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Two thoughts 1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings? 2) How do you avoid a race

Two thoughts 1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings? 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? I'm all for affordable housing but it seems too nuanced to allow market forces to take care of it. I think the correct solution revolves around government subsidized/funded housing but that's a whole other can of beans.

arcticbull 7y ago
1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings? They are but they build and then sell off, developers develop, they tend not to own those units long-term. I believe this to be true regardless of market direction. Generally in the case of condos for sale, developers manage the complexes for a couple of years until enough units are sold off and the HOA takes them over. If someone wants to run the whole building for rental, they can certainly still do that. You would just factor in that your rent would grow with inflation instead of geometrically when you're planning your building. 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? Indeed, that is a risk, however the current solution of not providing these folks a place to live is a punt. Re: government operation model, I actually agree with you wholeheartedly. Singapore's model where something like 80% of housing is built and managed by the HDB and 20% if totally free-market has worked very well there. I didn't want to bring that into the already-long-enough post as I felt it might distract from my point shrug. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
- sokoloff 7y ago
  > You would just factor in that your rent would grow with inflation instead of geometrically when you're planning your building. Compounded growth at inflation is geometric growth.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    Yeah, I bit my thumb as I wrote that haha, better-than-linear in constant-dollars instead of geometric in constant-dollars :P
- hkmurakami 7y ago
  FWIW there are developers who build and hold long term, but it depends on their strategy and hoe their capital structure is set up.
bonniemuffin 7y ago
Currently the poor are homeless or enduring multi-hour mega-commutes or stuffing a bunch of people into a single studio apartment. Well-located "barely livable wage slave pods" would be a huge improvement for a lot of people. I agree that the race to the bottom effect is a problem, but I think even the worst-case scenario would still be better than our existing housing situation.
- generalpass 7y ago
  Indeed, it is only a problem in the sense that it is not a perfect solution.
- wnissen 7y ago
  Correct. A fire in a nice, completely unremarkable neighborhood about 40 miles east of San Francisco destroyed 4 units and made 35 people homeless. Almost 9 people to a home. And this is a solid 3-hour roundtrip commute from San Francisco or Mountain View. "Dickensian" is the word for it. Not literally, perhaps, because the housing situation in Dickens's time was even worse, but there is human misery on a broad scale. https://www.independentnews.com/news/chestnut-street-fire-in-livermore/article_c8f2e59c-e2e0-11e8-b09c-731ef788e7f9.html https://www.independentnews.com/news/chestnut-street-fire-in...
sampo 7y ago
> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away. Currently they can only choose the latter.
- treis 7y ago
  You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment. The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms. Those are mostly fixed costs, i.e. it costs the same to plumb a toilet, shower, and sink in a 50 sq foot bathroom as a 100 sq foot one. Only when you get to stupid high real estate cost does a ~300 sq foot pod start making sense over ~600 ft 1 bed or ~1000 sq ft 2 beds. It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price. It's essentially impossible to build something new that will be cost competitive with something that already exists.
  - slg 7y ago
    >It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price The problem is that housing in any location is not a closed system with fixed demand. It is an open system in which increased supply can generate increased demand. When you build that housing for upper middle class and up, they vacate their homes, the price of their old homes goes down, then upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live in a cheaper area over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never fully flows down market to the poor people in the city. This is why the market approach to building more housing isn't going to solve the whole problem. You need to build new homes at every pricing level and the market generally doesn't do that without the government incentivizing them.
    - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
zozbot234 7y ago
> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? The poor can always move away if space becomes a real problem. Plenty of "SF-poor" people outside CA who are actually living in "abundant villas" in their preferred locations.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
  Moving isn't free. Most people you would assume to be not poor couldn't afford a move. Neither could they finance a move because of how leveraged they already are.
  - raven105x 7y ago
    If you are an adult, and you have a car, you can move. If you have so many items that you can't "afford" to move, you sell some of those items and suddenly you not only have money for relocation, but less things to move as well. There will never be a country, society or civilization where the entire population can afford to live in the most expensive areas - and that's okay.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
      You're making it sound like it's easy to hock a bunch of stuff. Ever try to sell a bed? If you can't take it with you and can't sell it then you're paying disposal and transportation fees only to buy the same junk again. It kind of seems like you're arguing from a place of privilege not experienced with the consequences of moving a family without help, without savings, without adequate work.
      - therealx 7y ago
        In Oakland? You just pull the bed to the side of the road and it's gone within a day, tops. Same with most metro areas. Also a lot of non-trash-strict places will take a mattress in the trash pickup if you just put it near the trash can and make it known it's trash. Also, for the same reason it's hard to sell a mattress, it's easy to buy one used in a new city. If you can afford to heat treat it, you can be sure theres no bed bugs, or if you have a job, buy a $200-$300 mattress from amazon - theyre surprisingly good these days. I moved 10 times in the first 3 years I was on my own, and have done huge moves up/down since (up to a three bedroom, then decided I hated owning so much and downsized to a studio.) - no family, no savings, just a lot of manual labor/smart packing. I think ops comment stands, unless you are used to some crazy nice cost of living (which is a different privilege).
specialist 7y ago
Please don't sour the discourse by providing a false choice. There are a lot of options (opportunities) between residential zoned single family dwellings with huge setbacks and love hotels. Simply progressively incrementally upzoning areas, on a fixed 30 year schedule, is The Correct Answer. So that (for instance) Seattle would go from 75% zoned residential today to 70% in 2050. That kind of long term planning makes the market predictable and protects current owner's investment and plans. eg Maybe someone wants to stay in their house until their kids go off to college, or stay in their house during their golden years, and it'd be nice to know they can afford to stay.
- khuey 7y ago
  The idea that "allowing multifamily housing" is somehow different from "zoned residential" shows an interesting cognitive bias here.
dgreensp 7y ago
Plenty of people would love to live in a micro-apartment. Just because it would make you feel poor to do so doesn’t mean it should be illegal!
peteey 7y ago
Your suggestion is not in opposition to repealing zoning restrictions. You can do both, but one should happen first. Zoning laws restrict what builders can build. Subsidies take funding. I find it unpalatable to have a portion of my income taken to solve a problem caused by rules which can be repealed for free. An extreme example would be subsidizing gold plated homes. Gold plating adds no practical value and makes the house needlessly expensive. Tax dollars should not fund gold plated houses. Replace the concept of gold platting with suburban zoning.
goosehonk 7y ago
Micro apartments are a straw man. The zoning codes all over California prohibit duplexes and triplexes, including over 85% of the area of the supposedly dense city of San Francisco. We don’t need weird innovative forms. We need the old forms.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  I agree. This is a false dichotomy between the status quo and Judge Dreddesque super towers. I think changing zoning at the edge of the current sense areas could help a lot too. You'd likely need an increased investment in public transit to make that work.
  - goosehonk 7y ago
    We've already spent the money on the transportation and forgot the upzoning that should have accompanied it. For example we poured billions into BART to serve dispersed areas full of detached single-family homes. All areas within half a mile of a BART station should permit 5-story multi-family dwellings without mandatory parking. This was the point of SB50.
    - DubiousPusher 7y ago
      I don't live in SF so I've only been on the BART in downtown. I didn't realize it ran out to so many suburban areas. Definitely seems like a no brainier to up-zone in at least a mile radius around every one of those stations.
    - theluketaylor 7y ago
      My city (Waterloo region Ontario) pretty much did exactly what you described. Approval to build light rail was tightly tied to automatic upzoning within a given radius of stations. The light rail itself took years to build and has been open less than 6 months, but the zoning fixes are already apparent. Density around many of the stations has shot up and the skyline would be almost unrecognizable to someone who lived here even 10 years ago. Unfortunately, like the bay area we are very popular for tech and the all the new dense buildings going up hasn't been able to outpace demand from newcomers. Prices have been skyrocketing and it's really starting to squeeze the most vulnerable. Even more zoning restrictions need to be slashed and timelines for building permits approvals need to tumble.
bobthepanda 7y ago
In terms of part two, legislating middle class comfort standards as a requirement mostly makes new housing only affordable to the middle class and up. American localities have significantly larger minimum space requirements than peer cities around the world. A Parisian studio can be from 9-35 square meters, and that basically wouldn‘t be allowed as new construction in the vast majority of the country today.
landryraccoon 7y ago
> How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? I don't see how this is worse than what we have right now. SF housing is already dystopian.
Shivetya 7y ago
the fad of tiny homes shows what can be done with a limit amount of space and we must always be aware of one fact. our bias as to what we would accept is not what others would accept. let alone what qualifies as a micro apartment, is the size the same world wide or even nation wide? We already have a market that is effectively subsidized/funded by government and that is why we have the problem we do have. Government does not have to serve the market, it only has to serve the particular housing program put in place and no more.
overgard 7y ago
> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? Given the abundance of "working homeless" (homeless people with jobs); I think we're already there. At least with cheap housing they can be insulated from the cold and such (unlike tents).
hkmurakami 7y ago
1) developers can make what’s called “development margin” on the improvement of the site (fixing a house, building a multi family on top of a vacant lot, etc.). The margin is the (sale price - acquisition cost - building cost - planning cost) / (total cost). This is separate from the YoY post property tax equity appreciation of a housing unit by simply buying and holding.
Kalium 7y ago
> 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? Right now we've got a scenario where the rich live in fifty-year-old units that really ought to be reasonably priced and the poorest live in alleyways. Having the poor in up-to-code micro-apartments would be a major step up. It would also help if the rich could also live in modern up-to-code units of luxurious size. That would free some of the stock of existing units for everyone else instead of them being pinched between the rich and the most vulnerable. > I'm all for affordable housing but it seems too nuanced to allow market forces to take care of it. I think the correct solution revolves around government subsidized/funded housing but that's a whole other can of beans. The US has a poor record of being capable of funding and running public housing, even after you get past the effects of concentrating poverty. The first major problem is often that permanently BMR units cost in excess of $800k each to construct in places like SF - and the city has to be able to afford a lot of those. Then you have the problem of funding ongoing costs, which has often been the problem in the US. With this in mind, it's perhaps worth reconsidering why some might favor approachs that center on inclusing subsidized units into mixed-income properties.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> 1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings? The difference is that it's a value-creating investment rather than a purely speculative one. If you buy a piece of property for $500K and then build a dozen $300K condos on it, you come out with a sizeable profit, but each of the new residents gets the opportunity to live somewhere for $300K when they would have previously had to compete to pay $500K. > 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? You can't make someone's options worse by adding more of them. If you'd rather keep your existing two hour commute in exchange for a larger living space, that option continues to exist. But if people choose the closer, smaller apartment when given the choice, what does that tell you about whether having that option leaves them better off?
rayiner 7y ago
> How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas The “race to the bottom” is called the market price and quality. One of the big progressive mistakes was instituting all sorts of bans on cheap, low quality housing. Bans on week-by-week rentals, etc., made it hard for poor people to live near where jobs are. The alternative has become fighting for a tiny supply of subsidized housing, or going to locations where there are few jobs. The problem with government subsidized housing is: where will you build it? At least the market creates an incentive to put the housing near where the jobs are. Political control of where housing gets built and how much results in poor people being segregated away from jobs, opportunity, etc.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  This wasn't a progressive mistake. In California it's been consistently shown in opinion polls that Republicans (wealthy suburban Republican homeowners) are more strongly in favor of exclusionary zoning than Democrats are. It's just that the problem is most acute in big cities, which trend Democratic.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    Right. The Republicans, who are in control of both California's state legislature and city governments, are blocking Democrats from passing any policies. The Democrats push hard to pass laws for more inclusive zoning, but since California is such a red stronghold, there's absolutely nothing they can do.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    I’m not talking about zoning. I’m talking about regulations on housing quality. Tenement style housing wasn’t pleasant, but it was better than having no housing or only having housing far away from jobs.

arcticbull 7y ago

1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings? They are but they build and then sell off, developers develop, they tend not to own those units long-term. I believe this to be true regardless of market direction. Generally in the case of condos for sale, developers manage the complexes for a couple of years until enough units are sold off and the HOA takes them over. If someone wants to run the whole building for rental, they can certainly still do that. You would just factor in that your rent would grow with inflation instead of geometrically when you're planning your building. 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? Indeed, that is a risk, however the current solution of not providing these folks a place to live is a punt. Re: government operation model, I actually agree with you wholeheartedly. Singapore's model where something like 80% of housing is built and managed by the HDB and 20% if totally free-market has worked very well there. I didn't want to bring that into the already-long-enough post as I felt it might distract from my point shrug. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

sokoloff 7y ago
> You would just factor in that your rent would grow with inflation instead of geometrically when you're planning your building. Compounded growth at inflation is geometric growth.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  Yeah, I bit my thumb as I wrote that haha, better-than-linear in constant-dollars instead of geometric in constant-dollars :P
hkmurakami 7y ago
FWIW there are developers who build and hold long term, but it depends on their strategy and hoe their capital structure is set up.

bonniemuffin 7y ago

Currently the poor are homeless or enduring multi-hour mega-commutes or stuffing a bunch of people into a single studio apartment. Well-located "barely livable wage slave pods" would be a huge improvement for a lot of people. I agree that the race to the bottom effect is a problem, but I think even the worst-case scenario would still be better than our existing housing situation.

generalpass 7y ago
Indeed, it is only a problem in the sense that it is not a perfect solution.
wnissen 7y ago
Correct. A fire in a nice, completely unremarkable neighborhood about 40 miles east of San Francisco destroyed 4 units and made 35 people homeless. Almost 9 people to a home. And this is a solid 3-hour roundtrip commute from San Francisco or Mountain View. "Dickensian" is the word for it. Not literally, perhaps, because the housing situation in Dickens's time was even worse, but there is human misery on a broad scale. https://www.independentnews.com/news/chestnut-street-fire-in-livermore/article_c8f2e59c-e2e0-11e8-b09c-731ef788e7f9.html https://www.independentnews.com/news/chestnut-street-fire-in...

sampo 7y ago

> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away. Currently they can only choose the latter.

treis 7y ago
You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment. The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms. Those are mostly fixed costs, i.e. it costs the same to plumb a toilet, shower, and sink in a 50 sq foot bathroom as a 100 sq foot one. Only when you get to stupid high real estate cost does a ~300 sq foot pod start making sense over ~600 ft 1 bed or ~1000 sq ft 2 beds. It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price. It's essentially impossible to build something new that will be cost competitive with something that already exists.
- slg 7y ago
  >It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price The problem is that housing in any location is not a closed system with fixed demand. It is an open system in which increased supply can generate increased demand. When you build that housing for upper middle class and up, they vacate their homes, the price of their old homes goes down, then upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live in a cheaper area over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never fully flows down market to the poor people in the city. This is why the market approach to building more housing isn't going to solve the whole problem. You need to build new homes at every pricing level and the market generally doesn't do that without the government incentivizing them.
  - amanaplanacanal 7y ago

zozbot234 7y ago

> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? The poor can always move away if space becomes a real problem. Plenty of "SF-poor" people outside CA who are actually living in "abundant villas" in their preferred locations.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
Moving isn't free. Most people you would assume to be not poor couldn't afford a move. Neither could they finance a move because of how leveraged they already are.
- raven105x 7y ago
  If you are an adult, and you have a car, you can move. If you have so many items that you can't "afford" to move, you sell some of those items and suddenly you not only have money for relocation, but less things to move as well. There will never be a country, society or civilization where the entire population can afford to live in the most expensive areas - and that's okay.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
    You're making it sound like it's easy to hock a bunch of stuff. Ever try to sell a bed? If you can't take it with you and can't sell it then you're paying disposal and transportation fees only to buy the same junk again. It kind of seems like you're arguing from a place of privilege not experienced with the consequences of moving a family without help, without savings, without adequate work.
    - therealx 7y ago
      In Oakland? You just pull the bed to the side of the road and it's gone within a day, tops. Same with most metro areas. Also a lot of non-trash-strict places will take a mattress in the trash pickup if you just put it near the trash can and make it known it's trash. Also, for the same reason it's hard to sell a mattress, it's easy to buy one used in a new city. If you can afford to heat treat it, you can be sure theres no bed bugs, or if you have a job, buy a $200-$300 mattress from amazon - theyre surprisingly good these days. I moved 10 times in the first 3 years I was on my own, and have done huge moves up/down since (up to a three bedroom, then decided I hated owning so much and downsized to a studio.) - no family, no savings, just a lot of manual labor/smart packing. I think ops comment stands, unless you are used to some crazy nice cost of living (which is a different privilege).

specialist 7y ago

Please don't sour the discourse by providing a false choice. There are a lot of options (opportunities) between residential zoned single family dwellings with huge setbacks and love hotels. Simply progressively incrementally upzoning areas, on a fixed 30 year schedule, is The Correct Answer. So that (for instance) Seattle would go from 75% zoned residential today to 70% in 2050. That kind of long term planning makes the market predictable and protects current owner's investment and plans. eg Maybe someone wants to stay in their house until their kids go off to college, or stay in their house during their golden years, and it'd be nice to know they can afford to stay.

khuey 7y ago
The idea that "allowing multifamily housing" is somehow different from "zoned residential" shows an interesting cognitive bias here.

dgreensp 7y ago

Plenty of people would love to live in a micro-apartment. Just because it would make you feel poor to do so doesn’t mean it should be illegal!

peteey 7y ago

Your suggestion is not in opposition to repealing zoning restrictions. You can do both, but one should happen first. Zoning laws restrict what builders can build. Subsidies take funding. I find it unpalatable to have a portion of my income taken to solve a problem caused by rules which can be repealed for free. An extreme example would be subsidizing gold plated homes. Gold plating adds no practical value and makes the house needlessly expensive. Tax dollars should not fund gold plated houses. Replace the concept of gold platting with suburban zoning.

goosehonk 7y ago

Micro apartments are a straw man. The zoning codes all over California prohibit duplexes and triplexes, including over 85% of the area of the supposedly dense city of San Francisco. We don’t need weird innovative forms. We need the old forms.

DubiousPusher 7y ago
I agree. This is a false dichotomy between the status quo and Judge Dreddesque super towers. I think changing zoning at the edge of the current sense areas could help a lot too. You'd likely need an increased investment in public transit to make that work.
- goosehonk 7y ago
  We've already spent the money on the transportation and forgot the upzoning that should have accompanied it. For example we poured billions into BART to serve dispersed areas full of detached single-family homes. All areas within half a mile of a BART station should permit 5-story multi-family dwellings without mandatory parking. This was the point of SB50.
  - DubiousPusher 7y ago
    I don't live in SF so I've only been on the BART in downtown. I didn't realize it ran out to so many suburban areas. Definitely seems like a no brainier to up-zone in at least a mile radius around every one of those stations.
  - theluketaylor 7y ago
    My city (Waterloo region Ontario) pretty much did exactly what you described. Approval to build light rail was tightly tied to automatic upzoning within a given radius of stations. The light rail itself took years to build and has been open less than 6 months, but the zoning fixes are already apparent. Density around many of the stations has shot up and the skyline would be almost unrecognizable to someone who lived here even 10 years ago. Unfortunately, like the bay area we are very popular for tech and the all the new dense buildings going up hasn't been able to outpace demand from newcomers. Prices have been skyrocketing and it's really starting to squeeze the most vulnerable. Even more zoning restrictions need to be slashed and timelines for building permits approvals need to tumble.

bobthepanda 7y ago

In terms of part two, legislating middle class comfort standards as a requirement mostly makes new housing only affordable to the middle class and up. American localities have significantly larger minimum space requirements than peer cities around the world. A Parisian studio can be from 9-35 square meters, and that basically wouldn‘t be allowed as new construction in the vast majority of the country today.

landryraccoon 7y ago

Shivetya 7y ago

the fad of tiny homes shows what can be done with a limit amount of space and we must always be aware of one fact. our bias as to what we would accept is not what others would accept. let alone what qualifies as a micro apartment, is the size the same world wide or even nation wide? We already have a market that is effectively subsidized/funded by government and that is why we have the problem we do have. Government does not have to serve the market, it only has to serve the particular housing program put in place and no more.

overgard 7y ago

> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? Given the abundance of "working homeless" (homeless people with jobs); I think we're already there. At least with cheap housing they can be insulated from the cold and such (unlike tents).

hkmurakami 7y ago

1) developers can make what’s called “development margin” on the improvement of the site (fixing a house, building a multi family on top of a vacant lot, etc.). The margin is the (sale price - acquisition cost - building cost - planning cost) / (total cost). This is separate from the YoY post property tax equity appreciation of a housing unit by simply buying and holding.

Kalium 7y ago

> 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? Right now we've got a scenario where the rich live in fifty-year-old units that really ought to be reasonably priced and the poorest live in alleyways. Having the poor in up-to-code micro-apartments would be a major step up. It would also help if the rich could also live in modern up-to-code units of luxurious size. That would free some of the stock of existing units for everyone else instead of them being pinched between the rich and the most vulnerable. > I'm all for affordable housing but it seems too nuanced to allow market forces to take care of it. I think the correct solution revolves around government subsidized/funded housing but that's a whole other can of beans. The US has a poor record of being capable of funding and running public housing, even after you get past the effects of concentrating poverty. The first major problem is often that permanently BMR units cost in excess of $800k each to construct in places like SF - and the city has to be able to afford a lot of those. Then you have the problem of funding ongoing costs, which has often been the problem in the US. With this in mind, it's perhaps worth reconsidering why some might favor approachs that center on inclusing subsidized units into mixed-income properties.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> 1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings? The difference is that it's a value-creating investment rather than a purely speculative one. If you buy a piece of property for $500K and then build a dozen $300K condos on it, you come out with a sizeable profit, but each of the new residents gets the opportunity to live somewhere for $300K when they would have previously had to compete to pay $500K. > 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas? You can't make someone's options worse by adding more of them. If you'd rather keep your existing two hour commute in exchange for a larger living space, that option continues to exist. But if people choose the closer, smaller apartment when given the choice, what does that tell you about whether having that option leaves them better off?

rayiner 7y ago

> How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas The “race to the bottom” is called the market price and quality. One of the big progressive mistakes was instituting all sorts of bans on cheap, low quality housing. Bans on week-by-week rentals, etc., made it hard for poor people to live near where jobs are. The alternative has become fighting for a tiny supply of subsidized housing, or going to locations where there are few jobs. The problem with government subsidized housing is: where will you build it? At least the market creates an incentive to put the housing near where the jobs are. Political control of where housing gets built and how much results in poor people being segregated away from jobs, opportunity, etc.

pcwalton 7y ago
This wasn't a progressive mistake. In California it's been consistently shown in opinion polls that Republicans (wealthy suburban Republican homeowners) are more strongly in favor of exclusionary zoning than Democrats are. It's just that the problem is most acute in big cities, which trend Democratic.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Right. The Republicans, who are in control of both California's state legislature and city governments, are blocking Democrats from passing any policies. The Democrats push hard to pass laws for more inclusive zoning, but since California is such a red stronghold, there's absolutely nothing they can do.
- rayiner 7y ago
  I’m not talking about zoning. I’m talking about regulations on housing quality. Tenement style housing wasn’t pleasant, but it was better than having no housing or only having housing far away from jobs.