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San Francisco's Housing Crisis Explained
An anonymous reader writes "We've heard a few brief accounts recently of the housing situation in San Francisco, and how it's leading to protests, gentrification, and bad blood between long-time residents and the newer tech crowd. It's a complicated issue, and none of the reports so far have really done it justice. Now, TechCrunch has posted a ludicrously long article explaining exactly what's going on, from regulations forbidding Google to move people into Mountain View instead, to the political battle to get more housing built, to the compromises that have already been made. It's a long read, but well-researched and interesting. It concludes: 'The crisis we're seeing is the result of decades of choices, and while the tech industry is a sexy, attention-grabbing target, it cannot shoulder blame for this alone. Unless a new direction emerges, this will keep getting worse until the next economic crash, and then it will re-surface again eight years later. Or it will keep spilling over into Oakland, which is a whole other Pandora's box of gentrification issues. The high housing costs aren't healthy for the city, nor are they healthy for the industry. Both thrive on a constant flow of ideas and people.'"
They Bay Area is one of the few economically active places in the USA, that's why housing is expensive there.
If you want cheap housing, go to an economically dying area, like Detroit; or a place with no regulations such that chemicals leak into your house or explode in your face, like Texas.
Table-ized A.I.
Why would they even bother with the Mission, when the Tenderloin has been a complete hole, even worse than Mission for years? It's a mystery how that area even exists. Clearly those tenants aren't paying any high rents.
I'm going to go with 1. Limited resources. There just isn't enough space and more importantly WATER in the area. The water problem isn't just in a drought year like now. It's an on-going concern. 2. Regulations are off the chart. I heard it's $500k just for the paperwork to build in some of these areas. 3. Huge demand, duh. Tech and finance have high salaries, everybody wants to live near work, everybody knows these guys have money so they charge accordingly. Compare and contrast with Oakland and the East Bay in general. You're taking a "million dollar ride" across the bridge or through the tube. Yep, you spend a lot of time commuting but you've got to do what you've got to do. 4. Prop 13. Since there are some limits on taxes, the market accounts for that and charges higher prices accordingly. That explains the whole state being expensive. Since most people must finance their purchase, what was once paid out in taxes is now paid out to bankers in the form of interest. The bankers don't use it to build schools. Some people blame illegal immigrants for poor schools; but the decline began with prop 13, and it's not like there were no illegals before it.
The only way to fix the Bay Area housing crisis is to build more fucking housing. Anything else is just shifting the pain around. This doesn't even need to mean high-rises; European cities manage population densities far higher than U.S. cities with buildings that are mostly 5 stories or less. But if people want to build skyscrapers, let them build skyscrapers unless there's a sound engineering reason not to.
Fixing the problem requires that the NIMBYs be crushed and that all non-essential regulations be eliminated. Obviously the buildings need to meet safety standards, but in a crisis situation like this, everything other than that should go. No "historical preservation" crap, no ability of "neighborhood activists" to block development, no convoluted environmental impact statements. Let's face it, the Endangered Species Act was passed because people cared about charismatic megafauna, not snail darters or burrowing owls. As things currently stand it's primarily a tool of NIMBYs.
This problem goes back decades. Up until the 1970s we could build like crazy. Empire State Building? Barely more than 1 year from groundbreaking to completion. Hoover Dam? 5 years. In contrast, the Big Dig took 15 fucking years to finish (1991-2006). And these examples are not atypical of the time periods in question. During the 1970s, we gave troublemakers of all stripes the ability to throw sand in the gears of development in a dozen different ways, and they all started to use it. Enough of this crap.
Because, as TFA points out, the problems San Francisco has are entirely self-inflicted. It's amusing to see karma on such a large scale.
DATABASE WOW WOW
A couple decades back, people were living in the exact same houses we're living in today.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
It's a great place to live if you're rich, and virtually impossible to live if you're middle class or poor.
Considering that California is the most populous state in the nation, I think you might be exaggerating things just a bit. Clearly, lots of people live here, and not all of them are rich. Me, for instance.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
This isn't gentrification. This is super rich people pushing out very rich people, as compared to everybody else in the country.
If you're paying more than $1,500/month rent to live in a one bedroom apartment anywhere in the US, you're very rich. If you're paying $2,500/month to live in a one bedroom apartment anywhere in the US, you're super rich. The last time any poor people lived in San Francisco was the 1960's.
The rest of the US population not living in San Francisco doesn't have very much sympathy for you, except maybe the unfortunate souls living in Boston or New York.
I use the terms very rich and super rich, but feel free to substitute "less affluent upper middle class" and "more affluent upper middle class," if it makes you feel any better.
A couple decades back a blue collar worker could buy a house on 3 years salary. Can you do that today?
A couple of decades back people actually saved their money. I remember a time when almost no home had more than one TV (some not even that), Cable was considered a luxury (if available), not a necessity. You made a down payment on a car and kept it for years after it was paid off. Now it's more popular to lease a new car every three years or so. Even though most cars will last for well over 100K miles, if not 200K miles. If you wanted a house, you didn't buy new cloths every season with some designers name plastered on your ass and everything else you owned. You can actually survive without the latest iPhone. But most households have one for each person. That shit adds up fast. You also didn't buy things on credit. If you didn't have the cash, you saved for it. People who rent are probably two years salary in debt these days.
So yes, you can afford a home as a blue collar worker. But it has to be important to you. At least more important than much of the frivolous shit that most of us seem to think is a necessity today. I remember, years ago, refusing to get cable because I thought $5/ month was insane. I'm paying more than 20 times that for satellite now. And cable is even more expensive. I've been wanting to cut it off for years because there's very little worth watching, and I almost never turn on the TV. But my wife and daughter seem to think we must have it.
blink... blink... wow. there really are people in the world who think like this?
Supply and Demand my friend. If you want rent prices to go down, you need to flood the market with more housing, not less. Only an idiot would think that limiting the increase of available houses while the population is growing would reduce the cost of said houses. But then I notice that you post as AC and I am probably poking a troll.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
There is a huge amount of land in California the middle class can afford: the Central Valley. The air is so bad you are almost guaranteed to experience asthma or allergies, but you can swing it on as low as 30k per year in my opinion. Those kids living in LA, SF, SD who make 30k per year? They basically live in squalor(for America). They value the coolness of those cities so much they are willing to live 4 to a 2-bedroom, or get their own place and live paycheck to paycheck, or live with their folks.
Middle class can't afford San Francisco. A cheap house there is 800k. It isn't a question of sacrificing on a cell phone plan. The values are stratospherically out of reach for middle class earners.
Seriously, a couple decades ago you could go to a bank an open an account where the rates were at least competitive with inflation. These days, the typical interest rate is well under 1% with the Fed purposefully keeping inflation above 2% on the belief that inflation is good.
That also keeps mortgage interest rate extremely low. My first mortgage, several decades ago, was 8.5%, which was really good at the time. We moved last year and I think it's under 3.5% now. From 1975 to 1990 the average fixed rate 30 year mortgage barely dipped below 10% and was as high as 18%.
Well, inflation isn't good, having inflationary expectations discourages people from saving money. Granted, you don't want long stretches of deflation either, but we're getting exactly what should have been predicted.
Inflation in the 1970's is part of why the mortgage rates hit almost 20% in the late 70's through the early 80's.
What's more, companies don't pay people based upon their value to the company these days, they pay the bare minimum they can get away with in most cases. Sure there are exceptions, but those exceptions have a harder time staying in business.
That's always been the case. The difference is that there is no loyalty to anything anymore. Employees have no loyalty to the company they work for and will leave to go somewhere else for ten cents a day more. And employers will replace you for the dumbest of reasons. Replacing pensions with 401K's looked great on paper. But the unintended consequences weren't so great.
And no, blue collar workers around here would have a really hard time saving for a house when rent alone is typically aroudn $12k per year.
I don't know where you live. But that's pretty cheap from what I've seen rent wise.It could certainly be done on a blue collar salary. The bigger problem is, is that most blue collar jobs are disappearing.
Heh, actually SF-like phenomenons are happening pretty much anywhere these tech companies locate. As someone who was born and raised in Pittsburgh and now is living in Tokyo after a stint in Europe, I was just curious to see how condos in Pittsburgh compare to what there is in Tokyo...and I was shocked. I was expecting them to be much, much cheaper but the reality was quite different. Tokyo was more expensive, but not by that much. I was talking with a friend(another ex-Pittsburgher) and he reminded me that both Apple and Google have recently opened relatively large campuses in Pittsburgh. This is what probably sent housing prices sky-high, the owners of these housing complexes knew that a lot of money was going to come streaming in. I cannot imagine this is sitting well with a lot of the poorer residents of the city...
Monstar L
No. Bullshit.
Poor white people are not nearly as violent as poor black people. Check the stats yourself. Blacks are about 13-14% of the population but they commit 50% of the murders alone (usually they murder other blacks). Other violent crimes like robbery follow the same pattern. It is popular among blacks to celebrate a culture of violence, drugs and gangs. Until that changes the crimes will continue to be associated with their skin color. But that is a choice BLACKS THEMSELVES are making.
Do you ever question your own beliefs? Even your most sacred cherished ones? DId you ever stop for a moment and think that maybe, just maybe, the endless excuses people like you keep making for the blacks and their culture of violence, the limitless passes you give them, just might be perpetuating the problem and actually causing MORE people to suffer including those very same blacks? Ever wonder why things never change? Lack of necessary change can only indicate one thing - that what you are doing is not working. Time to take a different view.
At one time it was not politically correct to advocate heliocentrism either. But it was still a fact.
Black men can start by seriously trying to parent their children instead of leaving them to be raised by single mothers in broken homes in bad neighborhoods. All blacks can start by dropping this victim idea that nothing is ever their fault. None of the successful blacks I met ever thought like that. None of them thought being a thug was cool. None of them thought studying hard in school was "acting white". None of them thought working hard made somebody "uncle tom" either.
If you think that's coincidence then you simply are not intellectually mature enough to be reasoned with in an adult manner.
Where's the mod option for "harsh truth"?
Poor white people are not nearly as violent as poor black people. Check the stats yourself. Blacks are about 13-14% of the population but they commit 50% of the murders alone (usually they murder other blacks).
As much as your racist mindset would like that to support your conclusion. It simply doesn't. Being 13-14% of the population does not imply being an even distribution within the demographics of the population. If all 75% of that 13-14% is poor (not unreasonable), but only 10% of the white people are poor (also not unreasonable), then that would give you pretty much the exact same number of poor people of either race. The result - an unsurprising 50/50 split in crime rates too.
Ever wonder why things never change?
No, because it's clear.
1) They do change. We've gone from blacks, women and gays (amongst many others) being ostracised, to many of them being productive members of society, and people like you being frowned upon. That's great!
2) The change is slow, exactly because of people like you, trying very very hard to make sure that these people get held back as much as you can. Thankfully idiots like you are getting rarer and rarer.
At one time it was not politically correct to advocate heliocentrism either. But it was still a fact.
That's an interesting comparison. You seem to be suggesting that we generally go from poor understanding of the situation, to more enlightened understanding of the situation. That our knowledge of the situation improves. One way that this has improved is that we've realised that the earth is not the centre of the universe, and then even realised that neither is the sun. Another way is that in the past, we thought that blacks, women and gays were somehow inferior, and not just normal human beings who happened to have a different pigmentation, sexual organ, or preference. Thankfully we've advanced past that point now.
Black men can start by seriously trying to parent their children instead of leaving them to be raised by single mothers in broken homes in bad neighbourhoods.
This is almost as laughable as "The poor just need to stop being poor, then they could afford health care."
Right, all those San Francisco Republicans... Did you eat paint chips as a kid?
Numbers much?
There are 17 Million poor whites, compared to 10 million blacks in poverty. If poverty was the only indicator, the white demographic would be leading the charge, rather than the fact that just 6% of the American population ( Black Males) responsible for 50% of the murders. Can you stop being so reflexively hurt by facts that you can't approach things to find a real solution? Facts > Your feelings. Deal with it. Once you come to terms with the idea that were not all the same, we can start to find real answers to the problems we all face.
Not to mention, a lot of those "rich areas" were "cheap areas" when those roots were laid down. Which is kinda what the people in SFO are bitching about: "It was cheap and perfectly fine before the .coms showed up. Now everyone wants to live in the cool part of town, and I'm part of the reason it's the cool part of town, but because they make so much money, they can price me out of my own home. So I move, but where? My job is down the street and I can't afford to live in the neighborhood, so where to? Oakland? HA!" And there's plenty of people who would say "tough titties, life's a bitch" to that. It's even worse when you've got someone living on fixed income and suddenly finds themselves having to move at age 80. Can you imagine apartment hunting at that age? I certainly can't.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Let me make it simpler on you.
Rational choice + Social disorganization = Crime
Interestingly enough, when you break one or two of those two options, you're doing enough to break the classic situation which breeds criminal behavior. Reinforce it however, or do nothing, and it will continue to perpetuate itself.
Om, nomnomnom...
He may be wrong on some points, but he did not say at any time that blacks can not change. And I do not need statistics to conclude that he is right in what he said, I just need to go outside. Here is obvious the culture of violence, young blacks boast about of being gang members, their language is 80% violence and profanity. Poor young whites do the same thing, but is most common to I see blacks doing it. Racism? No, unfortunately this is what I see happening on the streets here, I like it or not.
(And as he said, people can change to better. But they have to want to do this and it is not what is happening with the majority.)
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time