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Comment by davidf18 | Hacker News Reader

The high cost of housing and commercial real estate in SF, NYC, Boston, DC, LA, London, ....all have the same underlying cause which was fixed in Japan by the Japanese federal government.

It is a market inefficiency caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status which creates a politically induced artificial scarcity in housing (scarcity = rising prices). These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump. It is wrong, and Japan has fixed the problem removing zoning density restrictions at the local level. The result, in 2014 there were 140,000 homes built in Tokyo compared with about 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 in NYC.

Economist David Ricardo wrote about this phenomenon of "rent-seeking" about 200 years ago related to the Corn Laws. Corn Laws taxed the import of all grains which benefited not farmers but landowners. Ricardo joined Parliament and managed to overturn the "rent-seeking" law.

The solution is a federal law in the US following the example of Japan.

View on HN

I understand the desire to convert a discussion of homelessness to a discussion of high house prices, but homelessness is not caused by high house prices. 99% percent of the population cannot afford to buy a house in Manhattan. That doesn't mean that they are living on the streets there. They move to where they can afford to live, and the U.S. has many areas where housing is quite cheap. If you are able to maintain a steady income, then you can also maintain housing. But if you are not able to maintain a steady income, then there is no price at which you can afford to buy a house. Even if free, you would not be able to pay property taxes, maintenance, or utilities. San Francisco has a high homelessness problem because of the mild climate, large amounts of city services, and the liberal attitude.

The homeless people here expect and receive a steady income from people on the street as well city services. I remember the first time I was in San Francisco and someone came up to me and demanded money for food. He said "I don't eat meat!". I was stunned, both at a stranger coming up to me and asking for money and also about why they can be so picky about their diet. I gave him $1. He looked at me like I insulted him and said "Salads cost more than meat". The homeless in San Francisco are really quite aggressive in comparison to other cities, and just like the rest of my fellow San Franciscans, there is a strong feeling of entitlement. There is just no price at which the number of homeless will decrease -- only when we start paying the homeless to live in houses will that happen.

The only thing I can think of is fully funded group homes that are mandatory to live in -- basically prisons with nice amenities and educational programs that you can graduate out of based on demonstrating a track record of being able to provide for yourself. Because as long as we give people the option of living on the street, there is a certain small subset of the population that will prefer to do that over the other options available to them, and San Francisco will be home to an outsized share of that population.

but homelessness is not caused by high house prices.

I have had an actual college class on homelessness and public policy. There is no single cause of homelessness, but sky high housing costs definitely contribute to homelessness. There has been a serious and growing lack of affordable housing in the U.S. going back decades, about 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s at a time when they weren't really needed for demographic reasons but they were never replaced, and average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped. Meanwhile, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for years.

No, high housing costs do not single handedly and directly cause homelessness. But that's because there is no single cause of homelessness. But high housing costs are absolutely a contributing factor.

Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.

It's nice that you've took an actual college class on homelessness. I've logged about 10 years in volunteering for programs to feed the homeless, and have shared my home with homeless people for almost 7 years (until I stopped). I've talked to many, many homeless people and every single one of them could have stayed in a shelter but chose not to because of the restrictions on personal freedom. Every single one had some sort of serious mental issue, often compounded by physical disabilities, and was simply unable to care for themselves. Every single one had serious attitude problems to where they basically gave up on trying to make it in this society.

Here, I am talking about the chronic homeless, which are the root of the problem. Not families that may need to sleep in the car because they are in between housing or people crashing on couches while they straighten themselves out. I mean people with tents.

The one person I knew the longest was basically camping out around Palo Alto. The reason why you don't see so many homeless in the suburbs is because the Police are fairly effective at driving them out with beatdowns and destroying their property. This is the reality of not forcing them into group living situations -- let them live on the streets creating a lot of quality of life issues or have an unspoken policy of police brutality. So I would say that what we have now is dystopian.

The last homeless man I let live with me I ended up asking to leave, because he was unable to keep steady work. I just asked him to do something, anything -- it didn't have to be full time -- and he could keep the money himself. But he was able bodied and needed to work. I drove him to his job. At the end of the day, he was pretty blunt in telling me that at his age -- he was in his 50s -- he couldn't stand doing menial work and being ordered around by some kid. For him, it was either a high paying job or camping out. So I finally asked him to leave and he's been camping out (assuming he's still alive at this point -- it's been a while).

I think it's cute you took a college class and now understand the issue. But housing costs have nothing to do it. You can today find a place to live in the U.S. for a few hundred a month. No, not in San Francisco or Manhattan or Monaco, but most of the country is incredibly cheap.

Look at rent prices in the middle of the country. For example, in Phoenix, real rental costs have not increased for 30 years. They've been basically flat. But in Phoenix, the homeless don't have the same access to city services as in San Francisco, or NYC.

I have been homeless 5.5 years. I have a chronic illness and two special needs sons that are on the street with me.

We are getting healthier and I have been paying down debt. My student loan was paid off just days ago and things will start getting better for me in July because of that. In fact, they have been getting gradually, slowly better the entire time I have been on the street.

I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I have been interviewed by reporters on 3 different occasions because of it, though, so far, none of that has resulted in a published article promoting my work.

The class I took involved an internship in a homeless shelter in Vacaville and I continued to do volunteer work there after the class ended. I was instrumental in getting them a proper website set up.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-to-effec...

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I am sorry you are bitter and were never able to figure out how to effectively help people solve the root causes of homelessness in their lives. That is not evidence that I am clueless.

I am not bitter, but I have come to some realizations over the years, one of which is that society, in order to provide us with benefits such as division of labor and higher density living, also comes with obligations, such as paying taxes, obeying zoning laws, not being loud after a certain time, and yes, not sleeping on the street. I knew a woman who had problems with screaming and she ultimately got evicted and became homeless because she couldn't stop shrieking at night. She never understood why "being loud" -- such a simple and benign thing -- was enough to ruin her life. And yet it did, because people need to be able to sleep at night, and there are rules for high density living. People will call the cops, landlords will send notices and ultimately evict you for quality of life issues like shouting at night, if you do it all the time and refuse to get the help needed in order to stop.

There is a very small percentage -- basically 0.03% of the population are chronically homeless -- that are unable or unwilling to meet their obligations. There will always be some Bartlebys with us, who when presented with their obligations as members of a community respond with "I prefer not to". I prefer not to live in the shelter because it's unpleasant. I prefer not to move to where housing is cheaper because this is my home. I prefer not to live in a supervised environment because I like being in control of my life. I prefer not to take this medication that will stop me from screaming because I don't like how tired it makes me feel. And with these Bartlebys the choices are prison, banishment, and forced compliance -- institutionalization. Because a society is not a collection of isolated individuals, it's a web of obligations that are, at heart, mandatory. Some people view this as a dystopian nightmare. They are naive. It is living in a rooted world. From the beginning of civilization if you did not meet the obligations placed on you, the society expelled you, whether by death or banishment. What I don't understand is why people who have no problem enforcing laws banning camping in national parks or forcing people to pay taxes under threat of jail are unwilling to ban camping on the street in a high density city. If you want a nature preserve or other area outside of society in which all the individuals who are unable to comply with our rules can do whatever they want, that's fine. But you will find that with enough people filling up that area, a government will form, a society will form, and you will be back in trouble if you start violating the new expectations placed on you in that new society.

If you aren't bitter, then why the ugly comments like saying "It's cute" that I have taken a class on homelessness and public policy? (That's a rhetorical question. Given your lack of apology, I am not expecting a meaningful answer to it. Consider it food for thought.)

I don't disagree that we shouldn't allow people who are homeless to camp openly on city streets and generally be a public nuisance. I don't do either of those things, so I don't believe it is a given that being homeless must equate to such behavior.

Historically, the more desperately that governments try to control people, the more people find ways around it. This is the origin of Martial Arts. Governments denied the peasants access to weapons, so they learned to use their hands and feet and farming tools as lethal weapons. You couldn't reasonably deny them those things. They needed them in order to produce food for the nation.

I don't agree that imprisoning all homeless people merely for being poor is at all a humane solution. I also don't agree with general trends towards criminalizing behaviors in such a way as to be a kind of Jim Crow law for homeless people. You don't solve this problem by trying to get them to just leave your city and go elsewhere. All that does is shift it around. It doesn't get people off the street.

There is a tremendous housing crisis going on in the U.S. today. Evictions are at very high rates and young people are basically expected to live with roommates because there are almost no spaces suitable for a single, young person to live alone, like there once were. Returning to historical practices of making market rate housing available that single young people can afford on an entry level salary will not solve homelessness, but it will take some of the pressure off.

Homelessness occurs when someone has more problems than solutions. The more solutions we can make available, the more feasible it is for people to make their lives work, even if they have serious personal problems for which there are no ready solutions.

I was born with my medical condition. For many years, I was a full time wife and mom. This gave me a middle class role in society, even though I was actually too sick to hold down a paid position. At some point, I expect to return to a more conventional life. My condition is not curable, but that doesn't mean my life cannot be made to work. It did in the past. It will again in the future, at some point. As the number of problems I have shrinks and the number of solutions I have grows, at some point, it will cross some tipping point.

Let me stop here and thank you for being so generous for a decade of your life. I am sorry it has made you so very cynical. But I don't think your cynicism is actual evidence that more affordable housing cannot play a role in helping get this problem under control.

It's not that simple to move. People are more comfortable with the devil they know than the devil they don't know.

FYI, Mz also claims a certain level of direct and personal experience with the problem.

You might focus more on what you're sure you know, and not what you think someone else does, doesn't, or ought.

It's true. Homeless people have no money. The difference between 200 and 2000 a month doesn't matter, they can't afford either.

This is not true. Some homeless people have no money. Others have a social security check and nothing else or a military retirement check and nothing else. Some even have jobs. For people like me, if we could find a decent (not hell hole) place for $200, that would absolutely get us off the street.

I could afford about $400 a month in the near future. I am trying to find a way to get off the street now that my student loan is paid off and that frees up enough money where I could afford that much for shelter in the near future.

Not trying to be critical or anything just curious. Why not get like a Van with a 300 dollar note? At least you have shelter and can park near city services.

I'm sure you mean well, but one-off comments from internet strangers are not going to solve my problems. I am solving them. It is just much slower than I would like. I did not comment on my situation in order to solicit advice. I did so in order to make it clear what the basis of my opinions are.

No man I hear you about the homeless who have potential like yourself. Homelessness is a huge trap. I mean I feel like simply providing showers and some sort of basic amenities to help the homeless who are trying to work their way out of it would help enourmously.

But these homeless programs that just keep the homeless subsisting are better than nothing but sill aren't helping the ones who could escape.

I only went to homeless services when I was truly destitute for basically the first six months. If I can find another solution, I do. Most homeless services are incredibly crappy and often counterproductive.

I'm with you. I've been homeless before. I would never use a shelter. But if there had been free showers I would have used them lol. I had to use the shower bus riding around SF. Also, if there had been free toothpaste and soap that would have been nice.

Sorry, I mistook your original query. It was amongst a bunch of such comments and some seemed to not be getting made in good faith.

The super short version is that I don't want to live in a van because I no longer drive due to my medical condition. There are other factors, but that's a big one.

What percentage of homeless adults spend less than $200/month on drugs? (including alcohol and tobacco, excluding prescription meds)

Your knowledge, persoective, and experience are valuable. Overall I appreciate this comment. But condescending to someone who disagreed with you is uncalled for and detracts from the rest of what you're saying.

Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.

There's a Star Trek episode that explores this idea. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District

It's difficult to think of ways of combating homelessness. To get them on their feet, you might need to redefine what a job is. A normal job requires some common elements: a shower, the ability to be there on a regular schedule, some productive task to do. But homeless people don't really have the ability to do any of those, except perhaps show up during regular hours.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the only solution is to give them money, and that most of them will just spend it on drugs or alcohol. But that's too heartless of an outlook. Some people who fall into homelessness are just like you or me. When your family connections fail and you have a debilitating illness, homelessness tends to result. And those kinds of people could be pulled out, if only we could figure out how.

There are homeless people that are essentially unsalvageable, though, and it's hard to know what to do with them. No family, no home, but most critically no willingness to help themselves even when given a small opportunity. But they still have friends, and if we focus on helping their friends out of homelessness, they might want to follow.

Just because you can't imagine a solution does not mean there is none. Steve Jobs was homeless for a time. Richard Stallman was sometimes 'between apartments' while working on his open source stuff and had trouble getting a voter registration card because of it until some big publication listed his maker space as his address and then the registrar of voters was finally willing to accept that answer.

I am homeless and have had a class on homelessness and these are two of my websites:

http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I also started a Reddit recently called Housing Works and I have various related little blogs, like Project SRO. I am still kind of throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks, but the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide is a thing I started for myself in order to keep track of useful info I needed while homeless in downtown San Diego and I abandoned it after I left downtown. It was not updated at all for six months and then I realized it had organic traffic. It has the most organic traffic of any site I run because there is need for the info.

A lot of people who have spent time homeless are ashamed of that fact and don't volunteer that information normally. Even those who are not ashamed and not actively hiding it, well, you don't know just from looking at someone that they used to be homeless. Lots of people do get off the street. It is not a permanent situation for everyone.

However, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for some years now and it does concern me that there are larger forces at play here that are causing it to be more of an uphill battle than it used to be.

The issue is chronic homelessness, not people "in between jobs" or couch crashing. Those aren't the ones defecating on city streets and aggressively panhandling. We have data on this, so let's not conflate the issue with non-issues.

2/3 of the chronic homeless have mental or physical disabilities. 1/3 have drug problems. You are talking about 83,000 people in a population of 320 million, but these 83,000 people are creating huge quality of life problems in all of our major cities. In San Francisco, you have 300 million dollars spent fighting a problem created by 2,000 people. The non-profit and social services mafia employs more people to "care" for the homeless -- or more cynically exploit them -- than the actual number of chronically homeless.

I have a chronic illness and I am getting healthier and more productive while on the street. I have been homeless for 5.5 years. My father drank heavily for years and I have another close relative who used to snort $10k a year in cocaine up their nose back when $10k was real money.

First, we can go after the low hanging fruit of helping people who are more easily helped. More availability of actual affordable housing would help with this issue. Some people who are homeless do have income, just not enough to pay for a middle class American lifestyle.

Second there are things that work to help rehabilitate people with serious, entrenched personal issues. I raised and homeschooled my two gifted learning disabled sons, one of whom has the same medical condition I have.

I know quite a lot about this problem space and I see it as solvable. It will take time, but it can be done. Writing people off as hopeless does not help the problem at all. It just compounds it.

Certainly. I only meant to add to the conversation.

Your endeavors seem promising.

I realize it is complicated and has many moving parts. Perhaps it would help to think of it this way: We don't actually need comprehensive solutions like so many people are looking for. We just need a thread to pull to start unraveling it and begin to shrink the problem. And because there are many moving parts, there are many threads to pull. People can work on various parts of it, to good effect.

Best.

Just wanted to thank you, Mz, for continually expressing patience in the face of arrogance and condescension whenever the conversation on HN turns to homelessness. Your experience and perspective are hugely valuable, all the more so because you are able to use it to educate folks about the complexities/challenges of the homeless.

Thank you. I do my best. Some times are easier than others.

>average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped

I've read this many times, bigger houses have contributed a great deal to rising housing costs. But do we have any data on the cost of materials and labor now vs. then as well as the cost of land and regulations now vs. then?

I've always had an inkling that materials/labor costs haven't actually risen that much even as houses grew larger.

In addition to being larger, houses today are more lavish. In the 1950s, houses were around 1200 square feet, they had a kitchen and a bathroom but did not necessarily have a washer and dryer or air conditioner. They certainly did not have a microwave and probably did not have a dishwasher. They tended to have less insulation, less electrical wiring, etc.

Yes, there is data on such things. There are a number of reasons that housing has gone up in cost, but size inflation is absolutely a contributing factor.

The appliances you're describing are a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each. Maybe we could expect the full package to contribute $30k, or even $50k, of increased costs.

This could explain a jump from $200k to $250k. Not from $50k to $200k.

Average housing size has also more than doubled, plus there is inflation. Average new housing is above 2400 sq ft, nearly 2500, iirc.

> Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.

I actually think his solution makes sense.

For the really impoverished people who are willing and capable to work their way up, this would be exactly what they want; for those who really don't want a roof over their heads, they should really be put into some sort of institution with restricted freedom and mental illness help.

If we have $300mil budget to help 10 thousand homeless, that's $30k per person, enough to support a decent standards of living in a cheap part of the country.

They tried that in Victorian England (workhouses) and we no quite rightly regard it as utterly barbaric.

Workhouses were for debtors who could not repay debts. That's a very different situation from say, Reagan kicking the mentally ill out of institutions and onto the streets of our cities.

It's only 2000 chronic homeless in San Francisco. It's crazy how such a small number of people can make a such a huge impact on the city.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-new-count-shows-h...

I've been working in SF for a year now. After working in Baltimore City and going to NYC multiple times, it's amazing just how bad it is in SF. But the vast majority of homeless people I've run into never ask for money but instead simply "exist", sleeping or walking around on the sidewalks. Many, maybe even most, have mental issues that make it harder to re-integrate.

While housing prices are a little different, zoning is most certainly an issue as many would much prefer to stay in any type of housing. You suggest making it a requirement but I contest that as that wouldn't actually be constitutional and most of the homeless here would love a place to stay. In NYC there are TONS of places for the homeless to stay but in SF, many shelters will have lines out the door well into the night and into the morning. There just isn't much shelter for them here. Attempting to build new homeless housing is always faced with NIMBY opposition.

Baltimore born, raised and living here still.

My startup adventures have prompted many visits to San Fran and in turn I witnessed the plight of the homeless there. It does not exist on any scale like it does there whether it's in Baltimore or New York City where I lived a year after college.

There's not much you can do re: the homeless in San Francisco, but it bothers me and makes me feel bad.

Overall not a fan of San Francisco for a variety of reasons.

Sure, they would love a place to stay, as long as someone else took care of it and paid all the bills. But the same difficulty with life that causes them to be where they are -- whether mental, physical, or abuse related, is going to prevent them from being self-sufficient even if the rent they have to pay is zero. In terms of being unconstitutional, maybe it is, but it's the only solution to this problem. People who are unable to take care of their basic needs and defecate on the streets need to be forced into group home situations until they demonstrate an ability to handle the difficulties of managing self-care.

> In terms of being unconstitutional, maybe it is, but it's the only solution to this problem. People who are unable to take care of their basic needs and defecate on the streets need to be forced into group home situations until they demonstrate an ability to handle the difficulties of managing self-care.

You're advocating for in-prisoning people who cannot afford or, for whatever reason, can't live in a home. That's really awful and lacking in empathy. That's almost like debtors prison.

The vast majority of these people will actually stay in a home if you provide one. The majority of them in SF, however, do not have access to any type of shelter because the existing shelters are far too overcrowded and any attempts at building new shelters get held up for years by people who don't want homeless people in their neighborhoods.

The solution to helping someone is providing them with healthcare (preventative is far cheaper than reactionary care for the tax payer) and providing them with a place to stay. Currently we don't really do either, especially in SF.

Not to be rude, but you sound like the out of towners we are sick of already in the bay area.

Please read grandparent's other posts. They are thoughtful, born from experience, and (IMHO) dead on.

Bingo! Some one with big enough balls to say the actually and undesirable reality of homelessness on the streets. The richer the city the greater the homelessness, because the homeless like every animal in the world (us included) goes where life is the easiest. And rich cities, have richer populations that then donate more money to homeless people.

In my hometown there are people that quite there jobs to panhandle, because they make more money doing it. It's not common, but it happens and it shows that it's not a simple issue.

FYI mental illness is also common in the homeless population and for them I'm very much in favor of looking at any solution that'll help them have the success they desire in their lives. *Just saying.

In my city the panhandlers are professionals. You can find open positions on Craigslist and there's set shifts at standardized locations. If you get up early enough sometimes you'll see a shift change. A cheap cargo van shows up, the guy gets in, and another hops out to take his place.

All of the nearby locations with panhandlers are setup this way, maybe a couple hundred spots in the city. Sometimes I wonder how many people there are running the system...

That which you subsidize you get more of.

You're saying that the homeless people that approach you for money represent all or most of the homeless people that exist, and that simply isn't true. There are some people that choose a panhandling lifestyle, but there are many more who end up homeless and are too sick or proud to do that.

I think it is absolutely true that homelessness is much more nuanced than "housing is expensive." It is also pretty clear from the last 5 years that where SF is spending its money is not as effective as they would like. (it is called out in the article, millions more spent and the problem hasn't changed). There is also the issue that while you have population counts you can't really track individuals, so did last years money get 5,000 people into homes who have been replaced by 5,000 new people for a net change of zero, or was it just ineffective? Hard to say given the data sets available.

One of the observations is that homeless populations tend to self select into encampments. And part of the expense and challenge is that where they choose to camp does not facilitate maintenance (cleaning, services, etc). I have not found any papers or articles on municipalities that have built infrastructure that specifically designed for hosting a homeless encampment. Could you build a system that would support a locally hosted infrastructure? Passive sanitation systems, trash depositories and collection points, water supplies?

Maybe I look uncharitable, but I very rarely run into panhandlers in San Francisco.

Perhaps it depends on the neighborhood. In the Tenderloin and parts of SOMA, there is an abundance of drug addicts and people with mental health issues living on the streets. I'm randomly screamed at or verbally threatened, but they don't ask for money.

I used to think there were lots of panhandlers asking for money.

Then I realized that there are roughly four different people working BART station entrances along Market Street, who collectively account for 100% of the times I've been asked for money.

> The only thing I can think of is fully funded group homes that are mandatory to live in -- basically prisons with nice amenities and educational programs that you can graduate out of based on demonstrating a track record of being able to provide for yourself

Sounds like a great premise for a dystopian short story

As soon as someone starts pulling out anecdotes to generalize people, I don't read much past that.

And seriously, locking up people for not living in homes and working? We used to do that in my country back in the late 19th century, it was a very handy law for the government to dust off when you had to jail protesters or strikers in the street.

> homelessness is not caused by high house prices

For what it's worth, 70% of SF's homeless population lived in SF in homes before they were on the street. It's probably fair to assume that if rents were lower, more of those people would still be in homes.

Source? SF's official stats have most of their homeless coming from outside of the city/county altogether with their sole SF "residence" being shelters and/or outdoors.

https://mobile.twitter.com/alastairgee/status/87575674352289...

In NYC and not only Manhattan housing is expensive. Yet in NYC is where a lot of jobs are. Taking care of very poor populations who may indeed have very high medical costs are substantially reduced by giving them stable housing which is hard to do with zoning density restrictions that makes housing expensive.

  very high medical costs are substantially reduced by giving them stable housing

Do you know of any study that documents such an effect?

Not exactly what you requested, but a pertinent source: http://www.salon.com/2017/06/10/cuts-in-federal-housing-help...

I also know that health crises for homeless people tend to hard to resolve and cost a lot more than for people who are housed. Medical advice like "stay off your foot and soak it twice a day" simply cannot be complied with if you are homeless. The health issues of the homeless tend to compound and get incredibly expensive, in most cases.

Source: I have had a class on homelessness and public policy, I am homeless, I run a few websites pertinent to this problem space. (In essence, I am kind of a SME here.)

It us known in medical circles that take care of the poor. I am speaking of people that cost the medical system a huge amount of money. This is a great explanation.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/24/the-hot-spotter...

Saying "it is known" is not data.

For example the "it is known" premise that the ACA and Medicaid expansion would result in lower consumption of medical care overall. The opposite has happened.

One example, with data:

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/21/emergency-room-visits-...

Did you read the article? A number of people who have very expensive medical bills when given a home the bills went down substantially. Read the article.

I can't find where it says that or gives comprehensive hard numbers (or references to same) at all.

The relevant question is: is any resulting consumption of medical care dollars reduced by more than the cost of these frequent in-home care visits? Generally, personnel costs (especially in public agencies) far outweigh the cost of (mostly generic) meds.

I see no hard numbers for either statistic. What did I miss?

Look, just read the article and you'll see it:

"After several months, he had recovered enough to be discharged. But, out in the world, his life was simply another hospitalization waiting to happen."

Hospitalizations can cost thousands of dollar per day. So this stay cost in the several hundred thousand dollar range.

[skipping some paragraphs]. He is given a stable housing environment:

"I spoke to Hendricks recently. He has gone without alcohol for a year, cocaine for two years, and smoking for three years. He lives with his girlfriend in a safer neighborhood, goes to church, and weathers family crises. He cooks his own meals now. His diabetes and congestive heart failure are under much better control. He’s lost two hundred and twenty pounds, which means, among other things, that if he falls he can pick himself up, rather than having to call for an ambulance."

The entire article is about this sort of thing and about many cases.

A small Canadian city has eliminated homelessness by giving them housing for free, which is actually cheaper for the city.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-e...

Medicine Hat is hardly a magnet for out-of-area homeless like S.F. is, nor is it ever likely to become one.

I saw this up close in Boston (really Cambridge MA). In most American municipalities, neighborhood groups have enormous power to shape development. All development has to get approved by the city, and the city listens to neighborhood groups. Those groups can also petition a landmark commission to landmark a building making redevelopment much more difficult. And they can sue. Even when these tactics don't work, they're extremely time consuming. I've seen one court case drag on for years even though the people filing literally submitted briefs written in crayon. So it is often better to just settle with neighborhood groups, but like patent trolls, that only encourages them.

One issue is that in the US, we treat housing as the primary source of wealth for middle class people. So everyone is expected to be a homeowner. A world where the price of your primary wealth asset is rising is good! And a world in which its value is flat or falling is disastrous. And so local laws get shaped so as to keep housing prices high; in practice that means choking the supply of new more dense housing. After all, any change might harm the value of your home!

If people would like to learn more about Japanese zoning (which isn't a lack of density zoning, but rather more of an "up to this" rather than "restrict to" zoning), there's this post on my favorite urban design blog: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

This was a fantastic read, thanks for sharing! Is there a piece you recommend that talks about the cons/rebuts "up to this" Japanese zoning laws just to see both sides?

Excellent point.

Is there even ONE city in the US that does it this way?

Can't we talk San Francisco into trying this approach? What are the objections?

Houston has a famously liberal, in the classic sense of the word, approach to zoning that results in an endless supply of cheap housing—and an ungodly amount of sprawl. Tradeoffs in everything.

What is the problem with sprawl?

Traffic. Everyone else pays for your cheap housing in higher freeway travel times (to go the same distances) and air pollution.

That isn't true. If you shrink a metropolis the traffic moves slower and the roads take up more relative space, and more people live close to freeways. There is a relatively small time advantage when you squeeze a city's transportation system, and if you want quality air you do way better in a suburb or exurb than downtown.

New housing in walking distance of likely destinations (or high quality transit) generates fewer vehicle trips than housing that requires driving everywhere.

Who cares how much relative space the roads take up?

I agree, you personally will experience better air in the suburbs. Everyone in aggregate will experience worse air due to your drive between the city and suburbs.

> Who cares how much relative space the roads take up?

That's a variable that affects travel time (because even moreso less stuff within a given radius).

I'd argue that shaving a few hundred feet of road off your journey is minuscule compared to shaving 20+mph off your speed.

The most bizarre thing about the Narrow Streets proposal is, how they hell are bikes or buses supposed to work at reasonable speed if the streets are choked with them (and pedestrians, who would apparently have right of way on the same paths as bikes and buses, rather than parallel sidewalks).

I'm not talking about any narrow streets proposal, just highways and major roads taking up more relative width as something to account for.

If you want the basics of an answer, there are plenty of sources, including a good Wikipedia article on sprawl.

The general response is "it creates problems" -- traffic, congestion, auto-centric neighbourhoods (which are poor places for children, the elderly, the disabled), and pollution.

I find more compelling the case laid out in the StrongTowns blog, by Charles Marohn, over several articles, that sprawl 1) costs more in the long term and 2) ultimately creates an unsustainable expenses-to-revenues balance.

Suburbs developed with cars, when cheap gasoline and asphalt made distance, rather than height (as in New York City) cheap. Homes were dropped on quarter-acre lots, retail centralised, and (in the US model) land use generally restricted to single-use: a lot is either commercial or residential, and industrial uses are kept widely separated.

Before that, cities were dense, because virtually all movement was on foot, by hand-cart, or, if you were wealthy, by a horse-drawn cart or carriage. Cities were also limited in size, because everything that went in had to come out, and that also generally happened by one or more of the above means -- no electrical sewerage pumping substations. Cholera and typhoid were killing tens of thousands of people per year in mid-19th century New York and London.

Space means you need more of everything: power lines, water mains, sewer lines, gas, cable, internet, streets, ... And maintenance for all of the above. At the same time, densities are too low to support intensive use -- think factory or even office jobs, or dense retail. Reliance instead is on moving people to retail centres -- built at a remove from either housing or city centres.

If you've got the resources (and cheap fuel), the spread-out life is ... relatively pleasant. If you cannot afford a car, or have had your licence revoked (drink driving, tickets, in some cases a penalty for failure to pay child support, or miscellaneous infractions), or can no longer drive (blind, disabled, epilepsy, ...), not so much. Transit options are almost always poor, and options such as walking or cycling not well supported.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

So you can build "strong" towns in the middle, sprawl around it, and let people decide where they want to live.

That suggestion retains the financial problems addressed above, amongst others.

Fully pricing in deferred future costs might help.

> These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump.

Out of the millions of property owners in the US who benefit from artificially propped-up real estate prices, you chose to single out this individual why?

He Is perhaps the most famous real estate developer worth billions with a lot of holdings in Manhattan. While a lot of Democrats claim to hate him, they are usually the ones on city council that pass these rent-seeking laws that are a regressive tax that gives Trump huge sums of money at the expense of working people.

I've lived in the Bay Area for a little bit and another issue is the "not in my backyard" problem. What I understand of this issue is that the richer communities want to use rent-prices as a wall to keep low income and homeless away from those areas and out their school systems. None of them want to be the first to take a risk on the "value" of their neighborhoods at the expense of everyone else. Would the federal law you mention address an issue like this?

Well one answer would be for the government to give up its stranglehold on running schools and leave them to the private sector.

I'm a layperson on these issues, but how would privatizing k-12 specifically solve the NIMBY issue? Also how do you align the long term goals of educating those kids with often short term profit motivated KPIs.

>I'm a layperson on these issues, but how would privatizing k-12 specifically solve the NIMBY issue?

If schools were voluntary and private then it wouldn't matter which school district your house is in. The quality of local government schools (and therefore the good school's district) often is a large factor in house prices.

>Also how do you align the long term goals of educating those kids with often short term profit motivated KPIs.

I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.

> The quality of local government schools (and therefore the good school's district) often is a large factor in house prices.

anecdotally i went through almost all of my k-12 in public school and it seems like the opposite: that areas with more expensive houses pay more in local taxes which fund nicer schools and governments. meaning the "quality" of the local government is a function of the wealth held by its residents. this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families. i don't see why privatization would be a better alternative.

> I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.

saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.

You must be a rich family to afford a home in a good school district. As your children perform well in school, the school rankings get better and the housing gets more valuable. These self-reinforcing pockets of wealth are great for those on the inside of the virtuous cycle, but further segregate them from those on the outside.

Decoupling property values from school quality has a lot of liberal appeal. SFUSD does it. Unfortunately, SFUSD's experiment has largely failed because parents who draw bad schools in the lottery system opt out and move to the East Bay, where they can reliably buy their way into good school districts.

(If they stayed, their children would likely turn those bad schools into good schools, or at least okay schools).

Privatizing education wouldn't remove school quality as a function of wealth, but it would let you pay directly for school quality, and disentangle it from the real estate market.

>this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families.

I think you are arguing that school quality is a function of the kinds of students that attend the school, rather than the value the school itself adds. In that case I agree with you.

>saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.

My hypothesis is that schools could be run much more cheaply and be as effective as they are today. Therefore the money not spent on public schools (or on expensive homes in good school districts) could be gainfully invested elsewhere in the economy which would make everyone more wealthy.

I always mistype the as thr on my phone to the point that it sometimes auto corrects it to that.

yeah me too obviously. I wish steve jobs had decreed that phones should come with physical keyboards and not otherwise.

>It is a market inefficiency caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status which creates a politically induced artificial scarcity in housing (scarcity = rising prices).

Then it is a government inefficiency, not a market inefficiency

In microeconomics is is called market inefficiency or market failure caused by special interests who influence passing laws. The terms are market inefficiency or market failure.

No, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_failure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Pick up a microeconomics book and it will explain. In microeconomics market inefficiencies or market failures have 3 causes: 1) rent-seeking, 2) negative externalities, 3) information asymmetry.

As I explained somewhere else in this post, Economist David Ricardo first discussed this problem of rent-seeking about 200 years ago. In this case, the wealthy landlords work to pass laws that give them wealth paid for by society or in this case renters.

David Ricardo first discussed rent-seeking with the Corn Laws of Britain which had a tariff on all grains which increased the wealth of landowners at the cost of other members of society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo#Protectionism

I mean, this isn't by accident. Powerful people can advocate for their interests to change laws. It's the market ad extremum. It's only government inefficiency in the sense that lawmakers are vulnerable to influence, rather than bureaucrats imposing centrally planned government programs.

In a democracy the many have the upper hand, if they get involved. Blaming the few at the top seems to be a easy device frequently used today.

It appears you are unfamiliar with public choice theory[1]. It turns out you are correct in a theoretic sense that very rarely works out in practice. Blaming 'the many' for failing democracy might be satisfying, but doesn't do any good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

The issue is that special interests have a much more focused need for the laws (or may have more money for lobbying or "buying" politicians).

There are import tariffs on sugar that benefits sugar producers while "harming" society (and other countries that want to import sugar).

Plutocracies work differently.

America is not a democracy

It's not that simple and it's not just about greed.

The Asian cultures have centuries more experience dealing with high density people situations. Violence is not as legitimized as a method of boundary enforcement for example because people have learned to deal with each other without killing each other. Sure it creates super thick-skinned rudeness (China/NYC/India) or super thin-skinned rule following (Japan) but boundary enforcement based on things like status markers(Like LV bags and iPhones) or rules or much better than those based on violence.

The U.S. is unique in its sheer mix of cultures but also because of the presence of its youngest culture (African American culture) that is today still reeling from the shock of being torn from its mother culture in Africa. Racism and the lack of a reliable justice system for them has forced their culture to rebuild from 0, going through stages where each person had to have the ability to dole out personal-justice/violence.

What's normal in China becomes rude in the U.S. What's justice in one culture is violence in another.

The locals who call a place home see this and want to preserve their own culture. Despite economic incentive allowing them to move anywhere else, their dollar is limited by their software in what it can do. It's like a project that has github dependencies forced to only use dependencies on some other place like gitlab. The project might as well die and start over. And though projects and start over, people can only die, and they will go down swinging.

Younger and newer cultures learn to be more flexible and adaptable. The software/culture limitation that prevented their parents from living like kings in Thailand is removed because their dependencies aren't as rooted. Some are even completely standalone and super flexible at the cost of having no way of influencing things. (eternal vagabonds w/ no long relationships)

Meanwhile new dense hardware developments can only be populated by software that can deal with the density and find it worthwhile. Thus you get H1B 'slave houses' filled with Indians/Chinese.

I think your comment is pretty good, and I don't know what's up with the downvotes :welp:

That said, as good as your point is about African American culture, it's far from our youngest; there's also the Chinese and Italian migration waves, the Armenian refugee wave... On the west coast, you would definitely also have to consider the effects of Japanese internment during WWII. That might be the most recent, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was another wave between now and then.

This doesn't detract from your overall point, or the severity of the effect on specifically African American culture, but I don't think you can call that America's youngest culture.

Those cultures are still connected to their mother cultures though. Though they start to become unique as they mix with American/other cultures the link and the advantages it confers have stayed whole. The studiousness of Chinese immigrants for example is a downstream effect from the exam based society of ancient China and is a feature that took hundreds if not thousands of years to develop. It's also not a perfect feature despites its evolution, it often trades max top speed for stronger initial acceleration.

Japanese internment during WWII is laughably incomparable to the damage inflicted upon African Americans over the last few hundred years or so. I think the OP meant age-range, or at least that was how I initially interpreted. Though I'm not sure that's true either. Even if OP meant something different, there are waves of Cubans, Chinese, Hmong, and many others. Who knows?

To borrow some momentum from modern pop culture via Bane from Batman. Japanese-american culture resisted the influence of darkness inflicted by the american culture that was consumed (temporarily) by the darkness. African American culture was seeded in that darkness. One culture resisted hate due its experience with hate, for the other, hate is all it knew.

Not sure about the downvotes, you're right.

I don't think that African Americans are the youngest culture in America but rather one of the oldest, considering the slave ship theory they've been here quite a while. However I strongly agree that they're still very wounded and needing healing.

Further, there's evidence being brought out that there actually were aboriginal Americans that we would call black.

What I mean by age is age of connection to older cultures. Almost all western countries have wealth, either literal or cultural from Greek and Roman civilizations. Asias subcultures have roots in Chinese culture. African American culture was fully severed from the mother culture in Africa so it's age is much younger compared to the thousands of years other cultures have evolved over. One example of a cultural strength, appreciation for education, is often taken for granted. Racism is the idea the blacks have an innate disdain for education but it's actually an ubiquitous cultural strength common to all cultures EXCEPT slave/severed cultures. Affirmative action is unfair from the lens of the present, but it is basically compensation from the lens of history, speeding up development of this basic cultural strength. Affirmative action that doesn't heal this rift annoys me as the compensation is not going to the victims. The vanity metric of black skin is often achieved by pulling from Africa where the ancestral culture links had stayed intact.

Trying to assign 100% of the differences between people(s) to their ancestral cultures is a grossly oversimplified post-modern mythology and unsupported by facts or a contemporary understanding of the science of human populations, and I'm fairly sure many Asians and Asian-Americans would be quite offended by the statement that their ephemeral "roots in Chinese culture" are what lead them excel where others struggle.

Don't be blind. Culture definitely provides tailwinds and headwinds in certain areas. Ignoring your attack on the strawman of 100% explanatory power the actual degree of effect may be very small but compounded over time.

A simple example is being good at multiplication in kindergarten. This small advantage can become a desire for continuous academic excellence via courage towards math. If a child's parents are stereotypically prudish, another "advantage" is the ability to sidestep distractions of athletics/sex.

If the natural momentum a culture can build isn't appreciated, people become shallow and hoarding. In my family for example, the idea that Asians are naturally smarter and Blacks dumber is common and was the impetus for my thoughts in this area. I see a greed and lack of empathy developing that is difficult to watch.

The most common actual real world usage I get out of explaining this model is more support for affirmative action. Perhaps other people can see it as having other value. No need to trash it. All models are simplifications of reality and thus "wrong".

The japanese and german communitys in the US are also in need of healing- after the misstreatment in world war2.

Um, fuck no. That's vastly different in terms of scale currently and past.

Hey New Yorkers aren't rude but we are intense, quick walking, quick talking, and impatient. Most of Manhattan is not dense at all and is covered with brownstone instead of high rises.

Care to elaborate on this a little more? I’d like to learn about it.

Scarcity results in rising prices. In general wealth creation comes from productivity. There are many in society including special interests that are not interested in creating wealth but taking it for themselves while harming society as a whole. That includes not only wealthy landlords but many other groups of people don't want competition.

Another example is limits on taxicab medallions (which we have in NYC) so that medallions in NYC were valued at $1.2 million each and higher fares for passengers but that scarcity was fixed by competition from Uber/Lyft so that now medallions are only worth $700,000 or less and fares are less expensive than they were.

Another example is labor unions. Various forms of tariffs also create scarcity benefiting the special interests over the needs of the general population. Many jobs have extraordinary educational or licensing requirements to create scarcity and limit competition.

When it comes to housing wealthy landlords want their land to appreciate so they lobby politicians to pass these regressive laws. Without spending a cent, simply reversing the artificial scarcity in housing means that renters pay less for rent and more for goods and services, the construction trades have jobs, etc.

Here's a bunch of my YIMBY readings:

https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/

Here's a good primer:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40509-yimbys-the-alt-righ...

If by "good", you mean "a bunch of filthy lies".

"a bunch of filthy lies"

Can you quantify?

It's a simple math of demand and supply. Density restrictions keep supply in check it keeps it constant, but demand grows exponentially over time, due to immigration and population growth. Thus price grows astronomically high. If you remove restrictions and with the right technology you could create housing that keeps up with the demand growth. SF homelessness is really about incompetence of city politicians, bureaucracy, and the lack of good talent in public service. Why would I want to work for the city to make it a better place when companies inside my city or just further down to the south pays me 3x or 4x what they're offering.

Dezoning most American cities would be quite a good thing. We massively subsidize parking thanks to our zoning requiring parking minimums (such that buildings are only able to rent parking for low $0.xx/sqft a month, versus $x/sqft a month for housing in the same building), and we also block or kneecap larger buildings by restricting their size and the number of units within them.

These restrictions (nearly all carried out as zoning) could easily be removed and allow a wave of development to occur, lowering housing costs and keeping many people from ending up homeless in the first place.

> It is wrong

As with any political matter, binary assertions like this oversimplify issues. A counter argument in this case is that strict zoning laws serve to control an influx of citizens to a location. Those influxes can fundamentally change the culture for the present residents.

Is that a bad thing? I think it's worthy of debate. But blanket statements risk dismissing reasonable arguments before they are even presented.

Except it doesn't really work that way. Strict zoning and building rules prevent the built environment from changing, they don't prevent the people from changing. Witness the decried gentrification in San Francisco, most of which has built very little over the past several decades.

It would seem that strict zoning and building rules hasten and encourage gentrification. Without more density, and with more people wanting to live in the same area, rents rise more and the ones who win out are the wealthier renters. If some buildings were replaced with more density, then the housing supply reaches further down the demand curve to those with less money.

In the absence of rent control, you're right. To stop a neighborhood from changing, you need both low density zoning (minimize incentive to tear down buildings) and ironclad rent control (make it impossible to dump existing tenants in favor of wealthier ones in existing buildings).

San Francisco has not managed the ironclad rent control part, and as you'd expect, landlords found various ways to get rid of low-rent tenants in favor of high-rent tenants. When you have the ability to drag your feet on repairs, the mechanism is obvious. When your tenants are poor and you're constantly forgiving them for being late/short with the rent, all you have to do is stop doing that.

Zoning by itself is just destructive. Zoning and rent control could theoretically work, though I'm not sure it ever has, because landlords are so much more clever about getting rid of tenants than cities are about designing rent control laws.

I don't think it's really a cleverness issue. It's that "ironclad rent control" is an expropriation of private property that our legal system would not permit.

Sorry, how in the world does this shut down debate? One should be able to say "Because of X, Y and Z, it is wrong," without worrying that somebody else won't even respond with "but what about A, B, and C, which mitigate the wrongness?" Or "but it is not wrong because D E F."

Your blanket statement seems to shut down debate far more than OP's original comment.

Yes, it's wrong to (try to) stop an influx of citizens to a location.

It feels weird to invoke patriotism here, but if there's an influx of citizens to a location, the individuals within it are doing the most American thing you possibly can: chasing opportunity.

To lock the doors, to hoard the opportunity for yourself because you were born in the right place or got there first, is the most deeply un-American thing you can possibly do.

We should be celebrating, encouraging, and facilitating the largest possible influxes we can get to our ascendant cities.

Unfortunately, I think this is a 'tragedy of the commons' kind of situation. Existing landowners (or at least groups of them) are incentivized to hoard the land-wealth by vetoing construction on their valuable land. What those landowners are missing is that everyone would be better off if land could be put to its most profitable use.

The resulting higher density of land-use would likely result in each landowners property becoming even more valuable. Imagine owning a single-family-housing-sized lot in the middle of New York City, for example.

Reread their message, grok the context, and connect the dots to figure out why it is considered wrong.

It's the responsibility of the writer to connect the dots on why it's wrong, not the reader. Throwing out a blanket statement like "it's wrong" and expecting your audience to figure out why (or not and simply agree, since that would be more convenient) is poor communication at best, and intellectually lazy at worst.

So, basically, you're saying "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge"?

I think it's more that “if you wish to convince people of your point, you can't ask them to go find the supporting evidence and reasoning, you need to provide the reasoning and identify the evidence.”

I don't follow. What do you mean?

It is a regressive "tax" and it creates more greenhouse gas since people have to commute farther, and it contributes to income inequality. It enables special interests to take a share of wealth without creating it through innovation by created by others through innovation.

These four items are deemed by society as wrong or bad and therefore it "wrong" as you say.

Somebody asked why it was wrong and I explained the reasons which are factually correct so if you're going to down vote discuss which fact you disagree with.

Nevermind that Tokyo has 20x the area and population of SF? That's not counting the metropolitan area which matches the population of California.

I think the most striking comparison is Tokyo vs CA itself; similar populations, much more area in CA, and Tokyo still built 1.5x as many homes.

More like 3X the area and 15X the population (Tokyo metropolis vs SF city and county) or 1.5X the area and 8X the population (Tokyo metropolitan area versus SF metro) -- all figures gleaned from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo

I love 300sqft apartments. Maybe instead of Tiny House Hunters on HGTV we can get Tiny Gentrified Shoebox Apartments instead.

I don't know if a 300sqft apartment is big or small because we use the metric system here, but if you're talking down small apartments, wouldn't the market partially sort that out? If an apartment is too small, people wouldn't buy or rent it. Or if they did, maybe it's all they could afford or a sacrifice they were willing to make?

I've read stories on HN of start-ups living or operating out of literal closets because they can't find or afford an alternative. Surely there's some size which is safe and liveable, but smaller than what is available now? And can be designed in a way that isn't a charmless, stifling box?

Well, the market is sorting things out right now isn't it? Rent is really high and there are long commutes. So how exactly does turning SV into a Tokyo solve this problem?

It doesn't. There are far more people who want to live in the Valley than there are homes and building homes won't solve that problem. If anything, they need to stop building so people are forced to relocate to other parts of the world. The insane concentration of technologists in one area is not good for the world.

And yes 300sqft is small.

Is it though? From afar, I thought the general criticism was that regulations were impairing development? Or is the NIMBY reaction from existing owners considered part of the market in a situation like this? (Honestly don't know.)

Bringing some Tokyo public transport wouldn't hurt, right? That would help with the commutes and make living further out viable.

Well you won't find any argument from me with respect to public transportation. It needs a massive improvement nationwide.

I just don't like the knee-jerk reaction from others (not you necessarily) who just call everything NIMBYism as if people who own property have 0 rights or concerns. I own and live in a small condo. Like under 100k in value. I have a cool little view of the city, nothing special. I bought it because of that and other factor. You're damn right I would be upset if somebody wanted to build a skyscraper blocking my view, it literally affects the quality of my life. Now, that certainly isn't justification in itself to block construction, but on the other end it very much seems as though, from the other end of the discussion, that my concerns would be deemed irrelevant.

How would you (not you specifically) if people started tearing down trees in your neighborhood to turn it into a strip mall so cars could get through? How bullshit is that?

Overall I just want to see a more balanced discussion, so I call out what I see.

It is wrong, and Japan has fixed the problem removing zoning density restrictions at the local level. The result, in 2014 there were 140,000 homes built in Tokyo compared with about 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 in NYC.

Well, there's also the fact that, unlike NYC and SF much of that city was destroyed during what Wikipedia calls "the single most destructive bombing raid in human history". So it's not like they had all that much historic architecture to protect, anyway.

Apples and oranges, in other words.

These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump.

Oh please. The Trumps made their money through, first, being notorious slumlords; then through mob connections and tax loopholes; and finally, as money launderers for the post-Soviet elite.

Not through the "overuse of historic landmark status", by even the most fantastic stretch of the imagination. (As an illustration, look into the history of the building that preceded Trump Tower at the same location).

Wasn't SF pretty much wiped out about 40 years before Tokyo?

Right, but it was rebuilt in era when humans still knew how to design solid-standing, aesthetically-pleasing buildings for just about any purpose (unlike virtually all of the crap built in the past 60 years). That's why much of its architecture counts as "historic", and preservation-worthy.

"solid-standing"?

Much of the post-fire development used unreinforced masonry and was built on poor-quality fill. We saw the effects of this during the 1989 quake in areas like the Marina district.

The preponderance of fill (and depth to bedrock) in the densest areas of SF is well-illustrated by the Millennium Tower fiasco[0]. The MT's pilings do not even reach bedrock!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...

Much of the post-fire development used unreinforced masonry and was built on poor-quality fill.

Also, the issue of some buildings being built to (allegedly) inadequate standards is a red herring. If that were the case, the city would be more than happy to have them condemned, and all manner of more useful structures (for affordable housing or otherwise, put in their place).

We saw the effects of this during the 1989 quake in areas like the Marina district.

A comparatively tiny portion of the city actually. But anyway, this is far afield from the original topic of this thread.

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