Central planning is almost assured to fail miserably tiling the power more into the hands of rich people while screwing up small people. There is nothing wrong in some cities specialising in industrial buildings while other cities focus on residential projects. Cities should have all this freedom.
The best solution is to relax zoning laws so that the average rents go down till they reach a point where they meet the average.
The real problem with California is that the politicians have put ridiculous elitist objectives such as climate change over sensible and practical objectives such as roof over the head of working middle class people. Somehow some godforsaken fish needs conservation but the minorities in most cities are forced to live in petty ghettos with conditions worse than animals.
P.S. Note that the real victims of these policies have been minorities. I rarely see blacks of hispanics living in better areas of any bay area town. In fact you can guess a neighbourhood is hispanic by just looking at the school ratings. They live in ghettos and their schools tend to be the worst as a result they are perpetually trapped in poverty.
I agree that this proposal is not ideal, but it's much better than what we have, and it might have a chance of passing. Add some way for cities to trade permits, and we can still have suburbs and job centers.
And actually, the root of all this is Prop 13 and the California tax system that makes it profitable for cities to have jobs inside their borders but a money loser to have housing.
If that was fixed, and cities got wealthy from housing, all this would solve itself in a few years.
But that's even more impossible than your "best solution", so we have to keep looking for half measures.
profitable for cities to have jobs inside their borders but a money loser to have housing
This is unrelated to Prop 13 and predates it by over a decade. Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, etc. all focused on industry and jobs while San Jose focused on annexing every parcel they could. Under Dutch Hamman alone, San Jose grew fivefold.
Tell me what is wrong with some of the following solutions:
1. Convert Golden Gate recreational area into a an urban housing area.
2. Widen the Santa Cruz - Los Gatos road to 8 lane expressway and build 3 more cities between los gatos and Santa Cruz by near flattening Santa Cruz mountains.
3. Why entire area of Alviso put under conservation ? Why can't Alviso be made the amazing city it once was ?
4. How about dumping that nonsensical SF LA high speed rail and instead building 10 more freeways and 4 more bridges across the bay ?
In most of these cases the objections are not from cities, objects are not from homeowners but mostly environmental groups whose political clout is next to zero.
P.S. While SF is an amazing tolerant city it has lost its hardcore American values of rising up to a challenge. The spirit that built cities like Seattle or Las Vegas. The Californian politicians are in my opinion far too old to keep up with time, far too rich to understand the problems and far too secure to actually do something for people.
There is no trade off between climate change and housing. Those are entirely separate things.
SFO is way too hung up on its past and the citizens living within need to get over themselves and allow “evil” developers to tear down all the old crap and build up. They live in a city. Shit changes.
It is astonishing how many two or three level buildings exist even within the most dense part of the city. Even more amazing is how even 5 minutes away from market street exists two story houses with garages in front.
Seriously. It isn’t historic. It’s just old crap. Tear it down. Build up.
Only gonna work if government can tell all the existing residents to fuck off and allow more development.
Governments should work for the people, and specifically, for the people they govern. Telling “existing residents to fuck off” falls somewhat short of that.
I'd actually argue that it is the opposite of a trade-off.
The more houses that are built down town, the less urban sprawl will exist.
One of the biggest contributors to climate change is everything that comes with urban sprawl, and high density housing fixes that.
A basic example of the problems that urban sprawl causes is more transportation pollution. (IE, people who live near work are less likely to drive. Total average driving could be cut in half)
I have never argued it is mutually exclusive. What I am saying is that climate change is a don't care term when it comes to Bay area. Worrying about climate change and carbon footprint of bay area is like worrying about low viper fluid when your car has lost its break. Technological revolution spearheaded by bay areas has saved millions of trees in last 3 decades have having few more million people in bay area will help us completely transform the world's sustainability.
The rural poor are the first to be affected by any ecological disaster (including "godforsaken fish"), as work disappears due to loss of crop and wildlife habitats.
And even urban poor tend to live in places more likely to be rendered unlivable by flooding (see New Orleans).
Clearly you are not familiar with Californian politics. California has already punished its poor farmers and they have already lost their livelihood.
Multimillionaires living in Mountain View have voted to increase energy prices to battle climate change while enjoying the wonderful moderate temperatures in their own homes. Where as the poor farmer in Redding to Frenso now has to pay lot more to keep his house warm.
The sanctuary city policies peddled by people living in safer towns like SF or Sacramento have destroyed inner cities completely such as Fresno, Stockton, Oakland, San Bernardino etc. I see that hispanics are living these areas claiming there are too many illegal Mexicans.
During the draught the fat-cats of bay area ensured that the poor farmers are denied the water received and stored in their counties and instead the bay area has plenty of water to waste.
The idiotic policies such as not doing controlled burning of forest eventually caused the massive wildfires that not only destroyed thousands of acres of forest cover but also thousands of wild animals and flora and fauna. Highway 1 that was washed out in the landslide is not yet opened.
California has not built a single new major road in last 30 years. This has resulted into inefficient travel times. I5 has become risky to drive on while route 99 which is mostly used by poor people is USA's deadliest road with maximum fatalities.
The point being that climate change is as elitist as it could get in California has it has already destroyed lives of the most vulnerable people in the state while promising them great future. Instead of waiting for climate change to kill people if you kill them today, I guess thats a win for the planet.
> Somehow some godforsaken fish needs conservation but the minorities in most cities are forced to live in petty ghettos with conditions worse than animals.
Well it's exactly because of this kind of short term thinking that we are in an environmental bind in the first place. America is the richest country in the world and even our poor are doing very well in the grand scheme of things.
We can afford to and should ensure that our children and grandchildren still have fish and forests. A higher cost of living seems like cheap price for not bequeathing our children a barren wasteland.
California's idiotic conservation policies have resulted into massive wildfires that actually destroyed more forests and wildlife.
If the cost of living is high and if you can't live in the state there is no point in conserving anything for you grandchildren. Because they won't exist in first place. Most of the single white woman I know in bay area have a dog and an abortion in the name of reproduction. Asians have pathetic fertility rates as they can't afford to have more than 2 children. It is not worth protecting future by screwing the current generation.
> ridiculous elitist objectives such as climate change
You're saying the effects of climate change - drought, famine, rising sea levels etc. - are problems that elites only will have to face? I mean I'll give you beach properties falling into the seas being an elite-problem - though I notice many cities are investing in seawalls and the like.
Is the California solar power mandate going to solve climate change by itself? No, but it’s another example of where non-wealthy Californians are asked to carry the load for the rest of the world.
Upvoted. Views like yours are not welcome on HN in general but this point is something that goes over the head of HN crowd which happens to be mostly rich people getting fat salaries in bay area.
While all these people talk about compassion and inequality somehow they think that the Mexican family in Gilroy who has 6 kids to feed needs to prioritise solar panels on their house instead of feeding their own children. Techies who otherwise understand the problem of scale and marginal utility and unable to comprehend the fact for every $1000 rise in house price we are forcing a poor person spend more money on housing instead of food, nutrition, health and education.
California's wildfires have generated more CO2 and has destroyed far more wealth than what we have saved by paying huge subsidies for electric cars. Incompetent government services will cause more such wildfires and will negate any benefits of solar panels either.
Solar lobbies are behind this new law. They are the ones going to make money while the poor people will end up paying for it.
>are asked to carry the load for the rest of the world.
Huh? Pretty sure most of the world aint the ones causing climate change, the US is as culpable, often more so, than the rest of the first world, and the rest of the world is not nearly as bad per person.
US Companies (along with other first world nations) acting without effective regulation through the 90's is one of the factors that got climate change as bad as it is now, I don't see how the rest of the world has much to do with it.
Feeling that the lower income areas are shouldering more of the impact than the rich is fair, but the problem there is not climate change regulation as a concept, it's the bad targeting and kid gloves the companies get treated by.
Having companies shoulder more of the responsibility in this, as well as housing, is surely part of what would fix lower income areas getting an unfair lunch?
The mandate doesn't apply to buildings taller than 3 stories. Maybe it'll have the effect of encouraging denser development? That would be a win for climate change, no?
You can't build a 4 story building unless city approves it first and in most cases it is not being allowed. Zoning regulations need to simplified for that to happen.
So we get to the actual root of the problem. Instead of dismissing climate change as an "elitist" concern and demonizing any measures to combat it as "anti-poor" and "anti-development" maybe we should talk about treating the root cause - entrenched interests pushing their interests to the detriment of society's.
"There is nothing wrong in some cities specialising in industrial buildings while other cities focus on residential projects. Cities should have all this freedom."
- Agreed, in this case if 'office tower/corporate campus' focused cities such as San Francisco (Salesforce/Uber), Mountain View (Google), Menlo Park (FB), Cupertino (Apple) want other cities on the Peninsula to build the housing, then they should share the additional tax revenue they are getting from such specialization instead of capturing all the profits and externalizing all the costs. Otherwise, SB827 will stay where it is now.
They are already sharing the revenue in the form of higher salaries for their employees which are making land lords in other cities rich. It is the kind of money transfer you are talking about.
The problem about higher housing prices is more about the poor who are not working for Salesforce or Uber or Google. They all can afford housing. It is about those who are cashiers at Whole foods or the people who come to fix your plumbing.
'They are already sharing the revenue in the form of higher salaries for their employees which are making land lords in other cities rich. It is the kind of money transfer you are talking about.'
>> Agreed that is to a certain extent what is current going on, but what makes more sense to me is instead of the money transfer going to only the city with the shiny new office building and the landlords in neighboring cities, it should go to the neighboring cities that are actually hosting the new employees who are actually building affordable housing and more school capacity.
Also families and the cities themeselves. The new middle class may be able to afford to rent a place, but barely and that won’t bode well in retirement. Add increased stress and brittleness when 50% of your income goes to housing. The cities themeselves are seeing entire generations without young families.
Affordable housing should be a basic right, and because of that it should supersedes the policies and regulations around marginal environmental and safety concearns and most certainly the winning from the NIMBY folks that limit it.
> Central planning is almost assured to fail miserably tiling the power more into the hands of rich people while screwing up small people.
This is not true. I encourage people to study the growth of Asian cities like Bangkok, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Central planning, contrary to simplistic ideological beliefs, is an excellent way to ensure the cities actually grow and grow equitably. Leaving these decisions to minor localities is a recipe for exactly what we see in California where residents vote in their own favor which is very often not for smooth, long-term growth.
> The best solution is to relax zoning laws so that the average rents go down till they reach a point where they meet the average.
More fantasy. It's very strange how Americans are obsessed with this idea that all their urban problems are due to zoning. At this point it's like this purely mythical enemy, a la Communism, which is rampaging across the land and must be fought on every street corner. This despite that we can look abroad and see very clear examples of cities that grow because of strong regulation. (Here Singapore is the classic example.) It's almost like zoning can be used for different purposes?
> The real problem with California is that the politicians have put ridiculous elitist objectives such as climate change over sensible and practical objectives such as roof over the head of working middle class people.
This is just meaningless nonsense.
But all of this does highlight why things won't get better. Americans are ideologically committed to policies that just don't work. SB827 was a bold attempt to reverse this -- remove power from local governments and rezone the already-dense cities to promote growth rather than restrict it -- but it never even made it out of the committee.
High rents, largely caused by a chronic undersupply of housing, absolutely does make it so that less wealthy residents have to spend an inordinate portion of their income to remain in certain metros. And I have seen lots of housing obstructionism pushed under the guise of environmentalism.
The best solution is to relax zoning laws so that the average rents go down till they reach a point where they meet the average.
The real problem with California is that the politicians have put ridiculous elitist objectives such as climate change over sensible and practical objectives such as roof over the head of working middle class people. Somehow some godforsaken fish needs conservation but the minorities in most cities are forced to live in petty ghettos with conditions worse than animals.
P.S. Note that the real victims of these policies have been minorities. I rarely see blacks of hispanics living in better areas of any bay area town. In fact you can guess a neighbourhood is hispanic by just looking at the school ratings. They live in ghettos and their schools tend to be the worst as a result they are perpetually trapped in poverty.