Slightly-off topic rant, but as a Bay Area millennial in the tech industry, I find it completely preposterous just how much even us with six-figure salaries are willing to spend for the opportunity to live above their favorite brunch spot in the Mission District.
A lot of fresh grads in the industry think that spending 50-70% of their net income on rent is a completely reasonable thing to do. Though my observations are unscientific, plenty of my friends are living paycheck to paycheck, eating out all the time, constantly travelling, by choice because their friends are doing the same. They don't want to take the extra 15 minutes on a train to visit their friends by living in a more affordable area. When I lived in Oakland for instance, my friends in SF would almost never visit me because it was just a bit too far even though I'm walking distance from the Oakland City Center BART station.
This insatiable desire for young techies to spend a stupid amount of their money to be part of this elite club is astounding.
As an older millennial (33), I couldn't agree more.
We're living in boom times, and one layoff or closure will make people rethink their behavior. I don't care how expensive a place is, you're just an idiot, plain and simple, if you're a 25-year old straight out of school, no kids/dependents, making 150k and can't afford to put away 15-30k/year. People will bitch and bitch about high rents, student loan payments, high taxes, etc. but it's like, show some discipline and skip the $30/person brunch for _one weekend_.
I mean, first it was Noe Valley... SF is gentrifying. The Mission isn't necessarily immune to this. People will be pushed out East down the Bart lines. Also I'm surprised East Palo Alto hasn't gentrified completely.
I've thought about this a lot. I've always lived in an unfashionable part of San Francisco - I grew up west of twin peaks in the 70s when it was considered foggy, boring, and square, and I now live south of 280, where mission isn't hipster.
I do wonder why some of the people getting crushed on rent don't just move farther out the bart or even muni line. There are still cheap spots south of 280 in SF that are an extremely short hop to the mission or downtown (like, 8-12 minutes on bart, if that).
Thing is, while people may complain, they often aren't quite as irrational as they seem. There may be exceptional value in living in the intense concentration of young tech workers and artists (well, with the latter rapidly diminishing).
In spite of being a programmer who spent almost my entire life in SF, I never really was in the thick of it. I think this might partly be age - I'm in my mid 40s now, and when I was in my 20s, SF wasn't nearly as big a part of tech as it is now. There were a few startups and design companies, but "Tech" was really mainly South Bay. Even well into the 1990s, SF proper was actually law firms, a few bankers, and a bit of publishing and media, with a generally much more conservative dress and business culture.
But watching it now - obviously there's something very valuable in the network effects of being in the thick of things. And by that, I actually do mean bumping into people you know or will know soon, working on similar things. Almost none of these young people expect to stay in SF (from the sound of it, many don't want to), but they're building careers in a way that, again didn't really exist to the same extent 20 years ago. SF just wasn't an "alpha" city for careers, it was a beta plus, a perfect fine place to have a career, but not the place. The most ambitious career driven types almost all lived elsewhere - even if it was tech, it was South Bay.
In short, if you're going to sacrifice your 20s to live in the Bay Area and pursue your career in the alpha city for that career, it actually might make sense to pay through the nose to truly live in the thick of it. Even a 15 minute drive on bart might deprive you of 90% of those in the moment interactions that make the whole difference.
It's just a thought, but there may be a higher career cost for those intensely career drive people than we realize if they live just a bit further, add just a bit more friction to interactions. Truth is, I've never really been one of them. I'm from an era where staying in (or moving to) SF was something you did because you liked SF, and you were willing to live in a good but not best city for your career.
Of course, it's changed the culture dramatically, to say the least. But if you've decided to live in an outrageously expensive place to pursue your career, perhaps it also makes sense to pay through the nose to live in the epicenter rather than merely nearby?
This scheme is doomed to fail. 51% of the people will vote for rising house prices because that's their greatest asset. When highly geared property doubles in value, the owners can make 5 or 10 times their initial investment. They don't think about the other 49% of the people -- that's the result of governments chosen by democracy. And to make the prices go up, boost the demand and restrict the supply. So governments bring in long-term visitors to boost the demand: immigrants, international students whose parents buy apartments for them, and guest workers to rent the houses. But governments, especially local ones, also restrict the supply: many regulations to slow down new development, rules against long-term hotel stays, and crackdowns on campervan living in urban areas. The people fighting the yimbies have cash flows and retirement nest eggs to protect, and that's the main decider on which way they vote. The yimbies are fighting a losing battle.
Hmm, your claim does not fit with what I've seen in LA. There has emerged a consensus among people who care about planning that density around transit corridors is part of a solution to the housing problem.
This manifested, since the early 00s, in housing construction that was mainly due to the mayor and some council-members influencing the planning department behind the scenes.
But then, the YIMBY argument (which is admittedly somewhat wonky) has within the last decade taken root broadly among the electorate, and there has been a lot of such large developments built - Hollywood has been transformed. It has also manifested in the resounding defeat of Measure S (went down 31/69 %, see https://la.curbed.com/2017/3/7/14850898/live-election-result...) in LA.
Of course, it's not 100% YIMBY. There are plenty of cases where neighborhoods have been transformed too fast, especially by house flippers (who are not really creating new housing), and there has been strong resistance.
> This scheme is doomed to fail. 51% of the people will vote for rising house prices because that's their greatest asset. When highly geared property doubles in value, the owners can make 5 or 10 times their initial investment.
You are correct that people think like that. But it is nearsighted because even if the price of your home goes up, you cannot sell it because you need a place to live. It is a lose/lose. It takes away a significant part of purchasing power. Money that could be spent on shopping, entertainment, etc is used to pay the mortgage. Younger people are even more screwed, it is a tax from the young to the old.
> But it is nearsighted because even if the price of your home goes up, you cannot sell it because you need a place to live. It is a lose/lose. It takes away a significant part of purchasing power. Money that could be spent on shopping, entertainment, etc is used to pay the mortgage.
It is forced savings for retirement. Most people downsize once their kids leave home, cashing out their equity (as long as you haven't cash out refi'd your home to buy cars and vacations).
Some people, those who bought low and sold high at the end of their lives may recover. I can argue that even these people lose because the high prices of housing increased overall living costs during their lives. (e.g. Local business have to pay more on rent, employees need more money,they have longer commutes, etc)
Value is more complex than that. Many people would like to live among friends and family and have their kids raise grandkids nearby. Housing price bubbles disrupt communities at great cost to society.
In Mountain View, home to Google, there are over 2000 luxury apartments and condos under construction. The situation is similar in several other Silicon Valley cities. This is a huge increase in apartment construction since 2010.
It is a similar pattern to San Francisco and other big cities mentioned in the Guardian article. The new construction is aimed toward generally young, generally single, tech workers at Google, Apple, Facebook and other employers within easy commuting distance of Mountain View. Many existing apartments have remodeled and boosted rents, effectively evicting many people with lower paying jobs. There is minimal construction of apartments for lower paid folks.
Google has the political clout in Mountain View to get more apartments for its tech employees despite the NIMBYs. Rental costs are a major negative for Google since the high cost means California tech salaries are actually among the lowest in USA adjusting for local cost of living. The disparity with the Plano Texas region (so-called Telecom Corridor) is astonishing.
People with lower incomes who are disproportionately Hispanic in California don't have a powerful force like Google to stand up for them.
There was a rent control measure (Measure V) passed in Mountain View about one year ago and remarkably actually enforced despite legal challenges.
More units, even luxury units, are good for everyone, even lower income people. The people trying to advocate for lower-income people by blocking housing are making it worse for the very people they're trying to help!
That is not necessarily true. Under some circumstances it can be true. For example, if a community builds more luxury apartments entirely in addition to existing apartments, then yes some well paid people will probably move out of the existing apartments into the new luxury ones, making apartments available to the lower paid.
However, if inexpensive apartments are either bulldozed or remodeled to become luxury apartments, eliminating inexpensive options for the lower paid. That has been happening in Mountain View and probably in San Francisco which the Guardian article directly discusses.
i agree in principle to the yimby movement, but i don't agree with some of the antagonism described in the article against the mission's latino population.
isn't there a compromise to be reached between the two groups?
latinos want to stay in the neighborhood but can't afford $4K rents (who really can? or should? $48K in rent, yikes!). yimbys want more units. so give developers a sweetner so they can be profitable but also build more affordable units. i know it's harder than it sounds, but it's been done many times before, so it's achieveable. but when it starts becoming us-vs-them, that just makes it so much harder.
The fundamental disconnect is there's a (large) group of people that think building expensive housing is bad for the housing crisis. This is 180 degrees wrong: what's needed to solve the affordability crisis are more units.
Below market rate units ("affordable" units) are by definition always in short supply.
A lot of fresh grads in the industry think that spending 50-70% of their net income on rent is a completely reasonable thing to do. Though my observations are unscientific, plenty of my friends are living paycheck to paycheck, eating out all the time, constantly travelling, by choice because their friends are doing the same. They don't want to take the extra 15 minutes on a train to visit their friends by living in a more affordable area. When I lived in Oakland for instance, my friends in SF would almost never visit me because it was just a bit too far even though I'm walking distance from the Oakland City Center BART station.
This insatiable desire for young techies to spend a stupid amount of their money to be part of this elite club is astounding.