Colonel Sanders
Veteran Member
Desirability of location shouldn't be a consideration with respect to low cost housing proposals. It's a They Get What They Get thing. There are tens of millions of acres to build on in California. The high desert in San Bernardino county is a good example. All the infrastructure is there to allow it to happen and there's tons of land owned by private sellers that the state could purchase.You have not demonstrated that this is in any way a cause, it sounds like more of the rich = automatically evil position.
Whatever, dude. California laws hurt the small fish and help the big fish , you happy now? I don’t give a damn about defending Newsom, and none of my posts were meant to. Every one of your replies seems to assume that. Newsom’s laws don’t scare Wall Street, they scare the little guy. And when the little guy sells, who do you think is standing there with cash in hand? That’s the feature of the current market structure I’m talking about. Maybe I wasn’t clear before: politicians tiptoe around the real enemy to affordable housing. They’ll talk about landlords, tenants, and zoning, but they avoid naming Wall Street, which distorts markets by concentrating in certain neighborhoods, buying in bulk, and treating housing as financial assets.
I agree about the underbuilding, but I do not see how Wall Street is remotely relevant.From what I understand, Wall Street’s role is secondary. The bigger driver of California’s housing crisis is decades of underbuilding, fueled by residents blocking anything but single-family homes in many areas. But I can’t even get to that part of the conversation without first cutting through all the reflexive defenses of Wall Street to get at Newsom. Fuck Newsom.![]()
A place is desirable, people move there, land is inherently fixed, so the cost to live there goes up. It's inevitable. The taller the building the higher the cost per square foot, you can't solve the problem by building up. Building up happens when the additional cost of building up is less than the cost of being far enough away not to need to build up.
If some of those who need affordable housing don't want it, they don't have to move there.
Another thing is the policing/security that would be required. Idealists can argue against this all they want, but low income areas are rife with crime. There would need to be a selection process that weeds out the law abiding from those with criminal records. There's no sense in spending 10s of billions of dollars to create the American version of Kowloon Walled City.