This is manifestly untrue. The city has been out of vacant land since 1954 and common talk of a "housing crisis" in San Francisco started in at least 1966 [0]. We have been failing to build enough housing to meet demand for decades.
What is true is that for decades people who came here at some time in the past complain about how newcomers are overturning its way of life, despite having been newcomers themselves at one point.[1] Aging hippies complained in the 80s that yuppies were ruining the Haight, despite having been "neighborhood-ruiners" themselves when they came in the 1960s; the Mission used to be an Irish and Italian neighborhood before it was the center of Latino culture in the city, but it's the neighborhood most vociferously complaining about newcomers and insisting on building moratoriums to stop the neighborhood from changing.[2] It's all deeply hypocritical and unprincipled, but also completely unsurprising.
tl;dr: San Francisco has always been an expensive place to live and we've never built enough housing to meet demand [3]
I don't buy the idea that San Francisco has a housing shortage. San Francisco already has rather a lot of houses for 47 square miles of land. What San Francisco has is is a ridiculous oversupply of people who want to live there.
The time has come to say it: San Francisco is full. Everyone start colonising somewhere else.
San Francisco itself is a counterpoint. It's still the densest area of the US outside of Manhattan, despite decades of anti-development NIMBY housing policy. Both the population and the average rent are rising every year.
The old Victorians you see on postcards were built as single-family houses. Most of them are now subdivided into multiple apartments. Many houses in the city have illegally built inlaw apartments in the basement. People live with multiple roommates into their 40s and 50s.
It is true that eventually housing prices become so high they outstrip the ability of the local economy to provide salaries. In the meantime, it massively increases the costs of doing business, the capital requirements necessary to operate any business in the city. So far, venture capitalists have been willing to provide that capital, but that can't last forever. Last time (1999), it ended in a big economic crash.
Further complicating the analysis is rent control: most existing residents aren't forced to leave, because they are legally shielded from rising property values and rents. They are given the reverse, an incentive to stay in place no matter what, because they enjoy an artificially low rent that they cannot possibly replicate in any comparable dwelling. This causes market rents to skyrocket as maintenance costs and profit are shifted by landlords to the few open units they have, subsidizing the long term residents. It's a wealth transfer from "people who have moved recently" to "people who have not moved recently."
Finally, there are tons of people living in tents in San Francisco, which has become a major political issue lately. This is arguably partly due to homeless people from outside the city moving in to take advantage of its extremely generous social welfare programs for the homeless, but it is at least in part due to high housing costs.
Nope. It has a housing crisis because policymakers and NIMBYs (whether wealthy SFH owners who bought into the inflation, or poor 'only approve if 100% affordable' housing types) block development.
What baffles my mind is people who think shutting down business is the way out. Which is what's happening in SF. Look at all the empty storefronts (now they want to tax landlords for keeping empty storefronts).
Whether you're being extorted based on your race, or trying to navigate all the permitting, it costs too much to do business here. That's why the storefronts are empty. Both on at the local level and even on the level of Tesla and Juul (who is leaving SF for many reasons including passing of more taxes for big local business, and attempts to ban corporate cafeterias in the city.).
The policymakers, many of whom have never done anything in the private sector are arrogant and corrupt to believe they can socially engineer people's behavior on all levels. I'm more inclined to believe shutting down the government would get more done (theoretically, notwithstanding existing gov employees).
You don't hear the stories of latino families who bought a house in the Mission for 50k in 1975 who then sold it for $1.5M in 2015. Or the people happy their neighborhood no longer has the violence it once did. You only hear the people who complain. Who are unable to adapt and take advantage of the incredible opportunity to grow themselves and their family. Maybe they should move to Flint, Michigan?
But then again, yea, keep hoods yours. Stave off the all evil racist (white) 'gentrifiers'...
And lastly, let me guess, you are not in poverty? But you know what's best for people who are? (Just checking)
Though this is not an uncommon view in SF at the moment, I find it horrifying. What has made SF such a great place from the 1970s to ~2010 has been its willingness to accept new people, including the strange and the weird. That's not to say that it's been a great city for everyone, the first-wave gentrifiers from the 1960s pushed out Black people from the neighborhoods they took over, like Haight Ashbury, and the downzonings they enacted over the city have greatly amplified their material wealth while keeping out those without wealthy.
But for a brief 40 years before the super-constriction of supply happened, it was a welcoming place to lots of people that couldn't find homes elsewhere, because there were at least some empty places to rent out.
What drives up the prices isn't that people with big salaries are there, they've always been there. What's driving up the rents is that the people with big real estate holdings have said that the people with paychecks can't build anything new. So instead of those big paychecks going to building more infrastructure and subsidized low-income housing, those big paychecks are going only to current landlords, and pushing out anybody without a big paycheck.
SF housing is a game of musical chairs, and all the people that found their chair in the 1970s and 1980s easily because there were lots of empty chairs have decided that there should be no more chairs. That provincial, close-minded, and ultimately xenophobic attitude is what makes the housing market so unfair.
Next, the housing shortages in other previously-afforded cities are being bought up by... other Americans, some moving from such expensive metros. That boom that happened during the pandemic might finally be reversing:
This is a bad-faith argument advanced by the opponents of construction (landowners, essentially). The facts are that San Francisco vacancy rate is among the lowest in the nation, stands near the all-time low for that city, and is way below the level required for a healthy housing market. You need liquidity for a functioning market, and liquidity means vacancy.
> the lack of available housing in the area due to a decades long aversion to building more housing and a huge jobs/housing imbalance amongst almost every city in the SFBA
> San Francisco, one of the most coveted places in the world to live in, has more than 30,000 empty homes according to 2010 U.S. Census data. That means about 8.3 percent or about one in every dozen homes is vacant — more than any other surrounding county.
San Francisco has build way more housing in the last decade compared to rest of the Bay Area and the state. Look at the entire east side of the City. Areas like SOMA, Mission Bay, Dogpatch were industrial wastelands. Now they have so much housing. Blame really lies in the rest of the Bay Area cities that haven't built their fair share of housing.
I was going to refute your (uncited) comment, but it appears that San Francisco's vacancy rate has increased from 4.9% to 8.3% over ten years, affirming your position.
There seem to be a lot of replies to this claiming that San Francisco is in fact building a lot of new units, which is debatable at best, but San Francisco is definitely not experiencing fast population growth. The numbers are right here: https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/popul...
The past 20 years is the lowest population growth the metro area has ever experienced. What it has experienced is growth in the wealth of the wealthiest part of that population, along with increased demand for office space, which competes for housing as a possible use of land.
The actual fast growing metro areas of the past several decades, i.e. San Antonio, DFW, Phoenix, Las Vegas, have also seen tremendous booms in housing construction.
It stands out to me in particular that the number of homeless people is about the same as it was in the 80s, but the public complaints being received have skyrocketed. What seems to have actually increased is the number of people either living or working in the city who aren't used to seeing homeless everywhere, presumably people from elsewhere displacing native San Franciscans. But both the absolute number of people in the city and the absolute number of homeless people in the city are not growing at any abnormal rate.
For decades, San Francisco hasn't been building enough new units to house even just the children of natives[1], to say nothing of those like you and I who were born elsewhere and dreamed of moving here.
The people who "gave the poorest folks nowhere to go" were the ones who voted to prohibit the construction of anything but single-family houses[2] in 76% of the city[3].
1) Literally any real estate market is going to have vacancies, because otherwise how would people move between spaces?
2) The question is 'what percentage of vacancies is too high?' Given the EXTREME carrying cost of owning an unoccupied home in SF, I think it's highly unlikely that SF is 'too high'. You neighbor may have had the wealth to pay that cost, but few others do.
3) 'Luxury' housing in SF does two things: house yuppies that would otherwise move to historic neighborhoods 2) turn into shitty non-luxury housing in 30 years. This idea that the fucking NEMA or whatever won't be a relatively low-rent building (a la Fox Plaza) in 20 years is not grounded in thoughtfulness.
4) The real 'villains' are property owners who want the value of their house to go up (as an investment). And what do those people hate more than anything? New construction that is more desirable than their home.
WE HAVE A HOMELESS CRISIS BECAUSE THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH HOMES, DRIVEN BY THE FACT THAT THE RESIDENTS OF SF LIKE HAVING EXPENSIVE HOMES. You can spin it any way you want, but it's the truth and if you don't watch out, the same thing is coming for you in your town, because SF is just ahead of everywhere else, not on a different path.
No, this problem appeared acutely starting in 2008. When I moved to SF, rents were not exorbitant; they were high, but ordinary people could pay them. Then they climbed dramatically in a short period. This is easy to ascertain; just look at any graph of rents. This graph has no relation to the graphs for new construction or population growth, both of which grow at a steady pace. This is an acute crisis caused by a spike in demand due to the sudden inflow of new wealth, not by a supply constraint. When one person can buy up every house in the Mission, the supply side of the equation is not as relevant as the demand size. This is blindingly obvious, and only some serious denial seems to be preventing people from acknowledging this.
As for concern over whether developers are making a profit; apparently you have never read any history of redevelopment. Here is a good place for you to start, learn something about your own city: https://hoodline.com/2016/01/how-urban-renewal-destroyed-the...
What will happen, over and over, is poor people will be moved out, rich people will move in, and developers will make a profit. Your econ 101 fantasy will not take place.
I remember people in SF claiming that there are roughly 1million people in San Francisco [1] . And roughly 1million total housing units. Therefore there is no housing crisis.
What is true is that for decades people who came here at some time in the past complain about how newcomers are overturning its way of life, despite having been newcomers themselves at one point.[1] Aging hippies complained in the 80s that yuppies were ruining the Haight, despite having been "neighborhood-ruiners" themselves when they came in the 1960s; the Mission used to be an Irish and Italian neighborhood before it was the center of Latino culture in the city, but it's the neighborhood most vociferously complaining about newcomers and insisting on building moratoriums to stop the neighborhood from changing.[2] It's all deeply hypocritical and unprincipled, but also completely unsurprising.
tl;dr: San Francisco has always been an expensive place to live and we've never built enough housing to meet demand [3]
[0] https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
[1] https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/04/15/san-franciscos-current-...
[2] http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_...
[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-cr...
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