I agree that it’s not something likely to happen. But not building enough housing is a policy choice, not a natural limit of some sort.
Realistically, the big factors in Japan are:
- Begging is not allowed.
- They’re not Christian and, generally, don’t believe in charity.
- The government guarantees jobs (generally in public construction) to anyone who wants it, so long as they’ll show up and be available during the work day.
- (Possibly) Families are still expected to take care of their mentally ill children, rather than foisting them on society.
I know SF is not a big city, but single-family homes?? Grocery desert??? Isn’t the whole point of living in a city the high population density, the 2–3 supermarkets plus some bodegas within a block of your building (plus endless cafes, delis, restaurants, and bars if you can’t be bothered to cook), the public transport to get you downtown, and actually being able to afford to live there.
Sure, there will be some lower-density areas, but not in the city center.
I remember I once talked to a guy who turned out to be from the Oakland urban planning office, and he said that the politicians ignored most of his office’s recommendations.
I clearly said that I recognize left-wing extremism exists and can be a problem. I don’t support or condone it and I’m not waving it away. But I don’t feel a need to do anything about this particular issue; I don’t live in San Francisco and I’ve never even been in California. This isn’t my problem. Let the people of San Francisco deal with it.
I have no problems with politicians facing a reckoning. I’m glad Andrew Cuomo and Brian Benjamin were driven from office. But I’d like to see the same standard applied to the innumerable Republicans who have committed crimes and see them also driven from office.
SF is about 49 square miles with a population of about 850,000. There are streets and streets of single family homes in the western and southern parts of the city. Most of them don’t have a grocery within walking distance; bars and cafes are more plentiful. There is public transportation to get you downtown, but if downtown is not where you want to go, it may take you 90 minutes to get to your destination without driving.
I think the point of living in a city is because that particular city is where you want to live. There are lots of draws to living here – cultural, gastronomic, the views, the weather (getting warmer every year it seems), recreation, the cosmopolitan nature of the place, and so on. It was a dream for me to live here since my late teens (I came when I was 30) based on the existence of an actual gay community. The things you mention are one set of reasons for living in a city. This is not Manhattan though.
Aren’t the owners of these single family homes the urban progressives under discussion here?
Tokyo (and all of Japan really) manages housing better because they have national zoning laws with 12 zones that are less restrictive than what we have in the US. Paris is another example. I believe they have only four zones: nature, parks, urban infrastructure (including airports, treatment plants, etc.), and general urban which covers like 90% of the city. It’s strange how in the US zoning gets extremely restricted in both low-density right-leaning suburbs and high-density left-leaning cities, sometimes for very similar reasons, and sometimes for very different reasons.
Not especially. Homeowners come in all political stripes, but because of the investment required for ordinary people to own their own home (as distinct from absentee investors, who don’t vote here) they tend to become very aware of their house’s market value, and what neighborhood features will raise it or bring it down. Low-income or subsidized housing, and high-density housing, tend to be among the factors that are perceived as bringing those values down. Increased housing density also tends to lower the cost of housing in general, so that million-dollar 1000 sq ft home they bought becomes a less good investment.
Instead of limousine liberals, SF has house-poor former liberals who can’t wait for their next re-fi so they can breathe financially again. This requires a significant rise in the value of the house they bought two years ago. The exceptions are the quick-rich tech crowd, who are young enough to retain their left-leaning views and rich enough not to suffer for them. But relatively few of those want to live in the city.
So if I distill that down, what you’re saying is that once people get assets, primarily in the form of houses, their liberal views are suddenly trumped by their desire to not see their assets devalued?
That makes sense… and is something that at least in the article, the SF city government isn’t really very concerned with, hence the recalls.
Yeah, that’s basically textbook NIMBYism. And it’s understandable! I also paid a bunch for my house and don’t really like the idea of the value of it specifically going down. But that is why I should not be given the power to regulate whether my neighbors can build housing. If we let each individual neighborhood veto building, we get the broken situation we’re in now, where it’s very difficult to build housing anywhere and housing costs keep increasing.
There’s a decent section in the article that discusses exactly this, about the development that was prevented on the old 2-acre farm. Like, I’m sure it’s nice to live next to a small farm in the middle of a city, but we should not let the neighbors of a farm prevent the owners from building housing on it, whether or not their quality of life would change slightly for the worse. It’s then followed by this bit, which I love.
The “progressives” seem to be pretty down on traditional concepts of “progress”. I’d call the mindset described here “conservative”.
There are precedents in the United States of the government applying “eminent domain”, not in the usual sense, but to force properties to get re-developed. (This can obviously be abused for corrupt purposes, too.) So it is at least theoretically possible to do this without succumbing to vetos from the property owner.
I think it’s broader than that - I don’t live in San Francisco but I’ve encountered many people whose views seem to change by who is affected and they aren’t necessarily homeowners. People who think that homeless people should be allowed to live in parks and on the street * - but not in front of their apartment building or the park their kids play in. People who who think more affordable housing is needed - but would absolutely oppose changing the zoning in their neighborhood to allow 20 ft wide lots instead of requiring 40 ft wide lots or allowing even two- family houses rather than only single-family… People who want a whole lot of reforms in the criminal justice system , including shorter prison sentences and more treatment rather than incarceration - but who then protest any suggestion that services might be provided in their neighborhood. ** It’s like they are only “liberal” or “progressive” if someone else is going to pay the price .This obviously doesn’t apply to all liberals/progressives but it certainly applies to some.
* I’m not talking about people who have no choice- my city has a legal obligation to shelter all homeless people , but some prefer to live on the street for various reasons.
** I actually knew an attorney who defended parole violators which means she was essentially trying to keep the violators out of jail. Fine, nothing wrong with that , they are entitled to a defense and they don’t all need to be jailed even if they did violate. And then she was horrified that a parole office was moving and it might move to her neighborhood.
Yep, that’s it exactly. And the absolute worst are the ones who were born here, especially if they grew up here in the 50’s or before, an era which is forever preserved in amber in their hearts as the absolute best era of the city. A city which, they* believe, they have a special right to keep as much like that as possible.
*probably not all of them, just the ones I’ve met.
I don’t think the school board recalls had anything to do with property values – I could be wrong, but the arguments didn’t seem to be going in that direction. It was progressivism vs. the business of getting an education in that case. So that would be the singular recall of the DA.
I agree with the first sentence but am skeptical of the second.
I would assume increased housing density would increase the value of land substantially, since the same amount of land now has the capacity to have much more housing. So I think that - based on that factor alone - the overall value of a single-family home would increase and not decrease if zoning allowed higher-density housing.
The real issue is that high density and low income housing make the neighborhood less desireable, in terms of traffic, parking, crowding of streets and other public areas, and in the case of low income housing, likely an increase in crime and deterioration of the schools as well.
Housing and land are not the same thing. Housing is a market, and price competition is a very real thing. Suppose there were 20% more rental units – average rental prices would drop (leaving aside rent control, which skews the rental market). That makes rental properties less profitable to own, whether low density or high density. At the same time, if renting becomes more affordable, there are fewer families trying to find a single-family house they can buy, therefore less competition driving the prices up, more houses sitting on the market, and therefore prices tending to fall.
Or suppose it is condos being built and there is a 20% increase in condo’s for sale. That too will push down the prices of single family homes for sale – with the same number of buyers having more options to choose from, some percentage are going to choose the less expensive condo option, which means lower demand for single family homes.
Another factor is perception. Most single-family home buyers don’t think much in terms of the value of the land. The advantages of one location over another certainly, but not the percentage of cost represented by the dirt and stones under the house.
This doesn’t have to be the case, if the property is properly managed. Too often city governments dump poor people into cheap properties and walk away. No wonder they disintegrate in the way you describe. The city has to keep their hand in, make sure the properties are kept up and the neighborhood is in good order.
There’s some different factors at play. A plot of * land * may be more valuable if high density housing can be built on it. However, by restricting density, it makes the * home * more valuable due to a lack of supply. So if you’re in a supply-constrained market (and in the US there’s few major cities that aren’t anymore), and you upzone some parcels they will become more valuable as they’re one of the few opportunities to actually build more housing. So a couple big apartment blocks are built, but you still only added 1,000 or so units to a market that needs 50,000. If the market wasn’t so out of whack to begin with, we wouldn’t need to play catch-up, which makes any progress look like nothing’s happening.
Another issue is the way property taxes are levied (mainly on improved value rather than the base land value). That makes it easy to just sit on property and hope for a bigger cash out later. That’s how you can have a ramshackle old house next to a vacant lot next to a 6-story luxury condo. That gets the “neighborhood character” NIMBYs to come out in force to try to stop new development, but if the alternative is just one or two new houses, then there’s no hope of satisfying demand. Liberals in Greenwich Village or the Mission District are just as guilty of this as conservatives in the Hamptons or Walnut Creek.
The implied connection is that the government (including the school board) is pursuing a campaign of esoteric left-think and mostly ignoring the material concerns of their citizenry. The school board wasting hours of meeting time planning to rename a school named after Abraham Lincoln because it’s too connected to a racist past and not being that concerned about opening schools because kids aren’t experiencing “learning loss” from being out of school, just “learning change” and the DA continuing to let repeat car thieves off with no or minimal consequences are of a piece.
Land is a major component of the price of a home. In most cases, it’s the biggest component - certainly in a single-family home in a major city this would be the case. Anything which substantially increases the value of the land would increase the value of the home, even if the value of the improvements decreased.
Most home buyers don’t think in terms of either the land or the improvements. They think in terms of what similar homes in the neighborhood are going for. Whether that’s driven by land or improvements is immaterial to most people. But the underlying factors that drive home prices are impacted. So if some real estate investor outbids several lay people for a home based on the notion that he’ll rent it out meanwhile but 10 years down the road he’ll maybe look to develop it or sell it to someone who will, then that will have the impact of pushing up the price of houses in the neighborhood, which will impact people who aren’t looking at it as strategically.
At best, that’s true in theory. As a practical matter, there’s a high correlation between low income and the issues I mentioned. So local NIMBY people are right to be concerned about the possibility of their neighborhood deteriorating. Whether it’s likely to deteriorate because of insoluble factors or because it’s likely that the property won’t be “properly managed” is not going to change their level of concern.
Those numbers were for the Bay Area, not San Francisco.