How the Transbay Transit Center Is Reshaping San Francisco

I know you're counterpointing here, but really it nets out the same. Connecting transport increases it's potential.

It baffles me that SF chooses not to integrate Bus, BART and Caltrain.

The number of yearly evictions attributable to tear-downs or move-ins is miniscule. When you hear that evictions have "doubled", the absolute numbers are still in the single or double digits, in a city of over 800,000 people. And most of those are otherwise legitimate reasons, like failure to pay rent. The city has something like 20,000+ "homeless", most of whom are housed and only homeless in a legal sense, for purposes of state and federal aid. Development isn't causing the homeless problem... no way, no how.[1] At most it makes it more costly to address the problem, because it increases the cost of government funded housing projects; but it doesn't appreciably contribute to the growth.

And don't forget, people are free to move _out_ of the area. I grew up in trailer parks for much of my childhood. For the amount of subsidies people are afforded in California, compared to living on the streets you could live an infinitely better life outside the city in a trailer park--much nicer than the trailers I grew up in rural Florida and Alabama. So a large part of the problem is mobility and a willingness to move. That implicates complex social and psychological issues, but it diminishes the culpability and relevance of housing prices.

I support rent control wholeheartedly, but too many supposedly "progressive" people in this town have a penchant for looking a gift horse in the mouth. Nowhere in the country do tenants enjoy such incredible benefits. Newcomers look at the insane rents and just assume it creates homelessness, but things look completely different on the other side of 10 or 20 years.

[1] A recent study purported to show that a majority of street homeless were evicted tenants. But they did this by asking tenants whether whether they had previously rented in the city. Somebody who moves here, rents a place for 2 months before being evicted for failure to pay, would count, even though they were for all intents and purposes they were immigrants. And of course it assumes they're telling the whole truth--such as not conflating sleeping on somebody's couch with being a renter. The lack of detail and substance in that survey was very conspicuous, especially the fact that it would be nearly impossible to square with eviction board statistics.