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See the Prop C campaign (e.g. Marc Benioff) for more insight in this issue. SF tech didn’t invent homelessness but it has clearly exacerbated it, simply by gene

See the Prop C campaign (e.g. Marc Benioff) for more insight in this issue. SF tech didn’t invent homelessness but it has clearly exacerbated it, simply by generating a lot of demand for housing. In a nutshell, the tech industry generally tries to point the finger at lack of supply and blame NIMBYS for obstructing housing construction. But this can be seen as a defensive strategy: it’s pretty clear that a sudden, massive surge of high income earners into a constrained area in the top of a peninsula with weak tenant protections will push a lot of poorer people out of their housing. It’s not only the fault of the city not to build housing fast enough. We’ve even seen “strange” effects in other boomtowns (Seattle) where building doesn’t solve the problem.[1] It’s not that strange if you truly understand economics 101. It contains the concept of price inelasticity, which one might see under boomtown conditions (insatiable demand for a necessity, essentially). But to even engage in a real economics discussion kind of misses the point. Mostly the tech industry wants to deflect blame for the problem. [1] https://knock-la.com/seattle-a-cautionary-tale-for-supply-side-housing-advocates-5b4ca5ed6d02 https://knock-la.com/seattle-a-cautionary-tale-for-supply-si...

pm90 8y ago
> simply by generating a lot of demand for housing. Oh for fucks sake. You realize this is what happens when a city becomes successful right? If you want to blame someone, its the NIMBYs: scuttling housing projects that would have eased the bubble and helped house a lot more people for reasonable prices, while benefiting from the economic successes of the companies and people moving in.
- donkeyd 8y ago
  > scuttling housing projects that would have eased the bubble and helped house a lot more people for reasonable prices Exactly this. In and around Amsterdam, housing prices are booming. The number of homeless people on the street has hardly increased, because we spend massive amounts of public funds to keep the homeless off the street and also to help them get a home. The biggest issue is graduates, that have to share houses or move out of the city. Also, it's nearly impossible to buy when you're alone.
  - abalone 8y ago
    It sounds like you’re saying something a little different though. You’re saying Amsterdam “spent massive amounts of public funds to keep homeless off the street,” not that they were able to lower market rates through more liberal building. Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.)
    - twblalock 8y ago
      > Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.) The mayor of San Francisco also opposed it. Pumping more money into a broken social services system is a pretty problematic idea and it's not like it was only tech companies opposing it.
      - abalone 8y ago
        It was mostly the tech industry putting in the money against it: Stripe, Lyft, Jack Dorsey. Arguably the mayor of SF is a puppet of the tech industry. It passed with 60%.
        jtmcmc 8y ago
        It was also the tech industry putting money for it too with Benioff. That of course discounts how the actual tech workers voted. I'd be curious to see polls on that. Anecdotally most tech workers I know supported it.
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  If I had a $2 million mortgage in SF I'd probably be a NIMBY too. Pretty much anything that increases supply of housing could wipe a million off my net worth. Low property taxes and Howard Jarvis's "taxpayer foundation" are the ultimate villains here by fighting to create this exact situation. The people who are fighting to escape being in $1 mil negative equity by going to town halls and kicking up a fuss arent necessarily deserving but they're simply reacting to incentives put in place by others.
  - abalone 8y ago
    The low property tax thing is another favorite of the tech industry to target, to deflect blame from the elephant in the room (massive insatiable demand). There is a lot of validity here: there are cases where rich property owners are not paying their fair share in taxes. But it’s often a disingenuous argument meant just to deflect responsibility. The property tax rules were originally passed to protect senior citizens from losing their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay surging tax rates. A boom happens, their house values go up, but they’re still living in fixed incomes. I literally just read a Twitter exec, on Twitter, openly say that well seniors could just sell their homes. Nice! Great solution. Just leave, old people! Or, they could just do a reverse mortgage. Sweet. Those are totally unproblematic for seniors, right?! I just watched Hell or High Water which is about two guys that become bank robbers because their mom was going to lose their home to a reverse mortgage.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      Or seniors could be allowed to defer their property taxes and convert them into a tax lien on their property, to be dealt with by the estate. You know, a simple and obvious solution. But of course, the two guys in Hell or High Water would still ultimately be SOL. That's what privilege (owning a house sitting on highly-desirable land that's probably worth millions of dollars) looks like in real life. Privilege and greed.
      - abalone 8y ago
        Did you see the movie? It was a poor family that put all their money into a house, then lost it through a reverse mortgage. “Privilege and greed” is a slapdash accusation here. Some families struggle to put their life savings into a home and don’t have anything left over for other investments. What you’re proposing is still going to place pressure on seniors to move lest they lose a lot of estate value. Basically I think you’ll find support for doing this go to rich who can afford it. But a blanket shift to liens on cash-poor seniors’ homes could end up disproportionately hurting the less fortunate.
- abalone 8y ago
  I predicted this response, right? Boomtown economics are tricky. There is just an extraordinary amount of demand that appeared in a very short time. The velocity and magnitude of the surge in demand matters. When you have an entire global population of techies that suddenly want to move to the heart of their industry, you may experience price inelasticity, which basically means you won’t see much downward movement in price. Think of it: before prices come down to affordable levels for the people you see on the street, or even service industry workers and teachers and whatnot, they would first be dirt cheap for tech. How many more tech workers would move to SF or start their companies here if they heard it was cheap now? That’s how deep the demand goes. That’s all the demand that needs to be satiated before market rates come down to where they could reverse homelessness. That’s why tech can’t just pass the buck to NIMBYS or pretend like this is any other city. We are creating some of the most valuable companies in the world here right now and it generally helps your prospects to co-locate. That creates very exceptional demand conditions.
  - mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
    Then only build new housing and not new office buildings. The government has control over which building projects are approved. If there are no jobs here, people will not move here. Technology companies do not benefit from sky-high housing prices. They'd be able to pay lower salaries if the housing wasn't so expensive. Only homeowners and landlords benefit from rising house prices.
  - pm90 8y ago
    You have good points. In a hypothetical scenario where the housing market was highly elastic, it would certainly lead to a huge movement of tech labor force to the Bay Area. But I feel like that is the way SFBA will grow. Every city has its secret sauce, for SFBA it is tech. Instead of fighting it, I can imagine a scenario where the concentration of Tech leads to a transformation of the area to be more like NYC. Or maybe it will take a different direction. As naive as it sounds, I still believe in Tech as a force for good (not Big Tech necessarily). I moved here from Austin, and folks there talk about how the tech industry is growing, but its still Satellite offices for Big Tech. The kind of talent I see in SFBA is staggering.
Kalium 8y ago
> In a nutshell, the tech industry generally tries to point the finger at lack of supply and blame NIMBYS for obstructing housing construction. But this can be seen as a defensive strategy Is it perhaps possible that there might be a distinction to be made between things that are defensive strategies and things that are factually incorrect?
twblalock 8y ago
It's not morally wrong to move to a city and purchase housing at a market rate. Nor is it the moral duty of any individual to provide or preserve affordable housing for his or her neighbors. That's the government's job. The government (and the voters) of San Francisco has reacted very badly to the influx of new people, which is happening in the context of decades of poor zoning and housing policy. I also don't buy the argument in the article you linked, because there are many other cities in the world that have successfully solved increased demand by building more housing. For example, the Tokyo metropolitan area has a population nearly the size of California's in a fairly small area but rent is cheaper than in San Francisco and it's more affordable for working-class people.
- abalone 8y ago
  You say it’s exclusively the government’s job to preserve affordable housing, not the tech industry. Ok. We just passed Prop C, a comprehensive measure to prevent homelessness. Guess who opposed it?
  - twblalock 8y ago
    > You say it’s exclusively the government’s job to preserve affordable housing, not the tech industry. Ok. We just passed Prop C, a comprehensive measure to prevent homelessness. Guess who opposed it? The mayor of San Francisco and a bunch of other individuals and businesses, including tech companies, who don't want to throw more money away pursuing the same bad policies as before. There were also major tech CEOs in favor of the measure, including Benioff who pushed hard for it. I predict that it will have very little impact on the homelessness problem or housing affordability in San Francisco.
    - abalone 8y ago
      It was mostly tech funding the opposition (Stripe, Lyft, Dorsey) and the mayor’s campaign also was funded by tech. I love how you think it’s the government’s job to solve homelessness but then don’t want to fund the government.
komali2 8y ago
But what they did was what companies are supposed to do - be extraordinarily successful. So successful that they can afford to pay their employees shitloads of money. So successful that they need to hire more and more to grow bigger and bigger. They didn't dump oil in the gulf. They didn't use shady laws to buy majority shares in a public Telecom utility. they didn't exploit the land with unsustainable crops. They sold ads on websites. So hence my theory - any issues caused by companies doing well without even being evil while doing well, is solely the fault of the government for failing to legislate properly.
gnopgnip 8y ago
Tech is a much smaller part of the SF economy than most would like to believe, and only part of why the city is prosperous. Finance, healthcare, education, government, professional services, and hospitality are all growing faster than the average in SF.
jtd514 8y ago
So build some more housing. The problems in SF are completely self caused.
licyeus 8y ago
That Knock LA article misunderstands Seattle housing, cherry-picking facts to suit its argument. The core problem is that over 80% of Seattle residential zoning is single-family, and much of the new development is concentrated where people are reluctant to live. E.g., article cites claim that two-thirds of downtown new housing development is vacant, yet ignores the source article's immediate next sentence: "thousands of new workers... are choosing to live in other neighborhoods." Most Seattleites don't want to live downtown; they prefer to live in surrounding neighborhoods: Capitol Hill, Fremont, Ballard, the Central District, etc. But those neighborhoods are mostly single-family zoning, so existing residents are either being displaced or seeing huge property tax increases (if they're lucky). A more distributed growth plan would alleviate this. Also re: "insatiable demand for a necessity". My demand for housing is one apartment and I'm fortunately sated. How many apartments do you need?

pm90 8y ago

> simply by generating a lot of demand for housing. Oh for fucks sake. You realize this is what happens when a city becomes successful right? If you want to blame someone, its the NIMBYs: scuttling housing projects that would have eased the bubble and helped house a lot more people for reasonable prices, while benefiting from the economic successes of the companies and people moving in.

donkeyd 8y ago
> scuttling housing projects that would have eased the bubble and helped house a lot more people for reasonable prices Exactly this. In and around Amsterdam, housing prices are booming. The number of homeless people on the street has hardly increased, because we spend massive amounts of public funds to keep the homeless off the street and also to help them get a home. The biggest issue is graduates, that have to share houses or move out of the city. Also, it's nearly impossible to buy when you're alone.
- abalone 8y ago
  It sounds like you’re saying something a little different though. You’re saying Amsterdam “spent massive amounts of public funds to keep homeless off the street,” not that they were able to lower market rates through more liberal building. Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.)
  - twblalock 8y ago
    > Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.) The mayor of San Francisco also opposed it. Pumping more money into a broken social services system is a pretty problematic idea and it's not like it was only tech companies opposing it.
    - abalone 8y ago
      It was mostly the tech industry putting in the money against it: Stripe, Lyft, Jack Dorsey. Arguably the mayor of SF is a puppet of the tech industry. It passed with 60%.
      - jtmcmc 8y ago
        It was also the tech industry putting money for it too with Benioff. That of course discounts how the actual tech workers voted. I'd be curious to see polls on that. Anecdotally most tech workers I know supported it.
crdoconnor 8y ago
If I had a $2 million mortgage in SF I'd probably be a NIMBY too. Pretty much anything that increases supply of housing could wipe a million off my net worth. Low property taxes and Howard Jarvis's "taxpayer foundation" are the ultimate villains here by fighting to create this exact situation. The people who are fighting to escape being in $1 mil negative equity by going to town halls and kicking up a fuss arent necessarily deserving but they're simply reacting to incentives put in place by others.
- abalone 8y ago
  The low property tax thing is another favorite of the tech industry to target, to deflect blame from the elephant in the room (massive insatiable demand). There is a lot of validity here: there are cases where rich property owners are not paying their fair share in taxes. But it’s often a disingenuous argument meant just to deflect responsibility. The property tax rules were originally passed to protect senior citizens from losing their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay surging tax rates. A boom happens, their house values go up, but they’re still living in fixed incomes. I literally just read a Twitter exec, on Twitter, openly say that well seniors could just sell their homes. Nice! Great solution. Just leave, old people! Or, they could just do a reverse mortgage. Sweet. Those are totally unproblematic for seniors, right?! I just watched Hell or High Water which is about two guys that become bank robbers because their mom was going to lose their home to a reverse mortgage.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Or seniors could be allowed to defer their property taxes and convert them into a tax lien on their property, to be dealt with by the estate. You know, a simple and obvious solution. But of course, the two guys in Hell or High Water would still ultimately be SOL. That's what privilege (owning a house sitting on highly-desirable land that's probably worth millions of dollars) looks like in real life. Privilege and greed.
    - abalone 8y ago
      Did you see the movie? It was a poor family that put all their money into a house, then lost it through a reverse mortgage. “Privilege and greed” is a slapdash accusation here. Some families struggle to put their life savings into a home and don’t have anything left over for other investments. What you’re proposing is still going to place pressure on seniors to move lest they lose a lot of estate value. Basically I think you’ll find support for doing this go to rich who can afford it. But a blanket shift to liens on cash-poor seniors’ homes could end up disproportionately hurting the less fortunate.
abalone 8y ago
I predicted this response, right? Boomtown economics are tricky. There is just an extraordinary amount of demand that appeared in a very short time. The velocity and magnitude of the surge in demand matters. When you have an entire global population of techies that suddenly want to move to the heart of their industry, you may experience price inelasticity, which basically means you won’t see much downward movement in price. Think of it: before prices come down to affordable levels for the people you see on the street, or even service industry workers and teachers and whatnot, they would first be dirt cheap for tech. How many more tech workers would move to SF or start their companies here if they heard it was cheap now? That’s how deep the demand goes. That’s all the demand that needs to be satiated before market rates come down to where they could reverse homelessness. That’s why tech can’t just pass the buck to NIMBYS or pretend like this is any other city. We are creating some of the most valuable companies in the world here right now and it generally helps your prospects to co-locate. That creates very exceptional demand conditions.
- mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
  Then only build new housing and not new office buildings. The government has control over which building projects are approved. If there are no jobs here, people will not move here. Technology companies do not benefit from sky-high housing prices. They'd be able to pay lower salaries if the housing wasn't so expensive. Only homeowners and landlords benefit from rising house prices.
- pm90 8y ago
  You have good points. In a hypothetical scenario where the housing market was highly elastic, it would certainly lead to a huge movement of tech labor force to the Bay Area. But I feel like that is the way SFBA will grow. Every city has its secret sauce, for SFBA it is tech. Instead of fighting it, I can imagine a scenario where the concentration of Tech leads to a transformation of the area to be more like NYC. Or maybe it will take a different direction. As naive as it sounds, I still believe in Tech as a force for good (not Big Tech necessarily). I moved here from Austin, and folks there talk about how the tech industry is growing, but its still Satellite offices for Big Tech. The kind of talent I see in SFBA is staggering.

Kalium 8y ago

> In a nutshell, the tech industry generally tries to point the finger at lack of supply and blame NIMBYS for obstructing housing construction. But this can be seen as a defensive strategy Is it perhaps possible that there might be a distinction to be made between things that are defensive strategies and things that are factually incorrect?

twblalock 8y ago

It's not morally wrong to move to a city and purchase housing at a market rate. Nor is it the moral duty of any individual to provide or preserve affordable housing for his or her neighbors. That's the government's job. The government (and the voters) of San Francisco has reacted very badly to the influx of new people, which is happening in the context of decades of poor zoning and housing policy. I also don't buy the argument in the article you linked, because there are many other cities in the world that have successfully solved increased demand by building more housing. For example, the Tokyo metropolitan area has a population nearly the size of California's in a fairly small area but rent is cheaper than in San Francisco and it's more affordable for working-class people.

abalone 8y ago
You say it’s exclusively the government’s job to preserve affordable housing, not the tech industry. Ok. We just passed Prop C, a comprehensive measure to prevent homelessness. Guess who opposed it?
- twblalock 8y ago
  > You say it’s exclusively the government’s job to preserve affordable housing, not the tech industry. Ok. We just passed Prop C, a comprehensive measure to prevent homelessness. Guess who opposed it? The mayor of San Francisco and a bunch of other individuals and businesses, including tech companies, who don't want to throw more money away pursuing the same bad policies as before. There were also major tech CEOs in favor of the measure, including Benioff who pushed hard for it. I predict that it will have very little impact on the homelessness problem or housing affordability in San Francisco.
  - abalone 8y ago
    It was mostly tech funding the opposition (Stripe, Lyft, Dorsey) and the mayor’s campaign also was funded by tech. I love how you think it’s the government’s job to solve homelessness but then don’t want to fund the government.

komali2 8y ago

But what they did was what companies are supposed to do - be extraordinarily successful. So successful that they can afford to pay their employees shitloads of money. So successful that they need to hire more and more to grow bigger and bigger. They didn't dump oil in the gulf. They didn't use shady laws to buy majority shares in a public Telecom utility. they didn't exploit the land with unsustainable crops. They sold ads on websites. So hence my theory - any issues caused by companies doing well without even being evil while doing well, is solely the fault of the government for failing to legislate properly.

gnopgnip 8y ago

Tech is a much smaller part of the SF economy than most would like to believe, and only part of why the city is prosperous. Finance, healthcare, education, government, professional services, and hospitality are all growing faster than the average in SF.

jtd514 8y ago

So build some more housing. The problems in SF are completely self caused.

licyeus 8y ago

That Knock LA article misunderstands Seattle housing, cherry-picking facts to suit its argument. The core problem is that over 80% of Seattle residential zoning is single-family, and much of the new development is concentrated where people are reluctant to live. E.g., article cites claim that two-thirds of downtown new housing development is vacant, yet ignores the source article's immediate next sentence: "thousands of new workers... are choosing to live in other neighborhoods." Most Seattleites don't want to live downtown; they prefer to live in surrounding neighborhoods: Capitol Hill, Fremont, Ballard, the Central District, etc. But those neighborhoods are mostly single-family zoning, so existing residents are either being displaced or seeing huge property tax increases (if they're lucky). A more distributed growth plan would alleviate this. Also re: "insatiable demand for a necessity". My demand for housing is one apartment and I'm fortunately sated. How many apartments do you need?