7 ms·

After recently getting back from Portland, it couldn't be more painfully obvious that the entire problem comes down to housing. They are building new (affordabl

After recently getting back from Portland, it couldn't be more painfully obvious that the entire problem comes down to housing. They are building new (affordable!) apartments there like nothing I've ever seen. You literally can't walk two or three blocks without seeing a construction crane. And the local culture reflects that. So many business that simply could not exist in SF were thriving due to the cheap labor and plentiful customer base of 20 somethings that can actually afford to live on their own in the city.

xefer 8y ago
It’s also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable.
- graeme 8y ago
  "There's so much crime that no amount of crime reduction will eliminate it" "There's so much corruption that no amount of anti-corruption drives will eliminate it" "There's so much alcoholism that no amount of alcoholism reduction will eliminate alcoholism"
  - true_tuna 8y ago
    That was my knee-jerk reaction too, but if you read the comment carefully you’ll see “truly affordable”. That’s the key. If we keep doing what we’re doing now, affordability gets worse. If we build at a fevered pace we might be able to keep up with migration and keep prices where they are. Building enough to bring prices down in the Bay Area enough to make it truly affordable is probably not feasible. It’ll take a combination of rapid building and another crash to do that. Or the complete destruction of the tech industry. But it’s unlikely we’ll convince people to allow even a little bit more building, let alone the lots more we’d need to stop the rising prices.
- true_tuna 8y ago
  That is correct. It’s unlikely we could ever bring the prices down. But if we build new housing for every new job we create, we can at least stop the bleeding and keep it from getting worse. And it will get worse. More people keep coming because there are jobs here. The problem will keep getting worse till we build enough to keep up with migration in.
- rsync 8y ago
  "It’s also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable." I am an SFBA (Marin) resident with a fairly large financial and personal interest in the health and welfare of the city of San Francisco - so this is something I think a lot about. I think your point is interesting and should be considered. Obviously it isn't literally true - clearly there would be a point at which enough housing could be built in San Francisco to hit any arbitrary affordability number. However, it's worth considering that any politically and physically feasible[1] amount of development might not satisfy the latent demand, nationwide, for a house in San Francisco. It is not inconceivable that there are literally 2 million people in the US that would like to immediately move to SF if housing prices were in line with, say, Minneapolis or Denver. I also think there might be a corollary to this with regard to homelessness in the state of California. I have read with great interest about the successful "house the homeless" projects that have been implemented in places like Salt Lake City which appear to suggest that you can solve a cities homelessness problem by building enough units to house that population. But what if there are (essentially, not literally) an unlimited number of people willing to be homeless in California ? What if the Salt Lake program really only works because it gets cold and snowy there and, really, there are only so many people willing to be homeless there and you can, in fact, house them all ? If either of those are the case, I don't know what a good solution looks like. [1] Including the time dimension ...
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    I think this effect is a bit more understated for the Bay Area, because San Francisco is only really desirable domestically, and that’s a function of jobs, which the Bay already accommodates by incentivizing commercial over residential development. But there’s a realistic cap to that; eventually industrial boomtowns like Pittsburgh and Chicago reached a more steady rate of growth, and I would expect San Francisco to do the same. The real places this effect kicks in are global status cities like New York or London, where it’s a status symbol in every country’s elite class to have a vacation home there. It may actually be impossible to supply both foreign and domestic demand for residential via the market.
  - davidw 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lmeyerov 8y ago
  If only half city that could be rezoned from 1 story houses, get some subway lines, and be paid for by taxing the richest people & companies in the world... Oh wait.
simook 8y ago
As exciting as this is to see. It's hard for me to watch Portland change into a different city. I think the hardest aspect right now is the amount of trash that is being thrown aside in the roads, parks, and greenways. I was born and raised in this area and it's been tough for me to witness this beautiful city being treated that way. If you want to help clean up Portland, I strongly recommend volunteering with the SOLVE Organization. I hope Portland will continue to be a beautiful city for my children to enjoy.
- davidw 8y ago
  I definitely hope we can keep Oregon 'green'! > I hope Portland will continue to be a beautiful city for my children to enjoy. To bring it back to housing, Portland might be a place your children can enjoy because they could actually afford to live there, unlike much of the bay area.
  - throwaway3451 8y ago
    "To bring it back to housing" ellides the important point GP made. They even acknowledged the excitement and advantages of growth, but pointed out some of the cost as well. If you want to advocate, don't blind yourself to those of us sensitive to the literal trash, noise, and other side-effects of growth. With wealth comes illth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illth Your personal utility function may make you less sensitive to this particular illth, but it's a consideration nonetheless. EDIT - I see you edited in a first sentence to acknowledge. Thanks - I'll let this comment stand because I think it's an important point, but appreciate your attempt to balance. Growth is good, but sustainable clean humane growth should be the real ideal - I'm not convinced modern urban design is really up to that.
    - davidw 8y ago
      Whether people throw their shit on the ground is more of a cultural thing than an 'urban design' thing. In terms of sustainability, it's not that hard: denser, less carbon-intensive living, where people can walk, bike and take transit, beats sprawl hands down. People have been making cities like that for thousands of years. What changed is our 'suburban experiment': https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
davidw 8y ago
Here are statistics showing that, indeed, rental prices are leveling off in Portland because supply has been added: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons-housing-supply/ https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons-housin... BTW, anyone who wants to see more homes and more housing options in Oregon should vocally support HB 2001. Our YIMBY group here in Bend just had a meeting with our state rep about it and it went pretty well. It's a practical, market-based approach to add housing, and add to the diversity of housing.
randomacct3847 8y ago
For context, the cheapest market price condo for sale in SF I could find today is a micro studio in SoMa (~260 sq ft) for $445k!
- echelon 8y ago
  Damn! I've got a 2000 sqft condo in Atlanta with 20 foot ceilings that costs less than that. The land is utilized much better here. I'm in an eight story converted factory (each condo is two stories) from the 1800s. If we just had single story homes, prices would be a nightmare. I work for a tech company based in sf making the same wages as my peers in sf do. It's not scary to leave sf for elsewhere.
  - randomacct3847 8y ago
    Yes, though if you bought the studio as an investment property I am seeing month-to-month sublets in that building go for $3500-$3800/month.
chaostheory 8y ago
Would love to move to the northwest, but the low vaccination rate makes us think twice
- rdiddly 8y ago
  If you and yours are vaccinated, what would that matter?
  - noahmoss 8y ago
    Vaccines rely on herd immunity to be effective. Even vaccinate individuals can contract a disease (or a different strain of one) if enough people are unvaccinated in the community.
  - pfooti 8y ago
    Babies cannot be vaccinated for a while and therefore benefit from herd immunity. Furthermore, that herd immunity benefits you if your immunization wears off before your scheduled booster shots. And everyone remembers to get their mmr booster every seven years, right?
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      What booster? The CDC makes no mention of one[1], and my understanding has always been that the childhood course is lifetime. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html
  - chaostheory 8y ago
    I'm not going to repeat what others have commented. They're right. Another issue for me is culture. While I love US northwestern culture, I need to live in a culture that values science and scientific thinking based on data. This is one thing that is non-negotiable for me.
bojackstorkman 8y ago
I find this post interesting. I moved out of Portland last year because I was summarily priced out of the city. By "Portland" are you including Gresham/Milwaukie/Beaverton in your estimation? About seven years ago my friends and I got a 2bd 1.5br apartment for $775 per month in SW Portland. That same apartment is now about double that. In many of the new or renovated buildings you can see a lot of studio apartments with a price floor of $1,300 per month. Also, little things like a beer that used to cost $2.09 now costs $4.19. What used to be a $4 sandwich is now $7.25, $1.60 tacos went up to about $3. Even prices for stuff like clothing at Goodwill went up significantly over the years that I lived in Portland. I know this is just my personal experience (and that of my friends), but the genral trend that I saw was an enormous shift to accomodate higher income individuals and families, and an exodus of lower income people all over the place.
- sizzle 8y ago
  Where are all the new high paying jobs to support higher cost of living though?

xefer 8y ago

It’s also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable.

graeme 8y ago
"There's so much crime that no amount of crime reduction will eliminate it" "There's so much corruption that no amount of anti-corruption drives will eliminate it" "There's so much alcoholism that no amount of alcoholism reduction will eliminate alcoholism"
- true_tuna 8y ago
  That was my knee-jerk reaction too, but if you read the comment carefully you’ll see “truly affordable”. That’s the key. If we keep doing what we’re doing now, affordability gets worse. If we build at a fevered pace we might be able to keep up with migration and keep prices where they are. Building enough to bring prices down in the Bay Area enough to make it truly affordable is probably not feasible. It’ll take a combination of rapid building and another crash to do that. Or the complete destruction of the tech industry. But it’s unlikely we’ll convince people to allow even a little bit more building, let alone the lots more we’d need to stop the rising prices.
true_tuna 8y ago
That is correct. It’s unlikely we could ever bring the prices down. But if we build new housing for every new job we create, we can at least stop the bleeding and keep it from getting worse. And it will get worse. More people keep coming because there are jobs here. The problem will keep getting worse till we build enough to keep up with migration in.
rsync 8y ago
"It’s also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable." I am an SFBA (Marin) resident with a fairly large financial and personal interest in the health and welfare of the city of San Francisco - so this is something I think a lot about. I think your point is interesting and should be considered. Obviously it isn't literally true - clearly there would be a point at which enough housing could be built in San Francisco to hit any arbitrary affordability number. However, it's worth considering that any politically and physically feasible[1] amount of development might not satisfy the latent demand, nationwide, for a house in San Francisco. It is not inconceivable that there are literally 2 million people in the US that would like to immediately move to SF if housing prices were in line with, say, Minneapolis or Denver. I also think there might be a corollary to this with regard to homelessness in the state of California. I have read with great interest about the successful "house the homeless" projects that have been implemented in places like Salt Lake City which appear to suggest that you can solve a cities homelessness problem by building enough units to house that population. But what if there are (essentially, not literally) an unlimited number of people willing to be homeless in California ? What if the Salt Lake program really only works because it gets cold and snowy there and, really, there are only so many people willing to be homeless there and you can, in fact, house them all ? If either of those are the case, I don't know what a good solution looks like. [1] Including the time dimension ...
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  I think this effect is a bit more understated for the Bay Area, because San Francisco is only really desirable domestically, and that’s a function of jobs, which the Bay already accommodates by incentivizing commercial over residential development. But there’s a realistic cap to that; eventually industrial boomtowns like Pittsburgh and Chicago reached a more steady rate of growth, and I would expect San Francisco to do the same. The real places this effect kicks in are global status cities like New York or London, where it’s a status symbol in every country’s elite class to have a vacation home there. It may actually be impossible to supply both foreign and domestic demand for residential via the market.
- davidw 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lmeyerov 8y ago
If only half city that could be rezoned from 1 story houses, get some subway lines, and be paid for by taxing the richest people & companies in the world... Oh wait.

simook 8y ago

As exciting as this is to see. It's hard for me to watch Portland change into a different city. I think the hardest aspect right now is the amount of trash that is being thrown aside in the roads, parks, and greenways. I was born and raised in this area and it's been tough for me to witness this beautiful city being treated that way. If you want to help clean up Portland, I strongly recommend volunteering with the SOLVE Organization. I hope Portland will continue to be a beautiful city for my children to enjoy.

davidw 8y ago
I definitely hope we can keep Oregon 'green'! > I hope Portland will continue to be a beautiful city for my children to enjoy. To bring it back to housing, Portland might be a place your children can enjoy because they could actually afford to live there, unlike much of the bay area.
- throwaway3451 8y ago
  "To bring it back to housing" ellides the important point GP made. They even acknowledged the excitement and advantages of growth, but pointed out some of the cost as well. If you want to advocate, don't blind yourself to those of us sensitive to the literal trash, noise, and other side-effects of growth. With wealth comes illth - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illth Your personal utility function may make you less sensitive to this particular illth, but it's a consideration nonetheless. EDIT - I see you edited in a first sentence to acknowledge. Thanks - I'll let this comment stand because I think it's an important point, but appreciate your attempt to balance. Growth is good, but sustainable clean humane growth should be the real ideal - I'm not convinced modern urban design is really up to that.
  - davidw 8y ago
    Whether people throw their shit on the ground is more of a cultural thing than an 'urban design' thing. In terms of sustainability, it's not that hard: denser, less carbon-intensive living, where people can walk, bike and take transit, beats sprawl hands down. People have been making cities like that for thousands of years. What changed is our 'suburban experiment': https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...

davidw 8y ago

Here are statistics showing that, indeed, rental prices are leveling off in Portland because supply has been added: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons-housing-supply/ https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons-housin... BTW, anyone who wants to see more homes and more housing options in Oregon should vocally support HB 2001. Our YIMBY group here in Bend just had a meeting with our state rep about it and it went pretty well. It's a practical, market-based approach to add housing, and add to the diversity of housing.

randomacct3847 8y ago

For context, the cheapest market price condo for sale in SF I could find today is a micro studio in SoMa (~260 sq ft) for $445k!

echelon 8y ago
Damn! I've got a 2000 sqft condo in Atlanta with 20 foot ceilings that costs less than that. The land is utilized much better here. I'm in an eight story converted factory (each condo is two stories) from the 1800s. If we just had single story homes, prices would be a nightmare. I work for a tech company based in sf making the same wages as my peers in sf do. It's not scary to leave sf for elsewhere.
- randomacct3847 8y ago
  Yes, though if you bought the studio as an investment property I am seeing month-to-month sublets in that building go for $3500-$3800/month.

chaostheory 8y ago

Would love to move to the northwest, but the low vaccination rate makes us think twice

rdiddly 8y ago
If you and yours are vaccinated, what would that matter?
- noahmoss 8y ago
  Vaccines rely on herd immunity to be effective. Even vaccinate individuals can contract a disease (or a different strain of one) if enough people are unvaccinated in the community.
- pfooti 8y ago
  Babies cannot be vaccinated for a while and therefore benefit from herd immunity. Furthermore, that herd immunity benefits you if your immunization wears off before your scheduled booster shots. And everyone remembers to get their mmr booster every seven years, right?
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    What booster? The CDC makes no mention of one[1], and my understanding has always been that the childhood course is lifetime. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html
- chaostheory 8y ago
  I'm not going to repeat what others have commented. They're right. Another issue for me is culture. While I love US northwestern culture, I need to live in a culture that values science and scientific thinking based on data. This is one thing that is non-negotiable for me.

bojackstorkman 8y ago

I find this post interesting. I moved out of Portland last year because I was summarily priced out of the city. By "Portland" are you including Gresham/Milwaukie/Beaverton in your estimation? About seven years ago my friends and I got a 2bd 1.5br apartment for $775 per month in SW Portland. That same apartment is now about double that. In many of the new or renovated buildings you can see a lot of studio apartments with a price floor of $1,300 per month. Also, little things like a beer that used to cost $2.09 now costs $4.19. What used to be a $4 sandwich is now $7.25, $1.60 tacos went up to about $3. Even prices for stuff like clothing at Goodwill went up significantly over the years that I lived in Portland. I know this is just my personal experience (and that of my friends), but the genral trend that I saw was an enormous shift to accomodate higher income individuals and families, and an exodus of lower income people all over the place.

sizzle 8y ago
Where are all the new high paying jobs to support higher cost of living though?