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Apple wants affordable housing in California—but laws stand in the way
Apple has pledged $2.5 billion to help address California's affordable-housing crisis, the company announced on Monday. In recent years, the San Francisco Bay Area has become the most expensive housing market in America. Los Angeles also suffers from housing costs far above the national average.
Apple's $2.5 billion package includes several different initiatives. Apple will offer a $1 billion line of credit to organizations building housing for low-income people.
[...] Apple's commitment follows on the heels of similar announcements by other technology giants:
- In January, Microsoft said it would provide $500 million in grants and loans to promote affordable housing in the Seattle area and aid the homeless.
- In June, Google announced a $1 billion initiative, including $750 million worth of Google-owned land, to support the development of at least 20,000 new housing units "at all income levels" in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- In October, Facebook unveiled its own initiative to offer $1 billion in grants and loans to support the construction of 20,000 housing units in the region.
Apple's initiative is larger than the other programs and appears to be more focused on low-income housing.
But there are some problems that can't be immediately solved with money:
These efforts to promote affordable housing are laudable, but corporate initiatives alone are unlikely to solve California's housing crisis. The Golden State's fundamental housing problem is that state and local laws simply don't allow developers to build enough housing to accommodate rising demand.
In the 20th century, cities could accommodate growing demand for housing by pushing suburbs outwards. But in major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and Los Angeles, that process has largely run its course. Most of the land within a reasonable driving distance of job centers has been developed. Which means that the only way to accommodate further growth is by increasing density: replacing single-family homes with duplexes, townhouses, and apartment buildings.
The problem is that the law doesn't allow this in most areas. A Los Angeles Times analysis found that 62% of land in Los Angeles is zoned for single-family homes only. In San Francisco, 75% of the land is zoned not to allow anything denser than a duplex. Laws in suburban Silicon Valley are even stricter.
Previously: Google Pledges to Build 15,000+ Homes in San Francisco
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by anotherblackhat on Tuesday November 05 2019, @08:39PM (2 children)
The fundamental problem is that people do not want housing prices to go down.
We saw this in 2007, when the housing bubble popped.
People didn't call that a "correction" or say "housing prices are almost back to normal" ... they called it a crash and took action to "correct" the "problem".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 05 2019, @09:01PM
And, "the system" backed them up on that through 2008. When we sold our home in 2013 we expected to "take a loss" from our 2006 purchase price, but... we had willing buyers bidding at our asking price, comparables around the neighborhood backing up that price, but the "impartial appraiser" managed to dig up three comps that knocked our appraisal down 10% from what the buyers were bidding. One of those comps was a year old, a friend of ours sold their home a year earlier and had the same situation: willing buyers but an appraiser who wouldn't extend the recent uptrends in the market to our neighborhood and so knocked their appraisal down 10% and our appraiser was using their sale price - depressed by their appraiser, as a comp for our appraisal a year later. The only mumbled comment I could get from the man was something to the effect of "the banks don't like it if I let these things get too high..."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 06 2019, @04:38AM
The people who own houses do not want housing prices to go down. The people who don't own houses want housing prices to go down, until they buy a house, after which they want the prices to go back up.
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