4 ms·

I wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. Ther

by Animats 11mo ago

I wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. There are a lot more tall buildings. This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. There's a huge amount of empty office space. Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.

tonyhart7 11mo ago
[flagged]
AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
Population growth is reduced by a housing shortage because people who otherwise want to move in can't if there aren't units available for them to move in to. Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?
- Animats 11mo ago
  > Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? Yes. 12 big landlords own a majority of SF bay area property.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle has an online map, but it's behind their paywall. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-majority-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-m...
  - barry-cotter 11mo ago
    That is not by any reasonable definition a monopoly. 12 landowners owning more than 50% of the property isn’t even an oligopoly.
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    The title of the link indeed says "the majority of the San Francisco Bay Area" but it also says that the largest of them owns 293 buildings, so for twelve times that to be a majority there would have to be no more than about five thousand total properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Meanwhile the Chronicle says there are about 2.3 million total properties, I couldn't find them repeating the claim that those 12 landlords represent a majority but they did say that "this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families". Which I wouldn't expect to be a majority of the >7 million people who live there.
hdgvhicv 11mo ago
Google suggests a whopping 15% if SF homes are empty. London by comparison is about 2.5% Why is SFs figure so high. Why are people holding on to unproductive assets, paying to maintain them.
- nikanj 11mo ago
  Empty means no permanent tenant means airbnb
  - hdgvhicv 11mo ago
    That’s included in londons 2.5% Dies SF have limits on rents that can be charged?
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
  Maybe land banking?
- Schiendelman 11mo ago
  I hesitate because there's not a lot of data out there. Are those being measured the same way? Are they even real measurements and not just repeated talking points...?
nikanj 11mo ago
There might not be a housing shortage on the North American continent, but that doesn't help because people want to live in New York, not upper Saskatchewan
- 9rx 11mo ago
  You may personally prefer New York, but the data shows much greater population growth in Saskatchewan.
  - YmiYugy 11mo ago
    But presumably pricing plays a role. If the cost of housing between NYC and Saskatchewan was comparable I imagine the former would have the higher growth rate.
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      If you change any attribute about these places at random then the migration patterns are likely to change, but that's a silly way to look at it. The comparison is around what is, not what could be in some other magical universe.
miki123211 11mo ago
You have to look at the average household size and number of children, not just population. A world where most households are man + woman + 0..3 children is very different than one where most households are 1..2 people + cat/dog. The latter demands far more housing than the former, even when populations are otherwise equal. A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families. This is what makes immigration-driven population growth so pernicious compared to childbirth-driven. The family structures you end up with are completely different.
- PlunderBunny 11mo ago
  I don’t have any data or links to contribute, but my gut feeling is that this effect would be dwarfed by population movement, specifically urbanisation - if rural areas are emptying out as everyone moves to the city, you can get the same patterns (e.g. reduced housing supply in cities and all the flow on effects from that) without any change in total population.
- amluto 11mo ago
  > A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families. Those housing units are not interchangeable. Families often want extra bedrooms, and units with extra bedrooms are frequently sorely lacking. This is one thing that is very strikingly different in different markets. A lot of US metros have a fair amount of new housing but almost none with even two bedrooms per unit, let alone three. In a place like Taiwan, there are similarly absurd housing prices, but the new dense developments have four- and five-bedroom units.
9rx 11mo ago
> This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. An actual shortage is characterized by prices being prevented from rising. It is already understood that "shortage" is being used colloquially here.
xg15 11mo ago
I noticed there is a split how this topic is discussed in (center-)left and (center-)right circles. The right generally takes as a given that the cause of the problem (if there is a problem at all) is that there is not enough housing and we just have to build more. The left argues that in we in fact do have enough units that could be used for housing (or at least the situation is not as clear-cut), but that other factors prevent them to be available at affordable prices, like the effects of extreme income and wealth inequality on the market. Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. We neither had a population explosion, nor a war or catastrophe that would have destroyed a lot of houses. So then why would there have been "enough" housing in the past but not anymore today?
- dragonwriter 11mo ago
  > Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. It comes from construction dropping far below what was necessary to keep up with historical utilization in proportion to population after the Great Recession and, while it has recovered above the amount needed to keep up, it hasn't been far enough ahead for long enough to cover the accumulated post-GR deficit. While this is a couple years old, it illustrates the issue: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-expensive-chart-inventory https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-ex... (And the national story undersrates the problem going on in lots of in-demand cities, which weren't keeping up with local need before the broader collapse of the GR.)
  - xg15 11mo ago
    Thanks for the pointers. That argument makes some sense actually. However that would still not explain the existing vacancies: https://www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/sfgate-there-are-more-than-40000-vacant-homes-in-san-francisco-report-says/ https://www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/sfgate-there-are-more-... https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2025/06/27/office-to-housing-conversion-potential-sf https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2025/06/27/office-... OT, I found a look at the US population growth trends quite interesting, especially Figure 2 and the apparent massive explosion in immigration in the last years. Not sure what exactly is going on there. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/12/population-estimates.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/12/population-es...

by Animats 11mo ago

tonyhart7 11mo ago

[flagged]

AnthonyMouse 11mo ago

Population growth is reduced by a housing shortage because people who otherwise want to move in can't if there aren't units available for them to move in to. Moreover, who is supposed to have a monopoly on housing in San Francisco? Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? And even if there was, wouldn't building more housing still fix it, because the more you build the more you dilute their monopoly?

Animats 11mo ago
> Is there any single entity that owns even as much as 1% of all the housing in the city? Yes. 12 big landlords own a majority of SF bay area property.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle has an online map, but it's behind their paywall. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-majority-of-the-san-francisco-bay-area https://www.fastcompany.com/90792419/12-mega-landlords-own-m...
- barry-cotter 11mo ago
  That is not by any reasonable definition a monopoly. 12 landowners owning more than 50% of the property isn’t even an oligopoly.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  The title of the link indeed says "the majority of the San Francisco Bay Area" but it also says that the largest of them owns 293 buildings, so for twelve times that to be a majority there would have to be no more than about five thousand total properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. Meanwhile the Chronicle says there are about 2.3 million total properties, I couldn't find them repeating the claim that those 12 landlords represent a majority but they did say that "this list of 12 includes some of the region’s major power players in residential real estate, housing tens of thousands of families". Which I wouldn't expect to be a majority of the >7 million people who live there.

hdgvhicv 11mo ago

Google suggests a whopping 15% if SF homes are empty. London by comparison is about 2.5% Why is SFs figure so high. Why are people holding on to unproductive assets, paying to maintain them.

nikanj 11mo ago
Empty means no permanent tenant means airbnb
- hdgvhicv 11mo ago
  That’s included in londons 2.5% Dies SF have limits on rents that can be charged?
nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
Maybe land banking?
Schiendelman 11mo ago
I hesitate because there's not a lot of data out there. Are those being measured the same way? Are they even real measurements and not just repeated talking points...?

nikanj 11mo ago

There might not be a housing shortage on the North American continent, but that doesn't help because people want to live in New York, not upper Saskatchewan

9rx 11mo ago
You may personally prefer New York, but the data shows much greater population growth in Saskatchewan.
- YmiYugy 11mo ago
  But presumably pricing plays a role. If the cost of housing between NYC and Saskatchewan was comparable I imagine the former would have the higher growth rate.
  - 9rx 11mo ago
    If you change any attribute about these places at random then the migration patterns are likely to change, but that's a silly way to look at it. The comparison is around what is, not what could be in some other magical universe.

miki123211 11mo ago

You have to look at the average household size and number of children, not just population. A world where most households are man + woman + 0..3 children is very different than one where most households are 1..2 people + cat/dog. The latter demands far more housing than the former, even when populations are otherwise equal. A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families. This is what makes immigration-driven population growth so pernicious compared to childbirth-driven. The family structures you end up with are completely different.

PlunderBunny 11mo ago
I don’t have any data or links to contribute, but my gut feeling is that this effect would be dwarfed by population movement, specifically urbanisation - if rural areas are emptying out as everyone moves to the city, you can get the same patterns (e.g. reduced housing supply in cities and all the flow on effects from that) without any change in total population.
amluto 11mo ago
> A population of 10 million singles demand 4 times more "housing units" than a population of 10 million people in 4-person families. Those housing units are not interchangeable. Families often want extra bedrooms, and units with extra bedrooms are frequently sorely lacking. This is one thing that is very strikingly different in different markets. A lot of US metros have a fair amount of new housing but almost none with even two bedrooms per unit, let alone three. In a place like Taiwan, there are similarly absurd housing prices, but the new dense developments have four- and five-bedroom units.

9rx 11mo ago

> This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. An actual shortage is characterized by prices being prevented from rising. It is already understood that "shortage" is being used colloquially here.

xg15 11mo ago

I noticed there is a split how this topic is discussed in (center-)left and (center-)right circles. The right generally takes as a given that the cause of the problem (if there is a problem at all) is that there is not enough housing and we just have to build more. The left argues that in we in fact do have enough units that could be used for housing (or at least the situation is not as clear-cut), but that other factors prevent them to be available at affordable prices, like the effects of extreme income and wealth inequality on the market. Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. We neither had a population explosion, nor a war or catastrophe that would have destroyed a lot of houses. So then why would there have been "enough" housing in the past but not anymore today?

dragonwriter 11mo ago
> Personally, I think the "left-wing" explanation makes more sense - at least I've never understood where that sudden shortage of physical housing is supposed to have come from. It comes from construction dropping far below what was necessary to keep up with historical utilization in proportion to population after the Great Recession and, while it has recovered above the amount needed to keep up, it hasn't been far enough ahead for long enough to cover the accumulated post-GR deficit. While this is a couple years old, it illustrates the issue: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-expensive-chart-inventory https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-ex... (And the national story undersrates the problem going on in lots of in-demand cities, which weren't keeping up with local need before the broader collapse of the GR.)
- xg15 11mo ago
  Thanks for the pointers. That argument makes some sense actually. However that would still not explain the existing vacancies: https://www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/sfgate-there-are-more-than-40000-vacant-homes-in-san-francisco-report-says/ https://www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/sfgate-there-are-more-... https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2025/06/27/office-to-housing-conversion-potential-sf https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2025/06/27/office-... OT, I found a look at the US population growth trends quite interesting, especially Figure 2 and the apparent massive explosion in immigration in the last years. Not sure what exactly is going on there. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/12/population-estimates.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/12/population-es...