San Francisco elected official Hillary Ronen said she’s against building new housing because it would cast a shadow. Instead, they want people to live in tiny little “pods.”
https://x.com/DanielAlmanPGH/status/1857467164891963460
https://twitter.com/DanielAlmanPGH/status/1857467164891963460
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
https://rollingout.com/2024/11/14/san-francisco-sleeping-pod-housing/
San Francisco’s sleeping pod solution to affordable housing crisis
Hundreds apply for scarce rentals at $700 per month
By Amari Apple
November 14, 2024
As the cost of living continues to soar in major cities across the United States, innovative housing solutions are emerging to address the growing crisis of affordability and homelessness. One such solution is the introduction of sleeping pods in San Francisco, a city notorious for its exorbitant rental prices.
The sleeping pod initiative
Brownstone Shared Housing, led by CEO James Stallworth, has recently made headlines by revealing that a staggering 300 individuals have applied for just 17 available sleeping pods in downtown San Francisco. Each pod is priced at $700 per month, a fraction of the average rent in the city, which is reported to be around $4,000.
These sleeping pods are designed to provide a low-cost housing option in one of the most expensive urban areas in the country. Measuring approximately 3.5 feet by 4 feet by 6.5 feet, the pods are large enough to accommodate a twin mattress. Each pod is equipped with privacy curtains, interior lighting and charging ports, making them a practical choice for those in need of affordable shelter.
Addressing the housing crisis
The concept of sleeping pods first gained traction last year, and despite facing coding hurdles in 2024, Brownstone Shared Housing remains committed to serving the community. This initiative highlights the urgent need for creative solutions to combat homelessness and provide affordable living spaces in urban environments.
With the rising number of applicants for these sleeping pods, it raises an important question: Should more cities adopt similar innovations to tackle the homelessness crisis? As urban areas continue to grapple with the challenges of high rent and limited housing options, the sleeping pod model could serve as a blueprint for other cities facing similar issues.
Potential benefits of sleeping pods
Affordability: At $700 per month, sleeping pods offer a significantly lower cost of living compared to traditional housing options in San Francisco.
Space efficiency: The compact design of sleeping pods maximizes the use of limited urban space, allowing more individuals to find shelter.
Community building: Shared living spaces can foster a sense of community among residents, providing social support and reducing feelings of isolation.
Privacy and comfort: Despite their small size, the inclusion of privacy curtains and personal lighting enhances the living experience for residents.
Challenges and considerations
While the sleeping pod initiative presents a promising solution, it is not without its challenges. Concerns about zoning regulations, health and safety standards and the overall acceptance of such living arrangements in urban neighborhoods must be addressed. Additionally, the psychological impact of living in a confined space should not be overlooked, as it may affect residents’ well-being.
Moreover, the sustainability of such initiatives relies heavily on community support and government policies that prioritize affordable housing solutions. As cities explore innovative ways to combat homelessness, collaboration between private organizations, local governments and community members will be crucial.
The introduction of sleeping pods in San Francisco is a bold step towards addressing the housing crisis that many urban areas face today. As more individuals seek affordable living options, initiatives like these could pave the way for a new era of housing solutions that prioritize accessibility and community.
As we continue to navigate the complexities of urban living, it is essential to remain open to new ideas and solutions that can provide relief to those struggling with housing insecurity. The sleeping pod model may just be the beginning of a transformative shift in how we think about affordable housing.
CNN understands that prices are based on supply and demand: “An influx of new residents drove up housing costs in the Tampa Bay region, leaving it with one of the highest annual inflation rates in the country last year. Now, the Tampa metro has one of the lowest rates, mostly thanks to beefed-up housing supply.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/housing-affordability-america-finally-improving-133523145.html
Housing affordability in America is finally improving. Not so much in these cities
By Bryan Mena, CNN
August 27, 2024
With the Federal Reserve all but confirmed to cut interest rates next month, there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel for Americans grappling with the most unaffordable housing market in decades. But the old saying that “real estate is local” still rings painfully true.
In June, home-price growth accelerated the most in New York, San Diego and Las Vegas, according to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-City Home Price Index released Tuesday. For several months, San Diego led with the fastest increase in home prices, eventually getting toppled by New York in May — a corner of the country already notorious for its high cost of living.
And it’s not just home buyers feeling the sting: A recent report from Moody’s Analytics showed that the situation is dire for renters, too. New York City, Miami and Fort Lauderdale in Florida, Los Angeles and Northern New Jersey were the five most rent-burdened places in America during the second quarter, the report found, based on rent prices and family incomes (or the rent-to-income ratio.) Renters in those cities allocate more than 30% of their income toward rent, Moody’s said.
That’s in contrast to regions seeing declining shelter costs, such as Tampa, Florida; Denver and Minneapolis, according to Consumer Price Index data. A pickup in home construction has been key for those metropolitan areas because it can ease upward pressure on prices. An influx of new residents drove up housing costs in the Tampa Bay region, leaving it with one of the highest annual inflation rates in the country last year. Now, the Tampa metro has one of the lowest rates, mostly thanks to beefed-up housing supply.
Nationwide, the housing market has finally shown signs of improvement. Year-over-year home-price growth has slowed over the past several months, as measured by the national Case-Shiller index, rising 5.4% in June from a year earlier, down from 5.9% in May, though the index itself reached a fresh record high that month. The average 30-year mortgage rate is currently at its lowest level since May 2023, housing inventory has expanded every month this year so far, and household incomes have continued to grow at a brisk pace, which is factored in to housing affordability,
Good luck living comfortably in New York
Affordability is being stymied for different reasons across different places, but the one region currently taking the crown as America’s most unaffordable housing market seems to be New York.
The Big Apple is the most rent burdened place in the US by far, according to the Moody’s report, where renters dedicated about 58% of their income toward rent during the second quarter. Nationally, that figure stood at about 27% in the April-through-June period. The New York-Newark-Jersey City metro had one of the nation’s highest annual inflation rates in July, with the month-over-month increase “primarily driven by higher prices for shelter,” the Labor Department’s Regional Commissioner William J. Sibley said in a release.
“It’s heartbreaking when I look at the data for New York,” said Lu Chen, senior economist at Moody’s who was the lead author of the group’s report. “There is just no way that many families, depending on the household structure, can afford to live in any unit without sharing.”
The median rent in Manhattan, home to Times Square and New York’s iconic skyscrapers, was $4,300 in July, according to a report from brokerage firm Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants. In Brooklyn, the median rent in July was $3,600; and in northwest Queens, it was $3,450 that month, the report said. The median national rent for all bedrooms and property types is $2,106, according to Zillow.
Home-price growth in New York was the nation’s fastest, rising 9% in June from a year earlier, according to Case-Shiller data.
Miami’s unaffordability problem persists
Regions that have seen strong population growth in recent years, particularly many cities in the Sun Belt, have seen housing costs climb. From Miami to Atlanta and Phoenix, an influx of new residents in many American cities — either because folks were seeking warmer weather or a lower cost of living — has driven up demand, including for housing. Initially, that resulted in some growing pains: The shelter indexes for the Miami, Atlanta, Phoenix and Tampa metros areas each reached a record high in 2022, CPI data shows.
But nearly all of those metros have now reversed course: Inflation in Atlanta, Tampa and Phoenix has plummeted over the past year, thanks to slowing housing costs. The one exception is Miami, standing in contrast to its counterpart across the state.
“Tampa is a fast-growing area and there’s significant building going on because we have a lot of available land in surrounding areas like Hillsborough County and Pasco County,” Brian Adcock, chair of the Tampa Bay Chamber, told CNN previously. “There are a lot more neighborhoods now and that’s the key difference with Miami.”
Miami was the second-most rent-burdened place in America, Moody’s reported, with renters dishing out about 37% of their income for rent. The CPI shelter index for the metropolitan area registered at a 5.8% annual rate in June, according to the latest data, compared to the 5.1% rate seen nationally in July.
The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives
The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives
In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall.
By Derek Thompson
August 5, 2024
Children—and the millions of private decisions to have or not have them—are in the news these days, for regrettable reasons. Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has made a habit of excoriating progressives who don’t have a record of procreation. In November 2020, he implied that childless Democratic leaders are “sociopathic.” In an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2021, he lamented that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” Later that year, in an address in Southern California, he said he wanted “to take aim at the left, specifically the childless left … because I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country.”
Vance’s commentary is rude and revisionist. Childless adults aren’t psychotic, and many childless people are desperate to bear children. Suggesting that their unsuccessful reproductive efforts amount to sociopathy is cruel. More substantively, in 2022, it was progressive Democratic leaders—that witchy coven of child-loathing felinophiles—who pushed for an extension to the refundable child tax credit, while Republicans overwhelmingly rejected a deal that would have sent tens of billions of dollars to parents.
But, at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.
First, the facts. In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall, according to a new analysis of Census data by Connor O’Brien, a policy analyst at the think tank Economic Innovation Group. From 2020 to 2023, the number of these young kids declined by nearly 20 percent in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. They also fell by double-digit percentage points in the counties making up most or all of Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
This exodus is not merely the result of past COVID waves. Yes, the pace of the urban exodus was fastest during the high-pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. But even at the slower rate of out-migration since then, several counties—including those encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are on pace to lose 50 percent of their under-5 population in 20 years. (To be clear, demographics have complex feedback loops and counter-feedback loops; the toddler population of these places won’t necessarily halve by the 2040s.)
Nor is the exodus merely the result of declining nationwide birth rates. Yes, women across the country are having fewer children than they used to. The share of women under 40 who have never given birth doubled from the early 1980s to the 2020s. But the under-5 population is still declining twice as fast in large urban counties as it is elsewhere, according to O’Brien’s census analysis.
So what’s the matter with Manhattan (and L.A. and Chicago)?
After the Great Recession, during a period of low urban crime, young college-educated people flocked to downtown areas to advance their career. Retail upscaled, and housing costs increased. Soon, families started to leave. In 2019, the economist Jed Kolko showed that in cities including San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., young, high-income, college-educated whites were moving in, and multiracial families with children were moving out. The coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in school closures and loosened the tether between home and office, pushed even more families to flee.
“I’m deeply worried about a family-exodus doom loop,” O’Brien told me. “When the population of young kids in a city falls 10 or 20 percent in just a few years, that’s a potential political earthquake. Almost overnight, there are fewer parents around to fight for better schools, local playgrounds, or all the other mundane amenities families care about.”
Behavior is contagious, as the Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis has shown. If you have a friend who smokes or exercises, it significantly increases the odds that you will do the same. The same principle might hold for having or not having kids. As young children become scarce in big cities, people in their 20s and 30s who are thinking about having children will have fewer opportunities to see firsthand how fulfilling parenthood can be. What they’re left with instead are media representations, which tend to be inflected by the negativity bias of the news.
At a glance, these trends may not seem like they have anything to do with contemporary progressivism. But they do. America’s richest cities are profoundly left-leaning, and many of them—including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are themselves ensconced in left-leaning states. These places ought to be advertisements for what the modern progressive movement can achieve without meddlesome conservatism getting in the way, at the local or state level. If progressives want to sell their cause to the masses, they should be able to say: Elect us, and we’ll make America more like Oakland. Or Brooklyn. Or suburban Detroit. If they can’t make that argument, that’s a problem.
Right now it’s hard to make the argument, because urban progressivism is afflicted by an inability to build. Cities in red states are building much more housing than those in blue states. In 2024, Austin, Raleigh, and Phoenix are expected to expand their apartment inventory more than five times faster than San Diego, Baltimore, or San Francisco. Housing policy is the quantum field of urban life, extending across every sector and making contact with every problem. When cities fail on housing policy, the failure ripples.
Housing has for several years been the most common reason for moving, and housing in America’s biggest and richest blue cities is consistently the least affordable. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, among the cities with the highest median price-to-income ratios in 2023, nine of the top 10 were in California or Hawaii. The five cities with the most cost-burdened renters and owners were Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, Honolulu, and Oxnard, followed by Riverside, Bakersfield, the New York metro area, and Fresno.
One hidden effect of expensive housing is that it raises the cost of local services and creates shortages of workers willing to accept low wages in labor-intensive industries, such as child care. As a result, large urban areas have more expensive child care, even relative to their higher levels of income. A 2023 analysis by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Women’s Bureau found that infant child care devoured the highest share of family income in large urban counties. Nationwide, the average family with at least one child under the age of 5 devotes about 13 percent of family income to pay for child care. But the typical infant day-care center in San Francisco and Chicago consumes about 20 percent of a local family’s income. In Boston, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, it’s more like 30 percent. Child care is just another example of how constrained housing supply can poison parts of the economy that don’t immediately seem to have anything to do with it.
To be fair, one might argue that federal policy nudges families toward the suburbs. Federal spending on highways lubricates suburban transportation while urban transit sputters, and the mortgage interest deduction reduces the tax hit from homeownership. But a national trend toward the burbs doesn’t explain why cities in red states have managed to build houses, or better restrain child-care inflation, better than those in blue states.
Conservatives like J. D Vance think they’re getting mileage out of judging the private-life decisions of urban progressive men and women. But these decisions exist … well, in the context of all in which we live. They are shaped by place and by policy. The steady march of the childless city is not merely the inevitable result of declining birth rates. It’s the result of urban policy, conceived by, written by, and enacted by liberals. Progressive leaders aren’t family-hating sociopaths, but they currently preside over counties that young families are leaving. They should pride themselves instead on building places where those same families would want to stay.
Los Angeles recently gave developers an incentive to limit new apartment buildings to no more than 15 units
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
April 13, 2024
The Los Angeles Times recently reported:
Though it’s known as the “mansion tax,” except for rare exceptions it applies to all properties sold for more than $5 million, no matter if they are gas stations, strip malls, apartment buildings or actual mansions. Under the measure, a seller is charged 4% of the sales price for properties sold above $5 million and below $10 million.
At $10 million and above, the tax is 5.5%.
Apartment developers and real estate brokers said additional costs from ULA make it even harder to earn a reasonable profit in what can be a risky business.
That’s because when building apartments, developers often sell their finished product, which would probably trigger the ULA tax for any building over 15 units, according to Greg Harris, a real estate broker with Marcus and Millichap. Even developers who hold onto their properties typically need to take out a mortgage on the finished building — and Harris said lenders are willing to give less because they too would need to pay the tax if they foreclose and sell the property.
Los Angeles recently gave developers an incentive to limit new apartment buildings to no more than 15 units.
Given that the city already has a severe shortage of housing, I think this new policy is a bad idea.
To me, this is what it means to be a libertarian
https://twitter.com/DanielAlmanPGH/status/1740615275182264577
In Los Angeles, a 49-unit apartment complex is taking 17 years to complete, the result of complex laws that exacerbated California’s affordable housing crisis
https://www.yahoo.com/news/los-angeles-49-unit-apartment-014226893.html
In Los Angeles, a 49-unit apartment complex is taking 17 years to complete, the result of complex laws that exacerbated California’s affordable housing crisis
By John L. Dorman
December 17, 2023
For decades, California has struggled with a persistent affordable housing shortage.
A WSJ report detailed how one LA housing project was unable to get off the ground for over 15 years.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has made it a priority to obtain project approvals in a timely manner.
Los Angeles has long attracted new residents with its warm weather, abundant outdoor amenities, and the lure of opportunities in the media and entertainment industry.
But the state of California has also become widely known for its severe housing crunch, with affordability being the leading issue that has driven many natives and longtime residents to inland communities and lower-cost states.
According to The Wall Street Journal, California’s complex regulations have played a major role in delaying the construction of a 49-unit apartment complex known as Lorena Plaza in the Boyle Heights neighborhood east of downtown Los Angeles.
In 2007, A Community of Friends, a local nonprofit organization, was given land to build a small affordable housing development, but construction on the project only began roughly a year ago.
The project was slowed down by the need for various approvals from politicians and commissions and higher construction costs caused by multiple delays, the Journal reported.
The city wants to build 450,000 new units of housing by 2029, according to The Los Angeles Times.
But the absence of housing remains a significant obstacle for many Angelenos right now. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, in their 2023 report, estimated that roughly 46,000 people in the city are experiencing homelessness on any given right.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, a former congresswoman who this month completed her first year in City Hall, said last December that the glacial pace of progress regarding Lorena Plaza was emblematic of policies she sought to reshape as mayor.
“How on earth could we expect to house 40,000 [homeless] people if we continue to do business as usual?” the mayor said at the Lorena Plaza site at the time, per The Journal.
Bass has prioritized projects that only contain affordable units, but there’s still a need for more subsidies to build additional buildings, per The Journal. And there’s also the issue of some cities in California carefully scrutinizing projects to such a degree that long construction delays are inevitable if the projects even get off the ground.
According to a UCLA and CSU-Northridge analysis of building permits from 2010 to 2022, constructing an apartment building in California took an average of four years during that period.
According to the analysis, 36% of the projects awarded permits in the state during that timeframe have yet to be finished.
“Thinking about building in a city like Los Angeles and dealing with the politics, navigating the bureaucracy, it’s the last place I want to be,” Pacific Companies CEO Caleb Roope told The Journal.
A 1970s-era state law permitting an appeals process for environmental reviews further halted construction at the Lorena Plaza project before it was revived.
However, Bass has pushed for major changes in Los Angeles that would seriously limit the sort of delays that previously plagued the Lorena Plaza project, per The Journal.
And Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a slew of laws in October to help ease the state’s housing crisis, according to Business Insider.
Environmental appeals can no longer drag on for a year or more, and hearings must be conducted within a 75-day timeframe. And the zoning approvals for affordable housing projects are occurring more swiftly, sometimes within a few months, as part of an executive order signed by Bass.
Strained housing affordability is a ‘manufactured crisis’ created by bad zoning—just look at L.A.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/strained-housing-affordability-manufactured-crisis-170452391.html
Strained housing affordability is a ‘manufactured crisis’ created by bad zoning—just look at L.A.
By Alena Botros
August 13, 2023
There’s a project in Sherman Oaks, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, that started in 2004. After two decades of lawsuits, they just broke ground, Artem Tepler, an L.A.-based real estate developer, told Fortune, because “it is so hard to do a big project in L.A.”
The city’s supply, or lack thereof, is pushing local house prices up. New construction is heavily restricted, but people still want to live in Los Angeles, it’s as simple as that. So with an average home value of $901,291, and a median household income of $69,778, it’s a “drive until you qualify market,” as Tepler put it, who’s also the cofounder and managing partner of Schon Tepler.
“You almost have to be a statistical anomaly to own a house anywhere in prime Los Angeles,” Tepler said. “You have to kind of drive far away and buy a home for like $600,000 to $700,000. There’s no starter homes under $700,000 and $800,000.”
In New Jersey, where Tepler is from, he says $700,000 buys you a 4,000 square-foot home that’s basically a mansion. It’s not a far-fetched statement, as the average home value in New Jersey is $451,559, although there are areas like Ridgewood, where that number is much higher. In Tepler’s view, L.A.’s housing problem comes down to an inability to build. That’s largely because of zoning, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and the state’s 10-year liability defect on new construction, Tepler said.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles was downzoned, as measures passed that cut floor-to-area ratios, limiting development, particularly for multifamily housing. As for the California Environmental Quality Act, some suggest it’s being used to block housing. Earlier this year, the University of California Berkeley’s plan to build student housing was blocked by a state appellate court. The court cited the state’s Environmental Quality Act and ruled that students could potentially have an environmental impact. The ruling garnered a response from none other than California Governor Gavin Newsom, who said: “Our CEQA process is clearly broken when a few wealthy Berkeley homeowners can block desperately needed student housing…California cannot afford to be held hostage by NIMBYs.” Additionally, California’s construction defect law allows homeowners to file a claim against builders, if their building standards are violated, for up to 10 years (although there are some caveats.)
“That’s the reason why we don’t go bigger here…we don’t want to get caught up in lawsuits,” Tepler said—and it’s crippling the city’s supply and pushing home prices, which are already detached from local incomes, further up.
So the further you drive from, let’s say, Downtown Los Angeles, the cheaper housing gets. That can mean driving all the way to Riverside County (where the average home value is $568,515), until housing gets cheaper and more affordable, and commuting to work, Tepler said. That’s why he says you’ve got to be a statistical anomaly, in terms of how much money you make, to afford to buy a home in parts of Los Angeles, like Studio City that’s average home value is $1,490,859—or have family money. If it’s not a successful business owner or an executive at a big company, the buyer has family money for the down payment, Tepler said.
“Average people can’t live in the city,” Tepler said. “And it’s not an issue that developers can’t provide the housing because if the developers were let loose they would build bigger condos, two and three bedroom condos, go higher up, build six, seven story buildings. But L.A. has been downzoned to the point where there was an anti-growth sentiment.”
Look no further than Stan Oklobdzija and his partner, Sarah Boyd, a couple making around $225,000 annually that said the thought of ever owning a home in Los Angeles is “hilarious.” As a professor of public policy, whose research tends to focus on housing policy, Oklobdzija’s reasoning wasn’t far-off from Tepler’s. Oklobdzija previously told Fortune it’s the “refusal to build” that’s creating a housing crisis, one by choice, and he and his partner have left Los Angeles.
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” Tepler said. “It’s just this artificially created problem because we’ve been too downzoned. You need to upzone and make everything by-right, [and] reform CEQA…And then let developers build.”
When Tepler says by-right, he’s referring to a zoning code, which is considered to be “by-right” if the approval process is streamlined to comply with zoning requirements, without undergoing a discretionary review process. Tepler also mentioned measure ULA, dubbed the “mansion tax,” which he said “is going to destroy new supply,” if it doesn’t get repealed. As Fortune’s previously reported, L.A.’s high-end realtors and brokers were almost apocalyptic when referring to the tax and its implications on the city’s real estate market. Clearly, Tepler shared the same sentiment.
“Every major developer, institutional developer is basically shelving their projects…They don’t want to touch L.A. now,” Tepler said, adding later that despite it being well-meaning, the measure will make the city’s housing crisis worse because almost no one wants to build.
It’s the restrictions on zoning, on permitting, on development and construction of new housing that’s created a “manufactured crisis,” Tepler said, adding that he says the housing crisis is manufactured because it’s just policy, in his view.
“We’ve run out of land. When you run out of land, the way to solve it is to go vertical, to go up,” Tepler said. “You don’t have to make this into Manhattan, but you should make it into six, seven story buildings… but L.A. is still zoned for a lot of single family homes. It needs to get upzoned for the population.”
It so happens that a lot of voters are homeowners, so politicians that want those votes are less inclined to upzone and allow for greater density housing, Tepler suggested. Cue NIMBY-ism, which economics writer Noah Smith, previously argued worsens already restricted developing and permitting rules in the country.
“Everyone wants it, they just don’t want it in their own backyard,” Tepler said. “So everyone wants housing for the homeless, they just don’t want it near them. Everyone wants more apartments, they just don’t want it near them. And no politician wants to upset their constituency.”
S.F. supervisors shelved townhome project because of shadows. What does it mean for the city’s housing shortage?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/housing-supervisors-nob-hill-18177181.php
S.F. supervisors shelved townhome project because of shadows. What does it mean for the city’s housing shortage?
By Danielle Echeverria
June 30, 2023
A decision by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week to delay a 10-townhome project in Nob Hill, in part from concerns over how shadows would affect a neighboring park, raised fresh doubts among housing advocates and political leaders that the city can break old habits and meet an ambitious, state-mandated goal to build housing.
The move “raises serious doubts about the viability of SF’s housing element,” state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote on Twitter, referring to the state’s requirement that San Francisco build 82,000 new units during the next eight years.
Mayor London Breed said Thursday that the supervisors halted the project at 1151 Washington St. for “complicated, kind of unsubstantiated reasons,” undercutting the city’s stated commitment to building much more housing.
“We say we support it, but our actions show something completely different,” she said on the steps of City Hall. “We have to get out of our own way.”
The California Department of Housing and Community Development said in a statement Thursday that it was aware of the supervisors’ vote and is taking it into consideration in its investigation of housing issues in San Francisco.
Though a tiny project by San Francisco standards — the 10 townhomes would replace one single-family home — the supervisors’ move to delay it for months or possibly years reminded many of the board’s well-known rejection of a proposed 495-unit tower on a Nordstrom valet parking lot in the Mid-Market neighborhood in 2021. That case became exhibit A in arguments for reform of San Francisco’s housing-approval process.
But the Washington Street project’s opponents, including the next-door neighbor who brought the appeal forward and the community groups that joined it, said that’s not a fair comparison, and that there were specific reasons the development needs environmental review.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose district includes the development and the park, as well as Chinatown community members, said the situation is unique, especially in a neighborhood that is so densely populated with many people living in cramped, single-room occupancy homes, where many people rely on the park to get fresh air and sunlight.
“Chinatown is the city’s densest area with very little open-space opportunities, and the Chinatown community, pursuant to the law, raised a number of questions that the board of supervisors found to be compelling enough to ask for additional analysis,” Peskin said.
Malcom Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, a group that opposed the project, said it is reasonable to require the developers to examine alternatives that don’t block sunlight on a public space. That’s especially true in Chinatown, where high rises are common, he said.
“To characterize this fight as anything other than a fight for equity and to characterize this fight as ‘blocking housing’ erases the critical issues faced by Chinatown and low income places like Chinatown,” he said in a statement. “Given the dependence of all San Franciscans on open space for their health and wellness, all developments should be required to implement designs that avoid blocking essential sunlight to our city’s urban parks.”
Peskin echoed that concern. “I think the city and its leaders have a particular obligation to Chinatown, a community that historically has been ignored by generations of City Hall leaders,” he said. “I’m pleased that the Board of Supervisors listened to them.”
Shadows have historically been one successful type of objection used in San Francisco to block housing that otherwise has no issues to prevent building, according to Annie Fryman, director of special projects for urban planning think tank SPUR.
“At the point people are fighting about shadows, they’re really grasping at straws to stop a project,” she said.
It isn’t the first time San Francisco has stopped housing projects because they would cast shadows on parks — in 2016, shadows over Chinatown parks created a challenge for the still unfinished 50 First St.; in 2018, the Board of Supervisors required more review on a Mission housing project that would cast shadows on an adjacent school’s playgrounds, during hours that the playground was closed; and in 2019, the board rejected a 63-unit housing project in South of Market that would cast an evening shadow on a park.
Each project had similar concerns about disadvantaged communities being disproportionately affected by shadows cast by the buildings and residents who would not be able to move elsewhere.
While state law does not require cities to analyze shadows as an environmental impact, San Francisco has its own law intended specifically to protect public parks from shadows. A 1984 ballot measure, Proposition K, blocks construction of any building more than 40 feet that casts an adverse shadow on Recreation and Park Department property unless the Planning Commission decides the shadow is insignificant.
But the Washington Street project, the Planning Commission argued, is not subject to that law because it is not above the 40-foot height limit. Opponents to the project argued that it is unique because it’s uphill from the recreation center, which makes its shadow more prominent, though the city’s planning staff countered that urban parks downhill from buildings are not unusual in San Francisco.
Fryman said that, while she empathizes with the Chinatown community’s resistance to changes to their beloved recreation center, shade in parks isn’t inherently bad, and that in a warming climate, it’s appropriate to have shaded areas in parks where people can cool off.
“We don’t see anyone ever complain about shade cast from trees. We don’t ever hear people complain about shade cast from other types of things,” she said. “We selectively care about shadows when it is a tool that can be used to stop or delay housing or water down housing.”
Public commenters at the meeting said that a shadow shouldn’t be a good enough reason to block new homes, especially in an urban environment.
“Housing for all means housing for all, even if there’s a little bit of a shadow,” said Kent Mirkhani, a YIMBY Action member who spoke at the meeting. “And that really sucks, but we have to pretend we live in a city and sometimes there’s a little bit of a shadow.”
The owners of the building previously sought to expand their home by building out the back — an effort that was turned down by the Planning Department in 2021 because it did not maximize the amount of housing possible on the lot. Neighbors also complained about obstructed views and shadows for that project.
Fryman said the move was an example of how illogical San Francisco housing decisions can be. The city first rejected it because it was not dense enough, then because a more dense proposal would cast shadows.
But Peskin said he thinks the developer can work with the community to design the housing such that it doesn’t block the sunlight — a solution, he said, that has helped resolve issues of shadows on parks, including in Chinatown, in the past.
“This can be done in a way that doesn’t adversely affect a precious community resource that adds to the quality of the neighborhood’s life,” he said.
The same day Peskin voted to block the townhouses, he and Breed proposed legislation that would reduce the amount of affordable units builders need to include and cut the fees they have to pay to try to speed up the city’s stalled housing development market.
Also on Tuesday, the board let through a proposal to build a similarly unpopular apartment building at 3832 18th Street. Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district the project is in, said the city would likely lose in court if it blocked the project because previous challenges using environmental law had already been resolved. Thus, he said, the state would have more power to overrule the city’s decision if it blocked the development.
Peskin said the seemingly contradictory decisions are examples of how complex development issues are.
“We can encourage the development of more residential housing in San Francisco and take care of precious resources,” he said. “These are not mutually exclusive concepts, but they require care and consideration and listening to our constituents, and particularly constituents who have an outsize reason to be listened to.”
The writer of this article seems to be implying that black people and white people should not live in the same neighborhood
https://www.yahoo.com/news/historically-black-neighborhood-watches-itself-171204871.html
Historically Black neighborhood watches itself disappear
May 2, 2023
Dallas historian Donald Payton says gentrification like that in Gilbert-Emory is common nationwide. It’s a story, he said, about the fight to endure and protect in the face of development in traditionally Black communities.
A historically Black neighborhood in Dallas is watching itself vanish as gentrification continues to sweep in.
Gloria Johnson’s residence is in West Dallas’ Gilbert-Emory neighborhood, one of the city’s most sought-after areas. According to The Dallas Morning News, the community received its name for Cecil and Helen Emory and Nathan and Margaret Gilbert, two Black families who ran grocery stores that provided food for the locals during a time when segregation prevented them from doing their shopping in white districts.
Many old homes in the formerly redlined area have already been destroyed by the swift gentrification sweeping through Dallas. Johnson believes developers have taken the historically Black neighborhood’s identity.
“We actually feel like the place that time has forgotten,” said Johnson, who believes developers are trying to force her out of the neighborhood, the Morning News reported. “Not important. Not significant. They don’t care.”
While many of Johnson’s childhood friends no longer reside in the area, she wishes to remain on the land her father worked two jobs to acquire.
According to census block data, roughly half of the neighborhood’s population was Black in 1990. Black people now make up only one-fifth of its populace.
Dallas historian Donald Payton noted that the issue Gilbert-Emory residents face is common nationwide. The story, he said, is about the fight to endure and protect in the face of costly development that puts housing in traditionally Black communities in danger.
According to research, Black homeownership rates in Dallas are significantly lower than white ones. Payton says the effect is a loss of Black culture, generational wealth and community.
“When you say gentrification, that’s a new word,” Payton contended, the Morning News reported. “At one time it was called ‘urban renewal,’ then it was called ‘urban redevelopment,’ and then it all boils down to relocation.”
Greater Mount Pilgrim Church is the largest church in Gilbert-Emory. While most congregants have moved to other neighborhoods, Pastor Ned Armstrong asserted that the church is here to stay.
Armstrong said Greater Mount Pilgrim had had a few new visitors after contacting neighbors and passing out fliers containing church information. However, he also noted that a few weeks ago, one of the church’s neighbors complained about noise, which was upsetting. For parishioners who sit outside, speakers are positioned on the structure and project the sermons and musical selections into the parking lot.
Armstrong said the church attempted to purchase the property across the street, where the Frederick Douglass School stood years ago. The school — which produced its own set of teachers and even a school principal — was so significant that many longtime neighbors still use the abolitionist’s name when talking about the neighborhood.
Some residents in the neighborhood wanted to see the land developed into a city park after the school closed in 1980. Armstrong yearned for a neighborhood center. However, Dallas Independent School District sold the land to a private developer for $1.7 million six years ago.
A street sign pointing to a housing development is the only clue that a school once stood there. The site of one of the first Black schools in Texas is now home to 27 gray townhomes with asking prices over $500,000.
“They came in, and we can’t compete with those guys. They have millions of dollars,” Armstrong said, the Morning News reported. “Next thing we know, it was sold. Boom. No notice. Man, really. That was pretty cruel.”
Check out this hypocrisy from Yahoo News! March 19, 2023: “A Landlord Got a Low Appraisal. He Is Black, and So Are His Tenants.” Yahoo News March 20, 2023: “‘We don’t deserve to be priced out’: Law aims to end gentrification in Black neighborhoods”
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
March 20, 2023
On March 19, 2023, Yahoo News published this article, which is called, “A Landlord Got a Low Appraisal. He Is Black, and So Are His Tenants.”
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/landlord-got-low-appraisal-black-143506573.html
Then on the very next day, March 20, 2023, Yahoo News published this other article, which called, “‘We don’t deserve to be priced out’: Law aims to end gentrification in Black neighborhoods”
Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/dont-deserve-priced-law-aims-090417689.html
So, at the same time, racism is causing the price of housing in black neighborhoods to be both too low, and too high.
The people who see racism everywhere will never be happy with the price of housing in black neighborhoods.
If the price is too low, that’s racism.
But if the price is too high, that’s racism too.
For the people who see racism everywhere, there is no price for housing that is not racist.
No matter what the price is, it is always racist.
This is what happens when you see racism everywhere.
Now I’m going to give my own opinion about the price of housing.
If you’re the buyer, then low prices are a good thing. But if you’re the seller, then low prices are a bad thing.
Likewise, if you’re the seller, then high prices are a good thing. But if you’re the buyer, then high prices are a bad thing.
And the best thing about this is that it applies to all races.
Buyers of every race want the price to be low.
And sellers of every race want the price to be high.
See how that works out? It’s got nothing to do with race. Instead, it’s all about whether a person is the buyer or the seller.
The great thing about my way of seeing this is that it is consistent for every person, every race, every house, every neighborhood, and every price. No matter what the combination of race and price is, my way of viewing this is 100% consistent.
Woman Was Asked “How is it like Being Homeless In Portland?”
Mice update
My previous post on this is here.
The tenant in the apartment next to mine was just evicted for hoarding. The company that cleaned it up filled up a giant dumpster all the way up to the top. I think the dumpster was about as big as the living rooms in our building. Anyway, I’ve caught 85 mice in my apartment. Now that she’s gone, I’m hoping that it stops. I did use 7 cans of Pestblock very recently, and that seems to be helping too. Real life mice are nothing like in the cartoons. Real life mice like to eat books – or at least chew and shred them to make nesting material. I feel sorry for my ex-neighbor for having a mental illness. But I also believe that people have free will, and that there’s no excuse for what she did to me and other people who live in this building.
Kingston, New York, orders landlords to reduce rent by 15%
The city of Kingston, New York, is ordering landlords to reduce their rent by 15%.
Pretty much every economist, even the ones on the left, agree that, in the long run, rent control reduces both the quantity and the quality of rental housing.
Rent control is great for people who already have a rent controlled apartment.
But it’s horrible for people who are looking for an apartment.
The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a housing expert, said that “rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing.”
That being said, as a person who does not live in Kingston, I think this is a great experiment to see what the results will be. Will the results here be the same as in other cities that had rent control? Or will they be different? Contrary to popular belief, it was not actually Einstein who first said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
Sources:
https://reason.com/2022/11/16/landlords-sue-over-city-mandated-15-percent-rent-cut/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_States
https://www.businessinsider.com/misattributed-quotes-2013-10
Mice in my apartment
The tenant who lives in the apartment next to mine is in the process of being evicted for hoarding her trash. In the meantime, I have caught 73 mice in my apartment. I keep all my food locked up tight so they can’t get it. I’m not the one who’s feeding them. It’s my neighbor who’s doing that. Even if it is a mental illness, I still believe that hoarders have free will, and they know that the wild mice they are breeding are hurting every tenant in the building. The stuff they show on the Hoarders TV show? That stuff is real. The show is not staged. I hope my neighbor gets put in a medical facility where she can get the help that she needs. I’ve thrown out a lot of my stuff that got damaged. Mice chew on everything. And they pee and poop everywhere. I’m really angry at my neighbor. But I also feel bad for her.
Town After Town, Residents Are Fighting Affordable Housing in Connecticut
Town After Town, Residents Are Fighting Affordable Housing in Connecticut
By Lisa Prevost
September 6, 2022
In the town of Fairfield, Connecticut, nearly 2,400 residents have signed a petition opposing a project proposed for downtown that could bring 19 units of affordable housing.
In nearby New Canaan, homeowners have raised about $84,000 for a legal fund to fight a proposed apartment complex downtown on Weed Street that would include 31 rent-restricted units for households with moderate incomes.
And in Greenwich, a developer recently withdrew an application to build a project that would include 58 apartments priced below market rate, after residents living in nearby luxury condominiums objected
Throughout Fairfield County, Connecticut, local residents and elected officials are seeking to block large housing projects that include units affordable to low- and moderate-income households
The restrictive zoning “disparately harms Black and Latino households, and deepens economic and racial segregation in the area,” said Erin Boggs
That sort of suburban antipathy to density has contributed to a severe housing shortage in Connecticut, especially at the low- to moderate-income range
But many people who work in the towns cannot afford to live in them, said Karp, the developer.
“I already have a list of 20-plus people who work in town who would love to live here in a building that they could afford,” he said. “My view is, people who work in town deserve to be able to live in town.”
Affordability is a major deterrent to the many teachers in Greenwich who would like to live in town, said Aaron Hull, a longtime educator in town. Hull, who lives in Norwalk, said he and his wife had periodically contemplated moving their family to Greenwich, which he views as a “phenomenal community,” but couldn’t find anything within their price range.
His daily commute on Interstate 95, while only 14 miles, “can take anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes,” he said. “That seat time takes its toll.”
North Korean communists can’t figure out how to get elevators or water to the top floors of residential skyscrapers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-8glaZNXFk
https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-korean-penthouses-look-glamorous-233656358.html
Why only the poorest North Koreans live in the country’s high-rise penthouses
By Daniel Anderson
April 15, 2022
North Korea has finished construction of an 80-story residential skyscraper complete with penthouses in the capital of Pyongyang, but only some of the least fortunate in the country reportedly choose to live on the top floors of the country’s high-rise apartments.
Defectors have said that many North Koreans take issue with the higher floors of these apartments due to a lack of working elevators, electrical issues, minimal water supply and poor overall safety and quality, according to Reuters.
“In North Korea, the poor live in penthouses rather than the rich because lifts are often not working properly, and they cannot pump up water due to the low pressure,” Jung Si-woo, a 31-year-old North Korean defector, told Reuters.
Jung gave an example, adding, “A friend who lived on the 28th floor of a 40-story block had never used the elevator because it was not working. Most elevators worked just twice a day, during peak commuting hours from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., and the same timing in the evening.”
North Korean citizens are not given many options because housing is assigned, and the buying and selling of homes is illegal.
According to state media, housing development is an important goal for North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, and he has promised to build thousands of apartments. On Wednesday, the country completed construction on 10,000 new apartments, taking pride in their completion time and quality.
In Jung’s opinion, however, the efforts are theatrics. “It’s to show how much their construction skills have improved, rather than considering residents’ preferences.”
The editor-in-chief of Daily NK, Lee Sang-yong, a Seoul-based website that reports on North Korea, corroborates Jung’s claims, saying his sources reported that the “apartments for regular people were not ready to live in.”
“Windows had only frames, and water taps, though installed, were not working; but the recently completed luxury homes come complete with furniture and utensils,” Lee explains.
Kim Jong Un recently gifted a two-story luxury apartment to North Korean TV anchor Ri Chun-hee as thanks for her loyalty, saying, “There is nothing to spare for national treasures like Ri Chun-hee, who has led a virtuous life with the revolutionary microphone.”
Shame on the New York Times! Instead of asking “Where are the fathers of these children?” the New York Times blames childhood poverty on lack of government funding. Also, shame on the New York Times for saying “they had little choice.”
Here is a recent article from the New York Times about a bunch of unmarried women and their out-of-wedlock babies.
The word “father” does not appear in the article.
Instead, the New York Times uses the following words and phrases to explain why these women and children are living in poverty:
“have few options”
“waiting for subsidized housing”
“18 people had been inside the four-bedroom public housing unit, triple the number of people who had moved in a decade earlier”
“mothers, sons and daughters”
“they had little choice”
“a growing family forced to crowd ever more tightly into the apartment it already had”
“According to a 2016 assessment of housing needs in the city, Philadelphia is supplying less than 12 percent of the publicly supported housing needed for its low-income households”
“Without enough funding to support a program like that”
“Shakia Miller, who lives in a three-bedroom unit at the West Park Apartments, which are owned and managed by the housing authority, applied for a bigger place when she was pregnant with twin boys. They are now 9 years old, yet the family, which includes Ms. Miller’s three older children, is still living in the same apartment.”
“There were six people on the lease at that time, a number that expanded, by the time of the latest lease, to 14. There were three sisters, Rosalee, Virginia and Quinsha, and a growing number of children”
“There should have been a lot more resources for the family”
“For the families that are in such a situation, there may not be much of a choice at all.”
So that’s what’s in the article.
According to the New York Times, these women had no control over anything, and the reason that these women and their children are living in poverty is because the government is not spending enough money.
The New York Times never asks where the children’s fathers are.
The New York Times never asks why these women had so many out-of-wedlock babies that they could not afford to take care of.
Shame on the New York Times for not asking, “Where are the fathers of these children?”
Shame on the New York Times for blaming their poverty on lack of government funding!
Shame on the New York Times for falsely claiming these these women had no choice and no control over their situation!
I’d like to propose a new policy. Instead of the government spending more money on unmarried women and their out-of-wedlock babies, the government should stop funding them entirely.
Unmarried women who have babies out of wedlock should not be rewarded with public housing and section 8 vouchers.
Whatever you reward, you get more of.
We should stop rewarding unmarried women who have babies out of wedlock.
An unmarried women who has a baby out of wedlock should never be eligible for public housing or section 8 vouchers.
Before the Democrats started their “Great Society” and their “war on poverty” in the 1960s, only 5% of babies in the U.S. were born out of wedlock.
Today, it’s 40%.
This chart shows the increase. The chart is from this link at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nonmarital_Birth_Rates_in_the_United_States,_1940-2014.png
And now I’d like to talk about the origination of the fire that killed those mothers and their children.
First, someone removed the batteries from the home’s smoke detectors.
And second, a very careless and negligent cigarette smoker left their lighter in a place where a five-year-old boy was able to get it and then use it to set the family’s Christmas tree on fire. I don’t blame the five-year-old boy. I do blame the adult smoker.
This incident happened in Philadelphia. And while I don’t know the statistics for Philadelphia, I do know that in New York state, low-income smokers spend 25% of their income on cigarettes.
Choices matter.
Choices result in actions.
Actions result in consequences.
Having babies out of wedlock that you can’t afford is a choice, no matter how many times the New York Times writes that “they had little choice.”
Taking the batteries out of smoke detectors is also a choice that can lead to disastrous results.
Leaving a lighter where a five-year-old can get it is irresponsible and negligent.
Smoking is stupid.
Spending 25% of your income on cigarettes when your own children don’t even have adequate housing is inexcusable.
Childhood poverty would be greatly reduced if people behaved responsibly. Let’s consider two groups of people in the U.S. The first group has a poverty rate of 2%. The second group has a poverty rate of 76%.
The first group consists of people who followed all three of these steps:
1) Finish high school.
2) Get a full-time job.
3) Wait until age 21 and get married before having children.
The second group consists of people who followed zero of those three steps.
Among people who follow all three of these steps, the poverty rate is 2%.
Among people who follow zero of these steps, the poverty rate is 76%.
My source for that information is this article, which refers to this PDF, and the relevant data is on page 15 of the PDF. The study uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Finally, I’m going to end this blog post by posting a video of the song “Love Child” by the Supremes from the 1960s. By today’s standards, this song would be considered extremely conservative, as well as racist and sexist. It’s a great song, with a lesson that needs to be taught more often:
The Washington Post explains how Democrats use zoning laws to ban the construction of affordable housing
Democrats must figure out how to address Blue America’s housing crisis
By Charles Lane
June 17, 2019
LOS ANGELES
There’s nothing like people-watching on L.A.’s West Side, where some folks pitch tents in the parks, while others go in and out of $4 million three-bedroom houses — coffee mug in one hand, Maltese in the other — to get you thinking about affordable housing in the United States.
There is much talk of a crisis, based on statistics such as this one, from a 2018 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts: Of the nearly 43 million households who rented their homes in the United States, 7.3 million — 17 percent — spend half or more of their monthly income on rent. Often, their apartments are an hour or two away from where they work.
The situation is worst in booming coastal cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, which means it is mostly a Blue America problem, and that Democrats — both those who run the blue states and those campaigning for president — are under pressure to come up with solutions.
It’s tricky: Democrats are the party of government, but the housing crisis is in large part government-created.
To cut a long story short, blue American cities and counties need new rental housing, but local zoning, building codes, approval processes and other regulations — the whole legal infrastructure that keeps West L.A. neighborhoods neat, green and oh-so-pleasant — hinder construction.
That web of rules has accrued over decades: In 1960, Los Angeles had 2.5 million people and enough zoned real estate to accommodate housing for 10 million. By 2010, population had grown by 60 percent, to 4 million, but authorities had reduced the city’s maximum zoned residential capacity by 57 percent, to 4.3 million.
A study published in February by UCLA researchers found that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s goal of 3.5 million new homes statewide by 2025 cannot be met, because no more than 2.8 million could be built under current zoning laws.
Now consider that the incumbent homeowners who benefit from this arrangement are disproportionately white, upper-income, college-educated social liberals who largely vote Democratic, while the losers are disproportionately working people of color, who also vote Democratic.
A month ago, California’s state Senate shelved a bill to deregulate apartment construction. The sponsor was a Democrat from San Francisco, backed by Newsom. Opponents were progressive groups that said the bill would enrich private developers but not ensure affordability — and Democratic elected officials from such places as Beverly Hills, Palo Alto and West Hollywood.
Among Democratic candidates for president, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has offered the most detailed housing plan and, to her credit, it identifies “the root causes of the problem” as insufficient supply, “and state and local land-use rules that needlessly drive up housing costs.”
She would encourage states and localities to change these rules through a $10 billion grant program that would fund parks, roads or schools in return for land-use reform. It’s like the Obama administration’s “ Race to the Top” education-reform program, but for housing. It also resembles a state-level incentive plan Newsom has already proposed in California.
Then Warren would spend $500 billion over the next decade “to build, preserve and rehab” affordable units on the freed-up land (and elsewhere), paid for by restoring estate taxes repealed by the Republican Congress and President Trump in 2017.
Of course, if Warren really wanted to shake things up, she would fund her plans by eliminating both the mortgage interest deduction, for an estimated savings of $33.9 billion per year, and the exclusion of capital gains on home sales, for another $36.3 billion.
Ending those breaks would raise revenue and reduce huge tax-code subsidies for single-family housing — another “root cause” of America’s distorted residential real estate markets. West Los Angeles, and the rest of America’s suburban upper middle class, wouldn’t like it, though.
Tax changes might even be more efficient, as housing policy reform, than spending a national fund on a shortage that is crippling in some localities but nonexistent in others. Warren would distribute the money through all 50 state governments — guaranteeing that the dollars would not necessarily go where they were most needed.
Warren identifies a real challenge and its real origins. Her proposed solution taxes the ultra-rich — “14,000 of the wealthiest families,” in the words of Warren’s plan — but this populist flourish tends to obscure the much wider role of the suburban upper middle class.
These are the people who would ultimately decide whether local communities accept zoning reform. And recent political events in California suggest that their acceptance would be grudging indeed, even if the federal government sweetened the pot with infrastructure funds per Warren’s plan. Perhaps it’s better to see what that state’s own efforts yield before committing the whole country’s resources.
It is largely in Blue America that the future of the nation’s most sought-after living spaces will be decided, with huge implications for the Democrats, and for the social and economic opportunity the party champions.
The battle will be lost unless and until Blue America’s haves find ways to share more of their neighborhoods with the have-nots.
America’s big cities are turning into housing catastrophes. If we want to fix this mess, we should try and copy Tokyo.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/americas-big-cities-turning-housing-120600526.html
America’s big cities are turning into housing catastrophes. If we want to fix this mess, we should try and copy Tokyo.
By Jairaj Devadiga
October 9, 2021
A view of residential houses in Tokyo, Japan.
In major cities around the world, housing is becoming less and less affordable.
Tokyo, Japan, is a notable exception, with prices barely rising since 1995.
The US has restrictive, often absurd regulations, and should instead mirror Tokyo.
Jairaj Devadiga is an economist specializing in public policy and economic history.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
In major cities around the world, housing prices have spiraled out of control.
In California’s Bay Area, the median house price is $1.3 million. In Vancouver, the average household must save for 34 years to make a down payment on a house, and put aside 85% of its pre-tax income for mortgage payments. In Sydney, a decrepit house without any toilet facilities sells for $3.5 million.
In this sea of craziness, Tokyo has been an island of sanity. Its housing prices have barely risen since 1995. This is not due to deflation either.
While the population of Japan as a whole has been shrinking, Tokyo has been growing. Between 1995 and 2019, the population of Tokyo grew by 2.17 million, or just above 90,000 per year on average. To accommodate all these new people, lots of housing had to be built. Over the same time period, there was an average of 153,000 housing starts annually.
A study by the Fraser Institute illustrates what happens when housing supply fails to keep up with demand. Between 2015 and 2019, 120,000 new jobs were created in Vancouver and Toronto. In the same time period, there were only 57,000 housing starts every year. Since demand was growing more than twice as fast as supply, prices skyrocketed. The same story played out in almost every major city. Lots of new jobs being created, lots of people wanting to move, and not enough homes being built for all of them.
There are numerous bad policies which prevent the construction of more housing. Chief among them are restrictive zoning laws. In most cities with expensive housing, vast swathes of residential land are reserved exclusively for single family homes. Until very recently, the worst of the bunch was San Jose, with 94% of the land being off limits for apartment buildings. No wonder it is the least affordable city in America.
Not only does this make housing costlier for middle and low income folks, but also subsidizes mansions for the rich. The land on which a mansion sits would be worth a lot more if an apartment building could be built on it. The developer would make a profit even if they sold each apartment at an affordable price.
However, because that’s not allowed, developers won’t bid for that land, thus driving down its price.
While Tokyo does have low density zones, these do not prohibit multi-family buildings. Thus it is not uncommon to see a three story apartment building right next to a single family home.
Apart from zoning, cities dictate minimum lot sizes and maximum floor area ratios (how much of the plot is covered by the building itself), which further stifle construction. In much of Mumbai, for instance, the floor area ratio was capped at 1.33 until 2018.
This had the disastrous result of pushing poor people into slums, as they could not compete with affluent families for the limited housing. In 1971, 22% of Mumbai’s population lived in slums. By 2010, this had risen to 62%. By contrast, Tokyo allows floor area ratios as high as 13, and even higher with government permission.
Another problem is cities wanting to preserve too many historical sites. For instance, cities often declare old homes or commercial establishments to be historical monuments, which prevents them from being torn down and replaced with apartment buildings.
In some cases, cities prevent development even when the historical monument itself would be untouched. For instance, last year, a historic preservation board in Seattle rejected a proposal for a 200-unit apartment building because it would be taller than nearby historical monuments. While Tokyo has historic buildings, its criteria for preservation are much stricter and thus don’t get in the way of affordable housing.
Another important factor in raising housing prices is over-regulation. A recent report by the National Association of Home Builders estimates that regulations add almost $94,000 to the price of new homes. The vast majority of these regulations are purely aesthetic, such as mandating certain types of landscaping and architectural styles, or banning vinyl sidings.
This is not exclusive to American cities. A study on India’s Ahmedabad shows that unnecessary regulations add 34% to the cost of housing. By contrast, Tokyo has very few common sense regulations; mainly to protect against the frequent earthquakes. As long as developers follow these and the very liberal zoning laws, they are free to build as they please.
At this point, you might wonder why these restrictive rules persist if they are so obviously bad. Why is liberal city-planning the exception, rather than the norm? To answer this, we must examine the policy making process itself, to understand the motivations of all participants.
Consider San Jose, with its 94% single-family zoning. The politicians in San Jose were catering to the wishes of their constituents; the people already living in San Jose. Those voters wanted high prices. To them, their house is an investment, which would lose value if more housing were built in their neighborhood. It would also result in new neighbors bringing in a different culture from what the residents are used to.
People who wanted to move to San Jose, but couldn’t due to high prices, would benefit from more liberal planning. They might live in different parts of California, or even in other states. Obviously they don’t get to vote in San Jose elections, thus local politicians have no incentive to help them.
The same process plays out across every city, resulting in sky-high prices.
At the state or national level, though, the political calculus changes completely. People in a particular city might want to restrict housing development, but everyone else wants more. Thus state and national politicians have an incentive to liberalize.
This is exactly what happened in Japan. It too had local governments choking the housing market, resulting in a massive housing bubble in the 1980s. This prompted the national government to enact a series of reforms to rein in housing prices.
The national government formulates building codes, zoning laws, and other city-planning regulations for the entire country, giving very little leeway to local governments.
Recently, governor Gavin Newsom did something similar in California, by finally abolishing single-family zoning statewide, and also loosening some other restrictions.
To win elections, local politicians must necessarily keep down the supply of new housing. It is up to state and national governments to deny them that power, and quickly. Otherwise, home-ownership will remain a pipe-dream for most people.
S.F. spends more than $60K per tent at homeless sites. Now it’s being asked for another $15 million for the program.
S.F. spends more than $60K per tent at homeless sites. Now it’s being asked for another $15 million for the program.
By Trisha Thadani
June 24, 2021
San Francisco’s homelessness department is pushing to continue an expensive tent encampment program that it says is crucial for keeping people off the sidewalks, despite its high price tag of more than $60,000 per tent, per year.
The city has six so-called “safe sleeping villages,” where homeless people sleep in tents and also receive three meals a day, around-the-clock security, bathrooms and showers. The city created these sites during the pandemic to quickly get people off crowded sidewalks and into a place where they can socially distance and access basic services.
The program currently costs $18.2 million for about 260 tents. Unlike the city’s homeless hotel program, the tent villages are not eligible for federal reimbursement. Some of the sites have been run by nonprofits Urban Alchemy, Dolores Street Community Services and Larkin Street Youth Services.
The department is now asking the city for $15 million in the upcoming fiscal year for a similar number of tents, which amounts to about $57,000 per tent per year. If the funding is approved, San Francisco will pay about twice the median cost of a one-bedroom apartment for people to sleep in tents for the second year in a row.
The department plans to close some sites this year, but said it will look for new ones to replace them. Officials said they plan to significantly ramp down the program in fiscal year 2022-2023, when it expects to need $5 million to fund the program.
Several supervisors said at a Wednesday budget hearing that the cost must be re-examined, especially as the city winds down its COVID-19 emergency response.
“It is a big deal to have showers and bathrooms, and I don’t dispute that,” Supervisor Hillary Ronen said at Wednesday’s Budget and Finance Appropriations Committee meeting. “But the cost just doesn’t make any sense.”
Gigi Whitley, the homeless department’s deputy director of administration and finance, said the bulk of the costs at the sites come from the 24-hour security, three meals a day, and the rented shower and bathroom facilities.
Whitley said she hopes the department can control costs as it takes over the program from the city’s COVID-19 Command Center.
The tent program is entirely paid for through Proposition C, a 2018 business tax measure that collects money for homeless services. The cost accounts for only a fraction of the more-than $1 billion that the city expects to spend on homelessness over the next two years, mostly due to Prop. C.
Still, Supervisor Ahsha Safaí said it seemed like an “exorbitant” amount for a program that would be phased out as the COVID-19 emergency comes to an end.
The discussion comes as the city prepares to wind down its homeless hotel program, which is currently sheltering about 2,000 people. While the homeless department has promised that every hotel resident will be offered a housing placement, the city is still grappling with a tight housing market and limited shelter options for the thousands on its streets.
Shireen McSpadden, director of the department, said group shelters are still not allowed to operate at full capacity, despite Breed lifting all other COVID-19 restrictions on June 15.
The department said it is still “reviewing” federal shelter health guidelines and waiting on state public health guidance to “finalize the local shelter reopening plan and timeline.” The capacity reductions are significant: For example, there are currently only 91 guests allowed at the 200-bed Navigation Center on the Embarcadero, the department said.
Because of the shelter limitations and the upcoming closure of some hotels, McSpadden said she feels “strongly” that the city should maintain the tent program at its current level.
“We need it as just another tool in our toolkit as we bring people out of the hotels,” she said.
The board’s Budget and Finance Committee will decide whether to approve the proposal next week, before the entire budget moves to the full board for a vote. Then it will return to the mayor for her approval at the end of the summer.
Supervisor Matt Haney, chair of the committee, was also critical of the program’s cost Wednesday. He said the committee will decide next week whether it wants to reduce the money given to the tent sites and “instead direct the funds to other, more cost-effective investments to get people off the streets.”
San Francisco elected official Hillary Ronen blames the city’s homeless problem on “Republican ideology.” She is wrong. Here are six reasons why “progressive ideology” is the real cause of the city’s homeless problem.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
September 1, 2020
Hillary Ronen is an elected government official who gets paid $140,148 per year to work as a member of the legislative body for San Francisco.
In this video, Ronen blames San Francisco’s homeless problem on “Republican ideology.” (Skip to 8:52 in the video).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI
Ronen is wrong.
“Republican ideology” is not the cause of San Francisco’s homeless problem.
Here six are reasons why “progressive ideology” is the real cause of San Francisco’s homeless problem.
First of all, here is a link to an article that was published by the Atlantic in 2007.
When a developer builds housing, there are three separate and distinct costs: the cost of land, the cost of construction, and the cost of getting a building permit (which the article refers to as the “right to build”).
The article includes this chart:
So in San Francisco, getting a building permit (which the article refers to as the “right to build”) adds approximately $700,000 to the cost of a new home.
And please remember, this cost for the “right to build” is completely separate from the cost of the land, and the cost of construction.
The cost for the “right to build” is determined entirely, 100% by zoning laws, density restrictions, and other local government policies.
Since Hillary Ronen is an elected government official who works as a member of the legislative body of San Francisco, she is one of the people who is responsible for the city’s zoning laws, density restrictions, and other local government policies.
Secondly, here’s another example of how hard it is to get a building permit in California:
January 23, 2015
… there were more permits for single-family homes issued last year through November in just one Texas city Houston (34,566) than in the entire state of California (34,035) over the same period.
Let’s put this into perspective.
Houston is 628 square miles.
California is 163,696 square miles.
So even though California is 260 times as big as Houston, Houston actually issued more new building permits for single family homes in 2014 than did the entire state of California.
Just think about that for a minute.
Those numbers show just how incredibly, ridiculously hard California makes it to build new housing.
Anyone who has ever bought or sold anything at eBay understands that, all else being equal, the bigger the supply of something, the lower price, and the lower the supply, the higher the price.
By making it so difficult to get a building permit in California, the government is causing housing to be far, far more expensive than it would otherwise be.
Third, here is a great article by Thomas Sowell about how the politicians in California have waged war against the construction of new housing.
Fourth, this video also explains San Francisco’s war against the construction of new housing. And please note that it is progressives, social justice warriors, and other left wing activists who are the ones that are most opposed to building this new housing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
Fifth, in the video with Ronen that I included at the beginning of this blog post, she brags about creating a new government program that gives free illegal drugs to homeless people. (Skip to 7:56 in the video.)
Being high on illegal drugs makes the problem of homelessness bigger, not smaller.
And sixth, the Washington Post published this article, which is called:
“Rand Paul is right: The most economically unequal states are Democratic”
The article includes this chart, which ranks the states by their levels of inequality based on their Gini coefficients.
You can see a bigger version of the chart at this link:
The information in the chart verifies the title of the Washington Post article. Blue states have more inequality than red states.
So that’s six different reasons why Hillary Ronen is wrong to blame San Francisco’s homeless problem on “Republican ideology.”
In each and every one of those six cases, it is actually “progressive ideology” that is causing San Francisco’s homeless problem.
San Francisco is waging a very strong, major war against the constriction of new housing.
For Hillary Ronen to blame this on “Republican ideology” is a huge lie.
On the contrary, since Ronen is one of the left wing, progressive, elected government officials responsible for San Francisco’s housing policies, it is Ronen’s own fault that San Francisco has such a big homeless problem.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 
