4 ms·

I have a different proposal I'd like to run by you... I'm concerned about congestion on California's roads. The issue is simple: at rush hour, for many popular

by asr 8y ago

I have a different proposal I'd like to run by you... I'm concerned about congestion on California's roads. The issue is simple: at rush hour, for many popular routes, N > M, where N is the number of cars on the road, and M is the number of cars there are space for at any given time. Let's solve this problem--build more roads!! Oh wait: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/11/californias-dot-admits-that-more-roads-mean-more-traffic/415245/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/11/californias-d... ... In all seriousness, I am on your side--zoning laws which never change create lots of incentive problems and prevent central and desirable areas from sensibly adding density. But let's not pretend this is a simple math problem where nobody with sense can disagree--it just leads to demonizing the other side (which there is lots of here). Among other things, it will almost surely never be the case, no matter how successful YIMBY is, that N=M in the bay area, because adding more housing will increase demand--people will stop leaving to take jobs in Denver/Seattle/Portland, more people will find it doable to move to the bay area, etc.

Decade 8y ago
The big difference here is that I think a lot more people in San Francisco is a good thing, and a lot more cars on the road is a bad thing. I never specified that N = the number of people currently living in San Francisco. The outflow of people is somewhat greater than the inflow, as children of existing residents (and often their parents, too) move out and new people move in, limited by the slow growth of homes. However, when we have so many employed homeless people in the streets, it’s pretty obvious that whatever N is, N > M. https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612746/sf-math-teacher-housing-homeless https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612746/sf-math-teacher-hou... If we actually built housing in accordance with demand, then the population of San Francisco would be much, much higher, but it wouldn’t be unlimited. I wish San Francisco would get over itself; not everybody wants to live here. Patrick Wolff estimated that we would need 50% more homes in the next 20 years to make housing affordable. http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-area-housing-stock-must-grow-50-percent-20-years/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-are... There’s no way we can get 50% more homes with our current system, project by project, 500 units here, 1,000 units there. We need about 200,000 units in San Francisco alone. We can get there by eliminating the density limits. Just look at the zoning maps, how much of the city is restricted to single-family homes. With the more ambitious versions of SB 827, we could have achieved 50% more homes by converting half of the single-family homes into quad-plexes, as was traditional before zoning was invented to keep poor people out of nice neighborhoods. http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/sunday/zoning-laws-segregation-income.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/sunday/zoning-law...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
closeparen 8y ago
Adding more housing will lower prices, and lower prices will increase quantity demanded. Yes, more people will be able to stay in and move to the area. That's the point. You've not made an argument for why additional housing would increase demand (i.e. desire to move, willingness to pay). Road expansion boosts capacity just fine. Not as cost-effectively as public transit, but it works. What it doesn't do is fix congestion. I'd argue that there really isn't anything like congestion in the housing market. Homes are discrete; you have one or you don't. There's no such thing as "extra" people in the neighborhood shrinking all the existing homes.
- asr 8y ago
  Belatedly... yes, you are right, I haven't described any shift in the demand curve. But so what? I was responding to a suggestion that the reason there is a housing "issue" is that demand is relatively inelastic, and exceeds supply, which is also relatively inelastic. My point is simply that demand could actually be fairly elastic, and so we should not describe the problem in this simplified way, because if that's the case, increasing supply will not reduce price very much, and so increased housing won't solve many of the problems the YIMBY cause is hoping to address which are caused by high housing prices. In the road analogy, congestion on roads is akin to a price--people are paying for trips with their time. I was trying to make the point that adding more roads doesn't bring down the "price" of a trip substantially, just like adding some more housing in SF may not bring down the price of housing substantially. OP responded by noting that, in their view, having more people in SF is a good thing in and of itself. If you agree, then we have no argument (this is almost surely a result of building more housing). But if you think that adding more housing would be good because it would allow low-paid workers to live closer to where they work, or many of the other reasons advanced in this thread, my point is simply that the analysis of this policy proposal requires more nuance than the kind of N > M analysis OP was conducting.

by asr 8y ago

Decade 8y ago

The big difference here is that I think a lot more people in San Francisco is a good thing, and a lot more cars on the road is a bad thing. I never specified that N = the number of people currently living in San Francisco. The outflow of people is somewhat greater than the inflow, as children of existing residents (and often their parents, too) move out and new people move in, limited by the slow growth of homes. However, when we have so many employed homeless people in the streets, it’s pretty obvious that whatever N is, N > M. https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612746/sf-math-teacher-housing-homeless https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612746/sf-math-teacher-hou... If we actually built housing in accordance with demand, then the population of San Francisco would be much, much higher, but it wouldn’t be unlimited. I wish San Francisco would get over itself; not everybody wants to live here. Patrick Wolff estimated that we would need 50% more homes in the next 20 years to make housing affordable. http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-area-housing-stock-must-grow-50-percent-20-years/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-are... There’s no way we can get 50% more homes with our current system, project by project, 500 units here, 1,000 units there. We need about 200,000 units in San Francisco alone. We can get there by eliminating the density limits. Just look at the zoning maps, how much of the city is restricted to single-family homes. With the more ambitious versions of SB 827, we could have achieved 50% more homes by converting half of the single-family homes into quad-plexes, as was traditional before zoning was invented to keep poor people out of nice neighborhoods. http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/sunday/zoning-laws-segregation-income.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/sunday/zoning-law...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

closeparen 8y ago

Adding more housing will lower prices, and lower prices will increase quantity demanded. Yes, more people will be able to stay in and move to the area. That's the point. You've not made an argument for why additional housing would increase demand (i.e. desire to move, willingness to pay). Road expansion boosts capacity just fine. Not as cost-effectively as public transit, but it works. What it doesn't do is fix congestion. I'd argue that there really isn't anything like congestion in the housing market. Homes are discrete; you have one or you don't. There's no such thing as "extra" people in the neighborhood shrinking all the existing homes.

asr 8y ago
Belatedly... yes, you are right, I haven't described any shift in the demand curve. But so what? I was responding to a suggestion that the reason there is a housing "issue" is that demand is relatively inelastic, and exceeds supply, which is also relatively inelastic. My point is simply that demand could actually be fairly elastic, and so we should not describe the problem in this simplified way, because if that's the case, increasing supply will not reduce price very much, and so increased housing won't solve many of the problems the YIMBY cause is hoping to address which are caused by high housing prices. In the road analogy, congestion on roads is akin to a price--people are paying for trips with their time. I was trying to make the point that adding more roads doesn't bring down the "price" of a trip substantially, just like adding some more housing in SF may not bring down the price of housing substantially. OP responded by noting that, in their view, having more people in SF is a good thing in and of itself. If you agree, then we have no argument (this is almost surely a result of building more housing). But if you think that adding more housing would be good because it would allow low-paid workers to live closer to where they work, or many of the other reasons advanced in this thread, my point is simply that the analysis of this policy proposal requires more nuance than the kind of N > M analysis OP was conducting.