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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @02:25PM (3 children)
Is that the SN version of "let them eat cake?" Homeless? Just build your house on top of somebody else's house.
No, homeless people don't build houses.
However, it is the solution to the problem - build higher density housing.
That requires zoning changes but zoning boards tend to be inherently anti-development. The people who would move into the new housing don't live there yet so they don't get to vote for zoning commissioners, only current residents who generally do not want to see the paper value of their homes go down.
The problem is unlikely to be resolved unless zoning regulation is changed. One idea is to move it to the state level so self-interested property owners won't have as much control over what other property owners do with their property.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:35PM (2 children)
I live in a city about halfway between LA and SF and it's a microcosm of SV, complete with our own little technology industry. It's virtually impossible to buy a home for a young person, even a young couple. Forget about something big enough to have a family. Even renting is hard without roommates. Two types of people block progress here: elderly natives, and rich retiree transplants from other parts of California or the country. They both want to preserve this nauseatingly sentimental image of a Spanish colonial style "small town" so no building up. They both want their property values to stay high, so no building out either, lest supply actually increase to meet demand. Unless you got in early (20-40 years ago) when houses were affordable or you bring in at least six-figures, you're crammed into an apartment sharing a room. And even making $100k per year you're still probably renting, just a nice size house and without roommates. The people who have houses don't want to sell, and new ones are scarcely being built. When they are, they're usually turned into rental properties.
So what have people done? Moved to the peripheral cities, of course. Now rent and house prices are going up in those places and there's a growing homeless problem which is causing crime and drug abuse to increase (still at historically low levels in absolute terms, however). I'm seeing exactly the same thing as Silicon Valley, just with a scaling factor of *0.1 for land area and population size.
I went to a town hall event where affordable housing was being discussed. A woman came right out and said--without embarrassment or shame--that she was worried about the new affordable housing development being proposed lowering the value of her rental properties. And this is why nothing gets done. She votes and probably donates money to keep things as they are. The homeless and the displaced workers don't, or can't.
There has to be some balance between the workers that make the city livable being on the precipice of homelessness and a communist-style forced land redistribution at gun point. But I have to say, at this point I'm not very sympathetic to the plight of the woman sitting back and collecting rent on multiple properties while productive people can't get by.
I'd be in favor of moving control over zoning to Sacramento because the state overall is more liberal than my local government. And I want a more liberal government.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:38PM (1 child)
This sounds like something the free market should be able to solve, in theory, in a way: (warning: this does strain the definition of "free market")
As the OP to your post said, it'd be better if zoning were controlled at the state level, so that self-interested property owners wouldn't have as much control over local zoning decisions.
So, better-run states should pass legislation to make this so, and construction in those states should increase to meet demand, and housing prices should go way down. Workers and employers should then migrate to those states, away from crappy states that don't enact such legislation. Eventually, these asshole self-interested property owners should go bankrupt because their local economies will collapse, and their housing values along with them.
Unfortunately, I just don't seem to be seeing any such intelligent legislation in the US. They did pass something similar over in Japan though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @10:08PM
> So, better-run states should pass legislation to make this so
And that is a hard one to make happen for the same reason it is hard to get zoning boards to rezone - passing that legislation means fighting all of the same voters, but state-wide instead of just one locality at a time. It can still be done, but it's going to be an up-hill battle, you'd have to directly appeal to renters. But property owners are more likely to vote than renters.