SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the need-more-land-where-the-water-is dept.
California's Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country's food, including 40% of the fruit and nuts consumed each year. Yet today, backcountry places such as Patterson, population 22,000, are experiencing an increase in homelessness that can be traced, in part, to an unlikely sounding source: Silicon Valley.
The million-dollar home prices about 85 miles west, in San Francisco and San Jose, have pushed aspiring homeowners to look inland. Patterson's population has doubled since the 2000 census. Average monthly rents have climbed from about $900 in 2014 to nearly $1,600 in recent months, according to the apartment database Rent Jungle, compounding the hardships of the foreclosure crisis, the shuttering of several local agricultural businesses and surging substance abuse rates.
"The rents in Patterson are crazy," said Romelia Wiley, program manager of the local not-for-profit organization Community Housing & Shelter Services. "Why? I-5."
The freeway offers commuters access to high-paying job centers near the coast, and the number of people commuting to the Bay Area from the portion of the Central Valley that includes Patterson more than doubled between 1990 and 2013, to about 65,000 people, or at least 15% of the local workforce, according to an analysis by the University of the Pacific.
Why don't they build up instead of out?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @10:03AM (16 children)
"Why don't they build up instead of out?"
Because cities play games restricting development with zoning, institute rent control which makes new construction less able to pay off, etc. If people were free to build skyscrapers on their property in the city without local interference, and charge market rent, there would be no housing shortage. It's simple economics: laws that reduce supply increase prices. Voters have chosen the city having "historic neighborhoods" and "a pretty skyline" over people having a place to live, and they probably don't even realize it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @11:07AM (9 children)
Having spent much time in a place with no zoning at all, I don't think that is is something you would like to live in. Besides having a narrow 45 story condo among single family homes, there is the traffic where the roads can't handle it and the excessive distance to mass transit.
Then there is Toronto. As far as I can tell, on my last drive through, there is an unlimited supply of new condos. There is no rent control on them and rents are still going up. Wait until the market crashes?
Are there any kind of controls would create fairly price housing for all?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @11:22AM (2 children)
I did not propose no zoning at all. But cities tend to want to close down all but the most politically connected development, even in a time when their people are suffering. In theory, if zoning were just used to select WHERE new development occurs, it could be okay. Housing shortages are a symptom of the zoning system not allowing needed development ANYWHERE (or not anywhere reasonable enough to deal with demand).
And no, it is not the responsibility (nor proper role) of the government to stop people from making poor choices in the market either. However, it IS their responsibility to ensure that those who do so bear all the true costs of doing so rather than being able to dump their failure off on the taxpayer. Governments tend to be very poor at judging when market investment is 'reasonable', and any effort to restrict investment merely to prevent a bubble leads to a mess of corruption and political favoring where only the politically connected can succeed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 18 2017, @12:41PM (1 child)
Housing shortages are the result of many factors.
It's not that governments are poor at judging, it's corruption. Often, everyone knows which choice is better for the people, but a few bribes can persuade officials to make a different choice. The bribes shouldn't be too blatant. Slipping a wad of cash under the table directly to the official is risky. More like, the official's nephew gets a cushy job offer from an unrelated business whose owner happens to be a personal friend of the owners of the businesses that benefit. Then, the decision can be cynically blamed on government incompetence, or the public can be confused and fatigued by apparent complexity.
Buyer beware can go only so far. For instance, there are a ton of rules about housing construction, to protect home buyers from unprincipled builders who would take foolish shortcuts if allowed. Home buyers, and even professional home inspectors cannot see everything. Not easy to get a look at the inside of the walls, have to detach and move an outlet, or pull the nails to take a panel of the drywall off, or maybe try some kind of radar. How do you tell whether the plumbing is lead free? Without those rules, houses might routinely be built with flaws that will lead to a major plumbing or roof leak in less than 5 years, or an electrical system that will short out and start a fire within 3 years, or a gas leak that kills everyone inside. Or maybe asbestos, lead, formaldehyde, or other nasty toxins will slowly outgas for years and keep everyone inside mildly sick all the time, slowly poisoning everyone. Or the house might fall apart because they didn't do anything to protect it from termites, or the foundation may crack apart and crumble. And there are still big gaps. Like, how about the homes built in low areas prone to flooding? What if the site wasn't prone to flooding, until a new apartment complex or strip mall upstream added a bunch of pavement that dramatically increased the runoff rate? Or the city's sewer system backs up and forces sewage up through all the drains and toilets of the lowest lying houses?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:55PM
About the corruption. When each government official takes some small benefit to make a poor decision, he/she rationalizes it that what it affects isn't really important in the large scale. It only affects this building or that parking lot, or some specific project like a park.
The problem with that thinking is that it is like pollution. If I were the only one that did it, it wouldn't be a problem. But if everyone starts dumping toxic sludge into the river, there is going to be a big problem. If I was the only one throwing a bag of litter on the side of the highway, or pissing on the street, it would be a small problem easily delegated to an official with tiny hands. But if everyone did these things it would be a big problem.
Small corruption is the same thing. It's when everyone does it that the system is thoroughly corrupt through and through.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @12:57PM (1 child)
Are there any kind of controls would create fairly price housing for all?
imho, there are two factors:
- First, as another poster also comments, we have corruption. Politicians who pass regulations - not to ease housing - but to get kickbacks from developers who stand to make a buck.
- Second, there is the problem that governments are slow and regulations always accumulate. That well-intentioned regulation put in place today addresses problems from 10 years ago, and will still be in place 30 years in the future.
I think the best government can do is very general regulations, like general zoning rules. Beyond that, the market will regulate itself better than government can.
BTW, if you see housing prices out of whack, look more closely. Likely you will find some government regulations driving the process. This may be something direct, like rent control or overly strict building regulations. Or it may be something indirect, as led up to the 2008 crash: government regulations that forced lending to unqualified buyers and also allowed those mortgages to be resold in opaque derivative products.
What TFA is fussing about is a natural market correction: housing prices too high in one area lead to people moving elsewhere. Of course, below-market prices there rise. This is the market at work, averaging out prices. Individual people may be displaced, but the overall result is beneficial to society as a whole. Of course, politicians will try to use those individual sob stories as a reason to intervene and line their pockets - that is the temptation that must be resisted, because it will harm far more people than it helps.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:06PM
Except that:
1. Regulations do in fact sometimes get repealed. Often at the behest of businesses in the industry who hated the regulation ever since it was first proposed.
2. When that well-intentioned regulation gets repealed, it is not uncommon for the problem it was created to address to crop right back up.
That said, there is a market-based solution for the housing problem in the Bay Area: The VCs would be able to change this in a heartbeat by investing in companies outside of northern California. Start building up the hitech sector in, say, Austin, St Louis, or Detroit. Yes, you might have to relocate programmers from the Bay Area, but even if you add in the relocation service costs and the flights to go visit your funded startups once a month, it would still be much much cheaper than staying in the Bay Area. I mean, no question it's a beautiful area and all, but acting like the rest of the country doesn't exist isn't helping the VCs, the companies they're starting, or the employees of those companies.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:28PM (2 children)
Are there any kind of controls would create fairly price housing for all?
Birth control, though it'll take a while to be effective (a generation or 2, 3).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:35PM
Isn't it as simple as corporations externalizing the effects of workers needs to the surrounding society?
Even if the market were free it would mess up their environment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:05PM
The first reason is that politicians will use this as an excuse to import the 3rd world. Democrats think they will get votes, and everybody thinks that businesses will get slave-like workers. (actually the votes ultimately go toward denying rights to women and LGBT, and the immigrants tend to end up on welfare -- they fight to resist assimilation and we aren't forcing assimilation)
The second reason is that people from fly-over country will fill the void. Heck, they do this today: people in San Francisco don't have children, partly because of the school lottery, partly because of high prices, and partly because two dudes can't make a baby. Despite the lack of children native to San Francisco, there is no shortage of people wanting to live there. It's a fantasy land that half the country wants to live in.
The third reason is evolution. Within our population, there are people who actively want big families. They are currently a minority. If the trait is inheritable by any means, it will become predominant. The natural state for all living beings is to live in squalor, at the carrying capacity of the resources provided by the land. (either stable, or with boom/bust cycles, depending on the variety of resources and diseases and so on)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:32PM
Are there any kind of controls would create fairly price housing for all?
Georgism [wikipedia.org] is actually a pretty sensible system, both with a specific goal of affordable housing, and in general.
As I see it, land value has two components -- a location-independent portion due to the characteristics of the land itself, and a location-dependent portion due to desirability of its location and the quality of nearby infrastructure. Georgism focuses on the latter portion; IMO this is asymptotically correct/fair* for increasingly populous areas, where the value of the land really is mostly due to some combination of one's local government and one's neighbors, though I'm not convinced it's right in deep rural areas where the location-independent portion is more significant.
But "fair" or not, it does seem to have some very desirable effects:
It doesn't magically fix everything, of course, and maybe you still want a zoning board to block that condo amongst the little houses -- but it looks like a vast improvement from the current system.
*given fair assessment -- of course assessment is a big problem for any form of property tax, or rather, for any tax not based on an actual transaction. It's certainly no worse for land-value tax than for conventional property tax, and should actually be easier and less arbitrary, as land value is better-behaved (should generally vary smoothly with location).
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:14PM (3 children)
That depends on how you define shortage. Would there be a place for everyone with the cash? Yes. Would there be a place affordable to the many people working regular jobs that a city needs done? Not by a longshot. There'd be tent cities next to half empty condos.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:36PM (2 children)
Why? Is two half-empty condos somehow more profitable than one full condo and one budget apartment tower?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:21PM
I suspect the problem is that the value of the condo is expected to decrease if there is a budget apartment tower nearby.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:08PM
In some cases, yes. If they start renting at affordable rates, the tenants paying more won't be willing to put up with the next rent hike. They'll all wait for the other guy to blink. And all will fear missing out on the big spender if they fill up with commoners.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:01PM
Well that is the point. I have lived in the Bay Area, in Livermore and Fremont, and I live in Brooklyn now. The Bay Area's real estate prices are crazy out of control, and it doesn't have to be that way. The population density there is nowhere near what it is in NYC (inner core of SF notwithstanding). It's all low-rise sprawl. That also means their infrastructure usage is inefficient. More roads, more pipes, more schools, more everything. That means more traffic and more water usage. There are parts of San Francisco or maybe Oakland that are walkable, but for most of it you need to drive and sit in traffic for hours. Every day.
All of that is a choice folks there have made, and have codified in their zoning. If they chose to build up instead of sprawl, they would begin to realize better economies of scale with many aspects of their communities, housing prices and commute times among them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:53PM
Not that simple, sadly.
If you build up wildly, you'd better outlaw cars and use all the roads for public transport.
People need to move around. The denser you make the city, the less people can move, and therefore the less they can breathe, or be rescued when they stop breathing.
"I own this land, I'll build what I want" doesn't work very long. Urban planning is required to avoid choking the whole city.