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> New tech companies are driving the rents up in the area higher and higher. The endpoint of this process can be seen in San Francisco, which once must have bee

> New tech companies are driving the rents up in the area higher and higher. The endpoint of this process can be seen in San Francisco, which once must have been a halfway livable city. This is more the fault of NIMBYs and supply&demand-denialists who work hard to prevent new housing from going up. Yes, tech companies brought the demand because of good jobs, but last I checked, we wanted companies to offer high paying jobs, did we not? If the people need more housing, the solution is, shockingly enough, to build more housing.

Xylakant 8y ago
There's no space in that area to build more housing. Pretty much all the space is being used to build offices for tech companies. There's also the question of how people that do not work for one of those high paying tech companies are supposed to pay for their housing.
- Killes 8y ago
  Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!" Pay situation for many jobs in Berlin and to some extent most of Germany is just abysmal, even in tech in many cases. If people here put half the energy in fighting for fairer remuneration for their work rather than whining about the raising rent and property prices that come with being a desirable city and country...
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    Hey, I'm all for "raise the pay for everyone". I just don't see that happening and I do see the issues arising from "raise the rents and keep the pay low" all around me. I'm even a part of the issue, since I'm on the "hey, I can afford the rent for that nice, freshly renovated flat." side of the equation. Good friends are on the other side. I could go and close my eyes and willfully ignore that, but I'm afraid that won't make the issue go away.
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart. The only reason they're able to do this is because of years of fairly extreme mercantilistic policies combined with struggling economies in other parts of the EU (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and to an extent Ireland). It works out for Germany in the short- and medium-run, but it's bad for the EU as a whole. It's also bad for Germany in the long run, because even if extreme mercantilism were sustainable in a free market in the long run (spoiler: it's not), excess surplus means, by definition, that the government is underinvesting in public infrastructure. It takes a while for the effects of that to become evident, but Germany is starting to see hints of it already, and if these policies continue, it'll become much more pronounced.
    - Killes 8y ago
      Not so sure about that. Germany doesn't compete on firesale prices for its export products. Germany is amongst the top 5 richest countries whatever that means. I simply see many good and skilled workers paid way too little. How am I earning as much as a med tech with 12 years experience after being in IT proper for 2 years ? The answer lays, admitted within my limited view, in the skilled labor force simply accepting middling pays. Which is maybe harder to pull off in the IT branch it attracting more workers not ready to simply accept lower pays for their work. In the end I have colleagues with way more experience than me earning less than me simply because they asked for less...Somehow its more a kind of established cultural thing and companies / management taking good advantage of it. Lets not pretend C levels are badly paid in Germany XD.
    - usrusr 8y ago
      ...and the secret sauce of keeping rents down have been conscious efforts at keeping second and third tier cities and towns attractive for business, which distributed demand and thus kept it somewhat in check in the naturally attractive metropolitan areas. E.g. most of those small, highly specialized industry (car and other) suppliers that are the backbone of the German industry are based in cities you never heard of, that's not a coincidence but the result of careful balancing. In recent years (decades, actually), we seem to have dropped the ball in the counter-centralisation game, maybe as a consequence of reunification.
  - close04 8y ago
    Sure, raise the rent -> raise the pay. What happens to the people who don't work in the dynamic IT sector? Everybody gets a raise? Doesn't this just bring everybody to the starting block only with a little more inflation? Otherwise you create an imbalance where you have affluent neighborhoods and slums, something that you definitely want to avoid. The solution is to build more housing to alleviate the pressure. This way you can keep the rents low without pumping up just a few salaries. And in a city like Berlin the situation is vastly different from SF. Public transport and biking work like a charm so housing doesn't have to be smack next to the headquarters. Companies want to reap the benefits of coming to a city with a qualified workforce but the disbenefits get to be "enjoyed" by everyone else around there. Tragedy of the commons. They should be supporting the housing market if they want a good reception. Full disclosure: I'm saying this as one of the people who enjoys such benefits while some people around me bite the bullet.
  - mazesc 8y ago
    Sorry, but this argument is terrible. Look at the bay area and see how all the wages have risen. Nobody has to be homeless there because they can't afford housing anymore right?
  - rlanday 8y ago
    You can't fit more people into the same amount of housing by raising everyone's pay. Either someone needs to start living with more roommates, or someone needs to get priced out and decide to leave.
    - Xylakant 8y ago
      If pay was more equal, at least opportunities to stay in your local area would be more equal. I don’t think it’s the price as an absolute that makes people angry, it’s the feeling of being unable to compete for a beloved space.
      - TulliusCicero 8y ago
        Things might be slightly better then, but if there's still X number of housing units, you're still only going to have Y number of people living there. Giving people a more even chance at winning musical chairs is nice, but how about just making more chairs?
        Xylakant 8y ago
        This is partially at least an emotional problem which you cannot only tackle with logic. The other problem that you’ll currently see is that even if you can convince people that tearing down their house and building a new one in the same spot, they’ll often still want to be able to afford one of the new flats - and that’s currently not a given. So people understandably prefer to stick what they have. So a fundamental ability to compete is IMHO a basic requirement for building more chairs.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    > Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!" If salaries go up without housing being addressed directly, you get what's happened in SF: everyone middle-class and down being pushed out by high rent prices, because they're all competing for the same limited amount of space.
- deanCommie 8y ago
  B.S. You just need to re-zone massive sprawling single-family zones into mid-rises. The "american dream" of a massive house for every couple can't survive the 21st century without triggering a revolution.
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    Have you been in the area? There's no single family housing there at all for quite some distance (I'd say a few kilometers in each direction at least). It's mostly densely built-up with 3-5 story apartment buildings.
    - gradys 8y ago
      I think one of you is talking about San Francisco and the other Berlin.
      - Xylakant 8y ago
        I'm talking about Berlin since the whole thing is happening in Berlin. How things are in SF is of no relevance.
        TulliusCicero 8y ago
        Did you not read my comment?
    - driverdan 8y ago
      3-5 story isn't very tall. Tear them down and go taller.
      - ant6n 8y ago
        Firstly, the higher you build, the more space you need between buildings, and the more space inside the buildings is used for infastructure. There are diminishing returns, and it runs out that areas with good coverage of 5 story buildings can have very high density, often more than areas with high rises. Plus, Berlin likes to protect their heritage; often tearing down and rebuilding whole neighborhoods turned out to be a very bad idea.
thatfrenchguy 8y ago
Sure enough adding more housing when there is speculation works as we’ve seen in Vancouver.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  According to this, average 1br rent in Vancouver is only $1500/month, which seems pretty reasonable to me for a major city, especially one that's seen as very desirable like Vancouver: https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-vancouver-bc-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-vancouver-bc-rent... If we could get SF down to 1500/month I'd be ecstatic, that's less than half the current price.
  - spuz 8y ago
    Is that USD or CAD? Also, according to that site, there has been a 32% drop in prices since last year. I wonder what the reason for that is?
    - TulliusCicero 8y ago
      That is strange. I could see that being currency value changes, except the 2br price has been relatively stable.
21stio 8y ago
Unfortunately, it's more profitable to speculate on the rising property prices than selling them to home builders...
usrusr 8y ago
Lack of highrise developments is what makes those areas attractive in the first place. Berlin has plenty highrise residential, yet Google and the like are decidedly avoiding those areas. Converting more of the cityscape into the kind of area where neither Google nor the protestors would want to be would make the situation worse, not better. Also, it's quite possible that you widely underestimate the existing density, this is no single family sprawl we are talking about.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  One of the problems in Berlin is that dense residential areas cluster at the edges of the town and office space tends to cluster at the center. So now, if you want to have an office in Berlin and are a company that has more than a handful of employees, people will come from all sides of town, so you'd preferably want office space in the center - which gradually eats up all space that could have been used for housing in the center. Old buildings that could have been refurbished into flats are turned into offices since that's currently more profitable. There's little really high-density living space in central Berlin.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    Berlin has a center? Last time I checked (Sunday), it was still more like an eye of the storm kind of void. But that's perfectly consistent with your finer point, if you could somehow restrict your employees to roughly one quadrant, many things would be much easier. That will never happen of course.
    - Xylakant 8y ago
      Well, Berlin has a geographic center. It doesn’t have a center in any kind of sense that the social life happens around there, you’re right in hat regard. There’s also the mystic “Innerhalb des S-Bahn-Rings”.
- checkyoursudo 8y ago
  > Lack of highrise developments is what makes those areas attractive in the first place. Why? Aesthetics? Google-type people don't want to live in high-rises? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they aren't willing even to live near high-rises. That's a new one to me.
bildung 8y ago
> If the people need more housing, the solution is, shockingly enough, to build more housing. I know this is a popular opinion, but is there empirical evidence for this? Isn't this solution based on the assumption that there was a one-time surge of people, leading to a one-time rise in demand for housing?
- geezerjay 8y ago
  Even if if there was a surge in demand, that doesn't mean that increasing available housing does not contribute to deflate housing prices. It makes no sense to pretend that supply has no impact on housing availability, and that the only factor worth vilifying is a secondary factor affecting demand.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Sure, take a read here: http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-high-income2/ http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-high-income2/
  - bildung 8y ago
    Thanks for the link. That article only links to a single correlation study, and that study only shows what we know: if high income earners rent much of the given supply, rents for low income families increases, too. That doesn't help with the question of more housing lowering rent prices. My point was: If more housing gets built, what does high income earners prevent from moving to town and renting that, too? The article makes a fundamental error with that car market analogy, BTW. Cars are consumables that get bought to be driven by the buyer. Houses in cities are investments that are built to be rented out. Completely different market dynamics. That the author makes a grave error like this while blogging about urban planning is a bit scary. What I meant are real longitudinal studies that track rent price development and increasing supply over time, preferably in Europe, where the rent market works quite a bit differently than in the US. The vast majority of housing in Berlin is for rent.
titzer 8y ago
> This is more the fault of NIMBYs and supply&demand-denialists I don't think you quite grasp the effects of a massive influx of hundreds to thousands of new individuals making $150k-250k. It increases rent across the board, which impacts all the people in an area. Sure, it might create a few new jobs for baristas and shopkeepers, a few bartenders and waitresses. But ultimately it just leads to gentrification and prices people out of the market. It negatively affects all renters and only benefits speculators and owners in the area. You wonder why people are angry? It's because of tonedeaf responses from big companies pushing their agendas.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > I don't think you quite grasp the effects of a massive influx of hundreds to thousands of new individuals making $150k-250k. I'm from the bay area and pay close attention to land use/zoning issues, so yeah, I think I do. The bay area has had particularly extreme series of decades of rent increases precisely because of anti-housing policies. If the market was allowed to respond, rents would still rise, to be sure, but not nearly as much. > Sure, it might create a few new jobs for baristas and shopkeepers, a few bartenders and waitresses. But ultimately it just leads to gentrification and prices people out of the market. Anchor industries succeeding in a metro also raises wages for others in that metro. But, the catch is that the wage rise may not necessarily be enough to match the increase in cost of living. The bay area (and really all coastal California) is a good example of this. Wages for a lot of random job types are higher than normal, but housing is still too expensive. > You wonder why people are angry? It's because of tonedeaf responses from big companies pushing their agendas. Companies have a basic duty to run themselves ethically and obey laws and regulations. "You created too many high-paying jobs" is a silly thing to get upset at them for, when the problem is clearly a governmental failure. Liberal US cities are neither permitting the market to create new housing, nor are they creating large amounts of public housing themselves. Their attitude amounts to, "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!" You want a solution? Look at Singapore or Vienna.
  - evanlivingston 8y ago
    Or conversely, look at Portland for an example a place where keeping up with housing demand has not translated into preserving a quantity of affordable housing. Abstracted supply and demand alone does not result in ensuring housing at various price points
DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
> This is more the fault of NIMBYs and supply&demand-denialists who work hard to prevent new housing from going up. I wonder if the supply-and-demand model you're referring to is insufficient in this scenario. It sounds like political factors are at play here as well.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  I mean, in the case of SF, yes you're right. It's the laws that prevent supply & demand from working normally. Of course, even with liberalized zoning regulations, housing prices would still be higher than normal in SF. But they wouldn't be horrendously bad like they are now.
arez 8y ago
sure we want good jobs with high salaries, but these jobs are just for a minority and they will pump up the prices in the whole area. There're lots of unemployed and people with low paying jobs in berlin, some artists, students etc. they make the city vibrant, fun, adventurous, but they can't stay if you have to pay 1200€ a month for a decent flat.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > sure we want good jobs with high salaries, but these jobs are just for a minority and they will pump up the prices in the whole area. Higher-paying-than-average jobs are for a minority pretty much by definition. Do you just want to outlaw paying people different amounts of money? > There're lots of unemployed and people with low paying jobs in berlin, some artists, students etc. they make the city vibrant, fun, adventurous, but they can't stay if you have to pay 1200€ a month for a decent flat. Agreed, which is why pro-housing policies are necessary. Make it easy for the market to build reasonably-priced housing, and have the government build housing itself.
- visarga 8y ago
  > they make the city vibrant, fun, adventurous, but they can't stay if you have to pay 1200€ a month for a decent flat. But they can also leave and make another city vibrant, fun and adventurous.
sdenton4 8y ago
One of my favorite spots in Berlin is the Monsterkabinett. It's an underground dungeon full of giant animatronic creatures who dance and sing along with the industrial style music of their creators. It's also a fantastic example of what's possible when you don't have to worry about rent. The space is part of an old squat, still filled with artists who now get a steady flow of tourists to sell to. And some of the artists, who don't have to worry so much about day jobs, had time to take a side project building these creatures along with software to drive them. Berlin, and kreuzberg in particular, is full of artists and rebels who moved into a war zone because they had no where to go, found a blank canvas, and made something awesome of it. Bowie did some of his best work in that environment, and it's also given us great punk music, and was an incubator for techno and edm. You can call it NIMBYism, but for Kreuzberg it's really more about fighting gentrification and displacement, and preserving a city at the edge of society. There's a fundamental difference between fighting development in the mission and presidio...
- dexen 8y ago
  There is no difference in kind between two hungry IT students developing better web search, and several hungry artists developing awesome dungeon of animatronics. Either start off poor, but once they get major traction, the money starts rolling in. Of course, the web search scales faster, but that's about it. Point being, the artists' den would become expensive bohemian district of the city anyway, startups or not, as "new money" people learn of it and start moving in to bask in the splendor of the underground culture. Eventually pricing out the actual artists.
  - 738472527784 8y ago
    Are you saying any economically successful person is an artist, contributes to society and culture as art does? Are you saying, some billions heavy foreign company should have the same "right" to influence a region as a local art collective has? Because they are basically the same? Are you serious?
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > You can call it NIMBYism, but for Kreuzberg it's really more about fighting gentrification and displacement, and preserving a city at the edge of society. There's a fundamental difference between fighting development in the mission and presidio... SF tried "fighting" gentrification by blocking development, and it just made the problem twice as bad. Look at the results: do they look good to you? Why would you want to copy such an abysmal failure? NIMBYs are the cause of much displacement, especially of the poor. In some cases this is because of ignorance, in other cases it's greed. Either way, it's not acceptable.
carapace 8y ago
No, the data do not back that up: https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/27/rents-in-san-francisco-are-determined-by-demand-new-data-show/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/27/rents-in-san-francisc... In order for new construction to materially affect rent rate we would have to build more housing faster than it has ever been done before, for decades to come. Leaving aside the question of whether it is desirable to convert SF into another Manhattan, we could actually do it: there are modern methods to build entire new apartment buildings in forty days, etc. We could, in theory, convert the Richmond and Sunset districts from mostly single-family homes to three- and four-story apartment buildings, and do it quickly enough that rates rise slowly. Not fall, or stay static, just not rise as quickly as they are now. But still, how do the people not earning $100,000 or more afford to live there? Just building the buildings would require a sizable portion of the entire California construction industry. Where does that army live? How do all these people get into and out of the SF peninsula? You're talking about eventually two or three million people just in SF, South SF, and Daly City. How long before those teeming millions forget how much we value nature and start eyeing the Marin Headlands, or all that beautiful land south of Pacifica? San Francisco is the largest city with the most wild land around it in the world. Anyhow my point is, enough with the "Damn NIMBYs!" rhetoric already. This is a big ol problem that will take decades to sort out and the ocean will rise before that can happen, so please stop insulting your neighbors for liking their neighborhood, eh? One way or another it's not going to last, so why not let them enjoy it. You work in tech, right? You can afford to move up/inland early, beat the rush, no? You've got just enough time to stay and let your kids deal with it for you. Forgive me if that sounds harsh, I'm keeping it real: We have bigger problems than folks not liking new housing. San Francisco is at sea level.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Not to mention, earthquakes. All that tech in SF in Seattle, located at tectonic hotspots.
- throwaway34241 8y ago
  How do people not earning $100,000 afford to live there? They commute 2 hours each way (for real). I think it's unreasonable to expect a live-and-let live attitude to NIMBYs on online forums, while NIMBYs are pricing out the people who work in their neighborhoods through housing policy. Sure there are other issues like global warming but it's not like having a place to live is a trivial issue. It's more than reasonable for people to care or be upset about it. I'm talking mostly about the Bay Area here which I'm most familiar with, where a rule allowing you to build if you follow every law to the letter was shot down (building anything is a guaranteed long political fight), and minor things like having one apartment level above a shop are fought tooth and nail. I actually can somewhat respect the position, that young people should just move away and other places in the country need to deal with growth. But I think to do that properly, you should still zone for a proportionate amount of housing as you do office space (jobs). And if you don't want growth, do little of either. But approving lots of jobs, not zoning/approving the necessary housing, and then making excuses/blaming others as there's a shortage and prices/commutes go up - it's hard to see it as anything other than a massive political failure. Maybe calling this policy combination NIMBY is painting NIMBYs with a broad brush. But whatever you call it I think it's reasonable to be upset by it.

Xylakant 8y ago

There's no space in that area to build more housing. Pretty much all the space is being used to build offices for tech companies. There's also the question of how people that do not work for one of those high paying tech companies are supposed to pay for their housing.

Killes 8y ago
Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!" Pay situation for many jobs in Berlin and to some extent most of Germany is just abysmal, even in tech in many cases. If people here put half the energy in fighting for fairer remuneration for their work rather than whining about the raising rent and property prices that come with being a desirable city and country...
- Xylakant 8y ago
  Hey, I'm all for "raise the pay for everyone". I just don't see that happening and I do see the issues arising from "raise the rents and keep the pay low" all around me. I'm even a part of the issue, since I'm on the "hey, I can afford the rent for that nice, freshly renovated flat." side of the equation. Good friends are on the other side. I could go and close my eyes and willfully ignore that, but I'm afraid that won't make the issue go away.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart. The only reason they're able to do this is because of years of fairly extreme mercantilistic policies combined with struggling economies in other parts of the EU (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and to an extent Ireland). It works out for Germany in the short- and medium-run, but it's bad for the EU as a whole. It's also bad for Germany in the long run, because even if extreme mercantilism were sustainable in a free market in the long run (spoiler: it's not), excess surplus means, by definition, that the government is underinvesting in public infrastructure. It takes a while for the effects of that to become evident, but Germany is starting to see hints of it already, and if these policies continue, it'll become much more pronounced.
  - Killes 8y ago
    Not so sure about that. Germany doesn't compete on firesale prices for its export products. Germany is amongst the top 5 richest countries whatever that means. I simply see many good and skilled workers paid way too little. How am I earning as much as a med tech with 12 years experience after being in IT proper for 2 years ? The answer lays, admitted within my limited view, in the skilled labor force simply accepting middling pays. Which is maybe harder to pull off in the IT branch it attracting more workers not ready to simply accept lower pays for their work. In the end I have colleagues with way more experience than me earning less than me simply because they asked for less...Somehow its more a kind of established cultural thing and companies / management taking good advantage of it. Lets not pretend C levels are badly paid in Germany XD.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    ...and the secret sauce of keeping rents down have been conscious efforts at keeping second and third tier cities and towns attractive for business, which distributed demand and thus kept it somewhat in check in the naturally attractive metropolitan areas. E.g. most of those small, highly specialized industry (car and other) suppliers that are the backbone of the German industry are based in cities you never heard of, that's not a coincidence but the result of careful balancing. In recent years (decades, actually), we seem to have dropped the ball in the counter-centralisation game, maybe as a consequence of reunification.
- close04 8y ago
  Sure, raise the rent -> raise the pay. What happens to the people who don't work in the dynamic IT sector? Everybody gets a raise? Doesn't this just bring everybody to the starting block only with a little more inflation? Otherwise you create an imbalance where you have affluent neighborhoods and slums, something that you definitely want to avoid. The solution is to build more housing to alleviate the pressure. This way you can keep the rents low without pumping up just a few salaries. And in a city like Berlin the situation is vastly different from SF. Public transport and biking work like a charm so housing doesn't have to be smack next to the headquarters. Companies want to reap the benefits of coming to a city with a qualified workforce but the disbenefits get to be "enjoyed" by everyone else around there. Tragedy of the commons. They should be supporting the housing market if they want a good reception. Full disclosure: I'm saying this as one of the people who enjoys such benefits while some people around me bite the bullet.
- mazesc 8y ago
  Sorry, but this argument is terrible. Look at the bay area and see how all the wages have risen. Nobody has to be homeless there because they can't afford housing anymore right?
- rlanday 8y ago
  You can't fit more people into the same amount of housing by raising everyone's pay. Either someone needs to start living with more roommates, or someone needs to get priced out and decide to leave.
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    If pay was more equal, at least opportunities to stay in your local area would be more equal. I don’t think it’s the price as an absolute that makes people angry, it’s the feeling of being unable to compete for a beloved space.
    - TulliusCicero 8y ago
      Things might be slightly better then, but if there's still X number of housing units, you're still only going to have Y number of people living there. Giving people a more even chance at winning musical chairs is nice, but how about just making more chairs?
      - Xylakant 8y ago
        This is partially at least an emotional problem which you cannot only tackle with logic. The other problem that you’ll currently see is that even if you can convince people that tearing down their house and building a new one in the same spot, they’ll often still want to be able to afford one of the new flats - and that’s currently not a given. So people understandably prefer to stick what they have. So a fundamental ability to compete is IMHO a basic requirement for building more chairs.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!" If salaries go up without housing being addressed directly, you get what's happened in SF: everyone middle-class and down being pushed out by high rent prices, because they're all competing for the same limited amount of space.
deanCommie 8y ago
B.S. You just need to re-zone massive sprawling single-family zones into mid-rises. The "american dream" of a massive house for every couple can't survive the 21st century without triggering a revolution.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  Have you been in the area? There's no single family housing there at all for quite some distance (I'd say a few kilometers in each direction at least). It's mostly densely built-up with 3-5 story apartment buildings.
  - gradys 8y ago
    I think one of you is talking about San Francisco and the other Berlin.
    - Xylakant 8y ago
      I'm talking about Berlin since the whole thing is happening in Berlin. How things are in SF is of no relevance.
      - TulliusCicero 8y ago
        Did you not read my comment?
  - driverdan 8y ago
    3-5 story isn't very tall. Tear them down and go taller.
    - ant6n 8y ago
      Firstly, the higher you build, the more space you need between buildings, and the more space inside the buildings is used for infastructure. There are diminishing returns, and it runs out that areas with good coverage of 5 story buildings can have very high density, often more than areas with high rises. Plus, Berlin likes to protect their heritage; often tearing down and rebuilding whole neighborhoods turned out to be a very bad idea.

thatfrenchguy 8y ago

Sure enough adding more housing when there is speculation works as we’ve seen in Vancouver.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
According to this, average 1br rent in Vancouver is only $1500/month, which seems pretty reasonable to me for a major city, especially one that's seen as very desirable like Vancouver: https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-vancouver-bc-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-vancouver-bc-rent... If we could get SF down to 1500/month I'd be ecstatic, that's less than half the current price.
- spuz 8y ago
  Is that USD or CAD? Also, according to that site, there has been a 32% drop in prices since last year. I wonder what the reason for that is?
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    That is strange. I could see that being currency value changes, except the 2br price has been relatively stable.

21stio 8y ago

Unfortunately, it's more profitable to speculate on the rising property prices than selling them to home builders...

usrusr 8y ago

Lack of highrise developments is what makes those areas attractive in the first place. Berlin has plenty highrise residential, yet Google and the like are decidedly avoiding those areas. Converting more of the cityscape into the kind of area where neither Google nor the protestors would want to be would make the situation worse, not better. Also, it's quite possible that you widely underestimate the existing density, this is no single family sprawl we are talking about.

Xylakant 8y ago
One of the problems in Berlin is that dense residential areas cluster at the edges of the town and office space tends to cluster at the center. So now, if you want to have an office in Berlin and are a company that has more than a handful of employees, people will come from all sides of town, so you'd preferably want office space in the center - which gradually eats up all space that could have been used for housing in the center. Old buildings that could have been refurbished into flats are turned into offices since that's currently more profitable. There's little really high-density living space in central Berlin.
- usrusr 8y ago
  Berlin has a center? Last time I checked (Sunday), it was still more like an eye of the storm kind of void. But that's perfectly consistent with your finer point, if you could somehow restrict your employees to roughly one quadrant, many things would be much easier. That will never happen of course.
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    Well, Berlin has a geographic center. It doesn’t have a center in any kind of sense that the social life happens around there, you’re right in hat regard. There’s also the mystic “Innerhalb des S-Bahn-Rings”.
checkyoursudo 8y ago
> Lack of highrise developments is what makes those areas attractive in the first place. Why? Aesthetics? Google-type people don't want to live in high-rises? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they aren't willing even to live near high-rises. That's a new one to me.

bildung 8y ago

> If the people need more housing, the solution is, shockingly enough, to build more housing. I know this is a popular opinion, but is there empirical evidence for this? Isn't this solution based on the assumption that there was a one-time surge of people, leading to a one-time rise in demand for housing?

geezerjay 8y ago
Even if if there was a surge in demand, that doesn't mean that increasing available housing does not contribute to deflate housing prices. It makes no sense to pretend that supply has no impact on housing availability, and that the only factor worth vilifying is a secondary factor affecting demand.
TulliusCicero 8y ago
Sure, take a read here: http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-high-income2/ http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-high-income2/
- bildung 8y ago
  Thanks for the link. That article only links to a single correlation study, and that study only shows what we know: if high income earners rent much of the given supply, rents for low income families increases, too. That doesn't help with the question of more housing lowering rent prices. My point was: If more housing gets built, what does high income earners prevent from moving to town and renting that, too? The article makes a fundamental error with that car market analogy, BTW. Cars are consumables that get bought to be driven by the buyer. Houses in cities are investments that are built to be rented out. Completely different market dynamics. That the author makes a grave error like this while blogging about urban planning is a bit scary. What I meant are real longitudinal studies that track rent price development and increasing supply over time, preferably in Europe, where the rent market works quite a bit differently than in the US. The vast majority of housing in Berlin is for rent.

titzer 8y ago

> This is more the fault of NIMBYs and supply&demand-denialists I don't think you quite grasp the effects of a massive influx of hundreds to thousands of new individuals making $150k-250k. It increases rent across the board, which impacts all the people in an area. Sure, it might create a few new jobs for baristas and shopkeepers, a few bartenders and waitresses. But ultimately it just leads to gentrification and prices people out of the market. It negatively affects all renters and only benefits speculators and owners in the area. You wonder why people are angry? It's because of tonedeaf responses from big companies pushing their agendas.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
> I don't think you quite grasp the effects of a massive influx of hundreds to thousands of new individuals making $150k-250k. I'm from the bay area and pay close attention to land use/zoning issues, so yeah, I think I do. The bay area has had particularly extreme series of decades of rent increases precisely because of anti-housing policies. If the market was allowed to respond, rents would still rise, to be sure, but not nearly as much. > Sure, it might create a few new jobs for baristas and shopkeepers, a few bartenders and waitresses. But ultimately it just leads to gentrification and prices people out of the market. Anchor industries succeeding in a metro also raises wages for others in that metro. But, the catch is that the wage rise may not necessarily be enough to match the increase in cost of living. The bay area (and really all coastal California) is a good example of this. Wages for a lot of random job types are higher than normal, but housing is still too expensive. > You wonder why people are angry? It's because of tonedeaf responses from big companies pushing their agendas. Companies have a basic duty to run themselves ethically and obey laws and regulations. "You created too many high-paying jobs" is a silly thing to get upset at them for, when the problem is clearly a governmental failure. Liberal US cities are neither permitting the market to create new housing, nor are they creating large amounts of public housing themselves. Their attitude amounts to, "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!" You want a solution? Look at Singapore or Vienna.
- evanlivingston 8y ago
  Or conversely, look at Portland for an example a place where keeping up with housing demand has not translated into preserving a quantity of affordable housing. Abstracted supply and demand alone does not result in ensuring housing at various price points

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago

> This is more the fault of NIMBYs and supply&demand-denialists who work hard to prevent new housing from going up. I wonder if the supply-and-demand model you're referring to is insufficient in this scenario. It sounds like political factors are at play here as well.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
I mean, in the case of SF, yes you're right. It's the laws that prevent supply & demand from working normally. Of course, even with liberalized zoning regulations, housing prices would still be higher than normal in SF. But they wouldn't be horrendously bad like they are now.

arez 8y ago

sure we want good jobs with high salaries, but these jobs are just for a minority and they will pump up the prices in the whole area. There're lots of unemployed and people with low paying jobs in berlin, some artists, students etc. they make the city vibrant, fun, adventurous, but they can't stay if you have to pay 1200€ a month for a decent flat.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
> sure we want good jobs with high salaries, but these jobs are just for a minority and they will pump up the prices in the whole area. Higher-paying-than-average jobs are for a minority pretty much by definition. Do you just want to outlaw paying people different amounts of money? > There're lots of unemployed and people with low paying jobs in berlin, some artists, students etc. they make the city vibrant, fun, adventurous, but they can't stay if you have to pay 1200€ a month for a decent flat. Agreed, which is why pro-housing policies are necessary. Make it easy for the market to build reasonably-priced housing, and have the government build housing itself.
visarga 8y ago
> they make the city vibrant, fun, adventurous, but they can't stay if you have to pay 1200€ a month for a decent flat. But they can also leave and make another city vibrant, fun and adventurous.

sdenton4 8y ago

One of my favorite spots in Berlin is the Monsterkabinett. It's an underground dungeon full of giant animatronic creatures who dance and sing along with the industrial style music of their creators. It's also a fantastic example of what's possible when you don't have to worry about rent. The space is part of an old squat, still filled with artists who now get a steady flow of tourists to sell to. And some of the artists, who don't have to worry so much about day jobs, had time to take a side project building these creatures along with software to drive them. Berlin, and kreuzberg in particular, is full of artists and rebels who moved into a war zone because they had no where to go, found a blank canvas, and made something awesome of it. Bowie did some of his best work in that environment, and it's also given us great punk music, and was an incubator for techno and edm. You can call it NIMBYism, but for Kreuzberg it's really more about fighting gentrification and displacement, and preserving a city at the edge of society. There's a fundamental difference between fighting development in the mission and presidio...

dexen 8y ago
There is no difference in kind between two hungry IT students developing better web search, and several hungry artists developing awesome dungeon of animatronics. Either start off poor, but once they get major traction, the money starts rolling in. Of course, the web search scales faster, but that's about it. Point being, the artists' den would become expensive bohemian district of the city anyway, startups or not, as "new money" people learn of it and start moving in to bask in the splendor of the underground culture. Eventually pricing out the actual artists.
- 738472527784 8y ago
  Are you saying any economically successful person is an artist, contributes to society and culture as art does? Are you saying, some billions heavy foreign company should have the same "right" to influence a region as a local art collective has? Because they are basically the same? Are you serious?
TulliusCicero 8y ago
> You can call it NIMBYism, but for Kreuzberg it's really more about fighting gentrification and displacement, and preserving a city at the edge of society. There's a fundamental difference between fighting development in the mission and presidio... SF tried "fighting" gentrification by blocking development, and it just made the problem twice as bad. Look at the results: do they look good to you? Why would you want to copy such an abysmal failure? NIMBYs are the cause of much displacement, especially of the poor. In some cases this is because of ignorance, in other cases it's greed. Either way, it's not acceptable.

carapace 8y ago

No, the data do not back that up: https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/27/rents-in-san-francisco-are-determined-by-demand-new-data-show/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/27/rents-in-san-francisc... In order for new construction to materially affect rent rate we would have to build more housing faster than it has ever been done before, for decades to come. Leaving aside the question of whether it is desirable to convert SF into another Manhattan, we could actually do it: there are modern methods to build entire new apartment buildings in forty days, etc. We could, in theory, convert the Richmond and Sunset districts from mostly single-family homes to three- and four-story apartment buildings, and do it quickly enough that rates rise slowly. Not fall, or stay static, just not rise as quickly as they are now. But still, how do the people not earning $100,000 or more afford to live there? Just building the buildings would require a sizable portion of the entire California construction industry. Where does that army live? How do all these people get into and out of the SF peninsula? You're talking about eventually two or three million people just in SF, South SF, and Daly City. How long before those teeming millions forget how much we value nature and start eyeing the Marin Headlands, or all that beautiful land south of Pacifica? San Francisco is the largest city with the most wild land around it in the world. Anyhow my point is, enough with the "Damn NIMBYs!" rhetoric already. This is a big ol problem that will take decades to sort out and the ocean will rise before that can happen, so please stop insulting your neighbors for liking their neighborhood, eh? One way or another it's not going to last, so why not let them enjoy it. You work in tech, right? You can afford to move up/inland early, beat the rush, no? You've got just enough time to stay and let your kids deal with it for you. Forgive me if that sounds harsh, I'm keeping it real: We have bigger problems than folks not liking new housing. San Francisco is at sea level.

Apocryphon 8y ago
Not to mention, earthquakes. All that tech in SF in Seattle, located at tectonic hotspots.
throwaway34241 8y ago
How do people not earning $100,000 afford to live there? They commute 2 hours each way (for real). I think it's unreasonable to expect a live-and-let live attitude to NIMBYs on online forums, while NIMBYs are pricing out the people who work in their neighborhoods through housing policy. Sure there are other issues like global warming but it's not like having a place to live is a trivial issue. It's more than reasonable for people to care or be upset about it. I'm talking mostly about the Bay Area here which I'm most familiar with, where a rule allowing you to build if you follow every law to the letter was shot down (building anything is a guaranteed long political fight), and minor things like having one apartment level above a shop are fought tooth and nail. I actually can somewhat respect the position, that young people should just move away and other places in the country need to deal with growth. But I think to do that properly, you should still zone for a proportionate amount of housing as you do office space (jobs). And if you don't want growth, do little of either. But approving lots of jobs, not zoning/approving the necessary housing, and then making excuses/blaming others as there's a shortage and prices/commutes go up - it's hard to see it as anything other than a massive political failure. Maybe calling this policy combination NIMBY is painting NIMBYs with a broad brush. But whatever you call it I think it's reasonable to be upset by it.