5 ms·

> ...local regulations used by homeowners to block new development. If the YIMBYs want to win they need to realize their opponents are not just homeowners. Low

> ...local regulations used by homeowners to block new development. If the YIMBYs want to win they need to realize their opponents are not just homeowners. Low-income renters have issues with them too. YIMBYs are generally in some form of denial about that. They like to believe that they are fighting the progressive fight against rich, old homeowners. They like to proclaim they are fighting for "poorer, younger, and (frequently) non-white people" (Stripe).[1] But when it comes to explaining why poorer and non-white renters aren't always on their side, YIMBYs are caught flat-footed. If they're not careful they end up sounding condescending. Like, Didn't you guys take economics? Supply and demand, bro! That's probably why the bill failed. There were significant amendments added to address the concerns of low-income housing advocates, who see a greater need for BMR units among other things. But these were added only after substantial protest. One low-income housing activist said it best: "The YIMBY movement has a white privilege problem."[2] They are kind of in denial about the effect of development-stimulated gentrification on rents in affordable neighborhoods. They like to think that young tech workers are in the same boat as minimum wage earners, all in need of "affordable" housing. They really don't like to think about things like induced demand, where adding capacity can actually create more demand. In the long run even the tech industry needs affordable housing for service industry workers to support its continued growth. It's not just about economic justice or turning back gentrification. Quite simply, if cooks and teachers and artists can't afford to work here it's not going to be as desirable a place to live. If the market alone can't solve that -- and many low-income housing advocates believe it can't -- then we need to fight for BMR and other strategies to create and protect truly affordable housing. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16988398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16988398 [2] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failure-equity-groups-20180502-story.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu...

nerfhammer 8y ago
they have a problem with low-income housing activists more so than actual low income people. check the 2nd to last graph on this page: http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-affordability/ http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-aff...
- abalone 8y ago
  See, that's exactly what I mean. First, it's kind of condescending and dismissive, like low-income housing activists don't actually represent the populations they live with and fight for. Second, you're misinterpreting the graph. It just says renters want more housing. But if you scroll up you'll note the kind of housing "strong majorities favor": "affordable housing projects" -- not market rate. The debate here between YIMBYs and the low-income housing activists is not the same as it is with NIMBYs. Both want more housing. The issue is how much market rate to facilitate vs. how much BMR and other developer concessions to negotiate for.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    Tenants' rights groups in California don't want new housing. That's why they opposed SB 827, and that's why they opposed SB 35 (even though some of them, for example MEDA, went and used it anyway to construct affordable housing, while still maintaining their opposition to save face).
  - ewjordan 8y ago
    People want more affordable housing by apartment count; activists will happily block large projects that would include sizable numbers of affordable units because they're not happy with the percentage of affordable units. The percentages that they want tend to be high enough that the projects would be unprofitable, so the end result is that 0 units get built, either at market rate or BMR. Most YIMBYs are perfectly happy to add more affordable units, as long as the economics work out so that something gets built. Many (not all) activists would prefer to block everything than compromise.
    - abalone 8y ago
      It is frustrating when developers and activists can't come to an agreement. But some projects have gone through. Jane Kim successfully negotiated 40% BMR in a few cases.[1] The developers are not in the poor house as a result. [1] https://www.janekim.org/2018/05/01/housing-that-works-for-san-franciscans/ https://www.janekim.org/2018/05/01/housing-that-works-for-sa...
pcwalton 8y ago
Induced demand in housing is a myth. Research confirms that building more housing reduces displacement. UC Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project study covers this quite well: http://www.urbandisplacement.org/research#section-84 http://www.urbandisplacement.org/research#section-84 Key summary: "What we find largely supports the argument that building more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate development is important for many reasons, including reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing large segments of the population. However, our analysis strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even more important when it comes to reducing displacement of low-income households."
- abalone 8y ago
  You misinterpreted the summary. Reading the actual study, it confirms induced demand: "At the local, neighborhood scale, however, new luxury buildings could change the perception of a neighborhood and send signals to the market that such neighborhoods are desirable and safer for wealthier residents, resulting in new demand. Given the unmet demand for real estate in certain neighborhoods, new construction could simply induce more in-moving." "...What we find largely confirms this regional versus local argument;... This suggests that indeed in San Francisco, and by extension similar strong markets, the unmet need for housing is so severe that production alone cannot solve the displacement problem." (p7) Note that the summary concerns the regional effect of new housing construction -- with a strong emphasis on subsidized housing. Exactly what low-income housing advocates are campaigning for.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    The single solution to this is to massively build housing in places that are already deemed desirable and gentrified. If a place is already expensive and unaffordable, then double the density in THAT place.
    - ggg9990 8y ago
zkms 8y ago
> we need to fight for BMR and other strategies to create and protect truly affordable housing. The "BMR or nothing" thing that those low-income housing advocates do pisses me off so much (and I say this as someone whose current income qualifies them for BMR housing (the waitlists are many years long so it's not really an option though)) and it's so frustrating to see how effective the "displacement" concern-trolling is at preventing the right actions from being taken; namely "build enough dense/tall/small market-rate housing such that the market-rate becomes affordable for everyone, and remove bans on medium/high-rise buildings, and small apartments/SROs/rooming-houses". Avoiding eroding/ending NIMBY-enabling zoning/planning/land-use laws because it'll cause disruption/displacement is the same sort of understandable-yet-suicidal decision as someone refusing to push the stick forwards in a stalled plane because they're afraid of causing the thing to pitch down and lose altitude. Doing the non-instinctive/unfamiliar/counterintuitive thing is terrifying and unpleasant; but if you don't wanna hit the ground you gotta point the nose at the ground to get airspeed. I'm legitimately shocked how even amongst people who don't have anything to gain via artificially scarce housing, the mindset is disturbingly often isomorphic to "pulling back on the stick puts me farther from the ground, time to pull back!" and well, I really don't want to follow that trajectory to its sad, pancake-shaped end.
fiter 8y ago
If "development-stimulated gentrification" and normal gentrification are our problems, then what's the solution? You are setting up a scenario where there is gentrification no matter what. The problem with trying to get BMR units everywhere is that less units are created. Big picture, you're just helping two classes: those who qualify for BMR and those who are rich enough to buy the units that are subsidizing the BMR. What happened to the people in the middle?
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Tenant activist groups want to return the Bay Area to the way it was in some romanticized time in the past, often the 1970s. They want nobody to move in and for tech to move out. It's certainly true that magically freezing California in time would solve displacement and gentrification. (Of course, it's not possible to do so, and it would be deeply unfair for the same reason the Chinese hukou system is unfair, but that doesn't stop them.)
stale2002 8y ago
The market isn't being ALLOWED to to solve the problem. Allowing the market to solve the problem would happen if we significantly upzoned the land. (ie, we need to double the allowable density across SF). The best way to produce more affordable housing isn't that build so many houses that the market price is BELOW the affordable housing price. But if you really care about affordable housing, one thing that could be done is incentives. IE, if you make 30% of your units affordable then in exchange, you can build you building to be 3 times the height of whatever it is currently zoned for. YIMBY people would absolutely be in favor of an incentive like this, that triples density, in exchange for making 30% affordable.
OrganicMSG 8y ago
>induced demand, where adding capacity can actually create more demand. The timeline on induced demand for number of houses required has to be pretty long. Also, if you are worrying about induced demand from housebuilding, then you are attempting population control with homelessness.
wbl 8y ago
Which poor neighborhood in SF would SB 827 have lead to new development in?
emodendroket 8y ago
> Quite simply, if cooks and teachers and artists can't afford to work here it's not going to be as desirable a place to live. At the risk of sounding excessively cynical, I think the most exclusive cities are pretty able to foist this burden onto those workers by making them travel long distances.
- abalone 8y ago
  Glad you brought that up. The bay area's unique geography (and/or inadequate regional mass transit to match it) make this a much greater problem here. There was a really great map that I'm trying to find again, comparing how far you could travel from an affordable market-rate unit on mass transit in an hour in different metros. In NYC you could reach most of Manhattan from affordable neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Harlem. In SFBA, the vast majority of SF was unreachable. Just small areas around the BART stops basically. This is a huge problem for the service industry, for example. It is getting very hard to hire restaurant and retail staff in SF without jacking up prices so high that the business fails. Not a lot of people want to commute 3 hours a day to a minimum wage job.
  - ggg9990 8y ago
    BART is pretty good... you can get from a cheap gang infested area of Richmond to downtown SF in an hour. It’s pretty expensive though, an hours pay for the round trip.
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    I heard a pretty memorable discussion on the radio about people walking all the way from Queens and Brooklyn to their jobs at the Manhattan McDonald's because their pay was too low to afford the subway fare.
damnyou 8y ago
Yes, "induced demand" for housing exists. But that extra demand is generated by the extra economic activity more people bring in. It's called having a growing, lively city.
wahern 8y ago
Here are 25 concrete suggestions proffered by not just a YIMBY but a bone fide, for-profit housing developer: https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-perspective-fix-california-housing-crisis https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-pers... Which of those specific, concrete suggestions do you find objectionable? Like some other YIMBYs (myself included) he even admits that we may need to expand rent control. NIMBYs can't shake their fingers at housing developers and will them into burning money on unprofitable projects. And even a city government as rich as San Francisco couldn't build a small fraction of the units necessary to relieve the pressure before it would bankrupt the city. This is the cold, hard truth. Renters have exactly two choices: continue opposing (by action or inaction) new development while prices rise and the rent-controlled stock slowly disappears, or be part of the solution. But tacking on BMR requirements is not a solution--it's no different than saying, "you can build new housing, but you still need to jump through all the same hoops and, oh, yeah, you have to give it away". WTF!? On top of all that, while NIMBYs complain about displacement and the depletion of rent-controlled housing, there's literally no organized movement on their part that I'm aware of that proposes mitigations as part of a grand bargain. All I hear is, "no, no, no; but, but but." Rather, it's the YIMBYs proposing comprehensive solutions, including expansion of rent control. The funny thing is, rent control and density go hand-in-hand. The more units in a building the greater the turnover and the less the burden on an individual landlord.
- abalone 8y ago
  If by me you mean low-income renters.. then probably #10, where the bona fide for-profit developer explicitly opposes affordable housing fees. You offer no support for your assertion that BMR requirements of any kind are unprofitable.
  - wahern 8y ago
    The evidence was in the article: And yet SLSs are dying in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has run out of missing middle zoning, and they are not creating any more of it in plan updates. The city has recently looked to tighten rules on the development of SLSs. Recent increases in fees (See rule #10) has hit SLSs hard. Entitlement applications for SLS have dropped. New developments increasingly skew toward luxury sky-rises precisely because smaller, mid-rise, middle-income projects have increasingly grown unprofitable. It's a vicious circle: the more exactions imposed on the developers the bigger and more expensive the units need to be in order for the project to be viable, which fuels resentment and political pressure for more exactions. The problem with BMR requirements is that though they make politicians appear responsive to voters and tough on developers, the greater effect is that they permit politicians, voters, and developers alike to avoid difficult decisions. Such as, for example, expanding rent control, changing master zoning plans rather than relying on negotiated variances (a costly process), investing in transit, reducing parking requirements, etc.
saosebastiao 8y ago
If induced demand in housing was actually a thing, silicon valley wouldn't be overpriced because everybody would pack up and move to Indianapolis, Dallas, or Houston, where housing is plentiful and nobody is stopping more from being built. The reason prices keep going up when you build more has nothing to do with inducing demand. The demand was already there and already growing, for a million reasons you have no control over. Prices keep going up because you're not building enough. And if you refuse to accommodate or allow growth, you're gonna get displacement. The reason San Francisco has become a displacement nightmare is exactly because of the stupid induced demand myth, that somehow by not accommodating new arrivals that they'll just stop coming. San Francisco's problems are only the fault of people like you who refuse to accept economic reality.
- abalone 8y ago
  That’s not how induced demand works even in the classic example of traffic congestion. So you’re not really in a position to lecture on “economic reality”. YIMBYs sometimes argue that we can solve the affordability crisis by simply building more market rate housing, because the law of supply and demand dictates it will bring prices down. But that is a simplistic understanding of supply and demand; even in Econ 101 we learn that the price change depends on the demand curve. So what’s the demand curve for housing in SF? Induced demand is the phenomenon where lowering cost motivates people to change their behavior and start using the good. It shifts the curve. This counterintuitively keeps the cost high despite expanding supply. It’s why roads are always congested even after expanding them. There are a lot of tech people in the world who would still like to move to SF. There are speculators too. Like adding lanes to a highway that never gets better, it’s possible that a purely market rate based approach will not result in prices low enough to address the affordable housing crisis for folks who are not making tech industry salaries. YIMBYs as a rule really do not like to admit that. Adding lanes too a highway can help put more people on the road who can tolerate high (opportunity) costs, but you’ve got to look at other solutions too like protected lanes for qualified vehicles. The analogous things in housing would be things like BMR units for qualified residents.
  - saosebastiao 8y ago

nerfhammer 8y ago

they have a problem with low-income housing activists more so than actual low income people. check the 2nd to last graph on this page: http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-affordability/ http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-aff...

abalone 8y ago
See, that's exactly what I mean. First, it's kind of condescending and dismissive, like low-income housing activists don't actually represent the populations they live with and fight for. Second, you're misinterpreting the graph. It just says renters want more housing. But if you scroll up you'll note the kind of housing "strong majorities favor": "affordable housing projects" -- not market rate. The debate here between YIMBYs and the low-income housing activists is not the same as it is with NIMBYs. Both want more housing. The issue is how much market rate to facilitate vs. how much BMR and other developer concessions to negotiate for.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Tenants' rights groups in California don't want new housing. That's why they opposed SB 827, and that's why they opposed SB 35 (even though some of them, for example MEDA, went and used it anyway to construct affordable housing, while still maintaining their opposition to save face).
- ewjordan 8y ago
  People want more affordable housing by apartment count; activists will happily block large projects that would include sizable numbers of affordable units because they're not happy with the percentage of affordable units. The percentages that they want tend to be high enough that the projects would be unprofitable, so the end result is that 0 units get built, either at market rate or BMR. Most YIMBYs are perfectly happy to add more affordable units, as long as the economics work out so that something gets built. Many (not all) activists would prefer to block everything than compromise.
  - abalone 8y ago
    It is frustrating when developers and activists can't come to an agreement. But some projects have gone through. Jane Kim successfully negotiated 40% BMR in a few cases.[1] The developers are not in the poor house as a result. [1] https://www.janekim.org/2018/05/01/housing-that-works-for-san-franciscans/ https://www.janekim.org/2018/05/01/housing-that-works-for-sa...

pcwalton 8y ago

Induced demand in housing is a myth. Research confirms that building more housing reduces displacement. UC Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project study covers this quite well: http://www.urbandisplacement.org/research#section-84 http://www.urbandisplacement.org/research#section-84 Key summary: "What we find largely supports the argument that building more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate development is important for many reasons, including reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing large segments of the population. However, our analysis strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even more important when it comes to reducing displacement of low-income households."

abalone 8y ago
You misinterpreted the summary. Reading the actual study, it confirms induced demand: "At the local, neighborhood scale, however, new luxury buildings could change the perception of a neighborhood and send signals to the market that such neighborhoods are desirable and safer for wealthier residents, resulting in new demand. Given the unmet demand for real estate in certain neighborhoods, new construction could simply induce more in-moving." "...What we find largely confirms this regional versus local argument;... This suggests that indeed in San Francisco, and by extension similar strong markets, the unmet need for housing is so severe that production alone cannot solve the displacement problem." (p7) Note that the summary concerns the regional effect of new housing construction -- with a strong emphasis on subsidized housing. Exactly what low-income housing advocates are campaigning for.
- stale2002 8y ago
  The single solution to this is to massively build housing in places that are already deemed desirable and gentrified. If a place is already expensive and unaffordable, then double the density in THAT place.
  - ggg9990 8y ago

zkms 8y ago

> we need to fight for BMR and other strategies to create and protect truly affordable housing. The "BMR or nothing" thing that those low-income housing advocates do pisses me off so much (and I say this as someone whose current income qualifies them for BMR housing (the waitlists are many years long so it's not really an option though)) and it's so frustrating to see how effective the "displacement" concern-trolling is at preventing the right actions from being taken; namely "build enough dense/tall/small market-rate housing such that the market-rate becomes affordable for everyone, and remove bans on medium/high-rise buildings, and small apartments/SROs/rooming-houses". Avoiding eroding/ending NIMBY-enabling zoning/planning/land-use laws because it'll cause disruption/displacement is the same sort of understandable-yet-suicidal decision as someone refusing to push the stick forwards in a stalled plane because they're afraid of causing the thing to pitch down and lose altitude. Doing the non-instinctive/unfamiliar/counterintuitive thing is terrifying and unpleasant; but if you don't wanna hit the ground you gotta point the nose at the ground to get airspeed. I'm legitimately shocked how even amongst people who don't have anything to gain via artificially scarce housing, the mindset is disturbingly often isomorphic to "pulling back on the stick puts me farther from the ground, time to pull back!" and well, I really don't want to follow that trajectory to its sad, pancake-shaped end.

fiter 8y ago

If "development-stimulated gentrification" and normal gentrification are our problems, then what's the solution? You are setting up a scenario where there is gentrification no matter what. The problem with trying to get BMR units everywhere is that less units are created. Big picture, you're just helping two classes: those who qualify for BMR and those who are rich enough to buy the units that are subsidizing the BMR. What happened to the people in the middle?

pcwalton 8y ago
Tenant activist groups want to return the Bay Area to the way it was in some romanticized time in the past, often the 1970s. They want nobody to move in and for tech to move out. It's certainly true that magically freezing California in time would solve displacement and gentrification. (Of course, it's not possible to do so, and it would be deeply unfair for the same reason the Chinese hukou system is unfair, but that doesn't stop them.)

stale2002 8y ago

The market isn't being ALLOWED to to solve the problem. Allowing the market to solve the problem would happen if we significantly upzoned the land. (ie, we need to double the allowable density across SF). The best way to produce more affordable housing isn't that build so many houses that the market price is BELOW the affordable housing price. But if you really care about affordable housing, one thing that could be done is incentives. IE, if you make 30% of your units affordable then in exchange, you can build you building to be 3 times the height of whatever it is currently zoned for. YIMBY people would absolutely be in favor of an incentive like this, that triples density, in exchange for making 30% affordable.

OrganicMSG 8y ago

>induced demand, where adding capacity can actually create more demand. The timeline on induced demand for number of houses required has to be pretty long. Also, if you are worrying about induced demand from housebuilding, then you are attempting population control with homelessness.

wbl 8y ago

Which poor neighborhood in SF would SB 827 have lead to new development in?

emodendroket 8y ago

> Quite simply, if cooks and teachers and artists can't afford to work here it's not going to be as desirable a place to live. At the risk of sounding excessively cynical, I think the most exclusive cities are pretty able to foist this burden onto those workers by making them travel long distances.

abalone 8y ago
Glad you brought that up. The bay area's unique geography (and/or inadequate regional mass transit to match it) make this a much greater problem here. There was a really great map that I'm trying to find again, comparing how far you could travel from an affordable market-rate unit on mass transit in an hour in different metros. In NYC you could reach most of Manhattan from affordable neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Harlem. In SFBA, the vast majority of SF was unreachable. Just small areas around the BART stops basically. This is a huge problem for the service industry, for example. It is getting very hard to hire restaurant and retail staff in SF without jacking up prices so high that the business fails. Not a lot of people want to commute 3 hours a day to a minimum wage job.
- ggg9990 8y ago
  BART is pretty good... you can get from a cheap gang infested area of Richmond to downtown SF in an hour. It’s pretty expensive though, an hours pay for the round trip.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  I heard a pretty memorable discussion on the radio about people walking all the way from Queens and Brooklyn to their jobs at the Manhattan McDonald's because their pay was too low to afford the subway fare.

damnyou 8y ago

Yes, "induced demand" for housing exists. But that extra demand is generated by the extra economic activity more people bring in. It's called having a growing, lively city.

wahern 8y ago

Here are 25 concrete suggestions proffered by not just a YIMBY but a bone fide, for-profit housing developer: https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-perspective-fix-california-housing-crisis https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-pers... Which of those specific, concrete suggestions do you find objectionable? Like some other YIMBYs (myself included) he even admits that we may need to expand rent control. NIMBYs can't shake their fingers at housing developers and will them into burning money on unprofitable projects. And even a city government as rich as San Francisco couldn't build a small fraction of the units necessary to relieve the pressure before it would bankrupt the city. This is the cold, hard truth. Renters have exactly two choices: continue opposing (by action or inaction) new development while prices rise and the rent-controlled stock slowly disappears, or be part of the solution. But tacking on BMR requirements is not a solution--it's no different than saying, "you can build new housing, but you still need to jump through all the same hoops and, oh, yeah, you have to give it away". WTF!? On top of all that, while NIMBYs complain about displacement and the depletion of rent-controlled housing, there's literally no organized movement on their part that I'm aware of that proposes mitigations as part of a grand bargain. All I hear is, "no, no, no; but, but but." Rather, it's the YIMBYs proposing comprehensive solutions, including expansion of rent control. The funny thing is, rent control and density go hand-in-hand. The more units in a building the greater the turnover and the less the burden on an individual landlord.

abalone 8y ago
If by me you mean low-income renters.. then probably #10, where the bona fide for-profit developer explicitly opposes affordable housing fees. You offer no support for your assertion that BMR requirements of any kind are unprofitable.
- wahern 8y ago
  The evidence was in the article: And yet SLSs are dying in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has run out of missing middle zoning, and they are not creating any more of it in plan updates. The city has recently looked to tighten rules on the development of SLSs. Recent increases in fees (See rule #10) has hit SLSs hard. Entitlement applications for SLS have dropped. New developments increasingly skew toward luxury sky-rises precisely because smaller, mid-rise, middle-income projects have increasingly grown unprofitable. It's a vicious circle: the more exactions imposed on the developers the bigger and more expensive the units need to be in order for the project to be viable, which fuels resentment and political pressure for more exactions. The problem with BMR requirements is that though they make politicians appear responsive to voters and tough on developers, the greater effect is that they permit politicians, voters, and developers alike to avoid difficult decisions. Such as, for example, expanding rent control, changing master zoning plans rather than relying on negotiated variances (a costly process), investing in transit, reducing parking requirements, etc.

saosebastiao 8y ago

If induced demand in housing was actually a thing, silicon valley wouldn't be overpriced because everybody would pack up and move to Indianapolis, Dallas, or Houston, where housing is plentiful and nobody is stopping more from being built. The reason prices keep going up when you build more has nothing to do with inducing demand. The demand was already there and already growing, for a million reasons you have no control over. Prices keep going up because you're not building enough. And if you refuse to accommodate or allow growth, you're gonna get displacement. The reason San Francisco has become a displacement nightmare is exactly because of the stupid induced demand myth, that somehow by not accommodating new arrivals that they'll just stop coming. San Francisco's problems are only the fault of people like you who refuse to accept economic reality.

abalone 8y ago
That’s not how induced demand works even in the classic example of traffic congestion. So you’re not really in a position to lecture on “economic reality”. YIMBYs sometimes argue that we can solve the affordability crisis by simply building more market rate housing, because the law of supply and demand dictates it will bring prices down. But that is a simplistic understanding of supply and demand; even in Econ 101 we learn that the price change depends on the demand curve. So what’s the demand curve for housing in SF? Induced demand is the phenomenon where lowering cost motivates people to change their behavior and start using the good. It shifts the curve. This counterintuitively keeps the cost high despite expanding supply. It’s why roads are always congested even after expanding them. There are a lot of tech people in the world who would still like to move to SF. There are speculators too. Like adding lanes to a highway that never gets better, it’s possible that a purely market rate based approach will not result in prices low enough to address the affordable housing crisis for folks who are not making tech industry salaries. YIMBYs as a rule really do not like to admit that. Adding lanes too a highway can help put more people on the road who can tolerate high (opportunity) costs, but you’ve got to look at other solutions too like protected lanes for qualified vehicles. The analogous things in housing would be things like BMR units for qualified residents.
- saosebastiao 8y ago