A few final points:
>> There is no such law. This is a myth propagated by political
>> propaganda.
>
>You cannot really believe this statement. Of course there is a "law" of
>supply and demand, which works much like the "law" of evolution.
Nope. Evolution is a principle of all life. "Supply and demand"
applies only within a market-governed social structure, which is a
comparatively recent human construct. The human species has
existed for tens of thousands of years but capitalism has
existed in the U.S. only since the late
19th century. California was an essentially feudal economcy prior
to the Gold Rush, it wasn't a money economy at all. The market only
came to be a dominant governing principle since the late middle ages.
There is no reason to think a market-governed social system is
determined by "nature." At present the market, to varying degrees, may
be inevitable, but just as it is a human construct, it can be socially
controlled. I.e., i'm not proposing that it be done away with altogether.
What I'm saying is that the social collectivity can act to constrain
the market, and that this is needed to protect people
and the environment from a destructive "race to the bottom". I.e. a
problem as the market is relatively unfettered, is that good conditions
are driven out by worse, since the latter are financially cheaper to
firms -- worse working conditions, worse levels of pay, worse environmental
destruction.
> But also recognize that if the
>city is to have a future, there also has to be room for the new
>information industries and their employees to live here. There does
>have to be some turn-over -- like any organism, without change, San
>Francisco will die. It is a physical and practical impossibility to
>give everyone what they want. Your solution seems to be to try to
>freeze the city's "frontier" (where there is room for additional growth)
>into some sort of golden age of "rust belt" industry that, given a
>choice, very few people would really like to live in. (After all, who
>really wants to stand at a oroduction line assembling solar hot water
>heater? Yes, the transition is hard on today's assembly line workers,
>but their children will be a lot happier if these kinds of jobs are
>automated out of existance and the new generation educated to do
>something more constructive.)
I agree that a city is like an organism, continually adapting, and
that it requires the freedom to adapt to changing needs and uses.
What is at issue is, What are the rules and principles to govern that
process? It's a strawman to say that those who don't accept unfettered
market forces are wanting to "freeze" what already exists.
Nor is the Taylorist model of the assembly line the only way to view
production industries. I mentioned the German model of skill-enriched
work as an alternative. I've worked in the "information sector" for
the past 15 years and I've seen too many destructive aspects of it,
and too much hype on this score to view it uncritically.
>> You mean "compete" in the capitalist labor market to see who can
>> get the most income and let those with the most income buy whatever
>> they can. What if this diminishes the rights of the majority?
>
>But that is what guarantees the rights of the majority. Your only right
>in the real world is to work try to obtain what you desire. No one,
>anywhere, has a right to have what they desire handed to them. In that
>case, if you have a limited resource that everyone cannot have (like
>living in San Francisco), you are distributing that resource through
>some sort of executive force, rather than through free competition
>amongst individuals.
What you refer to as "free competition amongst individuals" is in fact
a system based on "executive force." That's because people are forced
to work for whatever wage they can get, and are subject to autnoritarian
bureaucracies in virtue of that.
You also seem to be assuming that individuals are like standalone
atoms that have all their characteristics prior to, and independent
of, the society that sustains them, educated them, constitutes
the framework of their lives. I'd point out that is an ideology,
not a fact, and a very dubious one at that.
There are in fact many things that the society provides collectively
to each other, we're in fact highly socially dependent animals.
>> Building such housing won't solve the problem you have described.
>> You don't know if the amount that would be created by the current
>> market forces will be such as to facilitate affordable rents for
>> those currently living here. I see no reason to think it will.
>
>Of course I don't know how many houses are needed to house all of the
>people who might or might not want to live in San Francisco by the time
>those houses are or are not built. Nobody can know all of that. That
>is why these decisions are almost never successfully made by an
>executive decision. That is the reason for a market.
This is a distinction without a difference. "The market" comprises
production decisions made by "executive procedures", by rule-governed
bureaucracies called "companies."
>If someone builds
>too many houses, the price will come down, they will lose money and stop
>building houses. If they don't build enough, the price will go up, they
>will lose money because they didn't have enough "product", and somebody
>else will build houses and make money. The builder, ideally, only makes
>money when he build the number of houses that people will buy, and,
>spread over a large number of builders, the number of houses will stay
>in rough balance with the number of people who want to buy them.
This is contrary to the evidence at present, where there are serious
housing shortages in both northern and southern Calif.
>Ah, ha! Unless my poor old eyes deceive me, here is something we agree
>on! Proposition-13 has been an unmitigated disaster for this State.
>Not least because it has shifted taxation from rich older land owners to
>young people who are just starting out, enforcing economic
>stratification.
The main beneficiaries, tho, were the largest landowners, who tend
to be railroads and utilities (and they are very definitely likely
to hold the land since 1978). That's why I suggested splitting
the property tax rolls. In effect, the commercial property owners
were getting this break by taking advantage of the fears of a lot
of fixed income older homeowners.
Although it may be a good thing that floor-level retail was a
requirement for downtown office buildings (is there such a requirement?),
it's noteworthy that the new live/works have no such retail component.
>> Clearly, people with working class incomes, equal to or below
>> the median, are the largest group whose protection is the function
>> of rent control.
>
>I disagree with this. Everyone I know who rents, no matter what their
>income level, is benefiting from Rent Control.
Not if it is causing an increase in the overall rent level as you claim.
>The net effect of Rent
>Control for everyone is that it discourages moving. This decreases
>turnover in the apartment stock, which means that there are fewer
>apartments available for newcomers or for people who, for some reason,
>have to move. Since there are fewer apartments, there is more
>competition for the few remaining, and so the price goes up. Rent
>Control is probably the single biggest contributor to the outlandish
>market price of San Francisco rents.
I think this reverses cause and effect to some extent. I think that
rent control did contribute to inflation in rents, but that this
happened because landlords used vacancy noncontrol to greatly increase
the rents of the vacant units to compensate for their inability to
raise the rents as rapidly as they think they could get away with
for the controlled units. Keep in mind that for a long time the
maximum allowable annual rent raise was higher than the rate of
inflation (4% was the rent raise cap til that loophole was closed).
>
>> 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
>
>What land? There is very little land available for new housing.
>Therefore, new housing generally must be very dense, or it won't amount
>to much.
I think we end up talking past each other to some extent because
"dense" is not clearly defined. If you allow, say, three or four stories of
loft apartments over stores -- a type of development I would favor --
that would amount to a significant increase in density in many parts of
S.F.
>
>> and provide financing
>
>With what money? I don't mean to be facetious, here, but you are
>proposing a major change from the way things are done now. It is your
>responsibility to provide specifics. How much money? Where will it
>come from? How do you get homeowners and businesses to pay it rather
>than move to Pleasanton or Oakland?
Where is the money for the live/work boom coming from? It is financed
based on prospective revenue. The city can do the same thing -- and
in fact does so. For example, revenue bonds for transit improvements
are backed by both fare and tax income.
There is also *some* subsidization of housing going on now -- some of this
from federal programs. I don't think it is outlandish to look to
an expansion of the size of this pool of funds for subsidization.
>
>> 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.
>
>I've tried to avoid saying this in this conversation, but I can't help
>it here. This sounds like exactly the kind of thinking that created
>ugly, dispirited housing in Russia (or Counsel Housing in England, or
>equily dispirited "projects" here).
I suggest you go back and reread what I said and not impose your own
stereotypes. I made a number of key provisos that were designed
precisely to avoid what you are referring to: (a) that the housing
would *not* be designed or built by any government bureaucracy, and
(b) that it would be managed by a residents association (entirely
analogous to a condo association -- an idea you say you like).
The reason that I referred to Christopher Alexander's ideas about
resident participation in the design (and even the construction) process
is precisely to ensure that these do *not* end up as sterile
developments that fail to take into consideration the individual
needs and tastes of the residents.
>> 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?
>
>Because people with higher incomes will always find some way to corrupt
>the system and use their higher incomes to get what they want.
And would you make this same characterization of the existing
market system of housing? Are you saying it's "nature" that
"those with lots of money will win out in one way or another"?
I see no reason to believe that.
>Look at
>every country that has tried this.
Okay, let's do that. I suggest you read Christopher Alexander's
"The Production of Houses." The state government of Baja provided
sponsorship (land, mainly) and the local credit union provided financing
for his experiment there. He ended up building a group of houses,
each taylored to the requirements of the family that would live in it
(i.e. each is unique), for $3,500 each. And the families love their
houses precisely because they are such a good fit, and because they
put a lot of themselves into the design and construction of the houses.
>> This [the market] has a lot to do with why the auto has
>> become so dominant in most American cities.
>
>Actually, the auto is one of the best arguments _for_ a free market.
>The automobile culture came about when the government, for basically
>military reasons, destroyed the free market for transportation by
>building the freeway system at no cost to the end users.
This is a mischaracterization of the process, because:
(a) Real estate development had already gone over to reliance upon
the car by the '20s. That's because they had previously had to
subsidize transit systems, and now they could free themselves of
that cost, transferring it to the users. This is because the
defects of the car are "negative externalities" not reflected in
market prices to users, and the growth of car use was thus
encouraged by being underpriced relative to social cost. This is
a very good example of what is *wrong* with the market.
(b) Early street and road development programs in cities, prior to
WWII, were based on the assessment district system, where homeowners
in new subdivisions -- the main users -- paid for the improvements.
It was not til after WWII that the federal gov't, at the insistence
of the big auto companies, began developing the interstate freeway
plan. Prior to that the federal highway funding was restricted to
rural road development. Moreover, the freeway construction program
was paid for mostly by the gas tax. That's why freeway construction
in Calif. didn't get going til after passage of the Collier Act in
1946, which greatly increased the gas tax.
(c) I agree that the interstate freeway system, by breaking up
urban areas and making more dispersed development possible, made
a qualitative difference in city growth, but that didn't come on line
til the early '60s for the most part. By then you already had a highly
auto-centric process of growth going on for the reasons cited in (a).
>> 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.
>
>That's because you are only counting non-computer labor, when ever more
>labor is computer-related. I think that that is a good thing!
No, growth in the value of all product per worker hour increased only
at the rate of about 1% annually from 1974 til recently. That is
lower than at any time since before the Civil War.
A friend of mine, who is writing a book on this subject, argues that the way
in which computerization has contributed to declining productivity
growth, is, among other things, through all the time required to
constantly upgrade, learn the new features and systems, etc etc which
becomes an ever greater burden as uncontrolled competitive pressures
have shortened the software development cycle time. So, this is an
example of another "negative externality", in effect.
I think this discussion has gotten to the point that we're going in
circles, so maybe it is time to go back to talking about transit. :)
Tom Wetzel
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! Tom Wetzel !
! Senior Technical Writer !
! BEA Systems, Inc. !
! 2315 North First Street !
! San Jose, CA 95131 !
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