>Can you provide any examples where rapid growth has occurred in the Bay Area in the last 20 years?
Sorry I meant what the people outside the Bay Area want. It hasn't, but that seems to be because the residents are blocking it.
For me, it seems people who don't live in the Bay Area want the people in the Bay Area to build "affordable housing," which really means "subsidized housing," which is subsidized by the residents that live there. I mean call me crazy but the people who live there don't want more building and they certainly aren't going to pay higher taxes to subsidize housing for more residents that they don't want in the first place.
Since zoning and all that is controlled by the mayor and city council, the only people the mayor and city council are beholden to is the residents, not people who want to be residents. I don't think affordable housing has a snowball's chance in hell of happening there.
They could come to my city, they're building like crazy here, road capacity be damned. It's been bumper to bumper during rush hour like never before. They're building a 1.5x0.5 mile strip of packed condos on a 2 lane road right by my kid's school. Those condos are right across the street from an even larger tract of apartments. That will be fun.
> The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco.
What's the basis for this comment? I feel like I read something like this on HN every time the topic of affordable housing comes up, and it's usually written by a Bay Area resident who just kind of assumes that's the way things work rather than a uniquely dysfunctional characteristic of where they live.
NYC has it's issues, and expensive housing, obviously, but it doesn't seem similar to SF really at all. Where I live in downtown Brooklyn, literally dozens of huge high rise residential rental buildings have been built in just the last few years, the area is almost unrecognizable. We're talking thousands of apartments, literally.
What are these abusive zoning policies, specifically? Is NYC really suffering from a problem of low density? You sure? There are many issues with affordable housing in NYC, but I'm not at all convinced that you've really hit on any of them.
NIMBYs. Builders want to build, but the people who already own won't let them in most cases. I live in Cupertino. They want to build 2000 units next to my house. Most of neighbors are against it because it will "change the character of the neighborhood". That is true, it will. But I'll be the farmers who lived here in the 1960s said the same thing when all of our houses were built as the farmers sold their land.
The main difference this time is that the current residents can't get rich selling their land because the developers want to build up, not out.
CA tried to solve this with SB 827, which would force upzoning near transit. Sadly, it was poorly written and failed to pass, but it was a good idea. It would have forced pretty much all of San Francisco to allow building medium size buildings in place of existing single family homes. And a lot of the rest of the Bay Area too.
>The bay area is such an outlier that I almost feel like it should be exempt from broader 'housing cost' discussions. Fixing the bay area housing crisis is a whole other set of concerns.
I think it's pretty similar to most other places that were built low density that now have high demand. We need to change the rules to allow high density, and we need public transit.
>No one in our area wants more office space. I don't know that there's much of a demand for new office space, the buildings we have are full of vacancies.
I... kinda do? back in the days after the crash, I would rent industrial spaces as workshops for my business. I had 1/4 of an industrial condo down the way from the hacker dojo at one point. It was a lot of fun, and only possible 'cause there was a lot of space and it was cheap. I mean, yes, yes, I should have bought. but my point is just that having space is... pretty nice.
That, and at work I'm crammed into this open office; they allocate more space to my car in the parking lot than they allocate to me - I think we'd all enjoy a few more sqft.
Yep. Obviously. I hope that you didn't think that I thought otherwise.
From what I've read about the topic, it seems like a few things are true:
* Housing costs are rising radically throughout the Bay Area
* No major Bay Area city is building to meet demand in the area
* Some Bay Area cities (notably, SF, MV, SJ, and others) are actively impeding new residential construction with a variety of pleasant-sounding excuses
It's true that SF's fucked-up housing policy doesn't necessarily mean much for the rest of the Bay Area. However, it's a sad fact that the landowners in much of The Area have -correctly- surmised that they stand to make a shitload of money if they fail to build to meet demand.
Fuck housing that's reasonably priced when there are pockets to be lined and fortunes to be made, amirite? :(
> Rents, both commercial and residential, are completely out of control and it actively drives away business.
I find this constant complaining about rents and zoning whenever the Bay Area comes up amusing. Why should SF or the Bay Area strive for growth at all costs?
The rents are presumably as they are because the demand for the space that is available is sky high? It would seem they don't particularly need to change.
The Bay Area also already has a population density that is high. If the people who live there want to keep voting for local governments that wants to restrict increases in density, and it stops you from living or setting up show there, then don't.
Personally to me, the current character of the place is a huge part of what would make the Bay Area attractive if I was to consider relocating anywhere.
The city of SF is half as dense as Brooklyn and there are a lot of empty lots here. There is a lot more room for development. The problem is that the current political situation makes it easy for people to block new housing.
As an example - there is a 600-acre empty lot near the Bayshore Caltrain station. The developer wants to build 4400 units. The city wants to build 0 units and build an office park instead. Which will get built? It's not clear - the 5 people voting on it will probably be swayed by how many people show up to the meetings and advocate one position or another. I showed up last Thursday and one city resident said we should not build housing there because an earthquake may cause the buildings to fall over.
> I think it is only a few terminally online people that object to this.
The reality of the matter is that the insane population growth of the 20th Century led to some pretty haphazard development (e.g. CDMX’s never ending sprawl).
This has made areas with livability amenities (e.g., walkable safe neighborhoods) relatively rare all things considered.
For various reasons, certain areas with good amenities remained isolated from broader real estate markets (e.g., living in CDMX would seem laughable to an American in the 1980s based on crime statistics alone).
Because of COVID, a lot of those areas are now a part of larger real estate markets.
The people who live there now realize that they can’t afford the prices that the larger market brings, so acting in self interest, they try to remain isolated from the market.
(In the vein if SF experiencing the worlds problems a decade before anywhere else) This is basically the story of SF’s Mission district over the past 20 years and why you’d see ridiculous things like people protesting new development because it had floor to ceiling windows.
It’s a weird phenomenon, but one that most people on this forum can’t really relate to.
I love idiots screeching about big tech creating to much demand. Seriously? Too much demand is a bad thing? Hardly! How about reversing the crap zoning laws and NIMBY attitudes so supply can rise up to meet demand?
The SF housing crises was caused by a bunch of selfish people declaring through policy (zoning laws) that they have theirs and don't want where they are to change to accommodate others.
And this is supposed to be an enlightened leftist utopia? Talk is cheap until it can affect you personally is the real lesson of San Fransisco housing politics - playing out rather dramatically. Blaming landlords is laughable. San Fransisco has an embarrassment of jobs brought by the high tech companies in the bay area and instead of embracing them (by letting more housing be constructed) they resent them and blame everyone but the real root cause - severely restricted supply.
>If that were true the bay area would have been empty long ago because of the ridiculous housing cost. Fact is most people won't change cities for lower housing cost.
Do you genuinely think that housing costs don't factor into which cities people choose to live? I'm not sure this conversation can go anywhere beneficial if we can't agree on that fundamental and in my opinion obvious fact.
> … how is the Bay Area housing market artificially inflated?
I shouldn’t have an opinion on this because I don’t live in the Bay Area or closely follow its politics, but the most common refrain I see is that policies (e.g., zoning) prevent building more and higher density housing, thus artificially limiting supply.
> The fact that the population of greater Houston has more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea that they are building enough for growth.
This isn't enough to support the idea unless prices have also not climbed.
The Bay Area population has dramatically increased and prices have too because building to support this growth has been fought by NIMBYs via bad policy.[0] As a result houses on the peninsula have reached insane prices and there is little available for new people, see: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom...
Myself and many of my friends (~30yrs old) rent with multiple roommates.
The only people that can buy experienced some sort of exit event or have a lot of FAANG equity with two FAANG incomes. Even then they have to pay property tax on that insane value that the NIMBYs don't pay.
Maybe Houston has done a better job, but population increase itself isn't much evidence.
Bad incentives for existing owners to restrict growth exist everywhere, but they're particularly bad in California because of Prop 13.
The most frustrating bit to me, is that the NIMBYs that won the housing lottery and leverage their political power to screw everyone else also play victim. I hope one day we can pass something that corrects a lot of these bad incentives. The new RHNA housing policy and things like Sacramento's elimination of single family zoning are the way. SB50 and related policy would help too.
> This is precisely the mistake San Francisco has made.
What is that mistake? Permitting new, nice housing?
If this is your opinion, I cannot agree with it.
Firstly, something like 10->20% of all new residential construction must either be set aside for "affordable housing", or enough money must be given to The City to construct those units on behalf of the developer. Secondly, San Francisco's mistake is to -through a variety of screwups- make it nearly impossible to build new, dense residential buildings in the city.
If a district is able to build enough housing to meet current and expected near-future demand, rents will usually remain stable. See footnotes 0 and 1 at [0] for some info on long-term trends in the area.
> If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause.
No, but you'd have all those people waiting on the sidelines jumping in immediately. Net result, housing is still expensive (sorta like the highway analogy, we still have tons of traffic after building these lanes).
> The Bay Area's housing crisis is caused by a mix of bad zoning laws and rampant NIMBYism that has blocked enough housing construction to keep up with population growth.
There shouldn't be any population growth to keep up with. The problem is too many people on too little space. Not sure why people seem to want to live in cities that resemble ant-hills if it's shown that it makes them miserable and depressed.
>Pretty much every state has zoning laws because among other things, people in suburbs don't want huge apartment complexes popping up next to them.
Do you not get that it's all relative? If California was building enough homes for its population growth and now it isn't--that certainly impacts prices. This is why Japan has cheap homes--even though they have tough zoning laws. It's all a game of manipulation.
Yes, other states have zoning laws, but they don't cripple new housing development. California has absurd laws that allow neighbors to challenge homes being built on empty lots or about the design choices of someone else's home. You claim to be for freedom in another comment then defend this? Which is it? Do you want an open market or not? Or are you just for what benefits you? That's fine, but be honest about it.
> not everyone has to live in the same city, and there's always more land to build on
This is the stupid and selfish talking again. This is why the Bay Area has workers living in Gilroy and Livermore commuting to SF and San Jose. This isn't good for anyone. San Francisco doesn't have to stay 2 stories tall... that's all a charade to prevent housing supply increasing.
>But plenty (most? idk) of those who left the area still stayed elsewhere in CA.
I actually don't disagree with this, but curious if you can cite anything because I had workers move to Florida, Montana, Colorado, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, NYC, Utah... and none of them ever returned. I do think a lot stayed in California--I for one moved from SF to Burlingame and then to Sacramento then to San Diego. I do think there would be some interesting migration patterns to track.
> In case you haven't noticed sf is bounded by the Pacific Ocean. It can't just grow and it already has a very high housing density. The only area that can absorb new housing is china basin (3rd st) and that is being developed. The rest is already full.
No, it doesn't. I live in the Haight (which is a key cultural mecca of the city). While, there certainly are gorgeous Victorian era houses (The Painted Ladies), most of the buildings are look like cute, unstable, four - five floor buildings which were probably built in the fifties or the sixties (Or certainly look like it). IMO, this place could do with a few shiny high rises. I am convinced that it should be possible to design a place that doesn't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of a neighborhood whilst helping organic growth.
> Do we really want or feel that more people in sf is a good thing? Why not live down the peninsula or the east bay where there's an unlimited amount of space.
This is not going to solve the problem. I used to ponder about why Austin which has roughly the same size and population as SF is not as packed or doesn't have as shitty a public transport system. I think there is a reason for that: It is because San Francisco acts like a cultural magnet for the rest of the bay, which means that irrespective of who actually lives/works here in the city, the presence of unlimited amount of space or job opportunities in the rest of the bay is not going to depress demand. I know people living in South/East bay, who keep looking for places. All these requests are driving up our rents and that hasn't been affected by the space constraints outside the city.
Yes, it is. The norm in cities in the US until very recently was that you could get a middle class job, buy a small home, raise a family, etc. This phenomenon of only being able to lick the boots of the homeowners near the good jobs is relative new.
> able to afford a home in Beverley Hills
We’re talking about the entire Bay Area, not a specific suburb. Anywhere within an hour commute of Google HQ is like this.
> Should you be able to afford a home in San Francisco itself? 40 years ago that was the norm.
Yes. It was the norm. Then the nimby dickheads stepped in and pulled up the ladder behind them by blocking everything they could and pushed through a very favorable proposition to existing homeowners (prop 13).
Your opinion might be that it’s fine to block out an entire generation from the bay and rent seek. I personally think that’s a shitty drag on society propped up by government created housing scarcity.
Sorry I meant what the people outside the Bay Area want. It hasn't, but that seems to be because the residents are blocking it.
For me, it seems people who don't live in the Bay Area want the people in the Bay Area to build "affordable housing," which really means "subsidized housing," which is subsidized by the residents that live there. I mean call me crazy but the people who live there don't want more building and they certainly aren't going to pay higher taxes to subsidize housing for more residents that they don't want in the first place.
Since zoning and all that is controlled by the mayor and city council, the only people the mayor and city council are beholden to is the residents, not people who want to be residents. I don't think affordable housing has a snowball's chance in hell of happening there.
They could come to my city, they're building like crazy here, road capacity be damned. It's been bumper to bumper during rush hour like never before. They're building a 1.5x0.5 mile strip of packed condos on a 2 lane road right by my kid's school. Those condos are right across the street from an even larger tract of apartments. That will be fun.
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