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Thanatosian posted:Goddamn, Prop 13 is some stupid-rear end poo poo. It is if you're not rich already, or
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Aug 13, 2013 23:32
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The counterpoint is the gentrified neighborhood. If person X lives in a house and can afford property tax, prop 13 allows them to stay in their home even if the neighboring homes rise in value. Reassessing due to gentrification could price people out of their homes.
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Aug 13, 2013 23:58
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Prop 13 is one of the reasons that the price spikes so much with gentrification. If you take that factor out then gentrification might not be accompanied by as steep of a rise in prices.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:01
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withak posted:Prop 13 is one of the reasons that the price spikes so much with gentrification. If you take that factor out then gentrification might not be accompanied by as steep of a rise in prices. Above a certain level it doesn't really matter how high they spike, at least for people already living in the area. If the gentrification still caused folks who had lived there for a few generations to move out due to prices, then it's a net positive (or at least no difference) to keep prop 13.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:06
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Yeah, the thing about getting priced out of your house due to property taxes rising is that you are probably also going to be turning a massive profit on the sale of said house. And I'm not convinced that it is that terrible of a tragedy if someone has to move because they can't afford the property taxes on great-grampa's house that used to be in a bad neighborhood that they got for free.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:11
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withak posted:Yeah, the thing about getting priced out of your house due to property taxes rising is that you are probably also going to be turning a massive profit on the sale of said house. And to be clear, it's not a tragedy in the least. My brothers and I are incredibly lucky to be inheriting anything. And I don't want to try scummy stuff to dodge taxes on it. Is George Lucas's epic trolling of Marin going through? Last I heard there's been a setback. I don't get if he's super-serious or if he's playing some weird hardball game. http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23459968/marin-george-lucas-affordable-housing-project-suffers-setback
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Aug 14, 2013 00:16
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Ron Jeremy posted:The counterpoint is the gentrified neighborhood. If person X lives in a house and can afford property tax, prop 13 allows them to stay in their home even if the neighboring homes rise in value. Reassessing due to gentrification could price people out of their homes. The obsession about not letting people's homes go down in value that most localities have is loving retarded. It should be seen as a place to live, someplace secure that you can do what you want to, and something with equity you can leave to your children, rather than as an investment vehicle that you dump some cash in, hang onto for five years, then flip for a profit.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:17
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Obdicut posted:And to be clear, it's not a tragedy in the least. My brothers and I are incredibly lucky to be inheriting anything. And I don't want to try scummy stuff to dodge taxes on it. I wasn't referring to you specifically. I was thinking more of the hypothetical people that Prop 13 was intended to protect whose property taxes suddenly drove them into the poorhouse.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:23
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That's certainly how Prop 13 was sold. Which is... interesting... given a major part of Prop 13 was protecting businesses too. Suddenly you realize it's not a socialist safety support to keep poor grandmas in the houses they've owned for the last 50 years, it's about a huge handout to businesses and wealthy people.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:43
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Leperflesh posted:That's certainly how Prop 13 was sold. Which is... interesting... given a major part of Prop 13 was protecting businesses too. Suddenly you realize it's not a socialist safety support to keep poor grandmas in the houses they've owned for the last 50 years, it's about a huge handout to businesses and wealthy people. If it's going to exist at all, it should only apply to primary residences, and there should be a value cap. Like, there's no way ten million dollar mansions should be protected by it.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:51
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Thanatosian posted:Yeah, the fact that it applies to commercial properties, and properties owned by corporations and trusts is loving bullshit. Well that's kind of the classic, thing, isn't it? Sell it to the middle class as something for them, when it's actually nothing of the sort. Similar to how the estate tax abolitionists talked about family farms.
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Aug 14, 2013 00:54
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Thanatosian posted:Yeah, the fact that it applies to commercial properties, and properties owned by corporations and trusts is loving bullshit. I 100% unironically agree this is literally the way to fix prop 13.
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Aug 14, 2013 02:06
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On the same subject, today's bay area gentrification article of the month (We've seen at least one article of this flavor coming out every other week the last half year). http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-silicon-valley-backlash-20130814,1665375,409348,full.story
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Aug 15, 2013 01:48
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ntan1 posted:On the same subject, today's bay area gentrification article of the month (We've seen at least one article of this flavor coming out every other week the last half year). Someone correct me on this: *) SF city is mostly low rise buildings due to zoning/regulations *) SF has rent control *) Landlords can Ellis Act their buildings to reset rents to market, but this takes them off the market for 5-10 years *) New development is basically limited to high-end condos and is in general a pain => Landlords have an incentive to Ellis Act buildings to pull them off the market, and they know they will be able to rent them after the 5 year cooldown period because nothing new will get built; meanwhile, demand keeps increasing So the only real solution is to build more housing (fat chance) Anyone want to bet on how long it is until SF removes rent control or eliminates the Ellis Act?
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Aug 15, 2013 02:10
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Malcolm XML posted:Anyone want to bet on how long it is until SF removes rent control or eliminates the Ellis Act? Eliminiting rent control would be politically very dicey in a city where 2/3 of units are renter-occupied, and the Ellis Act is a California state law, so probably not in the near future.
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Aug 15, 2013 03:03
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It is worth noting that rent control in SF only applies to units constructed prior to 1979. So that does make it slightly more attractive to build entirely new buildings in SF for rental purposes: you know you'll be able to keep your units at market rates. It also doesn't apply to 1-unit houses. So if you rent a house, no rent control for you! There's more rules and restrictions too. See: http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html e. Looks like it's houses AND condos that are exempt, but only if you moved after Jan 1, 1996. So maybe there's some people who have been renting the same condo or house for like 20 years who are still under rent control. Also, rent control DOES allow rent increases, just only at a measured amount per year. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 03:10
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Malcolm XML posted:Someone correct me on this: To elaborate on this a bit more, height limits are just the beginning. As a city, we’ve essentially decided that the only type of housing that the market can produce (without subsidy) is luxury/high-end housing. Mandatory minimum parking requirements is another factor making it tough to make money building anything downmarket from high-end. I don’t have the exact ratio on hand at the moment, but the law essentially says “if your building can house X tenants, then you must provide at least .6X parking spaces as part of your development”. There are a couple ways to go about this, but they all significantly increase the cost - build an underground parking garage, or pray that there’s a vacant lot nearby that you can turn into parking. By the time you’ve paid for that, it’s hard to turn a profit if you’re selling/renting your development as anything less than high-end. Thankfully some progress is being made in reducing/eliminating these requirements, but only in certain areas and not the ones necessarily in the most need of affordable housing. There are also limits on the number of units that can be built on a given property. Maybe you could build 20 1-bedroom apartments, but the laws say 10 units is the maximum allowed. Guess you’ll be building 10 2-bedroom apartments instead.
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Aug 15, 2013 17:47
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Thanatosian posted:The real solution to this is to stop giving a poo poo about housing prices when it comes to development. Yeah the goal for sane housing should be affordability not some get rich appreciation scheme.
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Aug 15, 2013 17:50
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gonger posted:Mandatory minimum parking requirements is another factor making it tough to make money building anything downmarket from high-end. It doesn't help that the space they're turning into high rise condos used to be the only parking lots in the area... Just sayin'. Hell, they just tore out a ~100-space parking lot at the corner of 2nd and Howard.
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Aug 15, 2013 18:11
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That's ok, surface parking is 100% inappropriate for San Francisco.
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Aug 15, 2013 18:13
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withak posted:That's ok, surface parking is 100% inappropriate for San Francisco. I don't disagree, but "no parking" is also inappropriate.
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Aug 15, 2013 18:17
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CrazyLittle posted:I don't disagree, but "no parking" is also inappropriate. I'd be fine with "no parking" as long as it applied to rich and poor alike. 
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Aug 15, 2013 18:25
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CrazyLittle posted:It doesn't help that the space they're turning into high rise condos used to be the only parking lots in the area... Just sayin'. Hell, they just tore out a ~100-space parking lot at the corner of 2nd and Howard. I hear you, but something’s gotta give - we’ve gotta build denser, build higher, increase the mode share of transportation that doesn’t require a large land footprint even when not in use. Way more people want to live here than we have housing for, and that’s driving prices up before you even account for the fact that a lot of new residents are working in the handful of fields that still pay well - housing in this market is a game of musical chairs and people with money aren’t going to be the ones left without a seat.
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Aug 15, 2013 19:13
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Not disagreeing with most of what is being said here, but I just want to note that 1) San Francisco is already the second densest city in the US, second only to New York. 2) There is a lot of new housing going up along the Market Street Corridor. The City is planning for pretty major population growth in the next 20 years, something like 20 percent.
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Aug 15, 2013 19:19
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predicto posted:2) There is a lot of new housing going up along the Market Street Corridor. The City is planning for pretty major population growth in the next 20 years, something like 20 percent. 20 percent over 20 years isn't "major population growth".
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Aug 15, 2013 20:08
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Dusseldorf posted:20 percent over 20 years isn't "major population growth". It is if that's entirely millionaires.
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Aug 15, 2013 20:36
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Dusseldorf posted:20 percent over 20 years isn't "major population growth". It is for San Francisco:  (Source: wikimedia commons) I could only find a chart that goes to 2005, but 2010 census puts the City's population at 805,235. It's basically been pretty stable since peaking in the post-war boom (which affected the whole bay area, there are tons and tons of houses here that were built during the 1950s). Adding another 160k residents in the next 20 years is going to be very, very significant. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Aug 15, 2013 |
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Aug 15, 2013 23:49
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^^ Indeed. Plus all people who end up living in East Bay trying to commute into SF will be large as well. Oakland is already on track the next SF in terms of rent prices spiking.gonger posted:I hear you, but something’s gotta give - we’ve gotta build denser, build higher, increase the mode share of transportation that doesn’t require a large land footprint even when not in use. Improving public transportation is probably easier in the short term (and even that's a pipe dream  ). I.e. subsidized ticket prices/free passes for poor commuters, a second trans-bay tube, more stops/tracks going to the peninsula, a true loop through South Bay and loop(s) through North Bay. It would drastically help depress prices if it was feasible to reliably and cheaply get to work without living in SF. The whole Google/Apple/Facebook/etc system of private transportation while NIMBY-ing public transportation is hosed up and needs fixing but that's just the most readily apparent divide between rich/poor.
Xaris fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 00:16
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Xaris posted:
SF is actually three times as dense as London or Rome and almost twice as dense as Berlin. It's still a pretty compact place.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:23
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It's also very compact, at about 7 miles by 7 miles. If you drew a 7x7 mile square around the city centers of most of those other cities and measured the density inside, I bet a lot of them would be higher than San Francisco. Basically SF exports its lower-density neighborhoods and suburbs to its neighboring counties, especially San Mateo County and Alameda County.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:26
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Dusseldorf posted:20 percent over 20 years isn't "major population growth". It is in a small city that is already dense and has had essentially the same 750,000 population for over half a century.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:28
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Leperflesh posted:It's also very compact, at about 7 miles by 7 miles. If you drew a 7x7 mile square around the city centers of most of those other cities and measured the density inside, I bet a lot of them would be higher than San Francisco. True, which is why the most realistic solution is better mass transit to those places, along with some more density along main transit corridors in the City itself.
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Aug 16, 2013 00:32
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gonger posted:I hear you, but something’s gotta give - we’ve gotta build denser, build higher, increase the mode share of transportation that doesn’t require a large land footprint even when not in use. The space at 2nd and howard isn't going to be housing. It's going to be a shiny new office building.
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Aug 16, 2013 05:03
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Granted, you could always destroy the presidio and a build a hundred+ tower blocks.
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Aug 16, 2013 05:06
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Ardennes posted:Granted, you could always destroy the presidio and a build a hundred+ tower blocks. This is the attitude that most of Southern California and parts of the Bay Area have taken on. "What? You mean, it's possible to get the land through buying it/getting it seized/bullshit political manipulation? Well, you know what this means. TIME TO BUILD SOME MORE loving HOUSES ON IT." Never mind that the infrastructure can't handle people living in what would've been a god-forsaken wasteland like Temecula and causing intense traffic jams and continuing water issues. This is literally what is wrong with Southern California on every level - people think building houses thirty miles away from somewhere and having people commute in won't cause any problems whatsoever, no sirreebob - in addition to all of the problems associated with having to build huge power plants everywhere to supply power/ build water/sewage plants to handle that housing. 
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Aug 16, 2013 07:55
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A White Guy posted:This is the attitude that most of Southern California and parts of the Bay Area have taken on. So in order to reduce sprawl you don't want to build very high density (public) housing within the city of San Francisco? You know the Presidio is San Francisco right? Either you sprawl out and build more freeways or build a bunch of high density housing near mass transit (if would require building at least a Muni line out there but there plans for at least BRT then light rail on Geary). Maybe you just want to hang a sign out on the city limits that says "town's full"?
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Aug 16, 2013 08:00
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Nobody's building high-density housing in Presidio National Park. Well OK, it's not completely a national park, it has a weird status. But the land is held by the national government, so neither the City of San Francisco, nor the State of California, can unilaterally seize it via public domain. As if there was any will at all to do so. I think it would be only slightly less politically difficult than trying to pave over Golden Gate Park. There are lots of undeveloped places in the City with less green-space protection. example: quote:In 2007, Donald Fisher, founder of the Gap clothing stores and former Board member of the Presidio Trust, announced a plan to build a 100,000-square-foot (9,300 m2) museum tentatively named the Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio, to house his art collection. Fisher's plan encountered widespread skepticism and even outright hostility amongst San Francisco preservationists, local residents, the National Park Service, the Presidio Trust, and city officials who saw the Presidio site as 'hallowed ground.'[21] Due to such criticism, Fisher withdrew his plans to build the museum in the Presidio and instead donated the art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before his death in 2009.[22][23] A museum? In our park? No! A travesty! gently caress off, philanthropist! We don't want your free, paid for by you, lovely museum full of art on our public land! Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 17:12
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Leperflesh posted:A museum? In our park? No! A travesty! gently caress off, philanthropist! We don't want your free, paid for by you, lovely museum full of art on our public land!
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Aug 16, 2013 18:13
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Leperflesh posted:A museum? In our park? No! A travesty! gently caress off, philanthropist! We don't want your free, paid for by you, lovely museum full of art on our public land! San Francisco doesn't need another huge museum, the permanent collections at their current museums are already pretty lackluster. Donating it to the MoMA or DeYoung Museum makes a lot more sense than paving over open space and knocking down historic buildings.
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Aug 16, 2013 18:24
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CrazyLittle posted:The space at 2nd and howard isn't going to be housing. It's going to be a shiny new office building. Yeah, but there are several very large apartment blocks going up on Market near Civic Center, and even more small housing buildings going up on almost every interesection on Market all the way down to Castro. Putting big office buildings in the Financial District right near BART and MUNI and CalTrain actually makes a lot of sense to me.
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Aug 16, 2013 18:41
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