>> I agree with the points you're making here, but I think it's fair to say
>> that renters do, indirectly, pay property taxes. Owners of rental
>> housing pay property taxes; the costs show up somewhere.
>
>Yes, I did recognize that later in my message to Tom. However, since
>most land lords have owned their buildings for a _long_ time in San
>Francisco, they are paying taxes far, far below market rate. Selling
>these buildings to new owners (setting aside the question of whether or
>not that is a good idea for other reasons) will _greatly_ increase the
>financial income to the city. I stand by my statement that renters pay
>very little of the city's real estate taxes, while home owners
>(especially new ones) pay the vast majority.
(Actually you said they pay none but we can ignore that.)
What you're pointing out is the inequity created by Prop. 13. That's
just a reason to get rid of Prop. 13. If apartment buildings are
treated as commercial property, this situation could be addressed by
splitting the property tax rolls, as I suggested, which would permit
raising the commercial property tax rate.
[..]
> I believe that one of San
>Francisco's enduring problems has been that it's density is just below
>the threashold needed for a truly vibrant city. It is too easy to drive
>here, there are too many neighborhoods where it is not possible to walk
>to everything you need,
Like the Sunset or Bayview? This is also partly related to zoning.
You have to make sure that large tracts of land aren't zoned into
a kind of land use monoculture. That can happen even with high density.
Take a drive along Wilshire Blvd. in L.A. east from Westwood village.
Massive luxury highrises for blocks. And not a single store. It's
as autocentric as suburbia, in effect. To buy a beer or a bag
of Peet's coffee, the residents will have to jump into their beamers or
Mercedes' and drive somewhere.
>and the economies of scale of having lots of
>people close together are not fully realized. The "solution" to this is
>more and taller housing. Which, does not _have_ to be ugly; how about a
>"beauty contest" for housing (although most of the towers they're
>building now are no advertisement for the financial district's beauty
>contest!). The old Eastern European cities, which are gorgeous but
>still have a pretty uniform housing height comparable to the Tenderloin,
>might be a good model.
[..]
One aim should be to foster multi-use districts where people can walk
to many of the "normal" sorts of functions you need in daily, weekly,
monthly life -- food store, drug store, hardware store, bank branch/ATM,
etc. The more things people can accomplish by walking, the less pressure
there is on them to use cars or to even own cars. So, I agree there needs
to be *enough* density to support vibrant commercial subcenters in
neighborhoods. But this need not be a Manhattanized variety. You can
get density, for example, through a *diversity* of building
types. It isn't necessary to commit an entire area to large buildings.
You can, rather, allow *some* number of apartment buildings in a given
district without that district being all of that type. You can encourage
mixes of use in a single building, such as apartments or offices above
stores.
One problem to consider with any proposal to eliminate
height restrictions: It isn't clear that the current structural steel
technology used in building highrises will actually survive the sorts
of earthquakes that can occur here. This was one of the more discouraging
results of the Northridge earthquake in 1994 in L.A. They discovered
that literally *hundreds* of new structural steel buildings in L.A.
had serious cracks in their structural steel frames, contrary to
expectations.
>
>> [Rent control i]s not needs-tested.
>
>I agree. This is _the_ major problem with rent control. It does not
>solve the problem because it wastes the city's limited income
>subsidising the rich, who do not need help, while doing nothing to help
>the poor, who still get out-bid for housing.
Clearly, people with working class incomes, equal to or below
the median, are the largest group whose protection is the function
of rent control. It's precisely because of the ineffectiveess
of rent control as a strategy that i propose replacing it or
supplementing it with
a strategy of cooperative housing financed and orchestrated
by the city (but NOT managed by the city). I make this distinction
between orchestration and management because the city is better
as a funnel or concentration of big picture political decisions
than it is at management of services. "Better" here means: people
have more control over it, at least in principle. I don't mean
that I always agree with the results.
>
>
>> From: Tom Wetzel <tom.wetzel@beasys.com>
[..]
>> The monopoly
>> nature of housing ensures that this will happen.
>
>It strikes me that laws preventing the transfer of housing to
>homeowners, and keeping it in the hands of land lords, is what creates,
>or encourages, the monopoly of housing in the hands of land lords.
All landownership is participation in a monopoly. There is simply
a finite amount of land here. This is why it isn't a commodity.
A commodity is something where you can increase numbers of units
produced in response to incresing demand.
>
>> Well, my approach here would be to municipalize residential
>> building.
>
>No thanks. Even if I have to go back to being a renter, I do not
>volunteer to live in a home maintained by the same clowns who run MUNI.
I''m not suggessting that. I'm suggesting that there would be
something like a housing commission that would be only responsible
for monitoring needs for increased housing and move to acquire land
and provide financing when it deems there is need for new housing.
But neither the construction, design, nor the management of the housing would
be in the hands of the city, on my proposal.
>
>> The idea
>> would be to assign that responsibility to associations of
>> residents, anlogous to, say, condo associations or housing
>> coops.
>
>It may surprise you, but I think that this is a _great_ idea. I am all
>for worker ownership of businesses, as long as they buy it and compete
>for customers along with everyone else.
[..]
> However, the key problem
>here is that most renters don't want the responsibility of maintaining
>their rental home (this "non-handy" individual certainly didn't!), and
Making the resident assoc. responsible for a lot of landlord-like
hassles takes care of much of this.
Under a condo association you're only responsible for your own
living space. This reduces a lot of the responsibility that a homeowner
has.
[..]
>
>> Nor would the city actually build anything on my proposal.
>> It would simply provide a voucher to prospective residents to arrange for
>> construction with builders, on land provided by the city.
>
>All you would get your proposal is a political or financial competition
>for vouchers, resulting in -- guess what! -- high-priced housing. As
>long as more people want to live in San Francisco than there is
>available housing, people will find a way to compete for that housing,
>and prices will remain high.
This doesn't follow. Clearly there would be rationing in some way
of the units made available. Market competition is only one form
of rationing but it need not be the method used. There could be
a waiting list for the vouchers. It could be "first come, first
served." Or there could be a lottery, as is used now for coop and
condo conversions. The cost to the individual residents would be, as I
conceive it, a function of their square footage in the cooperative
development. I.e., you take the total lease payment to the city
and divide it by total square footage to get a per-square-foot rate.
So, a family with 800 square feet has half as much to pay as someone
with 1,600 square feet.
When a group are brought together to work out the design, they can
specify a unit of a size that fits their pocketbook (keeping in
mind that the
per square foot rate would be a subsidized rate to begin with). People
with higher incomes would be able to "buy" a larger dwelling. An
advantage of this is that you'd get buildings with a multitude of
sizes and styles of units, rather than a cookie-cutter design.
>There is no government intervention that
>can change that fundamental equation, it can only "hide" it, making it
>even harder for the un-connected poor to compete.
Why? Why can't the "unconnected poor" sign up at a housing office
to participate in a housing lottery as easily as those with higher
incomes?
>Which does not mean
>that I believe we should build no subsidised housing (e.g., for
>artists).
Why should artists have this privilege anymore than, say, janitors?
If janitors are necessary to production, housing must be provided
for them.
> But we have to recognize that the city's means are very
>limited, and that this is not the way to build large tracts of housing
>for large numbers of middle class "rust belt" workers. In other words,
>subsidised housing should be carefully targeted to the poor or small
>groups that city voters consider vital to their future.
It need not be done that way. I think people would regard a lottery
as "fairer".
[..]
>Surely,
>you're not going to tell me that Hong King gives parcels of land to
>individual homeowners who build detached cottages. Hong Kong, like San
>Francisco, doesn't have the land for that, and that's not the way Hong
>Kong capitalism works. No, I strongly suspect that Hong Kong provides
>land to huge construction companies who build really big buildings and
>rent them out at market or subsidised rates to land lords or
>individuals. I could be wrong.
Not exactly. Hong Kong arranges and finances large highrise developments
to ensure housing supply. The amount of this planned in a given period
is a function of the city's estimate of the need. There is currently
a debate in Hong Kong about the possibility of privatizing the city
housing supply but as of now it isn't privately owned. In fact,
the largest amount of high rise structures in Hong Kong are owned
by the transit system! The Mass Transit Railway is the largest real
estate entity in Hong Kong. This is one of the reasons they
are profitable (they recoup value created by the provision
of rapid transit services -- ie. they "internalize" that value).
They've built numerous high rise "new towns"
around their stations. I believe Hong Kong has the largest supply
of city owned housing of any city in the world.
I wouldn't recommend following all aspects of the Hong Kong model, tho.
We don't need to go the highrise route, for one thing. I also favor
letting resident associations manage housing rather than a city
bureaucracy. But the idea of coordinating city-developed densification
with transit is surely a positive model.
[..]
>I agree that land is not a commodity, true or otherwise. If land were a
>commodity, there wouldn't be a shortage of it, and everyone could have
>some. Since there is an (increasingly) limited supply, it's value goes
>up. I don't necessarily say that your suggestions would not result in
>more housing, I'm just arguing that they won't really change the price,
>they'll just hide that price from the people who most need to know what
>that price really is.
I don't think your belief that the market registers "real" costs is
supportable. Positive and negative
externalities are just too pervasive to justify that contention.
This means that the market is a very distorted filter or representation
of actual social costs. This has a lot to do with why the auto has
become so dominant in most American cities.
>
>> It is possible to build to a modest level of density without using up
>> all the industrially zoned land, and without giving total leeway
>> to builders to build ugly boxes wherever they want.
>
>Not and have cheap housing. We have forty-nine square miles here. We
>can build lots of dense housing with MUNI access, _or_ we have lots of
>industry, _or_ we build a small amount of low-density housing with lots
>of cars, _or_ we can build a relatively small amount of housing mixed
>with industry. We have to choose. You are trying to get around that
>choice, rather than making it.
No, I *am* proposing a "choice." My choice, as I said, is to preserve
existing blue collar jobs in these areas, require that any new housing
be consistent with this, preserve a certain proportion of the space
for employment sites, and to especially encourage housing in mixed
use developments, where the housing is over or with commercial spaces.
[..]
>
>> You are assuming that rental housing that working class people could
>> afford would be built if it weren't for rent control. I see no reason
>> whatsoever to believe that.
>
>Agreed. The question is the solution. Banning high-density housing is
>not it.
I wasn't proposing such a ban. My position is a lot more nuanced than that.
I'm proposing *some* increase in density, *some* housing in the rustbelt
under certain conditions. Why do we have to turn S.F. into Manhattan?
You haven't explained that. Nor will it guarantee low rents. Take a look
at Manhattan's rents if you don't believe me.
[..]
>> Look, how do builders finance construction of condos? They get a loan
>> based on the probable sale value or rental value. The city can do
>> the same thing.
>
>But this will solve nothing. The problem is not that housing is not
>being built (San Francisco's population grew two percent last year, an
>amazing number), it is that not _enough_ is being built to meet demand.
>Say, the city builds a house and gives it to ex-tenants. That new house
>immediately attains the value of a house in San Francisco. Either the
>person stays in it, or they sell it, neither choice decreases the cost
>of housing in San Francisco for anyone but that one person. Since the
>city had to pay for that housing, it takes tax money away from, say,
>running MUNI, or, what is really needed, housing the homeless.
It doesn't take money away from Muni if each has some dedicated
funding stream, which I think they both should have.
>
>If you ban the re-sale of the house, or have the city retain ownership
>of the house (a horrifying thought given the city's inability to
>successfully manage much of anything at reasonable cost),
The city can own the building without managing it.
>or any of the
>other ways you might attempt to keep this house from attaining it's
>market value, you are increasingly limiting people's freedom of choice
>to live where and how they can afford to. I support some such limits --
>like green-belts, albeit through removing subsidies rather than
>enforcing laws -- but that's a road I want to be very careful about.
>The Founding Fathers (land owners all) were rightly very concerned about
>the state's ability to take ones propery and thereby limit a person's
>scope of action.
The Founding Fathers lived in a pre-capitalist era, an era when
virtually no one was willing to work for wages at all
because of the availability of free land (that's why slavery was
required to develop plantation agriculture in North America).
Land ownership was not the basis of landlordism or huge corporations.
So their situation is simply not relevant to today.
>We should do so only with the greatest of care, and
>not for the relatively minor goal of making San Francisco a some kind of
>mythical low density city.
Another strawman. No one in this discussion has proposed that S.F.
be a "low density" city. S.F. is not now a low density city. It has
one of the highest densities of American cities. I would describe
its existing density as "moderate". Like older European cities such
as Amsterdam or London. "High" density to me refers to places like
Hong Kong or Manhattan.
[..]
>
>> Unless some other form of taxation is found to replace the residential
>> property tax, the city would have to include a lease price to the
>> coop assoc. that is equal to the financing cost plus loss of tax
>> income, minus subsidy.
>
>"The market" determines this for us. Why should the city have to do it?
Because the market is a manifest failure.
[..]
>But, rich will find a way to take the most advantage of it. In the
>wider Bay Area, there already is housing for the majority. It is the
>poor that we are, or should be, concerned about. We should not be using
>extremely limited city money to subsidise those who do not need
>additional money.
There is working class housing in Pittsburg, Tracy, or Fremont, or
the Oakland flats. Sure. But what you have is a forced filtering
of the population on class lines, which restricts the self-
determination of the working class, i.e. their ability to continue
to live in the places where they are living and want to continue
to live.
>
>> U.S. back to a pre-capitalist level of productivity growth, i.e.
>> a level of growth so low it hasn't been this low since before
>> the Civil War, when the country consisted of independent proprietors.
>
>This is utter nonesense.
What is "nonsense"? It's well known that the rate of growth in
labor productivity in the last decade has dropped down to a rate
that is slower than anything seen since the Civil War. This has
happened in a period when 80% of all capital spending has been
on computerization.
[..]
>I don't know about you, but I
>_like_ being a writer and only having to dig in the dirt for fun. I see
>no value whatsoever in preserving the latter type of job.
Writing is not unproductive. Books are real production.
Farming is not the only form of real production. The problem is
the huge corporate bureaucracy and speculative financial sector that is
an increasing parasitic growth on real production.
>
>> Baking bread, making furniture, works of art, making solar water
>> heaters, printing books....there are any number of things that could
>> be made here other than software or "business services" (which
>> is entirely parasitic on the real economy of production).
>
>All of these things are done here, even in high rent San Francisco,
>mostly by small businesses or hobbiests or independent contractors. (In
>fact, essentially none of the trade books -- as opposed to "coffee table
>books" -- consumed in the United States are made overseas.) Note that
>most of these things (except maybe the water heaters) can be done in a
>high-density environment intermixed with housing.
I completely agree, and that's what I want (keeping in mind my
caveat about *degree* of desireable density).
[..]
>I prefer the true emerging American model, which is a bunch of
>self-employed indepenent contractors living in the lofts you so hate and
>selling their wares to the highest bidder. That is the market San
>Francisco should be aiming for. (As, note, is the new Mayor Brown's
>Oakland.)
I think that's a myth. Most "independent contractors" are not independent,
nor are they a particularly significant segment of the total economy.
Concentration of economic ownership is continuing to increase, even
while there is some decentralization in the organization of production.
Oursourcing and contracting out tends to create a divided economy
with a periphery of medium sized (and typically low wage)
contractors dependent upon large concentrations at the center.
Tom Wetzel
+===============================================+
! Tom Wetzel !
! Senior Technical Writer !
! BEA Systems, Inc. !
! 2315 North First Street !
! San Jose, CA 95131 !
+===============================================+