5 ms·

You can't build yourself out of the housing crisis when the problem is one of distribution, not one of supply. The idea that housing should be treated as an inv

You can't build yourself out of the housing crisis when the problem is one of distribution, not one of supply. The idea that housing should be treated as an investment is, itself, the problem. How can you want housing to be affordable while also wanting housing to gain in value, i.e. increase in cost? These are completely contradictory aims. Zoom out for a second and consider how wild it is that we turned a life necessity (shelter) into a speculative plaything.

gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
I think there's truth there, but housing distribution solutions never seem to be very elegant. The way it tends to boil down in my mind is more general philosophical concepts. Starting with the price and cost of housing to me isn't very interesting because market dynamics are what got you here. You want a different city. I want to learn more about what people think that city looks like, and then think about solutions from there. How do you decide who gets to live in SF (or insert city here)? Prioritize people who were born there? Whose family has history? People who have jobs there? What about self-employed people? People with kids? A lottery system?
harryh 7y ago
You can't build yourself out of the housing crisis when the problem is one of distribution, not one of supply. This is wrong. There is no distribution problem with housing. It's not that people can't find a house to live in, or a house has to be shipped across the country and the rail line is broken. The problem is that people can't afford housing. And they can't afford it because demand has increased dramatically while supply has been artificially constrained by government. The solution is to remove the government constraints on supply which will lower prices. Now obviously the trick is that existing owners don't want to do this, and they have a lot of political power. So I don't really see this happening, but if it somehow could happen that would be the path to the answer.
- ahelwer 7y ago
  I think you misunderstand what I mean by "distribution" - there is already enough housing for everybody (see article), it is just not distributed in an equitable way among people who need it. Nothing to do with shipping houses.
  - harryh 7y ago
    there is already enough housing for everybody This is not true because you aren't counting the vast number of people who want to relocate to the Bay Area. The article also ignores the fact that you will always have some % of empty homes. People move out and it takes time to find new tenants. People want to remodel. New buildings take time to fill up. People have second homes. Overall vacancy rates in SF and the Bay Area in general are TINY. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jose-san-francisco-lendingtree https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jo... The idea that 0% vacancy is achievable (or even desirable) is wrong.
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    There obviously isn't enough housing for everybody. How many people do you think want to live in San Francisco (including those displaced by housing prices), but can't, and therefore live out of town, out of state, etc.? The statistic about vacancies is only meaningful if you assume that the only demand for housing in SF comes from the homeless, which is clearly absurd.
    - ahelwer 7y ago
      How much extra housing would have to be built to reduce housing costs to the point that all people experiencing homelessness can afford them? Thinking you can build your way out of this housing crisis is the definition of insanity. So long as homes are commodities, people will be homeless and wealthy people will own a multiple of the number of houses that they need. In a society with decommodified housing, some amount of housing will need to be built to keep up with local immigration. That is massively below the amount that would need to be built to try to prod second-order market effects to do what we want.
woah 7y ago
Lots of homeowners in SF who have made huge gains from their property investment pay lip service to their liberal worldview by insisting that any new construction must meet the most stringent review and have a very high percentage of units set aside for affordable housing. This way they are able to stop new construction, exacerbating the housing crisis and making their investment more valuable, while claiming they are fighting for affordable housing.
- zapita 7y ago
  Also lots of deflection by blaming tech workers for cost increases.
  - tqi 7y ago
    One of the most frustrating things about the hostility that "native" Bay Area residents show toward new transplants is that in many cases, "native" Bay Area residents are ones getting rich off of the high rents.
  - woah 7y ago
    Yes, don’t be mad at your landlord for charging high rent, be mad at other tenants
davidw 7y ago
> supply It is (mostly) one of supply, though. California has massively underbuilt over the past decade. If an empty condo were an asset that didn't appreciate in value because of the scarcity of housing, maybe those wealthy people would sell them and invest in the market or companies or something else. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-the-French-are-fixing-a-housing-crisis-14931728.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...
all2 7y ago
> Zoom out for a second and consider how wild it is that we turned a life necessity (shelter) into a speculative plaything. Every necessity is a speculative plaything. There are futures and commodities markets for every consumable you could imagine. That's the beauty and cruelty of a (relatively) free market.
rayiner 7y ago
The premise isn’t that housing is treated as an investment. The premise is that housing is personal property. (Just like bread, etc., and many other things necessary for life.) It’s cities that are turning housing into an investment through laws turning it into a scarce resource. (Not just laws against building, but laws against short term rentals, boarding houses, tenements, etc.). It’s unsurprising that homelessness is actually decreasing in the US as a whole, whole increasing in wealthy cities: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/19/homelessness-is-declining-in-america https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/19/homelessn.... But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem. In 2015, about 10,000 people in San Francisco experienced homelessness at any time in the past year. That’s 112 per 10,000 people. (This is a different, and better, measure than the “homeless on a given night” instantaneous measure.) That same figure in Iowa is about 9 per 10,000. The national average is around 20-25 per 10,000.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  San Francisco also has survivable winter temperatures, many shelters and other infrastructure to help the homeless, etc. I remember being in Penn Station in NYC on many nights when homeless people slept in the waiting rooms. Police would routinely come by and kick them out. When this happened during the winters in sub-zero temperatures this meant a very real risk of death for the homeless who were forced to sleep outside. I wonder if it's the same in other parts of the nation, and if the reason there are only 25 homeless per 10,000 nationwide is that the rest have died of exposure during their winters (or from other types of neglect).
  - asdff 7y ago
    More homeless die of hypothermia on the streets of Los Angeles than they do in NYC. You can die of exposure when it's 50*, especially if you are wet from rain or sweat.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  > (Just like bread, etc., and many other things necessary for life.) Yes, this is a very good point. You don't see people vilifying farmers for making profits on food, even though some people go hungry. But for some reason people hate developers for making a profit on housing. (In my opinion, all of the NIMBY arguments, very much including the vacancy one in the article, are just attempts to mask the real reason for opposing housing—a preference for the suburban lifestyle.) > But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem. It's not just a San Francisco and New York problem. Add Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Austin, Miami, and Boston/Cambridge to that list, just to name a few. That's not even counting non-US cities like Vancouver, London, Paris, etc. I agree that housing shortages are unevenly distributed, of course.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
> the housing crisis when the problem is one of distribution, not one of supply. What’s your thesis for this? If the supply suddenly quintupled in the Bay Area and the population halved, I doubt we’d be calling it a “housing crisis”. Prices would fall dramatically because of supply.
- beefalo 7y ago
  The constricted supply is very much related to the treatment of primary residences as an investment. Quintupling the supply would definitely cause prices to fall, but any homeowner in their right mind opposes that development because they might lose $500k+ of property value.
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    If this were true, then it would be true for every city everywhere. Which we know it’s not. For example, look at cities with much friendlier building regulations such as Dallas.

gimmeThaBeet 7y ago

I think there's truth there, but housing distribution solutions never seem to be very elegant. The way it tends to boil down in my mind is more general philosophical concepts. Starting with the price and cost of housing to me isn't very interesting because market dynamics are what got you here. You want a different city. I want to learn more about what people think that city looks like, and then think about solutions from there. How do you decide who gets to live in SF (or insert city here)? Prioritize people who were born there? Whose family has history? People who have jobs there? What about self-employed people? People with kids? A lottery system?

harryh 7y ago

You can't build yourself out of the housing crisis when the problem is one of distribution, not one of supply. This is wrong. There is no distribution problem with housing. It's not that people can't find a house to live in, or a house has to be shipped across the country and the rail line is broken. The problem is that people can't afford housing. And they can't afford it because demand has increased dramatically while supply has been artificially constrained by government. The solution is to remove the government constraints on supply which will lower prices. Now obviously the trick is that existing owners don't want to do this, and they have a lot of political power. So I don't really see this happening, but if it somehow could happen that would be the path to the answer.

ahelwer 7y ago
I think you misunderstand what I mean by "distribution" - there is already enough housing for everybody (see article), it is just not distributed in an equitable way among people who need it. Nothing to do with shipping houses.
- harryh 7y ago
  there is already enough housing for everybody This is not true because you aren't counting the vast number of people who want to relocate to the Bay Area. The article also ignores the fact that you will always have some % of empty homes. People move out and it takes time to find new tenants. People want to remodel. New buildings take time to fill up. People have second homes. Overall vacancy rates in SF and the Bay Area in general are TINY. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jose-san-francisco-lendingtree https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jo... The idea that 0% vacancy is achievable (or even desirable) is wrong.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  There obviously isn't enough housing for everybody. How many people do you think want to live in San Francisco (including those displaced by housing prices), but can't, and therefore live out of town, out of state, etc.? The statistic about vacancies is only meaningful if you assume that the only demand for housing in SF comes from the homeless, which is clearly absurd.
  - ahelwer 7y ago
    How much extra housing would have to be built to reduce housing costs to the point that all people experiencing homelessness can afford them? Thinking you can build your way out of this housing crisis is the definition of insanity. So long as homes are commodities, people will be homeless and wealthy people will own a multiple of the number of houses that they need. In a society with decommodified housing, some amount of housing will need to be built to keep up with local immigration. That is massively below the amount that would need to be built to try to prod second-order market effects to do what we want.

woah 7y ago

Lots of homeowners in SF who have made huge gains from their property investment pay lip service to their liberal worldview by insisting that any new construction must meet the most stringent review and have a very high percentage of units set aside for affordable housing. This way they are able to stop new construction, exacerbating the housing crisis and making their investment more valuable, while claiming they are fighting for affordable housing.

zapita 7y ago
Also lots of deflection by blaming tech workers for cost increases.
- tqi 7y ago
  One of the most frustrating things about the hostility that "native" Bay Area residents show toward new transplants is that in many cases, "native" Bay Area residents are ones getting rich off of the high rents.
- woah 7y ago
  Yes, don’t be mad at your landlord for charging high rent, be mad at other tenants

davidw 7y ago

> supply It is (mostly) one of supply, though. California has massively underbuilt over the past decade. If an empty condo were an asset that didn't appreciate in value because of the scarcity of housing, maybe those wealthy people would sell them and invest in the market or companies or something else. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-the-French-are-fixing-a-housing-crisis-14931728.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...

all2 7y ago

> Zoom out for a second and consider how wild it is that we turned a life necessity (shelter) into a speculative plaything. Every necessity is a speculative plaything. There are futures and commodities markets for every consumable you could imagine. That's the beauty and cruelty of a (relatively) free market.

rayiner 7y ago

The premise isn’t that housing is treated as an investment. The premise is that housing is personal property. (Just like bread, etc., and many other things necessary for life.) It’s cities that are turning housing into an investment through laws turning it into a scarce resource. (Not just laws against building, but laws against short term rentals, boarding houses, tenements, etc.). It’s unsurprising that homelessness is actually decreasing in the US as a whole, whole increasing in wealthy cities: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/19/homelessness-is-declining-in-america https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/19/homelessn.... But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem. In 2015, about 10,000 people in San Francisco experienced homelessness at any time in the past year. That’s 112 per 10,000 people. (This is a different, and better, measure than the “homeless on a given night” instantaneous measure.) That same figure in Iowa is about 9 per 10,000. The national average is around 20-25 per 10,000.

pmoriarty 7y ago
San Francisco also has survivable winter temperatures, many shelters and other infrastructure to help the homeless, etc. I remember being in Penn Station in NYC on many nights when homeless people slept in the waiting rooms. Police would routinely come by and kick them out. When this happened during the winters in sub-zero temperatures this meant a very real risk of death for the homeless who were forced to sleep outside. I wonder if it's the same in other parts of the nation, and if the reason there are only 25 homeless per 10,000 nationwide is that the rest have died of exposure during their winters (or from other types of neglect).
- asdff 7y ago
  More homeless die of hypothermia on the streets of Los Angeles than they do in NYC. You can die of exposure when it's 50*, especially if you are wet from rain or sweat.
pcwalton 7y ago
> (Just like bread, etc., and many other things necessary for life.) Yes, this is a very good point. You don't see people vilifying farmers for making profits on food, even though some people go hungry. But for some reason people hate developers for making a profit on housing. (In my opinion, all of the NIMBY arguments, very much including the vacancy one in the article, are just attempts to mask the real reason for opposing housing—a preference for the suburban lifestyle.) > But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem. It's not just a San Francisco and New York problem. Add Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Austin, Miami, and Boston/Cambridge to that list, just to name a few. That's not even counting non-US cities like Vancouver, London, Paris, etc. I agree that housing shortages are unevenly distributed, of course.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

> the housing crisis when the problem is one of distribution, not one of supply. What’s your thesis for this? If the supply suddenly quintupled in the Bay Area and the population halved, I doubt we’d be calling it a “housing crisis”. Prices would fall dramatically because of supply.

beefalo 7y ago
The constricted supply is very much related to the treatment of primary residences as an investment. Quintupling the supply would definitely cause prices to fall, but any homeowner in their right mind opposes that development because they might lose $500k+ of property value.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  If this were true, then it would be true for every city everywhere. Which we know it’s not. For example, look at cities with much friendlier building regulations such as Dallas.