6 ms·

"Wishing people would just leave is what the NIMBY organizations have been trying for decades." ...and yet, this crisis is only about 5 years old. Between 2008

by timr 9y ago

"Wishing people would just leave is what the NIMBY organizations have been trying for decades." ...and yet, this crisis is only about 5 years old. Between 2008 and 2012, San Francisco rents were going down, not up. San Francisco's population declined in the 1980s. Say what you will about construction rates, but this is an acute housing crisis, brought on by an asset bubble, instigated by historically low interest rates. One way to look at the current situation is to get upset and say "how dare this community not overturn its way of life to accommodate our industry!", but another, equally valid viewpoint is to acknowledge the simple fact that it's painfully stupid to try to cram the entire tech industry in a 49-square-mile patch of land (or realistically, a 20-square mile patch; nobody in tech believes there's life west of Divisidero or east of Embarcadero). So no, people don't "need" to live here. There's no practical reason that the tech industry couldn't be spread all over the world. It was actually always kind of dumb and impractical to found startups here. But it's trendy for 20-something tech bros to live here right now, and therefore, everyone else is expected to move aside and make room.

mattm 9y ago
AirBnB is a huge factor. Take a look at http://insideairbnb.com/san-francisco/ http://insideairbnb.com/san-francisco/ and the chart under Activity and see it go up after 2012.
- briandear 9y ago
  AirBnB doesn’t cause 3 bedroom tract houses in Cupertino to cost $2 million. There is AirBnB in Houston and it has almost an unmeasurable effect of prices. I don’t know if the Bay Area has rent control, but those types of policies (along with planning commissions and other bureaucracies have more deleterious impacts than a thousand AirBnBs. The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased supplies because it makes your home less valuable. Homeowners are simply attempting to protect their equity. If housing prices dropped 20% because of increased supply, suddenly tens of thousands are now upside down on their home. I know the actual reason, but I still can’t help but wonder why Hong Kong/Seoul/Shanghai style high rises are not more of a thing in the Bay Area. There seems like a ton of good spots along the 280 from San Bruno to Woodside.
  - timr 9y ago
    "The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased supplies because it makes your home less valuable." Yeah, this is a bit of "yimby" rhetoric that's pretty simple-minded. People don't oppose new construction because of abstract fears like "property value"...they oppose them because of concrete fears, like changing the character of the neighborhood, or increasing traffic. I'm not saying I agree with those fears, but it's helpful not to make cartoon characterizations of the other side's arguments, when many of those arguments have merit. If you spent most of your life savings on a house in a cute suburban neighborhood, you'd (rightly) be pretty pissed if people suddenly wanted to surround it with high-rises. Again, I don't agree with these arguments, but it's helpful to actually understand them.
    - LMYahooTFY 9y ago
      I would not consider property values abstract in any sense of the word, especially when your "concrete" fears directly affect those values. Writing off the whole notion that people fear their property value falling is illogical.
      - timr 9y ago
        They're entirely abstract. Unless you're a professional real estate analyst, you have absolutely no idea what some proposed development is going to do to your "property value" (even then, you're basically guessing). When you go to planning meetings, people are not generally complaining about property values. They're complaining about neighborhood character, traffic, parking, etc. I'm not going to say it never happens, but when it does, you should dig deeper. There are always real concerns.
    - wbl 9y ago
      Neighborhood character is what they cited when they kicked out Willy Mayes. We are talking in some cases about people who bought houses knowing construction was permitted opposing it. Traffic goes down when we have mixed use zones vs. Euclidean zoning.
Decade 9y ago
5 years. How cute. Prop 13, a law with horrific long-term consequences, was passed by the voters in response to the housing crisis. 40 years ago. http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-housing-supply/ http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-housing-supply/ San Francisco rents have sometimes gone down slightly, but they never returned to sane levels, and affordable housing for the poor hasn’t been abundant in many, many years.
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  I guess we will have to revisit history in order to understand it? In the Bay Area, when politicans had their hands on that never ending supply of money; they spent it on pet projects, and projects that would boost their re-election. It seems fashionable to blame prop 13 for the housing crisis. And don't get me started on SF rent control.(talk about misplaced anger. Rent control in SF, just allowed the 1 percent to build luxury condos for 1 percenters, or their kids. These are not condos, they are mansions in buildings. How do I know? As a local 6 electrician--that's all I work on. Could I ever afford one--hell no, and my wage is over $100/hr., including benefits. A lot of you in tech will be going home due to a bunch of just bad.com investment money drying up. We have had investors throw money at thelatestestmonopolysaturatedcutestbuystufffromagayman.com I don't have a solution to the housing crisis. Pesonally, I think we need to open up state, federal, and county land to free camping because many of you complaining about rent right now will be Homeless after the gold rush ends, and a whole new reality will rear its ugly head. (There will be a politician who tries to exploit the projected prop 13 displacement for votes. I think the strategy will fall on multiple fronts. Remember this, before prop 13, property taxes for Everyone was going up every year. New house owners were greatly affected. Apartment dwellers just got an increase in rents.)
- hectorr 9y ago
  Yeah. Prop 13 massively depresses housing turnover and reduces property tax revenue, which means they need to collect more from income tax. Malcom Gladwell's excellent podcast on golf courses has a great discussion of this. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/11-a-good-walk-spoiled http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/11-a-good-walk-spoile...
- 9y ago
abritinthebay 9y ago
5 years? LOL It’s been a problem since the 90s but it eases off for a year or 3 every recession. Same deal here - it’s been crap for decades but the 2008 crash deflated the balooon a little for a while.
pcwalton 9y ago
I am much less interested in what "should" happen in a macroeconomic sense than what is happening: lots of people need to live here right now. It's worth remembering that the people most hurt by NIMBY policies are not, by and large, the tech workers making six-figure salaries. The victims are the teachers, firefighters, artists, nurses, secretaries, and everyone else who isn't a programmer. Yeah, it might be nice if the US tech industry were more geographically distributed throughout the country (though that would also potentially have negative consequences due to constant relocation necessary when switching jobs). But NIMBY policies have broadly failed at getting people to move away. They have, in fact, just made the situation worse.
- timr 9y ago
  "The victims are the teachers, firefighters, artists, nurses, secretaries, and everyone else who isn't a programmer." OK...but that's also an argument for creating public policy that discourages tech companies from locating in the city. We could start by eliminating the mid-Market tax incentives. The "yimby" movement is at least as much about tech companies who have invaded and now want to change their environment, as it is "everyone else who isn't a programmer." I wish we could be honest about that fact.
  - Decade 9y ago
    The housing crisis is much MUCH older than the tech boom. From your privileged position, with lots of income relative to normal Americans, there wasn’t a crisis until you couldn’t afford San Francisco. My parents are poor, so I watched the market from the bottom end. What I experienced was that the amount we paid for what we got was sort of dumb, but at least we could afford an illegal in-law. Then, in the early 1990s, we got an OMI eviction and moved in with relatives. And now I’m paying twice as much for a fourth of the space in the same neighborhood, while my parents were ripped from their communities and moved out of the Bay Area. For the low end of the market, any restriction will make housing more scarce, and San Francisco is not short on restrictions. That is why I support the YIMBY movement. https://sf.curbed.com/2013/4/3/10257506/navigating-the-treacherous-and-tumultuous-san-francisco-permitting https://sf.curbed.com/2013/4/3/10257506/navigating-the-treac... Even without the tech boom, California hasn’t been keeping up with housing demand: “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians - we call them ‘children.’” - Hannah Arendt http://ochousingnews.com/california-nimbys-dont-love-children/ http://ochousingnews.com/california-nimbys-dont-love-childre...
eastbayjake 9y ago
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] [0] https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme... [1] https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/04/15/san-franciscos-current-boom-repeats-an-old-story/ https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/04/15/san-franciscos-current-... [2] http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_pre.php http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_... [3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-crisis_us_5750a95ee4b0eb20fa0d682e http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-cr...
- timr 9y ago
  "This is manifestly untrue." Actually, everything I wrote is a fact, and you can verify it. SF rents went down as recently as 2012, and are currently in a pronounced, acute period of hyperinflation [1]. San Francisco's population declined rather dramatically from 1950-1980 [2] I'm sorry if this doesn't fit with your preferred narrative, but citing opinion articles does not provide data for your position. [1] https://medium.com/@mccannatron/1979-to-2015-average-rent-in-san-francisco-33aaea22de0e https://medium.com/@mccannatron/1979-to-2015-average-rent-in... [2] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2FrCiZiCNaMFiUqWC_RK8sh3NnU=/1600x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4660089/Population-Growth_SF.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2FrCiZiCNaMFiUqWC_RK8sh3NnU=... Edit: even your sfist link confirms the basic facts, despite its (inaccurate and hyperbolic) headline. To wit: "Dips in the population, urban flight, and a decaying Edwardian housing stock — much of which was built between 1907 and 1910 and was in great disrepair by 1970, when areas like Alamo Square were extremely "low-rent" and dilapidated — may have made life cheaper for the hippies, but that all began to change by the early 1980s." So yeah...SF hasn't "always" been an expensive city. No more than any other city, anyway.

by timr 9y ago

mattm 9y ago

AirBnB is a huge factor. Take a look at http://insideairbnb.com/san-francisco/ http://insideairbnb.com/san-francisco/ and the chart under Activity and see it go up after 2012.

briandear 9y ago
AirBnB doesn’t cause 3 bedroom tract houses in Cupertino to cost $2 million. There is AirBnB in Houston and it has almost an unmeasurable effect of prices. I don’t know if the Bay Area has rent control, but those types of policies (along with planning commissions and other bureaucracies have more deleterious impacts than a thousand AirBnBs. The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased supplies because it makes your home less valuable. Homeowners are simply attempting to protect their equity. If housing prices dropped 20% because of increased supply, suddenly tens of thousands are now upside down on their home. I know the actual reason, but I still can’t help but wonder why Hong Kong/Seoul/Shanghai style high rises are not more of a thing in the Bay Area. There seems like a ton of good spots along the 280 from San Bruno to Woodside.
- timr 9y ago
  "The simple fact is that if you own a Bay Area home, you will oppose increased supplies because it makes your home less valuable." Yeah, this is a bit of "yimby" rhetoric that's pretty simple-minded. People don't oppose new construction because of abstract fears like "property value"...they oppose them because of concrete fears, like changing the character of the neighborhood, or increasing traffic. I'm not saying I agree with those fears, but it's helpful not to make cartoon characterizations of the other side's arguments, when many of those arguments have merit. If you spent most of your life savings on a house in a cute suburban neighborhood, you'd (rightly) be pretty pissed if people suddenly wanted to surround it with high-rises. Again, I don't agree with these arguments, but it's helpful to actually understand them.
  - LMYahooTFY 9y ago
    I would not consider property values abstract in any sense of the word, especially when your "concrete" fears directly affect those values. Writing off the whole notion that people fear their property value falling is illogical.
    - timr 9y ago
      They're entirely abstract. Unless you're a professional real estate analyst, you have absolutely no idea what some proposed development is going to do to your "property value" (even then, you're basically guessing). When you go to planning meetings, people are not generally complaining about property values. They're complaining about neighborhood character, traffic, parking, etc. I'm not going to say it never happens, but when it does, you should dig deeper. There are always real concerns.
  - wbl 9y ago
    Neighborhood character is what they cited when they kicked out Willy Mayes. We are talking in some cases about people who bought houses knowing construction was permitted opposing it. Traffic goes down when we have mixed use zones vs. Euclidean zoning.

Decade 9y ago

5 years. How cute. Prop 13, a law with horrific long-term consequences, was passed by the voters in response to the housing crisis. 40 years ago. http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-housing-supply/ http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-housing-supply/ San Francisco rents have sometimes gone down slightly, but they never returned to sane levels, and affordable housing for the poor hasn’t been abundant in many, many years.

icantdrive55 9y ago
I guess we will have to revisit history in order to understand it? In the Bay Area, when politicans had their hands on that never ending supply of money; they spent it on pet projects, and projects that would boost their re-election. It seems fashionable to blame prop 13 for the housing crisis. And don't get me started on SF rent control.(talk about misplaced anger. Rent control in SF, just allowed the 1 percent to build luxury condos for 1 percenters, or their kids. These are not condos, they are mansions in buildings. How do I know? As a local 6 electrician--that's all I work on. Could I ever afford one--hell no, and my wage is over $100/hr., including benefits. A lot of you in tech will be going home due to a bunch of just bad.com investment money drying up. We have had investors throw money at thelatestestmonopolysaturatedcutestbuystufffromagayman.com I don't have a solution to the housing crisis. Pesonally, I think we need to open up state, federal, and county land to free camping because many of you complaining about rent right now will be Homeless after the gold rush ends, and a whole new reality will rear its ugly head. (There will be a politician who tries to exploit the projected prop 13 displacement for votes. I think the strategy will fall on multiple fronts. Remember this, before prop 13, property taxes for Everyone was going up every year. New house owners were greatly affected. Apartment dwellers just got an increase in rents.)
hectorr 9y ago
Yeah. Prop 13 massively depresses housing turnover and reduces property tax revenue, which means they need to collect more from income tax. Malcom Gladwell's excellent podcast on golf courses has a great discussion of this. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/11-a-good-walk-spoiled http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/11-a-good-walk-spoile...
9y ago

abritinthebay 9y ago

5 years? LOL It’s been a problem since the 90s but it eases off for a year or 3 every recession. Same deal here - it’s been crap for decades but the 2008 crash deflated the balooon a little for a while.

pcwalton 9y ago

I am much less interested in what "should" happen in a macroeconomic sense than what is happening: lots of people need to live here right now. It's worth remembering that the people most hurt by NIMBY policies are not, by and large, the tech workers making six-figure salaries. The victims are the teachers, firefighters, artists, nurses, secretaries, and everyone else who isn't a programmer. Yeah, it might be nice if the US tech industry were more geographically distributed throughout the country (though that would also potentially have negative consequences due to constant relocation necessary when switching jobs). But NIMBY policies have broadly failed at getting people to move away. They have, in fact, just made the situation worse.

timr 9y ago
"The victims are the teachers, firefighters, artists, nurses, secretaries, and everyone else who isn't a programmer." OK...but that's also an argument for creating public policy that discourages tech companies from locating in the city. We could start by eliminating the mid-Market tax incentives. The "yimby" movement is at least as much about tech companies who have invaded and now want to change their environment, as it is "everyone else who isn't a programmer." I wish we could be honest about that fact.
- Decade 9y ago
  The housing crisis is much MUCH older than the tech boom. From your privileged position, with lots of income relative to normal Americans, there wasn’t a crisis until you couldn’t afford San Francisco. My parents are poor, so I watched the market from the bottom end. What I experienced was that the amount we paid for what we got was sort of dumb, but at least we could afford an illegal in-law. Then, in the early 1990s, we got an OMI eviction and moved in with relatives. And now I’m paying twice as much for a fourth of the space in the same neighborhood, while my parents were ripped from their communities and moved out of the Bay Area. For the low end of the market, any restriction will make housing more scarce, and San Francisco is not short on restrictions. That is why I support the YIMBY movement. https://sf.curbed.com/2013/4/3/10257506/navigating-the-treacherous-and-tumultuous-san-francisco-permitting https://sf.curbed.com/2013/4/3/10257506/navigating-the-treac... Even without the tech boom, California hasn’t been keeping up with housing demand: “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians - we call them ‘children.’” - Hannah Arendt http://ochousingnews.com/california-nimbys-dont-love-children/ http://ochousingnews.com/california-nimbys-dont-love-childre...

eastbayjake 9y ago

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] [0] https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme... [1] https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/04/15/san-franciscos-current-boom-repeats-an-old-story/ https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/04/15/san-franciscos-current-... [2] http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_pre.php http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_... [3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-crisis_us_5750a95ee4b0eb20fa0d682e http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/san-francisco-housing-cr...

timr 9y ago
"This is manifestly untrue." Actually, everything I wrote is a fact, and you can verify it. SF rents went down as recently as 2012, and are currently in a pronounced, acute period of hyperinflation [1]. San Francisco's population declined rather dramatically from 1950-1980 [2] I'm sorry if this doesn't fit with your preferred narrative, but citing opinion articles does not provide data for your position. [1] https://medium.com/@mccannatron/1979-to-2015-average-rent-in-san-francisco-33aaea22de0e https://medium.com/@mccannatron/1979-to-2015-average-rent-in... [2] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2FrCiZiCNaMFiUqWC_RK8sh3NnU=/1600x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4660089/Population-Growth_SF.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2FrCiZiCNaMFiUqWC_RK8sh3NnU=... Edit: even your sfist link confirms the basic facts, despite its (inaccurate and hyperbolic) headline. To wit: "Dips in the population, urban flight, and a decaying Edwardian housing stock — much of which was built between 1907 and 1910 and was in great disrepair by 1970, when areas like Alamo Square were extremely "low-rent" and dilapidated — may have made life cheaper for the hippies, but that all began to change by the early 1980s." So yeah...SF hasn't "always" been an expensive city. No more than any other city, anyway.