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This is a false dichotomy. I call BS on your “fine with zero development” claim based on your “experience.” The most development in SF has happened in Jane Kim’

This is a false dichotomy. I call BS on your “fine with zero development” claim based on your “experience.” The most development in SF has happened in Jane Kim’s district who is a leading affordable housing activist. Under inelastic pricing conditions simply building more market rate housing alone will not alleviate the crisis of the working class. The only solution is to build and protect affordable housing.

closeparen 8y ago
It's not a false dichotomy because it's not a dichotomy. Getting more housing of either type requires building more of both types. We don't build market rate housing alone, we build it in projects that are 10-25% price-controlled. Concerns about "simply building more market rate housing alone" are irrelevant here. What gets us more price controlled housing is more market rate housing. The question is not which type we will build, but how much, and where. All San Francisco, including District 6, saw a net growth of 4,441 housing units in 2017 [0]. It needed more like 10-20x that just to tread water. So effectively zero. The battleground now is to increase the zoned capacity across the board, so that net-new hybrid housing stock has somewhere to go at scale. [0] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/17/17247340/san-francisco-housing-inventory-2017-2018-new-construction https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/17/17247340/san-francisco-housi...
- abalone 8y ago
  “Percentage vs quantity” is explicitly a dichotomy and you misrepresent what affordable housing activists are comfortable with. We can agree that height limits are an opportunity to negotiate for affordable housing. I’d further suggest we prefer development in neighborhoods with less rent controlled housing so as to minimize the impact on existing affordable housing.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    So we built a paltry 4,400 in the past, let's shoot for 44,000 units next year. At the already-negotiated 18% BMR, that's 7,920 price-controlled units, a massive increase in affordable housing capacity.
    - abalone 8y ago
      This line of reasoning is too simplistic. You have to look at the economic effects of the other 36,080 new high income earners, who will create new service industry jobs and thus place more pressure on afffordable housing. The BMR percentage may need to be substantially higher than that to relieve the restaurant crisis.
      - closeparen 8y ago
        And that is exactly the volume vs. percentage schism I'm talking about. You're taking an increase in volume as something the other side wants, a concession that might be made in exchange for something you want. Market rate housing does not spontaneously generate high income workers. Industry recruits them, regardless of housing construction. Those tens of thousands of workers are coming either way; the variable that can be controlled here is whether they gentrify existing buildings or divert to new ones. They're going to create more affordable-housing need by displacing people in existing units than they would in infill.
      - pcwalton 8y ago
        And if the BMR ratio goes up so high that projects don't pencil out anymore, then what? Do you agree that there is a limit at which developers will just refuse to build more housing, affordable or not?
pcwalton 8y ago
> The most development in SF has happened in Jane Kim’s district who is a leading affordable housing activist. Yeah, until Jane Kim raised the affordable housing percentage so high that the pipeline is now virtually stopped, in a bid to (unsuccessfully, I might add) try to win an election against Scott Wiener.

closeparen 8y ago

It's not a false dichotomy because it's not a dichotomy. Getting more housing of either type requires building more of both types. We don't build market rate housing alone, we build it in projects that are 10-25% price-controlled. Concerns about "simply building more market rate housing alone" are irrelevant here. What gets us more price controlled housing is more market rate housing. The question is not which type we will build, but how much, and where. All San Francisco, including District 6, saw a net growth of 4,441 housing units in 2017 [0]. It needed more like 10-20x that just to tread water. So effectively zero. The battleground now is to increase the zoned capacity across the board, so that net-new hybrid housing stock has somewhere to go at scale. [0] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/17/17247340/san-francisco-housing-inventory-2017-2018-new-construction https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/17/17247340/san-francisco-housi...

abalone 8y ago
“Percentage vs quantity” is explicitly a dichotomy and you misrepresent what affordable housing activists are comfortable with. We can agree that height limits are an opportunity to negotiate for affordable housing. I’d further suggest we prefer development in neighborhoods with less rent controlled housing so as to minimize the impact on existing affordable housing.
- closeparen 8y ago
  So we built a paltry 4,400 in the past, let's shoot for 44,000 units next year. At the already-negotiated 18% BMR, that's 7,920 price-controlled units, a massive increase in affordable housing capacity.
  - abalone 8y ago
    This line of reasoning is too simplistic. You have to look at the economic effects of the other 36,080 new high income earners, who will create new service industry jobs and thus place more pressure on afffordable housing. The BMR percentage may need to be substantially higher than that to relieve the restaurant crisis.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      And that is exactly the volume vs. percentage schism I'm talking about. You're taking an increase in volume as something the other side wants, a concession that might be made in exchange for something you want. Market rate housing does not spontaneously generate high income workers. Industry recruits them, regardless of housing construction. Those tens of thousands of workers are coming either way; the variable that can be controlled here is whether they gentrify existing buildings or divert to new ones. They're going to create more affordable-housing need by displacing people in existing units than they would in infill.
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      And if the BMR ratio goes up so high that projects don't pencil out anymore, then what? Do you agree that there is a limit at which developers will just refuse to build more housing, affordable or not?

pcwalton 8y ago

> The most development in SF has happened in Jane Kim’s district who is a leading affordable housing activist. Yeah, until Jane Kim raised the affordable housing percentage so high that the pipeline is now virtually stopped, in a bid to (unsuccessfully, I might add) try to win an election against Scott Wiener.