Posted on 09/28/2015 12:34:09 PM PDT by jazusamo
Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of "affordable housing," as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters.
A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment.
It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your pay check. The whole Bay Area is like that. Thirty miles away, Palo Alto home prices are similarly unbelievable.
One house in Palo Alto, built more than 70 years ago, and just over one thousand square feet in size, was offered for sale at $1.5 million. And most asking prices are bid up further in such places.
Another city in the Bay Area with astronomical housing prices, San Mateo, recently held a public meeting and appointed a task force to look into the issue of "affordable housing."
Public meetings, task forces and political hand-wringing about a need for "affordable housing" occur all up and down the San Francisco peninsula, because this is supposed to be such a "complex" issue.
Someone once told President Ronald Reagan that a solution to some controversial issue was "complex." President Reagan replied that the issue was in fact simple, "but it is not easy."
Is the solution to unaffordable housing prices in parts of California simple? Yes. It is as simple as supply and demand. What gets complicated is evading the obvious, because it is politically painful.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
Anyone else notice that every policy of the left makes goods and services so unaffordable that you MUST be subsidized in order to afford it?
We all know the purpose behind that as well.
location location location
Always the primary factor in real estate.
You could an own a house that looks like the one in Green Acres.
But if it is located in Bel-Air it would be worth many millions.
Yep, the libs and enviro-nazis want that precious land left alone and everyone living in city high rises, much easier to control the masses.
They used to have a website called “Crackhouse or Mansion” which showed random pictures of houses in Vancouver, Canada.
Some of them were crack houses which had been raided by the police. Others were real estate listings which had recently sold for over $1 million Canadian.
You had to try to guess which was which.
It was virtually impossible.
Grossly over-simplified argument. A lot of that open land along 280 for example is watershed for public drinking water. There are two ways to solve said housing shortage: build more housing or PAY people more money to afford what is there.
All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverly hills in somebody else’s name.
The “locations” where construction is allowed have been systematically limited more and more over the years, until there is really very little buildable land left anywhere in coastal California.
Got to protect the environment, you know.
Regulation has gotten so micro-oriented, that in order to build a “new” house on a property with an existing structure, the tear-down must leave an existing wall, three new walls may be constructed, and finished out for habitation, then the one remaining “old” wall may be torn out and replaced. If there is a complete tear-down, no new construction may be undertaken. Ever.
Does not seem to be a very economical way to renew a property.
The place that my aunt lived built “the projects” across the street.
it USED TO BE a beautiful old polish neighborhood. They had celebrations for all the holidays and the streets were filled with people and so much fun.
Then they built “the projects”
Within one year you could not safely walk the streets. The housing prices plummeted to 1/5th of their original value.
Everyone moved, the place was taken over by drug dealers and gangs. These days it looks like a war zone.
And all for about $165,000 PER PERSON (and this was 20 years ago) They could have bought every single man, woman, and child an entire house EACH for 1/3 of that.
That’s what happens when you vote Democrat to ‘help people’
In Singapore, they put these type of people off on some of the smaller islands and deliver occasional food shipments . The either get cured of their drug addiction or Darwin takes care of them.
“Supply and demand” is an economic fact, as is the fact that you can’t just will more supply into existence because the demand increases. At some point there must be enough “friction” to reduce demand lest the supply disappear entirely; many deride this as “price gouging”, but it’s just prices going up until people stop buying except for those who DO want it that badly and CAN afford the outrageous prices, and if it’s not the prices rocketing into the stratosphere then it will be decreasing the quality until nobody _wants_ it anymore. Sure prices in SF are stupid high, renting a bunk equalling my 2400 sq ft suburban retreat - because way more people want to be there than there’s space for; lower the prices and you’ll get even more people & buildings piling in until it’s Kowloon On The Shore.
As Madeline Albright noted: there’s a lot of space in this country. Much of it is really cheap, and you can put a nice “tiny house” on it cheap - as in a simple studio configuration on an acre for $10k, the price of renting a bunk in SF for half a year ... it’s just in freaking _nowhere_.
One acre of BLM land.
One “pop-up” camper.
One open-ended Soylent.Me subscription.
One can mixed seeds from MyPatriotSupply.com.
Add a few support items.
Done.
In all this discussion of “affordable housing/etc”, nobody objectively defines what they’re trying to “afford” and why.
Real problem is most of the intended recipients wouldn’t know what to do with the above.
I do not think it is overly simplified. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
The Presidio and other lands become available and they choose a park. Other land is set aside as open space. You may not build multi story buildings to preserve the sky line/view. Impact fees and permitting costs tens of thousands for modest structure to hundreds of thousands for large structures.
It is this way all up and down CA’s coast. It is what drives the cost.
Thoreau said we are wealthy in proportion to what we can leave alone. If you are a multimillionaire you can afford a Presidio park but most of us cannot. As he noted, Reagan said the solution is simple but the choices are hard.
I once was invited to a meeting of the Kansas Association of Planning and Zoning Administrators, and event that attracted public servants from all over the state (no doubt getting per diem). Anyway, it was fascinating.
Mentioned several times were methods to prevent riding lawn mower ownership, either by fiat, taxation, or regulation - the assumption being that people would quit buying 3 acre rural tracts for housing if they had to push mow. Another panel discussion dealt with stopping development - and the subject of the panel was how to circumvent the directives of pro-development elected officials. Their logic was that they were the experts, and could not allow novice politicians to intervene. Commuter taxes were also discussed, to prevent sprawl. Two full days of lib utopia...being strategized by actual public officials.
The whole time I kept wondering, if this is happening in Kansas, what’s it like in leftist states.
how long ago was this?
Sowell doesn't know what he's talking about. He's discounting that the reason the land would be cheap if the restrictions were lifted on development is that environmental laws have socialized so many assets on the land as to have depressed its value for anything but development. The distortions are everywhere, and politicians run around plugging them with yet more dirty deals.
Around 5 years ago.
There is no “housing shortage”. If there was a shortage, construction would be up, because nothing drives up prices (and therefore profits for builders) like a shortage.
Best response so far. I’d vote to move all non-working welfare recipients to some remote area. If we don’t have any suitable islands, then some remote desert area, maybe in Nevada, far from population centers. (I often see Nevada wasteland offered for sale at rock bottom prices.)
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