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Jerry Manderbilt posted:I can't wait to see all the "STOP THE OBAMA-CREATED DUST BOWL" signs that'll go up along the sides of the high-speed train down in Fresno/Bakersfield once it's done! Obama will have been out of office for years by the time the first train runs. Bizarro Watt posted:Good to see Gilroy getting attention for something besides garlic, I suppose. In my dreams, I'd like to have a high-speed rail line that goes up and down the coast. Caltrain currently runs from San Francisco to gilroy, so it makes sense to tie Gilroy in. Actually I assume they'll be using the same right-of-way as Caltrain for the whole run down from the city, since the land is already owned and there have already been some track upgrades done when they extended Caltrain from San Jose down to Gilroy back in the early 90s.
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Jul 10, 2013 21:47
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Casual Yogurt posted:CAHSR will be sharing the Caltrain tracks. Christ, I hope not! Surely just the right-of-way? A major killer of cross-country Amtrak is how it can't just blast through, because it has to wait for every goddamn freight train also using the tracks to pass it or get passed by it, and it also has to stop at every podunk stop because there's so few trains. If the high-speed bullet train has to share track with the local-stops trains, it will no longer be high-speed.
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Jul 10, 2013 23:23
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I think the biggest problem with high-speed rail, is that it is most effective when it makes fewest stops, but it must run through communities that are only possibly benefited by having it there if it has stops in those communities (because the existing rights-of-way follow railroads which were built explicitly to link communities, and many of those communities exist specifically because of the pre-existing rail lines). When you have a strong centralized top-down authority that simply decides "here there will be trains" and doesn't give a poo poo about whether Podunk Valley, CA wants it in their back yard or not, then you can get high-speed long-distance trains that run in a straight line and get from Point A to Point B, 400 miles away, as fast or faster than you'd get by driving to an airport, parking, waiting in lines, boarding, waiting for takeoff, flying, going through more lines, and then boarding transit or renting a car and driving to your final destination. When Podunk Valley can hold the entire loving thing hostage against guarantees that they get a station and that all through trains will stop at that station, so it'd have some chance of benefiting their local economy? You're either going to have to route around Podunk Valley (extra money, slows things down, more complex), accede to their demands (a lot of extra money, slows things down, more complex), or languish in red tape hell for year upon year waiting for their endless lawsuits and challenges and obstructionism to work their way through; and while that time goes by, costs go up a lot, everyone gets impatient, the public loses interest, politicians come in and out of office, and nothing ever loving happens. Add in the complications of having to use federal money, and therefore obey federal restrictions on that money (like, you can't take our federal dollars and then sit on them for 8 years without spending them); the fact that the whole thing is founded on a voter initiative (so if there's something in the legalese that turns out to be bad or needs to be changed the legislature can't just have a quick vote to change it); the fact that the entire thing is only even remotely likely to be worthwhile and useful if it all gets built (having a track from San Francisco to Fresno, and no further, would be utterly worthless)... and yeah, this is kind of a ridiculously difficult project to make happen. I really really want it to happen (and I voted for it), but frankly I'm skeptical. We need some serious eminent domain being exercised up in here, some whiny complainers, obstructionists, and anti-infrastructure conservatives need to be bulldozed without delay, and that's kind of out of character for California. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jul 11, 2013 |
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Jul 11, 2013 00:09
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All Of The Dicks posted:I am guessing that people who run transit systems have sorted out how to apportion normal and express stops. Of course, and a lot of smaller communities will be happy with limited service. However, if the high-speed trains share tracks with regular-speed or non-express trains, then you have to have places where trains can pass each other safely; and if a train is not on schedule, a fast-train might have to wait for a slow-train. Anywhere where there is only one track is especially prone to this sort of bottlenecking, but even when there's one (in each direction) you can have this happen a lot.
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Jul 11, 2013 03:21
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Tell me more about how thousands and thousands of people will have their property taken and their lives bent out of shape so that you can ride a train from SF to LA once or twice a year. I personally have no reason to go to LA and will probably have no need for the high speed train. This isn't about me at all. But more important, people's property is not just "taken", it's purchased at market rate. If you have a problem with eminent domain as a government tool, that's fine, but that's a larger and different argument to have... but eminent domain is well established in the law and using it to build infrastructure is the most defensible justification for the practice there is. quote:****** Putting the word "just" in front of an extremely complex, expensive, and politically mired endeavor does not magically turn it into a trivial task. Train track requires a big fat right of way, a bunch of money spent on infrastructure, and the cooperation of local governments and organizations. High-speed bullet train track is much more expensive than regular rail, on top of that. And every spur, every switch, every branch adds to the complexity and cost of running and maintaining the system. quote:Traffic management gets a lot more complicated, though, and with that complication comes expense. Exactly. quote:The reason that HSR is using the old Union Pacific tracks is that if it had to buy 100% new right-of-way and build 100% new tracks the whole thing would cost about as much as the Apollo Program did. It will have to build 100% new graded bed and track anywhere that the train will go faster than conventional rail. You simply cannot run a bullet train at high speeds on old, conventional grade/track. The rights-of-way are of course going to be used (because it beats the hell out of carving a new 100+-foot-wide path through private property for hundreds of miles) but in some cases will have to be widened, to make room for high-speed track parallel to regular track, add switches, spurs, side yards, areas for maintenance equipment, eliminate level crossings (that's a really big one), and so forth. Trabisnikof posted:Also, there will never be a high speed line past Victorville for the same reasons the BART will never get to San Jose via the Peninsula: Rich Suburban Cities. I think it's actually much harder than BART to San Jose; there are entrenched economic interests in California against exporting wealth to Las Vegas, in particular the indian gaming lobby. Zeitgueist posted:Heh, I'm getting my fastest speeds mixed up with running speeds, my bad. I was under the impression that those trains ran at 300mph, because they can do it. There may be experimental trains capable of going 300mph but the cost in energy to accelerate to such a speed is difficult to justify. The relationship between speed and energy cost is nonlinear, due to air resistance dynamics. One must also of course build track to ever-higher levels of precision and robustness to support even faster trains. Remember also that top speed is only achieved between stations. If you have two stations thirty miles apart, and you accelerate to 200mph in two minutes, and it costs another minute to decelerate from that speed (numbers pulled out of my rear end), how much faster do you actually get there if you spend another extra minute and a half pushing up to 300mph only to drop back almost immediately? The answer may be nothing nearly enough to justify the added cost. This is part of why top speed is a lot less important than just the sheer number of stops. Every stop not only adds to the duration of the trip due to sitting at the station: it adds another very long segment where the train is braking into the station, and another where it is accelerating out of the station, and both of those cost a bunch of energy and reduce the average speed of the whole trip. I mentioned level crossings above, but I'll come back to it for a moment. You can't run a train at 200mph across a level crossing. It's just horribly unsafe to both the train and to people using the crossing. Caltrain runs at ordinary train speeds and still hits a pedestrian several times a year (often a suicide, unfortunately, but not always). Bullet trains need to either slow down before they hit a series of level crossings, or they need to have under/overpasses constructed to avoid them (best is an under or overpass for the road/foot traffic, since that's usually vastly less expensive than running the train itself underground or on elevated track). Part of the deal with NIMBYs isn't just the noise of the trains, or the need to buy up property, but the expense and disruption of reconfiguring traffic corridors at and around the high-speed rail right of way. This is a really, really, really complicated thing we're trying to do here. It's no wonder it's incredibly expensive and incredibly difficult to make it happen across dozens of cities and hundreds of miles of California. I support it because I believe very strongly in the economic power of adding infrastructure, and I'm hopeful that it'll happen, but I think the risk that it will fall apart is very high right now.
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Jul 11, 2013 23:34
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Quantumfate posted:Okay, what is it with this drat state being so tightly linked to Cali? Reno here, and while we have our own papers and news, a fair bit of people still get their info from bay area news stations. It's also fairly common for people here to head into south lake or Truckee on a whim, or drive out to sac or San Fran for a weekend trip. A good rail line that meant you don't have to drive over the pass that killed the Donner Party would bring a fair bit of tourism to NorCal too. Can we Just divvy Nevada up and give vegas to SoCal and Reno to Norcal, and maybe elko/ely to utah? I love how when you drive across the border on 80, the state line precisely coincides (to within like a few hundred yards) with the sudden and drastic change in biome. Basically Nevada gets the land that's in the Sierra's rain shadow, and California gets the land that has water and trees and poo poo on it. And that's why Nevada doesn't belong to California. We got the nice stuff and you guys got desert basin-and-range. Now, it turned out you had a bunch of mineral wealth, but I'm guessing by the time the comstock lode was found, it was way too late for us to re-draw the lines and try to steal it. Anyway people from low-tax, low-regulation Nevada coming to California to spend their money is a good demonstration of why (to the consternation of conservatives everywhere) California is not, in fact, crippled by excessive taxes and regulation. People actually want to live here, more than they want to avoid state income tax or smog checks or whatever. Because it's gorgeous here, and we have a lot of nice stuff.
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Jul 13, 2013 23:58
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Let's not forget convention space. Las Vegas is the world's largest convention host, and people come from all over the planet (not just California) for them. The casinos are obviously the big revenue monsters, but convention space pulls in lots of tax money too. To be honest I quite like Nevada. I've gone opal mining in the northwest corner of the state a few times back in the 1990s. The basin-and-range geology is interesting, you have big sky and lots of space and there's actually quite a lot of nature to be explored. You can also prospect and make mining claims easier in Nevada than anywhere else in the country (although basically everything that you'd want to dig up has probably already been found and claimed, often more than once). But I wouldn't want to live there, no.
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Jul 14, 2013 19:30
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe most/all of the Strip, with all the big casinos, is actually outside of Las Vegas' city limits, specifically to avoid city taxes and regulations?
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Jul 14, 2013 20:03
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InterceptorV8 posted:It's in Paradise, NV. That article says it's a "census designated place", which is a concentration of population which is only in unincorporated land. Or in other words, Paradise NV is not a city at all. quote:At about 225,000 people, if Paradise were to be an incorporated city it would be either the fourth or fifth largest city in the state, after Las Vegas (585,000), Henderson (260,000), and North Las Vegas (229,000); Reno has a population of about 225,000. Paradise is the most populous CDP in the United States, except for Honolulu which is not separately incorporated from its county government, and officially recognized as a CDP and CCD by the Census Bureau. I suppose that does lovely things when you're trying to use the tourist money to fund services for the actual city of Las Vegas. Do they get money for services from the Clark County general fund? (Looks like the school district is county-wide, so that at least gets funds from the whole population of greater Las Vegas.)
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Jul 14, 2013 20:19
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The problem is that print journalism in general, and American print journalism in particular, is in a sorry state. California's papers are no exception. So picking the best of a big pool of turds makes you feel dirty. So yeah, sure, the Chron, the Bee, the LA Times, the Merc... whatever, they're alright I guess. For American newspapers. Which are poo poo. (But, what does this say about the worst CA papers, like The San Francisco Examiner (is that still printed, I haven't checked in years)?)
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Jul 16, 2013 00:53
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Arsenic Lupin posted:The best newspaper in the state is the Arcata Eye. Just the police blotter. The rest is utterly banal ho-hum typical small-town shite journalism, unfortunately. The police blotter is world-famous, though, and well worth the time.
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Jul 16, 2013 01:24
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enraged_camel posted:He's absolutely correct that he is entitled to due process. It makes me uncomfortable that people's default stance is to assume that he actually sexually harassed those women. What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? That applies to legal punishment. E.g., the courts and the government should treat him as innocent until proven guilty. Voters, on the other hand, can have him recalled for any reason or no reason, and politicians can be booted for things that are not crimes (infidelity, for one common example). If the voters of San Diego decide that this guy is a loving creep, they can oust him, and he's not "entitled" to some presumption of innocence until proven guilty to the standards required by a criminal court proceeding.
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Jul 16, 2013 18:40
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CrazyLittle posted:I think the only place whiter than Alamo might be Blackhawk... These places are all very white, for california, but there are plenty of places in the US which are whiter. You can explore this stuff using the interactive US 2010 census map from the NY times, here. For example: Alamo, CA:  St. Albans, VT:  New England in general is extremely white, of course, but I paged around in Vermont to find a particularly white area. e. The whitest county in California appears to be Trinity County, at 86% white. Every county in Vermont is above 90% white. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jul 17, 2013 |
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Jul 17, 2013 19:32
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To be fair, SOMA is one of the most expensive neighborhoods now.  Sunset is a nice neighborhood, too, I'm not just picking someplace poo poo. It's 30 minutes or more on MUNI to downtown, though, which is why prices are a bit lower, and it's also permanently enshrouded in fog for seven or eight months of the year (which I happen to like, but some folks hate it). Also, from that article:  There's a reason rents are high in San Francisco, and it's because demand is high. Rent control can help people who got an apartment 20 years ago, but it only applies to older buildings (1976 or older, if I remember right?) and of course it gets reset whenever someone moves out. When you have huge demand and severely limited supply (san francisco is a peninsula, it cannot expand except by tearing down buildings and building higher-density ones in their place, and that is an expensive undertaking) you are going to see prices rise. Even low-income projects get expensive, and the last time I read about it (which was over a decade ago, admittedly) the waiting list for Section 8 housing was like 8+ years long. So I agree, SF's housing market is crazy, but what can be done about it? Short of literally seizing property via eminent domain and then building government housing projects on the land, I can't think of anything that'd be particularly effective. e. I should mention, SF is my home town, and I love it there. But my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I couldn't afford to keep living there. In the early 2000s we were renting a basement in-law in the Sunset for $850 a month, and it had mice and was way out on 46th avenue and I got a job in Hayward. So we moved out, and got twice the space for the money in Burlingame (which is not a cheap city). Later we moved to San Mateo, and then I bought a house in Concord in Dec. 2009. I would love to live back in my home city, but I wanted to own a house and that will never be possible for me there; even at the absolute bottom of the housing market I could not have afforded a shithole in bayview/hunter's point, nevermind a sound structure in a non-murdery neighborhood. So the housing market there has pushed me out, and I'm a firmly middle-class white collar worker with a decent job. I could have bought an apartment, but gently caress HOAs/condo association dues, thin walls with loud neighbors, horrendous parking, and paying two hundred thousand dollars to live like a college student. gently caress that noise completely. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Jul 19, 2013 |
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Jul 19, 2013 01:39
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Or commuting. A huge number of people take transit into the city daily to work, including my wife. BART is packed to the gills these days. But it makes a lot of economic sense for a lot of people, to live in the east bay and BART into the city. If it costs you $150 a month in transit fares, but saves you $600+ in rent, well... how much is your two+ hours of time riding transit every day worth to you?
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Jul 19, 2013 05:18
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And if you're in LA, you say "The 101" but if you're in the Bay Area, you just say "101" without the "the." As in, "To get to San Francisco from the Airport, just drive up 101."
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Jul 19, 2013 20:35
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etalian posted:By the old 25% housing cost rule you would need to make at least $86000 a year gross, which doesn't factor in the higher cost of living in all the other areas for the Bay area. Haha the 25% rule, that's cute. Thanatosian posted:Wait, what? I totally say "Cali," and I lived there for most of my life. It sounds hella-stupid, though. I've never heard anyone say that out loud around here, I don't think. Then again, I've never heard anyone from around here refer to each other as "bro". Maybe I'm just old and out of touch. Get off my lawn!
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Jul 19, 2013 20:56
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WampaLord posted:Well, we can either have a Jets/Sharks style musical gang fight to decide who's right or we can drop the dumbest derail ever over the use of "the" before highway names. It's not a derail, because this is a specifically California argument and this is the California Megathread. Where else would we argue about this? Putting "the" in front is redundant and unnecessary! That's why it's dumb. 
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Jul 20, 2013 00:03
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bitprophet posted:I still do the same here, except...for some reason I frequently call Rt 1/PCN "the 1" because for some reason saying "I drove on 1" or "I took 1 from Santa Cruz to Monterey" sounds funny - in a way that "I took 680 to the South Bay" doesn't. We always say "highway 1" for exactly that reason. Nobody says "I drove up 1", they say "I drove up Highway 1, it was beautiful." Interesting exception, I think. Actually I think I use the same convention for Highway 4. Maybe it applies to roads with lower numbers of digits because they could be confused with local roads? mr. unhsib posted:Isn't this a NorCal/SoCal thing? Because in SF it's 101 and 280, and LA it's basically The Californians. Yeah: Leperflesh posted:And if you're in LA, you say "The 101" but if you're in the Bay Area, you just say "101" without the "the." As in, "To get to San Francisco from the Airport, just drive up 101." The convention down south (probably everything south of SLO?) is "the", but northern Californians (and especially in the Bay Area) omit it.
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Jul 20, 2013 01:11
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GrumpyDoctor posted:I do. So does my family. Well I guess that makes you guys nobodies.
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Jul 20, 2013 01:52
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FCKGW posted:I think what we can all agree on is that the Bay Area is terrible and that Southern California is the best California. gently caress you! You are exactly wrong! withak posted:Oakland is a pretty big place, if you don't want to live in the equivalent of Richmond or Vallejo then you don't have to. Oakland has tons of neighborhoods and some are very bad and some are very good, and often the very good neighborhoods are like 5 blocks from the very bad neighborhoods. When we were house shopping in 2009 we saw some very nice areas that we decided against only because my wife would have to walk through some hellhole to get to BART. Some of the intermediary neighborhoods have fairly reasonable pricing, too. FMguru posted:Or East Palo Alto, or Vallejo, or Richmond, or Fairfield... Yeah. But you can also head for San Leandro, or Concord, or Pittsburgh/Bay Point, or San Mateo, or El Cerrito. There are intermediary cities that are not ridiculously expensive (well, by Bay Area standards) but are also not too murdery. And are still on BART. These are the places your San Francisco blue-collar and service worker people live, which is why BART ridership is extremely heavy these days.
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Jul 20, 2013 05:27
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California housing prices bottomed out over a year ago. If you were waiting around to buy at the bottom it is way too late now. The current rush is to get in before interest rates go up, but that ship sailed a month or two ago as well. Now, you can still get a bargain well outside the major markets - I'm sure you can get a cheap house in vacaville or tracy - but (for example) in my neighborhood of Concord, which is a 45-minute BART ride from SF, prices are now a good 30%+ above their bottom from 18 months ago and are still rising.
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Jul 21, 2013 02:33
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withak posted:Getting from a ferry terminal to the Presidio will suck. To work in the Presidio you either have to live there or be willing to drive there from wherever every day. 29 Sunset, 43 Masonic, and uh... I want to say, 18 46th Avenue. Off the top of my head, without checking a MUNI map, and based on 10+ year old mental MUNI maps, but there are busses in SF that go to the Presidio. But yeah, don't try to do it from a ferry ride, the ferries drop you off down town. I would second the recommendation to check inner and outer Richmond district rents. The neighborhood is reasonably safe, and the prices are lower (for San Francisco). If you have to commute, you don't want to do it across the Golden Gate Bridge. The tolls are higher, the traffic is heavier, and there's ongoing work on the roads around there too. San Rafael? Good lord no. Marin county is extra expensive, it's where the people live who are too snobbish and rich for San Francisco's snobbish rich districts. Granted San Rafel is a lot less so than Marin proper, but, no. Try Daly City if you're willing to commute, or South San Francisco, or Colma, or (if you drive) even Pacifica.
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Jul 21, 2013 03:20
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Geared Hub posted:Yeah I was looking at Richmond area at first Richmond is the most dangerous and murdery location in the Bay Area. You might enjoy, in a looking-at-car-accident kind of way, perusing this crime map with crime data, for Richmond. Note the cheery bright red color, compared to the less glowy color of surrounding communities. Although this site thinks Oakland is worse, but I think it has to do with combined crime statistics that include petty theft and stuff; I'm pretty sure Richmond has the highest per-capita murder and rape rates. The City-Data crime rate for Richmond for 2012 is 594.3, compared to a national average of 307.5. Although, hey, bright side; it peaked in 2007 at 766.0! If you do decide to live in Richmond, there are safer areas of the city to focus on, mostly up in the hilly areas. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Jul 21, 2013 |
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Jul 21, 2013 21:18
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FRINGE posted:Those vampiric scumbags are making GBS threads on the entire country (again). Well, I mean, if they're buying up homes and renting them out, isn't that going to help the rental market? I'm not gonna go all free market capitalism rah rah on you or anything, but if rent is too high, adding units to the market should help to lower rents. Investors see a financial opportunity to simultaneously buy cheap houses in a market where house prices are rising, and take advantage of an insane rental market where rents are so high that they can provide an attractive return on investment. Combine this with new home building activity rapidly ramping up in the last 18 months and we should see market forces start to normalize the situation. I expect house prices to plateau (but not pop, I don't see this as a bubble), rents to gradually drop (but not plunge), and overall total units available both for purchase and for rent to increase (but not so rapidly as to crash prices). This is broadly speaking, across all the urban and suburban California markets. Local conditions may be different (new home starts within the city of San Francisco are not happening, other than a handful of big apartments under construction, so rents will stay high, home prices will keep rising, and SF will continue to head towards Manhattan Island kind of ridiculous real estate situation for the foreseeable future). Or I could be wrong, I'm speculating (in the non-financial sense). My point though is that while this sucks if you're out there trying to buy a house with a mortgage and you keep getting beat by all-cash offers, I think it's a predictable response to the current situation which could, potentially, in the long term help to relieve some of the major issues still affecting our housing market.
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Jul 23, 2013 07:51
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Miss-Bomarc posted:It's going to help the rental market for the five or six corporate entities that will, after a few years, own 65% of the residential property in California (and that will go up to 85% if you restrict it to the property that's anywhere near anything worthwhile.) [citation needed] Not to be glib, but this is the first I've heard of five or six corporate entities owning a large percentage of the total rental market, nevermind "the residential property" which is ridiculous on its face (the large majority of single-family homes in the US are occupied by their owner: see Homeownership in the United States). According to this, in 2010 home ownership in California was among the lowest in the nation... at 56.1%. Given that even with the mortgage crisis only a small fraction of all residential real estate has gone up for sale in the last five years, I find it incredibly implausible that this rate will dip below 50%, much less that "five or six entities" will own all or nearly all of it. So, if you could, please provide any sort of source for this assertion?
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Jul 24, 2013 21:36
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From that bloomburg article:quote:The market, which has been “dominated by ‘Mom and Pop’ owners” could total 12 million homes and be double the size of the institutional multifamily market, JPMorgan analysts led by Anthony Paolone, wrote in a note yesterday. “A corporate structure with institutional capital around the business makes sense.” 12 million homes as the entire theoretical size of the institutional rental home market? According to a quick google result: quote:It may be that the terminology is different than single family homes. However, barring that, here are some census.gov numbers for you. Taking just the single detached homes, there's over 91 million in the US. 12M would be 13% of the market of 80M single detatched & mobile homes that are occupied year-round (so, ignoring vacation rentals and such). Not even remotely approaching 65%. Even if you also include the implied 6M institutional multifamily market, you're then talking about the total market of 130M homes: so that's 130/18 or 13.8% of the total market. That's a lot, I suppose, but it's split among multiple companies who presumably would be in competition with each other, and it still leaves a huge gap between the majority (which are owner-occupied), and the remainder (presumably non-institutionally non-owner-occupied homes). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Jul 24, 2013 |
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Jul 24, 2013 22:18
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I'm not arguing against the premise that it's worrying to see companies buying up huge numbers of properties. I'm arguing against the hyperbole and (especially) wildly inaccurate factual assertions being used to support statements like:FRINGE posted:If you seize the food, the water, and the shelter, you get an entire country of voluntary slaves. I am sure no one thought of this and its all just an accident. I think it's possible to express concern about a trend without obliquely implying it's a sinister national conspiracy to enslave the country.
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Jul 25, 2013 18:50
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Willa Rogers posted:I'm bad at math, but explain to me how you're paying $500/month on a 15-year mortgage for a $400k house. Because $500/month is what I get quoted for taking out a $125k loan for 30 years, and that includes property taxes and assumes a 3.5 interest rate. I think what he means is that, during the month in which he did the re-fi, he had a single $500 payment, while taking a home equity loan (!) at the same time. But yeah his wording makes that really unclear. There's no way he's making $500 payments on even some kind of retarded balloon mortgage for a $400k loan.
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Jul 27, 2013 00:06
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VideoTapir posted:How about this....it is a collection of (in many cases objectively provable, in a few cases proven in court) conspiracies to extract more and more money from the working classes. Collectively this has the effect of removing our disposable income and our options. With the degree to which corporate directorates interlock, I think we can call it a single conspiracy, though there may not be any single conspirator who is involved in every aspect of it. I don't think the word "conspiracy" is accurate or helpful. It seems to me that we are discussing something that is categorically similar to corporate monopoly in any other typical context. For example: a proliferation of mom & pop grocery stores is gradually replaced by huge centralized warehouse-style corporate monolith stores (Wal*Mart, Target, Kmart, etc.). This initially benefits consumers because economies of scale provide lower prices. However, prices are low only while meaningful competition exists between the entities. When a corporation begins to gain monopoly power, it can manipulate the market, raising prices with little or no recourse for the consumer: the barrier to entry is now too high for small independents to gain a foothold, and consumers no longer have the choice of competing outlets. The government already has well-established regulatory antitrust powers. All that is needed is for it to exercise them. Sometimes those powers seem to be reasonably effective, and sometimes they seem to be amazingly ineffective: the FCC seems to be completely complicit with the conglomeration of the broadcast radio marketplace into one utterly dominated by Clearchannel, for example, while it has repeatedly exercised antitrust power to prevent telecommunications monopolies. If home-rental corporations gain monopolies (locally or widely), we have to demand that our regulators exercise their antitrust powers. However, based on the actual numbers which I have quoted in this thread, it does not appear that anything like a monopoly has arisen. There might be very localized exceptions, such as in Tampa Bay as suggested by that Tampa Bay Times article which Keyser S0ze linked, but even there, the article prefers to quote scary-big numbers without actually providing comparative statistics (what actual percentage of the total Tampa Bay rental market is now in the hands of Blackstone?) or substantiate the implication that Blackstone or any other individual corporation has sufficiently dominated the market that they can unilaterally raise prices without facing effective competition from other companies and the private rental market. I will reiterate, then: it is a trend that we should be concerned about, sure. If we think that increasing private home ownership is "good" (and I think that's a very complex question, actually), then this runs against that trend. If we think it's bad that all-cash investors have an advantage over borrowers when purchasing residential real estate, that's a problem worthy of discussion. But there's no loving conspiracy, it's just people with a lot of money recognizing a potentially lucrative investment opportunity. Housing prices took a huge nosedive and, due to both extremely negative consumer sentiment (which tends to trail the market) and very tight credit (which was a good correction but possibly an overcorrection to previously over-loose credit), houses nationwide in general and especially in certain markets were underpriced. The rental market became very tight (everyone who lost a home needed to rent one; the population rose while new home starts stagnated; both factors put heavy pressure on the rental market) which drove up rents while thousands of foreclosed homes sat empty. You can blame this situation on a lot of different factors but you can't really blame people with money for recognizing that they could buy a lot of houses and rent them for profit. This relieves the rental market while also helping house prices to recover! If momentum has taken the reverse trend too far the other way (and I don't think it really has: I think rents are still too high and homes in many markets are still underpriced) then it will gradually correct, as more homes available for rent loosens the rental market and the profit margin potential of purchasing a house and then renting it out drops accordingly. So yeah. Every corporation that sells products is in a conspiracy to extract money from the working classes! That's what companies are for, making profits for their owners. Which is why we need regulations, to protect the working classes (and everyone else for that matter), because unregulated capitalism is savagely cruel. But let's not act like a bunch of oligarchs have gotten together in a room somewhere and plotted to buy up 80% of the residential real estate in America into a single company so they can force everyone to rent and pay whatever they feel like charging with no recourse. That scenario is cartoonish and unrealistic. It's more just investors (and investment companies, including banks) realizing that the stock market is overbought, the bond market is overdue for a correction (especially when the Fed finally stops quantitative easing), gold is overpriced and overly volatile, so they need somewhere new to put their money... and real estate is (historically-speaking) cheap. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jul 27, 2013 |
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Jul 27, 2013 02:06
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FRINGE posted:Insofar as they have strategy meetings to suppress evidence, hide liabilities, inflate percieved rewards, manipulate markets, create a sense of desperation to squeeze workers - your statement was non-ironically correct. OK, I apologize. I thought we were talking about the California real estate market. It turns out, we were discussing some kind of "capitalism is theft" just-world political stance or something. That's not what I came to this thread for, so I'll happily drop it. enraged_camel posted:There will always be competition for the kinds of poo poo sold at WalMart, Target, etc. It's called the Internet. If Target raises their prices, people will simply start ordering stuff from Amazon. You can buy groceries on Amazon, but not for any kind of reasonable price. Likewise 40-pound bags of dog food. There are things that Amazon does better and a large amount of overlap but there are things that local brick-and-mortar still have a large advantage over Amazon for. But I do take your meaning, and had only used this particular marketplace as an example, so feel free to pick your own example. Miss-Bomarc posted:I said "California", not "the US". You have identified a trend (corporate home purchasing is up) and then extrapolated that trend to an absurd prediction (corporate ownership of homes in California will eventually reach 65%, or 85% of "worthwhile" properties). I have argued that there are strong economic factors in the short term driving this activity but that the activity itself is self-limiting due to how it affects the marketplace (essentially, this is a form of arbitrage, and arbitrage is self-limiting). You have yet to provide any kind of actual data or reference, however. I provided numbers for the US as a whole, because thirty seconds of googling did not immediately produce numbers for California, but I put it to you that you have made the dire assertion and therefore carry the burden of substantiating it.
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Jul 27, 2013 19:20
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FRINGE posted:You may feel that "capitalism is theft", but the discussion you started was about "conspiracy". To be fair, Miss-Bomarc pulled some numbers out of his or her rear end, and in particular said quote:They'll be able to control price by controlling supply (people aren't willing to pay your exorbitant rents? Just take half your units off the market! I took issue with both the numbers, and with the idea that there was anything remotely approaching the monopoly that would be necessary to exercise this level of control. And in response to that same post by Miss-Bomarc, you replied: FRINGE posted:If you seize the food, the water, and the shelter, you get an entire country of voluntary slaves. I am sure no one thought of this and its all just an accident. I suggested that Leperflesh posted:I think it's possible to express concern about a trend without obliquely implying it's a sinister national conspiracy to enslave the country. So while I was the first to use the word "conspiracy", I was specifically speaking to the premise - which I still think is totally unsupported - that the various large investors pouring money into real estate are conspiring with each other to the degree necessary to manipulate the market the way Miss-Bomarc predicted. So when VideoTapir said: VideoTapir posted:It is a sinister national conspiracy to enslave the country. I think it's reasonable for me to assume that he's not taking a broad position that capitalism itself, generally, or more specifically the fundamental legal structure that creates corporations (that is, joint ownership of a limited-liability entity, combined with the corporate personhood that allows such an entity to legally sign contracts) is the "conspiracy". Rather, I understood him to be refuting my assertion that the major companies, the largest of whom (Blackstone) is reported to have a total fund of $13.3B, are or are likely to conspire with each other to illegally manipulate a market. I did not intend to start a discussion about whether capitalism, broadly, or the existence of corporations specifically, involves conspiracy. I think such a discussion is probably well outside the scope of this thread, and I have little interest in a pedantic argument about the denotative and connotative meaning of the word and how it does or does not apply to the behavior of corporate officers. I am interested in the question of whether there is any possibility of a handful of companies coming to dominate the rental market, nationally or in California. I think the numbers involved show that it is very unlikely; $13.3B is a lot of money, but its' a drop in the bucket compared to the total size of the rental market in the country (and that money is not all being spent in California, it's clearly, according to articles already cited, a more diversified series of investments). --- FRINGE posted:The ironic things is that you will delinieate the ways that this is true, but then you feel inclined to call it something like "good business" and get upset when it is called "conspiracy". You might end up feeling that both are true, but you do not get to drop the also-true label you dislike. I hope I've explained above that I am objecting to an unsupported assertion that five or six real estate investment companies are engaging in illegal anticompetetive collaboration as a conspiracy to manipulate the California real estate market, such as by taking huge numbers of properties off the market in order to drive up rentals (and moreover that such a tactic would work). I did not, however, assign any sort of moral value to the more general behavior of corporations, or of real estate investment companies; I suggested that if investors are acting to put more rental units on the market, this should ease the tight rental market, and that would be a good outcome for renters even if it is also a bad situation for noncash buyers who find it difficult to compete with all-cash offers. Moreover that as rents drop and house prices rise, this behavior ought to be self-limiting, because at some point prices are too high and rents are too low for a buyer to see a reasonable profit margin in buying a unit to rent out. Miss-Bomarc posted:Next you'll tell us about how CDOs were a good thing and the market didn't actually crash in 2008, right? Of course not. quote:So you're seriously butthurt that I picked a number out of the air? I'm not seriously butthurt about anything, but yes, I took issue with your figures. The figures I have found indicate that A) a majority of single-family homes are owned by their occupants, even in California; and B) there isn't anything remotely approaching enough money going in to the market by these investors to shift that number to those you pulled out of the air. So I again invite you to back up your assertion that this was definitely going to happen or even likely to happen. All you have to do is show that Blackstone, or anyone else, has the capability of controlling 65% of the residential California real estate in the next X years. This would require them to purchase a substantial majority of the existing non-owner-occupied units in California, and in addition at least 20% or more of the owner-occupied units in California. The reason I took issue with your post is because I don't think this sort of wild-eyed doomsaying prediction is productive or useful. I think it's misinformation. And I think that there are very real existing problems with how home ownership works in this state and in this country, big problems that need a lot of work to solve, so it's actually counterproductive to invent imaginary new ones. quote:Do you agree or disagree with this statement: "massive inequality in property ownership with majority holdings by a small number of owners is a bad thing". I do not agree with that statement (because you used the word "is", which would require that it be a fact of the present, and I don't agree that it is). But that is splitting hairs, so: I agree with this modified version: "Massive inequality in property ownership is a bad thing" (irrespective of who owns it, companies or individuals or even the State) And also this statement: "majority ownership of real estate by a small number of entities would be a bad thing" (because if that actually happened of course it'd be bad) And to more thoroughly explain my position, this statement: "A lot of people who ought to be able to buy a house cannot, for a variety of reasons many of which are due to gross mismanagement by the government of their duty to effectively regulate the real estate market, including (especially) the mortgage market; anti-competetive laws ought to be enforced to prevent any single corporate entity from exercising a monopoly in any domain, including and especially services which ordinary people cannot do without, such as food, utilities, and housing; but at present there is no significant threat that a single corporation will gain such a monopoly in the rental real estate market, except possibly in a very small number of extremely limited markets, owing to extreme conditions existing there which are unlikely to persist." So basically: there's a lot of real things we can complain about without going chicken-little about extremely unrealistic scenarios of dystopian virtual slavery by imaginary cartoonishly-evil corporate overlords. There are real-life cartoonishly-evil corporate overlords doing actual real terrible things that destroy millions of people's lives in any number of other domains for us to futilely decry on internet message boards. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 05:04
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Miss-Bomarc posted:I'm saying it's going to happen by accident. I don't agree, obviously, but I don't see how I can present my case more strongly than I have. quote:But why would they do that? If they're making good money at existing rental prices then why would they act to reduce those prices by a significant degree? There isn't a 1:1 relationship between placing more units on the market and reducing the price of those units. Example: if you have 100 units in a market and they are making you a 10% net profit margin, and you calculate that purchasing 100 additional units and putting them on the market will reduce your overall margin on all 200 units to 8%, that would clearly be incredibly worth it. quote:why wouldn't large rental-property firms *prefer* a sharply limited supply? For the same reason many providers of commodities don't. I mean, in some cases they do: see the 1970s oil crisis, see also DeBeers. But in most cases they only prefer this situation if they have a monopoly! Since I don't agree that a monopoly is likely, I hope you can see why I also don't think companies will deliberately withhold hundreds of units from the market just to push prices up some fractional amount. Their overall losses would dwarf the marginal gains from increasing rents by some small number. quote:I'm sure that you mean well but I'm also sure that you have *no* idea how much like 2007 you sound right now. I feel I have a good grasp on the myriad conditions that led to the 2008 pricing crash. I can detail them if you think that would be helpful. I don't think my argument about the unliklihood of a rental market monopoly forming are related to any of them. I am not arguing that another crash is impossible or even unlikely.
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Jul 28, 2013 08:20
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FCKGW posted:Here's a good graph showing investors and cash buyers in the housing market right now. Home sales continue to rise while mortgage applications remain flat. This is not a good graph! This is a terrible graph. Look at what it's actually showing. The blue stuff has one scale, on the left; and the red stuff has a totally different scale, on the right. The person making the graph can select the range of that scale arbitrarily to force the data to appear related in whatever proportion he sees fit. You'll notice that neither scale begins at 0, which means the graph-maker has done precisely that! Even worse, the red stuff is based on an "index" while the blue stuff is an absolute number. The index may or may not be linearly scaled to the underlying data it represents. Effectively, this chart is a lie; possibly a deliberate one, or possibly merely the result of gross incompetence when it comes to informatics, but the outcome is the same. It purports to show that two different metrics are related (or aren't related) but it cannot actually show either of those things. All it really is, is two random charts superimposed on top of each other. You cannot draw a reasonable conclusion from such a thing. e. man statistics misuse chaps my hide. Look, there's more: one chart is for "existing home sales" while the other is for mortgages. But, mortgages can be used to buy new homes, too! So maybe the situation is even worse! On the other hand, you can open a reverse-mortgage on a property you own outright, which some older people/retirees in particular do to withdraw equity to support themselves in their final years. Are those included? Does the existing-home sales include cases where bank-owned properties get sold to an intermediary after foreclosure, which then go on to be sold again within a month or two?  bad misleading chartse2. Why is one a line chart and the other a bar chart?? e3. "Annual rate"? But the bars appear to be monthly or something close to that? What, is it a annualized-rate calculated based on that month's sales, or a trailing count of the previous 12-month total, or what? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Aug 1, 2013 |
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Aug 1, 2013 00:02
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enraged_camel posted:There is also a federal courthouse a few blocks from where I live that's nearing completion. I'm hoping that it will drive away crime and attract supporting businesses and high quality shops to the area, even if that causes some gentrification. Fortunately, Long Beach is pretty good about investing in Section 4 housing, so the pain caused to low-income residents should be somewhat nullified. Courthouses do not usually anchor nice business districts. They attract bail bondsmen, pawn shops, and payday loan sharks. I suppose crime might go down due to the police presence though?
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Aug 4, 2013 05:40
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Rent prices are also up because the population of the state has risen while total units of housing (rent and owned) have not kept up. During the recession, new home starts crashed. It will take a while before they catch up. The peninsula also has a lot less space for new suburban sprawl. New homes require infill and increasing density. There are open/green spaces but most of them are zoned as such (e.g., not for development). East bay still has some land left to develop, and land in general is cheaper, and the east bay cities are more likely to zone for more development. I actually used to live right on the border of Burlingame - my rented unit in a triplex was technically in san mateo, but if you crossed the street you were in Burlingame. We were paying $1400 for a small two bedroom unit with a small garage and an off-street parking spot, not including utilities. This would have been almost 10 years ago now. I imagine rents have gone up substantially since then. Burlingame is a fancy town of better-off wealthier people. Not at the level of Palo Alto or Belmont, but there are cheaper peninsula communities. Hayward varies between "OK" neighborhoods and scary shitholes. Be very careful about where you rent; there's places that are actually almost even nice, but most of the rental/apartment areas are bad neighborhoods. If you wind up east bay in that area, try for san leandro or union city instead.
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Aug 4, 2013 07:36
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I used to get shawerma at a middle-eastern deli in San Mateo on 37th ave. called Alhana Foods, but last time I went by, it was gone. The guy who ran it, Abe, was a Lebanese guy who had training as a french chef and then opened his own deli. One time I brought an Israeli co-worker there for lunch and she said it was the most authentic hummus she'd had in America. I'm completely gutted that it's gone. Over here in concord I've tried a place called Mediterranean and their shawerma is OK, but too tomato-y. The falafal is good though. Their hummus is too, uh, I'm not sure how to describe it. Creamy? Liquidy? It's not quite right. Regarding SF pizza, is Indian Pizza still on 46th and Judah? It's not at all remarkable as a pizza place or as an Indian food place, but their namesake is a tremendous thing that is instantly addictive. For Chinese food I used to go to a place on the corner of 6th and Balboa, because I used to live half a block away. It was always packed with nothing but chinese people, the menus were mostly only in chinese, and the food was amazing. That was in the late 90s though so I dunno how it is now or if it's even still there.
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Aug 6, 2013 05:20
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I always kind of find it rings false to me when people make blanket declarations about "oh the food in x place is better than y place" when those places have dozens and dozens of restaurants of that variety. Like, has anyone ever managed to try every Chinese restaurant in San Francisco? It'd be a daunting task. Never mind actually trying a representative sample of dishes from each of them. There's loving tons of Japanese restaurants too. Here in concord there's at least eight places I can get sushi within two miles of my house, and it's loving Concord. It's almost like people's experiences with what restaurants they've tried are subjective and non-representative or something.
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Aug 6, 2013 23:26
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I bought my house in concord in December 2009 for $240,800. Prices fell further after that, and recently have recovered, and I'm now probably in the black on this purchase but not by a lot. Point is, it's possible to buy a decent house a lot closer to San Francisco than loving Tracy for a lot less than half a mil. I live a ten minute walk from the BART station; my wife's commute into the city (embarcadero) is about 1 hour, including the time spent walking to the station and waiting for a train.
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Aug 12, 2013 19:52
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 13:05 |
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Oh, yeah, for sure if you work on the Peninsula south of Milbrae BART station and you had to drive to work daily, Concord is too far. I was more just saying that there's options that are closer than Tracy. Also, Concord home values are still at a median of ~$370k. If you filter for 4-bedroom houses you still hit a median of $473k. That's the median, there's homes below that, although not, as you correctly say, much south of $350k. cheese posted:Anyway, my point was not that you can't find ok housing on the outskirts of the bay area, but that many young workers (like myself) feel priced out of the market and are forced to make the choice of owning a home in Concord (no offense, but gently caress that) or renting a decent place at a high markup in San Mateo, Sunnyvale, Willow Glen, etc. Yeah. That's exactly where I was at for most of the 2000s. My wife and I rented a ~650 square foot house (cottage, really) with a separate garage for $1650 on the southern edge of Belmont. The financial crisis and housing price collapse was terrible, of course, but it presented me a unique opportunity to do something I honestly didn't think I'd ever be able to do: buy a house in the bay area. My mortgage + taxes + homeowners insurance + PMI are less than what we were paying in rent, and my home is about 1200 square feet, with a two-car garage and a front and back yard, in a decent neighborhood. It'd suck if I couldn't work from home (I'd have to seek work either in SF, or in the East Bay; gently caress commuting to Sunnyvale or something). As-the-crow-flies, Concord is still significantly closer than Tracy, and given the option of BART (and the widening of the caldecott tunnel, due to open this year), it's a lot less of a commute to SF and northern parts of the peninsula.
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Aug 12, 2013 23:09
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