18 ms·

Dear SF, More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment

by robbyt 6y ago

Dear SF, More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to buy... But it's still not possible here.

shortandsweet 6y ago
What should we do robbyt?
- cogman10 6y ago
  Taxing unoccupied homes and apartments will fix things real fast.
  - entee 6y ago
    Really hard to do. Not because it’s a bad idea but because it’s hard to identify a vacant apartment. One example using utility bills as proof of residence can be gamed by paying people to go turn on the lights for a while. How can you tell that the property is actually empty?
  - kungito 6y ago
    It's such a simple solution which would never pass almost anywhere in the world
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      Netherlands had laws discouraging speculators and hoarders from keeping empty homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting_in_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting_in_the_Netherlands
    - cogman10 6y ago
      It's already passed in SF for retail [1] and other areas for non-retail. Further, the revenue from that tax could be used to fund public housing to further drive down housing costs. [1] https://www.bookweb.org/news/san-francisco-approves-vacant-property-tax-576734 https://www.bookweb.org/news/san-francisco-approves-vacant-p...
    - knowhy 6y ago
      Berlin has such laws since 2014 and it is working poorly. Turns out that it is hard to get an overview of empty apartments. City government has to rely on other tenants reporting empty apartments.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Maybe something exponential? Small value first year, smallish value second year, expensive third year, super expensive afterwards.
  - itchyouch 6y ago
    How would that be done? If an address wasn’t claimed for a personal tax return for an owner or tenant, it gets a big tax bill?
    - cogman10 6y ago
      This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values. Presumably, the building company would be the owners for all the empty apartments which would make it easy to find and tax. It would be more difficult to detect someone buying a home/apartment as an "investment".
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        At what point do they become apartments though? When the Certificate of Occupancy is issued? "No problem; those units aren't finished yet. [They need a smoke alarm to be legal units and somehow we haven't found the time to get around to it yet.]" Or whatever the threshold is between "this is a vacant lot" and "this is a taxable unoccupied unit", you're just providing incentive to stay on one side of that line if there is a glut of builders using this strategy.
        cogman10 6y ago
        IDK, probably have to do some research into how much time it takes to finish a unit to say when the clock starts ticking. For example, obviously a smoke alarm is something that takes 15 minutes to install, so that wouldn't be when you start the clock. You might be able to base it on when any single unit is sold in the block. That is "You sell 1 apartment, you've got a year to sell to rest or you are going to start seeing vacancy taxes".
      - twblalock 6y ago
        > This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values. That isn't the reason rent is high in SF.
  - matwood 6y ago
    You mean add additional taxes? Presumably they are already taxed. Does SF have homestead property tax exemptions? Where I live property taxes are quite high, unless the property is owner occupied. The second homes and rentals subsidized the taxes of those who live here.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      SF, like all of California, has the worst possible property tax scheme. They passed "homestead" protections but did it for all property tax, not just homesteads. Any property tax, from vacant lot to strip mall to vacation home to industrial plant, can not rise above 2% per year. Meanwhile property values rise 5%-10% per year. The only way for property to get reassessed at market value is to build on it or sell it. This subsidizes speculation. If you own a vacant lot since 1970, and pay an effective tax rate of 0.05%, and building on it raises your taxes to 1%, you're taking a huge risk by deciding to enter the market now. Similarly, that super old 6-unit apartment building from 1930 has a ridiculously low tax basis; upgrading to 20 units hugely increases taxes.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - daveFNbuck 6y ago
    If the problem is developers making a bunch of apartments and releasing them slowly, wouldn't such a tax just mean they'd switch to a strategy of making them slowly to get the same effect?
    - sct202 6y ago
      The governor of my state ripped toilets out of one of his mansions to make it "unlivable" for tax reasons. No doubt the developers could stall finishing units if they had to.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Literally nobody has ever done this. Large apartment builders have banks breathing down their necks. They try to lease up as fast as they can, which generally takes about a year to get to 90% because there's a lot of friction in getting people to move.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Vancouver does this, and it reveals that vacant homes are not the problem. There's a small additional revenue stream, and some college students get to rent our mansions for cheap, but it's simply not enough homes to have much of an impact.
    - Tiktaalik 6y ago
      The vacancy/spec tax spiked the amount of rentals hitting the market the year it came into effect, adding 8000-11000 that year depending on if you factor in new builds. You're only gonna get that big impact one time, but it goes to show that the tax was worth doing. Doesn't solve the problem by itself, but the tax will help. The amount of units that suddenly appeared showed that there was a small percent of units "leaking" from every new build that never hit the market.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    Land value tax would be simpler. Tax everything based on the unimproved value of the land. Unoccupied homes and apartments become money-losers, and owners are forced to sell them to people who would rent them out or occupy them, or else it becomes a money-losing enterprise. No need to figure out what's occupied or unoccupied, and no loopholes. Just tax the externality and let the market figure out the rest.
- jakear 6y ago
  Public housing projects.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    You know, it's been a while since I left Potrero Hill, but I think that I heard the feds had taken over the public housing projects on the south side (you know, back where OJ Simpson grew up) because they were basically uninhabitable. What's the status on that? But you know, that's last generation projects. What's the status on today's "affordable housing" projects? Oh, you say it costs $750,000 in construction costs alone for an "affordable" 2BR apartment? Oh dear me, that's rather ridiculously steep, isn't it... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/California-housing-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/California-housing-cos...
    - blueline 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
      - Joeri 6y ago
        Singapore relies heavily on cheap foreign construction workers. In order for that model to be applied in SF would require opening the Mexican border to allow for cheap immigrant workers to come to SF. That’s not going to fly for many reasons.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        hollerith 6y ago
        I always thought that most of the construction workers in SF are illegal immigrants from Mexico and have been for the last 30 years or more. I always thought that there were about 8 million illegal immigrants in California, then 9/11 happened, but even after 9/11 the number never dipped below 1 or 2 million -- and if it got that low, it was only for a few years. Also, I thought that when the numbers have gone down, from 8 million to 4 million, say, it is more because of an increase in economic opportunity in Mexico than it is because of an increase in the effectiveness of US border control. And I thought that even with all his talk, Trump didn't improve US border control significantly. But I don't have any direct motive to stay informed on this issue. E.g., I don't hire cheap workers. So it is possible I am misinformed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
imaginenore 6y ago
Aren't NYC apartments consistently cheaper than SF?
fennecfoxen 6y ago
Dear SF, More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people. But, when you think of them, you're thinking way too small. You need to think in terms of, like, literally doubling the number of apartments available, and they may then be in reach of normal people once more. You also need to get yourself together and reverse that trend where your transit system has carried fewer people more slowly for more money since the eighties. (The bus-rapid-transit corridors are a good start, as they're much more transiting for much less money than new subways, but you're still thinking too small, and need to 10x your ambitions.)
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  So, the infrastructure can handle double its current utilization? Aren’t the sewers in SF literally over a century old? No issues with adequate water supply and sewage treatment?
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    These are bad faith arguments and therefore you are either debating in bad faith, or a dupe. San Francisco's gross water demand has been falling consistently for the last 50 years. Not per-capita. Gross. In 1998 the demand was 82 million gallons per day and in 2019 it was 63 million, with a population 17% greater. The more people you pile into a city, the less demand there is, because grossly wasteful activities like washing cars and watering grass get squeezed out. The east bay's EBMUD service area has experienced the same trend: total water demand has plummeted since mid-century and now stands at its lowest point in history, despite the exploding population.
    - frankfrankfrank 6y ago
      Not only is that very unnecessary strong language, but I find the types of squabbles around water rather unproductive. Sure, (referring to your other comment) one can see that efficient toilets have been productive in doing what they are supposed to do, but that also totally dismisses things like the fact that sewage systems designed/engineered in the past were created for specific flow rates that things like high efficiency toilets and faucets and generally low water usage have caused problems with. It also oddly erroneously equates water usage with some sort of negative thing in and of itself, akin to saying that rain is wasting water. It is not the use of water that is the problem, ignoring the rather minimal cost of things like moving the water, which is overwhelmingly a fixed, not variable cost. The real and only consequential problem is the contamination and pollution of water through things like significant quantities of soaps/surfactants, as well as almost unremovable harmful chemicals like birth control and other pharmaceuticals, preservatives from vehicle tires, and carcinogenic PFOA/PFOS that are now said to essentially be in EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET. I can assure you that pumping a million gallons of water out of a well and letting it seep back into the ground is not nearly as destructive and damaging as the emission of various hormones into the municipal water system by women simply going to the bathroom. In other words, if I were to use essentially nothing but moderate levels of natural surfactants, e.g., animal/plant fat produced soaps and did not take or use products created with "chemicals"; I could use tens of thousands of gallons of water per day and it would make no difference to the water cycle or availability. However, I could also use the amount and number of different destructive, polluting, toxic products that the average self-righteous person uses and I could pollute millions upon millions of gallons of water EVERY SINGLE DAY, all, while feeling self-righteous about my low water usage, while tossing new technology and plastic products produced by pumping tons of chemicals into Asian rivers. A lot of these things are about perspective. You would ask that you take a step back and reexamine whether you are actually rational and using the scientific method that requires the questioning and reexamination of all assumptions and facts, or if you are being militant and extreme, aka an activist.
aqme28 6y ago
Consider Tokyo. They have kept supply up with demand, and as a result prices have stayed relatively flat. https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-home-prices-stay-flat-11554210002 https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...
- onei 6y ago
  Isn't it common for Japanese apartments to be super tiny though? As in enough space for a mattress and not much more.
  - skellington 6y ago
    Yes, but if you want to have adequate supply in a very space limited area, that's going to be one of the natural compromises.
  - technofiend 6y ago
    I'm no expert, just a virtual tourist via YouTube. According to (1) average Tokyo apartment size is 20 square meters or a little over 400 square feet vs 700 square feet in San Francisco as found from a quick Google search. Considering some Japanese rent and live in Cyber cafe cubes that are even smaller I'm not sure how fair a comparison really is between the two. Japan in particular seems to have small appliances geared towards smaller footprint apartments. https://www.all-about-teaching-english-in-japan.com/Tokyoapartment.html https://www.all-about-teaching-english-in-japan.com/Tokyoapa...
    - kenneth 6y ago
      Japanese people are also smaller than Americans! Joking aside, the lifestyle is also different. Tokyo and HK where I live are known for tiny apartments, but they're also cities where residents spend far less time at home, offering cheap options for eating out, many places to hang out outside home, reliable transit, and extreme safety from crime at all times of the day. I'm far more comfortable in a tiny HK flat than I would be in the same size in SF. Thankfully I have the luxury of a decent sized space in both now.
jlmorton 6y ago
You're literally replying in a thread about a massive, rapid drop in average rental prices after a large increase in the vacancy rate.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
How about mixed-cost buildings? Some higher-cost "luxury" units whose price/rent subsidizes the lower cost "essential" units, where firemen, teachers, local people can live.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  Why should we subsidize homes for firefighters?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I don't know about firefighters but some public services are dependent on workers who commute from outside of San Francisco.
    - CalRobert 6y ago
      More broadly, if housing is so expensive people with full time jobs can't easily afford it, build more housing. Subsidizing it for certain groups is NIMBY-enabling tokenism.
- bjt 6y ago
  They've been doing that quite a while. https://sfplanning.org/project/inclusionary-affordable-housing-program https://sfplanning.org/project/inclusionary-affordable-housi...
- akiselev 6y ago
  A third of all units developers build in SF goes to low income housing
- cwalv 6y ago
  An alternative would be that the essential workers are just paid more; if they're truly essential, it's hard to see how this wouldn't happen naturally
Nelkins 6y ago
This is absolutely false. Every three years, by law, NYC does a housing and vacancy survey of tens of thousands of apartments (the most recent survey was in 2017). The raw data is here[0], and selected findings are here[1]. You can see in in the selected findings that the vacancy rate in NYC in 2017 was 3.63%, which is INCREDIBLY low. A "healthy" vacancy rate is closer to 7% or 8%[2]. [0] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nychvs.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nychvs.html [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2017-hvs-initial-findings.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2017-hv... [2] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/30/what-vacancy-rates-tell-you-about-a-housing-shortage https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/30/what-vacancy-r...
onetimemanytime 6y ago
>>true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. Why would they do that? Not to mention that NY is kinda big for developers to band together to manipulate this. My guess is that developers try to sell/rent units as fast as they can....and faster than the other guy.
dehrmann 6y ago
> More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Pre-covid, I knew engineers making $100k+ living with four roommates in a somewhat run-down apartment. Sure, $100k isn't that much, but it's enough that they should be living somewhere nicer without the roommates. People who should be in high-end apartments are living in low-end apartments, displacing "normal" people who would normally live there. If you build only mid-high-end apartments, the priced will come down to the point that the average tech worker can afford them, and they'll move out of their four roommate situation. That will free up inventory at the lower end, and prices will drop. This really is just supply and demand. It does funny things at times (see the backward bending supply curve of labor), but until there's a surplus of housing, this isn't one of them.
conanbatt 6y ago
Compare the density of SF to the one on NYC. It clearly has helped more people.

by robbyt 6y ago

shortandsweet 6y ago

What should we do robbyt?

cogman10 6y ago
Taxing unoccupied homes and apartments will fix things real fast.
- entee 6y ago
  Really hard to do. Not because it’s a bad idea but because it’s hard to identify a vacant apartment. One example using utility bills as proof of residence can be gamed by paying people to go turn on the lights for a while. How can you tell that the property is actually empty?
- kungito 6y ago
  It's such a simple solution which would never pass almost anywhere in the world
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    Netherlands had laws discouraging speculators and hoarders from keeping empty homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting_in_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting_in_the_Netherlands
  - cogman10 6y ago
    It's already passed in SF for retail [1] and other areas for non-retail. Further, the revenue from that tax could be used to fund public housing to further drive down housing costs. [1] https://www.bookweb.org/news/san-francisco-approves-vacant-property-tax-576734 https://www.bookweb.org/news/san-francisco-approves-vacant-p...
  - knowhy 6y ago
    Berlin has such laws since 2014 and it is working poorly. Turns out that it is hard to get an overview of empty apartments. City government has to rely on other tenants reporting empty apartments.
- oblio 6y ago
  Maybe something exponential? Small value first year, smallish value second year, expensive third year, super expensive afterwards.
- itchyouch 6y ago
  How would that be done? If an address wasn’t claimed for a personal tax return for an owner or tenant, it gets a big tax bill?
  - cogman10 6y ago
    This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values. Presumably, the building company would be the owners for all the empty apartments which would make it easy to find and tax. It would be more difficult to detect someone buying a home/apartment as an "investment".
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      At what point do they become apartments though? When the Certificate of Occupancy is issued? "No problem; those units aren't finished yet. [They need a smoke alarm to be legal units and somehow we haven't found the time to get around to it yet.]" Or whatever the threshold is between "this is a vacant lot" and "this is a taxable unoccupied unit", you're just providing incentive to stay on one side of that line if there is a glut of builders using this strategy.
      - cogman10 6y ago
        IDK, probably have to do some research into how much time it takes to finish a unit to say when the clock starts ticking. For example, obviously a smoke alarm is something that takes 15 minutes to install, so that wouldn't be when you start the clock. You might be able to base it on when any single unit is sold in the block. That is "You sell 1 apartment, you've got a year to sell to rest or you are going to start seeing vacancy taxes".
    - twblalock 6y ago
      > This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values. That isn't the reason rent is high in SF.
- matwood 6y ago
  You mean add additional taxes? Presumably they are already taxed. Does SF have homestead property tax exemptions? Where I live property taxes are quite high, unless the property is owner occupied. The second homes and rentals subsidized the taxes of those who live here.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    SF, like all of California, has the worst possible property tax scheme. They passed "homestead" protections but did it for all property tax, not just homesteads. Any property tax, from vacant lot to strip mall to vacation home to industrial plant, can not rise above 2% per year. Meanwhile property values rise 5%-10% per year. The only way for property to get reassessed at market value is to build on it or sell it. This subsidizes speculation. If you own a vacant lot since 1970, and pay an effective tax rate of 0.05%, and building on it raises your taxes to 1%, you're taking a huge risk by deciding to enter the market now. Similarly, that super old 6-unit apartment building from 1930 has a ridiculously low tax basis; upgrading to 20 units hugely increases taxes.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- daveFNbuck 6y ago
  If the problem is developers making a bunch of apartments and releasing them slowly, wouldn't such a tax just mean they'd switch to a strategy of making them slowly to get the same effect?
  - sct202 6y ago
    The governor of my state ripped toilets out of one of his mansions to make it "unlivable" for tax reasons. No doubt the developers could stall finishing units if they had to.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Literally nobody has ever done this. Large apartment builders have banks breathing down their necks. They try to lease up as fast as they can, which generally takes about a year to get to 90% because there's a lot of friction in getting people to move.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Vancouver does this, and it reveals that vacant homes are not the problem. There's a small additional revenue stream, and some college students get to rent our mansions for cheap, but it's simply not enough homes to have much of an impact.
  - Tiktaalik 6y ago
    The vacancy/spec tax spiked the amount of rentals hitting the market the year it came into effect, adding 8000-11000 that year depending on if you factor in new builds. You're only gonna get that big impact one time, but it goes to show that the tax was worth doing. Doesn't solve the problem by itself, but the tax will help. The amount of units that suddenly appeared showed that there was a small percent of units "leaking" from every new build that never hit the market.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Land value tax would be simpler. Tax everything based on the unimproved value of the land. Unoccupied homes and apartments become money-losers, and owners are forced to sell them to people who would rent them out or occupy them, or else it becomes a money-losing enterprise. No need to figure out what's occupied or unoccupied, and no loopholes. Just tax the externality and let the market figure out the rest.
jakear 6y ago
Public housing projects.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  You know, it's been a while since I left Potrero Hill, but I think that I heard the feds had taken over the public housing projects on the south side (you know, back where OJ Simpson grew up) because they were basically uninhabitable. What's the status on that? But you know, that's last generation projects. What's the status on today's "affordable housing" projects? Oh, you say it costs $750,000 in construction costs alone for an "affordable" 2BR apartment? Oh dear me, that's rather ridiculously steep, isn't it... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/California-housing-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/California-housing-cos...
  - blueline 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
    - Joeri 6y ago
      Singapore relies heavily on cheap foreign construction workers. In order for that model to be applied in SF would require opening the Mexican border to allow for cheap immigrant workers to come to SF. That’s not going to fly for many reasons.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - hollerith 6y ago
        I always thought that most of the construction workers in SF are illegal immigrants from Mexico and have been for the last 30 years or more. I always thought that there were about 8 million illegal immigrants in California, then 9/11 happened, but even after 9/11 the number never dipped below 1 or 2 million -- and if it got that low, it was only for a few years. Also, I thought that when the numbers have gone down, from 8 million to 4 million, say, it is more because of an increase in economic opportunity in Mexico than it is because of an increase in the effectiveness of US border control. And I thought that even with all his talk, Trump didn't improve US border control significantly. But I don't have any direct motive to stay informed on this issue. E.g., I don't hire cheap workers. So it is possible I am misinformed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

imaginenore 6y ago

Aren't NYC apartments consistently cheaper than SF?

fennecfoxen 6y ago

Dear SF, More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people. But, when you think of them, you're thinking way too small. You need to think in terms of, like, literally doubling the number of apartments available, and they may then be in reach of normal people once more. You also need to get yourself together and reverse that trend where your transit system has carried fewer people more slowly for more money since the eighties. (The bus-rapid-transit corridors are a good start, as they're much more transiting for much less money than new subways, but you're still thinking too small, and need to 10x your ambitions.)

daniellarusso 6y ago
So, the infrastructure can handle double its current utilization? Aren’t the sewers in SF literally over a century old? No issues with adequate water supply and sewage treatment?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  These are bad faith arguments and therefore you are either debating in bad faith, or a dupe. San Francisco's gross water demand has been falling consistently for the last 50 years. Not per-capita. Gross. In 1998 the demand was 82 million gallons per day and in 2019 it was 63 million, with a population 17% greater. The more people you pile into a city, the less demand there is, because grossly wasteful activities like washing cars and watering grass get squeezed out. The east bay's EBMUD service area has experienced the same trend: total water demand has plummeted since mid-century and now stands at its lowest point in history, despite the exploding population.
  - frankfrankfrank 6y ago
    Not only is that very unnecessary strong language, but I find the types of squabbles around water rather unproductive. Sure, (referring to your other comment) one can see that efficient toilets have been productive in doing what they are supposed to do, but that also totally dismisses things like the fact that sewage systems designed/engineered in the past were created for specific flow rates that things like high efficiency toilets and faucets and generally low water usage have caused problems with. It also oddly erroneously equates water usage with some sort of negative thing in and of itself, akin to saying that rain is wasting water. It is not the use of water that is the problem, ignoring the rather minimal cost of things like moving the water, which is overwhelmingly a fixed, not variable cost. The real and only consequential problem is the contamination and pollution of water through things like significant quantities of soaps/surfactants, as well as almost unremovable harmful chemicals like birth control and other pharmaceuticals, preservatives from vehicle tires, and carcinogenic PFOA/PFOS that are now said to essentially be in EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET. I can assure you that pumping a million gallons of water out of a well and letting it seep back into the ground is not nearly as destructive and damaging as the emission of various hormones into the municipal water system by women simply going to the bathroom. In other words, if I were to use essentially nothing but moderate levels of natural surfactants, e.g., animal/plant fat produced soaps and did not take or use products created with "chemicals"; I could use tens of thousands of gallons of water per day and it would make no difference to the water cycle or availability. However, I could also use the amount and number of different destructive, polluting, toxic products that the average self-righteous person uses and I could pollute millions upon millions of gallons of water EVERY SINGLE DAY, all, while feeling self-righteous about my low water usage, while tossing new technology and plastic products produced by pumping tons of chemicals into Asian rivers. A lot of these things are about perspective. You would ask that you take a step back and reexamine whether you are actually rational and using the scientific method that requires the questioning and reexamination of all assumptions and facts, or if you are being militant and extreme, aka an activist.

aqme28 6y ago

Consider Tokyo. They have kept supply up with demand, and as a result prices have stayed relatively flat. https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-home-prices-stay-flat-11554210002 https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...

onei 6y ago
Isn't it common for Japanese apartments to be super tiny though? As in enough space for a mattress and not much more.
- skellington 6y ago
  Yes, but if you want to have adequate supply in a very space limited area, that's going to be one of the natural compromises.
- technofiend 6y ago
  I'm no expert, just a virtual tourist via YouTube. According to (1) average Tokyo apartment size is 20 square meters or a little over 400 square feet vs 700 square feet in San Francisco as found from a quick Google search. Considering some Japanese rent and live in Cyber cafe cubes that are even smaller I'm not sure how fair a comparison really is between the two. Japan in particular seems to have small appliances geared towards smaller footprint apartments. https://www.all-about-teaching-english-in-japan.com/Tokyoapartment.html https://www.all-about-teaching-english-in-japan.com/Tokyoapa...
  - kenneth 6y ago
    Japanese people are also smaller than Americans! Joking aside, the lifestyle is also different. Tokyo and HK where I live are known for tiny apartments, but they're also cities where residents spend far less time at home, offering cheap options for eating out, many places to hang out outside home, reliable transit, and extreme safety from crime at all times of the day. I'm far more comfortable in a tiny HK flat than I would be in the same size in SF. Thankfully I have the luxury of a decent sized space in both now.

jlmorton 6y ago

You're literally replying in a thread about a massive, rapid drop in average rental prices after a large increase in the vacancy rate.

WhompingWindows 6y ago

How about mixed-cost buildings? Some higher-cost "luxury" units whose price/rent subsidizes the lower cost "essential" units, where firemen, teachers, local people can live.

CalRobert 6y ago
Why should we subsidize homes for firefighters?
- imtringued 6y ago
  I don't know about firefighters but some public services are dependent on workers who commute from outside of San Francisco.
  - CalRobert 6y ago
    More broadly, if housing is so expensive people with full time jobs can't easily afford it, build more housing. Subsidizing it for certain groups is NIMBY-enabling tokenism.
bjt 6y ago
They've been doing that quite a while. https://sfplanning.org/project/inclusionary-affordable-housing-program https://sfplanning.org/project/inclusionary-affordable-housi...
akiselev 6y ago
A third of all units developers build in SF goes to low income housing
cwalv 6y ago
An alternative would be that the essential workers are just paid more; if they're truly essential, it's hard to see how this wouldn't happen naturally

Nelkins 6y ago

This is absolutely false. Every three years, by law, NYC does a housing and vacancy survey of tens of thousands of apartments (the most recent survey was in 2017). The raw data is here[0], and selected findings are here[1]. You can see in in the selected findings that the vacancy rate in NYC in 2017 was 3.63%, which is INCREDIBLY low. A "healthy" vacancy rate is closer to 7% or 8%[2]. [0] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nychvs.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nychvs.html [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2017-hvs-initial-findings.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2017-hv... [2] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/30/what-vacancy-rates-tell-you-about-a-housing-shortage https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/30/what-vacancy-r...

onetimemanytime 6y ago

>>true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. Why would they do that? Not to mention that NY is kinda big for developers to band together to manipulate this. My guess is that developers try to sell/rent units as fast as they can....and faster than the other guy.

dehrmann 6y ago

> More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Pre-covid, I knew engineers making $100k+ living with four roommates in a somewhat run-down apartment. Sure, $100k isn't that much, but it's enough that they should be living somewhere nicer without the roommates. People who should be in high-end apartments are living in low-end apartments, displacing "normal" people who would normally live there. If you build only mid-high-end apartments, the priced will come down to the point that the average tech worker can afford them, and they'll move out of their four roommate situation. That will free up inventory at the lower end, and prices will drop. This really is just supply and demand. It does funny things at times (see the backward bending supply curve of labor), but until there's a surplus of housing, this isn't one of them.

conanbatt 6y ago

Compare the density of SF to the one on NYC. It clearly has helped more people.