[sudo-discuss] WOSP – City of Oakland’s Plan for Gentrification: A Target For Anti-Displacement Activity : Indybay

[Sonja Trauss]

Yeah all apartment buildings have that built in a little as you noticed:
different sized units for different prices.

Also, just encourage construction of all housing no matter the final
planned price point. Like all products, the new version is the most
expensive. The best middle income housing is the past's luxury housing.
The house I live in is 150 years old, my car is 23 years old, as it should
be, I'm mid-low income.
There are tons of high income people here and tons of new high income
people coming all the time. They want to pay a lot for things! They can
afford it and it makes them feel nice. As long as we build enough new, high
end stuff to satiate that part of the market, we don't have to worry that
our middle low income housing will be invaded.
What if they accidentally build too much high priced housing? That would be
great. That would be winning the lottery - they would cut prices on the
extra units until they got tenants. That's what happened in Phila after the
crash in 2008 and around here after the crash in the 90s.

The other way to make new build less expensive is to make it cheaper to
build. You're seeing a selection bias - if it costs $250/ sq ft to build,
no new thing will be sold for less than that. If it costs $100/sq ft to
build, then you will see projects that will sell for less.

The part of the building costs that are under the control of regular
citizens - maybe the fees and taxes the local municipality charges, and
definitely the costs that are incurred by a long drawn out entitlement
process.

This is what is so ironic and sad about the WOSP opposition. The specific
plan is a blanket EIR, so that builders can build more quickly (and
therefore cheaply). The opposition, if successful, would make building take
longer and be more expensive. So, selection bias, whatever gets built will
be the more expensive.

On Saturday, May 17, 2014, Romy Snowyla <romy at snowyla.com> wrote:

> Is there a way to encourage construction of middle class and low income
> housing? This is a tough question and has a lot do to with basic tax
> structure, social values & resources。
>
> I lived in Berlin and there were plenty of high quality safe mixed income
> neighborhoods . The wealthy people usually lived on the top floors (light) .
>
> By the train station there were a lot of nice low income homes mixed in
> with condos and centex middle income duplexes about a decade ago which was
> cool.
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On May 17, 2014, at 10:20 AM, Gregg Horton <greggahorton at gmail.com<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','greggahorton at gmail.com');>>
> wrote:
>
> Well hackerspaces along with pop-up shops, yoga studios, artisanal
> anything, third wave coffee shops and food trucks are some of the horsemen
> of the gentripocalypse
> On May 17, 2014 10:13 AM, "Romy Snowyla" <romy at snowyla.com> wrote:
>
> So I'm curious .. Once sudoroom moves out of it's current location what
> hot education tech start up moves in? I guess we are the frontline of the
> gentrification wave.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On May 17, 2014, at 9:30 AM, Sonja Trauss <sonja.trauss at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is an Orwellian notion of anti-displacement.
>
> In the face of increased population these people seek to build nothing
> new. I really can't understand what they think is going to happen when the
> population goes up but the housing stock doesn't.
>
> Sf tried that! Look what's happening there! It sucks!
>
> This is the saddest thing to me because all efforts like this do, is make
> building more expensive and difficult. That means the only things that get
> built are at higher price points. Or, if they're slightly successful,
> whole projects are blocked, and they miss the opportunity to get capital to
> build something useful, instead of something stupid like a new calendaring
> app.
>
> On Friday, May 16, 2014, Romy Snowyla <romy at snowyla.com> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/04/18/18754399.php
>
> WOSP – City of Oakland’s Plan for Gentrification: A Target For
> Anti-Displacement Activity : Indybay
> [image: 1888463_10151853655272163_918216235_n]<http://advancethestruggle.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/1888463_10151853655272163_918216235_n.jpg>
>
> Advertisement for Public Release of WOSP in Feb. 2014
> March 29, 2014
>
> *Snapshot of the State and Capital in the Bay Area*
>
> If the Bay Area’s economy was compared to every other national economy in
> the world, it would be the 19th largest. The Bay has the highest GDP per
> capita in the entire United States, and even outpaces London and Singapore.
> It captures 40% of the entire flow of venture capital in the US (p11),
> which constitutes a higher amount of capital than that captured during the
> dot.com boom. While the Bay accounts for only 2.4% of the total jobs in
> the US, it has 12% of the computer & electronics manufacturing, 10.3% of
> software development, and 8.3% of internet related jobs (p13.) Seven of the
> top 10 social media companies are here – Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter,
> Linkedin, Zynga, and Yelp. In short, the Bay is home to one of the highest
> concentrations of capital in the world and mapping out the composition of
> capital is key for us to situate ourselves as we continue to engage in
> class combat. *(Footnote #1)*
>
> The regional state is well aware of its place within the world economy.
> Over the past years, city politicians from the greater Bay Area have come
> together to generate a 30 year strategy about how to restructure the
> region’s housing, employment, and transportation structures. Plan Bay Area<http://onebayarea.org/plan-bay-area.html>(PBA) was developed by the Association
> of Bay Area Governments <http://www.abag.ca.gov/>(ABAG) to carry out the
> tasks of determining how the state can support and facilitate the
> accumulation of capital throughout the region. In order to grease the
> wheels of the local capitalist economy, the PBA aims to redevelop housing
> and transit throughout the Bay; New units are set to be built, new
> transportation “hubs” developed, and both of these projects are to be
> coordinated across single cities and the bay area as a whole.
>
> PBA aims to align the various metropolitan areas of the Bay in their
> development of housing
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://sudoroom.org/pipermail/sudo-discuss/attachments/20140517/a6cca3b0/attachment.html>