@tacpoly wrote:
@CramEiko wrote:
The area's so out of touch with reality anymore. Such a shame.
No. That is the area’s reality.
Agreed. High CoL cities like SF are high CoL because there's a little space and a lot of people who want to live there. They didn't just arbitrarily say "oh let's be all expensive!" and jack prices up. If 5 million people suddenly all wanted to live in a small patch of land in the middle of rural Oklahoma, you can bet that land would similarly skyrocket in price. Ask someone living in the Salt Lake City area how real estate's working out for them now that the tech companies are moving in. They're in the early stages of it now.
I'm a bit skeptical that this will work long-term. Rent control and subsidized housing's been a thing here for a while, and it kind of works...for a while. The problems it has:
- Owners are effectively prisoners in their property. When you get into a place for 20% the cost of the surrounding buildings, you can't exactly afford to move if you later want to, unless you also move out of the area. It does help keep some lower-income people in the local area, but they tend to concentrate into the low income buildings and you effectively get economic segregation within neighborhoods.
- Affordable housing addresses a single aspect of high CoL cities, but lower income people will still struggle mightily to live in that area. I'll use my local area (Boston) as an example for cost comparions. Here, chicken breast is usually around $7/lb at the grocery store. Eggs can be $5/dozen, milk can be $5-6/gallon, depending on where you live. It's half those prices out in the suburbs, but lower income people tend not to be able to afford cars and may rely on mass transit so they're captive to the local stores.
- The problem is as much income inequality as it is lack of affordable housing. Unless you build so much additional housing as to completely flood and tank the local real estate market, gentrification will continue whether you like it or not. The reason people who make $50,000 can't find housing is because people who make $250,000 can't find housing, either. There's plenty of units for sale, but sellers wanna make money too so they all go for the whale jugulars. There's more money pandering to the rich with Viking appliances, Italian marble tile, and elevators in your condo than there is making affordable homes for middle-class people.
Google can do this, but unless there's some severe and long-term restrictions (decades), once those units start turning over after the first round you can bet some will have been remodeled as luxury and sold for much more, thus being removed from the affordable market and contributing to further gentrification.
