Council Members:
I don’t know this blogger, but he writes well-researched articles about critical issues we’re all facing. Definitely worth
reading.
Pat Marriott
http://meetingthetwain.blogspot.com/2018/01/housing-jan-2017.html
[http://meetingthetwain.blogspot.com/2018/01/housing-jan-2017.html]
Housing Update 1/31/2018:
EXCERPTS:
At no time in the last 26 years have more than 28% of San Francisco residents been able to afford a house in San Francisco. Most
of the time it has been bouncing around between 10% and 25%. SF is expensive now, has been in the past, and will be in the future.
Even in Sonoma County the percentage of people who can afford a house has varied from 10% to, at the very most, 50%. Usually
affordability is around 30% meaning only 30% of residents can afford to buy a house. This is not a crisis. This is a permanent
condition.
If you want continued growth in high income jobs, then housing will keep rising in cost.
Ifyou want housing costs to stay constant, then you can't have continued growth in high paying jobs.
Perhaps the anger floating around about housing costs can be directed at the companies that can't figure out how to create jobs
outside the SF Bay area. They can have R&D centers in India but not Indiana?
So how is this boom different? Mainly in the builders' PR. By terming this,not particularly exceptional boom, a "housing crisis"
and getting everyone to accept that term, they create a panic-driven urge to over-ride all reasonable zoning limits. And ignore
the problems of getting people to and from work.
http://meetingthetwain.blogspot.com/2018/01/palo-alto-work-live-commute.html
[http://meetingthetwain.blogspot.com/2018/01/palo-alto-work-live-commute.html]
WORK-LIVE-COMMUTE
EXCERPTS:
Conclusion: Palo Alto is a poster child for bad (or lack of) urban planning on a regional level. Transit infrastructure is
insufficient and cannot be made sufficient without paying billions of dollars just so Palo Alto and Menlo Park can continue
creating jobs while leaving other cities to build and provide services for housing workers.
Yet with the geographic limits of Palo Alto (hills on one side, bay on the other), and the layout of Palo Alto streets for single
family housing it is hard to see how increasing housing to accommodate the number of jobs is possible without creating total
gridlock in and around Palo Alto. Which makes it self-evident that further job creation in Palo Alto is not in the best interests
of the region, including Palo Alto itself, since widespread resentment may force it to dramatically change itself in unpleasant
ways.
One reason promoted for increased density is to supposedly bring down housing prices so that more people can live in Palo Alto
near their work. Some hope this would reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. This runs counter to experience - if
increased density lowered housing prices, reduced traffic, and pollution, why doesn't NYC have low cost housing, light traffic and
clean air?
If you increase the density, two things happen.
First Thing: More people will be trying to fit on a fixed amount of land so the bidding for land will raise the price of land. If
you attempt to distribute the increased cost of land over more units by building up to have more rental income per acre you
trigger the second thing.
Second Thing: Building higher gives more rental income from the greater number of units per building. But, the price of land is
based on the income that the land can generate ("bid-rent pricing") so the price of land will rise along with the total apartment
building income. Therefore building up doesn't make rents cheaper because the landowner "captures" the supposed economies of
building up. As noted, lower Manhattan and Hong Kong are very expensive, despite (actually because of) their high density housing.
Increasing density won't lower the cost of housing as I showed at length and in depth here
http://meetingthetwain.blogspot.com/2017/02/is-there-housing-crisis.html
[http://meetingthetwain.blogspot.com/2017/02/is-there-housing-crisis.html]
WHOM DO WE BLAME?
Blame the Residents? Palo Alto's residents bought nice little houses on a nice quiet streets. Those streets weren't designed to
handle a lot of traffic or parking and cannot be retrofitted to do so. They have every reason to not want to have their house in
the perpetual shade of 8 story apartment buildings everywhere.
City Council? The city council wants the revenue from having businesses and sales tax revenue in town to fund the city services
including pensions that the state legislature authorized in 2000.
Businesses? If the prestige of a Palo Alto address brings more business why not pay the higher rents?
Workers? Palo Alto workers sought and accepted jobs there. Every day they go to work in Palo Alto they are making a decision to
keep on working there. They are making a trade-off between high-rents-with-less-commute and lower-rents-and-longer-commutes. They
may not likethe trade-off but they are adults so must accept the consequences of their fully informed decision.
What you see in the above description is a lot of groups each reasonably seeking their own best interests. Is there a bad guy
there?
Notice that there is the complete absence of an "adult in the room" to look at the big picture and decided what is best in the
overall long term for everyone.
Housing takes a lot of city services meaning a lot of city money - more than residential property taxes bring in (except in richer
communities like Los Altos Hills). On the other hand, businesses provide taxes including sales taxes if the corporate headquarters
is located in the city. Businesses typically require very few city services. A proper mix of each makes a community financially
stable.
ABAG (now MTC-ABAG) gets a lot of criticism but not for what they most deserve it for. That is the complete failure to allocate
housing, and jobs so as to optimize commutes. That is their mission - to set jobs and housing to minimize VMT and associated
pollution at which they have failed miserably. Just putting up housing doesn't do any good if you can't get from the housing to
the jobs. Maybe they don't have the power, or the will, or maybe they are getting bad advice but whatever the reason, Palo Alto is
a poster child for bad planning on a regional level.
