* alternatively buy food, electricity, and a car.
The root cause is neither tech workers nor foreign investors. The root cause is simply the shortage of housing stock relative to the number of people who want to live here (or, in the case of foreign investors, own property here). In most places in the Bay Area, that’s primarily because of short-sighted zoning, city planning, and (especially in SF) blatant nimby-ism.
But even if we fixed the root-cause shortage of housing – by, say, doubling the number of available units – we would probably see the local transportation infrastructure implode. Bay Area freeways are only vaguely sort of tolerable (in a Dante’s “levels of hell” kind of way) because the upper limit on how many people can live here is gated by the shortage of housing. Remove that gate, and now we’ve got a real mess on our hands.
The transportation infrastructure is, I fear, a completely intractable problem. In the almost three decades that I’ve lived here, the various municipalities that comprise the Bay Area have rarely agreed on anything, making big transportation improvements (like bringing BART to the South Bay) largely impossible.
The big tech companies have stepped in to mitigate the problem (somewhat) by running vast fleets of private coaches. While those programs have largely been successful, I know from direct experience how most of BoingBoing’s commenters feel about private coaches.
So we’re kind of screwed no matter what happens.
Is that a California number? Even if, it seems way high.
This calculator shows the actual tax liability to be closer to $25k. That’s just income taxes, though. No sales or property taxes. (CA property taxes are pretty low compared to the rest of the country, though).
Low as a percentage but very similar on an absolute value because of our high average taxable home values.
I regret selling a home in Redwood City about 15 years ago. Values have exploded so high I could have sold it now and just retired to… almost anywhere else.
What do they mean by “considered low income”? Does that mean government benefits, FHA subsidies, or what?
You won’t find any official support. But you will find your income to housing cost ratio to be very high. Disposable income will be low for a household making $117k in some parts of Silicon Valley. This is why some people commute from Stockton or Morgon Hill.
This is because affordable housing in the bay area costs $750,000 / unit to build. The sole reason for this is the local and state governments. The only reason they can build em for $150k in Portland and $750K in SF is jurisdiction.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/SF-mayor-convenes-summit-to-address-high-12932908.php
All I can think of is the line from Selina Kyle in the ball room scene from Dark Knight Rises:
“There’s a storm coming Mr Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches 'cause when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”
What this story really tells us is that as the American middle class is being decimated and wealth continues to concentrate at the very top financial precarity is creeping ever upward. That’s the final conclusion of the following related article about privilege-blind young white dolts complaining or bragging about how they’re “struggling”.
Why do I feel like one could make a universal theory of “black holes” or singularities (mathematical and physical) from just looking at economics and physics alone? Just bear with me on this idea. If we take Marx’s points on capitalism slowly carving out profit from depressed wages and other extraction methods where wealth keeps getting concentrated then in effect that wealth gets lost as the capital owning class can never effectively spend all of it even on dead end enterprises. They’re just not naturally inclined to spend all their wealth (I think paradox of thrift applies well here). So inevitably once an economy collapses from the lack of economic activity it’s in effect a black hole where wealth is trapped under private property rights the same way gravity in a black hole traps all matter. In effect, you got a kind of universal model for whether or not a system can or will naturally tend toward ‘blackholeishness.’ I wonder if anyone in physics, math, or economics has written on this problem. I suspect someone had to have.
Edit: the only difference between gravitational black holes and economic ones is that gravitational ones have Hawking radiation to evaporate naturally, economic ones just persist or get worked around in one way or another through social or political action. It’s still odd how they parallel though.
Vancouver also added an empty homes tax on < 50% occupancy/year to cut down on people sitting on investment properties and not renting them to anyone.
Naturally, there are people feeling hard done by this:
They call them “tiny homes” now.
home values have soared a staggering 64 percent over the last five years.
I would point out, as I am wont to do, that a standard S&P 500 index fund would have returned 86.8% over the last five years without paying property taxes, insurance, and whatnot. So if you’re buying property as an investment rather than a place to sleep, eat, and s***, you should probably stop so other people can just live there.
Successful businesses have buoyed the area that they are based in throughout modern history, attracting people with good jobs, which in turn increase house prices, etc.
However, at no time until the present have all the successful businesses been clustered in one relatively small area.
The net effect has been that the premiums that employees have enjoyed in these good jobs are almost entirely consumed by the increased rents and house prices that people who happened to live around these successful businesses are able to command. It’s also a much smaller group of people.
It used to be you were lucky if your childhood home happened to be near the HQ of a successful business. Now, you’ve won the lottery.
I’ll admit I find it darkly humorous that all the companies that are built on “shrinking the globe” through easy communication across the planet are all desperately concentrated in one teeny-tiny corner of one state.
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