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> why are people constantly complaining about not being able to afford living in San Francisco? Think of someone like a cook who has lived in SF for years. T

by IvyMike 13y ago

> why are people constantly complaining about not being able to afford living in San Francisco? Think of someone like a cook who has lived in SF for years. They came to the city, honed and practiced their skills, and in their own small way helped make SF one of the best food cities in the world. And their reward is "MOVE OUT", or at least live in a crappy situation. And that change happened really fast. It is human nature that someone in this situation would complain.

malandrew 13y ago
It didn't happen really fast. It's been ignored for several decades, probably since that person moved into the city. I honestly see little difference in the human mentality that lead to the national housing crisis that and the SF housing availability crisis. Yeah, you can say the national housing crisis started very quickly in 2008 and got bad fast, but the truth is that the seeds that lead to that unstable situation were planted long long ago. The same is true for SF's housing crisis. Rent control is a prime suspect in all this. In the case of NYC, rent control probably makes sense because it's largely hit the limit of how high a city can be built (it's easy to remove a 1-3 residence building in place of a 15 residence building, but hard to remove a 15 residence building for a 30 residence one.) It's easy to argue for 5x increases in housing for a given plot of land, but much harder to argue for 2-3x increases. Economists generally all agree that rent control fucks up housing markets and reduces the quantity and quality of housing [0]. Most importantly for SF, it removes entire swathes of the existing middle class from demanding more and more housing over the years as the city grows. When you build up your life around 1994 rents, you ignore the housing problem in SF and hunker down in the home you happened upon in 1994. If for whatever reason you're rooted up 15+ years later, the rental rates have changed so much that you can't even afford to stick around and lobby for a solution like making more affordable housing available by eliminating building restrictions and rent control. Worse yet, you're likely to make the market even more distorted by arguing for more tenant protection laws. Had you been participant to the problem since 1994 because you had no rent control, you would have also been participant in the debate asking for more housing to be built each year. This is the exact same mentality that causes banking crises: introduce some extreme distorting policy that disproportionately benefits you in the short term and ignore what is going to happen when the chickens come home to roost in 10-15 years time. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...

by IvyMike 13y ago

malandrew 13y ago

It didn't happen really fast. It's been ignored for several decades, probably since that person moved into the city. I honestly see little difference in the human mentality that lead to the national housing crisis that and the SF housing availability crisis. Yeah, you can say the national housing crisis started very quickly in 2008 and got bad fast, but the truth is that the seeds that lead to that unstable situation were planted long long ago. The same is true for SF's housing crisis. Rent control is a prime suspect in all this. In the case of NYC, rent control probably makes sense because it's largely hit the limit of how high a city can be built (it's easy to remove a 1-3 residence building in place of a 15 residence building, but hard to remove a 15 residence building for a 30 residence one.) It's easy to argue for 5x increases in housing for a given plot of land, but much harder to argue for 2-3x increases. Economists generally all agree that rent control fucks up housing markets and reduces the quantity and quality of housing [0]. Most importantly for SF, it removes entire swathes of the existing middle class from demanding more and more housing over the years as the city grows. When you build up your life around 1994 rents, you ignore the housing problem in SF and hunker down in the home you happened upon in 1994. If for whatever reason you're rooted up 15+ years later, the rental rates have changed so much that you can't even afford to stick around and lobby for a solution like making more affordable housing available by eliminating building restrictions and rent control. Worse yet, you're likely to make the market even more distorted by arguing for more tenant protection laws. Had you been participant to the problem since 1994 because you had no rent control, you would have also been participant in the debate asking for more housing to be built each year. This is the exact same mentality that causes banking crises: introduce some extreme distorting policy that disproportionately benefits you in the short term and ignore what is going to happen when the chickens come home to roost in 10-15 years time. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...