Senate The California Housing Crisis

Everyone wants to move to California. But when people get there they discover high rents, higher housing prices and few homes being built. NIMBYs and environmentalists have played a role in making the housing crisis worse. Yet somehow it takes the average person 24 dollars an hour of pay to make the average rent. Yet the average in California 18. It takes an annual salary of 70k just to afford a house. Nice huh. Yet people keep coming. California likes to pride itself on its green living but is it really green living if everyone travels two hours each day to get to work? Is it green living if more land is spent on single family housing then apts. You can knock NYC for being a city with no views but of buildings but at least you save more energy then most LA residents stuck in traffic. NY might appear to be crowded but a short trip and you are outside the city. In LA its not a short trip. La eats up more resources to live farther out then NYC lives closer together.


Is there a responsible solution that allows certain number of apts being built to certain number of houses?

 

How is everyone doing today?

 

I'm for strictly enforced reproduction quotas. Every second family can have one child, determined by lottery, followed by compulsory sterilization. Only bringing the U.S. population down to 100 million by the end of this century can save us.

Obviously California is a special case. Forced deportations of everyone who doesn't make movies, have a social media startup or doesn't run a venture capital fund would be a good start.

 

But who will make their soy milk half café white chocolate mocha latte?

 

Sorry to belabor this, but I have the sense that people have no idea how badly the rental market has been impacted by income discrimination. If they think you can't afford an apartment, landlords will often refuse to consider you as a tenant. Sometimes landlords will increase the rent after a year at a level that's permissible by local laws and regulations until it's no longer affordable for the tenant to stay in the apartment. Finding landlords who don't discriminate on the basis of income is next to impossible, and in a wealth-bigoted state like California it's difficult to even comprehend the scope of the problem. I'd call it systemic and pervasive.

 

California is the most narcissistic state in the union. If it wasn't then you would large apt complexes and other buildings thru out the area instead of the single family home on a third of an acre. But hey got to have the view of nothing but sprawl. NIMBYs have treated LA and the surrounding area like its all for them because they have the money. They swindle the environmentalists into thinking that they have to save the animals because it was there attitudes that pushed out apt complexes and high rises in favor of housing. Look at NYC, same amount of people on the third of the space with a lot less traffic and more to do. NYC moves more people quicker and more efficient then LA could ever dream of. LA is full of dreamers who want to go green but don't have the balls to kick out half the population to give rise to real housing solutions. Instead they just move it somewhere else.

 

I'm totally with you on kicking out half the California population. But where do you kick them out to? I'll tell you where: Not In My Back Yard. Hopefully Texas or one of the three Dakotas.

 

Flush it all away.

 

Not enough water for that.

 

I don't know what this drought hysteria is all about. The last time I was in California you could get a bottle of Voss sparkling artesian water pretty much everywhere.

 

What you need are honest politicians that will basically ignore everyone and build for the future. They need to tear down large sections of a city to make way for the population. Then with those places built they can lower the cost of all apts built to force the land lords to lower the cost of housing and then make it work for everyone. You need politicians with back bone. LA is reaching a point where people that are leaving will eclipse those coming in and then the LA dream will be over.

You need giant apt complexes that can house thousands of people to basically lower the cost rent. If you want to, build like they do in Downtown Montreal. They have large office buildings with shops on the first two floors and two bottom basement floors and then the subway. You can have a few of those in strategic places and be able to have the same population on half the area. Use subways to get them to other places and then they can have their cars in strategic locations to get to work or outside the city. They have to be mixed income as well to reduce crime populations. Its quite easy to do. Just no body has the balls. But with one building or two politicians have all their constituents in one place giving them easier access and less strain on city resources.

 

Behold: Peach Trees.

The California housing development of the future!

 

this actually isn't a ridiculous beezel thread so meh on those treating it as such.

we have the same issue in London. property prices are crazy, rents are climbing, fuelled by the fact it's seen as a safe haven for investing crap loads of money in zone 1 apartments. half of Kensington (apparently) is basically empty as it's just foreign investors pumping money into it but never living there. and there's also not enough houses being built, due to a combination of things but including developers sitting on land, excessive red tape etc. problem is even when places are built they're too expensive anyway.

even if you earn say £70k, which according to some reports is considered twice the average London wage (not UK average, which is far lower), you would get a mortgage for around £315k. given the average property price in London is something like £580k, it doesn't get you that much. probably a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment at best in zone 2 or 3, depending on area. so if you're actually just earning an average wage, god forbid under, then buying is basically impossible.

similarly to LA, I think London could be more dense.

 

Okay, jesus. I'm going to try and explain this in a variety of ways. Because the housing crises in the country are actually three separate things, all different, but manifest themselves similarly. Let's cover each one off.

Market Scarcity / "Market Borne Inflation"

This is what San Francisco, for example, and environs is facing. Regulations on building size, historical / landmark districts, etc. have made demand higher than supply by a lot as well as companies such as Google, etc. providing housing and being able to absorb costs (in various ways) by both increasing the price per square footage for the locations as well as providing "private public" transportation for their employees to get to work. So prices rise, corporations absorb the cost, regular people get priced out, etc.

Artificial Scarcity

This is one of the primary drivers of the NYC crisis, which is not that corporations are purchasing at excessively high price per square foot but foreign investors are doing so as a means to tax shelter their money. They buy $30 million dollar apartments as pied a terres or, literally, tax shelters and only get charged RE tax and there's no penalty for having empty real estate collecting dust, while also pricing people out of the market.

Bad Risk

This ends up being a combination of the above two -- where scarcity exists in a market from one of the above two methods -- and because relatively normal people are being priced out of the market, in order to stay in a location / city / etc. the loans required are more risky. This is a sub-set of the 2008 / 2009 housing bubble crisis, but in this case is being driven primarily from corporations and ultra-rich people (usually non-Americans) pricing everyday people out of their own home markets, so the everyday people don't look at the risk in the same way.

Each one of those is a different problem, each one requires a different way to solve it, and there are powerful forces arrayed against solving them in most cases. It's not just one "California housing crisis" it's a bunch of nationwide mini-crises.

 

Just don't go there?

 

On the low income end there has been a revolution over the past 15-20 years to tear down urban housing projects and replace them with subsidized housing programs integrated into mixed income neighborhoods. The problems with housing projects were real, but the problems with the new approach is that it's been badly underfunded in at atmosphere first of a real estate bubble and then later municipal and state budget crises. There isn't remotely enough of this kind of housing to meet demand. Chicago for example has a Low Income Housing Trust Fund with 600 participating properties and almost no vacancies ever.

 

i don't know how people live in southern california. i lived in central california and L.A. later . My parents sold their house there in 1996 and the price has tripled. With all the companies that were moving out of California (my dad's company sold their land there because of property taxes and moved it to arizona)
i don't know who can afford to pay those prices for housing.

 

But can you smell what the Rock is cooking?

 

The dream of California is that every century or so, San Francisco and LA should get a fresh start with the real estate thing:



edit, sorry. too late. but it's a damn fine trailer.

 

We almost moved to LA when I was a kid. But my parents found comparable housing in Florida for half the cost. Florida has its share of problems sure, complete with a water problem that the public doesn't address. But housing is at least affordable and plentiful.

 

In Florida, you can buY a million dollar house for $200,000.

 

What if I want to and a million dollar house for $200,000?

 

I am assuming that you are making a some kind of joke here.