.
A lot of the harms of suburban life are specific to the segregation of commercial and residential: moving people away from the places they want to go to means they need a car, and the infrastructure to use it with, which takes up space, which pushes everything else away, which creates more demand for cars and car infrastructure, and so on. Conversely, we could imagine, say, taking a few lots in an otherwise single-family development and turning them into convenience stores or something, which would be something people could just walk to.
Once you have the legal capacity to build you can then start talking about having government money go into buying and developing upzoned property. Private ownership and developers will follow. The goal is not to bring about some specific master plan but to just generally increase access to land and housing. You can run it as a co-op if you want but do not, for the love of god, micromanage people into wishing they had their $500k mortgaged single-family homes that they """owned""" back.
In smaller places, that simply isn’t an option, so there exists greater demand for family living in high rises.
Looked at a dozen midrise buildings this year across DC/Phila/NYC markets, some new/recent construction, some office conversions. Most buildings had zero 3bd units except for maybe a single penthouse, a 2bd unit every other floor, and the entire rest of the building evenly divided between studios and 1bd units in the 400-600sqft range. The competition for the 2bd units was unreal, in several cases people were offering the entire year's lease upfront, in cash, to secure an apartment.
It really is that competitive and the demand is there, the supply is not.
Other advantage is that keeping cities very dense and preventing urban sprawl means everyone has access to nature quickly, through public transports.
The reason they're so cheap is that nobody wants to live in those areas because cities are better and have better jobs.
What they can do is run buses on existing public roads. And they do that. It's still like 1.5+ hours from the Tri-Valley to SF.
Tech companies had very modest participation in the Caltrain PCEP project, and still barely participate in the Dumbarton rail corridor planning, have made no direct moves to expedite or simplify the BART Silicon Valley expansion, have not attempted to improve the performance of VTA light rail, have not publicly tried to pressure the SF city government to expedite or simplify Caltrain DTC, and have made no proposals to make use of vacant or underutilized rail or ex-rail rights-of-way across the Silicon Valley where no NIMBY opposition exists. (Yes, Atherton is famous for its NIMBYs blocking the original HSR construction plan. It's not currently relevant and can be bypassed.)
A lot of Intel R&D (and all their manufacturing) is outside the Bay Area, i.e., Oregon and elsewhere, so not sure this is a factor in their case.
Moreover, lobbying is more a question of connections and relationships which are lubricated with money than pure spending power, so it can be easier for a large corporation to nudge things its way at the national and state levels while still struggling to curry influence at the local level, and vice versa for small companies.
There's some whiplash in hearing constantly how the US is a corporate-dominated oligarchy, and then also seeing trillion-dollar industries at the forefront of the global economy constantly getting their shit rocked by a few dozen NIMBY retirees at city council meetings.