> This is precisely the mistake San Francisco has made.
What is that mistake? Permitting new, nice housing?
If this is your opinion, I cannot agree with it.
Firstly, something like 10->20% of all new residential construction must either be set aside for "affordable housing", or enough money must be given to The City to construct those units on behalf of the developer. Secondly, San Francisco's mistake is to -through a variety of screwups- make it nearly impossible to build new, dense residential buildings in the city.
If a district is able to build enough housing to meet current and expected near-future demand, rents will usually remain stable. See footnotes 0 and 1 at [0] for some info on long-term trends in the area.
> I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing.
Which only affect those builders who keep wanting to build in San Francisco. Just go and build somewhere else, that's the entire point of San Francisco regulation!
> massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business.
I don't agree with you. SF regulations are working exactly fine for SF community: they are preventing the population density from increasing, and that in itself is a very valuable outcome.
> San Francisco must exist in some sort of twilight zone where there are 1 infinity people that want to live there and if they build 1 infinity houses, all of the houses will cost 1 infinity dollars
This is something only you are saying, and it makes little sense.
What is true is that San Francisco has limited space, and so even if density can be increased, a new limit will be reached.
Have you noticed that Manhattan and Tokyo are not meaningfully cheaper than San Francisco, despite being much higher density?
The reason is that building more residences doesn’t make it any less desirable to live there, and even supply is still limited.
> If San Franciscans don't want their city to be 'verticalized' that's perfectly fine.
No it's not. It's ridiculous. Cities are meant to change, to grow, to adapt to conditions over time.
By refusing to build enough housing to match its booming economy, the cities in the bay area are seriously hurting people. They're seriously hurting economic opportunity. That is not okay.
>Building affordable housing isn't a priority, though, apparently.
Man, this is infuriating. San Francisco isn't under a magic spell that makes affordable and market-rate housing distinct. They can be the same, like they are in the rest of the country, with enough housing.
But people spouting this line will never let that happen, because the proposed projects aren't immediately cheap.
Yep. Obviously. I hope that you didn't think that I thought otherwise.
From what I've read about the topic, it seems like a few things are true:
* Housing costs are rising radically throughout the Bay Area
* No major Bay Area city is building to meet demand in the area
* Some Bay Area cities (notably, SF, MV, SJ, and others) are actively impeding new residential construction with a variety of pleasant-sounding excuses
It's true that SF's fucked-up housing policy doesn't necessarily mean much for the rest of the Bay Area. However, it's a sad fact that the landowners in much of The Area have -correctly- surmised that they stand to make a shitload of money if they fail to build to meet demand.
Fuck housing that's reasonably priced when there are pockets to be lined and fortunes to be made, amirite? :(
I love idiots screeching about big tech creating to much demand. Seriously? Too much demand is a bad thing? Hardly! How about reversing the crap zoning laws and NIMBY attitudes so supply can rise up to meet demand?
The SF housing crises was caused by a bunch of selfish people declaring through policy (zoning laws) that they have theirs and don't want where they are to change to accommodate others.
And this is supposed to be an enlightened leftist utopia? Talk is cheap until it can affect you personally is the real lesson of San Fransisco housing politics - playing out rather dramatically. Blaming landlords is laughable. San Fransisco has an embarrassment of jobs brought by the high tech companies in the bay area and instead of embracing them (by letting more housing be constructed) they resent them and blame everyone but the real root cause - severely restricted supply.
> San Francisco has seen huge growth but constructed basically no new units.
This is why San Francisco doesn't work anymore and isn't equitable until the electorate decides to build new housing. We shouldn't downplay a move to cities like Austin, Charlotte, and Atlanta that have no qualms with building lots of housing and affordable housing.
Why have a non-trivial percent of funding go to rent seekers, anyway?
> The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco.
What's the basis for this comment? I feel like I read something like this on HN every time the topic of affordable housing comes up, and it's usually written by a Bay Area resident who just kind of assumes that's the way things work rather than a uniquely dysfunctional characteristic of where they live.
NYC has it's issues, and expensive housing, obviously, but it doesn't seem similar to SF really at all. Where I live in downtown Brooklyn, literally dozens of huge high rise residential rental buildings have been built in just the last few years, the area is almost unrecognizable. We're talking thousands of apartments, literally.
What are these abusive zoning policies, specifically? Is NYC really suffering from a problem of low density? You sure? There are many issues with affordable housing in NYC, but I'm not at all convinced that you've really hit on any of them.
> SF is one of the densest cities in the USA (17k/sqm vs. NYC's 27k/sqm).
This is irrelevant, it's obviously not sufficiently dense to meet demand. If you look at the photo you'll obviously see that it's simply not particularly dense by visual inspection.
> Houses are expensive in SF because people want to live in SF.
They are expensive because they do not permit sufficient construction to meet the demand, what about that do you disagree with? It's not just that people want to live there - it's because people want to live there and city council would rather keep a derelict parking lot for Nordstrom than put up a 27-story 500 unit condo building in the middle of downtown. [1]
> If you want cheap housing for your city, make your economy unattractive like Gary Indiana, or, if you like your economy, take the Tokyo approach and make housing speculation unattractive and let units be small.
That has nothing to do with what Tokyo does. Tokyo permits construction via federal zoning rules.
> SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes.
Pretty much. When I lived in SF I received fliers in the mail urging residents to oppose new apartment construction literally on the basis that it was too tall.
If you want to see how difficult it is to build there, check out this story[1] of a laundromat owner who spent almost 5 years and $1.4 million attempting to convert to an apartment building.
This is even though it was already zoned for housing, didn't have any units above it (wouldn't displace anyone) and eligible for streamlined approval since it was close to public transit. And yet...
> San Francisco, for very specific geographic and regional reasons, will not have sufficient housing in the next century
Some of the densest cities on the planet are on islands. San Francisco is on a peninsula. It is a low density city with tons of infill potential. That densification potential, together with slow population growth in the developed world, makes the problem perfectly tenable. (That said, homeowners would lose money. So not holding my breath.)
You missed a "not" there.
You talk about that like it's a law of Physics.
It's not.
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