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You’re forgetting the all important factor of tech-boom fueled demand. Pretty major omission there. Also, means testing is not the only way of providing servic

• closeparen 8y ago
  The runaway success of an economy bringing lots of people to an urban area is not some sort of world-historical anomaly. Economic growth built practically every city on the map, and endowed many more than San Francisco with large professional services sectors. We should be interested in how they've dealt with these issues. Across the US, massive and centralized public housing complexes, for example, became catastrophic sociological failures. We probably shouldn't repeat those. Which is why we intersperse affordable housing in luxury buildings instead of doing towers in the park. In New York, price controls fell apart, but the region stays affordable through an effective train network serving places with lower land prices. Could that be a better ROI? In Germany, rent controls are widely successful at stabilizing people's lives while development catches up with demand. Are there examples of rent controls working well without the catch-up development? Centrally planned housing assignments are not self-evidently the best way to solve this problem. They could be! But other cities in the world have faced these pressures and come out okay. Mostly by letting their built environments grow. Let's learn from them.