5 ms·
Can you promise that
by gech 10y ago
Can you promise that
- eru 10y agoHappens all the time. http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/ http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/
- tptacek 10y agoOnly in the same sense that you can promise that an apple released from your hand will fall to the earth and not hover in mid-air.
- timr 10y agoOh, come now...if it were that certain, the article wouldn't have gone out of its way to explore the question. There's actually no guarantee at all that the markets for high-end and low-end goods are linked. The price of Lamborghinis doesn't have much to do with the price of Kias.
- tptacek 10y agoWhat a strange analogy. There's no scarcity to Kias at all; the car is built to command a particular price point. There's a huge surplus of drivable cars. That's not the case with SF real estate, even a little bit.
- timr 10y agoThe metaphor is fine. You're making my argument: there's no inherent reason that the prices of luxury products should influence the prices of commodity products. In fact, barring exceptional circumstances (i.e. shortages) they usually don't. It isn't safe to assume that "construction" will lower rents for everyone. Even here. Despite conventional wisdom and lots of hand-waving justifications, there's actually very little evidence that building more luxury units impacts low-end housing prices on anything but the long term. Even the author of this piece is falling back to long-term averages to make his argument, and the results are...tepid. A 2% reduction in aggregate, long-term rents for every 1% of new housing built is not a screaming endorsement for indiscriminate construction. If you have data that shows otherwise, feel free to cite it.
- tptacek 10y agoThere are a fixed number of residential slots in the SF real estate market. There is undersupply at every level of the market. If a slot is labeled "luxury", lower-income people will not move in there. But the converse isn't true: higher-income people will take "low-income" slots (see: the Mission) if that's all that's available. No part of this market in any way resembles the market for Lamborghinis and Kias.
- timr 10y agoYeah, I understand what you're saying: there's a shortage of housing, and there's not a shortage of economy cars. But that's not a rebuttal to the argument I'm making. The question is whether or not new luxury housing makes rents cheaper for poor folks, today. Even here, in the epicenter of a housing crisis, there's not a lot of evidence that it does. But there's evidence that preferentially building low-income housing does make a difference. This isn't a controversial or irrational or counter-intuitive argument: there are a lot of great reasons that a rich person might choose to live in a cheaper apartment. It isn't a given that rich people will self-segregate to luxury buildings because "luxury". So at the end of the day, you're back to aggregate supply vs. aggregate demand. And if that's the case, why not build for low-income people instead?