I am a NIMBY, and there is no housing crisis in CA

Yes, that’s a problem. But it’s different that what I am suggesting. The League is an advocacy group, but they represent a wider swathe of people than oil lobbyists. And even still, I wouldn’t suggest that the group should be able to set policy. I bring it up as a representation of the community of people that iiandyiii was talking about. Ultimately it’s an issue that is decided through voters and their representatives. My aim is to get those representatives to vote close to the direction I’m advocating for.

But if the construction is ‘prosperity for everyone nearby’ or the local community - then it makes sense to define that sphere of influence. Because the approach the state is taking is one size fits all for the state. That’s a voting block for sure, but it’s not what comes to mind when I think everyone nearby or the community.

Imagine instead the whole state decided to be more restrictive. Then it seems under the nebulous construction of everyone nearby that sphere would be increased until somehow the state lost that ability.

Because hurting people is wrong whether you do it directly or vote for laws that hurt people. Zoning laws make people spend more on rent, which means they have less to spend on their families. It makes commuting distances longer which means they spend less time with their families. It makes the environment worse and reduces economic growth. All of these outcomes are well known yet people support the laws anyway because they think it makes them richer through higher home values.

Government is a tool. It should be used to help the common good through the police, court system, and the military. If it is being used by the powerful and rich to intentionally hurt the less powerful and well off, then that is a perversion of government. History is littered with examples of the powerful using government to hurt the less powerful, I understand why the powerful do it, but it is always awful. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether the government being used to hurt people is a local city.

Every city everywhere wants local control. They’re all NIMBYs. The problem is that NIMBY is a terrible way to run a society, but every local government has the concept ingrained as a core requirement.

One of the purposes of local government is to represent the current residents of the town, to advocate for their benefit.

However, there are issues bigger than what benefits the residents of a single town, and local governments are unable to react properly to it, but they have the power to prevent solutions to it. That’s where the State, having a wider vision, needs to step in and implement policies that override the town level decision making.

So let’s test this then. If the majority of people support my side, say, 51/49 %, does that change the analysis and then make it favorable in your view? Because your position would also hurt people’s economic interests so I’m wondering when that becomes okay. What if that majority was 80/20?

If the people don’t want to spend more, travel further, etc. then they could choose to live or work somewhere else they can better afford. Unless you think people have some right to live in a particular place. But I pose the same question to you as I did to iiandyiii - are you okay with any zoning rules?

You didn’t ask me, but I am in support of keeping industrial uses out of residential ones. But the basis for this would be protection of public health, not property values. No one should be living right next to landfills or wastewater lagoons. People also should not be able to develop contaminated brownfields for residential purposes until they are fully remediated.

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It doesn’t matter how many people support it. Being oppressed by one rich guy is no worse or better than being oppressed by 80% of the population. The bedrock principle of freedom is that if what I do does not directly hurt you then it is not your business wwhat I do. If you want to tell someone what to do with their land or on their land either buy that land or shut up.

All zoning laws are bad and should be done away with. If the people around you are acting poorly, say by making something that pollutes the environment, then there are environmental laws to deal with that, if the people near you are too loud or too smelly then there are nuisance laws to deal with that. Otherwise mind your business.

The idea that zoning is all that separates the affluent from the hoi polloi is just not true. Houston has no zoning laws and there are plenty of neighborhoods with nothing but million dollar houses. The people who want to move into the Bay Area are young professionals wanted to start families, not gang bangers yelling “where the white women at?”

At least that clarifies the objection. I disagree of course. It makes sense to order communities in a way that organizes things like industrial, residential, commercial, etc. The way that is done is through zoning and city planning. A person shouldn’t be able to acquire property in an otherwise residential neighborhood and construct a strip club, or a high rise hotel, or other uses because it’s disruptive of the area just as polluting is.

And it’s not precisely informative to say that Houston has no zoning.

But hey, if people in Houston want their city to look the way it does, great for them. Personally I think it’s horrendous.

It’s not just CA, it’s not even just the USA. It is a problem in all the developed countries; how much subsidized housing should you build, and where? And who it o benefit from it? The market works fine for those who have a reasonable income, but how are you going the warehouse the less affluent and the disadvantaged? In short, where does the free market economy end and where does the welfare society step in? There is no simple answer, but housing that is overpriced overall tends to hollow out cities, all the working stiffs have to move out and commute, and the central areas are either for the rich or the very poor who create slums by packing the building with enough people to afford the rent. Not a desirable outcome, but how do you avoid it?

So, Bone, teasing apart your arguments, there seem to be 2 arguments you are making.

  1. Programs to make “housing affordable” artificially (like NYC’s rent control) distort markets and are frequently corrupt anyways.

    I think *some* of the posters in this thread agree with you here.
    
  2. “I happen to have an early stake in a pyramid scheme and my stake has doubled in under a decade. So this is awesome for me financially and terrible for everyone but the small group of people like me.”

    Basically everyone disagrees with you here.

Some of the best tech jobs in the country are in the Bay Area. From someone who doesn’t live in the Bay Area, but the tech field I am interested in is heavily concentrated there, from my perspective this housing scam is just a scam. It’s a way to steal most of the money I’d be working 60 hours a week to earn - or most of my free time. Money or time, lose-lose.

Because either I’d have 30% of my income burning away in rent (and get hit with high taxes on top of that), something like 30% of my waking free time wasted in commuting, or if I could buy,
a. Housing prices cannot inflate forever. There are limits, specifically as to the rent a property can command. It’s possible they are already near the max they will ever reach. At current prices, thousands of businesses and jobs are leaving yearly.
b. Unlike you, simply for coming later, I’d be forced to pay double the taxes. Why should you get to pay half taxes because you moved somewhere earlier? What entitles you to this unequal treatment?
And, here’s another counter-argument. Other people have mentioned dealing with the problem at a state level.

   There's a *national *security and national economy angle here.  In general, the well being of a country is higher if it's more efficient at producing things that other countries value.  Present thinking is that Artificial Intelligence is *the* most important product a country can produce, period, and it's the most valuable thing human beings will ever make.  

  It seems there is an enormous network effect to having a "tech hub" with the right policies in place.  You need all the top tier companies in one place, with a good climate, with labor policies that ban non-compete and poaching agreements.  You need reasonable taxes, you need weed and other drugs to be legal, you need a good transit grid, etc.

 Corruption in the building permit system is preventing the most valuable and productive part of the entire United States from growing as fast as it should.  The way it should work is this :

  It should be legal for developers to install any density of commercial or residential structure, anywhere they want, so long as the building/tenants aren't emitting air pollution or high noise levels.

  Municipalities should be able to charge a density tax nonlinear to the density of a building, and should be required to upgrade the infrastructure with the money through some form of federal incentive system.  They should be able to charge a higher tax for buildings that are isolated - lone skyscrapers are obviously harder to upgrade the infrastructure around than n+1 skyscrapers around the city core.  

That is, efficient land utilization would look like a neat 2d bell curve, with the highest buildings in the center and the best transit links between them. (because the owners of the buildings pay for those links). And as you get farther from the core of a city the heights get smoothly lower and lower. Residences would be interspersed smoothly with offices so that in many cases it would be possible to rent an apartment within a few floors of the same building where you work.

Rents, since this is a free market, would mainly just scale up and down with density costs. The only reason it would cost more to live in the center of the city is because those 100+ story skyscrapers cost more per square foot to construct. So rents would be perhaps 50-100% higher there simply because the building you are living and working in is made of stronger and more expensive stuff.

The primary reason we don’t have this in the USA is crime. The whole reason for absurdly inefficient suburbs, for land policies restricting density, etc, is that if you make housing expensive in large areas, only people who can afford expensive prices can be your neighbors. And richer people are far less likely to commit violent crimes against you. (they may commit all sorts of white collar frauds or use drugs in their homes but these crimes don’t affect you).

There’s a racial element here as well but the primary discriminating factor is money. In order to have high density - to have residential next to offices in a massive 3 dimension housing beehive - you have to solve the crime problem. Specifically you have to have individual accountability. Anytime anyone commits a crime, it needs to be solved. You need machine learning driven cameras with 100% coverage on public areas. They would recognize every single individual who passes under them, using multiple forms of analysis (gait, face, height, skin tone, ping their phone, time and place correlation, hair color, clothing syle) and save to a log who they saw and when.

Off database individuals would get learned because they can be tracked from camera to camera until they eventually go somewhere and show their ID or use a credit card or go to a home or something, and then the file entries can all be updated.

If you do this, any time a crime happens, a detective would have the ability to solve it because they could quickly determine all of the actual suspects it could be. And this would be true for both muggings and graffiti up to murder.

Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet. I’d be interested in getting Bone’s opinion.

Much of the skyrocking housing prices can be placed at the foot of foreign investors.

Do you think these speculators should have more say over how an area should be developed than the residents who’d like to actually drop deep roots in a community and help to make it better over the long haul but are quickly being priced out?

Total video coverage? Try some of the new cities in the PRC. OK, there is no crime, but it sounds hideously oppressive. And need one say more about the political uses of such technology? Which is in widespread use anyway, and not least in the USA.

It’s how you increase density. The police today already subpoena all the records they can get, they interview neighbors, etc, if they are investigating a serious crime.

The accepted, by evidence, way to reduce crime is you need to swiftly and surely punish criminals who commit it. The smaller the gap between committing a crime and punishment, the better. The punishment need not be particularly severe - the biggest factor in reducing crime is making criminals believe they are nearly certain to be caught, even if they only receive a light sentence.

In such an environment, where nearly every crime can be solved - where theft is pointless because the police will be at your place in an hour, where assault means you will be behind bars for sure by nightfall, where a rape means you will be in prison the same day - most crimes would never even happen in the first place. And those who are mentally ill and who will commit crimes even knowing they will be caught would be contained swiftly.

And there would not be any justification for personal gun ownership.

Bone’s answer to that is going to be “since foreign investors raise the prices, and thus increases the value of *my *home equity, *I *benefit. Therefore I would be in favor of laxer regulations that encourage *more *foreign investors than there already are. Bring in that Iranian money.”

Not everyone is so short sighted. Warren Buffet has his accountants use all the legal tax minimizing strategies on his income, but he knows the system is badly unfair and tilted in favor of the rich. He at least is consistent in saying the system that benefits him personally is unfair and needs fixing. Bone here, by his reasoning shown thus far, would be in favor of slavery as long as he was a slave owner and not himself a slave.

This is definitely happening in many parts of the bay area. People coming in with all cash offers pushing up prices. Overall I think attempts to mitigate or alleviate this are probably worse than the status quo. Money is money and there is a global market for real estate investment. The only possible out is that to vote, the locality needs to be the primary residence so unless these owners meet the residency requirement they aren’t going to be voting.

First off, many people in tech are regularly working 60 hour weeks. Pretty typical. 30% of your income on housing is nothing. You can live within SF in the residential neighborhoods and still have a 1 hour commute to downtown. Bay area traffic is probably a lot like other major metro areas, but if you’re not familiar with it it’s bad. To go from the north bay to the south bay could be 5 hours in commute traffic. My commute is 9 miles. It takes 45 minutes. That’s less than half of what I was doing previously.

And lastly, I’ve bought houses and moved at least every 5 years since I bought my first house. I’m not someone sitting on a mountain of equity paying property tax rates from 1990. I pay more in taxes each month than I did my whole first house mortgage payment. In any event, this seems to be targeting prop 13 locking property taxes with fixed increases rather than zoning which is what I’m discussing in this thread.

I actually do think housing prices can inflate forever. Inflation will see to that.

Your other comments about national security and criminal surveillance are a non sequitur IMO. I’ll just say that even if there were no crime, I’d have zero interest in living in a people dense environment.

First, your predictive powers have failed you. Second, this part about slavery is pretty offensive.

You’re in favor of screwing over the little guys who aren’t tech workers like you. Don’t see how you’d have much sympathy for slaves to be honest. But, regardless, at no point have you argued for any policy that isn’t to your personal benefit in your personal situation. You don’t appear to care a whit about anyone else.

30% of the rent is “nothing”? Says who? By what standard? 30% of 150-200k is a truckload of money, waaaaay more than the cost to manufacture/maintain a small 1-2 bedroom apartment even in a 100 story highrise.

I assume you are in favor of ISPs who happen to own the wires leading to your place charging $1000 a month for internet? Privatizing the roads in high traffic areas and charging you to drive on them?

All these are examples of monopoly rent-seeking behavior. It’s a rat-hole that robs wealth from the economy.

This is plain ignorance. An employee, even a high value one like a tech worker, produces a finite dollar value on average to a company. A company can’t pay them more than about half their value creation in salary each year. (rest goes to inefficiencies and profit for the owners)

Then, after taxes and food and basic essentials and transportation and student loan payments, such a person has a finite number of dollars left in a month. Rent cannot physically be higher than those dollars or they just can’t pay it.

Thus, rent cannot rise past a certain point - and thus the real value of properties even in the Bay Area can’t rise above that ceiling for long.

We are talking about real, inflation-adjusted dollars. Obviously as long as money continues to inflate, prices for housing can keep going up - but inflationary increases are not real value changes, you gain no net increase in equity if your property only goes up with inflation.

I think you’re making not only leaps of logic not supported by evidence, but leaps that are directly contradicted by evidence. In post #115 I said this:

Yet you somehow think I’d be okay with slavery. That’s pretty poor deduction. And you somehow apply these powers of deduction to other areas …just because? Good luck with that and the rest of the non sequiturs.

Here, we’re talking about zoning and state mandates overriding local control. Perhaps you’d like to join the conversation.

As to 30% - I live in the bay area, so me. I say it. You’re free to disbelieve me. My first house, I was at 70% after P&I and taxes and insurance. 30% of 200K is 60 grand, or 5k/month. that’s like, a regular mortgage. That’s the normal rent on a friend’s 2 bed condo in SOMA. 30% as a rule of thumb is great in normal markets but the bay area is near the top if not the highest cost area in the country. Rules of thumb don’t work as well here.

It’s not how much the rent is compared to what you are “used” to paying. It’s the value you get from the money. As a tech worker, you create value, but these real estate policies are robbing value away from most people. (obviously not everyone, in the same way that early investors in a pyramid scheme make money)

These “non sequiturs” : so far your demonstrated IQ is weak here. These “non sequiturs” were me explaining the real value of land : what a true free market policy would look like. If you want to see the results of that, look here :

As for local control vs statewide control : if the state government feels that they will improve the state that they govern (for example, if more tech workers can move in and pay state income taxes, the state will have more funds to do good things for it’s citizens), what’s the dispute here? The state government is sovereign except for matters where the Feds supercede them. Locals governments shouldn’t get a say at all - they…aren’t…the government, just a delegated entity to control matters the state government lets them control…

As for income being a protected class : dude I agree with you. The fix to the housing crisis is to build and increase density. More supply means lower prices. Increase supply enough and eventually prices will fall to fair and affordable levels for most people. Like it did in Tokyo. No special polices needed.

This shows you haven’t given serious thought to what’s happening.

You keep presenting the issue in the form of “Should X have the right to demand to live in Y locality?”

That’s not the relevant question. The relevant question is “How should society structure housing policy to bring the greatest benefit to society as a whole?”

Your preferred policy enriches you and a handful of your neighbors, but it imposes significant hardships that wouldn’t otherwise have existed on your fellow community members, the economy and society as a whole.

It makes all of us poorer. In fact it makes us far poorer than it makes you richer.

There have been several restatements of the argument in this thread, but I have seen nothing in your posts to show that you have actually read and understood them. You keep repeating the cause of your self-interest and in asserting the self-interest of the handful of people in similar positions.

This is the relevant question if you are a utilitarian. I am not. The greater good is only one aspect in decision making. I believe you come to your position through thorough thought based on your beliefs. Why don’t you believe I could not have done the same?