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: 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.