7 ms·

San Francisco Progressives Declare War on Affordable Housing

72 points by joshlittle 10y ago

thisisbad 10y ago
Building a business in San Francisco is a masochistic behavior. You face not only extremely high cost of living(rent, goods) and high salaries, but you also have a bunch of pinko losers that want to regulate and tax everything they can. Why would any rational person become a lemming and rush to where everyone else is going? Move to other states and try remote work.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
> If we’re going to create cities where everyone can live and work, we need density -- there’s just no way around it. Is it safe to say that, in US cities, quality of life generally gets worse with increases in population density? If so, is it because US local and state governments are pretty bad at managing population increase, in general?
- mmagin 10y ago
  I think that's true, except for the rich and powerful that can enjoy comfortable living in higher (average) density areas. Comfortably isolated from the grime and noise and poor mass transit.
- enf 10y ago
  Not without being explicit about what you mean by "quality of life." There are amenities of density and there are amenities of sparseness and people disagree about the relative importance of those amenities.
- eagsalazar2 10y ago
  I would say that is not safe to say at all.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ergothus 10y ago
  > Is it safe to say that, in US cities, quality of life generally gets worse with increases in population density? I'd have a hard time saying that. First, you have "in US cities", so you've already stepped up your density from a non-city situation. Moving to Seattle from smaller East Coast towns and cities was a notable increase in quality of life for me. (more to do, more people that share my interests, less effort/travel involved in doing things, more medical/food resources of various types, better public transit, etc). Historically, urban centers (more dense) have always represented more opportunities than rural areas (less dense). Without a doubt, some people in these dense areas have lower quality of life. But enough have the opposite that it keeps happening. Second, you'll have lots of individual variation. I've seen HN posters that LOVE their small-town areas, and others that love having everything needed in a high density 10 block areas. Very hard to make a generalization. All anecdotal, but there it is. > If so, is it because US local and state governments are pretty bad at managing population increase, in general? That's a statement I'd generally back. Govts represent the current populace, and the smaller the govt body, the more short-term the vision usually is. Whether it's putting in building height restrictions, avoiding loud construction, or losing a ton of money on stadium construction, there are a lot of examples of poor management. (I suspect there are examples of GOOD management, but that's much harder to _notice_.) I recall reading a condemnation of cul-de-sacs (they promote heavy car use and tend to create unwalkable neighborhoods, and thus drive away small shops and stores towards stripmalls at best). Despite this, they were (are?) heavily promoted by the federal govt, and you can see from aerial views of areas when they were built. (some areas have cul-de-sacs off the roads. 10 years later you see a fern-like structure of roads having roads off of them that have cul-de-sacs off of them. 10 years after that you gets these fractalish spiraling structures of roads of roads of roads of cul-de-sacs). In my view, poor management repeated over and over again.
- Retric 10y ago
  I would say the opposite, quality of life increases with density. NYC being the prime example. It's just not linear and takes good infrastructure. DC for example is a horrible 'city' due to height restrictions and poor infrastructure, but it's suburbs are much worse. The advantage to density is people don't need to travel as far to do things so you can support a lot more niche activities. Making it easer to connect with people and get a bite to eat at 4AM. Or put another way, you need density to overcome the downsides. Sprawl means you get the same amenitys as a small city which has better traffic and lower costs.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  A density increase is often a side effect of other strong factors that push the QoL upwards.
ergothus 10y ago
> Progressives on the city’s Board of Supervisors recently called for certain height limit restrictions to be lifted only for developments that include 100 percent below-market-rate housing (the current policy sets the number at 30 percent). Obviously, developing housing at entirely below-market rates is impossible without heavy government subsidies, so this proposal would effectively stop all new construction in many areas of the city. I must be missing something - housing prices are combination of "affordable minimum" due to costs, and "what the market will bare". In a market with scarce housing and huge housing prices, it should be very doable to offer below-market-rate housing and still be profitable, all without subsidies. Right? That said, I'm all in favor of increasing density. I forget where I read it, but I saw a great analysis about how it's "cheap" to get city councils to pass limitations on future growth (Nimby), but getting them to pass actions (new housing, etc) often requires they show how it is paid for. As those limitations have an opportunity cost, they too should be justified. Still though, I don't understand the above part of the article. Help?
- enf 10y ago
  "100% affordable" means that every apartment is priced below market rate, and in this case is also below the cost of buying the land and constructing the apartment. The extra money has to come from somewhere. With "30% affordable," the extra money comes from making the other 70% of the apartments more expensive. With "100% affordable" there is no built-in source for the extra money so it needs to come from some other source.
  - ergothus 10y ago
    Still lost. Is "market rate" what you'd otherwise pay for housing? If so, you can still sell that housing 100% below market rate (but above what is needed for maintenance costs) and make a profit in a scarce housing situation. You'd absolutely be below what someone getting market rate would get (be it by 100% market rate or a 30% below, 70% above ratio), but it'd still be profitable. Unless you mean that the cost of the land would be priced off of market rate, so the land cost alone would make this undoable. That makes sense.
VanillaCafe 10y ago
The article lost me on the first line, "The U.S. is running out of places for people to live." That's just not true. An trending increase in the national average monthly cost of rent shows that people are competing more for housing. But, that can be explained by a migration to major metropolitan centers and/or tech centers. Which is a totally different mechanism than "running out of housing".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- twinkletwinkle 10y ago
  It's not that far off. It should read "The US is running out of places for people to live and work"
  - aminorex 10y ago
    Or just work.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Should've been "Big cities in the U.S. are running out of places to live".
  - somenomadicguy 10y ago
    Or perhaps, handful of highly trendy and desirable cities are running out of places to live.
  - aminorex 10y ago
    Or perhaps: "too many rich people".
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      That wouldn't be a problem if they weren't hoarding properties in a zero-sum market.
rbanffy 10y ago
I'm confused by the use of the word "progressive" here.
- a13n 10y ago
  Yeah I generally think of tech workers as progressives and thought at first that this article was arguing that tech workers are nimbys. In my experience almost every tech worker I've met is a yimby and the nimbys are those who want to drive tech out of the city...
- alwaysdoit 10y ago
  You know, the standard definition of progressive: trying to put things back the way they were, to make SF great again.
- flomo 10y ago
  It's the standard way of referring to the 'opposition party' in local SF politics.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  The capital class and environmentalist / preservationalist camps have heavy overlap in the Bay Area and use the latter brand to further their interests in the former. If not furthering their capital, they will use their environmentalism clout to further their world view. It's a less visible but analogous dynamic to the Koch brothers using capital to shape the world after their vision.
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  SF progressives are people who work to maintain the status quo and make sure that change doesn't happen. SF progressives are people who would be called 'conservatives' in another context.
- seehafer 10y ago
  "Progressive" in SF == "f#$* you, I've got mine already".
- draw_down 10y ago
notadoc 10y ago
SF needs to approve and build a ton of high rise condos and apartments. Period. Problem solved.
- abannin 10y ago
  Not necessarily high rise, so much of the city below 4 stories. Just upzoning to 8-12 stories would triple density.
  - rorykoehler 10y ago
    If you're going to build 12 why not build 30 or 50 etc?
    - cam_l 10y ago
      Sun, wind, views.. And by views i don't mean distant views, i mean not looking into another apart 10 metres away.Even ignoring these crucial environmental factors, structurally at 50 stories the efficiency ratios drop down significantly. Highrise is not the panacea most people think.
      - amazingman 10y ago
        And earthquakes. Let's not forget earthquakes.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  SF employers need to hire and approve a ton of remote employees. Period. Problem solved.
beatpanda 10y ago
Oakland passed an eviction moratorium because there is an epidemic of illegal evictions of long-term tenants from rent-controlled units, and activists wanted to force the city government to actually enforce the city's laws. Characterizing this as part of a move to "kick tech out of the city" misses the point by several thousand miles. It is true that San Francisco's "left" is against housing construction. It is also true that San Francisco politics are an inverted world where "left" and "right" cease to even have meaning. So we need competent writers to try to sort this out. But writing articles like this that just plow through the nuance and make elementary mistakes, like apparently not even reading the language of or rational for Oakland's eviction moratorium, make it harder to get to a bargain on this stuff.
chris_va 10y ago
This is not a well researched article. Various sweeping comments like: "Rent control is in effect, but that has just increased the incentive for evictions" ... ignore so many issues that it makes it hard to believe the core argument.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Yes, the biggest problem with rent control is not evictions, but shortages. Price ceilings cause shortages. Always.
gozur88 10y ago
I don't think it's unreasonable for people who like a place to try to preserve the things they like about it. People living in San Francisco would be living in Manhattan if they wanted to live in Manhattan. Why would you expect them to quietly acquiesce to efforts aimed at turning SF into Manhattan West?
kafkaesq 10y ago
What a puerile and intellectually dishonest rant. Basically they're taking a situation that is notoriously complex and entrenched, with multiple interlocking tradeoffs and feedback loops; cherry picking a few of the driving factors, and throwing in a few offhand observations about the positions that "progressives" (as if this were an identifiable, let alone unified group) supposedly take in regard to these issues; and concluding with the innuendo that this "Them", this "Other", is "declaring war" on not just affordable housing, but on economic growth and progress itself. And also: Unlike progressives in New York City, who are often big supporters of density, San Francisco progressives have decided to focus on kicking the tech industry out of the city. No, not bending over for every regulatory or other concession certain elements of an industry might want does not equal a drive to "kick them out." This is a scare card, pure and simple; it's meant to befuddle and distract, and sheds no light on the complex issues at root.
vinceguidry 10y ago
> The U.S. is running out of places for people to live. Just when you thought you heard it all, journalists find another way to sound supremely stupid. The US ranks 182 out of 244 on the list of countries by population density. If you took the entire world's population and crammed it into the continental US, we'd be midway between Bangladesh and Taiwan.
- Anasufovic 10y ago
  As mentioned by others its more about desirable places to live. People are moving to cities and the cities are not keeping up.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    And as I already said, we can simply build more cities. It's what already happens anyway.
paulddraper 10y ago
I apparently don't know what "Progressive" means anymore. Maybe I'll start calling everyone progressive. They all have opinions about something.

72 points by joshlittle 10y ago

Building a business in San Francisco is a masochistic behavior. You face not only extremely high cost of living(rent, goods) and high salaries, but you also have a bunch of pinko losers that want to regulate and tax everything they can. Why would any rational person become a lemming and rush to where everyone else is going? Move to other states and try remote work.

HillaryBriss 10y ago

> If we’re going to create cities where everyone can live and work, we need density -- there’s just no way around it. Is it safe to say that, in US cities, quality of life generally gets worse with increases in population density? If so, is it because US local and state governments are pretty bad at managing population increase, in general?

mmagin 10y ago
I think that's true, except for the rich and powerful that can enjoy comfortable living in higher (average) density areas. Comfortably isolated from the grime and noise and poor mass transit.
enf 10y ago
Not without being explicit about what you mean by "quality of life." There are amenities of density and there are amenities of sparseness and people disagree about the relative importance of those amenities.
eagsalazar2 10y ago
I would say that is not safe to say at all.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ergothus 10y ago
> Is it safe to say that, in US cities, quality of life generally gets worse with increases in population density? I'd have a hard time saying that. First, you have "in US cities", so you've already stepped up your density from a non-city situation. Moving to Seattle from smaller East Coast towns and cities was a notable increase in quality of life for me. (more to do, more people that share my interests, less effort/travel involved in doing things, more medical/food resources of various types, better public transit, etc). Historically, urban centers (more dense) have always represented more opportunities than rural areas (less dense). Without a doubt, some people in these dense areas have lower quality of life. But enough have the opposite that it keeps happening. Second, you'll have lots of individual variation. I've seen HN posters that LOVE their small-town areas, and others that love having everything needed in a high density 10 block areas. Very hard to make a generalization. All anecdotal, but there it is. > If so, is it because US local and state governments are pretty bad at managing population increase, in general? That's a statement I'd generally back. Govts represent the current populace, and the smaller the govt body, the more short-term the vision usually is. Whether it's putting in building height restrictions, avoiding loud construction, or losing a ton of money on stadium construction, there are a lot of examples of poor management. (I suspect there are examples of GOOD management, but that's much harder to _notice_.) I recall reading a condemnation of cul-de-sacs (they promote heavy car use and tend to create unwalkable neighborhoods, and thus drive away small shops and stores towards stripmalls at best). Despite this, they were (are?) heavily promoted by the federal govt, and you can see from aerial views of areas when they were built. (some areas have cul-de-sacs off the roads. 10 years later you see a fern-like structure of roads having roads off of them that have cul-de-sacs off of them. 10 years after that you gets these fractalish spiraling structures of roads of roads of roads of cul-de-sacs). In my view, poor management repeated over and over again.
Retric 10y ago
I would say the opposite, quality of life increases with density. NYC being the prime example. It's just not linear and takes good infrastructure. DC for example is a horrible 'city' due to height restrictions and poor infrastructure, but it's suburbs are much worse. The advantage to density is people don't need to travel as far to do things so you can support a lot more niche activities. Making it easer to connect with people and get a bite to eat at 4AM. Or put another way, you need density to overcome the downsides. Sprawl means you get the same amenitys as a small city which has better traffic and lower costs.
hkmurakami 10y ago
A density increase is often a side effect of other strong factors that push the QoL upwards.

ergothus 10y ago

> Progressives on the city’s Board of Supervisors recently called for certain height limit restrictions to be lifted only for developments that include 100 percent below-market-rate housing (the current policy sets the number at 30 percent). Obviously, developing housing at entirely below-market rates is impossible without heavy government subsidies, so this proposal would effectively stop all new construction in many areas of the city. I must be missing something - housing prices are combination of "affordable minimum" due to costs, and "what the market will bare". In a market with scarce housing and huge housing prices, it should be very doable to offer below-market-rate housing and still be profitable, all without subsidies. Right? That said, I'm all in favor of increasing density. I forget where I read it, but I saw a great analysis about how it's "cheap" to get city councils to pass limitations on future growth (Nimby), but getting them to pass actions (new housing, etc) often requires they show how it is paid for. As those limitations have an opportunity cost, they too should be justified. Still though, I don't understand the above part of the article. Help?

enf 10y ago
"100% affordable" means that every apartment is priced below market rate, and in this case is also below the cost of buying the land and constructing the apartment. The extra money has to come from somewhere. With "30% affordable," the extra money comes from making the other 70% of the apartments more expensive. With "100% affordable" there is no built-in source for the extra money so it needs to come from some other source.
- ergothus 10y ago
  Still lost. Is "market rate" what you'd otherwise pay for housing? If so, you can still sell that housing 100% below market rate (but above what is needed for maintenance costs) and make a profit in a scarce housing situation. You'd absolutely be below what someone getting market rate would get (be it by 100% market rate or a 30% below, 70% above ratio), but it'd still be profitable. Unless you mean that the cost of the land would be priced off of market rate, so the land cost alone would make this undoable. That makes sense.

VanillaCafe 10y ago

The article lost me on the first line, "The U.S. is running out of places for people to live." That's just not true. An trending increase in the national average monthly cost of rent shows that people are competing more for housing. But, that can be explained by a migration to major metropolitan centers and/or tech centers. Which is a totally different mechanism than "running out of housing".

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
twinkletwinkle 10y ago
It's not that far off. It should read "The US is running out of places for people to live and work"
- aminorex 10y ago
  Or just work.
sotojuan 10y ago
Should've been "Big cities in the U.S. are running out of places to live".
- somenomadicguy 10y ago
  Or perhaps, handful of highly trendy and desirable cities are running out of places to live.
- aminorex 10y ago
  Or perhaps: "too many rich people".
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    That wouldn't be a problem if they weren't hoarding properties in a zero-sum market.

rbanffy 10y ago

I'm confused by the use of the word "progressive" here.

a13n 10y ago
Yeah I generally think of tech workers as progressives and thought at first that this article was arguing that tech workers are nimbys. In my experience almost every tech worker I've met is a yimby and the nimbys are those who want to drive tech out of the city...
alwaysdoit 10y ago
You know, the standard definition of progressive: trying to put things back the way they were, to make SF great again.
flomo 10y ago
It's the standard way of referring to the 'opposition party' in local SF politics.
hkmurakami 10y ago
The capital class and environmentalist / preservationalist camps have heavy overlap in the Bay Area and use the latter brand to further their interests in the former. If not furthering their capital, they will use their environmentalism clout to further their world view. It's a less visible but analogous dynamic to the Koch brothers using capital to shape the world after their vision.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
SF progressives are people who work to maintain the status quo and make sure that change doesn't happen. SF progressives are people who would be called 'conservatives' in another context.
seehafer 10y ago
"Progressive" in SF == "f#$* you, I've got mine already".
draw_down 10y ago

notadoc 10y ago

SF needs to approve and build a ton of high rise condos and apartments. Period. Problem solved.

abannin 10y ago
Not necessarily high rise, so much of the city below 4 stories. Just upzoning to 8-12 stories would triple density.
- rorykoehler 10y ago
  If you're going to build 12 why not build 30 or 50 etc?
  - cam_l 10y ago
    Sun, wind, views.. And by views i don't mean distant views, i mean not looking into another apart 10 metres away.Even ignoring these crucial environmental factors, structurally at 50 stories the efficiency ratios drop down significantly. Highrise is not the panacea most people think.
    - amazingman 10y ago
      And earthquakes. Let's not forget earthquakes.
paulddraper 10y ago
SF employers need to hire and approve a ton of remote employees. Period. Problem solved.

beatpanda 10y ago

Oakland passed an eviction moratorium because there is an epidemic of illegal evictions of long-term tenants from rent-controlled units, and activists wanted to force the city government to actually enforce the city's laws. Characterizing this as part of a move to "kick tech out of the city" misses the point by several thousand miles. It is true that San Francisco's "left" is against housing construction. It is also true that San Francisco politics are an inverted world where "left" and "right" cease to even have meaning. So we need competent writers to try to sort this out. But writing articles like this that just plow through the nuance and make elementary mistakes, like apparently not even reading the language of or rational for Oakland's eviction moratorium, make it harder to get to a bargain on this stuff.

chris_va 10y ago

This is not a well researched article. Various sweeping comments like: "Rent control is in effect, but that has just increased the incentive for evictions" ... ignore so many issues that it makes it hard to believe the core argument.

paulddraper 10y ago
Yes, the biggest problem with rent control is not evictions, but shortages. Price ceilings cause shortages. Always.

gozur88 10y ago

I don't think it's unreasonable for people who like a place to try to preserve the things they like about it. People living in San Francisco would be living in Manhattan if they wanted to live in Manhattan. Why would you expect them to quietly acquiesce to efforts aimed at turning SF into Manhattan West?

kafkaesq 10y ago

What a puerile and intellectually dishonest rant. Basically they're taking a situation that is notoriously complex and entrenched, with multiple interlocking tradeoffs and feedback loops; cherry picking a few of the driving factors, and throwing in a few offhand observations about the positions that "progressives" (as if this were an identifiable, let alone unified group) supposedly take in regard to these issues; and concluding with the innuendo that this "Them", this "Other", is "declaring war" on not just affordable housing, but on economic growth and progress itself. And also: Unlike progressives in New York City, who are often big supporters of density, San Francisco progressives have decided to focus on kicking the tech industry out of the city. No, not bending over for every regulatory or other concession certain elements of an industry might want does not equal a drive to "kick them out." This is a scare card, pure and simple; it's meant to befuddle and distract, and sheds no light on the complex issues at root.

vinceguidry 10y ago

> The U.S. is running out of places for people to live. Just when you thought you heard it all, journalists find another way to sound supremely stupid. The US ranks 182 out of 244 on the list of countries by population density. If you took the entire world's population and crammed it into the continental US, we'd be midway between Bangladesh and Taiwan.

Anasufovic 10y ago
As mentioned by others its more about desirable places to live. People are moving to cities and the cities are not keeping up.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  And as I already said, we can simply build more cities. It's what already happens anyway.

paulddraper 10y ago

I apparently don't know what "Progressive" means anymore. Maybe I'll start calling everyone progressive. They all have opinions about something.