How _____ friendly is Sacramento? (Roseville, Ross: to buy, to live in, rating)

[zen_klown]

When mass transit is worse for the enviroment, when its more expensive than driving and when it doesn't reduce traffic congestion, what is the purpose of insisting on putting more of it into our communities?

Is there some sort of inherent value in congestion that I am missing?

The cities that sprawl the most are the most affordible. The cities that highly regulate land use planning to force transit are among the least affordible. Yes lots of people take transit into SF or Manhattan, but how much of a middle class is there in either of those communties? Is there a place where most people are taking mass transit to work and where most people own their own homes?

Sprawl lets housing get built out on the urban edge where land prices are cheaper and more people can afford to own there own homes. Because those folks aren't competing with the folks in the urban center for housing, prices in the city center drops too. Sprawl destroys site rent and makes housing more affordible for everyone suburban and urban alike.

There isn't a land shortage in Sacramento, we're in a huge flat valley. There isn't even a water shortage, residential housing uses less water than agriculture especially when the local agricultural use is growing rice. What there is a shortage of is land zoned for building housing and that is the function of our over regulated land use system.

If you are making 60k a year in Kansas City, or Houston, you probably are a homeowner. In SF or NYC you aren't. Why I live in Sacramento is because I wanted to live in a community with a functioning middle class. Its why I love the burbs and don't want to see planners destroy them.

My problem with smart growth is that it is a policy that seems at war with the middle class. From the war on big box retailers to the need for ever more perfect land use restrictions, smart growth is in effect a series of polices that cumlatively zones out the middle class. When you need the government to allocate by law the availability of housing via a mixed use ordinance, it means you are now crafting policies to hide the consequences of other bad policies.

There isn't a land shortage in Sacramento, there is a shortage in land zoned to build housing. That is a policy failure largely created by smart growth that isn't being addressed.

[pba]

Originally Posted by zen_klown

When mass transit is worse for the enviroment, when its more expensive than driving and when it doesn't reduce traffic congestion, what is the purpose of insisting on putting more of it into our communities?

Perceptions. It's one of the biggest problems we have and has a lot of unintended consequences. The general perception of mass transit is that it's better. One train carrying hundred of people has to be better than 100 individual cars on the road, right?? On the surface it seems right but it takes some digging to find the real truth.

Another prime example of the perception being better than the reality is the use of alternative fuels like corn (ethanol). It's a natural product that burns effeciently and is completely renewable so what could possibly be better? The problem is that is takes enormous amounts of manufacturing to create this natural fuel which causes more pollution during the creation of the fuel than during the creation of the same amount of gasoline + the exhaust from cars using that gasoline. However, the perception that ethanol is 'better' will probably live on unfortunately.

Another example, the place I work has approx. 7,000 employees. They recently added some new buildings in our complex and totally re-created our entire parking lot. They intentionally only created 5,500 parking spaces because they figured if they did that then they could force people into using mass transit (just so happens there is a light rail station less than 100 yards from the building). What about the people living in El Dorado Hills, Rocklin, Roseville, Orangevale, Fair Oaks, Citrus Heights, etc. etc. who don't live near a light rail station?? They have to drive 90% of the way to work, park in a light rail parking lot and then ride the additional 10% of the way to work??? Sorry but most people just aren't going to do that.

It's just ridiculous and only means that you won't find a place to park unless you get to work before 7:30 in the morning. Get there at 8:00 and you park across the street and risk getting a ticket. With all the chaos that this created for the 1,500 people that can't find a place to park (granted some do take Light Rail) the perception is still that they did a great thing by making people take mass transit. Nice.

[wburg]

Several things you cats just mentioned are greenwashing tactics disguised as green strategies. Corn ethanol has never been a big choice for actual environmentalists, but it's pushed by the corn lobby as a "green product." Actual environmentalists can't stand corn ethanol, because they know it takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a gallon of ethanol.

Developers try to cut corners on things like parking because they make more money selling buildings than parking lots. Being "transit friendly" becomes an excuse to underpark a project. And yes, the main problem is that if you underpark a project but don't provide transit capacity you just create a parking crunch.

I don't buy the middle-class thing at all. I live in the central city. I'm a homeowner. I make a lot less than $60,000 per year.

As to land shortages: All those levees around the valley aren't for show. We have to build levees to make the land around here dry enough to build on, and from recent experiments in North Natomas we are having trouble even doing that properly. And where the land doesn't flood, there are other problems: sure, there's plenty of water on the floodplains used for rice fields, but there isn't nearly enough in the foothills of El Dorado County. Not to mention, if we build on the rice fields, or divert the water up to El Dorado County, where will we grow rice?

[zen_klown]

Originally Posted by wburg

I don't buy the middle-class thing at all. I live in the central city. I'm a homeowner. I make a lot less than $60,000 per year.

As to land shortages: All those levees around the valley aren't for show. We have to build levees to make the land around here dry enough to build on, and from recent experiments in North Natomas we are having trouble even doing that properly. And where the land doesn't flood, there are other problems: sure, there's plenty of water on the floodplains used for rice fields, but there isn't nearly enough in the foothills of El Dorado County. Not to mention, if we build on the rice fields, or divert the water up to El Dorado County, where will we grow rice?

When you say you don't buy the middle-class thing, what is your argument here? Are you disputing the correlation between high levels land use regulation and price levels? Or are you trying to argue that smart growth polices don't really demand particularly high levels of land use regulation? Or are you making some other point?

As to correlation between high levels of land use regulation and housing price, it seems pretty firmly established.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/...n3/v25n3-7.pdf

As to the land shortage. Nationally only 3 percent of the land is dedicated to urban uses whereas 9 percent is idle crop land under federal agricultural price supports/conservation programs.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/EIB14/eib14a.pdf

There is no land shortage, but there is a local shortage of land zoned for housing.

[ubu]

You are ignoring municipal finance. Under Prop 13 assessed values and property taxes can't go up more than 2% a year. The longer you stay in your home, the more prop 13 minimizes your property burden. Also property taxes rates are much lower in California around 1% versus the 2 to 3% in Texas. Lastly people in California generally expect higher levels of government service than in Texas.

Do you see the collective action problem for local politicians?Politically they can't repeal Prop 13. As long as housing prices are as cheap in California as in Texas, residential housing probably isn't paying for itself. So that is the intial inducement for land use restrictions. But if housing prices are pushed high enough, then residential development again makes sense again for local communities. A 300k house in California at a 1% assessed tax rate brings in the same property tax as a 100k house in Texas at a 3% assessment. If you push the price a little higher, you can make up for the fact that for the average length of residency property taxes fail to grow with inflation under prop 13.

Notice the boom bust cycle in California and how it starts shortly after prop 13.

Central California OFHEO Home Price Appreciation Tracker

Before California had prop 13, if you recall it sprawled like Texas and housing relative to incomes was about as affordible as it is in Texas very close to 2.5 times median incomes. But after prop 13, that type of development makes absolutely no fiscal sense for local munipalities.

Texas OFHEO Home Price Appreciation Tracker

The biggest land use restriction in California is prop 13. Until and unless you repeal that, California cities aren't going to grow like Texas cities.

[zen_klown]

I will have to look into this more, but I think local government is just a lot less dependent on property taxes, there is money from the sales tax and I think the state of California is funding local services like schools in part from the state income tax, so while prop tax levels are higher in Texas, I am not sure that overall tax burdends are less.

But its an interesting point, that I hadn't thought about.

[Ludachris]

Originally Posted by zen_klown

I will have to look into this more, but I think local government is just a lot less dependent on property taxes, there is money from the sales tax and I think the state of California is funding local services like schools in part from the state income tax, so while prop tax levels are higher in Texas, I am not sure that overall tax burdends are less.

But its an interesting point, that I hadn't thought about.

I think CA might use state income tax because the property taxes are no longer cutting it like they once did. I didn't put much thought into that either. Time to "change" prop 13?

[wburg]

Local governments get income from property taxes and sales taxes, plus whatever funding they get from the state and feds for various state and federal programs. Because property taxes got frozen by Prop. 13, sales tax became profoundly more important to local governments: you can track the rise of "big-box" retail in California to the era after Prop. 13, because it was so critical to have those sales tax dollars to try and make up the difference in tax revenue. You can also point to Prop. 13 as the point where California's public schools and infrastructure started decaying, going from the best in the nation to a national joke in a decade or so.

State and federal programs make up some of the difference, but no, in a lot of ways California cities are still reeling from Prop. 13. And yes, it's well past time to change things.

[zen_klown]

The bigger problem with prop 13 is that it doesn't just apply to residential construction. It applies to commercial stuff as well. Tenants come and go in commerical properties, but the actual ownership of those properties tends to turn over much less frequently than the average turnover of residential properties. So in effect, prop 13 is an even bigger subsidy to commerical property owners than to homeowners.

I am not sure that prop 13 will ever be repealed, but I do wonder about the ability to amend it along those lines.

[wburg]

zen_klown hits the nail on the head: it was sold as a way to avoid senior citizens on fixed incomes losing their homes due to increased taxes, but it was commercial properties that reaped the lion's share of the benefits.