Imagine you're a municipality like San Francisco. You control all of the zoning regulations, and many of the permitting requirements. You have a AA+ credit rating, and even in today's higher rate environment, you can borrow billions of dollars at 6%.
You already own oodles of land. You can build to whatever height you want within reason, because you control the zoning, and you even control many of the ordinances that allow citizens to block development (though certainly not all, like CEQA and NEPA). So you have lots of lands to build on, and what you build is largely in your control.
Construction costs in San Francisco are sky-high, at $440 sq ft. But people will happily pay you $40/sq foot per year for housing, probably for 75 years.
How is this not the easiest decision in the world?
Create a housing development agency, become a permanent developer, and landlord. Never stop building. Put proper incentives in place, so that employees at the agency can partake in the profits, incentivizing them to be efficient. Never stop doing this.
You might not be great at this at first, but fifty years later you will be.
Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Any city would be lucky to have that "problem." You have to actively work to make that a negative (by, say, refusing to allow almost any new housing for literally decades).
The consequences of that decision are fairly obvious and straightforward and they've by now been explained to everybody 50 times, but this is the path these cities choose anyway! It's their choice and it's what they keep choosing.
Cities like San Francisco have said clearly, firmly, and repeatedly: "we would rather suffer a housing crisis than allow the city to change too rapidly." At this point what else can you say in response?
Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere.
Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East, so maybe the tech industry needs to get out of SF, start a new hub somewhere else, and leave the city to the NIMBYs.
It includes two of the world's top ten universities, incredible natural beauty there and nearby, excellent weather (locals complain, as locals do, but it's wonderful), and all the resources and people are gathered there. It's hard to imagine the return on investment of moving.
Universities are institutions made of people. If SF becomes to expensive for those people to work and study in, they'll face the same problem of housing costs. And universities rise and fall over time: a great CS department one decade might slip down the ratings the next.
There are many places on Earth with nice weather and scenery (depending on taste). There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families. None of these things are unique selling points intrinsically required for a tech hub. And if remote work becomes the norm (and yes I know all the arguments for and against) you can live in your dream town with the right mixture of scenery/weather/nightclubs/schools without paying the premium.
The one thing SF has is inertia : tech happens there because it happens there. But Detroit used to have inertia, too.
I think it's the opposite; what changes more slowly? How has the list of elite universities changed over time, unless we are talking about centuries?
> There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families.
People like to find others with their interests. Very smart, highly educated, intellectual, creative people gather in SF, NY, LA, Boston. It's all the people who were bored and felt limited elsewhere. You want talented people to work with, to talk to, to challenge you. All those people who wanted to get out of their small town go to these places.
It’s easy to imagine it moving. The people doing the work are the ICs (individual contributors), and up until recently, SF was the only place to go to have a top notch career in tech. People sacrificed to live in SF as junior to mid level engineers because eventually they would get to the point where they are a senior engineer and make enough to afford housing. But now the housing has gotten so expensive that even the senior ICs have difficulty justifying sticking around because they are on a treadmill that takes years to save enough for a down payment (as prices keep rising). You need like $400k saved to buy in SF and you’ll still end up with a $6000/mo mortgage. You have to be a couple. Enough have figured this is a raw deal and have fled to other places like Seattle and Austin. So many in fact that you can now have just as promising a career today as someone could only get in SF 10-20 years ago. Eventually SF will find it hard to attract new ICs to the area and you’ll end up with an aging cohort of mid level managers, directors and staff level engineers that have fewer and fewer people to manage.
Companies won’t keep increasing total comp for junior engineers in SF when they can grow their offices in other cheaper cities instead.
You need a robust pipeline of junior folks and SF is increasingly strangling that pipeline and other cheaper cities are as attractive as SF once was.
It's also a place that is relatively welcoming to people from almost any part of the world. It's not perfect (no where is) but there a lot of places in the US where if you came from another continent or practiced an unusual religion you would feel more uncomfortable then you would in SF. That's a quality it has possessed for decades, for historical reasons.
I can think about Stanford as the first one... the other one is probably Berkeley. I'm quite surprised they both are in world's top ten universities - actually, skeptical about that. "Incredible natural beauty" is not only at least somewhat subjective, but definitely is not exclusive to SF. Weather is good, but even Honolulu and Miami would argue, not to mention quite a few other places, even if they are minority overall - so the weather is not that unique.
People - yes, currently the state of the people is well tuned in favor of SF (SFBA). But the question still remains.
You may even ignore this particular ranking, but it really doesn't matter, because neither Honolulu nor Miami, with all due respect, have anything close to either school, let alone both (or half a dozen of UC's in driving distance)
Also, very subjective, but I can't bear the humidity in FL and HI for more than a week, so saying it's all similarly good weather in all those places doesn't make sense to me.
But really, it's a combination of all of these things in one place.
Combination is good, agree. For separate points, the argument stands.
And the combination is likely the product of people, gradually accumulated in the area. So, yes, the intellectual potential is great. But that could be moved some hundreds miles away relatively easily, or at least replicated to a high degree - partially because of the sad situation with housing.
“Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East…”
Yes, but also no. Keep in mind the popularity of Westerns in the 1930’s-1950’s and the ease with which you can get to desert/mountain/beach/city/forest/etc settings within a relatively short drive from L.A.
After all, the Battle of the Bulge did take place in the California desert. Medieval England looks like California, too. Even the alien worlds of Star Trek look suspiciously like California.
And when production moved to Vancouver in the 90s, you had shows like the X-Files which often seemed to take place in a vague Pacific Northwest location.
First, yes, yes there is something magic about SF's geography, it's the closest major city to the largest VC hub in the world. These companies thrive on young talent that prefers to live in a city. It's not dissimilar to the gold rush 170 years ago when you think about it.
Second, what do you mean "San Francisco is just not suitable any more"? The tech companies and their employees are the least impacted by rising housing costs. By and large they are doing alright, so what is their incentive to uproot everything and randomly go roll the dice somewhere else which would A) not have a critical mass of VC in their backyard and B) will offer no guarantee of not reacting exactly the same as SF.
Keep in mind, 20 years ago there was barely any tech in San Francisco proper. Sure there tech employees who chose to live there and suffer the commute to the peninsula, as is their prerogative being free individuals residing in the US. The reason tech moved in was because SF offered tax breaks—they wanted their piece of the tax revenue and daily spending from well-to-do tech workers. If the city really felt tech being there was the problem they have a lot of levers (eg. raise taxes, zoning changes, etc) to push it out. Of course they don't want to do that because it would cause far more economic harm than good. NIMBYs are of course willing to entertain the charade of successful tech companies as the scapegoat because it keeps their home values sky high while deflecting to the amorphous "tech companies", who in fact they have zero control over policy and at best marginal interest in addressing the issue at all.
haha fair enough, closest cute major city : ) As a longtime South Bay resident, it's super-boring down here and actually many of the same problems, expensive and lots of homeless.
But all of that is beside the point. The real interesting question is whether the companies will yank the leash Musk-style and have everyone come back here, or not. There is a lot of hype in both directions, but I'd say that debate is not settled yet.
All this talk of "just relax zoning and build housing" is so simplistic that it's actually kinda cute. As if everything else just multiplies accordingly-- streets widen, schools are built, water/power/etc just magically appear whenever residential units are simply permitted.
Just FYI, San Jose is bigger than San Francisco in terms of population and square miles.
That's not to say that SF might not be more of a major city than SJ, in fact I would say that personally I think it is in terms of culture and history and social impact, but it's at least debatable.
I think SJ vs SF distinction is not very material to this thread. The OG Silicon Valley of HP and Fairchild Semiconductor fame liked to build corporate campuses around Stanford on cheap (at the time) land. 90's Yahoo, Doubleclick, Google followed suit. In the late 2000's, a new wave of startups like Twitter figured they don't have to stick to corporate code and just move up to a more fun city up north, combined with some tax breaks from SF specifically. How does it matter? It's the same area (i drive up and down every day) with much the same problems.
Both tech and VC are vastly more mobile than anything to do with the gold rush or even other 'technology' sectors with heavy physical assets, it's purely a coordination game.
I think having both in high concentrations is mutually beneficial. The same goes for tech workers: having thousands of potential employers within commute distance without having to move is great.
That's what I meant by coordination game: it could be any place, but they should all (well, sufficiently many) be in the same place. That's why there's a lot of staying power once a place has achieved that status (fyi, in game theory that's called a correlated equilibrium [0]).
> Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more?
Good to keep in mind that San Francisco never was part of Silicon Valley, until this past decade where the mindshare of being SV migrated north to include SF.
Especially for a city that is explicitly progressive, why the "all rapid change is bad, it must take decades or centuries, otherwise it's not natural" approach?
Germany's large cities have similar issues where they don't want to start building new districts because it'd be artificial and not naturally grown building by building. And it's better to have rents double every 10 years, apparently.
I don't get the "why", but the approach is fairly explicit -- and politicians get reelected while following it, so I guess it's what "the people" want.
Quickly throwing up cheap mass housing without also organically growing the services and rest of the community is how you get food deserts and ghettos though. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, just pointing out where it's gone wrong in the past and why people may be hesitant to try again.
"Food deserts and ghettos" are also the outcome of broader housing scarcity and lack of amenities. Where the only cheap areas around are those that have become cheap merely by virtue of being terrible to live in, and are since stuck in that vicious cycle.
It doesn't have to be "plan & build it within 12 months, and don't worry about anything but apartment buildings". It's not a new problem, it's been a constant topic (here, in Germany) for at least 15 years, with every year ending with "we have 2000 new apartments, but we need 20000 a year to keep up with demand". And city planners put their hands into their pockets and say "well, you can't rush these things..."
What will come first: commercial cold fusion energy or a return to actually building housing in Western cities?
A very practical reason: most of that available space is a desert, and people tend to prefer not living in a desert.
And also because European nations are much more developed, have much stronger economies, allow much more freedom etc etc. There's a reason why migration is a one-way-street.
People have been living around Cairo for millions of years. There are reasons why migration is a one-way street but they can change. There are millions of under-utilized young adults with access to the internet. They will find a way to prosper.
Egypt's natural environment cannot really support strong further growth. If they invest heavily into solar energy and desalination, I'm sure they can create more arable land, but it'll still come at very high capital expenditure compared to other locations.
What's your prediction here, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria overtaking Germany, France and Italy with regards to economy, science etc (broadly "development") and drawing migration from Europe? In what time frame, by 2050?
2050 is possible. There is no need for arable land if food is imported. People will want to live where the nicer weather is. Adjusted by air conditioning from cheap electricity, the advantage is in North Africa.
It's not inevitable, but when the competition is cold fusion and building housing in Western cities, I would bet on North Africa.
*edit:
>>>living around Cairo for ~millions~ thousands of years
Here in Korea quick building of mass housing is incredibly common yet there's not a single food desert or ghetto to be found. "Quick" and "cheap" are relative terms but here apartment blocks of 1k+ residencies are built in ~4 years. While most aren't "cheap" as they're built for families, those for 1 or 2-person households are very cheap by e.g. Western-European capital standards.
>Quickly throwing up cheap mass housing without also organically growing the services and rest of the community is how you get food deserts and ghettos though.
Not sure if this is the case overseas, but here in Melbourne (AU), it's really common for new developments in built-up areas to consist of a shopping centre with supermarket on the bottom floor, and a large amount of (nice) apartments on top.
Seems like a good way to solve the density problem without also isolating people from shops and services.
Food deserts are not the result of theft. Food deserts exist outside of SF or other cities that are accused of being so soft on crime and all crime is legal. Food deserts are incredibly common in rural areas, especially as a result of their non-density. But hell, when I lived in Jacksonville( which is a consolidated city-county) I was 10+ miles from any grocery store. North side has developed a lot since I left and that is no longer true but in many rural areas the only places opening up are dollar generals which are taking advantage of the economics of whatever local grocery store is charging and offering an alternative to driving 30+ miles to the nearest Walmart. A sad state of affairs.
I live in Pacific County WA and it is an economically depressed area with an outsized cost of living. Groceries are absurdly expensive relative to the average income in the area and you could probably get the same groceries for half th price by driving to where the closest Walmart is( which is 30 or so miles from where I live.
This is a popular trope, but companies have already begun walking back their claims of rampant theft[0].
There are increased profits when building in more prosperous areas, so one might understand why companies choose to do so given limited resources. But lower profits in inner cities are not always about theft so much as a lack of cash.
The article doesn't support your claim. What it supports is the idea that for Walgreens as a whole, shrinkage isn't a make-or-break issue. It says nothing about whether Walgreens will choose to place or keep a store at a high-theft location or whether a mom-and-pop store can survive in the same.
The grocery business is famous for having very thin margins, so anything that cuts in will necessarily cause fewer options for the people of that area. Academic studies have generally shown that this is in fact not a trope but fact.
That isn't what the article says. It says Walgreens is walking back their anti-theft measures because it's costly and ineffective and the customers don't like them.
It also says that they sounded the alarm when shrink was at 3.5%, but they're back down to the more-normal 2.5% now. That's a decline that undercuts the very-popular trope that open theft is rampant or out of control in certain cites.
> I don't get the "why", but the approach is fairly explicit -- and politicians get reelected while following it, so I guess it's what "the people" want.
Consider every time you have moved into a new place to live. What kind of research did you do and what factors did you consider when prioritizing multiple option down to the final selection?
It's possible you might say (since I don't know you) that you only look at price per square foot and do a sort based on that and take the cheapest option and that's that.
Most people don't do that though. They consider the neighborhood as a whole, nearby facilities, the character of the location (e.g. lots of 24hr pubs or quiet tree-lined street, etc). So the surroundings matter a whole lot to a lot of people. So people don't often want to go through the whole process of researching, selecting a place and moving to it, just to have the whole neighborhood torn down and redone in a different way a few months later. Might be better, but it's still different, so it doesn't check the same boxes they so painstakingly researched before moving.
So when you say you don't get the "why", it's just human nature. A lot of people want to settle into a stable-ish home, where things around it change slowly, not at a hectic pace that makes it seem not-home anymore.
I understand the individual's reason why they don't want a high-rise in their backyard. But having a new development 3km down the road really doesn't affect your home.
But in cities with lower ownership percentage, everybody is feeling the heat when you just cannot afford to move if you're not a top earner because your current flat would cost twice as much since you moved in ten years ago. Rent as a percentage of income steadily rises, 30% was the maximum recommended value, which is now considered good, 50% is now accepted. Germany has relatively low incomes and high taxes, people are clearly feeling it.
Yet still, they re-elect politicians who block large-scale developments in open areas. I've lived in Hamburg, they have plenty of space that can be easily developed and integrated into the public transportation network, but they don't. They wouldn't even need to build it themselves, they'd just need to allow private investors or housing coops to build. But they don't, because ... I don't know. Change is bad? It's too good of a topic to bemoan and win elections with, because people are too simple to see that they've been running the government for 50 of the past 55 years? Landlords paying them off? I don't know.
Almost no one in power in the USA is actually low taxes and low spending. Maybe a few libertarians scattered throughout the country that managed to get a seat but they're a very small minority.
Everyone is all about high taxes and high spending. It's just "high taxes for thee but not for me". So, for instance, republicans will repeal taxes on the rich and large corporations even when we already tax the middle class W2 earners more than the rich already. Similarly, republicans are huge for the MIC. So much for being fiscally conservative when they want to spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars on a stupid boondoggle airplane that no one gives a shit about.
Democrats have the same issues. They also have a hardon for the MIC and spending on stupid shit. The dems in SF will spend it on stupid trashcans or whatever nonsense that doesn't move the bar at all.
They will tax the hell out of the working class and spend the money on shit that doesn't improve the material conditions of everyday people. It's why we can't have healthcare. Both parties have no interest because that doesn't make their lobbyists money.
Given that Wyoming makes up around 0.2% of the US population, I guess the original claim that "almost[!] no one in power in the USA is actually low taxes and low spending" might be pretty reasonable.
I didn't want the tech workers flowing into Seattle with Amazon's decision to invade by building their HQ right in the heart. There was a lot of music culture there, at Cap Hill, in the basements of Seattle families that had lived there a long time. It really felt, if you were there, like an invasion: nobody coming in had any context of what was already there, they just took and took and all they could offer was software expertise and money. The city lapped it up.
Sometimes it isn't about just building to accomodating: it's about hey we don't know who you are, you just heard our city was the place to be but you didn't care about the music or the art just came in clueless.
We're not good stewards of the places we move to. We move in and pillage. Our lives are code and Zoom stand-ups, which fine whatever but what are you bringing in outside your code and Nanoleaf wall lights that give you just enough design to be tech-hip. We're raiders, trading our money for jacked up bulletproof lattes and a scene that doesn't belong to us, nodding along to punk music that's not for us, not about us except as the enemy.
Honestly, the best thing Microsoft did was have their own little stronghold out in Redmond. Amazon upended that careful respect-at-a-distance by landing their dumb super-HQ like an atomic bomb in downtown Seattle.
When a company creates a new HQ, it's displacement. When a company leaves a town (especially a small one) it leaves people jobless and they are evil for it. On the surface it seems some people think cities should stay entirely static forever, frozen at the particular time when they remembered they enjoyed it most.
The people moving in will have their own experiences. Places change. If you don't like your place, work to make it better or find one you like more. Maybe not everyone in your city is into the arts and "scene" as much as you are, and the changes are a net benefit to them.
> On the surface it seems some people think cities should stay entirely static forever, frozen at the particular time when they remembered they enjoyed it most.
I didn't say this.
> The people moving in will have their own experiences. Places change. If you don't like your place, work to make it better or find one you like more. Maybe not everyone in your city is into the arts and "scene" as much as you are, and the changes are a net benefit to them.
The tech people moving in make no effort to learn what the city is about or to integrate. That's really what I'm taking a stand on. They use money in lieu of real effort. That's pillaging.
The root of the problem is big corporations aren't held responsible for the seismic shockwaves they produce entering a city. They make cities fragile because now you've replaced a diverse set of businesses with a monocropping of tech workers and overpriced goods and services to sate them.
> It really felt, if you were there, like an invasion: nobody coming in had any context of what was already there, they just took and took and all they could offer was software expertise and money. The city lapped it up.
Story as old as time. There were people 30 years ago who wanted to keep out the people you're celebrating as the old-timers. If the older-old timers had their way your preferred old-timers would never have been allowed to move there. And there were even older-than-the-older-old timers who wanted to keep out the older-old-timers. And on and on and on.
Cities change. It's natural. You'll like some changes and hate others, but that's what comes with freedom of movement and, well, freedom more generally. At one time Midtown Manhattan was a forest. Then it was farmland. Then a semi-rural village. Eventually, rich New Yorkers started building Mansions up 5th Avenue. But they did this in the old days before powerful people could block change and even they couldn't stop the walk-ups that replaced their estates. Then those walk-ups were mostly lost to taller buildings. And then even taller ones. And now here come the super-tall skinnies that every New Yorker loves to hate.
At every step there were constituencies opposed to the changes, people who thought the newcomers didn't properly understand the true spirit of Midtown Manhattan. And maybe they were right. But on it goes.
As much as you might not like the changes, the alternatives are far worse. Internal migration controls? Way worse. Refusing to build any new housing to spite the newcomers? Just ends up hurting everyone.
You want to live in Seattle and so do lots of other people. And in a free country their claim on the city is equal to yours. They are full citizens the day they move in. They don't have to pass any kind of Authentic Seattleite test. Because what it means to be an Authentic Seattleite will change, too. That's just life in a free society.
The displacement is real, Ballard used to be mostly Boeing employees, but your not going to be buying there with Boeing's pay and stability problems today.
Visiting Georgetown is a glimpse into the Seattle of 20 years ago IMO. It has it's charm.
Amazon is definitely a turn and burn, threadbare employer that doesn't understand how to value talent and internal resources they develop. Low and mid-level employees are like chewing gum to them, lasting a year or two before Amazon spits them out.
Many of their workers embrace this mentality, making decisions based around their ephemeral stay in Seattle that normal Seattleites find off-putting.
> the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco
The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access.
A similar dynamic happens in Boston, where people are resentful of gentrifiers, and I can't blame them. They're not the ones voting to block housing, it's the already rich people in the area who do that.
> The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access.
The majority of them think that YIMBY is useless or counterproductive because only luxury apartments are being built. There have even been protests against this [1]. The main problem is that most housing advocacy is focused on taxing tech workers and using that to subsidize rents, which of course does nothing for housing costs, but does help landlords.
Yes, they are. What do you think "anti-gentrification activism" boils down to, in practice? Build more and drive prices down? Of course not, the activists will conveniently tell you that this makes gentrification worse! Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!
> Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!
How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is?
The more the price drops, of course, the demand will go up. So how much "in the world" at both current prices and also if, say, prices went down by 5%? 10%? 50%? 75%? I think there's enough currently-unmet demand to keep the prices from falling far even if you add supply.
(You can also increase demand by building. This is the goal of every property developer ever, after all. To make it worth more than it was when they found it.)
Who knows? Pretty easily 40 million like Tokyo has, and that would already be more than double the current population. Possibly much more.
There are a lot of people held back by nothing but cost, so dropping prices would increase demand. There are also people held back by other factors, but some of those would also likely be relieved by building more housing.
Think about it - that works just as well if you take it to the extreme as "rebuild the entire city denser" - once you knock down the entire city, that land is gonna be worth a lot less.
And the demolition approach has the advantage of costing less than rebuilding everything after you demo it!
It's also a good way to force demand to move around, right?! Hell, if you demolished Manhattan and everyone there moved to other cities in the US, I wonder if the average rent and/or mortgage payments of the displaced people would go down...
> Hell, if you demolished Manhattan and everyone there moved to other cities in the US, I wonder if the average rent and/or mortgage payments of the displaced people would go down...
Is that a rhetorical question?
You've asked the wrong question. It should be whether the sum that everyone in the world spends on housing will increase or decrease, not only the displaced Manhattanites.
The effective demand for places like Manhattan comes from the highly productive economic activity that can be pursued in such places. So if the demand for places like Manhattan (or Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai etc.) really was that boundless, that would be plenty of reason to build as many of them as possible and speed towards that post-scarcity techno-utopia.
(But the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wrong. So, as it turns out, you can only YIMBY so much.)
I don't think the demand is literally boundless, but I think the idea that we could easily outpace demand with construction to dramatically increase affordability is wildly optimistic.
I'd rather build new Dallases, or denser Dallases, than try to double the density of Manhattan, because it will both be easier to find/acquire un-utilized land to use, and because the amount of work required to double the density of Manhattan is much more intense, construction-wise.
Of course density should be pursued wherever it's cheapest to do so. The point of thinking about the Manhattan case is that this is the natural endpoint of any sort of "more housing and higher density always leads to higher prices" argument. It clarifies to what extent that argument can possibly work, as a matter of basic logic.
As far as I can tell, the Manhattan case tells us that we aren't even close to the "building more will cause prices to fall" point anywhere in the US. And because of that, building more where it's cheaper is a better strategy for controlling costs than building more where it's already expensive.
Manhattan was brought up to mock the idea that construction could make prices worse for existing residents, I don't think it shows that at all.
Is it any wonder that "you're dumb, building more will lower prices" hasn't been a persuasive argument to people who've seen construction push up prices around them for decades without the promised lowering of prices yet? That's just asking for a leap of faith that this time will be different, we'll hit the magic tipping point, without any actual evidence for that.
> Is it any wonder that "you're dumb, building more will lower prices" hasn't been a persuasive argument to people who've seen construction push up prices around them for decades without the promised lowering of prices yet?
You're making an assertion about causality that often gets thrown out, but typically without being backed up.
Certainly construction often correlates with prices rising. However, the arrow of causation could run in either direction. It's possible that construction itself increases demand in the area enough to raise prices. However, it's also possible that increased demand (due to agglomeration effects, etc) raises prices and results in construction to meet that demand, which lowers prices in the area relative to what they would have been without the construction.
This doesn't necessarily mean that construction will lower housing prices, but it does mean that without it prices will be even higher, because the construction is attempting to meet new demand that's already there regardless.
"Expensive" city centers in the U.S. have comparable density to bog-standard suburban towns in the rest of the developed world. By all indications, we're nowhere near the "tipping point" where trying to increase density there would physically be so costly as to be unsustainable. That's something NYC can perhaps legitimately worry about, but I'm not sure how that could apply to other high-demand places in the U.S.
The tipping point of concern for the anti-gentrification crowd isn't "is it profitable to upzone", it's "will upzoning make things cheaper" and those are VERY different questions.
But just going on the numbers for the former question, the "expensive" city centers in the US generally start with Manhattan, Brooklyn, SF, and whatever you'd call "center" of LA. And they don't seem that far behind a lot of the rest of the developed world...
Manhattan is >70k/sqmile.
Brooklyn is 37k/sqmile.
SF is ~19k/sqmile.
LA is 8k/sqmile.
So what are the "bog-standard suburban towns" you think they're comparable to?
I can't think of many, and my searching isn't turning many up. Milan appears to be 20k/sqmile while Rome is 6k/sqmile. And those aren't "bog standard suburbs" like a Marietta, Georgia; those are central cities! Let's go bigger and even more central - London is 15k/sqmile, Paris is 53k/sqmile. Tokyo is ~17k (and larger, more like a double-size LA, there), but not overall denser than the US's expensive city centers. Manchester, in the UK, is 5450/sqmile. Stuttgart is 7,800/sqmile.
Manchester is apparently comparable to San Jose! So again, seems like the way to fix is it to focus on the places further down the list, like an Austin, TX, at 3k/sqmile.
> the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wrong
Except most of them filled up and now it's just another one of these Chinese misconceptions in the west that of course isn't newsworthy to clarify. Pudong was a prominent example a decade ago and is now a thriving financial hub.
Very much a case of build it and they will come, whereas us in the west seem to require significant undersupply and rampant social problems before we even talk about building housing or infrastructure to meet basic needs.
There's nothing wrong at all with overbuilding.
> any developments initially criticized as ghost cities did materialize into economically vibrant areas when given enough time to develop, such as Pudong, Zhujiang New Town, Zhengdong New Area, Tianducheng and malls such as the Golden Resources Mall and South China Mall.[16] While many developments failed to live up to initial lofty promises, most of them eventually became occupied when given enough time.[7][17]
> Reporting in a 2018, Shepard revisited a number of the so called "ghost cities" several years his book and noted that, "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities ...
People are of two minds: on the one hand they complain of "middle class flight" decimating the tax base. on the other hand they complain when the middle class "gentrify" a neighborhood.
The Mission is probably a decent example. It used to be more or less like Noe Valley many decades back. Then people moved out and was settled by people looking for affordability --then decades later, as housing in Noe Valley etc., was exhausted the Mission was "gentrified" in a slow cycle and people again complain.
They don't. But getting people to understand supply and demand is hard. Getting them to blame visible changes in the neighborhood (e.g. fancy new apartment buildings going up) is easy.
People who live in rent-controlled apartments seem to be against gentrification, as they end up losing their rent-controlled apartments for new construction.
> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you
Oh, people are gaining from them. It's just that the people gaining are generally the people who already have political power.
Someone who owns their home doesn't mind seeing land values quadruple, thanks to this influx of free tech money.
Someone who is renting, so that they can save up money for a downpayment, whose service industry wages have not quadrupled in that period of time minds very, very much.
I can't imagine any place will be much of a 'joy' to live in, if there's no barista's, waiters, etc who can afford to live within a 2 hour radius.
I mean, if you want a 'servant' class, then you need to at least make it worth their while and ability to thrive. Everyone wants to be able to go to Olive Garden, or McDonald's but there won't be these places if people can't afford to live there.
There will always be lesser jobs, but not if nobody can live for the wage given to them. The only answer is more housing, and/or higher wages. Probably both, but esp more housing.
It’s really the opposite, they wanted to gain too much from it.
If your city wants to keep it’s style of residential density, fine, limit commercial growth, stop adding jobs to the city if you won’t add housing to match it. And that would be fine, plenty of other places would benefit from spreading the tech wealth around.
> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift!
Those tech workers, once they move, are not customers, they are the city. It's their city as much as anyone's, any failures or successes are theirs; what have they done?
Recent arrivals pay the lion’s share of property taxes thanks to Prop 13. Income tax on tech wages and stocks gave California its budget surplus in recent years. Political advocacy is a bit more limited, but you have to keep in mind that tech is heavily foreign born. I’m the only one of my work friends who can vote.
New arrivals to a city, no matter their socioeconomic status, in the aggregate, have less influence than folks who are long established in the city. It's a human thing.
> How is this not the easiest decision in the world?
Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change.
Welp!
This is why higher orders of government need to step in to "force" municipalities to enact some of these sorts of policy changes you describe. This gives the local municipalities cover to enact the good policies that the selfish rich would kill at the ballot box.
The state has an interest in keeping its cities economically healthy, perhaps more than the city government itself which is focused on appeasing citizens with its delivery of police/recreation services. The state government can act more dynamically since it has a wider voter base to consider, including those who would like to live in the city but are pushed out.
The Valley must maintain some level of competitiveness with other city hubs, else the techxodus worsens and California loses a large portion of their economy and tax revenue. This is an existential threat to California, and the residents of the valley will lose out in the long run.
California was doing just fine when I was a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s. No doubt it’ll be doing just fine when the tech bros take their ball and go home.
There’s absolutely nothing in California that is essential for the tech industry but plenty to offer that turned it into an economic powerhouse before that time.
Pretty depressing that the only way I could possibly permanently move back to the land of my birth is in a casket.
It's not "their" city/neighbourhood. It existed before them and it will exist after. What gives someone a right to move in and create laws to make it harder for other people to do the same thing they did? I understand they actually have that right, it's just shitty to have that kind of mindset.
> What gives someone a right to move in and create laws to make it harder for other people to do the same thing they did?
Conversely, what gives a right to people who don't even live somewhere to go pass laws in that place so that those who have made their life there can no longer afford to stay and need to get kicked out so that the newcomers can take their place?
Either of these is too extreme, there needs to be some reasonable middle ground. But arguing that outsiders with no connection to a city other than the wish to live there someday are allowed to make laws to get rid of the locals, that doesn't sound right.
The people that currently live there are not being ousted by outsiders imposing laws on them so they can no longer afford to live there. That is false. The people that currently live there are making laws so that no one else can move into the neighbourhood.
If all decisions were best made at the most local possible level, then we wouldn't have highways or trains, and slavery would still be legal in the South
Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change.
Yes, combined with useful idiot "anti-gentrification" activists who have convinced themselves that the concept of supply and demand is a capitalist myth.
I’ve just become negatively polarized into supporting gentrification at this point. Seems like the alternative is crime ridden, blighted cities without amenities.
Well yes, but why "negatively polarized"? Gentrification is just a somewhat derogatory word for "amenities that attract people to want to live in the area". It doesn't have to mean increased prices; that will depend on how easy it is to build real-estate there. A place can be perfectly "gentrified" in the amenities sense and be just a quaint, high-density town or neighborhood with average or even low housing costs.
It's ironic that the same people who want to prevent gentrification are the actual "bootlickers" after all. I ended up leaving San Francisco over this sort of stuff to go to my hometown with a cheaper cost of living.
Here in Louisville, we have fewer things going on than most metros. Yet every time a new apartment complex comes up a good amount of people scream bloody murder that it will raise rents unless 30% of it is marked "below market rate". This causes developers to spend their time building elsewhere, so that new options don't emerge to drive down rents. The city is objectively less wealthy than most other metros in the USA.
Nobody has ever said "stop farming, all that food is allowing more people to live, and now food is more expensive", yet they will repeat it time and time again with housing. Instead they correctly think, "farm more, if we get more people on Earth they can help us farm even more food. Also we can finally have enough people to have doctors."
Funny enough my state has 80% of the doctors per capita that California has, and 60% of the doctors per capita that New York has[1].
It's very frustrating to see people here fighting to stunt growth, and force their own young out to nearby cities with more open minds that let people make choices. For example, the state is debating between prioritizing poorly allocated pensions and lowering our tax rate. We're currently committed to lowering the income tax from 5% to 0% over 10 years but it's continually framed as theft to benefit the wealthy by opponents. Meanwhile Tennessee and Texas continue to have a 0% income tax and take our children and new businesses. The limited job market + wages and new business formations here reflect this. Everyone thinks of Kentucky as a poor state - people don't know we have one of the higher tax rates as well.
The only thing these anti-growthers are accomplishing is making sure the same elites who made these people's lives meek stay relatively powerful by upholding the very structures that enrich the elites. Maybe the elites are the ones driving the conversation?
I know I'm soapboxing here but wealth, a clean environment, ample jobs, and the ability for your own children to make a living in your region is as much a choice as anything else in this life. I'm thankful that San Francisco chose to let jobs develop there, but sad they chose not to allow me to settle there. I proudly work remotely for a CA company, and hope other states can copy the choices CA made to allow businesses and workers to flourish, and learn from their mistakes which are currently sending them away.
If you choose to stop chaining your neighbor good things will flow.
It's a very common mindset -- one of wealth being zero-sum. If you believe that for whatever reason, it's very easy to be against growth, because you think growth will come out of your own pockets.
Wealth is not utility. There are very strong reasons to think that the greater the level of absolute wealth, the greater the impact of relative condition vs. absolute condition is on what people actually experience, and that therefore, as the overall level of wealth increases, growth with poor distributional features goes from being beneficial (yes, some people are getting much richer, but a large mass of people are going from starving to less starving) to neutral to a net negative in social terms as the baseline moves up.
Now, of course, the best solution, if and to the extent possible, is to keep the growth and lose the distributional problems, rather than the other way around.
> Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change.
Sometimes poor established renters also don't want change.
In the 20th century a lot of cities grew practically 'out of nowhere'. Why has that stopped? That's a great pressure relief valve and gets new buyers/renters out of a vicious feedback loop caused by the tendency of already cash-or-property-rich people to concentrate resources.
"The opportunity/jobs are there" is historically the answer, for millennia of cities. But does it have to be that forever? In the 20th century US, there were a lot of explicit government interventions and such that caused things like the defense industry to sprawl across countless different states and counterbalance it. What would that look like in a post-2020 world?
Cities out of nowhere do exist in function in the USA, there are plenty of cities where people can buy for cheap. New settlements get started due to something unique about the place, be it ports, resources, trade route nexuses, and so on. The USA was a frontier and thus these cities were established. You'll notice in western europe you don't see many new towns either for 100s of years, because it's frontier was settled long time ago.
People want to live in SF because of the effective social networks that develop there and access to it's labor market. Cities are essentially representations of different labor markets, and labor markets in specific places develop because there is something unique about the place, or they seed crystal into a form of 'labor black hole' as a new industry develops.
Sure, but we explicitly tried to counter those forces in the US, including through government policy to build industry in areas where it wasn't before.
Moving the defense industry to be less-concentrated in Los Angeles was deliberate and wasn't moving to "frontier" towns. It was moving to towns that were created for one purpose but had been somewhat "skipped over" after that in favor of the biggest cities.
I think it's probably worth trying to incentivize that more today. It still happens organically some (big companies moving HQs out of expensive areas, for instance), but probably could stand to happen more.
I'm a big fan of the German style of federalization, where federal agencies are spread out around the nation, instead of all being headquartered in one federal capital. The Ministry of Defence is headquartered in Bonn; the BfV in Cologne; the Bundespolizei in Potsdam.
There's no reason why we can't do the same in the US, and have the USDA be headquartered in Kansas City, the Treasury in New York, the DOT in Indiana, and Interior in Colorado. It would be a material step towards "draining the swamp".
Or even more beholden to industry as they live closer to industry than they do to other government agencies, making them even more of a revolving door than they are already. It's tradeoffs all the way down!
> Sometimes poor established renters also don't want change.
The way this is framed is so insidious. The "change" that "poor established renters" don't want is more expensive housing that they can't afford that will incentivize their current landlords to raise the rent on the properties they have and also change the local businesses to also raise prices.
On one hand you have working class renters that are fighting a literally existential threat to their existence in the city. For many, if they are evicted, without the controlled, affordable rents they will be forced to move into some existence unknown.
On the other hand you have the top 10-5% ultra wealthy that don't want new apartments because they don't want to see poors near them.
No, just average people, who built the community over time into something desirable, that were promised with zoning laws that it would be the type of community (single family homes, etc) that they wanted, and that then dedicated the majority of their lifetime earning power to purchase a home there.
There are how many acres of land in this country? Why do you have a right to overrule the will of people in one comparatively small community to force that community to be something else, in the name of affordable housing, when there is so much land available elsewhere? You want it, build it, commit your life to it, like they did in paying so much of their lifetime income into their family home. If we were a tiny island country you might have an argument, but there is soooo much land in this country, arbitrarily picking one small area because that is where you want to be is not a right.
You don’t even need to build, there’s plenty of cheap already built housing in places like detroit. Ask yourself: why do people prefer to live in san francisco so much more than detroit? It has nothing to do with the housing market. Solving the housing problem might not need to involve housing policies at all, just creating reasons for people to want to look for housing in other places.
Detroit is a crime ridden and cold place in comparison to San Francisco. I moved to a similar city (Cleveland, OH) and I see why people may want to live in SF instead of this place. The neighborhoods look very depressing, it's overcast most of the time and despite cold weather adequate house construction quality is just not there, so maybe I'm paying less for the rent, but living in these old houses with leaking foundations and walls full of holes is just not comfortable.
This is the problem with promoting a highly illiquid and undiversified asset, bought with extreme government-backed leverage, as an ideal savings and investment strategy for people who don't know any better.
Existing homeowners would prefer to profit from a vibrant dynamic and growing community, they just need to screw over all the newcomers bringing that growth, those people who need new housing, by not allowing new housing, which drives up their property values.
They don't block job creation, which attracts people, they just block new housing. And then complain about the homeless.
I'd say removing the interstate from the Embarcadero and Hayes Valley is a substantial improvement, but your point still stands. That was politically unpopular and required a major earthquake.
In demographic and vibe, sure, but the built environment is very much the same. The city was even _downzoned_ in 1978 [1] to keep single family homes at the end of their life from being demolished and rebuilt into denser apartments: 76% of the city would be rezoned as single family home only.
> No, just average people, who built the community over time into something desirable, that were promised with zoning laws that it would be the type of community (single family homes, etc) that they wanted, and that then dedicated the majority of their lifetime earning power to purchase a home there.
No one was promised that the zoning laws wouldn't someday change.
Maybe what's really needed is a complete repeal of proposition 13. If homeowners want to block local development leading to increasing housing costs, they can at least pay for it in their taxes.
Frankly that's a waste of time. People are are all too happy not paying their fair share of taxes and will fight hard to preserve that inequity. The clearly correct approach is for the state to continue its current path of overruling local zoning ordinances and to allow increases in density against the will of local homeowners.
> The clearly correct approach is for the state to continue its current path of overruling local zoning ordinances and to allow increases in density against the will of local homeowners.
That's a very radical statement. In your view, the role of the state is to go against the wishes of people who actually live there? To satify whom? People who are not citizens of the state who might later move in if things change?
What if the state angers the locals to leave and the outsiders who instigated the change decide not to move in after all?
Can you document historical cases of cities and states which thrived on such an approach?
How much land does San Francisco truly own that isn't already used for an essential purpose? Are you encouraging them to turn the parks or schools into housing? That's not going to make SF an attractive community.
Are you encouraging them to use eminent domain to out existing single-family homeowners? That's really not going to go well.
Assuming that you raze the parks and schools and seize single-family homes to build high-density rentals as you suggest, the average life span in the US is 77 years. Assuming people still leave the house at 18, that's 59 years of renting... if those people choose not to buy elsewhere, given that you've razed the parks and the schools.
I don't think you understand how hamstrung San Francisco is in regards to the amount of available land it could actually develop.
Theoretically, sure. In reality, people have invested a lot of money in housing and want to preserve that investment. I recall a time in Seattle where the mayor and city council proposed removing most of the zoning restrictions in the city. Within weeks course was reversed[1]. Personally, I think it was a good proposal, but it's hard to convince homeowners to give an inch. While I think that's bad for society, I can't blame people for looking out for one of their largest investments.
I am one of those tech workers that moved to the Bay Area. The chance of me living here in 20 years is essentially zero. The governments here were granted a golden era of prosperity and have mostly squandered it.
Trillions of dollars have been minted here, but you wouldn’t know it just by driving around. Public services are abysmal. Horrible public transportation.
In another 20 years if the winds shift to some other place in the country/world people will look back at Silicon Valley and ask how it could manage not to thrive, and the inescapable answer is greed and incompetence.
> Imagine you're a municipality like San Francisco.
I couldn't get past this because the analogy breaks down already. SF as a polity is not controlled by one person or single department. The power is highly decentralized (the Board of Supervisors hold most of the keys).
Thus, even if you have someone who can make sweeping changes, likelihood is they'd never get elected in such a setup (or if they do, be able to effect change).
The BoS & electorate create laws, bureaucracies, structures and courts that would create those 25 year court cases in the first place. The properly allocated elected set of judges, supervisors, mayor and DAs can make most of those disappear in the first place by changing the law, how the government runs and how the courts run and rule on cases, complete with prioritizing court cases for the few they don't have a choice in getting rid of to make them get through the system quickly.
> The BoS & electorate create laws, bureaucracies, structures and courts that would create those 25 year court cases in the first place. The properly allocated elected set of judges, supervisors, mayor and DAs can make most of those disappear in the first place by changing the law, how the government runs and how the courts run and rule on cases, complete with prioritizing court cases for the few they don't have a choice in getting rid of to make them get through the system quickly.
Let's say they do that. All the branches of SF government collude to make or remove laws as needed to eliminate all obstacles to permenently buidling more.
Who will be satisfied? What would happen to the city as everyone flees such authoritarian approach?
The end result is a lot more apartment buildings would be built in the city fairly quickly, dedicated transit bus lanes would be developed fairly quickly again and a lot more people would move in and a bunch of grumpy old people will complain impotently that their city is changing, but will not move away because the old don't like to change anyway. A bunch of other old landowners will cash in for above market rates and retire to florida to get away from the cold fog, stressful driving and high taxes.
So on net, a few will move away, the vast majority will shrug as usual and SF will have a lot more people in it.
landlord: may or may not own a home, but have a property to rent out, may it be a residential or commercial like a warehouse. They may not even own the home they live in, which is surprisingly very typical to cut cost and deploy money in other ways.
They would in theory never run out of development projects for 20+ years. Many large cities could fall into this category as well. The pressure to not piss off homeowners is atrocious.
It's an issue with the zoning laws. Back when it became illegal to ban black people from your neighborhood the next best thing was to ban the kind of housing that black people could afford. So the only place where it's legal to put the kind of housing that addresses the problem is in the city centers which were already established and therefore out of scope for the zoning restrictions. (more on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc)
The city of San Francisco isn't some independent entity. It is made up of people, a lot of whom already own houses and/or don't want higher buildings and more neighbors and/or don't want to be in the business of building and managing housing. If you think about individual incentives rather than what is right and wrong then it makes perfect sense.
You don't have to do any of that other than change the zoning/permitting/building process (which you would need to do for your plan above as well otherwise you won't be building much of anything). The problem in San fran isn't lack of builders or even lack of labor to build. The problem in san fran is the government forcing the process to permit and build something to multi year approaching decade timelines (if it is even approved).
Basically all they have to do is set some basic, reasonable rules (heights, setbacks, etc) that, if you stay within them, you get your permit in a month or two the problem would be 70% solved within a decade. They might have to rezone some of san fran to allow denser building construction (with the same fast tracked permit described above) to get to 100% but that is literally it. They aren't doing it because the nimbys like the system the way it is (and the increased house value windfall it has given them).
Another factor to consider is that there may also be significant infrastructure upgrades required to support the increase in population, and costs might increase dramatically when you consider increased water usage in an already drought stricken region.
Right - just build more housing. Forget about failing utilities, packed roads, overwhelmed social services, crowded schools! Just build more skyscrapers and move half of the country to SF so that we can all drown in shit together.
This oversimplification that we just need to build more houses is amusing. SF is a tiny city, stuffing more people here won’t resolve many of the problems that already make life here difficult. And no, it won’t lower rent by much: SF doesn’t exist in a vacuum, more people will move here and will keep rent as high as before.
But... San Franciscans don't want to live in a city like Tokyo or Taipei. Who would benefit from this changing city with taller buildings? Not many San Franciscans want that, so newcomers? I am not convinced either. People love the Bay and move here because of what it is, not because of what it is not. The complaints that I am hearing most often are about public transport, crime, street cleaning, social services. Not about having small buildings in SF.
There is no single coordinated entity making all the decisions. In reality, there are dozens of self-interested groups which have no interest in solving homelessness and just want to stop every kind of development for all kinds of different reasons.
There is also the homeless-industrial complex which has a lot to lose if you solve homelessness
A municipality is run by a group of individuals elected by other individuals, whereas you have framed your housing policy proposal as if pitching to a dictator.
Imagining how we might govern unfettered by frustrating negotiations with others is fun but dangerous.
Singapore, but only because it targets the middle class and results in ownership. Poorer Singaporeans are in a different system of smaller rentals (still public housing).
> The government is run by and for the benefit of the established land owners and they don't want housing, they want excess returns. Simple.
Simple but simplistic, that's just a caricature. Reality is more complex, and regular homeowners don't care about returns, excess or otherwise. People buy homes to live in, to raise their kids in and to maybe retire in if health allows. Most people enjoy stability, so it's nice for the neighborhood to change slowly or not that much.
To the extent that SF renters are organized, they're organized around groups and ideologies that don't prioritize supply a solution. They're focused on things like rent control, just cause eviction, foreign/institutional investor boogeymen, and preventing even substantially or fully below-market housing developments because they still threaten to upset what renters believe is a delicate balance their neighborhoods/communities depend on.
It makes sense, renters who are politically engaged and organized are more likely to be long-term residents, and being able to preserve your tenancy/community is a different thing from being able to easily move or upgrade.
> They're focused on things like rent control, just cause eviction, foreign/institutional investor boogeymen, and preventing even substantially or fully below-market housing developments
Which is funny, since every single thing here makes the situation worse, because it ensures that new developments will be more expensive and riskier.
San Francisco has a large transient population of renters. They drift in, party and work hard, and then leave when they have kids or want to settle down. This is because San Francisco is not very family friendly - it's a city with more dogs than kids -- with more drug addicts than kids. It's much more of a party town than a place where people can put down roots. The average renter lives in San Francisco for 6 years and then moves away. Don't think of San Francisco as a self-contained unit, it is a 7x7 mile square containing 800K people in a larger SF Bay Area containing 8 million people. People go to the Square when they are in the mid to late 20s to early 30s to party and then move to other places nearby when they have a family.
This transient population generally does not involve itself too much in local issues because it is not attached to city. That is why SF mayoral candidates and city council candidates spend a lot more time discussing how they will fight global warming and white supremacy rather than discussing local zoning. Because the transient population cares about these general non-local issues and generally don't bother too much with details of local issues. This has some hilarious consequences, for example, one rich family whose view would get blocked by new development managed to put on the ballot a measure to block the development, and got it to pass in the name of "Save our Waterfront From Greedy Corporations". That's why SF has a large parking lot and tennis courts on prime waterfront real estate. There is no one easier to manipulate than the uninformed do-gooders that is the SF voting population -- just link more housing development to "greedy corporations" or "gentrification" or "large carbon footprint" or complain about lack of diversity in the construction crew or administrative staff, or new residents, etc. So many ways to kill a project.
The result is that control over local issues -- e.g. what the city council actually does -- is handed over to a small core of residents that do care and have put down roots -- e.g. to homeowners. And homeowners want house prices to rise and for neighborhoods to not change radically. Therefore the SF city council and mayor are very conservative about things like zoning, even as they spend a lot of time espousing radical positions on generic lefty issues.
Congratulations on squeezing every toxic canard about "transient" renters into a single comment!
According to the Census American Community Survey of 2021, 43% of renters in San Francisco have lived in the same dwelling for ten years or more. It certainly is not typical that a person arrives and departs the city in just 6 years.
Renter occupied: 427300
Moved in 2019 or later 170948
Moved in 2015 to 2018 70878
Moved in 2010 to 2014 64753
Moved in 2000 to 2009 71281
Moved in 1990 to 1999 31614
Moved in 1989 or earlier 17826
What we see is that 40% of renters lived in their unit for 2 years or less.
About 17% lived in their units for between 3-6 years. 15% lived in their unit for 7-11 years. 28% lived in their unit for 12 or more years. Therefore it's clearly false that 40% of renters have lived in their unit for 10 or more years.
Let's compare with the corresponding table for owner occupied housing, and you see the difference:
Owner occupied: 370695
Moved in 2019 or later 48657
Moved in 2015 to 2018 50381
Moved in 2010 to 2014 53299
Moved in 2000 to 2009 91120
Moved in 1990 to 1999 63382
Moved in 1989 or earlier 63856
Here, the smallest category is 2 years or less, and the the largest is 12-21 years.
Yes, there are renters that are long term and have comparable roots (not 40%, but 28%). But they are a sufficiently small minority of renters that they are comfortably and easily outvoted by owners, which is why the city council reflects the views of owners and not renters.
Even though SF has more renters than owners, if you restrict yourself to the population that has tenure longer than 2 years, then owners outnumber renters 322K to 256K.
Yes, B25026 has this data. Thanks for pointing out that the link doesn't go directly there, links to these SPAs often don't work well.
FYI, S2502 is not the right table to use because it is looking at housing units rather than people, whereas you want to measure people. So if there is a apartment that is owner occupied and rents out a room to a tenant, then this is an owner occupied unit for purposes of S2502. This also applies to in-laws.
Again, I'm not saying all renters are transient. There is certainly a core of renters -- I think 28% or 1/3 is a good estimate. That is, from living in SF for a while and spending a lot of time with this data, I'd say a good 1/3 of renters in SF are just there for a couple of years to have fun and will move out quickly. They have no roots at all. 1/3 are a bit in the middle, where they think they have roots but decide to leave when they have children or get married and the realities of family life in SF hit them. 1/3 are all in.
So even though you have a 60-40 split in terms of renters/owners, the actual split of people who care about zoning and local issues is heavily in favor of owners. This is why the city council is constituted as it is. It's not voter suppression. It's not dirty tricks. It's just reflecting the demands of the population that cares about these issues. That's why you have things like crazy shadow ordinances preventing tall buildings from being built, or why the 8 Washington debacle happened.
Children need bedrooms but don't generate any income, the typical adult who moves here can barely afford their own bedroom, so of course most people will have to leave when they have kids. It's not a revelation about the kind of people who move here or why, it's just a mechanical consequence of high prices.
Unfortunately at this point, you've reached the end of my knowledge. I assume California has reasonable mail in voting procedures. That should make the "cost" of voting very very minimal. Do we still see poor people voting less there? I don't know actually.
* do San Francisco renters turn out to Town Hall meetings, local elections, pester their representatives and put in as much #not-bribery as landowners?
Yes, they very much do. The voter turnout gap by housing tenure is about 20 percentage points (e.g. 70% turnout for owners and 50% for renters). Also the voter registration gap is massive because many renters are not eligible to vote or face hurdles registering due to lack of permanent address. Finally, the people who would benefit from new housing construction in a place like San Francisco are often registered to vote in some other jurisdiction. The people who already live in S.F. have no particular compelling interest in a new apartment tower, but the prospective tenants of those apartments who would vote for them aren't all voters in that city.
And lower income people are far more likely to be renters than landowners. Lower income jobs are less likely to provide time off to vote. Even if mail-in voting is allowed such low-income jobs are also less likely to provide time off to attend city council meetings or public hearings or other such things.
Yup. Census data shows that non voters with incomes less than $20k/year give transportation issues as the reason in 8% of cases, but only 0.1% of people with incomes over $100k give this reason.
The non-visible homeless (people down on their luck, to an approximation) get mentally sorted into the vast category of "that's unfortunate but it doesn't affect me directly," which might influence people's votes or charitable donations, but doesn't arouse much passion for most of us.
By contrast, the visible homeless are a visceral inconvenience, even a danger, so people feel strongly about how that problem is addressed. As a smallish woman, I am on high alert in certain areas of San Francisco, Oakland, etc. I'm not all that likely to be accosted, but if I ever am, it will be a big deal, so navigating those places is nerve-wracking because my threat-detection is constantly dialed up.
I would compare it to, like, road planning versus traffic enforcement. The former has far-reaching, long-term impact (like housing policy) but the latter is what gets people heated, due to the immediate impact in their day-to-day lives.
I'm guessing that you misunderstand the threats, and are much more likely to be hit by someone in an SUV. I've spent lots and lots of time in cities; I've never had a problem with a homeless person.
Would you count having to step over an active urine stream on your way to the grocery store as "a problem"?
How about walking with your pregnant wife past someone who is splitting his time yelling at the sky and scratching his crotch from the inside of his pants?
Sure, in both scenarios we weren't physically harmed, but it certainly made us feel unsafe and uncomfortable. It's not something that I think we should all just get used to.
Those are great opportunities to teach your children about the consequences of an apathetic voting base. It’s also a great time to nurture children’s empathetic abilities by teaching them to juxtapose indecent behavior, mental illness, poverty, and general despair.
Want more action? Try protesting and demanding solutions that include no questions asked housing, healthcare, food, water, and basic essential communication technology and interconnection.
Unless people want to misery murder homeless people en masse, the above is the solution. Hard stop. Don’t like it? That’s not my problem, I’m not complaining about desperate people from a place of immense privilege.
There are so many countries on earth with a far, far more apathetic voting base than San Francisco which face a fraction of the homeless issues. It’s not fair to tell regular citizens that the homeless people harassing them on their walk to work are only there because they haven’t protested hard enough, that’s just baloney.
Something’s very, very wrong in SF and it’s absolutely okay for tax paying law abiding citizens to be making noise about it.
People in the neighborhoods with fewer problems (let’s face it, there are many very quiet expensive neighborhoods in the Bay Area) have very “progressive” views on the homelessnesses. They don’t experience its effects frequently, so don’t think it’s a big problem. They vote for policies that grow social services for the homeless, even though those policies don’t work. But the idea they have is that these services just need more money. And then more money again, and again.
Progressives live in cities more than anywhere else, San Francisco being a center of progressivism. The critics live elsewhere, and love to tell people in cities what they really should want and do (more guns, no progressive reforms, etc. etc.). In NY, the anti-progressive vote was in the suburbs; in the city they do well. In Philadelphia, the progressive DA did best in African-American neighborhoods.
You may misunderstand me. I’m not saying tax payers are at fault for not protesting hard enough. What I am saying is that Direct Action is required to force the hands of people who have the authority make the direly needed changes.
I’m not interested in quibbling about how the homeless population grew so large unless it is explicitly for the purposes of calculating reparations and identifying perpetrators.
Make all the noise you want, complaining about people peeing is ineffective. I see trust fund brats pissing in public regularly and have never seen this volume of outrage directed at this population of people. More public bathrooms is the solution to that particular problem.
>>Those are great opportunities to teach your children about the consequences of an apathetic voting base
I think you would be much better off using those opportunities to teach your kids to stay away from drugs and alcohol, and to study hard and work hard - so they don't end up like that.
Plenty of people have worked excruciatingly hard and never done drugs but wound up homeless anyways. Reducing homelessness to laziness and drug addiction is a good indicator that you aren’t familiar with the the literature around homelessness and might have some prejudices against homeless presenting people.
Tangentially, I think it’s much better to use people like Elon musk, or Donald trump, or Sam bank man fried, jk Rowling, etc as examples of who not to become. Bad luck can befall anyone whereas these people woke up and chose violence, repeatedly.
Take a deep breath, or just don't live in cities if you can't handle it. These are momentary distractions; just go on with your day.
The second person is very easy to avoid; I've done it many times (maybe the same person!). The first you just keep going.
I do have empathy for these people, who have noplace else to go. Maybe build some public bathrooms - I know when I'm out in the city, it can be hard to find a bathroom, and I don't get stereotyped and rejected by most places (just stereotyped and accepted!).
However, I spend lots and lots of time in cities and hardly ever see these situations, though critics love to describe them. What smells isn't urine (people love to give examples including human waste - the well-used 'human feces' now gets a laugh from a few of us - how could you tell what kind of feces? Did you examine it closely? Take a sample? Tell us your technique!).
A variant of this comment comes up every time someone expresses tense situations.
I used to live around the corner from homeless services in the greater Seattle area and commute by foot after dark regularly. I never got physically assaulted but certainly would have if I didn't have my wits about me.
Are most homeless folks problematic? Absolutely not. Is there higher prevalence of mental illness, drug abuse, and other things that lend themselves to irratic behavior among that demographic? Absolutely.
It's ok to be both compassionate and recognize that there is a real safety/health issue. We don't have to minimize someone's experience based on "the numbers"
> I used to live around the corner from homeless services in the greater Seattle area and commute by foot after dark regularly. I never got physically assaulted but certainly would have if I didn't have my wits about me.
How do you define a “problem”? Is poop on the streets a problem? Used syringes? Mountains of trash? High people blocking public areas? Mentally ill people shouting at night and waking up whole neighborhoods? Physical assaults on weaker looking people (women, elderly, etc)?
This is the everyday reality in SF.
The problem with the homeless isn't how it offends your senses.
"I'm not all that likely to be accosted, but if I ever am, it will be a big deal, so navigating those places is nerve-wracking because my threat-detection is constantly dialed up."
Have you ever thought that being this worried about threats is something you're partially responsible for?
Every self preservation instinct is something each person is ultimately responsible for, but that doesn't mean that is the only dial that can be adjusted to solve the issue.
Some people really do worry too much.
Some areas really could be cleaned up so that random people feel comfortable moving through them without threat of assault.
When you clean up your house, you might put everything back in a good place designed for it. For example, people in homes. If I were being as ridiculous as you, I would say you must not believe in people having homes.
I'm a white man but I don't see how that matters. If I was Black would be more likely to be assaulted for some reason? Do homeless people avoid assaulting white people?
I get that you implying that I would feel safer because I'm less likely to be sexually assaulted and that I have a greater chance to defend myself. However, that doesn't prevent me from criticizing other's feelings. It's like a someone who is racist saying "well you don't live with them so you don't understand"
If you're interested in helping the housing problem across the US, I encourage you to check out: YIMBY Action who does local activism across the US, and particularly active in SF Bay Area and CA.
Full disclosure, I'm on the board, but I joined because the ROI / growth are both crazy. We have a tiny budget / staff but have a huge impact on the discourse, passing various laws and pushing cities to follow the law to approve housing. We're now at an inflection point and need to scale our model out.
If it was that simple someone would have done it recently.
LVT would cure places like SF where there's huge land values and pent up demand, sure. But it also creates a huge incentive to block development on a town level to keep taxes low.
LVT is economically simple, just politically impossible, especially at a scale that would make a big difference (i.e. replacing income tax with land value tax).
> But it also creates a huge incentive to block development on a town level to keep taxes low.
Wouldn't the town as a government entity be incentivized to foster development to raise tax revenue? The only people who I could see might have an incentive against development is property owners in parcels near the ones being developed, since their land value and therefore taxes will go up; but usually those same people will benefit from the additional economic activity that comes from development, so I'm not convinced.
Yes, LVT needs to implemented along with Japan style national zoning to halt the progress of nimbys. It’s certainly not easy, but that’s because of politics, not the economic reality.
When people talk about "homelessness," they're often referring to street people. Most technically homeless people aren't street people, they're between jobs or living in their car or something like that.
It seems clear that lower rent/housing prices would help with homelessness but I don't think it would help street people.
US HUD segments homeless populations into three dimensions:
- sheltered vs. unsheltered homelessness
- chronic homelessness, where "chronic" is defined as a person with a disability who is "continuously homeless for one year or more, or has experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in the last three years where the combined length of time homeless on those occasions is at least 12 months."
- individuals ("households that were not composed of both adults and children") and families
As of mid-December, the US point-in-time counts of those were:[1]
More than half of all counted unsheltered chronically homeless individuals in the United States in December were in California (44,120 of 78,615; 56% of total unsheltered chronically homeless, 7.6% of total US homeless).
I think if we could just help the out of sorts, hardship cases that are 'newer' homeless, or maybe classified as 'under-housed', which may include couch-surfers, car/van-lifers, etc. I mean there's levels to homelessness some of which is mental health related and such, some people actually maybe could prefer that life for reasons. There's a lot who are forced into it, and are just down on their luck. These should be a much easier subsection to target for at least fixing things a bit.
It doesn't help that we are basically doing the opposite. In my experience you pretty much have to already be homeless to get any help. It would be nice if you didn't have to lose everything before you get assistance.
> Among the 44,197 homeless shelter stays, on average, a homeless shelter stay was about 77 days, with the median 30 days, and the maximum of 5,030 days (the entry date started in 2002 for this extreme case). ... 2,872 (∼6.5%) homeless shelter stays were just 1 day long, 6,726 homeless shelter stays (∼15%) were between 2 days and 5 days, and 34,695 homeless shelter stays (78.5%) were 10 days or longer. About 81% of all homeless shelter stays were by clients who have experienced recidivism.
Agreed. There is a shortage of _low-cost_ housing. This isn't because of "zoning", it's because low-cost housing became considered undesirable. Think housing projects, SROs, "flop houses", etc. As gentrification occurred and these were closed (and some refurbished into upscale units), their occupants-- and their future occupants-- became homeless.
The homeless debate, especially around housing, has become a nightmare of semantic creep and rising metricism [1].
Metricism is the tendency to focus on measurable things; in principle a noble goal, but more often than not you can't actually measure the thing you're interested in, so you measure something similar and then pretend you're measuring the thing you want, and when you're done, you've implemented solutions which reduce your metric but have no effect on the underlying problem.
What is the problem of "homelessness"? Is it transient homelessness, where people, through a run of bad luck or circumstance, find themselves unable to afford housing, but otherwise are functional in society?
Or is the problem the much more visible problem of mentally ill and otherwise unstable individuals wandering the streets and pushing kids on to subway tracks?
The latter is the homeless problem that people care about (I mean, we are human, we care about both, but if I had to choose which one I'd rather fix, as a New Yorker, the latter takes priority). Fixing this problem, though, is incredibly hard -- there's the intersection of human rights, involuntary confinement, and the otherwise incredible complexity of managing mental health in a free society.
But this is SOOOOOOO hard to measure! It's much easier to just measure the people who are "unhoused", pretend you're solving the "homeless problem", and show that you can make the numbers go down. The problem being solved by increasing housing and lowering rents is not the problem of people walking down the subway screaming about electricity and knocking cell phones out of people's hands -- he is more than a couple of rent payments away from being okay.
[1] metricism is my own neologism; closest analogy is James C. Scott's "legibility" or Goodhart's "observed statistical regularity" or even the drunk "looking for the keys where the light is good" but I'm more specifically concerned about fetishizing around metrics specifically.
The real issue is that apartment managers can come after you for the remainder of your lease. You can suddenly be in 10-20k of debt if you need to break your lease early. That's both more accessible and worse than many medical debt horror stories.
Even without that, you're still easily $2k in the hole and that all on its own is scary - the long-term repercussions of "evil by bureaucracy" are, of course, even worse; but the very beginning is plenty terrible, enough that there doesn't need to be a "real issue" here for it to be bad.
If you signed an agreement to pay a certain amount, for a certain number of months, and then you don't do it, the counterparty should be able to come after you.
I understand that some of the people who break leases are experiencing hardship, but others are just breaking their leases because they can -- and a lot more people would do that if it was easier. That would put landlords on the defensive and result in more restrictive lease agreements and/or higher rents to reduce the risk, which would ultimately make things worse for all the renters who really do intend to honor their agreements to the best of their ability.
Also, in many places, landlords are legally obligated to make a good-faith attempt to find replacement tenants before they sue lease-breakers for the remaining rent.
There's "covering risk", and there's tenant lock-in.
I have no problem with requiring a tenant to rent for a year, to prevent quick turnover and the risk and costs associated with that.
But multiple landlords now have all had the same policy: the lease will never go month-to-month, basically. You can, but e.g., for my current lease, it costs ~60% more to go month to month. This creates bizarre pay-off points, and greatly raises the costs of trying to move. When it's "+$2k/mo to go month-to-month", that's not risk-reduction, that's just greed, trying to make sure I can't move.
IME, it used to be that after you rented for a while (e.g., a year), the lease went month-to-month. You were a long-term stable renter, and you'd paid enough rent at that point to cover the overheads of finding a new tenant and making the necessary touch-ups to the apartment. (Beyond what was covered by security deposit.)
(I recently had this conversation with my parents recently. The previous generation has no idea about some of the provisions that renters of my generation are having to put up with.)
An average price of $18,000 to break lease on a 3+ year old lease is absurd. We need more housing, to drive competition in the rental & housing markets.
If I ever get to buy a house (… if my landlord doesn't first capture any gains I might get…) the first thing I'll have to do is not get to live in it: the most logical course of action would be to rent it short term, until I can get out of my own lease.
The term of the lease isn't materially longer than 12 months. (Mine actually is >12 mo, but not by a whole lot.) But at the end of the (say) 12 months, you sign the next lease, for another (say) 12 months, or move out. (The rent invariably goes up, at this point.)
It's at those individual lease boundaries that I (rather technically) have the opportunity to go month-to-month, if I want to be bled dry.
My note about it being a 3+ year lease is the total time we've rented, consecutively. That the lease is broken into separate segments by the contract is an implementation detail, when discussing recovering the costs of / managing the risk of short-term tenants. I'm not a short term tenant, after having been here for that long.
> a landlord refusing to allow a lease to go month-to-month is illegal.
That's news to me! I've never lived in such a place, and boy would that be nice. A cursory Google search indicates that, in my jurisdiction, "allows the landlord or tenant to end a month-to-month lease at any time, as long as they give 30 days' notice". The state I lived in previously is the same.
(This is where the nuance of "what the lease actually says" meets the "how it is implemented".) Technically, my lease becomes month-to-month at the end of its lease period. To my landlord, not signing a new lease would result in (their, legally speaking) 30 days notice to move out. (They've made this somewhat apparent to us in the past, as they tend to not send out the new terms soon enough and then get antsy when they're not signed.) They want the increased rent, and it appears they'll get it from me, or the market.
> They want the increased rent, and it appears they'll get it from me, or the market.
Is that wrong? Do you think you are entitled to live in someone else's property, at a price below what others in the market would pay, for as long as you like?
There has to be some balance here. Someone is contracting to let you live in their property. If they don't get something out of it, why should they do it? Why would anyone be a landlord? And if nobody wanted to be a landlord, wouldn't it be harder for you to find a place to live in your price range?
If nobody wanted to be a landlord, it'd be so much easier to find a place to live -- so many vacancies, so much empty space, so little occupied land...
Uh, no, there would be no options other than home ownership or homelessness (or government housing projects, which are only options in certain areas and are always pretty bad).
Rentals don't just exist without landlords to own and maintain them. No apartment buildings would get built if there weren't landlords ready to buy them from the property developers. The existing ones would be left vacant because it would be cheaper than filling them and keeping them habitable.
Every time the government makes it harder to be a landlord, they also make it harder to be a renter. Even well-intentioned programs like rent control always end up impacting the majority of renters negatively.
If you are a renter, the best thing you can do for yourself is to advocate for more housing and more landlords to rent it from. It's supply and demand.
> there would be no options other than home ownership or homelessness
There are also extended-stay hotels. But other than that, is near-universal home ownership such a bad thing? What's the big difference between paying a mortgage and paying rent? Rent already pays for mortgage, repairs, and maintenance anyway. All that's left is closing costs when you move.
How can someone on minimum wage own a home? Even if home values dropped by 90% nationwide, there would still be people who can’t afford to buy one. What are they supposed to do, live in tents? Come on, be serious.
Roommates? Co-ownership? A higher minimum wage? Permitting smaller houses?
Keep in mind the median housing unit price today skews higher because things like studios and SROs never go up for sale. SROs are effectively illegal to build in many cities today.
Yes it probably varies by location. And if housing supply were more plentiful then landlords could compete on more flexible lease terms as well as actual monthly rent. When housing is scarce they can demand whatever price and terms they want.
When I've lived in areas where housing was not scarce, it was reasonably easy to find apartments that would do month-to-month leases right from the start.
They're not super common, but they are out there. I'm in Seattle and my first lease here was 13 months and second was 14 months. When we were first looking, we probably found 3 out of the 15 places we looked at that were offering up to 15 months. I've actually got friends in this building (https://www.thenoloseattle.com/) on a two year lease and there are plenty of 18 month leases still available on their website right now.
In Seattle there are many places that will do leases longer than 12 months e.g. my current lease is 36 months. It may not be the default but if you ask they are often amenable.
Requiring a full year lease, instead of month-to-month, is the landlords only option under just cause eviction. Otherwise the landlord is essentially a non-party to the lease (the rent board and tenant dictate the future terms).
The scariest part imho is the huge housing and apartment owning conglomerates, not the small guy who happens to be renting out a house.
Its the large housing corporations which don't care about difficulties paying rent, and unlike the small guy they have an army of lawyers ready to crush anyone in their way. They also have the money and power to influence local politics in a way that favors them.
I’ve lived on the streets and worked with homeless charities for years and years.
I am extremely skeptical this is case and for those whom it is true, I expect them to fall into the class of “transient homeless” who experience it for a short period.
Transient homeless (those who have fallen upon hard times, and may still have a job, but no longer have a place for their family to live) make up around 80% of the homeless population.
Sure, but not really the policy outcome that people are thinking of when they talk about solving the "homeless problem". The guy passed on in the subway car next to his own feces is not going to be helped in any way by these policies.
There are no good solutions here that respect the rights of the individual and also our collective right to live in a civil society. Involuntarily detention through the criminal justice system (horrifying) or the mental health system (completely dehumanizing) are the best tools we have, other than having compassionate people who will devote time and effort and individual attention to the victims of mental health or pathological substance abuse problems.
No reason why mental institutions cant be compassionate and devote time and effort to individuals. Much better than letting these people live in their own excrement in the subway.
Well, maybe "no reason" is a bit strong. Organizations cannot be engineered to be compassionate; compassionate individuals can make an organization more compassionate, but the bottleneck will always be finding people who are compassionate, have subject matter expertise, and are willing to work for the wages offered.
And even with compassion there are still problematic situations. Involuntary confinement of any sort requires a careful application of principles -- when is it okay to confine someone; when and how do you decide when they can or must be released; who can make the judgment calls and what checks are in place to prevent abuse. These are questions that seem to have no good answers.
It’s the non-transient population that cause the vast majority of externalities associated with homelessness. We’re not talking about Jeff who is homeless because he’s crashing on Aunt Karen’s couch for a month.
Put another way:
It is undesirable to be impermanently homeless.
The permanently homeless make it undesirable for you.
The wording for this is hilariously bad. “Poverty” isn’t the real driver of homelessness so long as you define poverty in a way that it’s unrelated to your ability to shelter yourself!
This sort of tired, pointless game of “if you define words differently, sentences have different meanings!” is so oddly popular on here, especially when it comes to housing.
I personally go by the dictionary definition of poverty:
1
a
: the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions
If the landlords in your city use some scummy software (1) to provide cover for them deciding that they should help themselves to 110% of your paycheck and that results in your inability to live indoors, you’re functionally impoverished.
Is street homelessness really driven by people who couldn't pay their rent? You would think they'd stay away from drug-addled violent tent cities - and sleep in a car or at a friend's house.
Too many ideas seem to be conflated with the umbrella term "homeless"
It's obviously both. If you're a heroin addict in West Virginia you just rent a trailer with a revolving list of fellow addicts for like $400 month and you beg or steal enough to get by. Plus, you're in a part of town where nobody is really going to notice you.
That doesn't work in San Francisco.
So did the heroin make you homeless or the high prices? It's kind of a silly question. It's both, in some sense.
That's why we see a direct correlation between the cost of rent and homelessness.
But my question is - if you can't pay rent in LA, what draws you to set up camp in skid row? Why add that burden of living there on top of everything else you're dealing with?
Well, yeah, which is why the people who say addiction isn't a factor at all are being more than a little silly. Rent is a factor, but drug addicts make poor decisions in a crisis, obviously. And it's no coincidence that addicts have a weaker support system; most of them have spent years wearing it thin by the time they hit rock bottom.
Awesome to see that you broke out of that. If you don't mine my asking, did you join a street community in a downtown core, or did you use any social services to help?
Did you meet a lot of people in a similar situation to you on the street?
To add to that, if rent use too high in SF, becoming homeless in SF isn't your only other option. I know plenty of people who thought rent was too high in SF and they moved to other cities rather than onto the street. Further I hear that in Portland 50% of homeless arrive homeless in the city. Doesn't sound like a high rent issue, but an issue with addiction that or severe mental health issues.
I see where you're coming from, but if you go to the extreme and anyone could have a private room for $1 a month, would anyone be living on the streets?
Absolutely yes they would. I know someone in my extended family on the streets - his problem is addiction. Lot's of people are willing to offer a roof.
I know that's anecdata - but you asked about the extreme case.
Is it because buildings refuse to house people with addiction problems, or that the extra $1/month is better used in their mind to get the next dose of the substance?
Those conditions make the offering quite different from being able to rent your own room inexpensively. One of the facets of having your own place is that you can do whatever you want there, whether it be drugs or whatever. That might not be healthy, and it's quite understandable why family would put conditions on offering a free room, but people do value their autonomy.
The current link points to the website of a radio station that only posted a brief summary of a much longer article from The Atlantic. Maybe the URL in this post should be changed to the original? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...
Building more housing is tossed out as if this is a single dimension economics problem, like widgets in Freshman econ.
Perform a capacity utilization study of all available housing, where Capacity is the number of room days of housing available and utilization is the amount it is actually occupied. Then tag each of these housing units (room) across multiple dimensions including cost, location, house, apartment, condo, etc..
Find out how existing housing is actually being used and how much it is being used. Then adjust the financial incentives to change the usage to what you think it ought to be.
I live in an medium to high cost of living location and the number of underutilized properties due to second homes, opportunistic rentals, and basic investment properties (downtown condos) is substantial.
If someone can point me to a city that has performed a Housing Capacity Utilization study, I'd like to read it.
What a bizarrely complicated argument to try to refute the most basic law of supply and demand.
Many economists have proven over and over that building more housing means that there are more places for people to live. The burden of proof is on you, since you are the one making outlandish claims.
The number of "underutilized properties" is likely a few percent in your area. "Most condos are empty and owned by foreigners" is a myth perpetuated by NIMBYs and conspiracy theorists.
Even if it was true, the best way to screw over these shadowy foreign empty-building-owning figures would simply be to build more housing so that it's not an artificially scarce investment asset. The value of their investment would plummet and they would have to sell it or take on tenants.
From a supply and demand side, Real Estate Developers would gravitate to high value developments due to potential for making higher returns as well as the prestige in building "fancier" developments.
A glut in the supply of high value developments would lower the market price of existing lower value stock, as well. Plus, in a lot of places developers are forced to focus on "luxury" housing because their margins are hamstrung by affordable unit requirements; so instead of putting up a building that's 100% medium rate, they build something with 70% luxury units to offset the 30% affordable units.
Before the pandemic this problem really seemed intractable for a lot of metro areas, but now with WFH taking hold we've been given a potential life raft if we jump on it.
Office space cannot get converted into homes overnight. There's a lot of remodeling and rethinking of how to fit an apartment into one, but it's a chance nonetheless. The biggest burden is likely to be the cause of the problem in the first place, zoning. Hopefully we learn from the past and correct this while we can
I never said affordable housing. Just having more housing period would help at this point. However, that doesn't seem to be true in NYC when we incentivized it and we built a lot of affordable housing. Just not enough
The focus on affordability in new housing is, I think, a glaring example of short-term thinking. I mean sure, those sparkling new condos that somehow managed to squeak by the municipal approval process (the length and cost of which are no small part of why they cost so much) may be out of reach for most people, especially newcomers. But with time—or even sooner after, say, I don't know, a recession?—what was once luxury condos may become decidedly middle-class housing.
Building luxury downtown apartments and saying that they'll making housing more affordable for everyone really feels like trickle down housing to me, ESPECIALLY when combined with an argument that the economics will take care of themselves.
What is the path to profitability you see? They pretty much have to gut rehab the building to add kitchens and bathrooms, in an economy where loans are pretty expensive. Is that competitive with people selling existing move-in ready housing stock in a down market? Do you want to be the first person to sign a contract in one of these conversions? (Not to mention the usual "new construction" taxes that are seller-paid on existing housing, but buyer-paid on new construction.)
I think everyone is incentivized to sit on what they have now and offer cheap leases. I also think that cities are incentivized to bring workers back to the office. Like in NYC, we spent billions of dollars on a new commuter railroad terminal that opens this year, and upgrades to run more trains per hour during rush hour. I don't think the state is going to step in and offer free money to make more housing.
All in all I love the idea of converting offices to housing. Working from home is great, and affording your own home is even better. But, I don't think the economy wants either of them :/
> we spent billions of dollars on a new commuter railroad terminal that opens this year, and upgrades to run more trains per hour during rush hour.
This is my problem with trains in general — they make very long term expensive assumptions about where people want to go. But when the trends change (such as remote work,) then there are hundreds of billions invested in trains going places people don’t need to go.
Unless you're referring to something besides the baseline interest rate (in which case you might need to clarify, as it's non-obvious why it would be the case), loans aren't "pretty expensive" now: they were "absurdly cheap" for the last decade.
Setting your baseline during the post-financial-crisis period of permanent zero interest rates is not particularly realistic.
My understanding is commercial real estate operates a bit differently than residential. The value of the property is based on a multitude of factors and the people that invest in commercial are not making an investment in residential.
For example, the value of the property is based on the last or current rent they have received. It is better for the property owner to not have a tenant, than it is to accept a lower lease because it impacts their financing agreements and property valuations.
> The value of the property is based on a multitude of factors and the people that invest in commercial are not making an investment in residential.
This represents a set of assumptions about the operation of the market that a durable shift would invalidate; its not a stable situation that supports keeping units empty forever.
Scarcity drives prices up. If we keep the housing supply lower than it needs to be, landlords can continue to excuse raising prices on their X*mortgage < rent condos, apartments and *plexes.
If rents rise to a level that you can't find a home, aren't you by definition impoverished? Is there some aspect of this distinction that I'm not grasping?
A friend of mine who recently moved to the US from the UK put it to me like this: "imagine one state says they will pay out benefits without a permanent address. Where do you think the homeless are going to move to?"
The "The Obvious Answer to Homelessness" by Jerusalem Demsas, published by The Atlantic (linked in another comment by thamer) argues that this hypothesis is falsified, and can cite research:
> Few Republican-dominated states have had to deal with severe homelessness crises, mainly because superstar cities are concentrated in Democratic states. Some blame profligate welfare programs for blue-city homelessness, claiming that people are moving from other states to take advantage of coastal largesse. But the available evidence points in the opposite direction—in 2022, just 4 percent of homeless people in San Francisco reported having become homeless outside of California. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Aldern found essentially no relationship between places with more generous welfare programs and rates of homelessness. And abundant other research indicates that social-welfare programs reduce homelessness.
I don't understand this thesis. In terms of visible homelessness a huge percentage are untreated mentally ill and/or drug addicted to such an extent that they won't be able to afford housing at any price level.
The article offers no data to support the claim, just some anecdotal observations.
Cities like Milwaukee have very low homelessness. Is it because the people there are just less mentally ill? Less prone to drug addiction? Of course not. (In fact in a state with cold, dark winters and where there is a bar on every corner, you’d expect the opposite.)
No, it’s because of the low cost of housing and because of their Housing First initiative.
Housing First works and it’s only because of a lack of political will that it’s not being used in more places.
Its also possible that it is very hard to be truly homeless in the winter in many places in the USA, and being someplace warm year-round, makes being homeless easier. Just like being someplace that is less likely to arrest you for openly doing drugs in public. If you make it easy to do drugs without consequences, easy to live on the streets year round, you are pretty much guaranteed of getting more of those things.
I live someplace where it routinely gets well below 0F in the winter, for weeks on end - if you live someplace like that, you do your best to make different life choices if you do not have a death wish.
You just missed the distinction. Talk to people who work with “street people” and they will tell you almost all either suffer from mental illness or addiction. This is not the same as people who are housing insecure.
As other commenters have mentioned, people living on the street don't comprise the majority of unhoused people. It does seem like California has a higher overall percentage of "unsheltered unhoused" people among the unhoused. But e.g. here in NYC the vast majority of unhoused people move in and out of the (largely corrupt, poorly maintained, highly restrictive) shelter system, and a only small percentage live on the street or in the subway.
Not exactly since the largest cause of housing insecurity is the fact that there simply isn't enough homes (at least where we need them). Paying everyone more wouldn't solve that issue, it'd just make rents rise further
> There are a lot of poor people in Utah, there are a lot of poor people in Detroit and Philadelphia, but we don't see the kinds of homelessness that we do in Los Angeles, San Francisco,...
Because where would you rather be if you're poor and homeless? Detroit or San Francisco? Philly or La? I know where I'd rather be in such a situation!
Add to poverty drug addiction and poor life choices and you have basically nixed any chances of renting a place.
I have heard this line a lot, and it shouldn’t go unchallenged. Most homeless people don’t plan to be homeless anywhere, and certainly don’t plan to move from Detroit to LA to be homeless. Many poor but non-homeless people have never left their state, so it’s pretty hard for me to imagine a homeless person gathering enough money for a cross-country trip to supposedly homeless Mecca. And most homeless people are only temporarily homeless.
Many people also aren’t aware of the fact that a sizable percentage of homeless people have jobs. So “poor life choices” can prevent a person from having a roof over their head, but apparently not from working.
No, what is clear is that there is a direct relationship between an influx of people, lack of new housing, and an increase in homeless people. Did people suddenly become more predisposed to mental illness and drug addition when housing demand went up? Of course not. Most of the homeless people in a city are from that city.
In places with Housing First, there is a huge decrease in homelessness of course, but also in other associated problems like mental illness and drug addiction.
Well, you should talk to the homeless people then. I live in SF and am on first-name terms with close to 20 homeless people. All but one of them came from outside SF.
You'll often hear of "point in time" surveys which claim that 70% of homeless people lived in SF when the became homeless. But this is a self-reported survey, without any proof, and the definition of "lived" is very loose: even if you were living in a homeless shelter and got evicted, you'd be classified as having "lived in SF when you became homeless".
I read an interview of a homeless woman from Minnesota, who explicitly said: I had a choice: would I rather be homeless in Minnesota, or homeless in San Francisco; so I hopped on a bus and came to SF.
SF has a very permissive culture, and an open drug scene, so it is attractive to anybody who's homeless.
More theorizing. Why don't they just ask the homeless, on an individual level, why they're homeless? They know better than we do. It's not like they're animals, such that we can't ask them a simple set of questions.
My personal theory? The reason there's more homeless in LA and NYC is because LA and NYC are huge. There's more of everything in those cities. Why shouldn't there be more homelessness as well?
obviously. rent seeking corporations have infected every major city and speculators and local greedy developers are half the problem, city councils raising property taxes and doing nothing to fill vacancies in their cities....usually foreign owned....
The first level is one where you don't have permanent shelter. Maybe you're staying on a friend's couch or in your sibling's basemenet. But not long term. You may have several such situations and bounce between them. These arrangemenets tend to be temporary and are triggered by the loss of a job or rising rent or divorce or a number of other factors. These people are larely invisible.
The next level of homelessness is when you're exhausted your temporary options and you end up living in your car. You are likely still employed and need your car to get to and from work (because America). This too is a temporary situation. Towns and cities don't like people living in cars. You may get harassed by police. You may get towed. Your car may just stop working and you can't affrod to repair it. On top of that, you may have a bunch of parking violations you can't afford. You may have to deal with crime (eg people breaking into your car and stealing your stuff). These people are a little more visible but are still mostly invisible. Like I've seen cars people are clearly living in but my guess is that 95% of people don't see it.
The third level is where you've lost your car and now you're living on the streets. This is the first truly visible level of homelessness. This experience is traumatic and dangerous. This is where you may start self-medicating (eg drugs, alcohol). It's more difficult to hold down a job so you may lose that too. Crime will affect your daily life. You will be harassed by the police who will randomly move you somewhere else to get you temporarily out of sight. Such people will tend to find some form of community for self-protection, which is why you have encampments.
The last level is where you've been on the street so long that you have serious medical and mental health issues. You may well have substance abuse issues too. You likely will have suffered or at least witnessed serious violent crime. The self-medicating continues. At this point it is incredibly hard to come back from this.
My point here is that when people talk about homelessness they only talk about visible homelessness (ie the last 2 levels). But the problems begin way before then. It starts with a lack of housing security.
The most important thing to do for homeless people is to find them somewhere to live. It's not a shelter. Those have their own dangers and issues. This is what people mean when they talk about a "housing first" policy towards homelessness.
We, in the US, live in the richest country on Earth. There is absolutely no reason why we can't feed and house and provide medical care for every man, woman and child in this country. But we don't because some people don't want to give anything to other people. Some think it'll somehow "encourage" homeless people and stop them from being "lazy".
Instead we pour billions of dollars into an incredibly ineffective and highly militarized police force. Homelessness and poverty breeds crime. The only way to address that is to address the underlying cause. A lot of places simply ship their homeless to coastal blue states.
Just this week, NYC agreed to pay a man $135,000 in settlement after an NYPD officer decided to drag him out of a mostly empty subway car for having a bag on the seat and then lie about what happened [1]. That officer faced no disciplinary action and still works for the NYPD.
The worst thing to happen in the West is the financialization of the housing market. Everybody treats housing as an investment. We've created an incentive to make housing more expensive for the less fortunate. We create policies to make housing unaffordable. This is by design at this point.
This premise is interesting in that you are basically saying that homelessness is progressive. I am not sure that your levels encompass all types of homeless out there, given that the data is so scant. By that I mean there are a number of individuals who may refuse offers of shelter or homes (de facto homeless by choice). How do most homeless end up homeless and in places where resources ARE readily available, why do some choose not to use them?
It's not a strict progression. I mean you can not have a car or could lose it first and then lose your home and go immediately into the streets.
My point is that approaches to homelessness are inherently aesthetic and performative. It's focused on reducing the appearance of homelessness (ie those on the street), which is why police will clear out an encampnet now and again or, in the worst case, just bus them to some other city to deal with.
But for so many people these problems start long before they get to the streets and the biggest problem of all is housing security.
No it is not. Raising rent is a correlated effect, not a causation. All cases of homelessness are highly individualized. They usually follow a pattern such as this:
1. The setup: Some sort of condition or pattern of life choices that isn't intrinsically harmful, but combined with other things, will become overwhelming once the bottom drops out. The lack of community and isolation from a support network are key indicators that a person is at risk.
2. An Event: divorce, disease, severe mental illness, tragedy, etc that causes their steady state to change significantly.
3. An Aftermath: Poor coping mechanisms such as hard drug usage, alcoholism, and other short sighted choices, combined with the inability to bounce back from things in step 1, lead to the bottom falling out. With no support network, the individual falls out of normal society and ends up on the street. Addictions can develop and the person becomes trapped.
^ These three things aren't mine, It's something a social worker pointed out to me.
This theory is wrong and it is easy to see why. Rates of homelessness are not correlated with "life choices" or "events" at all. Mental illness rates don't vary much geographically and they don't correlate with homelessness. Same with drug abuse and disease. However housing costs are very strongly correlated with homelessness.
> Rates of homelessness are not correlated with "life choices"
What could this possibly even mean? Someone roles a dice and then somebody materializes on the side of the road with a tent and a shopping cart and a fentanyl addiction?
This person just existed in a choiceless state up until the exact moment where the gained agency and simultaneously became homeless?
It means that poor choices and addiction can’t explain why San Francisco has so much higher homelessness than other places like West Virginia, which has much higher addiction rates.
It certainly does not mean that poor choices and addiction haven't lead to any or even most of the outcomes in SF. It means that the exact combination of dynamics in SF have produced different rates of homelessness than other places.
Nothing more or less.
It does not even come close to justifying the statement
> Rates of homelessness are not correlated with "life choices" or "events" at all
It's not wrong, though. This is just a rephrasing of the same problem. Imagine two people, one with a family that will take them in in an emergency and another with nobody. They both become heroin addicts. The addiction results in a job loss and a few arrests. Soon they've sold all their possessions, their health is declining, and they're behind on rent.
Person A puts their tail between their legs and goes and sleeps in mom's basement.
Person B becomes homeless.
It would be fairly deranged to say that "life choices" and "events" didn't matter "at all," that the second person's homelessness can be entirely explained by the lack of supportive family. It's both things. Homelessness arises when poor choices intersect with a lack of options.
I don't feel a ton of emotions about phrases like, "personal failing" one way or the other, so it doesn't really make that much difference to me and I'd just say that obviously the illness was a factor. That's what we're talking about here: whether to describe obvious factors as such. It would be equally silly to claim that the illness in that case was not relevant.
You already own oodles of land. You can build to whatever height you want within reason, because you control the zoning, and you even control many of the ordinances that allow citizens to block development (though certainly not all, like CEQA and NEPA). So you have lots of lands to build on, and what you build is largely in your control.
Construction costs in San Francisco are sky-high, at $440 sq ft. But people will happily pay you $40/sq foot per year for housing, probably for 75 years.
How is this not the easiest decision in the world?
Create a housing development agency, become a permanent developer, and landlord. Never stop building. Put proper incentives in place, so that employees at the agency can partake in the profits, incentivizing them to be efficient. Never stop doing this.
You might not be great at this at first, but fifty years later you will be.