Build the new $600,000 condos now, because if you don't, the old $400,000 condos will become your $600,000 condos instead.
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Shane Phillips
@ShaneDPhillips
He/him. Biochem , policy . Now: . Co-host of UCLA Housing Voice podcast. Supply, stability, subsidy. I wrote THE AFFORDABLE CITY:
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For comparison, Manhattan has 200,000 more people than San Antonio on 1/20th the land. If everywhere was built like Manhattan we could fit the entire US population in a space 200x this size; instead, we destroyed tens of thousands of spaces like this to accommodate sprawl.
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It's finally here.
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Developers hope to break ground by 2024 on "The Star," a 22-story, 500,000sf office tower on Sunset Boulevard #Hollywood la.urbanize.city/post/new-detai
"wow look at all the development happening in LA"
*zooms out*
"oh"
I gotta say, the line landlords use about needing to raise rents the inflation rate rings pretty hollow when you consider that their two biggest costs — a mortgage & property taxes — are usually fixed and capped, respectively. 7% inflation does not mean a 7% increase in expenses.
In most cities and towns in the U.S., you're allowed to build parking without housing, but you can't build housing without parking. That says a lot about our priorities, and all of it bad.
Santa Monica, ever the innovator, is breaking new ground in the field of blocking new homes by appropriating the language of social justice. This proposed initiative would require developers to pay up to 2.7 times the prevailing wage, which is of course completely infeasible.
This overlay of the NYC Metro on Los Angeles by Oren Ben-Joseph is a good illustration of why "Manhattanization" shouldn't be a dirty word. We use so much more land than NYC for a similar population, with severe negative consequences for mobility, equity, and the environment.
Homeowners in high-demand cities, pick:
1) Allow few new houses, prices rise, kids can't afford to stay so you rarely see them; they inherit your home when you die
2) Allow more new houses, prices stabilize, live near your kids + grandkids; they own their own homes nearby
"Developers are parasites."
-- Person in their home, built by a developer, which has appreciated in value by 1000%, using their post-retirement free time, which is supported by a publicly subsidized pension, to call into a public meeting to oppose new housing
My question for every LA-area elected official: What are you doing to ensure that the home I purchased for $500k in 2017, and is worth $750k today, isn't worth $1 million or more in 2030? If you don't have a plan for that then you're not serious about solving this crisis.
Regular reminder that water scarcity probably isn't a valid excuse for your high-income, job-rich coastal city blocking the construction of new homes. Los Angeles added over a million people over the past 50 years and it *reduced* its total water use.
What a bummer of an outlook. Imagine calling yourself a progressive and not wanting a city that's welcoming to all, new and old.
It costs at least $400,000 per unit to build new homes in LA. At that cost, and assuming no profit, maintenance/repairs, or management, you'd have to charge $1,900/month to break even. If you want rents that cheap, or lower, you've gotta spend public dollars.
I don't understand how people can say stuff like "we don't need to build unsubsidized housing because people who can afford it already have plenty of options" and not realize that "rich people moving into older, cheaper homes" is exactly the problem we're trying to avoid.
A Taco Bell turns into a Taco Bell in Los Angeles. (2015➡️2017)
"I'm a homeowner so my opinions should count for more than some transient renter."
No. Even if that renter *does* eventually move away, they're likely to be replaced by another renter. Their interests are probably similar, and someone needs to express them.
My neighborhood is relatively poor; it has a median household income around $50K. The median home is valued over $800k. When people say new housing isn't affordable to the people who live here, they tend not to mention how the drafty 100-year-old homes aren't affordable either.
Holy shit Metro it's 830pm and these are our Regional Connector headways? We spent $2 billion on these new stations to run trains every 30 minutes?
There's a sort-of-understandable intuition that new housing is mostly for new people — people from some other city or region; this is wrong. In big metros across the US, 75-90% of the people who moved into new housing in the previous year came from the same metro area.
California has been permitting about 110,000 new homes per year. Two facts about that number:
1. At that pace, the average house needs to last 130 years just to maintain the current number of homes.
2. Subsidizing that many homes would cost ~$50 billion/year.
Organizations that can't get on board with mixed-income housing built by union labor on commercial land -- where renter displacement is all but impossible -- are not interested in solving the housing crisis. I don't know how else to interpret this.
A lot of bad housing policy opinions seem to boil down to the belief that there's an inexhaustible supply of rich people.
U.S. housing policy of the past ~40 years is often framed as a case of bad outcomes caused by a market (and developers) run rampant. That seems clearly wrong. But as a case of regulatory capture supported by an alliance of land/home-owners and large developers, it works.
There are 6 vacant parking spaces for every car
And 1 hour of occupied car for every 11 hours of parked car
And 3.5 empty seats for every occupied car
Imagine someone is born in LA, grows up here, goes to college, moves back and takes a $40k/year job, and 10 years later they're living with a partner earning a combined $150k/yr. This is a very common type of person. It'd be good if they could live here w/o crowding others out.
A small number of cities had the good fortune to attract a bunch of high-paying jobs in the tech sector, and instead of turning that to their benefit, they decided to do nothing and enrich property owners at everyone else's expense, then blame it all on those well-paid workers.
In 2020 we started producing fewer new cars than people wanted, and after two years used car prices have increased by 50%. We've been producing fewer new homes than people want for decades.
Oh to have the housing problems of Tokyo, where, due to falling prices, long-term tenants actually pay somewhat higher rents than those moving into market rentals today.
I have a strict policy of liking every "I got an e-bike" tweet that I see
It's so galling to see people in positions of power, homeowners in most cases, describe 20- and 30-somethings paying $2500/month in rent as "the new elites." That mindset is a big part of why there are so few new houses and the older ones keep getting more expensive.
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A senior advisor to the White House on housing:
"I think the new elites like the younger folks who work in tech need to refuse to stop paying ridiculous amounts of rental housing. For their own good and for the market as a whole."
Ummm... No...
Some regulations are good! Others are bad! "Regulation" is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Sometimes "deregulation" is progressive, other times it's not.
We have absolutely got to start taxing cars by weight. This thing will cause, uhh, roughly 50x more road damage than a typical car? Fourth power equations are a trip.
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Interesting use of funding intended to support people living with HIV/AIDS, AIDS Healthcare Foundation (which fully funds Housing is a Human Right).
There's some truth to the fact that younger, upwardly mobile pro-housing advocates got involved in housing for self-interested reasons. What's overlooked is how older homeowners have been doing the same thing for decades, but with the goal of making housing less affordable.
If you're on the lefty end of the political spectrum and you can't get on board with the government building housing and using any "profits" generated to subsidize rents for low-income households then you are truly lost
What if YIMBYism is a big hoax and we allow more people to live in socially liberal, environmentally sustainable, economically productive cities for nothing?
Another day, another survey showing that about two thirds of people support apartment buildings in their community. And that renters are more welcoming than homeowners. today.yougov.com/topics/politic
What are some mid-size cities you think are doing great stuff on urban planning, and housing in particular? Please include examples of specific policies or projects if possible, and bonus points for non-coastal cities.
The relationship between vacancy rates and rent increases is astonishingly clear. When vacancy rates are low, rent growth is high; when vacancy rates are high, rent growth is low (or negative). H/t to for link: smcorridornews.com/steady-as-she-
Get ready for a bunch of less expensive market-rate housing and tons of additional below-market homes in transit-accessible neighborhoods. This is one of the biggest housing affordability, transportation, and climate bills in recent history. All of them at once.
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CA is making housing cheaper & easier to build by eliminating parking requirements for new housing near transit and daily destinations like jobs, grocery stores, & schools.
Thanks to the work of @laurafriedman43, we’re prioritizing people and the planet over cars.
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This insight (and graphic) by has always stuck with me. In California, at least, rent control policies tended to come years after downzonings that created housing shortages and put upward pressure on housing prices.
The most unaffordable city in America is on the verge of restricting use of the most affordable and sustainable construction material (wood) because of fearmongering by an astroturf concrete industry lobbying group. I can't believe this is happening.
Good lord. California and Florida were the only states where an SUV or truck wasn't the #1-selling automobile in 2020.
There's a difference between people who are critical of the US because they believe it can and must be better, and those who believe it's essentially evil and irredeemable, and I'm not sure I've ever felt the distinction between those two groups as sharply as I do today.
It's very clear that we can't rely solely on the private market to meet everyone's housing needs, but I really don't understand how people can just wave away the decades of affordability in the mid-20th century that was mostly a result of large-scale private construction.
Someone should write a book about how we've forgotten to do things fast, especially in the public sector, and all the problems that come along with that -- high costs, out of date designs and procurement, more disruption, lack of public motivation and trust, etc etc. I'd buy it.
Having owned a home for five years now, it's absolutely baffling to me that a California homeowner could feel even a little bit beleaguered by state or federal policy. It's just a constant stream of subsidies and rebates and incentives.
My take on why the SF vacancy tax proposal is controversial: For many, it's confirming the worst intuitions about what some people are in this advocacy space for. It's like if YIMBYs proposed an upzoning bill that exempted all affluent white neighborhoods. twitter.com/MClendaniel/st
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I support well-designed rent control laws, but I also agree with the aphorism, "the best rent control is housing abundance." One big reason is it aligns incentives: Landlords with long-term RC tenants want them to leave; when housing is abundant, landlords want tenants to stay.
People who want developers to build more affordable housing before they support zoning reform are making exactly the same mistake—or committing exactly the same sabotage—as people who don't want transit agencies to increase bus service until more people start riding.
Pick your favorite unaffordable city. There's no question that if over the past 30 years it had built 50% more housing, that city would be more affordable and sustainable than it is today. Every day we don't act, or take half measures, we are choosing to repeat this mistake.
Here's my contribution to the SRO discourse: Single-room occupancy hotels/units are good. As with all other housing typologies, they aren't for everyone and there are trade-offs. Whether you personally would live in a given housing type shouldn't determine whether it's legal.
Thinking of becoming a "there are 4 vacant parking spaces for every car" guy.
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In other words, we should build homes. All kinds of homes. As many subsidized homes we as a society can afford, and as many unsubsidized homes as individual households are willing to buy or rent. The number for both types is much more than we're building today.
City councilmembers when the the state tells them they need to build more housing
Why do you think it is that zoning was introduced (at least in the US) in the early 1900s rather than the 1800s or 1700s or earlier?
People are constantly unhappy about nearly everything to do with cars and driving — traffic, parking, gas, other drivers. Yet somehow, the people who get the angriest are also the biggest proponents of pouring more resources into... cars and driving.
A transit agency that allows 3,300 parking spaces on top of a heavy rail subway station is a transit agency that doesn't believe in its service.
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Fresh renderings for District NoHo - the $1-billion mixed-use complex which would bring more than 1500 homes, offices, and retail to land surrounding Metro's North Hollywood Station urbanize.city/la/post/fresh-
It'd be great if we just approved as much housing as it took to reduce prices rather than focusing on pseudoscientific estimates of "housing need." If we fail? "Oh no, lots of new higher-quality homes and more people living in our most productive and sustainable cities!! 😱😭"
So apparently AB 946, which would eliminate mortgage interest deductions for *second homes* in California, isn't moving forward this year. A similar bill failed a few years ago too. It blows my mind that there are any Democrats who oppose this.
Not saying it's not possible that Millennials end up with the same homeownership rate as Boomers, but this chart doesn't give me much hope for that.
I'm really blown away by the selfishness of some suburbanites. It's one (bad) thing to prohibit inexpensive housing choices in your own community, but it's a whole other level to oppose it in cities 10 or 20 miles away because it'd make parking there more difficult for you.
Home (i.e. land) value appreciation is really just a straight transfer of wealth from future homebuyers to current homeowners and from younger people to older people. It's not creating wealth for anyone, just moving it around in extraordinarily inequitable ways.
If we'd had SB 9 in place 30 years ago the median home price in Los Angeles would probably be around $400k or $500k today, instead of $900,000. It's why places like Houston are so smart to have addressed their housing barriers *before* getting incredibly expensive.
Housing politics is exhausting. No matter how much evidence accumulates that new homes help mitigate rising prices, to say nothing of their other benefits, every single project gets attacked for causing gentrification by people who know better and offer no realistic alternatives.
I'm amazed that someone could say this with a straight face. Virtually every city in the world that ranks highly on productivity, upward mobility, livability, sustainability -- name your priority -- is also relatively hostile toward cars. It's not a coincidence, it's a necessity.
I cannot get over how some people can argue—with a straight face!—against state preemption of housing policy on the grounds that local governments are best suited to addressing housing needs. Local control has been the norm for generations and the result is unequivocal failure!
More people got to live in my amazing city, rents went down slightly, and it didn't cost the public a dime, but I'll be damned if I'm not still mad about it.
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That sound you hear is the goalposts shifting from "gentrification buildings raise prices so much and push people out 
" to "oh actually these buildings don't lower prices enough "
" to "oh actually these buildings don't lower prices enough "
From what I understand, this is a converted single-family house, and because it's Palo Alto it's probably worth at least $3 million. This is exactly the kind of thing YIMBYs are trying to avoid by making normal apartments and condos legal and cost-effective to build.
I know it's not all bad faith out there, but the emphasis on "public land for public housing" feels increasingly misguided and counterproductive. Nowhere in the US has a shortage of land; we have a shortage of land where it's legal to build dense, relatively inexpensive housing.
"Our city is growing too quickly," say residents of city with 0.0% average annual growth rate over the past 50 years.
New paper connecting market-rate housing production to reduced rents, this one in Germany. A pretty big effect, seen pretty much immediately. Nice to see this finding in another market, after several recent studies in the U.S. with similar findings. econstor.eu/bitstream/1041
File this under: "It's not taxes driving people out of California, it's housing prices." Funnily enough, high-income households are the only ones CA is adding, on net. We're losing low- and middle-income households to Texas because they can afford housing there; that's it.
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Replying to @ArmandDoma
State and local combined tax rates as a percent of personal income (ITEP 2019):
"Building more will never lead to lower prices because they'll just stop building if prices start to fall"
Solar panel manufacturers:
Be careful what you wish for
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Would you want a Wall Street hedge fund living next door? Neither would I.
That’s why I introduced a bill to stop hedge funds from taking over the housing market, driving up prices, and making homes even more unaffordable. Homes are for raising families, not increasing profits!
In honor of today's IPCC report, I am literally begging people to support incremental and/or imperfect solutions rather than hold out for their perfect solution that's probably never going to happen -- certainly not in one fell swoop.
It is just nuts that an infill project in Downtown LA is being held up on its perceived impacts to greenhouse gas emissions and construction noise. Meanwhile, we'll keep building 3,000 sq ft houses in the suburbs of Phoenix and Las Vegas.
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A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge has overturned the approvals and environmental impact report for a proposed mixed-use project that would replace part of the Southern California Flower Market #DTLA urbanize.city/la/post/downto
When you think YIMBY is about being pro-market rather than pro-housing
This paper is several years old, but I'm regularly re-amazed that we spend tens of billions of dollars on mortgage interest deductions each year only to increase housing prices, reduce homeownership, increase debt, and make society worse off overall. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10
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Some people are just here to spread their joylessness far and wide, no matter how inappropriate the setting.
How is this not an instantly fireable offense?
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Can someone let me know why LASD would have their badge numbers covered in tape?
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Literally Depression-era housing production levels, with a population 3x larger than it was in the 1930s.
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The idea that low taxes are what makes a place attractive, as opposed to cost of living (of which taxes play a relatively small role) and quality of life, including quality of public services, is so patently absurd.
I'm not a homeownership booster at all, but the takes like "homeownership is actually bad," or specifically a bad investment, just don't click with me. In much of the U.S. owning is wayyy better than renting. The goal shouldn't be to deny that truth, but rather to make it untrue.
My book in two sentences: "Housing scarcity is one of the main reasons we require strong tenant protections, and most of the negative consequences of tenant protections are a product of housing scarcity. It's why we need to prioritize supply policies *and* stability policies."
It really is strange how being forced to do something yourself (own a car, drive) is considered freedom to some people, whereas allowing someone else to drive you places (bus, train) or getting yourself there cheaply (bike, walk, scooter, etc) is some kind of oppression. twitter.com/mtsw/status/14
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