Ezra Klein lives in Washington DC where I'm sure he can afford multiple acres and a house that's no less than 4000 square feet, truly brilliant analysis thank you for blessing us with it
The old San Francisco Bay Guardian, the alternative weekly, used to rail against the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco. Bank of America tower was a blight. Georgetown could use some more skyscrapers, though. And DuPont Circle. Sure Ezra Klein would agree.
Ezra Klein can be an pompous prick, but sure we do need more high-density housing. If he'd actually look around he'd see that there's been a lot of it built around downtown in recent years. It's getting better. Here's the thing about YIMBYism though. To paraphrase Mike Tyson's "Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth", Everyone's a YIMBY until it actually *is* their neighborhood. Something tells me that Ezra Klein would turn into a NIMBY real fast if someone proposed a 20-story low-income housing complex next door to his Williamsburg flat. "No, I'm talking about how San Jose could become the next Shenzen [sic], not in Williamsburg around my flat!!"
Yeah but Peninsula/South Bay homeowners are another beast altogether. They kick up a storm and declare Newsom / CA legislature to be fascist terrorists at the suggestion of building any incremental high-density housing at any level, when it's badly needed to make our communities attainable for those who aren't riding the latest VC-propelled boom. A lot of our jobs are located in the suburbs so it makes sense for medium- and high-density housing to be located nearby as well. The tide is gradually shifting but there is still a lot of opportunity left on the table.
Could have had 12 and 14 story residential towers at Japantown Corp Yard site (full city block) recently built out with 4-5 story buildings. Developer (from Portland Pearl District) claimed too costly, but City of San Jose (which owned the land) could have induced greater density with the sale but did not. Literally got fewer than half the units that site could support because lack of proper government oversight. Not NIMBY issue.
He actually lives in Brooklyn, NY supported by his own posts in 2023 and a profile in The New York Magazine. He grew up in Irvine before going to UCSC and later lived in Oakland.
Yeah, that's why I made references to his "flat in Williamsburg". I don't know if he lives in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn or if he has a flat, but he could.
The fact is that much of the new development isn't affordable. That's how it's promoted, but people with low incomes can't afford to pay even a slightly-below-market rent that's higher than the rent for older properties. Maybe, maybe, instead of trying to destroy middle class communities (none of these developments will touch places like Atherton and Hillborough, where VCs actually live) the state could offer economic incentives to companies who open offices in more affordable parts of the state. Meanwhile, people who commute two hours each way to work on the peninsula are not leaving their 4-bedroom house with a pool to squeeze their kids and dogs into an 800-sq-foot highrise apartment...that rents for more than the mortgage on their homes. Follow the money. Who is profiting from this excessive guilt-mongering and accusations of racism and elitism?
Seems to me that we need more subsidized low(er) income housing. As you say, the market forces are not gonna really do it. Just don't build it near Ezra's flat in Brooklyn!!
Ah, but who's paying those subsidies? I can't speak to the entire state, but on the mid-peninsula, private equity firms started buying up housing developments -- that truly were affordable -- about 20 years ago. Replaced them with far less affordable housing. Multiply that by 1000, and suddenly our state has a housing crisis. That's my current theory, anyway.
At the end of the day it has to be some government entity, right(?), either to provide housing subsidies, rent control, or public housing. The market is not gonna fix it by itself. I think Ezra's argument is that there is too much regulation around building, which is probably also true, but relaxation of regulations is not going to fix everything. And of course there's also NIMBYism or Ezra style YIMBYism (YIMBY, but just not actually in my backyard, only your backyard!).
Well, that also has to do with the ballooning demand as well. If you don't create supply (or at least allow supply to be created) at the middle-high end (e.g. so-called "luxury" apartments which are really just...apartments for working professionals) it will put the squeeze on the more affordable segments as well. Here in San Mateo there are people seriously arguing that increasing the number of mid-rise residential buildings near Hillsdale/downtown is somehow harmful to the community, it's simply exasperating.
We've also seen cities approve more and more office space in order to entice big names into their cities without worrying about where the people working in them are going to live. That's some other city's job to make sure there's housing.
Well there it is. Everyone's a YIMBY until it's actually *their* neighborhood. Turns out that no one is a fan of their property value going down by 50% because there's a high rise going in next door. It's not necessarily an easy problem to solve. But sure it would help to get more people on board with the "abundance" narrative to try to whittle some of that away resistance away.
Well, the most recent ballot measure (Measure T last fall) in San Mateo did pass by a comfortable margin so there is some progress. I think the reality is that there are very vocal contingents who consistently oppose housing but they are dwindling in influence as folks become more cognizant of the issue.
Modern Ice development on Oakland Road. City plan and our neighborhood would have allowed 50 units per acre but City planners let the developer get away with 25 per acre. YIMBY thwarted by government. We’ve had decades of this. Drive down 2d or 3rd by SJSU. Four story condos built in 90s in the downtown core. Could have had four times the housing in same landmass.
What's happening in my town: two enormous development projects -- one well underway -- that provide way more office than housing, so will make the jobs:housing imbalance even worse. The city only seems to listen to developers, and they tell city planners that housing doesn't pencil out; they need to build office space. Residents try to tell our city planners that it's not their job to ensure that developers turn a profit, but they don't listen to us! What's interesting is that we only have one big employer in town: Meta, which didn't have a lot of employees when it moved here. Meta is clearly a regional employer, with employees from all over the Bay Area, as far as Marin and Monterey. In an ideal world, Meta would be on the hook to provide housing as they gobble up increasing amounts of land. But they're not. The onus is on current residents, and the playbook has them being shamed into giving up their quality of life on behalf of people who want to live here but can't or won't pay for it.
Interestingly, some of the same issues impacting the Bay Area (although without some of the geographic constraints) are evident in Madison as well. Between the UW (50K student), state government and Epic (gigantic health care software company that's spawned a lot of other local businesses in that space and employes 4K) there is a surplus of people wanting to move to a surfeit of housing. Even worse, the demand is somewhat bi- or trifurcated between the need for temporary housing for the hordes of youngsters between August and May, the need for mid-term housing for young code monkeys with a likely career longevity here of four or five years, and the need for normal, stable housing for a growing population. Of course, we hear the usual grumbling about taller infill development (although there is a weird height restriction within a certain distance of the Wisconsin State Capitol - the only state capitol built on an isthmus) from the folks who paid $34K for their single-family home on an eighth acre in 1980-something... So the only alternative is to build up or out, and both are happening at a pretty amazing clip. The joke goes that even though the official bird of Madison is the pink plastic flamingo the unofficial bird is the construction crane (lots of sandhill cranes around here). And when you drive out into rural Dane County - either east through the glaciated farmland or west into the Driftless Area (starts just west of Madison) you see an incredible amount of development - from modest multi-unit condo/apartment buildings to the horrible McMansions.
I've seen an astonishing amount of development in Salt Lake in recent years. Not what I'd call infill -- rather, they are building farther out of town, lone housing highrises with nothing nearby. The buildings probably have gyms in them, but otherwise, you have to drive everywhere. SLC seems to be attracting a lot of those young code monkeys (my son), so I guess that kind of housing makes sense. They aren't planning to put down roots or establish themselves there.
And that’s the thing. Ezra can extol the virtues of easier build in Texas and Florida, etc. but these are often cities with lots of space around them. It’s just not as easy here with suburban sprawl. We can do a post mortem on that but many of those city planing decisions were made decades ago.
And therein the problem. The people who stand to make money off these developments can claim suburban sprawl. But for the people who actually live in those homes -- and in the Bay Area, most homes are very modest compared to the rest of the country -- they represent the American dream. People work for years to save the down payment, work for decades to pay the mortgage, hoping for a safe neighborhood for their families and a scrap of grass for the kids and dogs. For many of those people, their homes represent their primary asset. But, hey, who cares about residents' property rights or quality of life when there are Russian billionaires hoping to build skyscrapers!
I think we have to let go of the idea that the addition of multifamily housing is inherently ruinous to a previously SFH neighborhood. "Building skyscrapers" is a strawman - even projects of modest size/height are routinely opposed and/or excluded.
My neighborhood was designed in the early 1950s to be affordable to people at all income levels. There's an inner circle of sfh surrounded by streets with multi-unit buildings -- typically 6-20 rental units per building. The tallest buildings are three stories. Residents can easily walk to downtown Palo Alto and downtown Menlo Park; Stanford is a few minutes farther. I wish the "building skyscrapers" were a strawman. It's not. This is what has been proposed for the intersection -- single-lane streets (and already crowded much of the day) formerly occupied by Sunset headquarters and gardens: https://menlopark.gov/Government/De...evelopment/Projects/Under-review/80-Willow-Rd Because of a loophole in the state law (now partially closed), after a city has submitted its housing element and while it's waiting for state approval -- a process that seems to take 3-4 months -- a developer can come in with a preliminary proposal and there is nothing a city can do to oppose or exclude it. It's not just my city: Saratoga has 22 such projects -- https://www.saratoga.ca.us/603/Builders-Remedy-Projects State legislators have said that they don't want the cities to be redesigned by speculative developers. But they also say that they are lobbied heavily by these developers, who are major donors, and they can't afford to lose that support. So let's not pretend this is about serving the residents of our state. The question, as I mentioned above, is "who benefits?" Follow the money.
Aside from the ticket increase for the Inter Miami-Messi game, did they raise the price on parking, drinks and concessions that night as well?
My tickets did not increase in price, nor did I notice an increase in price for drinks or concessions. It was nice to have an option to purchase game-specific scarves and pins, though, so the team earned more revenue from me that way (same true of Sacto Open Cup game).