4 ms·

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

• timr 9y ago
  "The housing crisis is much MUCH older than the tech boom." Except, it isn't. As I've documented in this thread, like most American cities, the SF population was declining for ~30 years, until the mid/late 1980s. The first tech boom really kicked things off for local real estate again, starting in the early 90s...which was the last time the city saw a building boom. Developers build in times of increasing demand, and that's exactly what happens in SF. In any case, repeating the "supply and demand" mantra doesn't change basic facts about the timing and cause of this boom. The problem is not that developers "didn't build enough" in 1980...it's that we've disproportionately grown demand starting in ~2012, and large housing projects don't get built that quickly in tiny, landlocked cities. Cutting the counter-productive tax incentives for tech should be on the very short list of ideas for restoring sanity to SF.
  • Decade 9y ago
    I admit that “supply and demand” is not the cause of the housing crisis. It merely explains the high price of housing (with minor contributions from a bunch of other factors[0][1]). I feel that supply and demand is most useful as an intuitive appeal to balance: There is way more demand than supply,[2] of course we suffer from a shortage. The cause of the crisis is the array of regulations against homebuilding, that caused the shortage. As you say, developers build in times of increasing demand, yet there hasn’t been a real building boom since the early 1990s.[3] In a normal situation, increasing prosperity would bring both jobs and homes to an area. Here, we have the jobs but not the homes.[4] The developers intimately know how price is caused by supply and demand, and do not build unless they are reasonably certain that they can make a profit. They avoid causing gluts. The problem here is that California has some of the most misguided regulations,[5][6] and municipalities some of the worst processes,[7][8] that prevent housing from being affordable to build.[9] Developers can’t be certain to make back their investment when housing is not in crisis, and we need to fix this. Like sea urchins in a kelp desert,[10] mega-developers with large projects are not the core issue. Mega-developers work best when trampling over pristine wilderness. We need to build inside cities.[11] The core issue is that we collectively do not have the imagination to enable thousands of small-time landowners to undercut the mega-developers with naturally affordable housing.[12] Zoning makes it illegal,[13] and government process makes it impractical, for ordinary non-developer people to build around here. The Republican mantra is that “Government is the problem.” But at the local level, the government is the people, or a funhouse subset of them. The policies that create the housing crisis enjoy bipartisan support. My support for the YIMBY Party[14] is not about supply and demand. It’s about creating a political demographic for getting people into humane homes. [0] http://www.sightline.org/2017/07/05/stop-blaming-foreign-home-buyers/ http://www.sightline.org/2017/07/05/stop-blaming-foreign-hom... [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-economists-hate/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-econ... [2] https://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/12/12945854/bay-area-cities-jobs-housing-san-jose-palo-alto-sf https://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/12/12945854/bay-area-cities-jo... [3] https://twitter.com/mottsmith/status/856553360278736896/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mottsmith/status/856553360278736896/phot... [4] https://sf.curbed.com/2017/7/26/16040938/san-francisco-jobs-housing-ratio-homes https://sf.curbed.com/2017/7/26/16040938/san-francisco-jobs-... [5] http://www.builderonline.com/building/regulation-policy/the-unintended-consequences-of-law_o http://www.builderonline.com/building/regulation-policy/the-... [6] http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2003-07-01/more-ceqa-delays http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2003-07-01... [7] 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... [8] http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/May-2017/The-Real-Cause-of-Gentrification/ http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/May-2017/The-Real-Cause-of-Ge... [9] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/6/15/affordable-housing-that-might-have-been https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/6/15/affordable-hou... [10] https://cdfwmarine.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/perfect-storm-decimates-kelp/ https://cdfwmarine.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/perfect-storm-de... [11] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-climate-change-goals-20170306-story.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-climate-ch... [12] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-growing-incrementally https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/12/the-power-of-g... [13] https://www.curbed.com/2017/3/7/14837014/affordable-housing-zoning-nimbys-art https://www.curbed.com/2017/3/7/14837014/affordable-housing-... [14] http://www.sfyimby.org http://www.sfyimby.org