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This just in: woman who has staked her career on a pro-housing political platform announces that market-rate redevelopment is good for everyone. The question i

• deleted 9y ago
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• apsec112 9y ago
  "because that’s trivial. Of course it will." Many in San Francisco (and other cities) argue against this. It's certainly not universally accepted. "The question is: “what if you have to knock down N affordable units to build M market-rate units?” This “simulation” doesn’t even come close to addressing that question." That's because housing units are virtually never knocked down in San Francisco, so this question basically never comes up. Almost all new housing is built on warehouses, parking lots, gas stations, and so on. See my analysis of all recent housing built in the Mission District: https://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/05/25/new-york-times-makes-up-facts-about-sf-housing/ https://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/05/25/new-york-times-mak...
  • irq11 9y ago
    “Almost all new housing is built on warehouses, parking lots, gas stations, and so on.” That may have been true, but the city’s own analysis shows it isn’t true anymore, and it certainly won’t be true by the time we’ve built enough to lower market rents (yet another reason why this “simulation” is nonsense). San Francisco simply doesn’t have that many vacant parcels of land.
    • lostdog 9y ago
      Would you link to this analysis please? I hope you will support your claim that new housing is replacing old housing.
    • awalton 9y ago
      > That may have been true, but the city’s own analysis shows it isn’t true anymore Alright, this is three times you've said and been called out on the same exact lie. You're going to need to provide some sources, or at the very least some references to sources, to back up your extremely bold and most likely false claims. What specific housing is being targeted for being knocked down for which projects?
      • irq11 9y ago
        Nobody “calling me out” has provided any evidence, so I’m not sure what you’ve been reading, but OK: https://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Housing-Units_Lost.jpg https://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Hous... By my math, that’s 769 legal units removed or merged between 2012 and 2015. AKA, it happens all the time. So let’s talk about your definition of “lies”...
• xenadu02 9y ago
  > The question is: “what if you have to knock down N affordable units to build M market-rate units?” No it isn't. No one is seriously proposing knocking down N affordable units unless they're also including N+X affordable units + M luxury units in the new structure. Any such plan would be a massive waste of time because it has zero chance of being approved. This article is addressing protesters against "The monster in the mission!!!!1" who marched against replacing an empty warehouse and a Burger King with 16 stories of housing. It is also addressing people like Dwyer who thought they were untouchable and important enough to work against building more housing without suffering any consequences. I've noticed some attitudes starting to shift out in Sunset as lifetime SF residents find their kids coming home from college or getting married, yet being forced to live hours away. Suddenly the anti-development stance is less attractive when it means never seeing your grandkids. Ultimately I don't think the Bay Area can muster the political will to solve the housing problem. Too many people benefit from eternally-rising housing costs or have a "screw you, I got mine" attitude. The state government will have to step in and remove local zoning control.
  • irq11 9y ago
    There are essentially no development projects in SF that don’t involve demolishing existing housing. While I grant you that some such projects have (ridiculous) community resistance, these still aren’t the norm. In most places in SF, the resistance comes when housing is being replaced and/or the developer doesn’t want to build low-income units (instead preferring to donate to the low-income housing fund). It’s not a clean story.
    • Kalium 9y ago
      In both Oakland and SF, there's been significant resistance to projects that propose to replace things that are not housing at all with things that are. If memory serves, the "Monster in the Mission" was proposed for an empty lot. I saw significant resistance to putting a tower in a literal hole in the ground at MacArthut BART. In SF, the resistance often seems centered on the idea that however much subsidized housing the developer proposes isn't enough for the interest groups fighting it. Often the push is for 100% subsidized, plus assorted "community benefit" donations to non-profits.
• fourth_party 9y ago
  In SF M >> N, to the extent you can assume N =~ 0. The results hold.
• kristianp 9y ago
  You can extrapolate from her result, that if M is significantly greater than N then it helps.
  • irq11 9y ago
    No, you can’t. You displace people, who then have to look for housing. Moreover, there are hard floors on new construction rent. It’s not linear, and the “simulation” isn’t even remotely accurate. If you replaced every low income unit in SF with twice as many market-rate apartments tomorrow, you would raise those individuals’ rent to some value near market rate.
    • troupe 9y ago
      > If you replaced every low-income unit in SF with twice as many market-rate apartments tomorrow, you would raise those individuals’ rent to some value near market rate. Assume there are 100,000 rental units in SF and 50,000 of them are low-income units. If overnight you replaced those with 100,000 units that will float to market rates, you are correct that the displaced individuals would now have no units available that are significantly below market rate. However, the market rate will not be the same as what it was previously. It will go down based on a 50% increase in supply. From an economic standpoint, the same thing should happen regardless of what percentage of low-income housing is being replaced. Whether or not this goes down to the artificial price they have in low-income housing depends on how much more supply is being introduced into the market. > there are hard floors on new construction rent. If you are saying that the price set for "affordable" housing is so low that new construction couldn't even break even at that price, then there is a whole different set of problems involved in addition to supply and demand.
• averagewall 9y ago
  They're removing subsidized houses to build market-rate ones? How does that work? Is it the same owner demolishing their own house and replacing it - surely a violation of the conditions they had to agree to to get the subsidy. Why would the government pay a subsidy, then allow the very thing the subsidy was supposed to prevent? Does that money get refunded to the government - maybe allowing them to spend it on another subsidized house somewhere else?
  • irq11 9y ago
    Not “subsidized”...affordable. A landlord has 3 older units that rent for $x. She wishes to redevelop the property to create 6 new units that rent for $3x. Net result is that 3 units have been created, but 3 people have been displaced. Likely permanently. This is the heart of the redevelopment debate in SF.
    • Kalium 9y ago
      Subsidized is an accurate description of the financial arrangement surrounding the unit in a way that "affordable" is not. Why not use it? I know, I know. Politics, right?
    • averagewall 9y ago
      $x is a rent controlled price? By rebuilding, she loses the requirement to keep the rent low? You're right, that's not a subsidy since it's the landlord that pays for it.
      • Mz 9y ago
        In most cases, when you improve a property, you then charge more because it is improved. It isn't unreasonable on an individual basis, but the end result is that affordable units disappear and do not get replaced. Rinse and repeat and pretty soon there simply aren't any affordable units.
    • empath75 9y ago
      Yeah but people are moving out of less desirable and housing to move there, opening up new housing down market.
• DINKDINK 9y ago
  Please list which housing developments have destroyed existing housing stock. Here's the catch, you can't because all of it in the past 5 years has been on existing commercial property (gas stations, commercial businesses), so your central argument that market rate housing is taking land from income-controlled subsidized housing doesn't hold. Side note: >woman who has staked her career on a pro-housing political platform announces that market-rate redevelopment is good for everyone. What's the point of this statement? Do you equally scoff at groups that delay housing construction to increase subsidized housing units and ludicrous when they advocate that slowing down housing construction benefits certain groups?
  • irq11 9y ago
    https://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Housing-Units_Lost.jpg https://my.paragon-re.com/Docs/General/SixtyFortyImages/Hous... Lots of legal housing has been demolished or merged over the past five years. It happens all the time, you just don’t hear about it on pro-development blogs. I have no particular problem with development, but Sonja Trauss is not an objective commentator, and this “simulation” is little more than opinion dressed up as data.
    • akanet 9y ago
      You've just linked a chart that you claim shows "lots" of housing demolished or merged over the last five years, but these numbers are tiny, representing far less than a single percent of the city's housing stock. The vast majority of new housing construction happens without the removal of any previous housing unit.
      • irq11 9y ago
        You can’t evaluate it as a percentage of all housing. By that standard, even new construction is a “tiny” percentage of the whole. SF doesn’t have much infill development left. That’s the point. Arguing about what people did in the past isn’t relevant today.
    • InternetGerbil 9y ago
• ChuckMcM 9y ago
  You can run the simulation yourself, but the bottom line is if the total number of houses grows, more people get housed in all income groups. That is a tremendously powerful message for city supervisors. They only have to look at one thing "After this change will there be more or fewer houses?" if the answer is 'more' then the change will be positive for people trying to find housing, if it is 'less' then the change will be negative. A very simple and objective proposition. Say someone proposes to demolish a 100 unit SRO hotel in the Mission and replace with with a high rise luxury condo building with 250 market rate units. There will be a big protest about how gentrification is pushing the people out of their own neighborhood and where will the people in those 100 SRO units move to? etc etc etc. What this tells you is that after adding an additional 150 houses all income groups will have more housing opportunities period. That might seem non-intuitive but the model works.
  • Kalium 9y ago
    The politics in some parts of SF favor people whose response to the simulations will tend to be "That's nice, but what if all of those units were permanently subsidized?"
  • irq11 9y ago
    The “simulation” is garbage. I’ve pointed out one limitation, but there are many others. For example: rental markets are not auctions. Landlords set prices, and renters pay them, or do not. What happens when you replace 150 SROs with market rate condos? You make 150 of the poorest people in the city homeless, and you remove a tiny bit of competition (maybe) at the higher end of the market. (You’ll note that this post doesn’t discuss who is evicted.) At a minimum, it is the responsibility of the simulator to show that their simulation reconstitutes reality before it is to be trusted for any form of prediction. The only “powerful message” here is that Sonja Trauss is running for office on a pro-development agenda.
    • ChuckMcM 9y ago
      It is a model, not a simulation, and it is traditional to argue the flaws in the methodology or assumptions of the model if you seek to invalidate. What I heard you to say was: “what if you have to knock down N affordable units to build M market-rate units?” And the model exactly models this, showing that as long is M > N, everyone will will get more housing. If you run the simulation you can see how it does this, market rate housing captures people who can afford it, they move out of mid-tier housing, which captures the folks who want mid-tier, which frees up affordable units that were being occupied by people who could move up.
• InternetGerbil 9y ago
  There is no reason to assume that building new housing requires tearing down affordable units. That's the point of using the word "adding".