And Now this:
Well, that’s where I think you are being too pessimistic. Chicago, for instance, is still a very nice city - its downtown around Michigan Ave and the Magnificent Mile, really all the way down to Millennium Park is spectacular and hands down the best downtown among the major cities of the US. They have some of the best museums like the Art Institute and the Field Museum. The Navy Pier and much of Lakeshore Drive are great. And some of the West Chicago suburbs are posh enough to hold their own against our Orange County.
Now, admittedly, as you go south on Lakeshore drive, and it becomes Hwy 41, the blight of the South side does become apparent. The South side probably got ruined from densification and poor urban planning.
But on the whole, Chicago still has a lot going for it - still the one bright spot in the Midwest.
And I think the Bay Area will similarly continue to be a great urban area of the US even if there is significant densification compared to today
1 Like
I do agree with you. I am possibly overstating my pessimism.I do believe Bay Area too will have its pockets of prosperity. Even the third world cities have some first rate neighborhood that have homes more expensive than several bay area homes.
1 Like
in sf anymore right In Bay area, everything will be converted into Housing: Roads, Garage, Parks, Train Stations, Gas stations, Busstations, Land adjoining highways and roads, Industrial Buildings etc. Nothing but housing in a state where half of the people say they want to leave. Who will buy these houses?
1 Like
Send our homeless to China. Enough empty homes for 65million
Problem is they want to live amidst the prosperity created by capitalist minded people. In a communist country, they might be send to a labor camp or gulags.
What is size of average lending ? Like is it $100 for consumer merchandise? And what will be the percentage of default?
1 Like
1 Like
3 Likes
Looks like we will finally have some real progress. On SB9:
This reform is likely to be most significant in Silicon Valley, where tech companies like Apple and Google have added tens of thousands of new, highly paid jobs in recent years. Cities like Google’s Mountain View and Apple’s Cupertino have little if any undeveloped land available for construction. And their residential areas are overwhelmingly zoned for single-family homes, leaving little room for new housing. So affluent tech employees have bid up home prices to stratospheric levels: modest bungalows in Cupertino, for example, routinely sell for $2 million to $3 million.
It’s easy to imagine SB9 triggering a modest building boom in a city like Cupertino. A retired Cupertino homeowner could work with a developer to tear down her $2 million home and build two or even four homes in its place. These might sell for close to $2 million each. SB9 requires the owner to occupy one of the new units. The others could be sold to new homeowners, with the developer and homeowner splitting the profits.
State government is making it more and more difficult for cities to drag their feet on ADU’s:
By 2016, the legislature had gotten fed up with these tactics. It passed a series of three bills—in 2016, 2017, and 2019—that progressively weakened local authority over ADUs. According to Elmendorf, the 2019 bill “created an essentially unqualified right for every homeowner in the state to add a freestanding backyard ADU of up to 800 square feet.”
These bills worked as intended. Bloomberg’s Kriston Capps writes that “California homeowners built some 12,000 backyard flats in 2019—more than double the number permitted just two years earlier and a ten-fold increase since the state passed its preemption laws.”
Finally, there are real consequences if cities fail to build enough housing:
Cities that fail to cooperate with this process will face a series of escalating sanctions. If a city falls behind on its housing goals, a developer can bypass the regular approval process. This is what happened in the San Francisco story I wrote about last month: because San Francisco was behind in its goals for affordable housing, a building with enough affordable units could get fast-tracked.
Overall, two thumbs up!
2 Likes
It is good that fight is brewing up between the locals and the state. No need to say how it will end up if history is anything to go by.