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San Francisco legislators' complete inability to understand economics never fails to amaze me. There are twenty different taxes and bonds proposed every single

San Francisco legislators' complete inability to understand economics never fails to amaze me. There are twenty different taxes and bonds proposed every single year by the city to "build affordable housing." And every year, that money is squandered in regulation and red tape, while housing prices continue to rise. The issue here is, first and foremost, supply and demand. San Francisco has made the process of building new housing so incredibly onerous that, once a developer finally succeeds in erecting a building, the only ones they can sell to are the wealthy. If it was easier to build in SF, with less regulation, less restrictive zoning, and less expense, then housing would be built for the middle class. Then, the city could apply affordable housing policies to reserve units in middle income buildings, and the housing crisis could be averted. But instead, our legislature continually enacts nonsense like this, which accomplishes little beyond rabble rousing.

hellllllllooo 7y ago
It might effectivly reduce demand.
- halflings 7y ago
  How? How many people would not come to the Bay Area because they might get taxed if they IPO?
  - hellllllllooo 7y ago
    People move to SF to work. If companies decide to start elsewhere it spreads out demand for housing.
  - eanzenberg 7y ago
    No, they would not move to SF when less SF jobs are created due to this law.
    - davidw 7y ago
      Ah, the "North Korea" strategy to make San Francisco affordable. Yeah, that would probably work. Kind of a roundabout way of doing things with a lot of other bad consequences, though.
    - perseusmandate 7y ago
      Great idea- let's just ban the jobs while we are at it and the problem will be solved
      - hellllllllooo 7y ago
        Supply and demand issues can be addressed at both ends. The US is a large place and only a few cities have these issues. What's wrong with the jobs being elsewhere in the US in cities with more capacity if people are moving to the jobs anyway?
  - jdavis703 7y ago
    I moved to California despite the high taxes. In doing so I was able to go from earning $55k per year to $150k a year. No amount of tax cuts would have given me that income boost. As long as people can make more after-tax money in SF and California than everywhere else the place will remain competitive. Now, I’m not endorsing this particular tax proposal, just merely defending the general high tax policies here. Edit: I probably spend about $40/month on transportation. I do not own a car and bike to work and most other places. I spend $2700/month (market rate rent, no rent control) for a 1 bedroom apartment in a very walkable location. While the cost of living is higher, it's not so high as to make my life in the Bay Area worse than back home.
    - kfriede 7y ago
      Simply knowing salary tells us almost nothing about the benefit(s) of your move. How much more/less do you spend on: * Vehicle Registration, Public Transportation, Gas * Housing (rent/mortgage) * Sales tax * Etc. The housing is a huge factor, given that 30% of $55k is $1300/mo (A decent house in most of America), yet 30% of 150k is $3750/mo (A nice cardboard box in the bay area)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - alain94040 7y ago
        Sure, but the numbers still favor the bay area if you are a software engineer: https://thestartupconference.com/2018/09/21/about-that-silicon-valley-job/ https://thestartupconference.com/2018/09/21/about-that-silic...
        souprock 7y ago
        No, they favor the bay area if you are a software engineer who is willing to sacrifice quality of life. That article starts off with this horrific line: "rent a room and move in with some friends". OMG. That is the sad situation we might expect for an unskilled high school drop-out with a felony conviction. That article continues on with "Start a Family [...] It’s been 10 years". It is indeed common that people in high-cost areas feel unable to start families earlier, but that isn't something to just accept as normal. It is better to have kids when you have energy for them and when birth is safer. Starting earlier also allows for the possibility that you might end up wanting a larger family than you had initially expected. For example, I sure didn't imagine I'd be having 12, but that probably could not have happened in the Bay Area. In 10 years, one ought to have paid off a house. The article mentions college, which can be had cheaply, but neglects to mention private schooling. Normally this would be the larger expense by far. The "middle of nowhere" comparison also seems a bit low for salary. It might be right if you tossed a dart at a map of the USA to determine your location, but not if you chose a low-cost area with a suitable industry.
shard972 7y ago
While at the same time they have declared themselves a sanctuary city for all to come seek refuge. Hard to drop housing prices when despite internal negative net migration, you are still growing in population.
throwing838383 7y ago
can someone please pin this at the top of every housing related post?
eanzenberg 7y ago
That would only solve part of the problem. There’s still the influx of homeless from outside the city and state to deal with.
- jordonwii 7y ago
  Do you have source for calling it an "influx"? According to the city's annual survey (from 2017)[1], 70% of the current homeless population lived in SF county before becoming homeless, 21% lived in another CA county (which may include, say, Berkeley or Oakland), and only 10% came from outside CA. I'd hardly call 10% of the current homeless population an influx. [1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Point-in-Time-Count-General-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    Isn’t this based on self-answered surveys and not hard verifiable information to establish residency? The homeless and activists/nonprofits advocating on their behalf have an incentive to make it look like they’re mostly local.
    - jordonwii 7y ago
      > Isn’t this based on self-answered surveys and not hard verifiable information to establish residency? True, though collecting hard verifiable proof of prior residency from homeless folks seems beyond what can be expected from a one-day citywide survey. :) If you know of a survey that did collect that information, I'd certainly be interested in the results. > The homeless and activists/nonprofits advocating on their behalf have an incentive to make it look like they’re mostly local. I suppose a high out-of-county population might make locals stingier, but getting caught providing bad data also seems like a pretty bad outcome for any of the local non-profits that helped conduct the survey.
    - nerfhammer 7y ago
      Is there any systematic evidence of the oft-repeated idea that homeless are being bussed in from every corner of the country? Besides an anecdotal case or two? If not, why should we believe that it happens with any degree of frequency? Do you believe that estimates of the total counts of homeless people might be more or less accurate, since there's no supposed incentive for activists to discount it? SF's homelessness per capita is actually not particularly high compared to other major cities, which is not at all what you would expect if homeless were swarming en masse to SF from those other places: https://medium.com/hatchbeat/homelessness-a-tale-of-three-cities-d81ee1c7de02 https://medium.com/hatchbeat/homelessness-a-tale-of-three-ci... . What's really high in SF and other West Coast cities is the percent of unsheltered homeless. It may be that it only seems like there are more of them because they are more visible because besides SF's dislike of building housing they also don't build sufficient homeless shelters: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...
pbourke 7y ago
How to make housing more affordable: 1) cut red tape 2) relax zoning requirements. Both are politically unpalatable, so around and around we go appropriating money that governments don’t even know what to do with.
- halbritt 7y ago
  Are there historical instances of 1) and 2)being successful in reducing housing prices in a high-demand area?
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Reducing, maybe not, but stabilizing, definitely. Look at most major cities in Japan, they keep building new apartment towers all the time and prices are more or less stable. Tokyo is an exception right now because of the olympics bubble.
  - haroldp 7y ago
    Yes, Tokyo Japan: http://archive.is/pVrex#selection-1755.0-1755.64 http://archive.is/pVrex#selection-1755.0-1755.64
    - halbritt 7y ago
      Excellent example. I was reminded of this video as well when Tokyo was mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w
  - jpadkins 7y ago
    https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/ https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/ https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/houston/2008/hb0801.pdf https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/houston... Houston is a nice natural experiment on zoning laws impact on affordable housing. I believe Houston has more net immigration that SF or Seattle, but has much more affordable housing.
baddox 7y ago
To the extent that economics is about how incentives influence behavior, to assume that SF legislators don’t understand economics is itself probably a misunderstanding of economics.
- ladberg 7y ago
  There are people working for the City of SF who know economics, but that doesn't mean the people passing the laws do. I took an urban economics class taught by Ted Egan, the chief in-house economist for the City of SF, who knows pretty much everything about the subject and if he was put in charge of housing laws for the city I am certain housing quality and quantity would improve. However, he and people like him don't get to pass the laws. Instead, we have extremely vocal NIMBYs who lobby to get laws passed that benefit the rich minority of residents and harm everyone else.
  - brianwawok 7y ago
    > benefit the rich minority of residents and harm everyone else But is that true? As a Midwesterner, I have no skin in the game. But is it ever OK for city to say "We like the size we are, we don't want drop zoning and turn our entire coastal town into 100 story mega-skyscrapers?" I don't think the end game of every city has to be to become Tokyo. As prices rise, more industry moves out of the city. Seems like a valid case for a local resident to want?
    - ZainRiz 7y ago
      +1 to that (and I don't live in California either) It seems more like the proponents of cheap housing want to encourage lots of people to move into the city (which is how the existing supply becomes insufficient), at the expense of the people who were already living there. Though what I haven't been able to understand is why these groups are not in favor of creating housing further off where the land is cheaper? In the bay area why is "goodness" only measured in distance from downtown? This is a sincere question, I'd love to understand.
      - 7y ago
outside1234 7y ago
Oh they understand. They are not actually trying to solve the problem, but inflate the problem. They own real estate, the regulations give them a lever to get contributions from developers, higher property prices equals higher tax revenue, and doing something dumb like this IPO stunt makes foolish property-less people think that they are on the same side of them. They are not -- they are on the side of property prices going up.
- robertAngst 7y ago
  Apply this to Federal Healthcare. Physicians want to get paid 300k/yr. Pharma is obsolete by computers and paid over 100k/yr. Not to mention the pharma companies and hospitals. Its why healthcare only gets worse with legislation.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Pharmacy is obsolete by computers? Not yet, it's not. I mean, retail pharmacy, maybe, mostly, but all of pharmacy? No. And pharma companies? You think computers are going to automate drug discovery? Not for a long time, they won't.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    To be fair, many physicians went into significant debt based on an ROI of making $300k a year.
    - germinalphrase 7y ago
      Maybe that too is a problem.
      - bdcravens 7y ago
        I've long held that if you want to get healthcare costs under control, if you end up impacting provider salaries, you have to tackle the education side of the equation as well.
      - 7y ago
adrr 7y ago
vote them out then. People complain about their local politicians but no effort to remove them from office like donating money, or volunteering.
- cubecul 7y ago
  It's not that simple in SF. Lots and lots of neighborhood associations and local groups like that who are really loud and who hold a lot more power than their equivalents in other cities. There's a whole infrastructure on one half of the political spectrum in SF that you have to defeat.
- mc32 7y ago
  It’s a one party town. Whoever you vote in does the same as the previous supe. They’re into high-profile, low-impact pet projects the likes of which are reminiscent of ideas high school students would propose to solve issues. Ban plastic straws, but don’t prosecute people who defecate on the street. That’s SF politics. Nothing of consequence happens except when something has the potential to propel them into state politics, and again it’s a high viz low impact issue.
  - bruceb 7y ago
    I dont want people defecating in the streets either, but how you going to prosecute that? If you have reached that level, do you care about a fine you cant pay? Is govt going to fine them the $250 they dont have? Also where are they supposed to go to the bathroom, not like there are many readily available in SF, especially at night.
    - chrisdhoover 7y ago
      There is a theory that says the cheap plastic bags were reused to contain shit. Now with the bag ban the shit is on the streets.
  - bassman9000 7y ago
    It’s a one party town. We got what we deserve, then.
dgzl 7y ago
As a fourth-gen Southern Oregonian, my family is perpetually irritated that Californian policies eventually end up here as well.
abalone 7y ago
Do you have sources for these claims? I feel this narrative is often repeated on HN and it becomes kind of an echo chamber. Then I read in the SF Chronicle that there’s permitted and approved projects that developers are not moving forward with, like around the new hospital off of Van Ness, due to the “tightening of capital markets” and “soaring construction costs.”[1] Not NIMBYs or government regulations. And then I dig a little deeper into the “it’s just supply and demand, dummy” narrative and find articles that document how luxury housing development actually is associated with a rise in rents for the working class.[2] Who would have thought macroeconomics is complicated? I feel the narrative here is highly politicized around are particular market-driven philosophy, so much so that people feel comfortable posting unsourced polemics. In the spirit of HN I would like to steer us toward a real analysis of the facts in the ground. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Turns-out-SF-s-big-new-hospital-on-Van-Ness-13698405.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Turns-out-SF-s-b... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-expensive-cities-rents-fall-for-the-rich--but-rise-for-the-poor/2018/08/05/a16e5962-96a4-11e8-80e1-00e80e1fdf43_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-expensive...
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  Your first article attributes those quotes reasoning about the lack of construction to speculation by “neighbors”. There is also a traffic problem created in part by construction of a bus line that is 18 months overdue. It seems a bit quick to be using that as justification for SF housing policies, especially as they don’t seem to be working. Your other article is paywalled, but I imagine that tightly planned cities introducing only new luxery housing is the same general situation and would be similarly vulnerable to the very arguments you’re responding to.
  - Aloha 7y ago
    How much construction does a 'bus line' take exactly?
    - BrandonM 7y ago
      I live a couple blocks away from Van Ness. Here's the project: https://www.sfcta.org/projects/van-ness-improvement-project https://www.sfcta.org/projects/van-ness-improvement-project. They're moving to dedicated bus lanes, allowing the buses to load and unload safely without blocking other traffic. As with all significant projects, they've lumped in a bunch of other maintenance that has been put off for too long, like upgrading utility lines. Construction generally blocks a lane of traffic on one side of the street, rerouting the other lanes and pedestrians, for several weeks at a time. Then they move on to the next block or to the other side of the street. Just from a layman's perspective, it seems incredibly tricky to try to construct a housing development with that going on around it. The "bus line" construction has already put additional pressure on traffic up and down Van Ness, and it's got to be very tricky to get permits for parking spots, dumpsters, and other necessities with everything else that's going on. And anyway the city could probably just come through and close everything down for weeks or months so that they can perform another stage of "bus line" construction. (I'm putting "bus line" in quotes because they haven't even really started on that part. This whole project is a pretty incredibly yak shave that's taking 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for a bus line.)
dmode 7y ago
San Francisco has build way more housing in the last decade compared to rest of the Bay Area and the state. Look at the entire east side of the City. Areas like SOMA, Mission Bay, Dogpatch were industrial wastelands. Now they have so much housing. Blame really lies in the rest of the Bay Area cities that haven't built their fair share of housing.
jseliger 7y ago
It is a sort of grim form of comedy to watch it: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f...
bassman9000 7y ago
And yet, the same people keep getting elected. Whose fault is it?
rajacombinator 7y ago
I believe you’re misunderstanding the incentives and goals of these govt officials, and the people who vote for them. It’s much worse than a mere ignorance of economics, and totally intractable.
TheMagicHorsey 7y ago
You'd be surprised how many socialist-minded people there are in SF, who always invent some cockamamie reason why more government requirements are the answer. Its always more and more regulation. Like the last twenty years of affordable housing regulation didn't do anything. So lets try another twenty years of experiments. Though I live in SF, I really hope they do implement some of these asinine punitive taxes and finally kill the tech industry here. Then all these Nimbys can enjoy an empty city devoid of activity.
- malandrew 7y ago
  ...And those of us that enjoy working in tech will finally be able find interesting engineering jobs in cities that aren't SF.
g9yuayon 7y ago
Of course they understand economics. They just don't think it matters or don't care as long as their constituents support them. Well, their constituents do support them -- it's easy peasy anyway. People in California hate Republicans to the bones. As a result, we don't really have check and balance. Without check and balance, we get all kinds of ridiculous policies. In a word, we get what we vote for.
fuckyah 7y ago
Couldn't agree more. Thanks!

hellllllllooo 7y ago

It might effectivly reduce demand.

halflings 7y ago
How? How many people would not come to the Bay Area because they might get taxed if they IPO?
- hellllllllooo 7y ago
  People move to SF to work. If companies decide to start elsewhere it spreads out demand for housing.
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  No, they would not move to SF when less SF jobs are created due to this law.
  - davidw 7y ago
    Ah, the "North Korea" strategy to make San Francisco affordable. Yeah, that would probably work. Kind of a roundabout way of doing things with a lot of other bad consequences, though.
  - perseusmandate 7y ago
    Great idea- let's just ban the jobs while we are at it and the problem will be solved
    - hellllllllooo 7y ago
      Supply and demand issues can be addressed at both ends. The US is a large place and only a few cities have these issues. What's wrong with the jobs being elsewhere in the US in cities with more capacity if people are moving to the jobs anyway?
- jdavis703 7y ago
  I moved to California despite the high taxes. In doing so I was able to go from earning $55k per year to $150k a year. No amount of tax cuts would have given me that income boost. As long as people can make more after-tax money in SF and California than everywhere else the place will remain competitive. Now, I’m not endorsing this particular tax proposal, just merely defending the general high tax policies here. Edit: I probably spend about $40/month on transportation. I do not own a car and bike to work and most other places. I spend $2700/month (market rate rent, no rent control) for a 1 bedroom apartment in a very walkable location. While the cost of living is higher, it's not so high as to make my life in the Bay Area worse than back home.
  - kfriede 7y ago
    Simply knowing salary tells us almost nothing about the benefit(s) of your move. How much more/less do you spend on: * Vehicle Registration, Public Transportation, Gas * Housing (rent/mortgage) * Sales tax * Etc. The housing is a huge factor, given that 30% of $55k is $1300/mo (A decent house in most of America), yet 30% of 150k is $3750/mo (A nice cardboard box in the bay area)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - alain94040 7y ago
      Sure, but the numbers still favor the bay area if you are a software engineer: https://thestartupconference.com/2018/09/21/about-that-silicon-valley-job/ https://thestartupconference.com/2018/09/21/about-that-silic...
      - souprock 7y ago
        No, they favor the bay area if you are a software engineer who is willing to sacrifice quality of life. That article starts off with this horrific line: "rent a room and move in with some friends". OMG. That is the sad situation we might expect for an unskilled high school drop-out with a felony conviction. That article continues on with "Start a Family [...] It’s been 10 years". It is indeed common that people in high-cost areas feel unable to start families earlier, but that isn't something to just accept as normal. It is better to have kids when you have energy for them and when birth is safer. Starting earlier also allows for the possibility that you might end up wanting a larger family than you had initially expected. For example, I sure didn't imagine I'd be having 12, but that probably could not have happened in the Bay Area. In 10 years, one ought to have paid off a house. The article mentions college, which can be had cheaply, but neglects to mention private schooling. Normally this would be the larger expense by far. The "middle of nowhere" comparison also seems a bit low for salary. It might be right if you tossed a dart at a map of the USA to determine your location, but not if you chose a low-cost area with a suitable industry.

shard972 7y ago

While at the same time they have declared themselves a sanctuary city for all to come seek refuge. Hard to drop housing prices when despite internal negative net migration, you are still growing in population.

throwing838383 7y ago

can someone please pin this at the top of every housing related post?

eanzenberg 7y ago

That would only solve part of the problem. There’s still the influx of homeless from outside the city and state to deal with.

jordonwii 7y ago
Do you have source for calling it an "influx"? According to the city's annual survey (from 2017)[1], 70% of the current homeless population lived in SF county before becoming homeless, 21% lived in another CA county (which may include, say, Berkeley or Oakland), and only 10% came from outside CA. I'd hardly call 10% of the current homeless population an influx. [1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Point-in-Time-Count-General-FINAL-6.21.17.pdf http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  Isn’t this based on self-answered surveys and not hard verifiable information to establish residency? The homeless and activists/nonprofits advocating on their behalf have an incentive to make it look like they’re mostly local.
  - jordonwii 7y ago
    > Isn’t this based on self-answered surveys and not hard verifiable information to establish residency? True, though collecting hard verifiable proof of prior residency from homeless folks seems beyond what can be expected from a one-day citywide survey. :) If you know of a survey that did collect that information, I'd certainly be interested in the results. > The homeless and activists/nonprofits advocating on their behalf have an incentive to make it look like they’re mostly local. I suppose a high out-of-county population might make locals stingier, but getting caught providing bad data also seems like a pretty bad outcome for any of the local non-profits that helped conduct the survey.
  - nerfhammer 7y ago
    Is there any systematic evidence of the oft-repeated idea that homeless are being bussed in from every corner of the country? Besides an anecdotal case or two? If not, why should we believe that it happens with any degree of frequency? Do you believe that estimates of the total counts of homeless people might be more or less accurate, since there's no supposed incentive for activists to discount it? SF's homelessness per capita is actually not particularly high compared to other major cities, which is not at all what you would expect if homeless were swarming en masse to SF from those other places: https://medium.com/hatchbeat/homelessness-a-tale-of-three-cities-d81ee1c7de02 https://medium.com/hatchbeat/homelessness-a-tale-of-three-ci... . What's really high in SF and other West Coast cities is the percent of unsheltered homeless. It may be that it only seems like there are more of them because they are more visible because besides SF's dislike of building housing they also don't build sufficient homeless shelters: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...

pbourke 7y ago

How to make housing more affordable: 1) cut red tape 2) relax zoning requirements. Both are politically unpalatable, so around and around we go appropriating money that governments don’t even know what to do with.

halbritt 7y ago
Are there historical instances of 1) and 2)being successful in reducing housing prices in a high-demand area?
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Reducing, maybe not, but stabilizing, definitely. Look at most major cities in Japan, they keep building new apartment towers all the time and prices are more or less stable. Tokyo is an exception right now because of the olympics bubble.
- haroldp 7y ago
  Yes, Tokyo Japan: http://archive.is/pVrex#selection-1755.0-1755.64 http://archive.is/pVrex#selection-1755.0-1755.64
  - halbritt 7y ago
    Excellent example. I was reminded of this video as well when Tokyo was mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w
- jpadkins 7y ago
  https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/ https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/ https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/houston/2008/hb0801.pdf https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/houston... Houston is a nice natural experiment on zoning laws impact on affordable housing. I believe Houston has more net immigration that SF or Seattle, but has much more affordable housing.

baddox 7y ago

To the extent that economics is about how incentives influence behavior, to assume that SF legislators don’t understand economics is itself probably a misunderstanding of economics.

ladberg 7y ago
There are people working for the City of SF who know economics, but that doesn't mean the people passing the laws do. I took an urban economics class taught by Ted Egan, the chief in-house economist for the City of SF, who knows pretty much everything about the subject and if he was put in charge of housing laws for the city I am certain housing quality and quantity would improve. However, he and people like him don't get to pass the laws. Instead, we have extremely vocal NIMBYs who lobby to get laws passed that benefit the rich minority of residents and harm everyone else.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  > benefit the rich minority of residents and harm everyone else But is that true? As a Midwesterner, I have no skin in the game. But is it ever OK for city to say "We like the size we are, we don't want drop zoning and turn our entire coastal town into 100 story mega-skyscrapers?" I don't think the end game of every city has to be to become Tokyo. As prices rise, more industry moves out of the city. Seems like a valid case for a local resident to want?
  - ZainRiz 7y ago
    +1 to that (and I don't live in California either) It seems more like the proponents of cheap housing want to encourage lots of people to move into the city (which is how the existing supply becomes insufficient), at the expense of the people who were already living there. Though what I haven't been able to understand is why these groups are not in favor of creating housing further off where the land is cheaper? In the bay area why is "goodness" only measured in distance from downtown? This is a sincere question, I'd love to understand.
    - 7y ago

outside1234 7y ago

Oh they understand. They are not actually trying to solve the problem, but inflate the problem. They own real estate, the regulations give them a lever to get contributions from developers, higher property prices equals higher tax revenue, and doing something dumb like this IPO stunt makes foolish property-less people think that they are on the same side of them. They are not -- they are on the side of property prices going up.

robertAngst 7y ago
Apply this to Federal Healthcare. Physicians want to get paid 300k/yr. Pharma is obsolete by computers and paid over 100k/yr. Not to mention the pharma companies and hospitals. Its why healthcare only gets worse with legislation.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Pharmacy is obsolete by computers? Not yet, it's not. I mean, retail pharmacy, maybe, mostly, but all of pharmacy? No. And pharma companies? You think computers are going to automate drug discovery? Not for a long time, they won't.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  To be fair, many physicians went into significant debt based on an ROI of making $300k a year.
  - germinalphrase 7y ago
    Maybe that too is a problem.
    - bdcravens 7y ago
      I've long held that if you want to get healthcare costs under control, if you end up impacting provider salaries, you have to tackle the education side of the equation as well.
    - 7y ago

adrr 7y ago

vote them out then. People complain about their local politicians but no effort to remove them from office like donating money, or volunteering.

cubecul 7y ago
It's not that simple in SF. Lots and lots of neighborhood associations and local groups like that who are really loud and who hold a lot more power than their equivalents in other cities. There's a whole infrastructure on one half of the political spectrum in SF that you have to defeat.
mc32 7y ago
It’s a one party town. Whoever you vote in does the same as the previous supe. They’re into high-profile, low-impact pet projects the likes of which are reminiscent of ideas high school students would propose to solve issues. Ban plastic straws, but don’t prosecute people who defecate on the street. That’s SF politics. Nothing of consequence happens except when something has the potential to propel them into state politics, and again it’s a high viz low impact issue.
- bruceb 7y ago
  I dont want people defecating in the streets either, but how you going to prosecute that? If you have reached that level, do you care about a fine you cant pay? Is govt going to fine them the $250 they dont have? Also where are they supposed to go to the bathroom, not like there are many readily available in SF, especially at night.
  - chrisdhoover 7y ago
    There is a theory that says the cheap plastic bags were reused to contain shit. Now with the bag ban the shit is on the streets.
- bassman9000 7y ago
  It’s a one party town. We got what we deserve, then.

dgzl 7y ago

As a fourth-gen Southern Oregonian, my family is perpetually irritated that Californian policies eventually end up here as well.

abalone 7y ago

Do you have sources for these claims? I feel this narrative is often repeated on HN and it becomes kind of an echo chamber. Then I read in the SF Chronicle that there’s permitted and approved projects that developers are not moving forward with, like around the new hospital off of Van Ness, due to the “tightening of capital markets” and “soaring construction costs.”[1] Not NIMBYs or government regulations. And then I dig a little deeper into the “it’s just supply and demand, dummy” narrative and find articles that document how luxury housing development actually is associated with a rise in rents for the working class.[2] Who would have thought macroeconomics is complicated? I feel the narrative here is highly politicized around are particular market-driven philosophy, so much so that people feel comfortable posting unsourced polemics. In the spirit of HN I would like to steer us toward a real analysis of the facts in the ground. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Turns-out-SF-s-big-new-hospital-on-Van-Ness-13698405.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Turns-out-SF-s-b... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-expensive-cities-rents-fall-for-the-rich--but-rise-for-the-poor/2018/08/05/a16e5962-96a4-11e8-80e1-00e80e1fdf43_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-expensive...

ultrarunner 7y ago
Your first article attributes those quotes reasoning about the lack of construction to speculation by “neighbors”. There is also a traffic problem created in part by construction of a bus line that is 18 months overdue. It seems a bit quick to be using that as justification for SF housing policies, especially as they don’t seem to be working. Your other article is paywalled, but I imagine that tightly planned cities introducing only new luxery housing is the same general situation and would be similarly vulnerable to the very arguments you’re responding to.
- Aloha 7y ago
  How much construction does a 'bus line' take exactly?
  - BrandonM 7y ago
    I live a couple blocks away from Van Ness. Here's the project: https://www.sfcta.org/projects/van-ness-improvement-project https://www.sfcta.org/projects/van-ness-improvement-project. They're moving to dedicated bus lanes, allowing the buses to load and unload safely without blocking other traffic. As with all significant projects, they've lumped in a bunch of other maintenance that has been put off for too long, like upgrading utility lines. Construction generally blocks a lane of traffic on one side of the street, rerouting the other lanes and pedestrians, for several weeks at a time. Then they move on to the next block or to the other side of the street. Just from a layman's perspective, it seems incredibly tricky to try to construct a housing development with that going on around it. The "bus line" construction has already put additional pressure on traffic up and down Van Ness, and it's got to be very tricky to get permits for parking spots, dumpsters, and other necessities with everything else that's going on. And anyway the city could probably just come through and close everything down for weeks or months so that they can perform another stage of "bus line" construction. (I'm putting "bus line" in quotes because they haven't even really started on that part. This whole project is a pretty incredibly yak shave that's taking 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for a bus line.)

dmode 7y ago

San Francisco has build way more housing in the last decade compared to rest of the Bay Area and the state. Look at the entire east side of the City. Areas like SOMA, Mission Bay, Dogpatch were industrial wastelands. Now they have so much housing. Blame really lies in the rest of the Bay Area cities that haven't built their fair share of housing.

jseliger 7y ago

It is a sort of grim form of comedy to watch it: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f...

bassman9000 7y ago

And yet, the same people keep getting elected. Whose fault is it?

rajacombinator 7y ago

I believe you’re misunderstanding the incentives and goals of these govt officials, and the people who vote for them. It’s much worse than a mere ignorance of economics, and totally intractable.

TheMagicHorsey 7y ago

You'd be surprised how many socialist-minded people there are in SF, who always invent some cockamamie reason why more government requirements are the answer. Its always more and more regulation. Like the last twenty years of affordable housing regulation didn't do anything. So lets try another twenty years of experiments. Though I live in SF, I really hope they do implement some of these asinine punitive taxes and finally kill the tech industry here. Then all these Nimbys can enjoy an empty city devoid of activity.

malandrew 7y ago
...And those of us that enjoy working in tech will finally be able find interesting engineering jobs in cities that aren't SF.

g9yuayon 7y ago

Of course they understand economics. They just don't think it matters or don't care as long as their constituents support them. Well, their constituents do support them -- it's easy peasy anyway. People in California hate Republicans to the bones. As a result, we don't really have check and balance. Without check and balance, we get all kinds of ridiculous policies. In a word, we get what we vote for.

fuckyah 7y ago

Couldn't agree more. Thanks!