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>That and new SROs have been banned; they might be profitable but they are illegal to build in most jurisdictions. I am more familiar with the LA market than S
by slg 5y ago
>That and new SROs have been banned; they might be profitable but they are illegal to build in most jurisdictions.
I am more familiar with the LA market than SF, but they are legal in LA and a few are in the process of being built[1]. The developer for those is a non-profit though which leads back into your first point. We build at the top of the market because that is the most profitable. I believe there needs to be government incentives or regulation to spur construction across the full spectrum of housing
[1] -http://www.srohousing.org/index.html http://www.srohousing.org/index.html
- epistasis 5y agoAgreed that there should be changes in regulation, but most of that is allowing a lot more construction. Right now we allow neighbors, particularly wealthy and powerful neighborhoods with the most amenities and the most demand for housing, to stop new housing. This is the core problem. Housing markets have never delivered for all of society, but right now by constraining them heavily, we are in the worst possible situation. I personally support a robust system of public housing, for all income levels that uses cross subsidy to expand the public housing system and provide for all income levels. However, being more politically realistic, even allowing young professionals to pay laborers to build new housing, rather than forcing them to pay landlords and drive out lower income people, would be a big improvement over our current system. But even this small change seems politically intractable, unless we move zoning and permitting responsibility to the state level rather than city/county level. This is how Japan has made housing much more affordable, by not local power brokers and land owners act as rentiers.