1. There are some specialized types of jobs in the software industry where there are only a small handful of employers and where most of those employers are located in Silicon Valley. There are some areas in the software industry, such as web development and enterprise software, where there are plenty of jobs outside Silicon Valley and similar tech hubs. Plenty of businesses need custom applications, and the Microsoft software stack of Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET, Azure, and other products is commonly used outside of Silicon Valley, which seems to be focused on Linux. But suppose you work in the area of compilers, or you're an operating systems developer. The chances of moving to a place that isn't a tech hub and finding a compiler or operating systems development job is lower than finding a web development or Microsoft enterprise app development position. My line of work is in research in systems and AI, and it would be difficult for me to me to find similar work in most American metro areas outside of the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and New York, all of which (except for Austin) are expensive.

2. The Bay Area is famous for its acceptance of diverse cultures, lifestyles, and worldviews. The Bay Area's cosmopolitan atmosphere is one of my favorite aspects of living in the area. However, cosmopolitan urban areas in the United States tend to be expensive. New York, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles are still expensive places, even if they are not as expensive as the Bay Area. An exception to the correlation between cosmopolitanism and expense is Sacramento, a very diverse place which by California standards is also still affordable despite rising housing prices. I would not mind living there, but it's a very long commute to Silicon Valley, and there are not many jobs in my subfield of systems and AI research in the Sacramento area. If I couldn't live in or near a diverse, cosmopolitan area, my next preference would be a tourist town with a nice, laid-back atmosphere, such as many of the towns on the Central Coast of California. But, once again, those areas lack the jobs I want.

But not all tech companies in Silicon Valley pay Facebook/Google levels of compensation. There are plenty of engineers in Silicon Valley who make low six-figure salaries (i.e., $100K-$150K) and who don't own five or six figures worth of stock. I fall in this category. While we can afford to rent apartments in Silicon Valley, buying a house within an hour commute from Silicon Valley in a safe neighborhood is definitely a stretch goal for us. If I want to buy at my current salary, it's either a 2-bedroom condo in South San Jose or in Alameda County, or it's a long commute from exurbs such as Tracy and Hollister.

Now, San Diego is much more affordable and would be a very appealing option for me since the housing prices are within reach, perhaps not in places like La Jolla, but in places a little further away like Oceanside and Escondido. I wouldn't mind relocating to either one of those places.

Salaries will become lower because there will be too much supply, as dev people will flock in. Conversations will become a lot less interesting because S/N ratio will decrease.

There will be less benefit from living in the Valley if you are one of the very best (if you make a salary in top 10% of the dev jobs, you are not concerned with the rents now, it is you who DRIVE the rents to where they are), and more benefit if you aren't so good.

VC will also have a much higher pool of founders to pick from. Non-funded founders are poor, many can't go to the Valley now, they will. VCs will get picky, and deals will become worse for everyone. Valley will just get watered down.

Also, it’s weird to say that with more people moving in it will lower the amount of competent people. That’s not necessarily true and there’s no evidence that the influx of people will affect the ratio of what it is now.

Being away from the valley has allowed me to recognize how odd most of the people there are and how much it’s affected my own thinking during my stay there. Elitist thinking like this runs rampant and when you move to other places you’ll see the people in the Bay Area aren’t all that elite after all.

As for salaries the point of Silicon Valley as a selling point is to try to pay for quality - a fixed housing SV would still be more expensive than generic office in a generic town or outsourcing to cheaper still.

1. specialized jobs. True, and you will miss out on some career options, as this is the center of the world for tech by far. But nowadays there are remote work possibilities in many areas and the lower cost of living as well as much lower taxes outside CA make up for higher salaries in the bay area (remote work jobs tend to pay a bit less).

2. "Diversity". Meh, you can find all the diversity/culture you need in any decently sized city. My closest friends have been from Eastern Europe/balkans and I find those guys wherever I go. Whatever you are into, you'll find it, but you just have to seek it out. It's like people who rave about being in a town with so many art galleries and symphonies, but they don't actually attend said galleries or symphonies. And most people can't tell the difference between the Santa Fe symphony and the SF Symphony, TBH. Sure, it's a step down, but you will get all the culture you need. In terms of tolerance, the bay area is not what I would call tolerant -- it's a pretty authoritarian place. Try wearing a MAGA hat to work and see how tolerant they are. I'm not talking about getting dirty looks, odds are good you will get physically assaulted. Having lived here for a while, I've seen the transition from a quirky place with a strong libertarian bent and that likes to experiment to one that is more of a monoculture constantly looking for something to be outraged about, and the overton window for what is tolerated is shrinking every day. Even a lot of the old style hippies which I used to hang out with have moved out, many heading to Portland or TX. Oddly, places like Palo Alto and Cupertino are much more tolerant of other worldviews. A good rule of thumb is that if you can find a neighborhood with a thriving pentecostal church, a presbyterian church, a catholic church, and a synagogue all in reasonable proximity, then you have truly discovered a place where there is diversity of opinions and worldviews. Also, if the state isn't deep blue or deep red, then there is some diversity of worldviews. Most people, however, only pretend to want that. What they want is to be surrounded by those who share their values, which is completely understandable. You can find that and lower cost of living in many places.

3. Don't overlook walkability and nice, old fashioned architecture. This is huge. It's the best thing San Francisco has going for it -- human scale architecture combined with density. That's the one thing you will miss the most. There are so many benefits from not needing a car, not only health benefits, but mental health benefits. Despite all the problems with homelessness in the city, which have gotten much worse over the years, there many nice walkable neighborhoods, as well as nice staircase hikes, viewspots. It's lovely.

In terms of places to look at, there are lots of nice places that, in my opinion, would provide much higher standards of living.

1. Miami/beach places in Florida.

2. Small towns on the east coast, like Asheville, Charleston, Charlottesville.

3. Washington DC is underrated, but also expensive and there are crime issues. But not as pricey as SF.

4. Chicago has low cost of living if you can put up with the cold. Crime issues tend to be isolated to bad neighborhoods so the headlines aren't as bad. One thing to be aware of is the horrible state finances in Illinois -- high income people are going to be soaked, so caveat emptor.

5. Although NY is expensive, Long Island is relatively inexpensive still.

6. The entire desert southwest is awesome -- New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, are all gorgeous states with wonderful cities. Take a look at Flagstaff, Arizona.

7. New Hampshire is underrated, if you can take the cold.

For walkability, which is key for me, one option is to find a small town -- those tend to be walkable. It needs to be not dead and close to a big town. Access to healthcare is a real issue in small towns, so you will end up driving to big towns to see your doctor.

DC the city is nice for the most part; crime and rough areas are concentrated mostly in South East DC. The DC suburbs are literally the overall richest counties (Loudoun VA, Fairfax VA, PGC Maryland, etc.). Lot of tech around there, in those 'burbs, but also expensive. To unlock the SF-FAANG level salaries around DC you need to do cleared work -- with all the headaches that security clearances imply.

Really liked Salt Lake City, Utah. Mormon presence is lower compared to other parts of the city and a beer isn't too expensive. Weather and people are nice.

Heard good things about Boise.

"We've got ours, everyone else can bugger off" is a political position subject to debate, not a property of the universe.

The risk is what happens when that job is done and you find yourself in the boonies with no meaningful tech work within hundreds of miles?

I was at Sun during the era when they made a big push to get people to give up their offices (save on real estate) and go remote, work from anywhere! It was so tempting to move to Hawaii and keep the silicon valley salary. I'm glad I didn't. I know many people who did. When Sun was over, they found themselves owning farmland in the middle of nowhere, no job and no possibility of getting one in the area.

North America is vast and largely empty. This is a planning issue in that cities allow this sort of demand to grow unchecked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20834469

I lived there for several years and got out, and it’s really nice to be living somewhere I know I won’t spend half the year with a little voice in the back of my head suggesting suicide as the solution to every other problem because I am tragically low on sunlight and vitamin D even with a 2’ square sun lamp and lots of pills, and I see the symptoms of the same shit in the friend I’m talking about who ended up there after SF’s insane rents pushed him out.

Sure we admire their ingenuity and hard-work ethic and how they recovered the land from the sea but that same energy probably could have been applied with more productive results somewhere else. Look what the Mormons have done with Utah. Maybe the Dutch could have done something similar with Montana (or even Minnesota). I'm certain they would have done a better job with San Francisco than we've done.

It's not an issue of building out, or even necessarily of building up, but just allowing and/or encouraging more building and allowing some building to replace existing low-density housing.

I've lived an hour North of SF my entire life. I've seen how housing policies affects SF as well as where I live (which is also very expensive, but not quite to the same level). People don't like to allow too much change into a neighborhood because it changes the nature of the community. News flash, so does allowing housing prices to double or triple over a couple decades. The only difference is that the existing land owners get to capitalize on that, so it's not just about change, it's also about people controlling the flow of benefits of an area to maximize their own benefits.

My inability to not afford housing in the places that I want to live in are not an outcome based on “efficient markets”.

The cost of housing in major American cities is largely determined by whether they can build more housing to meet demand and lower costs. The new housing is blocked most often by people who already live there.

So now the question is how different groups with opposing interests might apply power to get their desired outcome.

I can’t live in Monte Carlo, for example, even though it looks quite lovely. And I accept that, because that’s how reality works.

He simply needs to take the personal responsibility to make it achievable vs capitulate to some strange reasoning of "it's not my fault I can't afford it, it's their fault because XYZ".

The question is whether the people who cook my food, do my laundry, plumb my home, deliver seltzer to my bodega, butcher chicken in my grocery store should be able to afford to live within a reasonable distance of my home. We can choose to build cities that make it nearly impossible for them to do so and for them to live in constant fear of homelessness (with many eventually sliding into it) or we can build ones where they can comfortably afford a modest home.

Another factor is that the average wage in the area is around 12/13 dollars. For someone to be paid twice the average private sector wage for the area is quite significant. Especially when this is a small town and money that is paid for the librarian comes out of their budget and means an reallocation of resources from elsewhere.

Tl;dr I'm not saying that the librarian should not get a pay raise to 25 an hour. What I am saying is that just b/c people are skeptical about wages doesn't mean that it's a direct correlation with them hating on college graduates/ect.

For some industries (viz: YCombinator, startups, and VC) there really aren't many options outside the SF-SJ corridor, NYC, Seattle, and Austin being among the few, though largely of vastly smaller scope.

There's also the matter of those who've grown up or raised families in the region who find that they either can no longer live their themselves or that their children must move elsewhere. Fair or not, this destroys relationships and community cohesion.

Cities exist for reasons, and facilitating encounters and interactions between people (and organisations) is chief among these.

In fact, if you pull up the 25 best places to live list that US news does, you’ll find that other than Santa Rosa and San Jose, nothing else in the Bay Area makes the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

>>>* Pockets of STD's spikes that happen every few years

These seem like "those who live in glass houses should not throw bricks" positions to me. [1][2][3] And if you look at the STI maps by region, it's the poor Southeast states with the highest disease rates, not the Flyover Country interior (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Missouri, etc...)

[1]https://alt1053.radio.com/blogs/kcbs-radio/san-francisco-has...

[2]https://www.sfaf.org/resource-library/hiv-hep-c-statistics/

[3]https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/San-F...

In any case, you cite

> * Lower incomes

> * Less savings

in response to an article about a person who is miserable living in a garage. Is it strange to consider that some would rather be "worse" off living in a larger purpose-built dwelling somewhere else? Perhaps they can get paid on an SF pay scale and buy housing in cheaper markets?

> * Higher suicide rates

SF is literally building a suicide barrier on its iconic bridge.

TL;DR; It's okay that people want to live where they want to live. People thrive in different environments.

But that's not the grouping of cities commonly referred to as being "coastal." I obviously know that non-coastal != rural, but that equivalence is frequently used in American discourse. See also: "flyover country", etc.

Those are populous cities.

>in response to an article about a person who is miserable living in a garage.

Something something anecdotes.

HN is complete garbage holy shit.

FAR is the ratio of floor area to lot area; it's not about parking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floor_area_ratio

Parking minimums are certainly a problem, though, especially when they limit dense construction in places with excellent public transit.

If we're talking about the US, excellent public transit isn't really a thing. IMO, roughly 50% of Manhattan qualifies, and that's it.

Sure, most of the country doesn't have adequate transit. But some neighborhoods in most metros do. Cities should not be bound to parking minimums in those dense urban centers. If it turns out that transit is not good enough, then the market value of such housing will be appropriately low.

You mean, for example the Palo Alto Caltrain station? If you happen to work in another city center, that will suffice for your daily commute, but not much else. How do you get home from the casino at 2am? How do you get to your friend's house in the suburbs? How do you get to In-n-Out?

I'd consider this barely acceptable, far from excellent.

Employment is an excellent example of an activity which the government might want to facilitate with public transportation, and, as you point out, Caltrain is optimized for certain daily commutes. Late-night gambling-entertainment, on the other hand, belongs way down the list of priorities.

The bigger problems I think have to do with building height restrictions and anything else that explicitly restricts the density of a city.

I can have my two kids share 100sqft room (10x10) but two 50sqft (5x10) rooms in the same space would make everyone happier and they're young enough that they don't need a big room.

Only to give you a data point, in my country (Italy) norms require (since the '70's):

1) at least 9 sqm for a bedroom (for 1 person, 12 sqm for a double), rooms below 9 sqm in size can only be "studios" or "storage" or similar (at least officially)

2) at least 28 sqm total size to have the dignity of "flat" for 1 person or 38 sqm for 2 people (i.e. anything below 28 sqm cannot be registered as living space unit and while you can of course have two people living in a 28 sqm it is not "legal" , more generally, to be "legal", you need 28 sqm for the first person and additional 10 sqm for each other person resident in the house)

3) 2.70 m height for any room where people may stay for long periods of time (i.e. exception made for corridors, closets and bathrooms that must anyway be 2.40 m)

4) at least one bathroom of at least 4 sqm for each unit

5) a window or similar that must be at least 1/8th of the surface of the room (again excluded corridors, closets, bathrooms) for light and ventilation

Then you have two doors, and the space those doors need. Two windows for emergency exits.

I agree that height restrictions are a much bigger contributor to the lack of housing, but preventing dorm-style living seems to have little utility aside from preventing poorer people from living in your area.

They have in the past. They were tenements, projects etc. Most have been torn down and a vow made to never do this again.

Look at places like Hong Kong and other big Asian cities today, to see what high density living looks like. It can be good but often isn't.

https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...

Many people don't want to cook or clean. Many people don't want or need a living room or a private bathroom. This does not necessarily imply that these people must live in horrid squalor.

I respect the folks who try out tiny houses. It’s hard for me to picture them having a happy time or if they do maybe when they accurately document their experiences I will have a better idea of what I really need, which might still be a 2500 sq. ft. McMansion, but maybe not.

Edit: according to this article, the regulations used by 90 percent of US communities allow 70 sq ft. https://www.hunker.com/13711464/building-code-requirements-f...

Also, remove height restrictions and build better transit.

That's another way of saying "a housing policy problem"

This response is a common issue we run into when discussing policy. When people do not understand that policy is the absolute bedrock foundation for any and all subsequent law or regulation, they tend to not be able to visualize how wide of a net “policy” is and what falls underneath it.

Example:

Policy simplified: No more than X number of multi-family homes allowed.

Regulations and zoning laws are second: We only have room for X, so we can have no more than X number of multi family homes in Y sq miles.

As you can see, a decision does not start as a law nor regulation, it is broad policy.

So with your claim that it’s a regulation issue, how would changing the inferior part of the policy ensure it promotes change from the bottom-up? It will not change the issues that are created as a result of the original base policy (i.e. X number of MFHs allowed).

All regulations and laws must have a basis which can help explain the what, how, and why of implementation to ensure it falls within the boundaries of the initial policy decision.

Good luck fighting the land owners. NIMBY is more organized and has huge political will.

I honestly don't know what can be done and worry this will always be a problem.

Back in 1962 my grandma had her house built on some undesirable empty hills, in the city but far from the action. There wasn't a tech industry. That house is in the geographic center of San Francisco and is now worth about $2,000,000. It's still on a lovely tree-lined street with plenty of available free parking.

You would take that from her and the other people who created the neighborhood you now covet. You would change it forever, adding all the charm of a trailer park or housing project. The free parking would be gone.

No. You go make your own desirable neighborhood in a different city.

You're trying to cheat by skipping a step. You don't want to wait half a century. You want that nice neighborhood now, without investing the time to create it.

And free parking? It's city-funded parking. The city owns the roads and maintains them. Long ago, density and car usage was low enough that the city had more than enough parking spots to go around. Now it's different. You have to drive around for a while to find an open spot. You pay in time instead of money. For many of us, that's not a worthwhile trade.

Also, I do wonder what the property taxes are on that $2,000,000 home. If the owner hasn't changed, it could be ridiculously low. In most states, the outcome of property taxes is that they encourage more economically efficient use of land. This is very important because land is a scarce resource in cities. Sadly, prop 13 has made this not the case in California.

My grandfather fought in the Vietnam war. About a decade after he retired, two new families moved into the houses next door to him: a Vietnamese family on his left and a Russian family on his right. This caused him great distress. Should he have been allowed to stop those families from living next to him? I don't think so, and I think building apartments in the neighborhood causes far less distress than that.

Wrong, because of:

> the outcome of property taxes is that they encourage more economically efficient use of land

County assessors routinely change the valuations of real property and the taxes you pay are proportionate to that valuation -- not what you paid for it. If she bought the place for $20,000, which is likely in 1962, then she likely cannot even afford the taxes on the property anymore and would be forced to leave.

Basically, the longer you own a house in California, the lower your effective property taxes are.

But your main point is correct: A more productive use of the land would be for grandma to sell her home to a developer who would then build apartments. Reassessing property taxes every few years is a great way to encourage such developments. Again, the end result isn't to take someone's home. It's to tax them commensurate with the value of the land (a scare resource in cities). If they don't think the taxes are worth it, they can sell their land (usually for millions of dollars) and move to a place where land isn't as expensive.

You can't just move a really old person without increasing the risk of death. She would lose her connections to church and family. She would lose the familiarity of her home, both inside and out. This would likely cause depression and might even cause confusion.

If we're going to be coveting land, what about the park? The land value of Golden Gate Park is immense. People wanting a park can go visit one where the land isn't as expensive.

So you're saying she can't afford it. She can't afford to support the city that she now finds herself the beneficiary of? Perhaps because not enough people are paying property taxes? If there was more housing to go around, there would be more people to share that responsibilty.

If she sells she'll be well compensated. She can move somewhere more affordable and have plenty of money left over to give her kids.

Good for her. She could actually afford to own. This generation doesn't have the same luxury.

I hope Millennials and Gen-Z will be courteous enough to not defund social security and Medicare. They're growing pretty angry with student loans, cost of living, and inability to afford housing and retirement. They'll be looking for someone to blame when they're 40 and jaded.

> You would change it forever, adding all the charm of a trailer park or housing project. The free parking would be gone.

That's extreme. I was going to say apartment tower, which makes much more sense than single family dwellings with wasted space for parking cars.

> You're trying to cheat by skipping a step. You don't want to wait half a century. You want that nice neighborhood now, without investing the time to create it.

I own a half million dollar condo on the Atlanta Beltline. By all rights I should be a NIMBY too, but I empathize with those that are struggling and hope for densification and affordability. I didn't buy my place as an "investment" - I bought it because I love it and the neighborhood I live in. Lower house prices will mean lower property taxes, so it'd be a win-win. I want them to build more here.

Housing shouldn't be an investment you horde and keep from others because you've already got yours. Housing is an escape from constant shackles of rent-seeking. It should be accessible. People this generation don't even have that as a dream anymore...

> neighborhood you now covet

SF is a smelly and cold quagmire, and I only travel for business. It's a total monoculture without a thriving art or music scene. I've no interest in ever living there.

Tech either needs to pack up and leave, the law needs to enable denser building, or land owners need to see their values drop through steep, progressive taxation.

SF the city is extorting too much from business for not much in return - all of their employees are getting fleeced by the cost of housing. Businesses should shop elsewhere for a better run town that isn't controlled by rent seeking leeches preventing progress because they refuse to work hard and add new value.

I'm hoping tech leaves. My startup will be on the east coast.

She also didn't really get her home as an financial investment, and she is unlikely to personally benefit from the increase in value. There was no way to know she'd get lucky. She used the home to raise 7 kids and will probably die there. As you say, it was her "escape from constant shackles of rent-seeking".

It's not smelly on her street.

I also hope that tech moves elsewhere. It's insane to cram everything onto a tiny peninsula. I did go to an east coast start-up, and it worked out nicely. There's also that whole middle of the country. Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Wyoming are all fine places to live.

Probably good thing she didn't. You say the home is worth $2m today... Well if she invested $7397 in the S&P500 in 1962 it would be worth $2m today.

I'm going to guess she spent more than $7397 for the home and a lot more than $0 on taxes and upkeep. :) So if the home had been bought as an investment it wouldn't have been an amazing one.

I think it's important to point this out due to the other comments that seem to think that she's the recipient of some kind of astonishing windfall, she isn't.

The point the other commenters are making about Prop13 is a good one, however. Your central argument is essentially the problem Prop13 is intended to and actually does solve.

And bonus: You can inherit the property from her and preserve its tax level... so rising property values won't even force it out of your families ownership, not at least until you start running into estate taxes.

[Unfortunately, prop13 is also a lot stronger than what would be minimally required to solve the problem of property taxes pushing people out of their homes. E.g. some other states have similar rules but they only apply to a single residential property per person that they're required to live in, and as a result it causes a rather extreme burden shift onto newer residents including ones who opt to live in less expensive locations...]

There are plenty of reasons why nearby development can be a serious taking of an existing resident's property rights... but in California jacking up your property taxes is not one of those reasons.

Your point about parking is an actual argument that you could probably develop further. But I'm guessing that young able bodied posters who are used to living in an urban hellscape won't buy any argument that reliable nearby parking is a quality of life issue. :)

No need to wait. I'm 23 and I already feel jaded.

I can't comprehend why anyone would want to treat their primary residence as an investment. My mom bought a tiny apartment in an eastern European country 30 years ago for almost nothing that has appreciated and is now worth $35000. The problem? She wants to move and an actually desirable apartment costs twice as much. Two times almost nothing is still almost nothing. Two times $35000 is $70000 which is something she can't afford.

House appreciation ends up being a a net loss because it kills any potential exit strategy. Want to cash out? You will have to sell your house and then rent for obscene prices. Want to upgrade? Better houses appreciate faster than your low end house, so you have to cough up more money. Want to move to a different location that costs the same? Your taxes have appreciated too.

So the only way this investment strategy can pay off is if you want to move away from the place which is obviously what doesn't happen because people buy homes to stay there, not to move away in 30 years after their homes have appreciated.

It's actually very hard to imagine that your grandma did those things either.

There exist plenty of nice tree-lined streets around the country with free parking. In hardly any of them do houses cost $2,000,000. I think the reason housing is so desirable/expensive has very little to do with your grandma's choices and more to do with historical and economic factors that individuals have little control over.

There are certainly trade offs to be made. Housing has already become unaffordable for middle class people growing up here (that don't inherit a house), and many lower income people already commute multiple hours each day. But solving this problem might involve some homeowners (with already huge financial windfalls), not exactly giving up their homes, but having to look at some buildings and/or people they don't like.

All that being said, strip malls in the south bay would probably make more sense for redevelopment than already-dense SF neighborhoods (and I've been to the area of SF you're talking about and can certainly acknowledge the charm).

I say that as an Australian, where despite reasonable laws and ample land, we have some of the most expensive real estate per income in the world.

The issue is banking and tax law, which should weigh heavily on real estate capital gains, heavily on speculation and heavily on empty lots or tenancies. But go easier on rental income and losses.

These same arguments about nimbyism and building just have the effect of dividing and conquering, while carefully avoiding scrutiny of the real issue.. finance.

Another Aussie here. Sure we have lots of land, but no water. Our limiting factor is potable freshwater. Our major rivers are dying, rainfall is becoming less predictable. Right now politicians are pushing to build more dams to fix the problem (for agriculture, not population) but that's only going to lead to more negative environmental impact.

Here in Australia we need more water recycling. It's energy intensive.

Australian land may technically be ample, but Australia has enormous problems incentivizing living in rural areas, to the point of granting work visas to unskilled laborers that can be renewed long enough to achieve permanent residency (Working Holiday Visa). The only requirement is youth.

Australia's urban population: 90%; Sydney & Melbourne metros: 40%

Much like California, the bulk of Australian economic opportunity centers around the major metros.

Your comments about banking and tax law are a non-sequitor. The same banking and tax laws apply in the entire country, but the expensive real estate is largely limited to the major metros. Australians would live in pleasant coastal towns such as Surfer's Paradise if there were enough jobs in those regions to support them. Or they would have stayed on the sheep stations in the interior to remain close to family.

Besides all that, low capital gains taxes and negative gearing created the investment class in housing. Ie. Those who have 3 or more investment properties as it is now so is a net gain to lose money on a poor rental investment. And banks feed off this investment, valuing properties within the metro areas at ever higher amounts, propped up by low capital gains taxes and negative gearing. It is a vicious cycle of capital speculation.

Even though for pure rental income from a property, regional areas have historically been better investments.

And btw surfers 1. Has the second highest growth in the country 2. Is anything but pleasant.

I suspect the organizations promoting the concept of Missing Middle housing aren't for bringing back SROs. One site used to describe "residential above commercial" as fitting the definition of Missing Middle housing, but they seem to have changed it to "live-work." This excludes the idea of small units, like SROs, above a rental office or other commercial space in a downtown area.

Maybe they did that to intentionally exclude SROs or maybe they aren't aware the change has this impact. Regardless of the logic, it suggests they aren't including SROs in their agenda.

Reintroducing SROs and boarding houses would be one way to provide genuinely affordable spaces for small households, such as single individuals, childless couples and single parents. I think we could even improve on what typically gets provided in our remaining SROs which tend to be in old buildings.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

Because they're a bad idea, that had terrible consequences, and most reasonable people have vowed never to repeat that mistake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement

It's not like building real housing costs that much more. Trying to downgrade housing to make it cheaper is by scrimping 50sqft here, or a bathroom over there, is like the textbook definition of "penny wise, pound foolish".

---

Housing is expensive because land is monopolized, hyper-overinvested, and carries zero risk because of government-guaranteed bailouts. Housing in cities is expensive for the same reasons, plus the inherently higher costs of higher density in construction.

Housing is not expensive because an apartment is required to have running water, a functional toilet, and enough floorspace for a mattress. That's just simply not the issue.

As long as they are code-compliant with regard to fire protection (sprinklers) and emergency egress, might as well make them legal. Let the market decide if the lower rent vs a small studio apartment with in-unit bath and stove is worth it. (I suspect in most cases, people would prefer to team up via craigslist or facebook and share a multi-bedroom apartment or townhouse rather than live the dorm life though. But PodShare seems to be getting customers...)

https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...

I spent nearly six years homeless. I got off the street by moving into an SRO.

An SRO with access to electricity, heat, bathroom facilities etc beats the hell out of living in a tent, peeing in the bushes and living in fear of being rounded up by the police for being too poor for my existence to be legal.

I'm working on resolving my personal problems and raising my income. I still struggle to make ends meet every single month. I'm not a drug addict and I don't have a mental health diagnosis.

I do have two special needs sons who still live with me and I'm medically handicapped.

If you really want to outlaw poverty, you basically need to start applying the death sentence to anyone who has intractable personal problems, no matter the cause.

Beat up by your husband and no place else to go but a shelter? Oh, death penalty for you.

Gave birth to a child with an expensive genetic disorder? The baby needs to die so you can keep being a productive member of society.

Etc.

I don't think that works so well, personally. Our current system does a poor job of helping people find their way back to a middle class life once things go wrong somewhere and, so far, no one is quite yet proposing the death penalty for such problems. Which means people barred from having minimal housing become an increasing drag on the system because they have no immediate way out of their predicament.

That's not intended as hyperbole:

The average life expectancy in the homeless population is estimated between 42 and 52 years, compared to 78 years in the general population.

https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/health.html

Our housing policies are killing people, just more slowly and with more plausible deniability than putting a bullet through their brain. And some do get murdered simply for being homeless. Four homeless individuals were murdered in their sleep in New York recently and three years ago someone was setting tents on fire in San Diego.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york-crime/man-accuse...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/san-diego-police-looking-for-pers...

No, it really doesn't. My argument boils down to "poisoned/expired milk is never worth it, even if it would help reduce the price of milk".

> I spent nearly six years homeless. I got off the street by moving into an SRO.

I'm glad you found something that's better than nothing. I totally get how an SRO helped you out, and that you want to maintain that step for others. That's a good and admirable thing. But this is not an argument for SROs. It's an argument for more real apartments.

If you had not managed to land an SRO, but had instead found a coleman tent, and it had helped you out, should we provide free camping tents to the homeless? That's not a solution, it's a band-aid. SROs are obviously much much nicer than this, but ultimately are just a much nicer band-aid.

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We don't need to create "shittier" housing to get homeless people off the street. We don't need to revert back to tenements. The solution to homelessness is housing -- real housing -- the kind that meets all relevant local regulations. We can do this just as easily as SROs, for nearly the same price, there's zero reason not to build real housing for everyone. Including those with low income. Including those with no income.

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If your complaint is that no one is doing this housing (or not doing it properly), then I agree with you 100%. I personally believe housing is a fundamental human right, and that the government should be compelled to provide free housing to all citizens, automatically, by right of law. It should be systematically impossible for any citizen to ever be "homeless". (In the same way that's systematically impossible for a child to be "uneducated", since a public K-12 education is guaranteed for free to all citizens. In the same way that it's systemically impossible for almost any citizen to be "emergency-less", anyone can call 911 almost anywhere in the US, and be automatically connected to local emergency services, even if their cell phone isn't paid up, even if their provider is roaming, even if they borrowed it from a friend, even if they have no income at all, and so on)

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...

Missing Middle housing is being widely advocated for. It is also, to use your phrasing, "shittier housing." It is smaller and more dense.

Part of why we have such a big problem is because housing standards have steadily crept upwards for decades. In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and housed about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is over 2400 sqft and houses about 2.5 people.

Our housing standards have gotten ridiculously inflated such that only rich people can afford them. The solution is absolutely to start setting some more reasonable standards for basic housing such that we stop actively pushing people out into the street.

Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...

I'm not saying "Let's go back to grass huts with dirt floors and no plumbing." I'm saying that renting a room was a perfectly normal thing at one time and wasn't considered to be "slum" housing.

It was fairly normal for young people from even wealthy families. This tradition lives on and is preserved in the form of college dorm rooms and military barracks.

These are typically intended for people in their late teens to early twenties who are unmarried and childless. In both cases, it is normal for them to eat at a dining hall of some sort as a routine thing.

We cannot solve our current housing crisis by arguing that housing is a basic right and then setting such high standards that we can't afford it as a society.

I have six years of college. I have an incurable medical condition. I occasionally get a bit of money out of compassion from people who don't know me well, but charity is not enough to resolve my problems.

I'm not suggesting we need SROs everywhere. But I'm hardly the only person recognizing that we need to lower our crazy high standards somewhere. If I were, YIMBY would not be a movement and there wouldn't be resources promoting the idea of Missing Middle housing.

Our housing standards were shaped by the events surrounding the end of WW2 and American housing caters to an idea that a home designed for a nuclear family is the only acceptable housing. Meanwhile, people are delaying marriage, delaying having kids, having fewer kids, living longer after the kids grow up and move out, etc.

We have more families with three or fewer members than we had at the end of WW2 and we don't design housing for their needs. When I got divorced and my husband physically moved out, my sons and I had to start storing sodas in the fridge because the fridge was too large for our needs and if we didn't find some way to fill it up, milk would spoil.

I lived in Germany for a few years. Entire families have fridges the size of what are mostly found in college dorms in the US. You don't absolutely need a 20 cubic foot fridge to serve the needs of a household, but that's what we get, whether it works for us or not.

And in Japan, it's weird to have an oven. Americans who buy homes in Japan typically have to add an oven because that's just not standard over there. But they cook plenty and eat well and have world famous cuisine that has inspired restaurants and restaurant chains around the world.

Building a cheap home would be silly. The fees might be several times the construction cost. With the fees already so high, you might as well make the house fancy.

We've also added expensive required features. It seems the voters and/or lobbyists can't bear to see a person living without the latest fancy stuff. I mean things like arc fault interrupters and wired-in smoke detectors, and maybe even solar. That too adds to the minimum price, so you might as well build a bigger and fancier home for a modest extra percentage increase in cost.

You can see it in cars too, and in every other sort of product design. We've decided to put our cost of living out of reach of many people. I'm not saying it isn't nice to have airbags, 3-prong power cords, catalytic converters, and chainsaw brakes... but we're paying for it or failing to pay for it, making the country less competitive (need higher pay) and making people more likely to be homeless.

I spent over two years in Fresno which has housing costs more in line with the national average than is typical for most California cities. I still couldn't find housing that worked for me.

And that's partly because low end housing in Fresno is often a trailer in a trailer court. For health reasons, I'm unwilling to ever live in a trailer again.

I lived in a trailer for a few months in my twenties. It was horrible and I was deathly ill in it.

We no longer want SROs in the US and the reality is this means a lot of poor Americans are living in trailers which are such lousy housing that you have trouble financing them because their value goes down, not up, over time.

The widespread use of trailers is testimony that if you try to zone "affordable housing" out of existence because poor people shouldn't exist or something, it just slips through the cracks in the system and calls itself a vehicle or whatever to get around that.

In fact, the Tiny House movement probably goes back to some guy who literally put his tiny house on wheels and called it a "trailer" to get around housing regulations because it's not legal in most parts of the US to build a really small house.

And these rules go bad places on a regular basis. Apple Valley, California is full of mansions with crazy large yards because the town set some crazy large minimum lot size intended to "preserve the character" of the rural small town surrounded by farmland and not have it become suburban sprawl. It became suburban sprawl anyway, just on steroids.

The real way to preserve farmland is to create multifamily homes and set aside actual farmland. There are institutions that have studied this. A lot of well-meaning policies don't do what they were intended to do. They all too often do the exact opposite.

Policies have to be more than well intended. They gave to also be well researched and we'll designed.

My first room was the smallest room in the building with just a sink and fridge. I didn't feel I could make a hotplate or similar work in that space.

About two months ago, I moved to a larger room within the same building. I have a private bath and a George Foreman grill now. The fridge died like two days after we moved or something and I don't have the money to replace it.

But the thing is that I and my oldest son both have a serious genetic disorder. Since moving to a unit with a private bath, he has thrown up every single time he has cleaned the toilet.

We didn't want a toilet of our own at first. We didn't want to clean it. Management is responsible for cleaning the shared bathrooms in the building. But I am responsible for cleaning my private bath.

Toilets are not something that see so much use that every single individual needs their own personal toilet.

A large part of the increase in housing costs since the 1950s is due to rising standards and expectations.

In the 1950s, that 1200 sqft new house probably had a heater, but no air conditioning. It probably had a washing machine, but no dryer. Instead, there was a clothesline out back in the yard.

It probably was poorly insulated and had inferior electrical service compared to what we expect today. You didn't need a high electrical capacity and outlets everywhere. You had a radio and maybe a TV.

Home computers didn't exist. Microwaves didn't exist.

Etc etc etc.

A lot that we consider standard and the minimum today was not either at that time. And there are developed countries which generally treat their citizens better than we do here in the US that have smaller homes, smaller refrigerators, etc.

Europe has a lot of household stuff that exists precisely because they expect a high quality of life in spaces that are typically smaller than standard US homes.

I'm not sure why you are so adamant that SROs are wholly unacceptable. I've studied the history of US housing and I have some knowledge of how things get handled in other developed countries. I've also lived this problem space and I'm currently in an SRO.

So you aren't going to convince me that it's inherently evil to have dorm style rooms.

I don't really believe housing is a "right." I believe we need to do what works in practical terms and I don't think that framing is productive.

And lowering our crazy high standards that boil down to "We only build mansions in America" is something that must happen if we are to solve this.

I continue to research how to do that in a way that lowers the right standards because I'm absolutely not interested in creating slum conditions.

Anyway, thank you for speaking with me. But I'm not sure there's any real point in taking this discussion further.

If you generally agree with me, you can agree with whatever points you want to agree with, thank me for sharing a wealth of knowledge and stop there without going on to insist "Except this one detail, that I imagine is your entire goal, is completely and totally wrong and must be absolutely shot down for some damn reason."

I'm not talking about "SROs for everyone" or some nonsense.

I've studied this problem space for literally decades at this point. I'm writing at length because it interests me and I know a lot about it and I enjoy the somewhat rare opportunity to talk about it in depth.

But you are posting to...pretend to agree with me while insisting I'm wrong?

You're right, they make "only" 7x as much.

US Median Income: $43,585 China M.I.: $6,180

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-income-by-...

In USD really. Unsurprisingly, people living in a large city in China are not dirt poor as you would expect.

China reports Shanghai as the highest income city with an average salary of 9,700 yuan/month.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/10/WS5cad86f7a3104842...

In the middle of a large, populous city --on land that is not part of a postsecondary institution-- you can't just build a dormitory on it.

You can rarely build anything over 2 stories on the coast in California. There's no political will for it, so nothing happens.

And construction on the coast is specifically restricted by law because that is the political will and has been for decades.

There absolutely are zoning restrictions that would prevent you from building a dormitory anywhere. Let me go buy a $10 million plot in La Jolla farms and try and put a dormitory on it. "Oh, but it's so close to UCSD", you might think... but the surrounding properties are all $20m+ single family homes (that's how it's zoned, after all) and the dorms would ruin the "community vibe".

Yeah, keep going

If everyone worked remotely then Californians could keep their insane housing policies and people in "fly over country" could get access to jobs. Everyone would get exactly what they want.

So either make it illegal for cities to have significantly more jobs than housing or give employees the right to work remotely. Of course both of these option haven't happened and I don't think they will ever happen.

Thus perpetuating a housing problem that prevents them from moving anywhere else in the Bay Area because now it‘s unaffordable.