5 ms·

Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public trans

by TSiege 3mo ago

Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas. We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plentiful affordable housing without decoupling this idea. Houses are a poor financial investment once you remove all the incentives involved like mortgage tax credits, fixed mortgage rates, and obstructive zoning rules. Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.

lokar 3mo ago
Even today the structure is a declining asset. It’s just that bad land use policy has forced land value up enough to overwhelm that.
grttw11 3mo ago
[flagged]
- duped 3mo ago
  Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.
- jadenPete 3mo ago
  > This is patently false. I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before: 1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values 2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area. > Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home. I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.
everdrive 3mo ago
>There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.
- mbgerring 3mo ago
  > I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it. Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution: Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters. Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!
  - joinjune 3mo ago
    Short term you might be right. Long term we have seen that western "education" results in declines in birthrates. Demographics are destiny.
    - KylerAce 3mo ago
      Birthrates go down in the east too whenever incomes increase (and sometimes without income increasing)
    - xnx 3mo ago
      ""education""?
  - Legend2440 3mo ago
    The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-scotus-immigration-trump https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...
crooked-v 3mo ago
SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.
- orangecat 3mo ago
  Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.
  - crooked-v 3mo ago
    If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far. To me it feels much more like just a significant cadre who resist any change, of any kind, for any reason, who can ignore the personal side effects because of Prop 13 and because their family bought a house in the 80s and they don't give a shit about anyone else who wants or has to live in the city.
    - pseudalopex 3mo ago
      People have non financial interests.
    - scoofy 3mo ago
      >If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. They get this anyway, it's just unrealized capital gains.
    - littlexsparkee 3mo ago
      Rent control is another potent disincentive for change, probably due to fears of OMI/Ellis Act or other downstream effects.
bombcar 3mo ago
If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so. Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.
- scoofy 3mo ago
  >Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are. The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely. We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.
  - robocat 3mo ago
    > housing has been turned into a zero sum game Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for. And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum). Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-land-trap-by-mike https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...
    - scoofy 3mo ago
      >Not really. Land has always been zero-sum What? Yes, but you misunderstand. When you (intentionally) make expanding the housing supply illegal or practically impossible, then you've turned housing into a zero-sum game.
rvz 3mo ago
> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. This conflation is a coping mechanism by home owners, especially the ones in SF (which the entire city from SF to San Jose) is sitting on a fault line. The main problem is that building is being blocked by several other homeowners who are petrified of the value of their homes falling. No wonder young people are beginning to look to this policy in China [0] - "Houses are for living, not for speculation". > Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in. In 2026, it is really a bad investment in the AI age and especially in HCOL areas like SF, given the layoffs and the jobs being off-shored. If you were part of the people who leveraged their RSUs to buy, well that is also a bad idea to do in 2026. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
- xnx 3mo ago
  China is a weird example because they massively overbuilt housing.
gruntled-worker 3mo ago
I agree with everything you wrote. I'd like to add the pyramid angle. Fancy mansions have always been overpriced. For property prices to grow faster than inflation, the pyramid needed to grow its bottom. Supply restrictionism was the ticket. Eventually, every shack was priced mansion-like. This required extracting ever larger fractions of the incomes of renters. Some renters wisened up and bought homes (when they still could). Changing sides, they beefed up the scheme's political backing. No one cares if mansions are expensive, but basic housing should be extremely cheap. This sounds like a handout but isn't. It's what an unadulterated market would provide. It's what the pre-1970 market used to provide. That's not to say that markets should be left alone. It's to say that the way this particular market was "regulated" was fundamentally corrupt. We could call it negative regulation.
Volundr 3mo ago
> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. And it's a really, really shitty one. My house has roughly doubled in value since I bought it, but in practice that's useless to me. I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. If anything it reduces my mobility by making it harder to move, since I really need to coordinate the sale of my current home with buying the new one to help absorb that $500k or whatever price tag. My if house prices dropped by 50% or more drops my net worth on paper, but it doesn't actually change anything. I still have a place to live + my savings, investments, etc.
- Infinitesimus 3mo ago
  > I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.
  - beAbU 3mo ago
    Assuming the mortgage is paid off!
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago
    How does that help? If don't have enough cash now, then how will getting a loan that needs to be paid back with interest help with that. I will have cash for a little while, then I will have way way less as I have to make payments. Then I miss a few and they take my house and I'm homeless.
  - Volundr 3mo ago
    Sure, it increases one's borrowing power and that can be useful. But "I can use it to go deeper into debt" is pretty limited utility compared to other kinds of wealth.
- pandaman 3mo ago
  > I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?
tqi 3mo ago
It's frustrating to see the NYT frame this as an AI vs everyone else story, pitting incumbent renters against newcomers, while landlords literally extract rent.
gogobio 3mo ago
You're right about one thing - housing being expensive is a choice, it's a choice of those who have moved to SF and despite it making no sense for their financial situation just "trying to make things happen" there to stay there. These are the people who drive property costs up. It's not about "just building more", that's literally never the answer. Building more is solving just for one factor and when you build more - guess what's gonna happen? More density, even higher costs of living because guess what - more people moving means more demand on local services, shops, transit, so higher costs. On top of it - folks who buy these newly built properties aren't going to be making minimum wage at a local coffee and avocado toast shop - they're business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, etc. Your cost of living will keep rising with every new property built and every new transplant. The real answer is taxes, taxing the shit out of these rich transplants and the corporations. You're in California I can't believe you lot aren't more progressive about jacking up the taxes on the rich to pave the way for a healthy society for the rest. But given that every single tech nerd that moves to SF sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or a not-yet-founder - good luck with that, I genuinely do not see even the younger crowd being pro taxing the rich in a city full of tech leeches.

by TSiege 3mo ago

lokar 3mo ago

Even today the structure is a declining asset. It’s just that bad land use policy has forced land value up enough to overwhelm that.

grttw11 3mo ago

[flagged]

duped 3mo ago
Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.
jadenPete 3mo ago
> This is patently false. I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before: 1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values 2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area. > Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home. I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.

everdrive 3mo ago

>There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

mbgerring 3mo ago
> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it. Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution: Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters. Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!
- joinjune 3mo ago
  Short term you might be right. Long term we have seen that western "education" results in declines in birthrates. Demographics are destiny.
  - KylerAce 3mo ago
    Birthrates go down in the east too whenever incomes increase (and sometimes without income increasing)
  - xnx 3mo ago
    ""education""?
- Legend2440 3mo ago
  The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-scotus-immigration-trump https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...

crooked-v 3mo ago

SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.

orangecat 3mo ago
Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.
- crooked-v 3mo ago
  If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far. To me it feels much more like just a significant cadre who resist any change, of any kind, for any reason, who can ignore the personal side effects because of Prop 13 and because their family bought a house in the 80s and they don't give a shit about anyone else who wants or has to live in the city.
  - pseudalopex 3mo ago
    People have non financial interests.
  - scoofy 3mo ago
    >If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. They get this anyway, it's just unrealized capital gains.
  - littlexsparkee 3mo ago
    Rent control is another potent disincentive for change, probably due to fears of OMI/Ellis Act or other downstream effects.

bombcar 3mo ago

If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so. Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.

scoofy 3mo ago
>Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are. The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely. We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.
- robocat 3mo ago
  > housing has been turned into a zero sum game Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for. And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum). Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-land-trap-by-mike https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...
  - scoofy 3mo ago
    >Not really. Land has always been zero-sum What? Yes, but you misunderstand. When you (intentionally) make expanding the housing supply illegal or practically impossible, then you've turned housing into a zero-sum game.

rvz 3mo ago

> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. This conflation is a coping mechanism by home owners, especially the ones in SF (which the entire city from SF to San Jose) is sitting on a fault line. The main problem is that building is being blocked by several other homeowners who are petrified of the value of their homes falling. No wonder young people are beginning to look to this policy in China [0] - "Houses are for living, not for speculation". > Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in. In 2026, it is really a bad investment in the AI age and especially in HCOL areas like SF, given the layoffs and the jobs being off-shored. If you were part of the people who leveraged their RSUs to buy, well that is also a bad idea to do in 2026. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

xnx 3mo ago
China is a weird example because they massively overbuilt housing.

gruntled-worker 3mo ago

I agree with everything you wrote. I'd like to add the pyramid angle. Fancy mansions have always been overpriced. For property prices to grow faster than inflation, the pyramid needed to grow its bottom. Supply restrictionism was the ticket. Eventually, every shack was priced mansion-like. This required extracting ever larger fractions of the incomes of renters. Some renters wisened up and bought homes (when they still could). Changing sides, they beefed up the scheme's political backing. No one cares if mansions are expensive, but basic housing should be extremely cheap. This sounds like a handout but isn't. It's what an unadulterated market would provide. It's what the pre-1970 market used to provide. That's not to say that markets should be left alone. It's to say that the way this particular market was "regulated" was fundamentally corrupt. We could call it negative regulation.

Volundr 3mo ago

> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. And it's a really, really shitty one. My house has roughly doubled in value since I bought it, but in practice that's useless to me. I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. If anything it reduces my mobility by making it harder to move, since I really need to coordinate the sale of my current home with buying the new one to help absorb that $500k or whatever price tag. My if house prices dropped by 50% or more drops my net worth on paper, but it doesn't actually change anything. I still have a place to live + my savings, investments, etc.

Infinitesimus 3mo ago
> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.
- beAbU 3mo ago
  Assuming the mortgage is paid off!
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago
  How does that help? If don't have enough cash now, then how will getting a loan that needs to be paid back with interest help with that. I will have cash for a little while, then I will have way way less as I have to make payments. Then I miss a few and they take my house and I'm homeless.
- Volundr 3mo ago
  Sure, it increases one's borrowing power and that can be useful. But "I can use it to go deeper into debt" is pretty limited utility compared to other kinds of wealth.
pandaman 3mo ago
> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?

tqi 3mo ago

It's frustrating to see the NYT frame this as an AI vs everyone else story, pitting incumbent renters against newcomers, while landlords literally extract rent.

gogobio 3mo ago

You're right about one thing - housing being expensive is a choice, it's a choice of those who have moved to SF and despite it making no sense for their financial situation just "trying to make things happen" there to stay there. These are the people who drive property costs up. It's not about "just building more", that's literally never the answer. Building more is solving just for one factor and when you build more - guess what's gonna happen? More density, even higher costs of living because guess what - more people moving means more demand on local services, shops, transit, so higher costs. On top of it - folks who buy these newly built properties aren't going to be making minimum wage at a local coffee and avocado toast shop - they're business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, etc. Your cost of living will keep rising with every new property built and every new transplant. The real answer is taxes, taxing the shit out of these rich transplants and the corporations. You're in California I can't believe you lot aren't more progressive about jacking up the taxes on the rich to pave the way for a healthy society for the rest. But given that every single tech nerd that moves to SF sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or a not-yet-founder - good luck with that, I genuinely do not see even the younger crowd being pro taxing the rich in a city full of tech leeches.