5 ms·

This doesn't support or explain the lack of supply which is the core problem.

irq11 10y ago
unless you take the other, equally valid perspective, where the huge demand bubble is the problem. that's the nice thing about the "law" of supply and demand: there are two ways to promote balance.
- weberc2 10y ago
  It's not equally valid, there's a possible win-win scenario--increasing supply; instead SF opted for a zero-sum game.
  - bsimpson 10y ago
    It's in there interests of the people who bought housing under the current regime to block new supply. Otherwise, when prices come back to reasonable, they lose a gigantic amount of home equity.
    - irq11 10y ago
      It's in the interest of anyone who lives in the city, doesn't work in tech, and doesn't make enough money to compete with those who do. That covers most renters. Tech workers have this Napoleon complex going on where they react as if they're still in the high school cafeteria, being pushed around by the folks at the top of the social hierarchy. Times have changed. It isn't "NIMBYs" or politicians or rich landowners or anyone else who caused the SF housing crisis: it is, quite objectively, the fault of way too many wealthy workers, crammed into a tiny space, in a few years' time. There's an easy demand-side fix for that problem, but yeah, it isn't going to please people who work in tech.
      - Decade 10y ago
        These high prices are definitely not in tech’s interest. The way I see it, tech is the only way I can live here independently. Lucky that my brothers and I have the inclination for it. But even we have difficulty finding housing in this market. We look around, and it is the entrenched interests, the old money, that are holding us back, preventing new housing from being built. Despite appearances, techies are actually a small minority, especially in the voting population, and that’s how we still get pushed around. The market problem is that housing and transit have been growing very slowly, nowhere near what is needed, and not matching the growth in jobs and office space. The problem goes back decades, really taking off when Howard Jarvis passed Proposition 13, followed by Mayor, now Senator, Feinstein passing the rent control ordinance. The problems continue, as every significant housing development requires endless studies and community input before it gets built; in the meanwhile the market has risen again. When I was growing up, San Francisco was actually very anti-tech. Startups were always fleeing to the Valley when they became successful. Still, housing prices were high and rising; housing was ridiculously difficult to build. I remember the case of somebody buying an empty lot, just a normal-house-size rectangle in a normal-size block. It took many years of studies and litigation and multiple architectural plans before it could get built, and I don’t know if the owner ever succeeded. It’s hard to find the article again when the Google results are packed full of plenty of other, bigger, projects that are facing unfair difficulties. Likewise, there’s now a lovely new library building at North Beach, but Aaron Peskin (one of the politicians implicated in the Reason piece) used eminent domain to prevent that land from being turned into affordable housing, with the excuse that it should be a park. It lay fallow until he was term-limited out of the way and later supervisors at least built a library there. And then the old North Beach library is still sitting there, retroactively declared to be a historic landmark, so that is a suboptimal use of space. Tech only sped up an existing, broken process. If even the Huffington Post is posting about the multi-decade housing problem, then maybe, just maybe, it’s not the techies’ fault. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-crisis_us_5750a95ee4b0eb20fa0d682e http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-cr...
- friendlygrammar 10y ago
  Only a San Francisco politician would consider demand a problem.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

irq11 10y ago

unless you take the other, equally valid perspective, where the huge demand bubble is the problem. that's the nice thing about the "law" of supply and demand: there are two ways to promote balance.

weberc2 10y ago
It's not equally valid, there's a possible win-win scenario--increasing supply; instead SF opted for a zero-sum game.
- bsimpson 10y ago
  It's in there interests of the people who bought housing under the current regime to block new supply. Otherwise, when prices come back to reasonable, they lose a gigantic amount of home equity.
  - irq11 10y ago
    It's in the interest of anyone who lives in the city, doesn't work in tech, and doesn't make enough money to compete with those who do. That covers most renters. Tech workers have this Napoleon complex going on where they react as if they're still in the high school cafeteria, being pushed around by the folks at the top of the social hierarchy. Times have changed. It isn't "NIMBYs" or politicians or rich landowners or anyone else who caused the SF housing crisis: it is, quite objectively, the fault of way too many wealthy workers, crammed into a tiny space, in a few years' time. There's an easy demand-side fix for that problem, but yeah, it isn't going to please people who work in tech.
    - Decade 10y ago
      These high prices are definitely not in tech’s interest. The way I see it, tech is the only way I can live here independently. Lucky that my brothers and I have the inclination for it. But even we have difficulty finding housing in this market. We look around, and it is the entrenched interests, the old money, that are holding us back, preventing new housing from being built. Despite appearances, techies are actually a small minority, especially in the voting population, and that’s how we still get pushed around. The market problem is that housing and transit have been growing very slowly, nowhere near what is needed, and not matching the growth in jobs and office space. The problem goes back decades, really taking off when Howard Jarvis passed Proposition 13, followed by Mayor, now Senator, Feinstein passing the rent control ordinance. The problems continue, as every significant housing development requires endless studies and community input before it gets built; in the meanwhile the market has risen again. When I was growing up, San Francisco was actually very anti-tech. Startups were always fleeing to the Valley when they became successful. Still, housing prices were high and rising; housing was ridiculously difficult to build. I remember the case of somebody buying an empty lot, just a normal-house-size rectangle in a normal-size block. It took many years of studies and litigation and multiple architectural plans before it could get built, and I don’t know if the owner ever succeeded. It’s hard to find the article again when the Google results are packed full of plenty of other, bigger, projects that are facing unfair difficulties. Likewise, there’s now a lovely new library building at North Beach, but Aaron Peskin (one of the politicians implicated in the Reason piece) used eminent domain to prevent that land from being turned into affordable housing, with the excuse that it should be a park. It lay fallow until he was term-limited out of the way and later supervisors at least built a library there. And then the old North Beach library is still sitting there, retroactively declared to be a historic landmark, so that is a suboptimal use of space. Tech only sped up an existing, broken process. If even the Huffington Post is posting about the multi-decade housing problem, then maybe, just maybe, it’s not the techies’ fault. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-crisis_us_5750a95ee4b0eb20fa0d682e http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-cr...
friendlygrammar 10y ago
Only a San Francisco politician would consider demand a problem.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]