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NIMBY

Hundreds turn out to speak against apartments; meeting canceled | News | yoursun.com

The main point is that I’m trying, and failing, to make is that the free market is not allowed to work in a natural fashion, and the more govt programs the worse it gets.

But how do you know how good/bad it would be otherwise?  I doubt the government is doing such things in Fresno or Bakersfield, right?  
You're proposing they not make an effort, not be proactive to assist a problem in a high-population/low land area place.  You think their absence would be better, but how do you know?

So this is interesting and I agree with most of it, but I honestly still don't think it fixes the affordability problem.

It might help. At the moment more than a few cities out that way are throwing up apartments like the world is ending. It's gonna be like putting paper towels on a bullet wound, but it's something.

But the issue is still demand, demand, demand.

SF might have spent all that time fighting against more density. And yet, SF is very, very, very dense. It is not lacking for density. It is not a city of big lawns, big lots, big houses. And yet, being super dense doesn't at all correlate with having affordable housing.

Until you have people say "enough," stop paying and just leave, all the damn density in the world won't produce anything affordable.

Again, I think of this as being the entire Bay Area, and SF is only one bit of it. 

SF is naturally small physically. I.e. if you look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density

San Francisco proper is the second most dense city to New York City, at about 2/3 of the density per square mile. But NYC houses 8M people while SF houses 800K because NYC is physically larger. So you have a completely different order of magnitude in scale between the two. 

Where it gets REALLY interesting is if you filter and sort that list of the top 125 incorporated areas based upon metropolitan area. 

The New York City Metropolitan area has another 56 incorporated cities on that list which house an additional 2.3M people. 

The San Francisco Metropolitan area has another 5 incorporated cities on this list which house an additional 295K people. That's Daly City, San Pablo, East Palo Alto, Berkeley and Albany. Again, that's another order of magnitude. And the highest on that list is 49th in density. 23 of the NYC metro areas are above 49th on the list and are about 1.1M of the 2.3M from that NYC metro. 

So yes, San Francisco is expensive, and relatively dense. Even if it reached NYC's density, the population would only go from about 800K to about 1.2M. So it would still be expensive. But if the entire Bay Area, including extending down the peninsula and across the Bay, was a little more like the NYC metro area, the ENTIRE Bay Area would still have high demand but the affordability point would be much more accessible than it is today. 

But how do you know how good/bad it would be otherwise?  I doubt the government is doing such things in Fresno or Bakersfield, right? 
You're proposing they not make an effort, not be proactive to assist a problem in a high-population/low land area place.  You think their absence would be better, but how do you know?

https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2021-03-31/fresno-rent-spike-taps-into-california-covid-housing-trends

Local politicians and housing advocates say the situation is the result of gaps and failures in the city’s housing market that have built up over decades and have yet to be reformed after the mortgage foreclosure crisis nearly 15 years ago.

Construction of homes in Fresno nearly screeched to a halt after the Great Recession and remains stalled, even though, before the pandemic, the region was growing faster than others in the state, fueled in part by a booming healthcare sector. The average home value in Fresno is now nearly $300,000, according to real estate firm Zillow, having risen almost as fast as rents over the last four years.

The result is that rental housing for tenants at all income levels is in extremely short supply, with available apartments at record lows, according to data from real estate firm CoStar. And the ability to charge higher rents has increased speculation from investors looking to squeeze returns from newly purchased older properties.

For as long as she can remember, former Mayor Ashley Swearengin said, Fresno’s political leaders had been lulled into believing that as long as a small cadre of developers was building single-family-home subdivisions on the city’s fringes, the housing situation was fine.

“We had been engaged in this ‘cotton candy’ kind of economy, that swinging a hammer and building on our periphery was meeting our needs,” said Swearengin, who is now president and chief executive of the Central Valley Community Foundation. “The Great Recession was a wake-up call that it wasn’t. It was glaringly obvious that we were bringing the wrong tools to this issue, and we needed to change.”

https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2018/02/19/new-river-city-transform-california/ideas/connecting-california/

Transforming greater Fresno also would require collaboration between local governments that have spent decades using lawsuits to stall the growth of their neighbors. Madera County’s development has only recently gone forward after fights so bitter that the governor’s office intervened.

Indeed, the very structure of California, and its land-use planning, works against turning Fresno into a region, never mind a powerhouse. In our state, local jurisdictions are weak and have little power to raise their own revenues; they are incentivized to compete with other cities, often using questionable subsidies, in the chase for developments and the taxes they bring. In the Golden State, cooperating with neighboring municipalities is for saps.

The battles between the San Joaquin Valley’s cities have been especially hard-fought, since those municipalities are weak even by California’s diminished standards. (Madera County doesn’t even have a parks department.) The game is: support development that provides revenue for your city, while spreading the costs—in traffic, water and air quality—onto your neighbors.

That has inspired nearly constant litigation. To take just two examples: The city of Fresno sued Madera County to block the new river development plan until it got a tax-sharing agreement that would compensate it for impacts like traffic. In retaliation, Madera County sued Fresno to block a new shopping center, claiming it would siphon off shopping dollars and sales taxes that should go to Madera.

So those are two examples, with very different root causes IMHO, of how gov't policies are causing situations where proper housing wasn't being built. One because local gov't was focused on supporting the type of development that didn't actually meet the needs of its residents (SFH on the city's periphery), and another based upon a structural issue with gov't that caused cities within a unified region to fight against their neighbor's development, which had the effect of chilling development across the whole region. 

SF and its surrounding areas being so expensive caused Seattle to happen. It got more expensive, although values in the city proper are coming down.

Belleview seems to be doing OK, but not great, with values. My wife lived there for 3-4 years. Nice area.

Not entirely. I think a lot of Seattle as it is today can be tied to Microsoft IMHO. (Obviously Boeing is huge as well.) Gates was from Seattle originally, and Silicon Valley was there but not quite the craziness it is today. So I think wanting to be near home was more important to Gates than avoiding SF/Bay Area. 

Then Bezos saw that there was a lot of tech talent in Seattle (due to Microsoft), and because then he could sell to California, the state with the largest population in the country, w/o those buyers having to pay sales taxes giving him a competitive advantage over any firms based in CA (which has now changed of course). 

When you have two titans of an industry like this in one geographic area, eventually people leave those companies but don't want to leave Seattle, so it becomes a great place to set up OTHER tech companies in the area because there is a pool of talent to hire, and it becomes a bit of a mini-Silicon Valley. The same thing of course happened in Austin due to Dell. Now there are a lot of other tech companies in the area staffed by former Dell employees who wanted to do something different but didn't want to leave Austin. 

There are obviously big non-tech employers in the Seattle (aforementioned Boeing of course), but I think what drove Seattle from probably the 1990s to today was the combination of Microsoft and Amazon, and then all the tech industry that built up around Seattle because of the network effects those two titans generate. 

4 years in about all most folks can take of Seattle

But how do you know how good/bad it would be otherwise?  I doubt the government is doing such things in Fresno or Bakersfield, right? 
You're proposing they not make an effort, not be proactive to assist a problem in a high-population/low land area place.  You think their absence would be better, but how do you know?

I just usually believe that the free market can do a better job than the government can.  Again, if demand is high, and supply is low, the price will always be high no matter what the government does.  So you either need to drop demand, or increase supply.