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?
Related Stories
Google announces $1B, 10-year plan to add thousands of homes to Bay Area
The housing crisis in the Bay Area, particularly in San Francisco, is a complex and controversial topic with no one-size-fits-all solution — but a check for a billion dollars is about as close as you're going to get, and Google has just announced it's writing one. In a blog post, CEO Sundar Pichai explained that in order to "build a more helpful Google," the company would be making this major investment in what it believes is the most important social issue in the area: housing.
San Francisco is famously among the most expensive places in the world to live now, and many residents of the city, or perhaps I should say former residents, have expressed a deep and bitter hatred for the tech industry they believe converted the area to a playground for the rich while leaving the poor and disadvantaged to fend for themselves.
Google itself has been the subject of many a protest, and no doubt it is aware that its reputation as a friendly and progressive company is in danger from this and numerous other issues, from AI ethics to advertising policies. To remedy this, and perhaps even partly as an act of conscience, Google has embarked on a billion-dollar charm offensive that will add thousands of new homes to the Bay Area over the next ten years.
$750 million of that comes in the form of repurposing its own commercial real estate for residential purposes. This will allow for 15,000 new homes "at all income levels," and while Pichai said that they hope this will help address the "chronic shortage of affordable housing options," the blog post did not specify how many of these new homes would actually be affordable, and where they might be.
Another $250 million will be invested to "provide incentives to enable developers to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units across the market".
They should build an arcology or giant pod hotel.
Also at NPR.
Previously: "It's a Perfect Storm": Homeless Spike in Rural California Linked to Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley Charter Buses Vandalized by Pellet/BB Guns or Rocks
Related: Soaring Rents in Portland, Oregon Cause Homelessness Crisis
City of San Francisco Says It's Illegal to Live in a Box
San Francisco Restaurants Can't Afford Waiters, so they Put Diners to Work
In San Francisco, Making a Living from Your Billionaire Neighbor's Trash
A Rogue Coder Turned a Parking Spot Into a Coworking Space
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:
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:15AM
Kill the billionaires.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @08:31AM (12 children)
Is that the SN version of "let them eat cake?" Homeless? Just build your house on top of somebody else's house.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:13PM (5 children)
The Salesforce Tower, now under construction in San Francisco, will be 70 m (217 feet) taller than the Transamerica building. It's an office building, but having offices in tall buildings makes a city more compact.
abc7news.com/realestate/salesforce-tower-in-sf-becomes-tallest-building-on-west-coast-/1556148/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Tower [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @03:29PM (1 child)
For an example of why not to build up, see Vancouver, Canada. People live there like rats in cages and only land developers are happy.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:00PM
San Francisco may be even worse:
[...] Vancouver is the fourth most densely populated city in North America behind New York City, San Francisco, and Mexico City [...]
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by captain normal on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:41PM
I do wonder about the wisdom in building tall buildings on the San Andreas Fault.
As for Patterson, maybe the huge Amazon Fulfillment Center there has more to do with increased rents than commuters driving to the Bay area every day. Also the CVS Distribution Center, the Grainger Distribution Center and the Restoration Hardware Distribution Center all of which provide many jobs. Of course those jobs are mostly minimum wage jobs, so maybe the homeless there are employed but do not make enough to buy or rent a home.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:43PM (1 child)
How far will that one lean [npr.org]?
it's not only the San Andreas that's a problem, there's also the shitty ground quality and liquefaction risks...
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:54AM
Famously, the Valencia Street Hotel, which was built on land-fill, sank considerably during the 1906 earthquake.
http://www.sfcityguides.org/public_guidelines.html?article=317&submitted=TRUE&srch_text=&submitted2=&topic=Earthquakes [sfcityguides.org]
http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906/valhot.html [sfmuseum.org]
Liquefaction may not be a problem for the Salesforce Tower, because (according to one of the links I posted) it's built on high ground. People tend not to fill in such places.
(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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @02:40PM (1 child)
Well, this is a Phoenix666 article. He likes to tack a snappy, completely pointless/wrong comment onto the end sometimes.
Oh wow, this summary isn't even the first 4 paragraphs of the article verbatim.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:46PM
If you submit more, I submit less. It's that simple.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @09:36AM (4 children)
Free Wi-Fi for the homeless! All that internet advertising will surely motivate them to just stop being poor and spend money.
Blanket every underpass with signal! Get the google balloons flying! Anything and everything to connect every consumer to the avarice network! Greed will solve homelessness as soon as the homeless see all the trendy crap they don't have!
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday April 18 2017, @11:09AM
Free Wi-Fi for the homeless! All that internet advertising will surely motivate them to just stop being poor and spend money.
There's a much better solution to the problem [youtube.com] available.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:28PM (1 child)
Get the google balloons flying!
I think you are on to something. Build a small place and take of into a balloon. No ground rent needed..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:14PM
Been done before [imdb.com].
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday April 20 2017, @02:20AM
Hey! avarice is MY router's hostname. Don't send them here!
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @12:48PM (3 children)
haven't been in the SF area for awhile now. Are any of the big tech companies building offices outside the city to serve all these people that are now living an hour or more away? Seems like workers would be a lot more productive if they didn't have to spend hours/day on the freeway.
(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:57PM
"the city" is now 100 miles around the SF Bay
rents are $2000-$3000 a month pretty much everywhere now.
typical commutes are over an hour, it isn't uncommon for two hours for
people coming in from Tracy.
they have been tearing down blocks of 1 story tilt-ups, replacing them with
six story office buildings, which house thousands of workers.
housing, even the high-density warrens, aren't keeping pace
I'll be dead before BART makes it to the the SJ Diradon Caltrain station.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:19PM
If you think it's about productivity, you're missing the point.
Case in point: open office environments.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:16PM
TFA talks about tech workers displacing other people and creating a burgeoning homeless population on the periphery of the Bay Area, but I don't know that things are all that rosy for the tech workers either. I don't have any data from studies at my fingertips, but we visited some of my wife's relatives there last summer. One's a hardware engineer for Apple living in San Jose. He commutes 90 minutes each way to Palo Alto. The other one is a salesman for Facebook, who lives in SF and commutes down peninsula 1.5-2hrs each way on the Facebook shuttle. Each one has toddlers they hardly ever get to see because all that time sitting in traffic eats up the short spaces in the evening when the kids are still awake and they're home.
It beats being homeless by a long way, to be sure. I don't mean to minimize that because it's one of the most horrible things a person can experience. But if the folks in that area would get together and amend their zoning and urban development policies in a more sensible direction, maybe they could all win by not rendering people homeless, and not imposing ridiculous, crushing commutes and other hassles on the others. As a side benefit, having those two parties in closer proximity creates other mutual benefits like retail and service opportunities for both of them. You can see that in New York, where the population density means every block can support its corner deli and plethora of bars, restaurants, and shops.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:10PM (4 children)
"California's Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country's food"? I find that difficult to believe considering the millions of acres of farmland in the non-arid/ non-mountainous regions in the rest of the country.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:29PM
Well corn, wheat, soy beans, are exported in mass from this country so maybe that is how they get that number.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:34PM
That may be measured by price rather than energy content. Fruits, nuts, vegetables and dairy products are produced there.
Even so, it may be exaggerated. Circa 2007-2008, California "accounted for 17.6 percent of national receipts for crops" (page 1, numbered 17) and seven of the state's eight highest producing counties (the exception: Monterey County) were at least partly in the valley (page 13, numbered 29).
source:
https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/files/CDFA_Sec2.pdf [ca.gov]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:26PM (1 child)
There are a lot of ways they could be arriving at that figure, but even if we're talking gross tonnage it's not outside the realm of possibility. California is an immense state. The Central Valley is a well-oiled machine of agro-business. Truck farms, orchards, animal husbandry. They have a long growing season, too. Compare that to, say, North Dakota, where they pretty much get wheat and hay that they have to grow with strip farming to let half the acreage lie fallow and recover from nutrient depletion, and where the growing season is short. Not all agricultural areas are equal.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:13AM
Way to prop up a straw man and knock it down. North Dakota is not the millions of acres of fertile farmland in that includes most of the state's to the east of the Mississippi and the states immediately west of the Mississippi and those adjacent states. Californians have an overly developed sense of importance when it comes to their state.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Tuesday April 18 2017, @02:27PM (5 children)
I grew up in Rancho Cordova in what was in the 1950's and 60's the great Central Valley boonies. and watched it turn into a light rail-connected 'burb of Sacramento. Post-Vietnam immigration earned it the nickname Rancho Cambodia.
Nowadays the whole Sac Metro area is just low-income housing for the masters of the universes' despised underlings and the state burocracy.
People gotta go somewhere, even the homeless. Life may be tough on the streets of Stockton or Modesto, but it probably beats the hell out of roughing it in Detroit or Saint Louis.
Totally predictable, and completely irreversible without a major tech bubble burst.
Governor Moonbeam will probably launch a new assistance program (Cal Flophouse?) replete with tax hikes. That's the California way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @03:36PM (4 children)
Now I get you'd rather solve the problems by making housing affordable and decent jobs available to everyone, but that is not easily legislated. So in the meantime you suggest we let millions of people die in the streets? Tax funded "flophouses" are a part of being civilized now that we no longer live in the jungle... Or we can remove all welfare assistance and watch "the walking dead" become a true parody of reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:12PM
This is what England did. We can send people to Africa, or the Middle East, or South America. Someday we can ship them off to Mars.
The alternative is seen in Futurama and Soylent Green: we set up suicide booths and/or suicide centers. So... how about them colonies?
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:34PM (2 children)
Part of the problem is that the taxes that support California's already very generous welfare system make it even harder for average people to stay housed. If the income tax code was a little more progressive it might help. I don't imagine very many hipsters will bug out for Seattle over a few Starbucks-visits worth of economic impact funding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @11:39PM (1 child)
Fixing the tax code would be a good start. 'Progressive' will not work. Simplification and removal of *all* loopholes will. The states that have been moving towards flat taxes and no loopholes are going cash positive. We have had nearly 40 years of voodoo economics at this point to prove it does not work. Mathematically it should work. In practice those with the money just buy loopholes from their favorite political groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @12:03AM
That's true, and being a one-party state, the imbeciles in Sacramento have no impediment to further enriching themselves and their sponsors, or do anything innovative for the governed. Cali voters are so screwed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @02:29PM
but some people are more equal than others. (apologies to Orwell)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 18 2017, @02:52PM
That phrase stuck out to me in the summary -- what precisely is "unlikely" about this kind of trend? Unless I'm missing something, this is the kind of story that has played out again and again when you have a successful booming white-collar business area that grows quickly. Housing eventually runs out in the immediate area, and highly-paid workers begin moving into surrounding areas. It happens in big cities when the "Yuppies" (now other terms are used, but that's one of the early ones for people in such trends) start moving into surrounding blue-collar neighborhoods; suddenly the "locals" are priced out. It happens in suburbs of cities when those highly-paid workers start having kids and want a larger house and a yard, so they move a little farther out and drive up rents and housing prices in working class areas around the city.
Whether the people who are priced out of the areas become homeless or find other solutions depends a lot on what local governments do in response to all of this.
Anyhow, it may be difficult to predict in advance exactly where such a trend will arise and which outlying areas will become the "hip" ones for workers to flock to... but the general trend isn't surprising or "unlikely" to me in any place where you have a cluster of highly-paid workers that's growing. It would be positively shocking to me if Silicon Valley did NOT cause this sort of housing crisis to happen SOMEWHERE in surrounding areas.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:11PM
I recall an article in the San Jose Mercury News circa 2000 CE about a full-time public school teacher living in a homeless shelter because he couldn't afford housing in San Jose.
At the same time, a colleague at a tech firm in Redwood City lived three hours east of the office and had a hellish commute because he couldn't afford to house his family closer to his job.
That was almost 20 years ago, and housing prices are increasing even further afield. No surprise there.
Let's stop pretending and come right out with the truth. If you're not rich, you're a waste of life and belong in a place like this [azcentral.com].
Deal with it, or we'll deal with you [youtube.com].
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr