You look at the skyline from when Dell was founded, and look at the skyline today. It's been non-stop residential housing development, and it's only accelerating. The current squeeze is sizable, yes, but the market forces are working.
I'm not normally someone who picks on phrasing, but this one is a little orwellian. The implication is that, while homelessness is endemic basically everywhere, the proper "rules" for them to obey are that they are not to be seen. And enforcement regimes that allow them to exist in public are "lax"?
Yikes.
I don't think OP meant anything by his post. California's policies are lax. Regardless if you think they're deserving of consideration or not, it's miserable to have a huge homeless population living next to your house. People may pretend its not real but homeless areas tend towards drugs and unsanitary conditions and it's not a great place to raise a family.
This would be shocking if the Bay Area didn't have an abundance of shelter for them and very-well-funded homeless service programs, but it does. The resources are all there, but many don't want to use them, they just want to be outside and be left alone, and the cities don't do anything about it.
Austin has crazy property taxes in comparison to CA, which is where they get you.
2.5% tax rate evaluated for the property prices annually, so retiring on a fixed income in Austin is a tiny bit harder than in CA (that's the real goal of Prop 13).
Income taxes are easier to think about, because it goes to zero when your income drops, but property taxes based on the unrealized value of the house is completely out of your control.
The homestead exemption does apply, but Prop 13 is by far the superior option for an owner, though what Austin does is better for the government's fiscal policy.
Agree with you, but I would guess most of the Gigafactory workers who haven’t exercised stock options probably can’t afford to own in the Bay Area.
While Prop 13 probably filters down to renters in reduced rent, the supply/demand issues for housing is still pretty out of whack even with all of the new units in Milpitas. Also Prop 13 has second order effects that keep older empty nester boomers in a large house even though they would otherwise downsize if they didn’t lose such a generous benefit.
It doesn't.
Rent is set by the market. New and old landlords have drastically different tax rates but charge roughly the same rent. Same deal with gas stations: you can't figure out how much property tax they're paying based on the price at the pump.
In fact one of the main reasons California has rent control is that Howard Jarvis promised renters that landlords would be nice and pass along the cuts. Of course this was a lie and in the early 80s cities lashed out with rent control in response.
But you are right that the rental and home sale markets are entirely different. Owning costs more than renting in SF by a large margin.
Prop 13 was a "tax revolt" passed because greedy angry landowners wanted revenge on the state for taxing them.
Lots of low/middle income Californians actually have a higher total tax burden in Texas.[1] And I’d guess that Austin is one of the places where cost of living is highest for Texas, reducing the net quality of life profit.
Also, residential expansion in those two places is a bit of apples and oranges. Bay Area is surrounded by water, mountains, and Open Space Preserve. Austin is surrounded by land, land, and more land; and most of it is flat.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-19/wait-c...
Land and more land is one solution. Density and more density is another, so the downtown can actually grow bigger and bigger; if people are willing to live closer to everything, they have a better chance than in SF (but still a far cry from NYC or Chicago).
I don't agree with your assertion that homelessness isn't caused in part by house prices. That seems unintuitive to me. Yes some people will get roommates, but what about people that already had roommates and were barely meeting rent? Some of them will have the foresight to get up and move interstate before they get wiped out, but there's frictions and costs associated and not everyone will succeed.