Except NYC is already full of high density building.
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That’s true, I was mostly thinking of the west coast.
NYC is already pretty dense. Still, there are cities all over the world with twice or more of their density. So it COULD pack more in. Everyone wants to be where the action is at.
Meanwhile in the midwest was just keep sprawling out like a slime mold.
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I used to believe that, including myself.
But I’ve instead realized I have a smaller list of “wants” than I thought - access to good food, clean air, reasonable traffic, good shopping and other amenities, and a walkable, liveable area with local businesses to support is every bit as good as Downtown Toronto where I could support the (increasingly rare) local businesses but face the reality of being crushed in with 4 million other folk.
Turns out my definition of “where the action is at” is more fungible than I had believed.
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I graduated in '94, got a job at an air force lab that paid very little. I got a job offer from a Silicon Valley company that doubled my salary. I arrived to the area to find that not only was housing scarce, it was impossibly expensive. Like half a million for a 2 bedrom condo, $2500/mo for an apartment that didn’t reek of cigarette smoke.
The senior developers where I worked, my “mentors”, all drove BMWs and Corvettes, and routinely regaled me of the time they all bought property on the cheap, and were now living in incredibly modest million dollar homes by selling up.
I just could not stand the place! The bumper to bumper traffic, the expensive cost of living, and having to work 80 hours a week with no ROI and crappy raises.
We got out and lived for awhile in a nice little redneck mountain town, and when the Dot Com bust happened I did a contract job in Chicago, which was fun because we got to explore the city when the kids were little.
I don’t think I’ve ever caused property values to go up, cause when we finally settled in the PNW and bought a house that was when the Sub Prime crisis hit.
Me and my bad timing saved me from being one of those techies who ruin entire towns and neighborhoods. And I can sympathize w/ all the people who really aren’t “making it” either, the Millennials and Gen-Zers who wind up with low paying jobs and high rents.
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I look forward to finding a more affordable NYC apartment after the exodus.
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A good portion of those buildings are given over to purely commercial endeavors however, rather than residential, because they can charge a heck of a lot more for a commercial property.
And NYC has a dirty little secret that a high proportion of those are left untenanted because the tax write-offs make it cheaper to leave it as an empty building on the investment portfolio than to fix it up to rent.
[made an effort to limit the links to pre-pandemic articles]
EDIT: BTW, is it possible to make the links render as simple links rather than pulling in the giant images/summaries?
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I mean, they didn’t exactly migrate to put down roots in the first place.
Some of them might eventually. But I guess some have bought into the whole digital nomad thing.
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I was talking to a recruiter/contract hirer as well as the company itself on what would be a great opportunity, get my foot in the door, grow my knowledge and be in a position to influence an important component of the business in Silicon Valley, just as Covid was starting to flare up. I would see a 25% bump in pay, but the move would have been a 50%+ bump in housing costs plus being in a covid zone. I would have kept my house where it is and rented a cubby hole there maybe. Not a simple decision, and things went quiet for awhile too. Now the remote opportunity may be there so I will talk with them again.
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Good point. I didn’t think I’d stay this long when I first moved to California. I’ve noticed a lot of the ppl I met working in tech 2013 - 2017 or so have been posting updates that they’ve relocated. The people in my field (biotech) seem to be a lot less mobile, but it’s also harder to be a digital nomad and deal with wet lab.
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As a native Californian I’m curious to know where these plentiful “affordable” suburbs are. Certainly there are some places that are less ridiculous than others, but with a median price of $578k for the state there are darn few places where working-class people can afford decent homes, at least in communities that have decent employment opportunities. Yeah, if you’ve got a good job and are able to work remotely then you could always buy a home in Bakersfield or something, but in that case why stay in California at all?
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I personally don’t understand why most of the public pressure to increase density seems to be falling on the cities that are already among the most dense. The eight highest-density cities in the US are all in the New York metropolitan area. (If there was ever an example proving that high density doesn’t automatically lead to affordability, that’s it). San Francisco is also pretty dense, more so than places like Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, etc. It seems to me that these places have already done their part to a large extent when it comes to density and that rather than focus on ever-increasing their populations they should perhaps work on ways to equitably distribute affordable housing to the populations they already have, especially to folks like teachers, public servants, restaurant and service workers, and all the other essential people that make a city function.
There are plenty of great mid-size cities around the county that have ample opportunity to increase their densities more easily than the top three or four megacities, so it think we’d get a better bang-for-our-buck shifting attention towards them.
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Phoenix, Orlando, Atlanta, and Dallas would like to enter the chat.
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I mean, I think that is fair. I am just saying NYC COULD be more dense.
Certainly other cities would benefit from it more.
We have the ability to house everyone we need to in various cities, but the complicated dance of NIMBY and protecting current housing values is what prevents it.
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What do you mean by “everyone we need to”? If you’re talking about homeless shelters and the like, then yes, absolutely we can and should do more. But if you’re talking about people who don’t yet live in these magacities but would move to one if only it was more affordable, I’m not entirely convinced that it would be possible to build enough housing for literally everyone who might want to move in to SF or NYC if money wasn’t a factor. Supply and demand will always play a big factor is where people choose to live, with or without NIMBYism.
Edit: that said, I’m open to arguments. Is there an example of a popular large city that you can point to, either in the US or abroad, where you’d say that housing affordability has been “solved” primarily through increased building / density? It’s a sincere question, maybe there are good examples that I’m not aware of.
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It might actually help some of the low cost cities, my own included, if they fall into a weird little pricing range. One of the problems that happens in really low cost cities, particularly places like Cleveland and Detroit is that your house can drop to such a low price that it becomes essentially impossible to get conventional financing. This means a lot of people end up in this weird spot where they could easily pay for the house and put down a sizable down payment, but can’t buy because they can’t do the full price in cash. The sellers can’t get a conventional loan to renovate and raise the value for similar reasons and the houses spiral into decay until they are either demolished or sold in bulk to some rental mill. Even a few years of modest appreciation would completely alter the dynamics of large swathes of the city. It would take pentupling the prices in Cleveland just to reach the national average.
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A few I looked up on zillow.
Milford $232k (and a hundred other little lakeside towns like it)
Vacaville $473k
Redding $293k
Rancho Cucamonga $550k
Grass Valley $419k
Colfax $402k
Merced $262k
Fresno $259k
Lancaster $310k
Despite being expensive California, if you’re willing to live far away from a big city and in a small neighborhood, you can find lots of things. I think Fresno and Merced area strike the best balance between price and population. If I had money to invest in post-pandemic real-estate that’s where I’d focus.
I paid substantially below the median price (at that time) for my first California home in San José.
I looked up my childhood home town back east (Michigan). It’s a rural and working class town experiencing high unemployment. And it’s median price is $205k. I’m not sure where you draw the line on what “working-class people can afford”, but I feel that with decent credit and two people making about $15/hr then just under $300k is right on the edge of what is feasible (given the payments I calculated). Some people certainly buy more with less income, but I think most people wouldn’t attempt that. That’s my strong argument for $15/hr minimum wage (and clearly the minimum, average should be way higher for a couple with several years work experience)
Ok, let’s go with your <$300k number then. In your earlier post you specifically were talking about suburbs. The definition of a suburb is “an outlying district of a city” and is generally understood to mean outside a largish city where people would commute in to work. In the context of this conversation about tech workers it would specifically be somewhere within commuting distance to a major tech hub. So Milford, Redding, Merced and Fresno don’t really qualify. There are a couple of manufactured homes currently available in San Jose for less than $300k, but then you have to add the cost of rent to that so the effective cost is higher.
But fine. Yes, there are some towns in CA where working class people could probably afford to live.
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Big cities need non-rich people too. All those highly-compensated investment brokers and tech bros aren’t going to scrub the office toilets or fix the potholes or stock the grocery store shelves. Working-class people don’t just go to big cities because they want to live like rich people, they go to big cities because that’s where a lot of jobs are. And not just the kind of jobs people can do on Zoom.
If there’s no viable way for working-class people to live in those cities, or at least within a reasonable commute of those cities, then the housing system is fundamentally broken.
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I think most of us have been convinced of this for quite some time. It’s the upper management that’s often the obstacle here.
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