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Tag Bay Area

California Legislation Threatens to Become Law and Build More Housing

BART train at the platform

On August 23rd, a California assembly bill aimed at increasing transit-oriented development, like housing, was passed by the state senate, confirmed by the assembly, and headed to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk for signing. The bill, AB 2923, specifically targets the San Francisco Bay Area—making it easier than ever for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to build housing on the land it owns around its transit stations. Previously, housing developments on BART-owned land were still subject to local zoning rules, pushing projects through local processes to be approved before building began. This local control led to many delays, and, as a result, housing denials in the midst of an ongoing housing shortage—on that repeatedly spurs news headlines decrying four-plus hour super commutes, median home prices over $1 million, and neighborhoods blocking affordable housing. State bills like AB 2923 are a response to these reports, as well as the local control that led to them. If passed, AB 2923 and other bills like it, will bypass local control’s draconian rules to allow more housing to be built and ease the housing shortage. Under current law, land owned by BART is often subject to discretionary review in Bay Area cities. This forces BART to become de facto experts in every municipality zoning code, an impossible task that would take away from their focus on improving their transit system. Even attempting to master the zoning codes of every municipality takes time. Ultimately, this causes delays in building housing that’s so sorely needed. But this could easily be avoided if BART could establish their own zoning rules under AB 2923. Housing and transit is intrinsically linked and, just like suburban home developers build the roads to best suit their development, urban transit authorities like BART must utilize their capacity to build the homes best […]

ReasonTV on SF’s YIMBY Movement

Last week, Reason.tv (the multimedia outlet of Reason Magazine) published a video about San Francisco’s YIMBY movement.  The video describes the decades of underdevelopment in San Francisco as the result of community activism intended to limit the supply of new construction.  As a result, San Francisco’s housing market is severely supply-constrained, and outrageously expensive.  The problem has gotten so bad that pro-development, “YIMBY” organizations such as SFBARF and Grow San Francisco have sprung up to counter the anti-development forces. It’s great to see Reason taking notice of the YIMBY movement, and we’d love to see more attention paid to urbanism at libertarian sites.  Three of us at Market Urbanism attended the first nationwide YIMBY conference in Boulder that the video mentions, and we’ll be sharing our thoughts on the conference soon. (h/t Jake Thomas at the Market Urbanism facebook group)

San Francisco Turned Sisyphus: Why the City Can’t Fix the Housing Crisis On its Own

Housing prices in San Francisco are obscene. And, in large part, that’s because the city hasn’t permitted enough new construction. But that’s not the entire story. For as hard as San Francisco has resisted development, the Peninsula cities have resisted it even more. And in so doing they’ve pushed the responsibility of development onto their Northern neighbor. If San Francisco’s housing crisis is to be resolved, the Peninsula cities will have to quite literally grow up. Bad Neighbors San Francisco is synonymous with tech, but there’s plenty going on just down the road. Menlo Park has Facebook. Mountain View has both Google and Linkedin. These two cities alone are home to over 1,300 other tech companies and the story’s much the same elsewhere on the Peninsula. But where firms have sprung up and jobs have become abundant, housing has remained in short supply. Tech companies bus an estimated 7,500 workers from San Francisco apartments to Peninsula offices every day. They don’t do this for fun. There’s simply not enough housing near major employers. And what is available is often unaffordable, even for tech workers. But if housing prices are as bad or worse on the peninsula, one might ask why we only hear the word “crisis” in San Francisco. The reason is simple. What makes for crisis in San Francisco is nothing but windfall to the South. According to the U.S. Census, San Francisco’s homeownership rate is 36.6%. Mountain View’s is 41.8%, San Mateo’s is 53.6%, Palo Alto’s is 55.4%, Menlo Park’s is 56.2%, and Cupertino’s is 63.7%. Homeowners in these cities aren’t faced with skyrocketing rent. And thanks to Prop 13, they also pay almost nothing in property tax–no matter how much their homes appreciate in value. They not only face no downside from the anti-development status quo, they […]

Trickle-Down Housing Economics? Laying Reagan’s Ghost to Rest

In a recent 48 Hills post, housing activist Peter Cohen aimed a couple rounds of return fire at SPUR’s Gabriel Metcalf. The post comes in response to Mr. Metcalf’s own article critiquing progressive housing policy. Mr. Cohen bounces around a bit, but he does repeat some frequently used talking points worth addressing. Trickle-down economics Mr. Cohen calls the argument for market-rate construction ‘trickle down economics’.  Trickle down economics actually refers to certain macro theories popularized during the Reagan years. These models assumed a higher marginal propensity to save among wealthier individuals. And given this assumption, some economists concluded that reducing top marginal tax rates would result in higher savings. This would then mean higher levels of investment which would, in turn, have a positive effect on aggregate output. And from there we get the idea of a rising tide lifting all ships. Note that none of that has anything to do with housing policy. Labeling something ‘trickle down’ is a way to delegitimize certain policy proposals by associating them with Ronald Reagan. It’s somewhere between rhetorically dishonest and intellectually lazy. Though to be fair, it’s probably pretty effective in San Francisco. The concept Mr. Cohen is trying to critique is actually called filtering. In many instances, markets do not produce new housing at every income level. But they do produce housing across different income levels over time. Today’s luxury development is tomorrow’s middle income housing. The catch, however, is that supply has to continually expand. If not, prices for even dilapidated housing can go through the roof. For a more thorough explanation, see SFBARF’s agent based housing model.   If you build it, they’ll just come But even accurately defined, Mr. Cohen still objects to the concept of filtering. He cites an article by urban planning authority William Fulton to make […]

Seamless Transit: Thoughts on the new report from SPUR

Seamless Transit is the new transportation policy report from SPUR. Main author Ratna Amin proposes integrating the Bay Area’s balkanized transit systems to improve lackluster ridership. Given that the region has 23 separate transit providers–more than any other metropolitan area in the country–she may have a point. The report proposes standardizing service maps, fare structures, and payment systems; eliminating inter-system coverage gaps as well as redundant coverage; and reforming transit governance so that the different agencies actually make plans together instead of working at cross-purposes or not at all. The recommendations are sound and the report includes historical footnotes for context. These are helpful for understanding region’s complicated institutional arrangements. Seamless Transit is a fine piece of work and well worth the read for anyone interested in Bay Area transportation. But while organizational efficiency is important, it’s not the only thing to discuss. If we want to improve the region’s mass transit systems, we have to consider the physical environment in which those systems are embedded. To get transit right, the region needs to embrace density. Denser development around transit nodes would increase ridership substantially. When people live, work, and play in smaller geographic areas, more people travel between a fewer number of points. Mass transit, especially fixed rail transit, becomes more effective the denser development becomes. Hong Kong’s Metro Transit Railway (MTR) might be the quintessential example of urban density begetting mass transit success. The city is home to over 7 million inhabitants. It has a population density of over 18,000 residents per square mile. And of this population, 41% live within a half mile of an MTR station. The result? The MTR has a farebox recovery ratio of 186%–the highest in the world. Because of legal as well as political differences between Hong Kong and the Bay Area, […]

How to Fix San Francisco’s Housing Market

Want to live in San Francisco? No problem, that’ll be $3,000 (a month)–but only if you act fast. In the last two years, the the cost of housing in San Francisco has increased 47% and shows no signs of stopping. Longtime residents find themselves priced out of town, the most vulnerable of whom end up as far away as Stockton. Some blame techie transplants. After all, every new arrival drives up the rent that much more. And many tech workers command wages that are well above the non-tech average. But labelling the problem a zero sum class struggle is both inaccurate and unproductive. The real problem is an emasculated housing market unable to absorb the new arrivals without shedding older residents. The only solution is to take supply off its leash and finally let it chase after demand. Strangling Supply From 2010 to 2013, San Francisco’s population increased by 32,000 residents. For the same period of time, the city’s housing stock increased by roughly 4,500 units. Why isn’t growth in housing keeping pace with growth in population? It’s not allowed to. San Francisco uses what’s known as discretionary permitting. Even if a project meets all the relevant land use regulations, the Permitting Department can mandate modifications “in the public interest”.  There’s also a six month review process during which neighbors can contest the permit based on an entitlement or environmental concern. Neighbors can also file a CEQA lawsuit in state court or even put a project on the ballot for an up or down vote. This process is heavily weighted against new construction. It limits how quickly the housing stock can grow. And as a result, when demand skyrockets so do prices. To remedy this, San Francisco should move from discretionary to as-of-right permitting. In an as-of-right system, it’s much […]

Five union work rules that harm transit productivity

Since Alon’s comment a few weeks ago that union work rules, not wages and benefits, are the real problem with labor unions at America’s transit authorities, I’ve been looking into the matter, which seems to be something that a lot of transit boosters don’t like to talk about. It’s an uncomfortable subject for two reason: 1) urban planners and unions have an ideological affinity, and 2) it’s hard to lobby for increased subsidies for transit when you admit that you’re making poor use of the money you already have. But despite planners’ reticence to talk about the problem, it needs to be addressed. Throwing money around is what governments do best, and while it might be an easy solution to problems in the short run, the money is running out. Some will surely quibble that we can afford to raise taxes and do more deficit spending, especially for something as vital as transit, but whether or not that’s true, the fact is that voters are increasingly doubting that it is, and so politicians are going to become stingier about doling out money for transit. Anyway, the most obvious area for savings is in actual wages and benefits, but many mainstream conservative and libertarian publications have written a lot about this issue, so I want to focus on just inefficient work rules. These are rules that are written into union contracts hashed out in a political process, and management doesn’t have the authority to overturn them. I found surprisingly little on the issue in the academic literature, but there’s plenty on it in newspapers, and so here’s a round-up of the major issues that I found with various American transit unions. The list is by no means comprehensive – either of all the cities that have these problems, or even of […]

Links

1. The fact that we even have to have a debate over whether residential development should be allowed in Midtown, where new residents will have perhaps a smaller impact on transportation infrastucture than anywhere else in the country (they can either walk to work or do a reverse train commute), is pretty pathetic. 2. The plan for San Jose’s Diridion Station is is so loaded down with boondoggles and bad ideas that it’s hard to keep track of them all. As if a stadium and HSR station weren’t bad enough it’s also getting a neo-Euclidean zoning plan (business and R&D park to the north, entertainment, retail, and office space by the station, and residential and retail to the south), “adequate parking,” and what looks to me like probably too much parkland. One panelist from the Greenbelt Alliance said it was necessary for the plan to include “parks, trails and public plazas.” But given that it looks like we’re only really talking about an area that’s a dozen or two blocks in size, is all that really necessary? 3. Second Avenue Subway on Bloomberg’s transit failures. Looks like my bike lane rabble-rousing is spreading… 4. More union shenanigans: Unsuck DC Metro uncovers with a FOIA request $2.4 million paid out in the last five years “in grievance back pay for work never done.” Some of it is paid out in petty seniority squabbles, some in more reprehensible cases, including to people who have literally killed, assaulted, and stolen on the job. Also, if you’re interested in how exactly unions suck the lifeblood out of American mass transit, Unsuck’s three–part series on the DC Metro’s escalator problems is an excellent case study. 5. Highway interchange transit-oriented development. Not a joke. Courtesy of the Overhead Wire.

Links

1. NYT reports on dense suburban projects being scaled back across Long Island not because of financing constraints or the recession, but because local governments are refusing to accept the density. At the end it cites AvalonBay as saying that after the its rebuke on the Island, it will reconsider “whether we would stay on Long Island and be an investor.” AvalonBay is a developer that specifically targets “high barrier-to-entry markets,” so the fact that it’s considering pulling out of the market entirely is a bad sign for Long Island’s long-term growth prospects. 2. Cap’n Transit on the private bus battle brewing in New York City that we should all be paying more attention to. Coincidentally, earlier today I did a search for new about dollar vans, and the only coverage I found was about car crashes – anyone know of any new developments that have flew under the radar of the mainstream media? Separated by language and legality, private buses might be one of New York City’s most undercovered industries. 3. An incredible list of demands from DC Walmart foes. I have no particular love for Walmart – it’s clear that their business model relies heavily on government intervention in favor of roads and sprawl – but any self-styled “community” group that’s demanding free buses every 10 minutes to the Metro, transit benefits for workers, and “free or low-priced parking spaces” is not to be taken seriously. I also like how they want Walmart not to screen workers’ backgrounds at all but also want “no less than two off-duty D.C. police officers on its premises at all times.” The demand for direct cash bribes at the end is also pretty classy. 4. SFpark, the San Francisco market-based on-street parking pricing scheme, has launched. Apparently the price can get up […]

Links: A private cable car line for Hamburg, a private downtown for Quincy, Mass., and no adaptive reuse for Brooklyn

1. Hamburg’s newly-revitalized port could get a completely privately-funded cable car line, if the city allows it. 2. Quincy, Mass., a few T stops away from downtown Boston, is getting a new downtown from a private developer, replete with infrastructure and dense development. It’s unique, however, in that the city supposedly isn’t giving the developer huge tax breaks and infrastructure subsidies (more here). Here is an article about a previous project by the same developer, Street-Works. Environmentalists, predictably, are perturbed. In any case, the project sounds promising, though I guess the devil’s in the details. Anyone know anything more about it? 3. In Brooklyn, near a bridge, almost 150 years old, doesn’t have a roof! – adaptive reuse opportunities like Dumbo’s Tobacco Warehouse don’t come along too often, even in New York, so it’s unfortunate that developers are only being allowed to build to two stories (if they’re allowed to build at all). 4. Other cities seem to have plenty of people willing to do it for free, but Berkeley’s City Council actually subsidizes its BRT-hating NIMBYs to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars under the guise of the “Community Environmental Advisory Committee.” It’s a shame that every metro area doesn’t have a transit critic like the Drunk Engineer, who I think is the best transit commentator in the blogosphere. 5. Randal O’Toole on TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, and its mismanagement. 6. “A Requiem for ‘High-Speed Rail’,” from New Geography.

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