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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

That's not the full story. Commercial property is much more profitable for a city than housing, so every city in the peninsula is trying to build office space, and trying to offload the cost of actually housing those new workers onto other cities. The tax code needs to be fixed to realign incentives. One proposal I heard was to make it so that the state shares the income tax of the employees that live in the city with the city. That might disincentivize low income housing, though.

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This is why I've always been in favor of Hybrid zoning. Hybrid structures are even better in my opinion. You can have a building where the bottom floors are commercial space and the upper floors are residential space.

Or you can zone an area where both commercial and residential development are permitted. Sure, living right next to a metal shop or something isn't the most pleasant thing, but it's really nice if you work at that metal shop.

This is something I saw being developed in my home town before I moved away. Along the main "downtown" strip they built several new 2 story structures where the bottom floors were shops like whole foods and such. On the top floor were various types of apartments. These particular apartments were a bit on the expensive side mostly due to it being a kind of swanky neighborhood right along the beach. That said, the concept can be expanded upon to apply to more affordable areas.

In Japan, zoning is hybrid (includes all zones up to a given level, so you can have mixed residential/commercial), and height limits are based on shadow projection instead of some city commissioner. It seems to work better than America's obsession with suburbanization and having all your housing in a giant clump a 10 minute drive from all your shops.

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Yep. Japan leads as a great example in this case.

> This is why I've always been in favor of Hybrid zoning. Hybrid structures are even better in my opinion. You can have a building where the bottom floors are commercial space and the upper floors are residential space.

Interestingly in the mission bay area there's a lot of unused commercial first floor space below residential apartment buildings. Some of it empty since the buildings went up 2012/2013.

Mission bay San Diego?

Why do you think that is?

San Francisco, sorry, should have mentioned that. I've really no clue, I'm kinda curious. They're still building new buildings with commercial ground level floors. Besides being empty and presumably not making money that way, they're also not particularly pretty...

I wonder if they're trying to predict the future. Perhaps they foresee business moving in in the future.

For CA, those housing units are negatives on the budget because of prop 13. It doesn't really matter where they are built.

I would be strongly in favor of reforming that law then. I have not seen anything regarding it come up on any of the recent ballots.

A repeal is hugely unpopular amongst many, since it would destroy house values and immediately make houses unaffordable for many owners on borderline incomes. You could try phasing it in, but housing values would take the change into account quickly, depending on how it's structured. Would be great for renters looking to buy, but catastrophic for recent buyers. That said, property taxes are very important as a feedback loop to discourage nimbyism that drives up prices.

Yes prop 13 is basically the reason behind the differential. And because it is a political non-starter it's misplaced incentives are baked into the CA real estate market.

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