I completely agree. The idea that X% of new housing has to be sold at under market rate makes no sense to me. It just artificially increases the cost of the market rate units. You would build more housing if it were all sold at market rate (since it’s more profitable to build, and then more will get built/developers will be more incentivized to build) and have lower market rate prices. It seems fairer for the “below market rate” housing to just be the not-new housing at the actual market rates.
For some reason California is obsessed with the idea that housing is too expensive, so we need to force new construction to subsidize middle-middle class housing via a lottery system, which keeps housing expensive
Or at least don't want them in their neighborhood where they lower home values. This is where less local democracy would benefit the good for everyone. Especially, considering that out had been down in studies that folks who show up to community meetings are not representative. They tend to be older, wealthier and whiter and more male.
This exactly. So instead of having poorer people living in the apartment building next to you like you do in much of the midwest or south, you have them living in the van parked in front of your house like you do on the west coast. They still exist in your neighborhood, but in a way that's worse for everyone involved!
Perhaps this is where democracy meets principals...
The principal is that someone should be free to build on their land as long as they don't create safety issues or significantly impose on someone else.
Democracy at worst can be mob rule. Principals are important.
Japan does a good with federal zoning regulations. It's not impossible.
(utterly pedantic comment: I think the word here is "principle", not "principal" - principle is a foundational belief, principal is a synonym for "first".)
Define “significantly impose”. That’s the basic problem, existing near someone can have effects that are easy to justify in court unless you legislate that e.g. decreasing or limiting increase on future land values cannot be considered to be civil damages.
> Define “significantly impose”. That’s the basic problem,
I agree.
> existing near someone can have effects that are easy to justify in court
I had the impression this was a "mob rule" problem, that local voters were voting for zoning laws that limit the quality and quantity of new housing. I admit to not understanding the legal or moral justification. It just doesn't seem right to micromanage others to the extent that occurs today.
There are other countries that are much more flexible, like Japan [0]. Instead of single family single use zoning they start with three story multi-use housing. Some places in the U.S. are moving in this direction.
> decreasing or limiting increase on future land values
That can be flipped around. Someone who opposes new housing is taking value from the people who could have made use of that new housing, had it been allowed.
If we’re talking about California, “mob rule”[0] isn’t the right framing. This isn’t a majority of citizens suppressing the rights of people to build on their own property, it’s a minority using asymmetric political involvement to get their way.
The recent lawsuit against UC Berkeley is a great example. A handful of cranks angry about UC Berkeley admissions abused an environmental review process to impose their will on their town. Not the will of the majority, but rather the tyranny of the most rich and petty.
Indeed. Not getting a HOA was a hard requirement for us.
The fascinating thing about HOAs is that they’re all done under the guise that they “improve property values”, but I’ve never seen any evidence that this works. From my geographic location it seems like non-HOA factors drive prices (supply, demand, neighborhood location and nearby amenities like transit and shopping), not whether or not the neighbors flower bed matches the “neighborhood character”[0]. From what I see it just seems to let petty tyrants control their neighbors; the property value argument seems like a transparent excuse.
0 - You see this phrase a lot in zoning discussions and it makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. As if neighborhood character is a concrete thing that can be pointed to and protected, rather than a constantly changing and emergent result of the humans living in a place.
Not only in condominiums. In suburbia they also manage commons, but also impose rules on what you can do with your house and on your land. You likely need permission for color changes, there might be limitations on what can and cannot be planted in your front yard. You might get fined if your house doesn't fixes when the HOA decides they are needed or when you repeatedly don't bring your garbage in quickly.
I'm not sure what to make of the choice part here. Once an area is under an HOA it's almost impossible to dissolve the HOA. Anecdotal evidence from my own HOA which my wife was president of for many years shows that only very few people get involved. The people who do get involved tend to be of the type who want to overreach. When my wife was president she probably spent more time trying to bring the other folks involved in the HOA back to what's reasonable. Fortunately management companies also help with this. I'm afraid that without management companies most HOAs would devolve into attempts to build a miniature fascist state that only would be stopped by prolonged court battles.
> In suburbia they also manage commons, but also impose rules on what you can do with your house and on your land.
Not all HOAs have infrastructure to maintain. I know a few people in neighborhoods with HOAs that don't have private roads or facilities for the HOA to manage, it's just purely there for property value.
Partially true. You're right that they don't spring up unannounced, but there is something distressingly feudal about a property contract by (probably long dead) founders binding future owners in perpetuity without any possibility for redress or change. Personally I think it would be much better if current home owners could create or destroy a HOA if they felt that it no longer met their needs, rather than tying it to the lot forever.
Also, depending on your state it can be very hard to avoid a HOA. If you're buying a home in California, Colorado, or Florida you've got a 2/3 chance of buying into a HOA, with the numbers getting worse over time. 2/3 new homes being made now have a HOA, so pretty soon you won't have an effective choice when buying.
What those kinds of people never realize though, is you'll never get rid of the 'poors'. The label just changes places on the totem pole. What was once 'well off' is now 'poverty'.
The "poor", as same as "homeless", is an intentional misrepresentation of the issue. People oppose the "poor" moving to the neighborhood not because they have less money. They oppose the people who have vastly different views on what are the acceptable behaviors in day-to-day life and interactions between neighbors.
You aren't wrong, not entirely at least. For instance, a person can be of very little means monetarily; but have great wealth in the stuff they hold due to its liquid wealth and inherent value.
For instance, I am by all means of the definition living in poverty right now; but I also have much more than even some middle class folk might have depending on their life style.
So poor is relative mostly to the compared 'true wealth' of each other person.
You might only make 1200 a month, but you own a house. Or you might only make 2k a month, but you have a vehicle and house and many luxury items with in it.
By our current standards if you made those amounts, you would be considered poor, like me. BUT, you will still be richer than someone who gets that same amount of money from some stipend, but without any where to live and all those basic things that should be an uncontested human right.
So again. It's all relative to the situation at hand.
If I sold everything I have and went back to just a laptop with bag, a duffle bag of clothes, a back pack full of my 'stuff', and a blow up mattress; I would have maybe 10k total in my account to reuse as a nest egg.
And that's if I don't get ripped off by everyone and their mother.
No, it's not the vastly different views per se. To be clear, Nordic immigrants have always been totally welcome in America but like totally, they are the model immigrant. Maybe Norwegians for some period of time weren't quite as welcome because they were poor, I mean I suppose this fact, I haven't encountered any evidence.
Witness the lack of slurs for Nordics, I have no idea which they are. I'm sure they exist. I know more slurs for doctors than Nordics...wait I think I know one, "dumb blonde", and "rusio" is another one, in Chile..."gringo" in Chile..."borsch" I think is one for Germans though, it's really old, there's others, but not Nordic. "Honkey" comes from "Hungarian"...some Hungarians are very fair...I'd need like a slur dictionary to find a slur for Nordics.
These slurs must all be said at some point, it's irrelevant if I say G-R-I-N-G-O or "gringo", because putting it in writing and spelling it out is literally the same thing, you can read either just as well. For these particular slurs nobody can figure out what the hell I'm writing about if I don't write them in full. Similarly, History professors in Chilean universities can't tell their students about the "n-word" without actually saying it out loud, for real, at some point. They otherwise will never know what the professor is talking about.
Back to Nordic immigration. So yeah, if Swedes arrive next door and the women dress differently, and they recycle all kinds of things Americans don't recycle, like I guess if they yodeled that would piss people off...it would take some work. And white Americans surprise surprise are very tolerant of very different views if they like them. The big thing with the "poor" or "poors" (the worst slur in my whole comment) is the poverty is related to entropy. Same thing pretty much. So more entropy in their nervous system, more entropy in their bodies, more entropy in their housing, more entropy in how they communicate and their habits, more entropy in their relationships, more entropy in how they deal with neighbors ultimately. Reducing entropy in one thing means increasing it in another. On the other hand, if the poor who move in haven't always been poor, or have an excellent reason to be poor, or are rapidly moving up in society, or something else of that nature, they are not as entropic and are therefore welcome.
And that's why there was such a huge social movement to make education free and obligatory, because then you reduce the entropy in the minds of the poor, and that order (meaning strictly absence of entropy) radiates from there into everything else.
This is not about race. I had been living next to two Section 8 neighbors, both were white families, both were extremely disruptive. One was not even that poor - they had at least five cars (with just three people driving), not beaters either. It's the state of mind when you decided that the society has to provide you with housing, I guess. I am sure there are good and decent people on Section 8 and other affordable housing programs but having lived several years with music blasting, cars honking, fights and screams every night I will err on the side of my sanity and vote down any affordable housing in my neighborhood. Don't care if it's for Norwegians, Swedes, descendants of Mayflower, Arian Brotherhood redemption program etc.
> It's the state of mind when you decided that the society has to provide you with housing, I guess.
Well I suppose there's some moral hazard because the government is more tolerant than rent-seekers (I find the term "landlord" gross because of the "lord" part, no nobility in America, and the whole point of the endeavor is collecting rent, they're synonymous. If they don't want to be called rent-seekers all they have to do is stop seeking rent). Plus Section 8 costs IIRC either 30 or 33.33% of your income, so it's not that they pay nothing for housing, it's just limited to a very high but still feasible amount. You're objecting to exactly what I was talking about, entropy. In this case you're using the synonym "noise."
So you built your own house from scratch, no help from builders, mined your own iron, wrought your own steel, the copper and all, because surely "you" wouldn't be talking about "it" online if it weren't up to code. And claimed your own land...loaned yourself the mortgage, did it all on your very own. Society didn't do anything for you, after all.
33.3% of my income or income of some family member who signs the lease and might not have any income he or she decided to show to the IRS?
> You're objecting to exactly what I was talking about, entropy. In this case you're using the synonym "noise."
I live in a neighborhood without section 8 now and, surprise, there is no entropy!
>So you built your own house from scratch, no help from builder
I am sorry, it might be some popular point on reddit but I need more context, what are you talking about? I bought my house and the land. Are you, by chance, saying that you are sincerely confused by my usage of the verb "to provide" and believe that I used it in a general way, only indicating that the society somehow made the housing available, and not given wholly or partially free?
then who do they expect to do everything for them? the only way you can have the lifestyle of the ultrarich is paying people. who makes their food who sotckes the shelves at their stores who waits their table mixes their drinks drives them around and the million other jobs that their lifestyle depends on. we aren't building better mass transit so you cant bus them in or take the train/subway in to work, they don't want to pay them enough to live near by how do they expect to have a functional economy? slave labor living in coffin the basement?
Why don't they rezone everyone's land as commercial then?
Not sure about California, but in most places that would double or triple the value of the land. If you did everyone all at once, it probably wouldn't be so extreme but would still be an increase.
Zoning in the USA isn’t expansive (zones get more lenient, including what could have been put in more restrictive zones), rather they are exclusive. If all land was zoned as commercial, it wouldn’t give anyone a place to live.
The easiest way to have actual affordable housing is to change the "single-family home" zone limitations (this might have changed recently IIRC but it might not)
The only alternative is subsidizing people moving to California. Why bother doing that? If you leave it alone the property values will equilibrate to what you can reasonably support.
Subsidizing people moving to CA by changing zoning to allow building market rate dense housing without going through years of zoning and environmental review? You don't actually need to even pay anything - it's just allowing developers to build what they want where they want.
I invite you to actually look at the housing market in CA and show me all the older construction that’s affordable. My friends in LA (not even nice parts of it) are buying houses that are literally 100 years old for over $1M.
The “fix older stock” strategy really only works in areas where people aren’t all that keen to live. Ex. It’s easy to do in Pittsburgh or Detroit. Not so easy in SF or Austin.
I was under the impression Pittsburgh is one of the currently hip gentrifying cities (like Austin or Portland were 10 years ago)? At least I know several people who moved there from other, already expensive, cities.
It's nice and it has some gentrification, but the housing stock is much bigger than the number of gentry that wish to become landed. There's much to enjoy there but also some sections that aren't so expensive.
I hope it remains that way for a while! Up to about 2010 Berlin had a lot more available housing than demand but it caught up and resulted in the current housing shortage very quickly.
Right but I was talking about the last ~10 years, not 72 to 32 years ago. Berlin (where I now live) also lost a lot of population from the 40s till 1990 but has seen a lot of growth in the past decade, thus the current competitive housing market.
People also used to occupy far fewer square meters/feet of housing per person in the past so even though Berlin (or Pittsburgh) had a higher population in 1940 than today it doesn't necessarily mean there's a surplus of housing.
All the political "solutions" to the housing crisis are not only expensive, they make things worse, because they are in denial of the Law of Supply & Demand.
No government has ever been successful at repealing that law, but they sure keep trying.
For some reason California is obsessed with the idea that housing is too expensive, so we need to force new construction to subsidize middle-middle class housing via a lottery system, which keeps housing expensive