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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

As long as California's home construction continues to be below population growth, it will keep getting worse. There are a lot of causes you can point at, but until there's actually enough housing getting built, they're all red herrings.

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As long as a city parking space costs more than a person on assistance can pay, you're not going to have affordable housing. You can't call an uncovered slot of 200sq/ft with no services a home, but that goes for >$200/mo (a lot more than $6/day in most places) in a less nice part of downtown San Jose... I don't want to think what it runs in SF. The 80sqft tiny houses which violate building code are running $73k+ ignoring substantial land (320sqft+) and utilities costs (it's owned by the city).

You have to treat mental health and drug addiction, because other homeless people don't want to live with them. Probably, you'll have to move people out of the city center, if you don't want substantial new taxes. However, if you don't bother to enforce anything you'll still end up with several thousand people living in the creeks under tarps, because they'd rather do that than go outside the city center.

Not to disagree with your second point, but that 200ft^2 of land can house a lot of people if you're building 20 stories onto it. It seems to me housing crisis is affected massively by the anti-high-density sentiment in SF preventing efficient use of land.

Yes, but look at building costs for those 20 stories. They won't be like a tiny house. SJ has an airport, and SF has a lot of marsh fill. Both are in earthquake country. I don't think it's ok to violate earthquake standards so we can build tall buildings for the homeless (and to cost less than $5-600/mo they would need to be purpose built). We also don't want ghettos like Cabrini Green, but try putting them next to someone paying 10x ($5k/mo) in the same building. Your best bet is just straight up subsidy to get prices down and high value low cost build. That will be expensive to house even a few % of the population... a 1-2% sales tax increase (since that's one of the few the city could keep).

Yeah, this is point on... no.

Unless a price of a home is ridiculously cheap (under $100 a month?), and even then, people without any income and/or mentally unwell people will not magically become non-homeless. Next time, read your post two times after writing and check for logical errors.

In Berlin you can live in a decent apartment in the city center for 400 $ per month. The only reason this is not possible in SF is that you have so much low density crap even in walking distance of the center. This is insane.

How in the world is that point incorrect? Housing isn’t being built at nearly the required rates to at least depress the growth in costs - and that’s been fairly well established here and elsewhere. Are you saying that population growth in California isn’t a factor here? AFAIK the growth rate is still positive, albeit decreasing. Though that’s statewide, the pattern is the same in SF.

This sounds like a basic supply and demand question, no?

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