Bay Area Housing Crisis

The word missing in this essay is "zoning." California has severely restricted new housing development for decades: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/, and predictably, supply constraints have led to rising prices, and so we're seeing responses to high costs (<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ba

Mountain View (all of Silicon Valley, really) has the bad habit of approving anything that brings in new jobs while simultaneously rejected housing commensurate to the number of jobs added. Many of the residents of the valley want their cities to remain de facto suburbs (designed for cars). Throw in prop 13, a substantial number of well paid transplants, and you have a recipe for the extreme cost of living in the Bay.

A lot of people moved into the bay area for the good jobs, nice weather and nature. Once housing demand pushed above supply, prices started shooting up. Those locals whose incomes didn't grow were pushed out of their homes. The bay area is boxed in by the hills so hard to expand out. Also a lot of the land was already build up with single family homes and other low density housing a long time ago so upgrading the density is harder. The public transportation is also limited. BART didn't

It's a lack of development of new housing for decades that caused the high prices we see in places like the Bay Area.

I've lived in this area for a long time, and through several bubbles, and this is nothing new.- The bay area has a handful of thriving industries creating a lot of wealth, in a country with a stagnant economy, so people come here for opportunity, our population is growing.- Existing property owners are resistant to change, and they're "locked in", price increases don't affect them. They don't want those new dense apartments or the new stores. Prop 13 really lo

Its expensive just because its desirable? Housing doesn't work like a commodity you can ship around the world. Everyone needs a place to live, and having more housing for everyone who wants to live in an area only increases economic productivity. There is still more than enough space, even in the bay area, even near LA, to build housing, its just that the people elected to local offices also happen to be the same people who don't want the value of their houses to decrease. So i

What can't be discounted besides the usual suspects of bad zoning, high cost of land etc. is construction costs. Basically an area gets so expensive that it prices out construction workers and their families. This is being seen in the bay area now as a typical single family home goes for over 1M in the pennisula/SF/South Bay area. Go farther out to the east bay, far south bay(gilroy etc) and prices are still 700/800k+. The need for housing is so great but also it is a vicious

> If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there.You can't talk about this stuff without going all the way back to the beginning with the "worm at core" of this issue. California's prop 13 gives homeowners a significant financial incentive to do everything in their power to discourage new housing development in high demand areas like SF and Silicon Valley (all while gutting California's public school system).So Mount

There are plenty of nice cities in the developed world where people making a third of that have no trouble buying homes. California is expensive, because people oppose building new housing in sufficient quantities. They may support it in principle, but they oppose what it means in practice.Los Angeles also has other issues due to the way it has developed. The city is too large for everyone to commute by car and too sparsely populated to support good public transport. Building new housing is d

It's supply and demand. During the last decade all new buildings built that I've seen in the sf/bay area are business parks. When both new houses are not built, and we're not building up, yet corporations are allowed to build, you're going to get this kind of inequality.In Florida, for example, it's common to see new apartment buildings starting at 10 stories tall. In the bay area, it's rare to see an apartment building past 3 stories.There is massive