Adding more housing doesn't solve density, reduce demand, or lower prices:
https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/big-money-big-bui...
Adding more housing tends to exacerbate all the problems they're already facing.
https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/big-money-big-bui...
Adding more housing tends to exacerbate all the problems they're already facing.
Change zoning restrictions and make it a lot easier to build denser housing everywhere. One lot that currently supports a single house could easily support a five-floor, ten-unit building with much higher aggregate rent than the house.
I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that adding more housing exacerbates the problem of not having enough housing. It's not like there's infinite demand, and if you add ten million houses then eleven million people will instantly move to San Francisco. You don't say that giving a starving man food will only make his problems worse.
Just curious, do you own real estate in San Francisco?
Say you have a building with 3 units all of a type that do not appeal to foreign investors and wealthy people looking for pied-a-terres, and thus are occupied by people who live and perhaps work in San Francisco. Tear it down and replace it with a building with 10 units, all of which do appeal to the aforementioned investors and wealthy people. Then say 8 units get sold to investors who leave the units unoccupied most of the time, and 2 units get sold to people who want to live in the neighborhood. You've now reduced the amount of housing stock available to San Franciscans, even though you've increased the total number of units.
We've had discussions here on HN relatively recently where people discuss housing price inflation in London caused by foreign investors. Vancouver also has a large number of condo high-rises that sit mostly empty most of the time, because they're not occupied.
That can just as easily happen in San Francisco.
Obviously that won't happen if we build 10 million units. But we're not going to build 10 million units. The danger is that San Francisco builds enough units to attract additional investor demand, but not enough to satiate that demand. Which could leave actual San Franciscans worse off.
Look at New York. People are paying thousands a month to live in crappy 19th century tenements that used to be in dangerous and poor neighborhoods.
Really, you can't win by not building housing. "Them Chinese are buying our housing! Let's stop building housing! That'll show them! Now instead of owning 0.1% of housing, they'll own 10%!" How does that make sense?
The foreign investors aren't going to buy 100% of a city. They can't afford it; the total property value of NYC alone is over $800 billion. As they buy, value goes up. If we let builders respond to this demand, they will keep producing new units to make up for foreign investors. They don't have infinite money, so stop pretending they do.
In these discussions here on housing in San Francisco a pretty strict dichotomy seems to taken hold. A lot of people believe that either you're a fan of The Rent is Too Damn High, and believe that the problem is just zoning and if you just get rid of zoning then all the housing problem in San Francisco will be solved by the power of the free market. Or if you don't believe that, then you're a NIMBY who wants to see zero construction and either doesn't believe in free-market economics, or who wants to restrict construction so as to increase the value of their own property.
It's a tiresome bit of groupthink not worthy of the intelligence of the folks here. Just because I think the situation is more complicated than a simple supply/demand equation doesn't mean I'm anti-growth.
And for the record, I'm a home owner in Mountain View, and in the last city council election I voted for the pro-housing-construction slate of candidates. I also think The Rent Is Too Damn High is a rather stupid book.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158180
Here's a couple articles on the situation in Vancouver:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/real-est...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouv...
If you Google "Vancouver empty condos" you'll get an entire page of links.
London and Vancouver are created by loose investor immigrant laws and tax incentives for the rich. You could get Canadian citizenship as an 'investor' by basically buying a house until very recently. On top of that, you get special tax treatment for the first several years of citizenship if your rich by Canada. Canada's real estate bubble never popped.
China has a large amount of ongoing capital flight, Vancouver is nice and stable, and a relatively quick flight back to China. Vancouver has a huge Chinese immigrant community. All of this combined plus the general Canadian real estate bubble & laws creates Vancouver.
---------------
London is even worse. In the UK they have a nom-dom resident tax law, where you basically just pay a flat tax of ~$40k/yr and have no taxation on your foreign income as a rich person. London is a hub city for the world too. The UK also has very low property tax rates. All of these facts combined create London.
If the UK wants to reverse London, then getting rid of non-dom tax laws, adding wealthy-only property taxes and treating them as normal tax residents will reverse the trend fairly quickly.
--------------
The USA is not an attractive place to be rich resident, unless your wealth comes from a US corporation. The USA has a high relative tax load, citizenship based taxation (only place in the world!), harsh anti-corruption / anti-money laundering laws, a very powerful, wealthy and motivated tax collection agency, a global financial surveillance apparatus, estate tax, a long and annoying immigration process and so on. All of this puts a damper on the super wealthy making another London.
Also the state of a place doesn't really matter, the 'investors' would be interested in molding crack houses. They have the money to turn it into whatever they want. You can do a total rebuild in SF as long as you keep the same square footage. One ancedote is a heavily molded crack shack in my neighborhood listed at ~$600k and sold for ~$900k. Like I was getting an allergy attack just walking into this place for a few minutes. Also see the same thing in Vancouver with this comedy game: http://www.crackshackormansion.com/
In summary: Build more, build tall, we need more 30 story residential apartment complexes! The laws of supply and demand do work! Ideally right beside BART and Muni tunnel stations. The mission became overpriced despite being a bad part of town because of BART.
Which increases infrastructure demands, which increases labor requirements, which increases housing demands ...
> I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that adding more housing exacerbates the problem of not having enough housing.
Why is it so hard to understand that ecosystems have equilibriums, and that changing one variable never occurs in isolation, and doesn't magically maintain a balanced system?
> It's not like there's infinite demand, and if you add ten million houses then eleven million people will instantly move to San Francisco. You don't say that giving a starving man food will only make his problems worse.
There's also not infinite supply. Not of resources, not of land, not of infrastructure.
It's not like you can add "ten million houses" and expect that you'll somehow solve affordability in isolation.
That's just naive 5th grade economics.
> Just curious, do you own real estate in San Francisco?
No, I moved away from San Francisco, and bought something elsewhere.
If I owned real estate in San Francisco -- and didn't care about quality of life -- density would be good for my pocket book.
Now, does adding a small amount of housing have any appreciable effect on average price? No.
Therefore, the solution is massive construction of new housing.
The obvious answer is yes, but the obvious answer is often wrong. Adding more freeway can create more demand, meaning no progress is made. [1] [2]
Right now the major constraint on having a larger tech industry in SF is the real estate expense; both offices and apartments are through the roof. It's so bad that established companies are opening or expanding offices elsewhere, and even many startups are trying other things. They wouldn't be doing that if they could keep expanding here, so no, adding lots more housing might do nothing but create more demand.
Also, saying "massive construction of new housing" so glibly suggests that there is a lot of empty land just waiting for construction. Take a look at a map of San Francisco: there are buildings almost everywhere, and the people in them are generally pretty happy where they are. Where there are no buildings, we mostly have parks, which people are also quite fond of.
Mencken wrote: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." As here, an number of those answers come from applying Econ 101 in a way where one might as well be saying, "Assume a spherical cow..." [3]
[1] http://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
http://www.sf-planning.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documen...
You could easily rezone and up the density by a factor of 4 or 5.
Not so easy to upgrade the infrastructure (transit and otherwise) to handle 4-5 times as many people living in (and traveling out of and back into) the city, OTOH.
And if you do that, best case, you've got 4-5 times as many people living in the city, at similar costs, in smaller living spaces. Where's the gain?
Actually, this is the part where cities shine: infrastructure costs in cities are lower per-person than they are in suburbs. It's much more efficient to have a dense enough city that people can reasonably get around on foot or bike, for instance, than a suburb that requires driving everywhere. It puts way less wear and tear on the roads and requires fewer of them.
The suburban cul-de-sac generates traffic by making everyone take the same big roads. Cities can redirect traffic in any number of ways given a well-connected road network. With a mix of uses the need for heavy infrastructure decreases, as many trips that might in the suburbs require a car merely require a body healthy enough to move. Less driving can actually save lives, given how dangerous driving is. And those who drive in cities are probably less likely to die, given that speeds are much lower.
In large cities, transit becomes more efficient than building highways. For example, the DC Metro just got an expansion for ~$3 billion. Meanwhile, a single highway interchange in Virginia was redone with a cost of $.25 billion. A railroad can move way more people than 12 interchanges.
> And if you do that, best case, you've got 4-5 times as many people living in the city, at similar costs, in smaller living spaces. Where's the gain?
You've got lower infrastructure costs per-person than if 1x the people lived in the city and the other 3x-4x people lived in the suburbs, ultimately saving money. A lot of suburbs are long-term financially unstable as growth occurs because their infrastructure costs grow faster than economic growth grows the tax base to pay for said infrastructure.
Loudon County, Virginia, for instance, has drastically lowered its willingness to approve single family housing because it's realized that each new SFH actually gets a large net tax subsidy unless its value is above a certain threshold. More SFHs = budget death.
Apart from infrastructure cost savings due to the economy of scale, the other huge benefit is actually to economic growth: denser cities are more economically productive than less dense cities. In cities with good human capital, the effect is even stronger with higher density.
It's easy to see why this might be. For starters, for people and jobs in a given area means every person has access to more jobs than they would otherwise. In a spread out region, more jobs would be outside of reasonable commuting distance, meaning a good portion of workers would not be willing to take the jobs, due either to time or cost concerns (especially for the poor who will be less likely to afford a car, bus / train fare, etc.).
So yeah, the benefits are large. We founded cities for a reason thousands of years ago.
Now some might _choose_ to move because they could sell their single-family home for a much higher price to someone who would then build a multifamily building on the lot. But that's obviously their business.
But to the main point of your argument, about happiness: it's a general truism that people in low-density-zoned areas are happy there and oppose any sort of upzoning anywhere nearby. Upzoning nearby but not on their actual lot is particularly bad, because it would reduce the value of their real estate; people fight _that_ tooth and nail.
The result is that everyone who is already there is fine; it's people who are trying to enter the market, either via moving to the area or by growing up and trying to move out of their parents' house, who get screwed. But since by and large those people don't vote (the young for demographic reasons; the not-yet-residents because they're not yet residents), it's the incument residents who get to control the zoning rules to their exclusive (perceived, at least) benefit.
Which is all fine, but then prices get out of hand and people panic and start introducing things like rent control and whatnot, which makes prices get even more out of hand anytime someone actually moves. And then we see the current San Francisco real estate market.
People fight upzoning because they like where they live, and upzoning would destroy what they like about it.
As for "people trying to enter the market", upzoning makes it that much harder; condos are generally a worse investment, so most high-density developments are rentals. If you think housing prices are high, try the cost of a buying a rental building.
Lastly, the "incumbent residents" bit is hilarious. I believe that's called "a citizen", or "a community member" -- as in, the people who are paying the taxes and electing representative leadership to serve in the interests of their established community.
You didn't read what I said carefully enough. People fight _nearby_ upzoning because it reduces the value of their real estate. Upzoning of their actual land increases its value, of course.
Agreed on people fighting upzoning of their own land because it would change the surroundings in a way they find undesirable.
By "people trying to enter the market", I mean the housing market, not the real estate purchase market. That is, people trying to find a place to live. It's quite rare for people first moving out of their parents' house to do so by buying a house themselves; they typically rent. The result is that there are tons of places in the US (including San Francisco) where people have to move far away from their relatives when they move out on their own because there is nowhere nearby that is a viable place to live.
As for that last.... that's true if you exclude the interests of the children of the community (which are nearly always excluded; once the kids finish college they're on their own and typically shut out of the community). It's also true if you ignore the fact that some of these communities (and the Bay Area is particularly bad about it) try to create lots of employment opportunities but without the corresponding housing. This leads to hellish commutes for everyone, including the members of the community in question, lots of complaining, and poorer quality of life than you would have otherwise.
There are some unpleasant tradeoffs here, for sure. The problem is that some people refuse to acknowledge that the tradeoffs even exist and to discuss what the right tradeoff is. They insist that nothing must ever change, period, and it never occurs to them that this means that their commute will suck more and more and their kids will not be able to live near them.
Note that I say this as someone who lives in a suburb. I like it here. I would not be terribly happy with upzoning myself. And yet I'm watching a lot of the resulting problems play out (including people who grew up in the town being completely priced out of it). It's not pretty, and upzoning sure would help some of those problems.
Many such people would be pretty happy to have an independent one bedroom apartment in a 5 story building in the same neighborhood at a similar price, assuming some improved transit.
Personally, I also think a lot of land west of Twin Peaks is underutilized. But I think it's important for people not to be glib about the fact that a lot of the people living there think it's just fine, and that even for those who want something different we're talking about incredibly disruptive and expensive change.
How are you finding that has worked out for SF overall?
And two, I think things are working out reasonably well for SF. The US has a history of absolutely terrible attempts at grand redevelopment. Read up on our "urban renewal" waves, for example. San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy, and I think it would be monumentally dumb to let another bubble lead to big "solutions" to problems that are transitory.
If you and others would like to indulge that third-world dictator tendency to dramatic urban planning, might I suggest finding someplace else in the Bay Area? San Francisco is less than 1% of the land; there's no particular reason to do it here. Or, better, show us how it's done in, say, Texas, which has plenty of space to develop that nobody is currently occupying.
If you think that then I have a bridge to sell you. A nice International Orange one.
SF is a hive of planning idiocy, from dumb height laws, to 1:1 parking requirements, to terrible permit application processes. It's practically a model for planning idiocy at this point.
Assuming you do, then I guess this is just more spleen venting. Anonymous spleen venting of course; I imagine you wouldn't act this way in person: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
If you want to see the cause for "the problem SF has had for nearly 30 years now", look in the mirror.
I wrote this more than a year ago: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-San-Francisco-residents-a...
As far as I can tell, the willful obliviousness is just as bad as then, and maybe worse.
It's not true, but it sounds right if you don't look too close.
The tech industry isn't the cause of anything but growth. Growth isn't bad. Growth is totally manageable. It's not like these issues magically showed up in the tech boom of the 90s - it just made them worse.
However what DID cause this: bad urban planning, lack of ability to change, being systemically unable to fix the housing issues over the last 40 years.
Plenty of places cope with growth periods better than SF, but SF doesn't want to cope with them: it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. It can't, but it's been trying for a long time and failing horribly.
This is not a new development. It's not a new problem. The solutions have been the same for a long time but no-one wants to change to fix them.
It appears we both agree that rapid growth is a proximate cause of the problem, and the tech industry is the main cause of that rapid growth. Where we differ is that you think a bunch of other people should immediately change to accommodate you, while you simultaneously refuse to acknowledge their perspective, which is that their previous system was working well enough for them until tech people came along in overwhelming numbers. And that maybe they were perfectly happy with how things are, and feel no particular need to change to suit you.
The rest looks like dickish handwaving to me. If you'd like to just keep yelling at people, stop bugging me. If you'd like to have an actual discussion, then start behaving respectfully.
IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices did not drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-franciscos-fluctu...
My recollection is that housing rental was in between.
It's worth noting that the dot-com bust hit tech hard, but didn't do anything to housing nationally. So it's hard to separate the effect of the dot-com bust with the housing bubble that was starting to inflate at the time. And thinking about who I know who bought property right after the bust, it was people who made money in the previous bubble, which would also have a masking effect.
Just conservative and regressive selfish fools with no ability to look at the bigger picture to help their fellow man (and themselves)
What is true is that traffic flow does not depend on e.g. number of lanes. The problem of traffic flow has to be addressed on a system level rather that a individual street level. So e.g. variable speed limits can overall keep traffic flowing more smoothly than adding a lane to a freeway/motorway would.
In any case, the use of the analogy is correct. People are currently moving to the Bay Area because of the concentration of tech jobs and talent and investor money here. More people moving here means a greater concentration of the things that make people move here. For years this could be seen as a virtuous circle, but I think it has gone well past that. Especially if, as is widely felt, that we are in another bubble fueled by cheap investor money.
Short term, sure.
Long term, less clear. More people living in the city = more demand for various goods and services = more businesses competing for space with residences and more jobs and, thus, housing demand = higher market clearing prices for housing.
> Adding housing absolutely decreases the average price of housing. This is supply and demand.
You are assuming that the you can increase the supply without affecting demand. This is naïve.
If you re-zone some significant portion of the western and southern 3/4 of San Francisco by zones that allow for e.g. the construction of 4–5 story low-rise apartment buildings (ideally allowing ground floor retail), there will be room for dramatically more housing units to be built.
Developers are currently rushing to build on every bit of available land in SF that allows medium density construction (all the bits of that map that aren’t pale yellow). All of the parking lots, warehouses, and little one-story buildings in such areas are being converted to luxury condos at maximum speed.
With better transit and municipal planning throughout the Bay Area, there are many places where it would be possible to dramatically expand housing stock and bring housing rent down to more reasonable levels.
You can't increase housing supply without affecting demand. You also can't increase housing supply to meet demand ... unless you actually make the area so undesirable that demand itself drops, meeting you halfway.
In fact, interesting yet flawed theories of supply and demand are seldom used to justify some sort of "protect existing restaurateurs' oligopoly" law. That isn't to say that it isn't valid to limit the number or type of restaurant in any particular area for e.g. safety reasons. But that has to be process-based, not just a declaration that this neighborhood has enough.
You can't argue that allowing single-family structures to be replaced by e.g. townhomes in a reasonable fashion is somehow beyond us as a society.
That's not a change in demand, that's a change in market clearing quantity.
Conversely, increasing residential capacity increases people which increases demand for services for the people which creates jobs which creates demand for residential capacity.
> If more people go out to eat, restaurants will make more money.
In total, sure. Individually? No reason to expect that.
> You can't argue that allowing single-family structures to be replaced by e.g. townhomes in a reasonable fashion is somehow beyond us as a society.
Maybe one could could argue that (or argue that doing so "in a reasonable fashion" is self-contradictory), and maybe one couldn't. But its irrelevant, because that's not what any in this thread did argue.
What has been argued is that the naïve analysis of its effects on affordability considering it only as a supply change in housing without considering the less-direct effects that has on residential demand, demand for (and price of) essential infrastructure and services which factor in to cost of living, etc., is foolishly overoptimistic.
You are responding to a comment that didn't address your argument, because it's not actually a response to anything that you wrote.
The argument says "you can't argue" a point nobody argued for in the subthread it was responding to (or, AFAICT, anywhere else in the thread, or, for that matter, anywhere else ever.)
1) Allow non-local demand? Do people fedex overnight the food?
2) Significantly increase infrastructure load? Do people live at the restaurants when they're not serving food, and thus require schools, police, parking, roads, jobs, etc?
Even then, restaurants do create demand on the city, and they are managed via zoning laws.
A more accurate analogy -- claiming that high density development will bring more restaurant patrons, resulting in more restaurants opening, resulting in restaurant prices dropping.
In the long term: rent rises.
In DC proper, rents rose.
What do you call this, the Lewis Carroll school of economics?
* Generally, in CA, unless a property changes hands, its annual property tax increase is capped at 2% per year.
* AIUI, SF could waive any property tax increases for residential properties that would have been triggered by flattening the existing structures in order to build much more rental housing. [0]
[0] I'm not convinced that there would be any if the property didn't change hands, but it has been years since I read Prop 13.
I think you are referring to the maximum increase in tax basis value (which is only equal to the maximum property tax increase if it is taxed at the maximum value already, though that's probably the case, given the low cap on property tax rates also in Prop 13.)
And you are oversimplifying in a way which is misleading in this discussion: new construction triggers full cash value assessment not limited to the annual 2% increase.
> AIUI, SF could waive any property tax increases for residential properties that would have been triggered by flattening the existing structures in order to build much more rental housing.
To the extent that they could, where would the sense be in that? Accommodating more people, but reducing the public available to provide services needed by those people?
1) That's why I listed two points, rather than just one. :)
2) According to the Alameda County Assessor's office, the situation is not as grim as you seem to paint it (for every situation except the "building flattening" situation):
"Only the portion of the property which was newly constructed is subject to reassessment at market value. For example, if a family room is added to an existing home, only that portion is reassessed and the existing home will retain its previously established Proposition 13 base year value." [0]
This might partially explain all the damned San Francisco apartments with funky vintage 1970's-era single-paned windows. :P
> To the extent that they could, where would the sense be in that?
To encourage the build-out of housing in an area that has roughly between three and ten new people move in for each new housing unit constructed annually?
1) It's not like SF is currently starving for cash.
2) In the -very, very unlikely- scenario that only the ultra-wealthy, pensioners, and property "investors" occupy San Francisco, what happens to the tax base? What happens to the character of the city?
[0] https://www.acgov.org/assessor/about_property_assessment/new...
Maybe one day Jerry Brown will find enough money to adopt Narendra Modi style initiatives to end open defecation.
Hell, aside from the fact that it becomes a ghost town after regular business hours, many parts of FiDi are really attractive places.
If I recall correctly, only 9% of police officers that work in Manhattan live in Manhattan -- and Manhattan boasts an average density of 70k people per square mile.
NYC has a housing availability problem. It's the same one as San Francisco: new denser construction is near impossible to get a permit for. If NYC permitted lots more housing to be built, the cost of housing would become affordable.
Tokyo does not have a housing availability problem. The vast majority of families in Tokyo live in single family homes they own close to parks and rail transit. The ratio of housing cost to family income in Tokyo is more like affordable Dallas or Atlanta than nightmarishly expensive NYC or SF.
How did Tokyo do it? It permitted lots and lots of by-right building on small lots, issued permits automatically for new homes, didn't require any parking at all for every unit, platted out narrow streets, and built lots of rail transit at reasonable prices. There are few skyscrapers -- Tokyo's density is 150 (people/hectare), only double SF's average density and similar to North Beach, Pacific Heights, or Russian Hill.
It's too late for SF to build narrow streets, but permitting multi-story rowhouse construction throughout the city could easily add a few hundred thousand units and substantially reduce housing prices. A full solution will require other Bay Area cities to also permit reasonable density construction.
"Japan’s sluggish economy caused price gains in Tokyo to trail those in other urban centers like New York, London and Hong Kong since the 2008 global credit crisis."
"Homes are unlikely to become more affordable, with the yen’s 41 percent decline over two-and-a-half years and investment yields higher than in some major cities abroad propelling foreigners to buy. While Japan remains small by total transaction value compared with the U.S., Canada and Australia, it’s now “comparable” to those markets in terms of the number of clients seeking deals, said Gui of SouFun realty."
"It’s not as tolerable to Japanese. Prices in Tokyo have become “seriously unaffordable,” the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey shows."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-02/salarymen-...
New York City also does still have lots of opportunities to build upwards, many of which are being taken. A huge amount of housing inventory is coming online each year. The city is accommodating large influxes of new people. It could be doing even better with less restrictive air rights, but things could always be improved. San Francisco isn't doing as well by comparison.
And keep in mind, it's not like there's an infinite number of people living on the planet. Nor does building denser cities cause more people to be born that otherwise would (if anything, it's less). Housing demand thus isn't infinite, and it doesn't logically follow that addressing housing demand by building lots more housing is a self-perpetuating problem.
> Plus, in your fantasyland, demand would plummet. Who would want to live there?
I assumed that pbriet was making a claim that went something like "Cities that are packed with skyscrapers are barren hellscapes that noone wishes to live in.". To address that claim, I provided my subjective opinion of a section of San Francisco that is packed with skyscrapers, and reported what appears to be the community reaction to a new high-density high-rise apartment building in SoMA.
Meanwhile, those cities have high density (but nothing as ridiculous as +10M apartment archeologies) and haven't solved the problem.
Housing prices in cities are going to be more expensive than housing prices in the countryside. They shouldn't be so expensive that they exclude families and middle-to-lower-income households.
"Partly as a result of nascent Chinese buying, Tokyo apartment prices have reached the highest levels since the early 1990s, up 11 percent over two years, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute Co."
"It’s not as tolerable to Japanese. Prices in Tokyo have become “seriously unaffordable,” the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey shows."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-02/salarymen-...
Since the Bay Area has both crappy public transportation and not enough density it is doubly screwed. But incumbent homeowner NIMBYites and rent are happy, so great I guess?
If you meant to say "renters are happy", no, many of us are not. Those of us who were "lucky" enough to score a rent-controlled apartment around the 2008->2010 time frame are now trapped in those apartments; unable to move despite often worsening and/or malicious corporate landlords because of the substantial increase in rent hike that we would have to endure to find a new place.
If you meant to say something else, please disregard my previous 'graph. :)
Edit: Oh hey! Hallo again! I guess you've already heard all I have to say on the topic already. :)
For others: Don't forget that the city's colossal failure to build negatively impacts both those who wish to move into the city and those who wish to move within it.
The part about crappy public transportation is a reflection of our earlier conversation.
The rest is just an extended argument that the international rich are using real estate as a speculative investment vehicle/store of money. True, but that doesn't mean that adding housing exacerbates the problem of rich people bidding the prices of housing higher.
The problem for middle class people being that the domestic luxury condo buyers then get pushed into midrange property market where they outbid the middle class. The middle class then move into the low range property market outbidding the working class etc.