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"It's a Perfect Storm": Homeless Spike in Rural California Linked to Silicon Valley

posted by martyb on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the need-more-land-where-the-water-is dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:32PM (#495898)

    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 eliminates speculation in land (which not only destabilizes markets, but also wastes that land's potential until the speculator is ready to cash out), and the related political pressure (on e.g. zoning boards) to irrationally favor preservation of existing property values. A new development should be favored if it increases total land value, even when it does so by lowering some existing land values.
    • It gives government sane incentives for infrastructure projects; since their revenue is directly tied to land value, they'll only engage in projects that actually boost land values (i.e. are actually useful to the people), and yet will not hesitate to engage in those.
    • It tends to increase the efficiency with which land is used to provide living space; as the building itself is no longer taxed, there's less downside to building more living space, even when it can't all be rented out immediately.

    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).