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Comment by joejerryronnie | Hacker News Reader

How about legislating a carrot rather than a stick - e.g. every housing unit within a given radius gets an annual $1000 rebate on their property tax if new, affordable housing is built within their neighborhood? As it stands today there is no perceived short-term benefit for home owners to support new development. No matter how many well heeled YIMBY groups sprout up, they will always be far outnumbered by local homeowners.

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Subsidized "affordable" housing does more harm than good. We need more housing, period. Removing market-rate places for these subsidized ones just raises the price for everyone.

The problem is that if the housing supply is already too small there is little incentive to build anything other than luxury homes, since the margin is inevitably highest on those.

And yet many of the cities where this is true, politicians celebrate adding high-paying jobs but not adding housing to accommodate the highly-paid workers. Whenever a new office building is approved, housing construction permits should be issued until there is at least 1 bed for every desk.

That's OK though isn't it? Even having more luxury housing will eventually drive all prices down if we build enough housing. I don't care which end of the spectrum we want to tackle first. We need a huge amount of additional housing. If there is more incentive to build luxury housing first, so be it. But let's just start to actually build significant(!) amounts of any housing. Of love to see a lot of high rise buildings added all over the bay area. The avenues in SF for example are very low density and the houses aren't historically significant or anything either. Let's build a dozen or so 60+ floors apartment or condo buildings there and the prices are gonna come down.

AFAIK from history, this is what Manhattan thought too but didn’t turn out that way. So...

Wealthy people that can afford luxury units only rents one unit, and if that unit is in a luxury building then they won't compete for the rest of the housing stock.

An old building should have decreasing rent over time if the quality of the landlord does not invest in getting the units up to standard, unlike in the bay area where even moldy out-of-date units are going for about he same as a new luxury building unit.

Yes, and if Toyota were only allowed to build 1000 cars a year, you can be damn sure they'd only build Lexuses. But since 1) they're allowed to build as many cars as the market will buy; and 2) because they want to sell a car to every single person they can; and because 3) not everybody can afford a Lexus, then; 4) they end up making a lot of Camrys and Corollas, too.

Now imagine they were currently constrained to just those 1000 cars and lobbying to build more. The car NIMBYs would be saying, "But look! They only build Lexuses! They'll just build more Lexuses!"

But we know that's not what actually happens. And it won't be true with homes either.

But realistically they won't be able to build an unlimited amount of houses. So in your example let's say they're suddenly allowed to build 10000 cars, an order of magnitude increase. I think those 10.000 will still be just Lexuses.

I agree with the sentiment that luxury apartments is a start/ better than nothing, but I think the benefits for the lower end of the housing is overstated.

"But realistically they won't be able to build an unlimited amount of houses"

Unlimited is quite the stretch goal, but, frankly, why not? We've done it before. San Francisco doesn't need to be Midtown Manhattan to drastically increase its population. It just needs to look like most of Queens (or Brooklyn, which would be even better).

We've built Queens before. We've built Brooklyn before.

It's not impossible, assuming you don't make it illegal.

If all they're building is Lexuses, the problem isn't that they're allowed to build too many cars and therefore you shouldn't let them build more. The problem is that they're not allowed to build enough cars.

It is actually not correct that homeowners in SF outnumbers renters. 65% of the population are renters.

Because of prop 13 property taxes are also fixed and decreases to nothing as the property depreciates over 29 years. Prop 13 in effect removed much of homeowners incentive to support policies that promote development.

But many renters are opposed to increasing housing stock, no?

Yes, traditionally many renters that count themselves as progressives in SF has fought for restricting housing supply.

Restricting housing supply has priced out a previously thriving african american and hispanic community, as well as most working class families.

In Norway, where I come from, this would not be considered a progressive opinion at all. Quite to the contrary it would be considered an extremely conservative opinion, and possibly also classist.

Hardly any renters in San Francisco are market rate renters. Market rate raters are the only ones who directly benefit if the market rate comes down.

Not necessarily. Life situations change so a rent control tenant might need to find a new place or people they love might need to. For instance

* get children

* get grandchildren they want to be close with while their child can’t afford to live next door because of inflated rents caused by housing shortages

* become old and need to live in a building adapted to their needs

*their friends might move away because of high housing costs

Reducing prices solves these problems.

Oh, I totally agree, rent control makes it hard to move and that's terrible, we should have many more market renters and we should build enough to keep market rates reasonable. I'm just saying the political coalition isn't really there.

SF is just a small portion of the greater Bay Area and probably not all that representative of the majority - either demographically or politically.

More people rent in the bay area than you might think:

* San Francisco: 65% renters

* Oakland: 60.2% renters

* Berkeley: 57.3% renters

* San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area: 43.7% renters

I don't believe prop 13 allows decreasing the assessed value due to depreciation, although I could be mistaken. From what I understand (and is the case with my personally owned home) the assessed tax value of the property is the sale price and then goes up a max of 2% per year or the inflation rate.

The homeowners already have the greatest carrot of all: their homes. They could sell at any time for at least a million, move somewhere without crazy housing demand, and gorge themselves on steak and lobster for the rest of their days.

Their entire ask is the desire to keep their neighborhood the same. The only way to give them that carrot and build more is to build humongous interconnected complexes underground which, besides being too expensive, is arguably unethical (lack of sunlight / fresh air).

In this case the YIMBY org BARF has a lot of support from displaced techies and developers. They are using the court system to enforce the law already on the books. The cities can't win. It will just take time though. This together withsome new legislation from the State will probably solve the problem.

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