[rus20376]

I know I risk getting down voted to oblivion, but I truly do not understand this sentiment. There are plenty of places I cannot afford to live, so I live somewhere I can afford. Every time I hear about a "housing crisis" all I see are people demanding government mandated development in some fancy place (Manhattan! San Francisco!) that is out of touch price wise for almost every human being on Earth.

This idea that people are demanding Palo Alto or some other high end desirable community to build them a place to live makes no sense. I understand some community they can afford like Fresno or somewhere may be less desirable, i.e. fewer millionaires as your neighbors, but if that's what you can afford then that's where you go, right?

If someone wants to explain why a high end and highly sought after community needs to use the power of the government to force development for anybody at all please do let me know. Explain it like I am five. Also include in your answer why just living somewhere affordable is no longer an option, seeing as that is what seemingly everyone else so far in human history has done. In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that Palo Alto itself was just some undesirable hayfields. Every place you don't want to live is just a few decades away from being someone else's coveted dream home.

[ronsor]

I dislike people all bunching up into cities (we have plenty of free space), but consider that there are many jobs in places like SF, even low-paying ones, that the richer residents do want filled. You're not getting a barista to commute 2 hours because the only alternative is living with 6 roommates. It's not going to happen. So, do you still want your coffee?

[bryanrasmussen]

>I dislike people all bunching up into cities

environment wise though bunching people up in cities seems the most efficient thing to do.

on edit: clarified what was quote and what my response.

[itake]

> we have plenty of free space

Where? SF and Manhattan are surrounded by water on 3 sides. Seattle has water on 2 sides. Other areas: LA, Boston, Miami, Portland, Denver, Chicago, have similar geographic limitations.

If you were to flatten cities out (see Atlanta), jobs will still concentrate downtown. If jobs concentrate in one area, home prices in that area will also elevate (downtown, buckhead, etc).

> You're not getting a barista to commute 2 hours because the only alternative is living with 6 roommates

Personally, I wish I had 6 roommates. People aren't getting married in their 20s, so if they aren't living with their wife/husband, why shouldn't they want to live with friends?

[ronsor]

> Where? SF and Manhattan are surrounded by water on 3 sides. Seattle has water on 2 sides. Other areas: LA, Boston, Miami, Portland, Denver, Chicago, have similar geographic limitations.

All those places you listed are the cities with high cost of living and many people. "Where" is outside those cities--somewhere else. America is mostly empty space, even excluding parks, national forests, etc.!

> Personally, I wish I had 6 roommates. People aren't getting married in their 20s, so if they aren't living with their wife/husband, why shouldn't they want to live with friends?

It's fine if you do, but I feel like most people do not, and I do not. Being friends and being roommates can often be two very different experiences.

[itake]

It’s incredibly normal across history and cultures for people to live with someone, parents, siblings, husband/wife.

If you live in the empty space, where are the jobs? Where is the food? Where is the healthcare?

[DerekL]

> I dislike people all bunching up into cities

Are you talking about how certain industries are each concentrated to a small number of locations? That's for good reason. Suppose you were a software engineer, and every five or ten years you had to move across the country for your next job, because almost every single company is in a different city? Suppose you were running a software company, and it took every hire four months to start work because of the move?

[jameslk]

The unfortunate truth is that Palo Alto is in the epicenter of one of the biggest providers of jobs and income. As much as many would prefer to have that epicenter relocated to somewhere more deserving given how little the area cares to develop beyond a dreary suburban money vacuum, network effects prevents it

[modeless]

The government doesn't need to build any housing. They just need to stop preventing people from building housing. All of the obstacles to building housing come from the government. Take them away and the problem will solve itself.

[lelandbatey]

I would like folks I hire, folks I work with, etc, to not be forced to live an hours commute by car in order to do business with me. I would like jobs and lives to be possible to be co-located. As part of that, I'd love to do things like demolish the single-family home on my property and pay, with my own money, to turn that into a let's say 6-to-8 unit apartment/condo building.

However, I cannot do that. Due to zoning, I can turn this house into at most 2 houses. Unfortunate. If I could secure the money and funding, I'd love to build more housing via the land I own.

Notice, I haven't mentioned the government at all other than to say I am being held back from building housing. That's what folks talk about.

This is not to say I don't support government operated social housing. But I'd love to START with just making dense housing legal.

[kelnos]

> demanding Palo Alto or some other high end desirable community to build them a place to live

That's not what's happening. They're asking to be allowed to build. Y'know, like pay a developer to build them a house.

But no, I guess it's totally fair that the people who live there already just happened to be born at the right time and place to get to take advantage of living in a desirable area, and everyone else can just pound sand.

As a SF resident (haven't lived down near Palo Alto in years), the housing crisis is what's responsible for homelessness and for the high cost of everything (not just housing) here. If I could wave a magic wand and 50k new housing units appeared in desirable neighborhoods within the city limits, I'd do it in an instant. Life would be so much better not just for the people who want to live here, but for the people who already live here. (And yes, I say this as a SF homeowner who might stand to have a reduced home value.)

But NIMBYs love the whole "I got mine, fuck you" shtick, even if ultimately it's against their and their neighbors' own interests.

> in some fancy place (Manhattan! San Francisco!) that is out of touch price wise for almost every human being on Earth.

You're just talking in circles. The reason these places are out of touch price wise for so many people is because of the anti-housing policies in place in these cities.

[rus20376]

> pay a developer to build them a house

I seriously doubt anyone living in an RV has a plot of land in Palo Alto that they are forbidden to develop.

Is it just boiled down to the sentiment that you want to "stick to the rich!" by forcing the government to bulldoze their communities?

[kelnos]

> I seriously doubt anyone living in an RV has a plot of land in Palo Alto that they are forbidden to develop.

Sigh, I didn't mean that literally. Of course what I actually meant was: if housing policy allows for building more housing, with less friction, and less unnecessary cost, developers will naturally build more, and faster, because there's demand, and then people won't have to live in RVs, because there will be housing units available than they can afford.

> Is it just boiled down to the sentiment that you want to "stick to the rich!" by forcing the government to bulldoze their communities?

Wow, not what I said, and not what I think. If you're going to continue to take the most uncharitable interpretations of what I say, I don't really think there's much point in continuing to participate in this discussion.

There's plenty of land in all these places. No need to bulldoze anything. And not sure why you keep bringing up "the government". The government won't be doing anything except making it easier and more affordable to build housing.

[fzeroracer]

You can easily see what the down stream effects of these housing issues are with how many ski towns have been struggling. Exceedingly high property value with low housing availability means it's incredibly hard to field workers for the shit you usually take for granted. The end result is that nobody can afford anything, people start leaving and existing property gets bought up for use as rentals or AirBnB and everything sucks.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/colorado-ski-town-steamboat-...

[wpm]

>why a high end and highly sought after community needs to use the power of the government to force development for anybody at all please do let me know.

Why should they be able to use the power of government to force everyone to not develop please do let me know.

Palo Alto is filled with rambleshack little 60's starter homes. It's fucking preposterous they're a walking commute to the HQs of some of the largest employers in the region, some of the largest companies on the planet in history, and the houses near by are basically the same size and style of the ones in the Midwestern suburb I grew up in, but with less land and pissier neighbors! And because its lacking in density, every fucking road is a horrible shithole loud stroad, so don't even give me that bullshit "its so natural and pretty", it's an ugly strip mall. The land isn't expensive because it's nice, it's because of where it is, and the insane, overreaching rules that keep the built environment exactly the way it was 50 years ago, that makes it expensive.

The entire Bay has a natural growth boundary. If it hadn't been unnaturally ossified in amber, it'd be a wonderful, confederated metropolis of taller multi-unit, lots of 3+ flats, multi-use, even plenty of SFHs, and transit to link it all together. Instead, it's a ponzi scheme for the rich and the lucky who got there first, who are starving the state of voters for the 2030 census, the middle class schmucks clogging the roads in their car, and all the poor who can't afford to live there, but can't afford to leave, so they pitch a tent in a park to get out of the rain and get their face plastered on Fox News. It's short-sighted, selfish, and fucking stupid. Absolutely brain-dead land-use policy all around.

Ain't no one fucking dreaming of a $3.1M ranch home with < 1400 sq ft. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/527-Rhodes-Dr-Palo-Alto-C...

[lmm]

> Also include in your answer why just living somewhere affordable is no longer an option, seeing as that is what seemingly everyone else so far in human history has done. In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that Palo Alto itself was just some undesirable hayfields. Every place you don't want to live is just a few decades away from being someone else's coveted dream home.

Until the '50s nowhere had zoning laws, that's the big difference. Not to mention all the other ways to make housing illegal by stealth, like building code and electrical code and plumbing code requirements that make it illegal to work on anything yourself. It is now functionally illegal to build anything in cities (occasionally a developer who pays a big enough brib^H^H campaign contribution to the mayor's reelec^H^H an unaffiliated PAC supporting candidates that align with their interests gets to build a couple of buildings); if you're willing to build in an empty hayfield then sure, you can build a handful of houses for people who don't need jobs until there are enough people living there that they vote to incorporate and make building illegal. It's now functionally impossible to obtain a house near where the jobs are unless you are a boomer who got one back when it wasn't illegal, or are descended from one, or otherwise have generational wealth.

The people who built when that was a small town growing into a bigger town have pulled the ladder up behind them; that's new, and happening everywhere, and unfair. Especially because the whole scam only works because existing homes are grandfathered in. If you made the existing homeowners play by the same rules they're imposing on everyone else, and tore down any house where the guy who did the wiring back in 1955 couldn't prove that they had the required 4 years of college or what have you, things would get sorted out pretty quick.

[tayo42]

Where else can you live on the peninsula? Yeah we're talking about Palo alto but all the towns are unaffordable

[daveidol]

Plenty of affordable places elsewhere though

[Glyptodon]

Your entire comment is basically an asinine way of talking around the fact that employers want people to go to work in places that they can't actually afford to live or must otherwise waste vast portions of their lives and pocketbooks commuting to work. Perhaps I'd be more sympathetic if employers were taxed on their employees' commute distance and time, or had to pay overtime rates for employees commutes, even for salaried workers, or something, but as it stands people don't "feel like they must live in Manhattan." Instead, they feel like they have to work for whatever company that's got good vibes, aligns with their career (because network effects are very real), and locates their office or coworking space in SF or Manhattan, and then don't want to spend all their salary on rent or commute 2 hours each way.

[scoot]

/out of touch/out of reach/ ?

[dotnet00]

How dare the poors desire to live somewhere that commuting to their job isn't a multiple hour affair. They should know their place (which is far out of sight unless they're given the honor of preparing an overpriced coffee for their betters).

[dotnet00]

(If it wasn't clear, this is sarcasm)

[bryanrasmussen]

>Explain it like I am five. Also include in your answer why just living somewhere affordable is no longer an option

OK well, I was hoping to get something done this morning since I woke at 5, but I will provide an edge case.

Sometimes people are living in a high end community, but something bad happens to them, and when the bad thing happens to them the community has programs in place to help them. You might think that the community having programs in place to help them is good because that's what communities should do but it has a hidden bad side called lock-in, because getting the program to help you often takes a lot of time and effort and then when you have it you depend on it and you can't really leave.

But sometimes when bad things happen it means more bad things happen! The first bad thing causes other bad things to happen!

Like if you have a child born that needs a lot of special help and you start spending all your spare time helping them and going through all the work of getting the community to help which means undoubtedly months if not years of fighting for your child and getting stressed and then after a few years of that you can't handle your high paying job anymore you get fired.

So now you can't afford to be in the high end community!

If you move you have to move with the child that needs help, but moving is extra difficult because you have a child that needs help! Also maybe because you lost your job you don't really have the money to move anyway, because moving costs a lot of money! Maybe your best bet is to try to find some way to stay in the expensive community because that community is forced to help you because you have all the paperwork in place.

Also moving takes a lot of effort, you couldn't handle your fancy job anymore because of the stresses of having whatever problem you have (doesn't have to be a child with problems could be other things) and so you might not be able to handle all the stresses of moving, hell you might not even really be able to handle the stresses of searching for a new place to live far away.

But hey, there is a lady here with an RV. So you move into that for a small time until you can get a place in the community that provides help for your problem and devote your time to getting such a place, because that is actually the most sensible solution.

Now admittedly this is an edge case and whatever reasons these people have for wanting to build in Palo Alto, a place they obviously can't afford, those reasons might be different. I do get some feeling that people have a job in the area and need to be in that area to keep that job feeling for some of the characters described in the article.

Those people seem sort of rational (they're after all maintaining a place to live and not living on the street). But you're right they are doing something that on its face seems irrational. Your conclusion on seeing this irrationality seems to be that they are just stupid, much stupider than you.

My conclusion on seeing someone who is rational doing something that seems irrational is that there is something I don't know.

on edit: changed searching for a job to searching for a new place to live.

[bryanrasmussen]

obviously this example is a bit streamlined, but that is what happens when explaining to a 5 year old, as you requested.

[ricksunny]

Great book: Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris (2023)