I mean of course property values have a relationship with quality education. If I didn’t have to think about school quality I could probably pay 20 - 30% less for housing. But because I find those things important, I was willing to pay a lot more. And just as the rest of my neighbors and fellow residents in the area, I have a strong interest in maintaining that value.
Predictions of some causitive impact of lack of teachers in a given area pushing home values down seems like a stretch for San Mateo. I’m guessing the dominance of high paying jobs in the area will do quite a bit to overwhelm the impact, if it actually exists.
Please note the utter rejection of the concept that the free market can at all be coercive. That’s pretty typical libertarian doctrine, and it’s about as sensible as pretending that governments can’t be coercive because we vote for them.
Of course not. What does surprise me, and what I think probably sets you apart from most supporters of the kind of NIMBYism you’re for, is that (if I’m reading you right) you wholly acknowledge that this is very harmful to the less affluent people in your region, while only beneficial to a much smaller number of relatively affluent people, and you’re totally fine with this. You value your own comfort/high quality of life (and that of your family) more than avoiding contributing to significant harm to those in your region that are less affluent. I see that as remarkably selfish, at least when you already have a high quality of life and safety, and abandoning this sort of NIMBYism wouldn’t significantly harm your ability to maintain a high quality of life and safety.
In other conversations I’ve had, most NIMBYists insist that this kind of policy doesn’t harm anyone except (possibly) rich property developers.
Companies start moving employees to cheaper areas like Kansas City.
Well maybe not KC but I hear cities in Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico.
And I know of people who turned down good paying tech jobs in SF just because of the high cost of living.
Finally I wonder how many people working in Tech in SF after awhile start looking elsewhere for jobs? I mean yes, living in SF when your a hot shot developer straight out of college and working for the top companies is cool. But 5-10 years down the road when they want to settle down and raise a family - and they are still stuck in a 1 bedroom apartment - wont they look at moving?
Wait, my position is utilitarian. And yours is what?
Let’s accept your use of the word “right” here for a moment.
Let’s posit that we’re not talking about a fundamental right that is protected by the U.S. or California constitution.
So, given: a poor person doesn’t have a “right” to live in your neighborhood.
However, by the same token, you don’t have the “right” to force all your adjoining property owners to maintain their properties like you do–single-family detached housing on a minimum X-acre property with Y percentage of the land being reserved for a manicured grass lawn.
Both of you have the “right” to petition the government to support your preferred desires in terms of housing.
So now it comes down to a matter of determining which policy the government should adopt. Neither side has a trump-card “right” in this matter. So how do you determine which is the better policy?
Your policy makes you and a handful of your neighbors marginally richer in the short term, when they could easily sell up and move somewhere else to preserve their enclave of affluence. At the same time, it subjects the entire community to severe long-term costs.
On the other hand, requiring mixed-economy housing in all neighborhoods benefits the entire community.
Re: Prop 13
Does Prop 13 also prevent them from benefiting from real estate price fluctuations? Or do they get to have their cake and eat it too?
I dont know about the Bay area but I know in some areas they have had to build public housing units for government workers. Everyone from teachers to fire fighters, all living in government subsidized housing. Do they do this in SF?
Aspen and Vail Colorado even have to do this for doctors. The resorts provide housing for workers.
Finally as to quality of public schools, I’ve seen areas which have tons of income producing property (ex. resorts, hotels, factories) but actually have few people living in them or even fewer families with children (ex. more retirees). The result - awesome public schools and public services (think - newest fire fighting equipment). Branson Missouri with all those theaters and resorts is like this.
There are voluntary arrangements between property owners that could restrict supply, so the restriction of supply itself is not immoral. What is immoral is the use of coercion to restrict supply. This is not a voluntary arrangement as far as I can tell.
This elides the important distinction between not helping and hurting. Buying a car instead of buying a meal for a starving kid is one thing and going to the kid’s house and taking the food off of his plate is different.
The difference is that it is your money to be done with as you like when you buy the car and it is the kids food to do with as he likes when you take it off his plate.
Likewise, in a free society, there is no obligation for you to house people in your home or build apartments on your property. However, when you use the force of law to prevent other people from using their property to build houses or apartment buildings that is when it crosses over to being morally wrong.
It only arguably benefits the entire community when measured collectively. But how to determine which policy the government should adopt is by vote. At the local level, most cities vote my way. The whole thread is about the conflict between state and city interests. I’d venture further and say it’s even about big city interests vs. small city interests. The issues that places like San Jose and San Mateo face are not the same as the issues that Galt or Placer or Winters have.
Think about the question I posed upthread - would you support efforts of a state to override all local zoning and eliminate single family zones across the entire state?
Prop 13 does a few things:
[ul]
[li]It sets the property tax max at 1% of the home’s assessed value. There are local taxes that can increase that figure. [/li][li]It caps the amount that the assessed value can increase to 3% per year.[/li][li]Real property can only be reassessed when ownership changes, or when there are real property improvements. The reassessment for improvements only applies to the portion that was improved.[/li][/ul]
So to answer this question - unrealized price fluctuations would not impact property tax assessments beyond the 3% cap that is allowable under Prop 13. In general assessed values go up the maximum 3% each year and that has been my experience. During the 2008 downturn, assessed values actually declined on a temporary basis in some areas, but based on how the decline was executed it did not reset the baseline so during those years for those properties, when the market picked back up the assessed value subject to the 3% cap was preserved at the higher amounts.
The city of SF is known for this - starting a family is a catalyst for leaving the city for many folks. It’s expensive for sure, but the public school system lottery in SF is pretty much shit.
How about using the force of law to prevent a land owner from building a pig farm complete with a lovely waste lagoon? Or using the force of law to prevent a land owner from disturbing a bird nest?
In this scenario the pig farmer is hurting you directly by putting a smelly waste lagoon next to you. Since the purpose of laws is to stop people from hurting each other I have no problem with nuisance laws to prevent people from being smelly or loud and depriving their neighbors of the enjoyment of their property. Preventing people from disturbing bird nests is generally a bad idea and does not work.
I won’t say this is morally wrong. Like Bone says, it’s about city vs state vs national interests.
At the state and national levels, we want all 4 million of those people working in San Jose to have a place to live for affordable prices. In fact, if we increase density, you would expect for far more new jobs to be created. This is because of the network effect - software companies feed off each other and apparently proximity (so skilled specialists are a shared resource) is important.
And we know what the next phase is. Ever increasing power of software, replacing billions of human performed jobs with ever more sophisticated AI solutions. (probably the half that are most repetitive though some of these jobs are not blue collar).
You’re going to need a massive development center to do this. From a national level, it makes sense to do what China did and basically create an equivalent to Shenzhen for software.
At the local levels, people own property and they want it to get more valuable. Anything increasing supply decreases the value of their own plot, or so they see it.
In reality this isn’t quite so simple. Hypothetical question : what if SF started allowing mixed use residential/commercial buildings…everywhere. No height limit, 50 stories is fine.
In the short term, people like Bone would say this decreases the value of their own plot because 50+ stories means 50+ apartment/condos fit in the space that 1 house occupied before.
But the resulting economic boom would probably cause even more people to flood to SF. And occupy the new space. And create a demand for even more 50 story buildings.
Imagine if you owned a plot a house is on where they want to build the equivalent of the Sears tower. You could sell it for a lot of money, right? Probably millions, easily.
One quick addendum to my post above: I meant to say state and federal governments want all 4 million people living in San Jose to have a place to live (and work) for efficient prices. This doesn’t mean affordable.
This is a major point of divergence between my view and the views by many liberal activists in California.
Efficient means the cost of the living and work space costs what it actually costs to build and maintain the structure containing that space, plus the cost of infrastructure like roads and utilities, plus the cost of public goods a government has to provide for it to work(schools, healthcare, police, etc), plus a small free market profit. (the profit margin that you get in equilibrium when you have many buyers and many sellers, it tends to be small, about 5-10%)
Without artificial cost inflators. So there should be no unreasonable building codes or other government restrictions, density should increase to the density that the economics demand.
It doesn’t mean the prices would be *cheap *- skyscraper space is about $300 a square foot to build in the USA. People working low end jobs would not be able to afford to live in as big a place as they could afford elsewhere in the U.S. (in the South, houses in the suburbs are commonly sold for under $100 a square foot)
But it would no longer be “San Francisco”. From a libertarian standpoint, you could just keep adding building until it’s such a shitty place that no-one one wants to live there. Then they will move to someplace like Portland and ruin it.
I think if you want to have sunlight all day then you should have to pay for it by buying the adjoining land.
In reality tall residential buildings are not built in residential areas because the lack of transportation means that those types of buildings need to be either put in a walkable area, or in a location that is near a mass transit hub. What would actually get built is smaller apartments buildings with plenty of space around them for parking. The huge apartment buildings would be restricted to areas very close to the urban centers.
Do you want to ask about every scenario or argue from principles. Obviously every choice has tradeoffs. I acknowledge that if you get rid of zoning laws occasionally someone will build a bad building and annoy neighbors. Also some neighborhoods will change. However, in return millions of people will benefit from living closer to work and the country as a whole will benefit from the economic growth.
Will you acknowledge that zoning laws hurt the environment, the young, the poor, and the economy? In exchange for making the life of the richest people on the planet slightly better?
San Francisco has changed a ton over the years. When the Marina Districy was flattened in 1991, did the city stop being San Francisco? When the Transamerica Pyramid was built in the 1970s, did the city stop being San Francisco? When the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges were built, did the city stop being San Francisco?
Would you say that the real Manhattan was the pre-$27 in beads era?
Life is change. San Franciscans need to get over it.