Yeah, it seems like mobile oses are about as common as Linux distros in 1995. Sailfish, Maru, lineage, among the two you mention. If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck.
I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up.
If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.
> If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck.
Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.
Yep, Lineage is available on a 5X, Samsung S7, LG G5, etc.. Libhybris/Halium uses the driver parts of AOSP if I understand correctly, and Lineage uses ART in addition, they are all dependent on AOSP in some way currently atleast.
Google's project treble might make haliums' job a bit easier, so you might see halium on more devices than you'd think. Just speculating.
I played around with a solar savings calculator a while back out of curiosity, there is an excel spreadsheet on an Australian website I believe that's pretty thorough, but it's not the only one.
In short, I don't think it pays to sell electricity back to any utility (they pay back 1/2 of what they charge you) and a battery system probably won't be worth it unless you truly want to stay off the grid. Get a system that's enough for your maximum daytime usage, that's the fastest way to break even, and spend the least amount of money. For such a system, given my local electricity rates, the break even point was ~15 yrs. a decade ago, and it's 7-8 years now. If you can find cheaper panels/inverter the break even can be ~6 years, after which you'll only be left with a much smaller electricity bill. It even makes sense to add panels later if your usage increases.
The way the break even time has been shortening is very exciting, more people will be able to afford it; and if you can, it's a no-brainer to do it sooner rather than wait.
LA hasn't seen anything like the VC / tech boom that the bay area is currently in. Prop 13 reduces liquidity, but that doesn't automatically have an outsized effect on prices. It's only when a market is illiquid and there's a huge spike in demand that you see ridiculously negative effects like this.
And overturning it for commercial real estate won't do much to help housing prices, except for any re-zoning that happens. Overturning prop 13 or amending it might not happen for 5+ years, if ever. Note: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/07/19/californ...
Over the short, medium, and long-term then, building more is the only choice (SB 35, AB 71). Since you see prices not increasing as much in other parts of the state, it means building more can in fact keep prices down, as the deep-east bay construction shows.
True, but Seattle is seeing large increases in housing prices do to low inventory as well. Maybe it will play out different in the long term vs the bay area?
There are also YIMBY orgs almost everywhere. The south bay YIMBY twitter account has updates on what you can do as well.
From following the YIMBY movement (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/06/yi...) it's hard to not take the YIMBY position. More needs to be built, but we can have ~10% BMR requirements as ways of increasing diversity in a neighborhood and preserving some local control/culture. If enough is built, there won't be a need for BMR.
BMR is a scam in my opinion. It just prevents wages rising as they would naturally need to if housing became increasingly unaffordable to the point that workers can't even commute in. It recruits people into a program of lucky allocation rather than working for more. Busy or I'd write more.
I agree BMR is a scam, but not because of its effect on wages. It is too small of a factor, but because it is not market-based and leads to quotas, lotteries, middlemen, bribes- all bad.
To offset crazy high demand and prices, the only option is to increase supply (build taller, denser apartments/condos) or limit demand (disallow foreign buyers who speculate or invest, increase property taxes for owners that rent out their houses)
In Berlin all rents are controlled by default[1]. And despite similar purchase prices, rental prices are half of LA's.
[1] only newly built units or those renovated for more than 1/3 the value of the unit are allowed to be rented without price restrictions. This keeps the vast majority under rent control.
Affordable housing is actually quite scarce inside the city right now, people on average don't really earn that much. The rent controls had no actual effect on price increases. It has been suggested that the rules are simply being ignored and most tenants won't pick a legal fight with their landlords when housing is so scarce:
Rent control in berlin goes beyond the mietpreisbrmese - most significant is that you can't increase the rent once you get a tenant beyond the rate of inflation and that you (almost) can't kick out a tenant.
I have friends in London whose rent (in the same apartment) went up 10% every year for years until they had to leave the apartment. This is not happening in Berlin.
You can increase the rent up to 15% (Berlin) within three years, well above the rate of inflation. This forces some people to move out, as well.
Rents in Berlin are a joke compared to London. You can actually get cheap and plentyful housing just outside the city, but then you'll need a car as well.
I didn't know that, every place I lived in here had much slower rent increases (despite the market around the apartment raising more than that - in fact in my current place I'm still paying then same rent 3 years into living here).
Like I said, there's a demand for affordable housing and in Berlin that means very affordable. Lots of students, lots of artistans, and also lots of unemployed people.
> Either way 15% in 3 years is still rent control.
...which affects very few people.
There are some places that suddenly became "hip", where rent increases drove out lots of low-income people, which caused political backlash. These people really just had to move to less popular places.
Well I don't know what your point of comparison is, but my wife and I have been looking at buying or renting a bigger place (new baby) and all the stats I see when looking at places indicate purchase pricing going up at about double the rate of rental prices (often 5-7% YoY rent increase vs 10-15% YoY purchase price increases).
This has been the case for the last couple years at least. What do you attribute the discrepancy in rent increases vs purchase price increases if not for rent controls?
Do you know nobody living cheaply with an old contract that they would never get today, and that their landlord can't increase to market rate? Cause I know loads such people and this would not happen in a place without rent controls.
Real estate prices all over the world have gone up as a consequence of zero-interest monetary policy. Berlin is still on the cheap end, so it's still attractive to buy there even now.
Rents don't go up proportionally, simply because the demand isn't there. During the US housing bubble, rents didn't go up either, while property prices went through the roof.
> Do you know nobody living cheaply with an old contract that they would never get today, and that their landlord can't increase to market rate? Cause I know loads such people and this would not happen in a place without rent controls.
That's because most contracts specify that increasing the rent follows the standard procedure: Over three years, rent can rise by up to 20% (15% in Berlin), if the comparable rents in the area have risen as well (which is influenced by market rate). Ultimately, this limits the pace at which rents rise, but not the extent. In Berlin, only very few areas could sustain such growth, whereas in places like Munich where people earn way more, rents have risen much higher.
This is also not the rent control specific to Berlin (which is what you originally referred to), these are federal regulations.
I refereed to rent controls in the sense that the american OP said are causing price increases in SF (afaik this is simply limiting rent increases for existing contracts, which is the default in Germany).
All of Germany is under rent control in that context, and IMO it works compared to exploding rents in the US and other countries (UK, Israel, most places really aside from some of continental Europe).
That's because most contracts specify that
increasing the rent follows the standard
procedure: Over three years, rent can rise
by up to 20% (15% in Berlin), if the comparable
rents in the area have risen as well (which is
influenced by market rate). Ultimately, this
limits the pace at which rents rise, but not
the extent.
This is a form of rent control almost nobody in the rest of the world outside of continental europe enjoys - prices generally rise as quick for current tenants as they do for everyone there: your landlord can tell you tomorrow than the next time your contract is up to renewal (usually yearly), the price will be 2x the current one and if you don't like that you have to leave.
> your landlord can tell you tomorrow than the next time your contract is up to renewal (usually yearly), the price will be 2x the current one and if you don't like that you have to leave.
It all depends on your contract. Some contracts may put limits on rent increases in. Yes, in Germany there effectively is rent control that prevents a doubling of the rent within a year, but generally rents don't double within a year.
If those rent controls were good enough to satisfy the affected people, why are there protests and demands for additional laws for even more rent control in places like Berlin? Why is living in Munich so hard to afford? At what point does rent control start to "work"?
It works, it's just not enough. It's still better than the situation in the US, UK, etc where there's even less (I remind you that the OP's argument was that rent control was a bad thing).
There's too many variables to say that rent control for the entire housing stock is what keeps Berlin's rents down.
For starters, Berlin is known to be one of the cheaper German cities until recently ("poor but sexy"). In addition, the climate, geographies, and economies between LA and Berlin are significantly different.
>> Wages don't naturally rise just because rent is higher, if anything the converse is true.
I'll offer a lay-person first-person view in contradiction to this theory: rents set a solid bottom salary level acceptable to people. A typical Bay Area rent can consume 100% of your salary once you have a family involved.
As countless HN threads discuss, i'll pre-answer the typical nay-sayers. Yes, i realize I can raise my entire family of four in a studio apartment. I choose not to. Most people I know choose not to. Yes, i realize I can raise my entire family on ramen noodles, i choose not to. Yes, perhaps i'm picky. Yes, I realize I can drive 5hrs a day and live in a nice house -- I choose not to (mostly because my workday is already 10+hrs.). Yes, I can have roommates live with my family (seriously, someone suggested this on another HN thread. This is down-right creepy. I dont want a roommate living in the same house as my 1yo daughter.)
Call me prissy, but I just figured that Ivy League educations, CS degrees from top-5 institutions, 15yrs of experience and two decades of hard work would afford me more than a studio apartment.
Where does this all put me? It means I have a hard-hard bottom on what salary is acceptable in the Bay Area. Practically speaking, it has meant that I stay in NYC where live is more affordable (yes, i've done the math 10x and can demonstrate it.). I have a great live in NYC on a good tech salary. I'd give up half my quality of live to live in SF, which means that I need a much, much higher salary in SF to make it worth moving there.
What are you contradicting? You are supporting my point. You are sitting in NYC because you're not getting enough money in SF. High rents didn't make wages rise enough to make SF attractive even for you, a hot shot software developer. Now think about all the ordinary people that hail from SF...
Someone usually replies to statements about not being able to raise a family on a professional income in SF by suggesting these sacrifices and acccusing the poster of being entitled and having unrealistically high lifestyle expectations. ("Of course you can't live a suburban lifestyle here. Change your lifestyle"). Looks like parent was responding preemptively.
I see what you are getting at and I see your point, thank you. I had an orthogonal point that high rents put an absolute minimum on required salaries. You are absolutely right that sometimes that absolute minimum required salary is realized by the job simply not being taken!
10% is way low. SF has been negotiating for 25% and up.[1]
BMR isn't just about culture and diversity. It's about teachers and service industry workers and everyone a functioning city needs. The gap is so large between market rate and affordability, and there are so many richer people still wanting to move into SF, that it is likely wishful thinking that market rate development will be "enough" to solve the problem.
And that is the reason why the Yimby position is not an obvious choice. Cities need to negotiate with developers to have sufficient BMR housing to be functional.
If you read policy documents YIMBY support all sorts of housing for everyone. Generally ambivalent about inclusionary housing requirements because a) it depresses the production of market rate housing by 2.5 to 6 units per one BMR unit and 2) historically it hasn't been very effective at adding new units. Post Prop C the housing pipeline in SF dropped off a cliff.
Targeting BMR is going to be insufficient in SF anyway when 96% of the city rents units that reset to market rate when someone moves out, only thing that's going to help is a lot more new units of all shapes and sizes, hence the legislation listed above.
BMR units should not be required by private developers. This is a public problem that private developers are being forced to solve and many are just refusing to build more housing because they cant make a profit. Instead of requiring them to build BMR units just require all apartments to rent out 25% of units to section 8 housing and the city can subsidize the rent of low income people. The more barriers to housing you put in the more developer leave the market. If you want BMR units then have the city build them and they can build 100% BMR complexes
This is a problem which will eventually leave shortsighted developers holding the bag if they're not forced to deal with it.
Think of it like overfishing: you could just as easily say overfishing is a public problem that private fishermen shouldn't be "forced" to solve through quotas. Some fishermen used to believe that, too, right up until the day there weren't any more fish for them to catch because they'd destroyed the population they relied on for their livelihoods.
If housing costs in and around SF don't get under control soon, we're going to have a lot of very rich people who can't do much because there won't be any Uber drivers, baristas, waiters, garbage collectors or really any lower-paid service-sector people to keep the area functioning. And that will pop the housing bubble in a way that's devastating to developers, but they currently don't believe they have any incentive to head it off -- let somebody else build the cheap housing, I'm going to build as expensive as I can!
This would make sense if there was naturally 'cheap' housing and 'expensive' housing. There isn't. It's just housing. The fish analogy just doesn't work, we're talking about increasing supply of a durable good, not a natural resource. The only way is to make more. I'm sure tons of developers who don't bother playing the bay area would come back if cities lowered their BMR requirements. Leading to better designs, and more units. That plot of land that's designated mixed-use and has a gas station and a strip mall in the sunset isn't getting re-developed because developers know they'd have to do 25% BMR. With 0% BMR, that plot of land gets re-developed into 5-10 housing units. You're counting on prices being high-enough for redevelopment which is another self-fulfilling prophecy, instead of just building normal units. You can have 10% BMR and still get redevelopment quicker.
I would agree about the in-elasticity of the labor market, we're finding out right now. I see plenty of hiring signs around.
Are they both not housing? Can I not renovate one into another over a few weeks? I give developers more credit. If they want to make money, they need to figure out what the market will bare. And it's not their fault if only enough housing is being allowed that they can get away with making luxury only housing. If more was allowed without BMR conditions, there would be a much less price difference between what you find at avalon vs craigslist. The difference is actually not that much, everything is just very high and unaffordable period. Hence the dilemma we're in.
Can I not renovate one into another over a few weeks?
Unlikely. I strongly suspect you don't actually understand anything about physical construction given your seeming belief that all housing units are fungible. So I'll simply state it for you clear and plain: they are not in fact all fungible.
And it's not their fault if only enough housing is being allowed that they can get away with making luxury only housing.
Ah, it's the evil gubmint's fault. Well, that explains a lot.
BMR-renting makes sense at 25% or more. You can kick someone out in a yr. if they've started to earn more. You can rent at-cost, and not lose money like you would in a BMR sale.
Wouldn't you rather be using the loan/tax subsidy to house 10 people in rentals instead of 2 in a BMR condo? Asking for 25% BMR is holding back development and the marginal number of units built in each development. 10% is good compromise for service jobs (though service jobs do pay competitively in the bay area for the most part, teachers make 100k+, cops make 150k+). I'm not saying end BMR completely, just a compromise for which valid reasons exist, with the aim of hopefully someday eliminating it.
How long has SF had a BMR program? and rent control? I think they've both hurt more than help. Possibly even by design.
I would say most bay area and CA cities pay their public sector employees rather well (with pensions). It's the artists, private-sector service employees, and other low-income jobs that are squeezed the most.
Have you read the Obama administration's report on affordability of housing, or the UC Berkeley displacement report? Both show MR development has a protective effect on displacement.
The higher the %, the more expensive the market rate apartments have to be, which creates its own pressures. It also seems that every time a developer caves, no one is satisfied, and people are back demanding a higher number.
Nevada is too different, the combination of non-enforceable non-competes and the nice weather can be duplicated elsewhere in CA easiest, and this is happening. If your state has big corporate HQs forget about getting non-enforceable non-competes.
No one is forcing you as a company to make employees sign a non-compete, enforceable or otherwise. I've generally lived in states where non-competes are enforceable and I've signed exactly one.
I think they're speaking from the perspective of founders who, until they start the company, do have day jobs somewhere. In California, there's no issue, but in other states with enforceable non-competes, that can be a pretty big hinderance to starting the company.
It's not about you or a company, once the market tolerates non-competes, employers will use them for any sort of a knowledge-based position. People will shift jobs less, wages will lower, followed by other economic effects of slightly lower wages.
Wouldn't CA companies/employees not get pushed to sign unenforceable non-competes (because they're in CA, so it doesn't help the employer any, so they don't push for it in contracts)? So if you're poaching from CA anyhow...
Is it just me or wouldn't everyone just rather live in a world where privacy is respected by third parties just like a first party would. The do not call law has developed too many exceptions or needs strengthening methinks. If I'm getting a spam call on a burner number vs. my normal number, have I really saved any time? or privacy or security if the number can be reused in malicious ways?
I save numbers for 2nd factor auth, and I seem to get yahoo/msft messages from the same numbers, also github sometimes. Number reuse is definitely a problem. A PKI cert system for numbers/calls would be great to have in this case. I want to know for sure that I'm getting my 2nd factor auth code from msft, regardless of the number they're using.
I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up.
If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.