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Careful. You're getting perilously close to the hackernews shibboleth on development policy. Remember: if housing is expensive, it must be because there aren't

• xienze 9y ago
  The downvotes mean you're on to something ;). I share the sentiment. I find it likewise amusing that the same crowd that argues that building additional highway capacity won't accomplish anything because it'll just get filled with more cars seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately.
  • randomstudent 9y ago
    > the same crowd that argues that building additional highway capacity won't accomplish anything because it'll just get filled with more cars It will allow more people to commute into the city, which is the goal, right? > seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately. And more people will be able to live there... Isn't that the goal?
    • Spooky23 9y ago
      In both cases there are tradeoffs and diminishing returns. We discovered in 1930s New York with the Triborough bridge that highways will always reach a level of equilibrium (i.e. Max peak capacity) and will drive sprawl -- the new trio generation doesn't necessarily improve efficiency. In the case of NYC, it created inefficiency as it pushed the metro area up 75 miles up the Hudson River and at least 50 into Long Island and Jersey. Housing is boom/bust. Housing booms always attract dumb money and always bust.
      • closeparen 9y ago
        >it pushed the metro area up 75 miles up the Hudson River and at least 50 into Long Island and Jersey. So... it unlocked a whole bunch of housing supply? Sounds like a great policy!
    • xienze 9y ago
      > And more people will be able to live there... Isn't that the goal? The goal is "I want to be able to afford to live here." The only way to really affect prices is to absolutely flood the market with new housing. You can't just do it with a couple hundred units here, a couple hundred units there. Everyone in the world wants to live in SF, remember? They're just going to get snapped up and housing will still be expensive, the only real difference is that there's some more people living there now.
      • astrange 9y ago
        I doubt everyone in the world wants to live in a city with bad transit, unusable public schools and feces everywhere, but if you want to reduce demand you could try and prop up some competitor cities instead.
  • stcredzero 9y ago
    If it is filled up immediately, then some potential unrealized economic growth of SF is then immediately realized.
    • xienze 9y ago
      Sure, but it doesn't solve the problem of "I can't afford to live here".
      • stcredzero 9y ago
        It would get us closer to the solution. It's just that getting closer to the solution doesn't result in an immediate rent drop.
  • deathanatos 9y ago
    There are two, closely related paradoxes: There's the Downs-Thomson paradox[1], which is usually quoted as adding capacity to highways to the road network will not reduce congestion, and the one I believe you mean. What the paradox actually states is that "the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport." That is, as you add capacity to road networks, you disincentivize people from taking public transport, because the roads are quicker, until the two level out in terms of cost/benefit. I'm not certain how directly applicable it is to the housing market. Essentially, what is the housing market's "public transport"? I suppose you could argue it's still public transit, since there is a trade-off between the more expensive, but closer housing and the cheaper but farther away public housing. But I'm also in favor (and I think most of the people in the HN SF crowd are) of better public transit in the Bay Area and better housing/zoning policy. (Either would help me and many others: a better public transit network would reduce the need for housing in cities closer & further up the Bay.) There's also Jevons paradox[2], which says that when "technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand." This is mostly concerned with reducing use of the resource though, and I fully expect that better zoning policy would result in more and cheaper housing, more use of said housing, and more demand — all in line with Jevons paradox, but none of which seems detrimental when compared to the current situation. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    • dredmorbius 9y ago
      Housing's "more roads" is simply density. In transport, more roads means more capacity to carry traffic, and hence, more induced traffic. The death-spiral effect comes from the fact that each additional car on the road produces far more congestion than its operator alone experiences (negative externalities). True costs aren't born by the operator, so gridlock ensues. For housing, or rather, urban development generally, the challenge is that denser cities with more inhabitants (generally) give rise to greater opportunity. This is where the action is, for whatever definition of action you have. I'm not entirely sure what produces the death-spiral of cities pricing themselves out of their own housing markets, as SF is doing, but I'm inclined to think that the general trend of holders of investment assets to seek inflation of those assets' values is a key element. That is, you have a house, you've sunk a lot of money into it, you want its value to increase (hey! free money, right?). This turns into collaterisable assets for loans or other opportunities as well. There's also the fact that high-value urban real-estate markets make for good options to bank wealth appropriated elsewhere, or for money-laundering. Values are high, tend to remain high, the market is liquid, and urban cores are far more stable for real estate prices than outlying areas. Hence, the housing stock value is bid up further. Land value tax might help address that. Something I'm looking at. Originally suggested by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, though championed by Henry George.
  • abalashov 9y ago
    That's not quite right. The argument about widening highways leading to more traffic is called "induced demand" and is an accepted concept in traffic engineering and city planning; when you make driving easier or cheaper, people will do more of it because they can. The same person with the same car will use it more of the time, because why not? That's not quite how housing works. Yes, I suppose there's a broad supply-demand dynamic inasmuch as areas with more affordable house prices tend to see bigger houses and land parcels bought, but still, people don't just use more units of housing stock in response to a slightly less onerous housing crunch. If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause.
    • rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
      But to be fair, more housing stock in San Francisco could also lead to wealthier tech workers buying crash pads in the city for work during the week while they spend their weekends out at their houses in Silicon Valley, Berkeley, etc.
      • abalashov 9y ago
        All of that is certainly true, but given the supply and the pricing, it seems very unlikely that the needle is going to move anywhere near that much? In what other major metropolis in the world do you see people doing that on a mass scale — the kind of mass scale at which it is meaningful to speak of induced demand? The very wealthy will do it, of course, as they always have, and always will.
    • xienze 9y ago
      > If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause. No, but you'd have all those people waiting on the sidelines jumping in immediately. Net result, housing is still expensive (sorta like the highway analogy, we still have tons of traffic after building these lanes).
    • maxsilver 9y ago
      > If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause. But that's equally true of the highways too. If you widen a freeway, I'm not going suddenly commute to and from work an extra 3 times each day just 'cause. > when you make driving easier or cheaper, people will do more of it because they can. Not really, not anywhere near the amount people claim. This is a common misconception made by miscounting traffic on freeways past capacity. They mistake failed trips as non-existent ones, and then mistakingly claim "new traffic" was created when failed trips stop failing. It's like saying "if you make hospitals easier or cheaper, people will get more sick because they can". You could even support that false claim, by measuring patients in hospitals. "We had a 100 bed hospital last year, and it was full. We built a second 100 bed hospital this year, and now it's full too. Clearly building hospitals is a bad idea, because it just makes more sick people". This obviously isn't true, people were still sick before, they were miscounted because they weren't in the hospital (it was full). Just like how new freeways don't create new traffic, they serve existing traffic that was miscounted before because it wasn't on the freeway (it was full).
  • maxsilver 9y ago
    > I find it likewise amusing that the same crowd that argues that building additional highway capacity won't accomplish anything because it'll just get filled with more cars seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately. Yes, this! One thousand times this! Either additional capacity helps service that need or it doesn't. You can't argue it both ways simultaneously. So many people want to pick and choose where they apply that logic, just to fit their political desires. These two ideas are inherently contradictory, and it is an constant pet peeve of mine that most people refuse to recognize the contradiction.
    • ewjordan 9y ago
      When a good is in limited supply, yes, it's trivially true that increasing supply will allow more people to use that good. That is not the same as saying that more supply will drive up demand or prices, merely that more of the existing demand will be met. The difference between housing and cars-on-the-road is that housing is generally seen as a positive thing that people get real value out of, whereas cars-on-the-road are an unfortunate side effect of people not having housing near where they live. We explicitly want fewer people to drive into our cities; on the contrary we want more people living in housing near where they want to be. To put it another way, if you really think that building more housing will make things worse, then why not argue for the destruction of existing housing stock to make things better? Or do you think we're at a peak, where we have built just the right amount of housing and we should just leave it alone? I guess there probably is some amount that's just right for each city, though I have no idea what we'd have to look at to figure out that number.
      • maxsilver 9y ago
        > To put it another way, if you really think that building more housing will make things worse, then why not argue for the destruction of existing housing stock to make things better? I don't personally believe that. I think capacity solves shortage needs, consistently. But most don't. Most people really believe your reasoning is valid, and they advocate for the exact destruction you've mentioned (see "Road Diets" / freeway removal / any article from CNU / etc). > The difference between housing and cars-on-the-road is that housing is generally seen as a positive thing that people get real value out of, whereas cars-on-the-road are an unfortunate side effect of people not having housing near where they live I think most people agree with you, but I personally believe this is a very dystopian view. Transportation is an inherently positive thing too, that real people get real value out of. Even if every single human lived right next to their work place, it's still a good thing that people have fast reliable easy freedom of movement in whatever method they prefer. Even if you live right next to your workplace, your next job won't be. Your spouses job, or next job, won't be. Your parent's home won't be, your children's school won't be. Unless your constantly moving every 2 years, this idea of "transportation is just a bad side effect of not living inside your workplace" doesn't really hold up to regular life, in my opinion.
  • closeparen 9y ago
    Building more freeways will deliver transportation to more people. HN thinks this is a bad thing because driving is inherently bad, so facilitating more driving is bad. Fewer believe that people-living-in-homes is bad.
• ameister14 9y ago
  SF has a population that is 1/2 of Manhattan and covers 2x the area.
  • irq11 9y ago
    So? Your argument is that it's affordable? Or that they could build enough to make it affordable? Both are laughably wrong.