City Council needs to address this issue.
"This Palo Alto young lady could not have portrayed the problem any better, for Pacifica as well as Palo Alto.
Supply and demand is basic economics. More affordable work
force housing is needed all over the bay area none more than
in Pacifica. Our politics of the last 30+ years has
hamstringed new housing projects. Delays and obstructionism
has created this perfect storm of unaffordability. We
desperately need leaders that understand that there are
solutions to the challenges Pacifica faces in providing
housing for our work forces. Not just police and teacher but
for the rest of those working couples that aren't making six
figure salaries. Read this letter closely. It says a lot." Jim Wagner
| Protect our community, through an earnest plan to build affordable housing. |
This letter serves as my official resignation from the Planning and Transportation Commission. My family has decided to move to Santa Cruz. After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here. We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year — an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer.
.... ... the cost of housing is astronomical not just in Palo Alto but many miles in each direction. .... Over the last 5 years I’ve seen dozens of my friends leave Palo Alto and often leave the Bay Area entirely. I’ve seen friends from other states get job offers here and then turn them down when they started to look at the price of housing. .... Until renters, younger people, and people of more modest means organize, this problem will continue throughout the Bay Area." Read more.
Submitted by Jim Wagner
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Note graphic (chosen by the poster) from Habitat for Humanity, "High housing cost burdens in the United States."
Posted by Kathy Meeh
24 comments:
What is really interesting (or odd) is how few of these bay area tech employees have sought Pacifica as an option for housing. There might be a few. But the fact of stagnant city population for decades indicates Pacifica isn't as desirable as the rest of Bay Area?
Is my observation accurate? If it is, how has Pacifica escaped the gentrification wave that has hit the city and larger SF Bay Area?
The number of new people moving here and buying homes is equal to the number of people selling and movng away.
I don't get it. People spoke out about rent control, now they are saying this lady did good in Palo Alto.
3:05, expand on that please. if that is true how come we have thousands of new jobs created and yet woefully behind on housing stock to accommodate them.
Where did you read that this "lady did good in Palo Alto"?
She's leaving because she can't afford to live there. The demand has so monumentally outstripped the supply that housing is un-affordable.
Our local anti-growthers have been using phony environmentalism for at least 30 years to create the same situation in Pacifica.
This NIMBYism gone wild is not only destroying our town, it is preventing any reasonable approach to help local residents find affordable housing. Nancy Hall's brilliant solution was to cover an entire hillside with just ten $4,000,000 houses. This only proves their incompetence at running a city even though their fearless leader Peter Loeb and his looney gang pro ports to be the experts.
Some of the people in those "thousands of jobs" have moved to Pacifica, but if the population of Pacifica hasn't changed much, it must mean that a similar number of people left Pacifica.
3:05, the general trend in SF and Bay Area indicates that there are more jobs than what the housing stock can support. That was also pretty much the point of the post in that lady's resignation letter (though it was confined to Palo Alto). She also makes a good point about Palo Alto out-sourcing housing stock to place such as San Jose and Fremont and as a result causing horrendous traffic situations during commute hours (see the comments).We also largely understand, the latest wave of gentrification in SF was due to a boom in jobs that is unmatched by available housing stock, and therefore contributing to some of the most expensive re valuations in the nation today. Which brings me back to my question, how did Pacifica avoid this situation?
If there is indeed general shortage of housing, Pacifica is by most measures a good option housing. We've also observed increase in re valuations in Pacifica. Is this because Pacifica is harnessing the upside of the housing situation downside? Is Pacifica actually contributing to the problem of housing stock availability?
Reminds me of the Foster City Mayor who was homeless and living in a van by the river a few years ago. (See archived story):
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=886&dat=19901125&id=5HYzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=W4EDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3566,6331320&hl=en
"Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go, where do all the people go, when they gotta go".
(From the film "Gia")
The Pacifica Realtors sent a few shills to City Council to talk about Rent Control.
Oh, and the rent control minions didn't have any "shills"
please. Myopia rules evidently.
shill NOUN an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others.
The locals who are pro rent-control are the same people who won't allow new housing to be built. They cause a problem and then try to pin the blame on, in their words, "greedy landlord and developers".
Right. It's the poor people who can't afford housing who are the cause of the problem, not the rich landlords and developers.
There is no need for rent control. What we need are:
1) Smart Housing Stock (build up) which avoid pressure on infrastructure as much as possible and is efficient in using available infrastructure.
2) Transit Infrastructure Upgrade (public road, train & air systems)
3) Better carry capacity (water, utilities, sewage, recycling)
4) Faster network connectivity that would enable remote commuting and more efficient and faster transfer of information
5) More green cover and cleanliness (have you noticed the trash on freeways?)
Why do you think every landlord in Pacifica is rich?
Nobody said every landlord in Pacifica is rich. But if you're a landlord in this market and you're not getting a good return on your investment, you're not managing your property very well.
You're obviously not an apartment building owner and your opinion has many holes in it which is contributing mightily to the housing crisis we are currently experiencing.
In Pacifica if you don't constantly maintain your property you will lose your roof, windows, paint, exterior siding, electrical panels, security systems, fencing, decking, stairs, even doorbells and mailboxes, you will lose your investment in a very short amount of time to the harsh ocean elements. There is nothing more corrosive than fog filled with salt. It corrodes everything. You must have massive amounts of insurance to protect against very damaging and often times frivolous lawsuits.You must pay business license fees, bloated property taxes and fire and environmental fees for yearly inspections. A 30 day vacancy which occurs every time a tenant leaves is a 10% loss of income at a minimum. There are not many businesses anywhere that are able to achieve 10% profit, year in an year out.
Positive cash flow is largely a myth.The hoped for appreciation in real estate value and building of equity is the only real benefit, but this is cyclical, takes a very long time and is subject to many, many risks.Compounding these costs and risks with rent control, will only further unfairly tax landlords and no one else. The problem is NOT greedy, evil landlords. Supply and demand creates this inequity. The NIMBY's in Pacifica who blow up every opportunity to build housing (including affordable housing) are the culprits. They are the ones who promote this notion of greedy, evil landlords because it keeps the spotlight off of their destructive tampering with the basic laws of supply and demand.
Weak, selfish people who lack empathy and compassion are the REAL bad actors here and you are complicit if you don't bother to study this issue thoroughly.
Top Ten Most Affluent Zip Codes in the Bay Area
We need to bring more rich people to Pacifica.
So being a landlord in Pacifica is a money-losing proposition. Sell and get out.
If I could sell, I would. Again, a very simplistic view of the NIMBY made housing crisis in Pacifica.
You idiots think you know everything, unfortunately you don't know what you don't know.
Roll another one.
Call everybody who has a different point of view than you a NIMBY and an idiot. You are the cause of your own problems.
I fully accept that I am the cause of my own problems. Will you acknowledge that your extreme faux-environmentalism has crippled Pacifica's economy and left many people with no housing options in the town they would like to live in?
I'm a tenant at an apartment complex with 20 units. Each unit goes for about $2,000 a month, which works out to about half a million dollars a year. In the 5 years I've lived here the owner has painted the building once, and, well that's about it. His mortgage has been paid off for years. Tell me again how hard it is for him to make a profit?
I guarantee you there's more to maintaining a building than just painting it.
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