I'd classify myself as a progressive and I don't see why every Bay Area city has to make some "contribution" to increased housing.<p>An acceptable approach would seem to be to have the "center" becoming more dense over time while the outer rings stay less dense.<p>The problem is that current geography has resulted in natural centers being the ones that refuse to build and <i>that</i> is problematic. Palo Alto and the rest are happy to have Facebook and etc's business but won't make room for Facebook employees.<p>And the apparently illogical behavior comes out of proposition 13's logic. Cities can tax businesses but property values are immune.<p>Which is to say that prop 13 needs to be repealed or annulled before any other sort of sanity is going to happen (and maybe that's not happened but, hey, there you go).
You don't really need an article to point out the Bay Area is failing people.<p>The crazy amount of "sleeping rough" homeless mixed with people typing on phones inside their auto driving Teslas going by without lifting an eyebrow. If you are not from the US and have learnt to think that is "normal" it's pretty confronting.
Well, I think you have 2 factors colliding together.<p>1) As people moved here and got good jobs, made a life for themselves, they (you and I) inevitably become more sympathetic to and desiring of middle class values. Stability, some measure of comfort, concern about taxation, their local neighborhood. It's understandable, it's natural.<p>Yet this is in conflict (especially when growth needs to happen) with:<p>2) The people who have not yet moved here (or become voters, or homeowners in particular), don't get to have a say in the policies that govern a place, yet at some point are the ones who have to live within policies that others decide.<p>So, a lot of the policies around here favor those who "got theirs" already, and there's very little incentive to fix this. Because the people who it benefits aren't here yet!<p>I think the question is, what do you do about this conflict, and what do you want a region's population/demographic renewal policy to be? How do you turn over property, wealth, a city/region to the next generation in a way that's sustainable, especially if you want it to grow?<p>Because right now, it's a "here's what I want for me right now" policy landscape. And that favors old people who own houses in the Bay Area to the detriment of young/poor/up and coming people who want to find a place in the area. The only thing to do is wait for the few % of people to die or move out from frustration, and face high housing prices that preserve everyone else's interests.<p>It gets masked in terms like "neighborhood preservation" or "local control" (or even using some minorities as a headline grabber, when in the end it actually favors mostly the rich property owners).<p>It's a big problem.
Clarification for anyone else not familiar with Bay Area geography: There are 101 cites included in this regional study.<p>There’s a lot of data here I think is stitched together in support of a presumption presented as a conclusion, but one question:<p>> According to estimates from the US Census, the Bay Area’s population grew by about 10% from 2010 to 2019 [...] Yet of the ten richest cities of the 101 cities in the Bay Area, not one of them grew faster than 5%.<p>By how much did the area’s population of the richest grow? That is, if it grew at a rate of 10%, did they move elsewhere? If 5% - is there any point to the rest of the article? If less, wouldn’t astronomical property value explain why poorer groups didn’t move to these specific areas?<p>As with so many political issues, this is about economic class - and the differences in characteristics between them:<p><a href="https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertility/time-series/household-income/t7.xlsx" rel="nofollow">https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertili...</a>
> Rich communities should want to welcome more residents, particularly those less fortunate than them. Sadly, in the Bay Area, that doesn’t seem to be the case.<p>Is that the case anywhere in the world? Why single out the Bay Area.
To give someone an idea of how bad the difference between neighbours living in the same type of house (same lot size, same floor plan) can be because of Prop 13 in CA, check out this site: <a href="https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/" rel="nofollow">https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/</a><p>Feel free to zoom in in any residential neighborhood in San Jose or Palo Alto. You can see 10-20x difference in yearly property taxes payed.
Or maybe the people that live in low density neighborhoods don't want to live in high density neighborhoods. So they stop developers from changing the density of their town.
> Whether it’s to protect their property values, exclude Black people, keep down traffic or protect their city’s physical environment, these cities make it hard to build new housing.<p>Stopped reading at this part. What an ignorant thing to say.
> The data show that middle income cities have, on average, grown at a much faster pace than the region’s poorest and richest locales.<p>I'm not a housing expert, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.<p>Middle income cities grow faster because there was more growth in middle income demographics. The most common demographic with a lot of growth is the "senior software engineer" at tech company X. As tech companies exploded, this was the segment that grew the most.<p>As a result, this is the segment that is most competitive when it comes to housing, because that's where all the people are. This "middle class" income bracket for housing in the Bay Area translates roughly to the $1.25m to $2.5m range for single family home purchases depending on whether you have 1 or two tech incomes in the household.<p>There's no getting around it: wherever most of the people are will be the most competitive for housing, and when it comes to essentials like food and shelter, people /will/ compete. Want less competition? Buy a house in Vallejo for under $1m, or go above $3m, and there will be fewer people in those brackets who can compete with you.<p>Either increase the supply or decrease the demand, there's no way around the physical reality of housing.<p>P.S. It never fails to make me pause and think when people accept $200k jobs without asking, or trying to find out: "What's the distribution graph of incomes within a 30-min commute distance of the job, and where do I land on that bell curve?"