There is a supply and demand problem where there is an enormous demand for a small area when there are so many other great places to be in this country.
Jobs are abundant all over. If you want to solve the housing problems in the bay area, start programs that give people $10,000 to go anywhere else. You'll enormously increase the quality of life of the people who leave.
There's nothing wrong with an area that doesn't aspire to intense density. Nobody is entitled to that, there's nothing wrong with self determination and choosing not to grow. People need to realize there are other places to be, companies need to realize there are other places to be.
Yes, exactly. No one is entitled to live anywhere. Don't be ridiculous. If they were willing to move they would accordingly become scarce and therefore more valuable and an equilibrium would met. By staying they are simply harming themselves -- to what end? Plenty of people move away from the Bay Area for cost reasons.
This is the same dilemma that has inhibited them from gaining leverage politically that would resolve the zoning issues.
It's all supply and demand. If we need more housing, people need to move to places where housing is more available. There are plenty of small rural towns that have excess, cheaply priced housing. (In the Bay area, not so much.)
People desperately want to escape CA but have no choice because that's where the jobs are. Jobs are there because companies are there. Companies are there because it's not their problem and they don't pay the full cost of their egregious location decisions. It all comes down to supply of jobs vs supply of homes: it's desperately out of balance.
Voters think they can actually stop growth by stopping housing development. It's not the housing that brings people to CA, it's the jobs, especially jobs for immigrants and jobs for people outside of CA (in the US).
If housing and labor markets were entirely elastic, and those are the only two factors your people need to consider, then "go away" could be a reasonable government policy. But people are more than their income and their cost of living.
Consider a recovering opioid addict making minimum wage. Medicaid for health care. They are recovering, not relapsed, because of great support from their parents, brother, and grandparents, all of whom live in (say) Oakland. If we look at the labor market and the housing market, the rational economic decision is to move away. Away from their family, the support network that keeps this person employable (and quite possibly alive). Should the whole family move? Not all jobs are everywhere. Should the brother quit Berkeley? These webs are not easily untangled.
If their support network were a Church, or a local football club, the cost would be same: leave your life behind so the Bay Area can stay suburban.
Expensive housing destroys the small, vital institutions that hold our society together by driving people apart.
This is also my first thought when people say "Well, nobody wants to move to the Bay area anymore, everybody's leaving". Well, why is the rent still so high?
Wouldn't California, and the rest of the country, be better off if quite a few people from across the spectrum left for other places? The wealth/talent/business concentration is really unnecessary, and with drought, fires, and other global warming concerns, it's actually not that nice there.
The solution to a lot of the "housing problems" around the country isn't further concentration but decentralization.
This. 10 out of 10 discussions I have around this topic with people looking to move out of the Bay Area results in the other party realizing money isn’t going to net out in their favor.
I think you have to remember to apply marginal thinking and consider sampling bias.
At the margins, the people who move away are the ones who were already unhappy with “issue x” but had not actually left.
Now that “cost of moving” decreases, or “cost of staying” increases, the cost/benefit of moving becomes positive for those marginal residents, but stays negative for those that love where they are.
Clearly plenty of people don’t find it to be unlivable, indeed it’s still objectively ($/sqft to buy) one of the most desirable places to live in the country even despite the problems.
This is also completely consistent with small towns seeing a large influx of people fleeing CA; it doesn’t take a high % of the most-populous state leaving to make a substantial difference in all of the small desirable towns.
I do agree that the remote trend needs to be followed closely; it’s great for senior engineers at big companies, but I wonder if startups and juniors at large companies are soon going to realize that mentoring and rapid collaboration is really hard remote, and we’ll see the pendulum swing back a bit. Or maybe we will solve those problems and the agglomeration effect of the Bay Area fully dissolves.
Think about all the people behind on their rent and/or need to break their lease (an additional month rent) to move otherwise they risk a court ordered eviction, a debt judgement, and being on the “do not rent” list for all landlords everywhere forever no matter if the monthly rent is 1/10th the amount that caused the problem during a global pandemic.
A $10k cash infusion solves all or a lot of that in most cases.
Many of these people had already considered leaving or walking away.
The bay area is a very transient place of economic migrants, abruptly leaving isn't a major decision for a large population there, just as marginally inconvenient as any move.
Also we are talking about less than 500 applications so far. (1000 applicants, half from california, “many from bay area), bay area is 8 million people.
You have to remember that Santa Cruz is very near the Bay Area and in California. A lot more than 60,000 people want to live there many have been forced out by costs.
What you’re saying really amounts to saying you want to stop immigration into your town. While I can understand the sentiment, the problem is that people feel this way in so many places that it is creating a crisis of housing affordability.
Then what is the answer? People want to live in NYC, LA and the Bay Area. They need homes in the places they want to live, and if they don't get them they won't stay put: they'll move to sprawl in New Jersey, Orange County and Livermore. And those places will suck, and we'll all pay the costs in infrastructure stress.
Build housing where the jobs are. That absolutely is the answer. Any other solution is isomorphic to "put the desirable jobs somewhere else", a puzzle the whole world[1] is trying to solve, and failing. Housing is something we know how to do.
Yes. Not everyone has to live in CA. It’s a self compounding problem. Build more housing to allow more jobs which need more housing. Maybe let the free market decide and jobs will spread out into lower cost areas.
A large percentage of the people living in my R-1 neighborhood are retired now. They could sell their houses and "cash out", but what would be the point? Money is no substitute for a lifestyle. We chose this lifestyle because of the attractions it offered. A couple of my neighbors have moved away, but for every one that moved, there are ten who have stayed. Once we retire we aren't making that long commute any more, and most of us don't leave our neighborhood during the week because we have almost everything we need within a mile or two. For the people who are working in tech, a lot of them used to have WFH days, but now most of them expect to have more regular WFH days - perhaps even a majority. That's pretty much the utopia that people want to achieve through dense development, namely living locally.
I think there is one major issue that doesn't get mentioned, namely the fact that companies have chosen to site themselves in areas where there was a shortage of nearby housing. The south bay areas are the best example of this, with so many of the employers being north of 101 but almost no housing north of 101. This is not a new problem - I remember people commuting long distances to Lockheed and other defense employers north of bayshore in the 70s. As employers have continued to pack more and more jobs into tight spaces, they have exacerbated the problem.
There is a severe problem with affordability of housing, but that is caused by increased demand as much as limited supply. We worship at the altar of economic growth, and refuse to consider the consequences of that growth. Urban planning is about maintaining balances, in much the same way that we seek to strike balances in our lifestyles. Would anyone accept that employment growth is constrained to not exceed housing supply? It's hard to imagine.
Shouldn't we wait for a solution to our traffic and resource issues before trying to increase our density? Is it really so terrible for people to consider living somewhere besides California?
I'm a renter now, so I sympathize with people like me who are suffering from the current situation, but I feel like efforts like this just create sub-standard housing and enable more irresponsible growth. Are we just trying to lower the quality of life for everyone in CA until enough people leave?
This is true and explains some of it, but it doesn't change the fact that currently wanting to live in a desirable area and wanting to live in an area because of a job are conflated with no options that could effectively separate or distinguish between the two sources of demand. It's not like everybody would get up and leave the Bay Area, but it would allow those who only want the job to leave the market for housing in the Bay Area and lowering demand overall. At worst, the drop in demand would be supplanted with people who wouldn't move to the Bay Area at the current price (and thus the price wouldn't see much of a drop), but at least you wouldn't be crowded out by people who would leave the Bay Area given the choice.
The economic need will, of course, compensate for higher housing costs by providing higher compensation, which ultimately makes housing costs a moot issue for anyone providing value to the local economy.
As someone from outside of the region, what reasons necessitate that a lot of people be in the Bay Area that is beyond the economic need?
Many do, obviously. But from a societal perspective, why should they have to? California is doing well economically, particularly the bay area. In a time where the country seems short for good jobs, shouldn't we be pushing as hard as possible to let people move into and stay in areas that are successful?
One of the problems is that every person wants to live in some trendy neighborhood in "The City". Naturally, that means landlords can get away with charging exorbitant rents (the bulk of the inventory is under rent control, which reduces incentives for folks to move out). Because of this, you end up with ridiculous startups that rent beds out to people, folks paying $2000+ for a small room in a small house, and so on.
Meanwhile, in the majority of places that aren't the Bay Area (or urban CA), folks in professions like engineering are set up with nice suburban homes and additional properties by their mid-thirties.
I have seen many east-coast transplants move back after realizing that the madness is not going to end in the past ten years. Giving up access to the Bay Area job market, or existing social or family circles are perhaps the only thing holding folks back from getting the hell out of this area, I feel.
There is a supply and demand problem where there is an enormous demand for a small area when there are so many other great places to be in this country.
Jobs are abundant all over. If you want to solve the housing problems in the bay area, start programs that give people $10,000 to go anywhere else. You'll enormously increase the quality of life of the people who leave.
There's nothing wrong with an area that doesn't aspire to intense density. Nobody is entitled to that, there's nothing wrong with self determination and choosing not to grow. People need to realize there are other places to be, companies need to realize there are other places to be.
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