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    Low Information BoaterHamilton Nolan
    7/27/16 11:26am

    I really like that in response to being able to work from anywhere via the internet, we all congregate in a few massively overcrowded cities.

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      MrsASRLow Information Boater
      7/27/16 11:30am

      That has been the huge letdown of the Internet age. Telecommuting seems to be a bit of a phantom. Many people have the physical ability to work from home, but so many companies don’t allow it. There seems to be a mindset that a boss has to be able to see asses in seats in order to get work done. That’s demonstrably untrue.

      It’s a damn shame.

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      Certified Public AsskickerLow Information Boater
      7/27/16 11:31am

      And the solution is to require someone living in Oklahoma to pay for housing in NYC.

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    OMG!PONIES!Hamilton Nolan
    7/27/16 11:37am

    Have you ever considered not living in the city? There are apartments that exist outside of city limits. And townhouses and duplexes and houses.

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      The Shape of Punk to ComeOMG!PONIES!
      7/27/16 11:40am

      Poor people aren’t super mobile.

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      pre-emptive sighOMG!PONIES!
      7/27/16 11:41am

      Everything outside of the boroughs is an irradiated wasteland. At least that’s what I’ve heard. Nothing exists outside of the confines of NYC, Seattle, and San Fran.

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    ad infinitumHamilton Nolan
    7/27/16 11:49am

    Ah, California. You just win and win and win!

    I just got an “amazing” deal on a lease because the last tenant committed suicide in the apartment, they have to disclose that by law and apparently most potential renters hang up as soon as they hear that. I put “amazing” in quotes because it’s still nearly $300 a month more than I’m paying now, which is more than a little painful. But it’s way more apartment than I’d normally be able to afford, way closer to work than I’d normally be able to afford. I basically couldn’t find anything cheaper, and everything else I found in the price range was like 450 sq. feet, in bad repair, with Yelp reviews mentioning cockroaches.

    Fucking Orange County. On the plus side, it really is a lovely apartment, it’s 2 miles from work (my current commute is 40 miles and anywhere from 75 minutes to two hours each way), I don’t have to get on the 405 at all and I’ll be able to go home at lunch and walk my dogs. God help me if I get laid off, though.

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      Andrew Mochulskyad infinitum
      7/27/16 12:32pm

      Orange County prices are kind of stupid, but holy shit do they look better than Los Angeles prices: none of the green space and quadruple the crime at a 50% premium. Noped the fuck right out of that apartment search.

      I’m also giggling like an idiot as I’m typing this because for at least three glorious years, I won’t be dealing with Orange County and its unique blend of expensive inconvenience. Instead I’ll be paying less to get more in... central Illinois? Wait, no, Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Z nnnnooooooooo...

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      ad infinitumAndrew Mochulsky
      7/27/16 12:39pm

      I’ll actually be paying more (by about $35 a month) for the one-bedroom in Santa Ana than the total for my old two-bedroom in Koreatown. The apartment in Santa Ana is definitely nicer, and in a nicer complex, but not by a huge amount.

      I had a pretty amazing deal on the Koreatown place, though, and they hadn’t raised rent since I moved in in 2007.

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    jakeHamilton Nolan
    7/27/16 11:26am

    The problem is that nobody considers that maybe there is a structural component to these problems. For every homeless person in America, there are four empty houses. We have enough housing to ensure that every man, woman, and child in America have a roof over their heads, yet we are so caught up in the idea that you have to “earn” basic human needs that we refuse to actually address systemic poverty. It’s easier to blame individuals and to expect individuals to shoulder the burden of solving the housing crisis than it is to question the systemic nature of poverty. Modern structural poverty is not the result of scarcity, it has been deliberately engineered by people in power.

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      MonkeyTruckerv3.0jake
      7/27/16 11:28am

      No native Californian wants to move from San Francisco and live in Dubuque, Iowa.

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      The Shape of Punk to Comejake
      7/27/16 11:29am

      The housing crisis and the homelessness crisis are two different issues.

      And you can’t just ask people to move into old abandond houses. For one… How are you going to make the inhabitable ones habitable again? And two… Where people need to live in order for them to work and be around their families might not be close to where the open houses are. Moving is expensive. Poor people aren’t too mobile.

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    EatTheCheeseNicholsonHamilton Nolan
    7/27/16 11:28am

    Don’t worry, George Lucas has got this. And as an added bonus, it will keep him too busy to fuck up any of the upcoming Star Wars movies.

    As a minus, there’s a reason no major public transit goes from SF to Marin: to discourage poor people from living there.

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      swishswishswishswishEatTheCheeseNicholson
      7/27/16 11:49am

      It’s also a pain, because BART uses a non-standard track gauge - making it incompatible with existing track outside the system.

      The original BART master plan had it going from Marin down to San Jose and all the way out to Fairfield, it got scaled back quite a bit.

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      EatTheCheeseNicholsonswishswishswishswish
      7/27/16 11:59am

      Yeah, the original plans for BART looked pretty great. BART as it exists is... a little lacking.

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    O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!Hamilton Nolan
    7/27/16 11:47am

    I would support a tax on purchasing properties over $1 million. If you buy a property > $1M, you have to pay a 10% tax (whatever, negotiate it) to cover affordable housing projects.

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      QuadPoleO frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
      7/27/16 12:50pm

      Basically, every home sold in San Francisco today would be subject to an additional 10% tax? No thanks.

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      Cyrils-cashmere-sweater-vestO frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
      7/27/16 1:15pm

      We already have the “mansion tax” in NYC. One percent on the entire sale price if over $1 million, usually paid by the buyer. Which is funny since the median apartment in Manhattan is like $1.25 million. This is on top of all the other taxes, mortgage recording tax, transfer taxes. New York should be drowning in money.

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    SaintClarence27Hamilton Nolan
    7/27/16 12:22pm

    This is one of those rare times when I feel like the market should work itself out. Let them either 1) pay the service industries more to cover their insane housing costs, or 2) deal with not having enough service workers. Good luck.

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      Andrew MochulskySaintClarence27
      7/27/16 12:39pm

      The “market working itself out” in the short-to-medium-term leads to a whole bunch of really spectacular human misery for basically everybody that isn’t wealthy. In the interim, there will be hungry kids, household debt emergencies, underfunded public services, etc., and only then will the capitalist class experience some trickle-up inconvenience? Maybe?

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      SaintClarence27Andrew Mochulsky
      7/27/16 1:18pm

      If there’s government interference, I think it would be best in the form of moving assistance to an area with public housing and/or reasonable housing costs. That would help alleviate those issues and accellerate the trickle up inconvenience.

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    tito_swinefluHamilton Nolan
    7/27/16 11:46am

    In the early 90's, San Francisco realized that a lot of people were living in spaces that were zoned for business illegally. They thought that it would be clever to change the building rules so that these situations would be legal.

    However, what they did allowed people to build crappy condos called “live/work” spaces that now clutter up many neighborhoods. They’re built with a lesser set of building codes and generally don’t last. There’s one a few blocks from me, built in 1998 and now riddled with cracks.

    Politicians never seem to consider the side effects of the laws they write. Or, they are completely aware but pass them anyway to help out their cronies while pretending the law is going to help struggling grannies or artists.

    A good example of this is prop 13. Passed with the explicit argument that it would help grannies stay in their homes, it now allows large corporations to pay virtually no property tax on billions of dollars of real estate.

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      mmsfcHamilton Nolan
      7/27/16 1:06pm

      Again with the “Build more” foolishness. It is neither physically or financially possible to build 30,000 homes/year. If building more lowered housing costs, NYC would be cheap.

      Why should established residents accomodate and get shoved out by newly arrived people who came for the money, but do not care about the place? We built the city -literally with our working class labor, but now rich white guys get to take it, tear down and throw away our architectural and social history, then complain about paying taxes?

      California has no water. Right now it’s on fire. Again. There are no resources to accommodate this building boom and an influx of people.

      The tech companies could set up shop and support places that need the economic boost. Detroit, Baltimore, Indianapolis, New Orleans, all of Mississippi - but no, the whiners want NY and California. I say whiners, because in SF, where there is a world class opera, symphony, and ballet companies, where two Bay Area theater companies sent shows to Broadway to win Tonys, where a new Jazz Center just opened, have a patron base with an average age of 64!

      OTOH, we have twice as many restaurants as any other city, about 35/10,000 households, and the average cost per person is $75/meal. They’ve taken over buildings where people used to make things. Young people with money are not engaging, they’re eating.

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        FlibbityFlobbityFlammmsfc
        7/27/16 6:01pm

        Amen. The Bay Area is FULL. Hell, it is overfilled. We need to be focusing on solutions for people that are already here, rather than figuring out how to pack in even more people and assuming that there will not be any consequences.

        At the very least, there should be a halt put on all new residential construction until good, functional public transit is installed. BART and Muni are jokes, and the other bus+light rail systems in the region are not even worth talking about. Caltrain is OK, but it is really only useful for highly paid commuters. Anyway, put in a proper regional transit system underground or raised up high enough that suicidal high school students in Palo Alto can’t jump onto the tracks. THEN start thinking about adding housing.

        Anecdotally, I know of at least 8 different people/families that are gaming the shit out of the SF rent control system. These are people with incomes well above six figures and some with net worth in excess of seven figures who either live in single family houses on the peninsula and rent the units out illegally at the full market rate, or live in single family houses on the peninsula and let their kids live in them for free. SF needs to go through and audit every single rent controlled unit and bust these cheaters. Hit them with the maximum fines possible with the threat if a property lien on the house they are living in. The system is BROKEN right now.

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      Tidal TownHamilton Nolan
      7/27/16 11:57am

      What do we consider “affordable” when we have these discussions?

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        TaxpayerSubsidyTidal Town
        7/27/16 3:34pm

        “What do we consider “affordable” when we have these discussions?”

        I believe the standard is housing costs equaling 30% of the monthly household income. Presume that we’re talking about averages when we discuss it city-wide?

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        Tidal TownTaxpayerSubsidy
        7/27/16 4:15pm

        30% before or after taxes?

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