[lsc]

>* more traffic

Homeowners generally don't fight nearly as hard against new office buildings. The bay area, for example, wouldn't have a housing problem if we built apartments like we build offices, and our traffic problem would decrease.

The problem is that the home value model of homeowner motivation fits the data much better than any other model.

Show me a bay area "homeowners for better public transit" rally and maybe I'll change my mind.

[plughs]

The bay area is such an outlier that I almost feel like it should be exempt from broader 'housing cost' discussions. Fixing the bay area housing crisis is a whole other set of concerns.

No one in our area wants more office space. I don't know that there's much of a demand for new office space, the buildings we have are full of vacancies.

[lsc]

>The bay area is such an outlier that I almost feel like it should be exempt from broader 'housing cost' discussions. Fixing the bay area housing crisis is a whole other set of concerns.

I think it's pretty similar to most other places that were built low density that now have high demand. We need to change the rules to allow high density, and we need public transit.

>No one in our area wants more office space. I don't know that there's much of a demand for new office space, the buildings we have are full of vacancies.

I... kinda do? back in the days after the crash, I would rent industrial spaces as workshops for my business. I had 1/4 of an industrial condo down the way from the hacker dojo at one point. It was a lot of fun, and only possible 'cause there was a lot of space and it was cheap. I mean, yes, yes, I should have bought. but my point is just that having space is... pretty nice.

That, and at work I'm crammed into this open office; they allocate more space to my car in the parking lot than they allocate to me - I think we'd all enjoy a few more sqft.

[desert_boi]

San Francisco's problems have rippled out to places like Boise, ID and Reno, NV.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/business/economy/reno-gro...

Both of these cities (and metros) are low density (1,049.64 people per sq. km). They're filled with complaints about traffic and growth.

NIMBYs don't want to build up. In Boise, condos are almost exclusively limited to 6 stories, max. Three quarters of downtown is parking lots or roads.

Folks from outer burbs (Meridian and Eagle) don't want to lose parking, and transit is terrible. A bus runs the 5km between Downtown Boise and the airport every 40 minutes.

I think the housing crisis is uniquely painful in the States because of the weird confluence between investing and culture around urban cores, inner burbs, and outer burbs.

[davidw]

The Bay Area is where it's worst, but it's essentially the same problem there as it elsewhere. Also, what people do down there has a ripple effect everywhere else. Where I live in Bend, Oregon, we see a lot of people moving up from California who either 1) made out like bandits because of scarce housing, prop 13, etc... and can afford to sell out and live like kings because housing is "cheap" here (for them, not for the rest of us), or 2) can't hope to afford a home there, so move somewhere like here seeking that opportunity.

[0xffff2]

Funny to see Bend pop up, since I was just looking at houses there on Zillow today and I came away pretty shocked. I work in Silicon Valley but I already own a house in South Central Oregon because I'll never be able to afford one in California. The only problem is that it's rural enough that I can't get any kind of internet other than satellite.

I've been half-seriously looking at houses in Bend or Klamath Falls where I could work full-time remote, but there aren't a lot of houses that I could afford in Bend! It's nothing like the Bay Area, but the percentage of $1m+ houses was really surprising to me, and when you look at the price history, it's a very recent phenomenon.

[davidw]

Happy to talk to you about Bend if you're curious; my email is in my profile.

Bend is very different from K-falls, these days. And yeah, the prices here bounce around a lot - they were the fastest in the US going up before the previous bubble popped, then they cratered, now they're skyrocketing again. I'd consider waiting...

Whereabouts is your house? South central Oregon off the grid brings this story to mind: https://magazine.atavist.com/outlaw-country-klamath-county-o...

[0xffff2]

Yeah, I've spent a day in Bend here and there and lots of time in K-Falls since it's the nearest town to me and "different" barely even begins to capture it. Klamath county certainly has its charms, but a bastion of civilization it is not.

Thanks for the link! Haven't read the whole story in the link yet, but it's definitely not the first I've read about the Tableland. I'm halfway between Chiloquin and Sprague River so that's practically my back yard. The stories abound. I haven't decided just how true some of them are yet.

I'm just close enough to civilization to buy power from the grid, but nothing else. I'm going to wait at least a year or two to see if Musk's Starlink project delivers. If it lives up to its full potential I might be able to work from the boonies.

[davidw]

Wow, that's really remote. Interesting book about a ranch just north of there: https://www.amazon.com/Yamsi-Year-Life-Wilderness-Ranch/dp/B... - you'd probably recognize some of the places in the book.

[parsnips]

Bend's layout also has some constraints as well with National Forest and BLM land surrounding it :-/ That and every Californian wants to pack into the West-side of town so prices get super wonky.

[davidw]

There's actually quite a bit of land available for Bend to sprawl - as well as build 'in' and up.

It's not just Californians - lots of people from Portland and Seattle too: https://twitter.com/EastSlopeEcon/status/1217860613247946752...

[TheCoelacanth]

Wouldn't the home value model predict support for public transit because public transit tends to increase nearby property values?

[lsc]

This model does depend on the idea that most homeowners think that public transit will bring poor people and/or crime and thus would lower property values. There are lots of examples of homeowners blocking transit and then complaining about traffic.

There's a lot of evidence for this in the '70s; this was super tied up with wanting an ethnically and economically homogeneous neighborhood. it explains a lot about where VTA goes (and why we have VTA in the south bay and not BART) The evidence for this is not as strong now.

[lsc]

>because public transit tends to increase nearby property values

Do you have references? my impression is the opposite.

Do you think having a bus stop out front would make the average suburbanite want to pay more or less for their house? My guess is quite a bit less, but I also don't have references to back up my impression.

(I mean, I think this is changing in the most urban areas. But I think that in the case of the homes of a majority of Americans, nearby transit lowers the sale value of a home rather than raising it.)

[Nasrudith]

If people were purely economically rational actors, maybe. If they own a home they already have adequate transportation for themselves 99% of the time (only exceptions I am aware of are aging suburban populace who can no longer drive) and often don't want to pay for what they don't need or believe the expense will be greater than the gain. Maybe if traffic reaches a critical mass such that transit becomes the quicker option and roads aren't remotely viable.

Second there is an all too common ugly undercurrent of bigotry viewing it as bringing "undesirables" that they worry will lower it or negatively effect their lifestyle.

[rcpt]

Offices don't bring in new voters.