Stripe to donate $1M to California Yimby | Hacker News Reader

Stripe to donate $1M to California Yimby

nytimes.com

544 pointsdcgudeman598 comments

Stripe cofounder here.

This is an issue that I know a lot of HN readers care about and I'd encourage anyone interested to get involved. (Feel free to reach out to CA YIMBY, your local representatives, or any of the other organizations doing good work in the field.)

Bad housing policy is one of the biggest impediments to overall economic growth[1] and to individual economic opportunity[2][3] in the US. Our current restrictive policies disproportionately hurt poorer, younger, and (frequently) non-white[4] people. I really hope we can change them.

[1] https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/chang-tai.hsieh/research/gr...

[2] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/83656/...

[3] From the Obama administration: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

I can't say thank you enough! California's housing policies have repercusions even way up here in Bend, Oregon:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/back-againbend-oregon-matt-ab...

The articles and book you cite are excellent ones, and I'd highly recommend them to anyone interested in this issue.

I have a bunch more here, too: https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/

I used to live in Dublin, CA outside of SF, and there was a big housing boom there. I said that SF could turn off Dublin's housing boom with one vote. The entire Western US is in the same position with CA - every good place to live west of the Rockies is inundated with people leaving CA, many carrying CA housing wealth with them.

Sadly, a lot of them bring the same bullshit policies and ideas with them. One person, originally from LA, commenting locally here in Bend was complaining about how a duplex would "ruin the neighborhood".

California Expats in large numbers are often disastrous for local politics. Many were political outsiders in Cali, but they bring baggage like the strong police state bent that most in SoCal seem to prefer with them.

Especially in smaller communities, it is quite common to see a major ideological divide between those fleeing Cali and everyone else who lives there.

I could not agree more.

A lot but not all. I live in the north sf bay (born and raised) and am an engineer for a municipality that has seen a big influx in the past 10-years of wealthy bay area/socal types. I (and basically all of my co-workers who mostly grew up here when it was not much different from Oregon) feel the same way you do in Bend about them here in California. It is definitely a class of people who are all about getting up in everyone's business if it is something they do not agree with. I am not sure where they come from but I would definitely say it isn't so much California as a whole, as maybe those accustomed to urban centers moving to more rural areas.

>It is definitely a class of people who are all about getting up in everyone's business if it is something they do not agree with

I agree. I think this mindset is cancerous to society. Being all up in everyone's business is part of what creates things like asinine zoning, the war on drugs, etc.

I agree. The biggest gift CA can give to the other 49 would be to stop driving their own residents out.

CA housing policy has hurt many places outside CA, Denver for example.

As someone who considers myself a YIMBY, I welcome people from elsewhere, but I hope that they move to my town because of its merits, not simply because "WOW, CHEAP!".

Everyone has a limited budget and you can't ask people not to consider the rental prices while choosing the locality.

I don't intend to speak for 'davidw, but communities imply a social contract and people picking where to live based primarily on rental prices seem quite a bit less likely to build a rapport with that community. I'm not blaming them for it--late capitalism, yo--but it is a thing and it's not unreasonable for an established, community-concerned member to be like "hey, there's more to us than where your apartment is."

>cash out and live like a king

That's increasingly the problem in CA. Current residents have spent so much on housing that their only chance for a decent retirement is of their home values keep going up. They've paid so much that they haven't contributed nearly enough to their retirement accounts.

You can hardly blame a NIMBY if nearly 100% of their net worth is tied up in their home value and falling home values will result in them having 0 retirement and no ability to sell their home and move because they are so far underwater.

That depends on the definition of the word "blame" that you're using. If it's a moral castigation? No, of course not; they are being ground down by the shitty circumstances that entrap most of us and of course it's hard to hold as a moral failing the maximization of what little they have (and while it is a lot to people below them, yeah, it's little in the grand scheme of things).

But if it is an identification of a problem? I think it is fair. The amount of misery that NIMBYs can spread through forced inaction significantly outweighs the amount received in the case of action, I think.

The first one. "You can hardly blame them" pretty much always denotes moral castigation rather than the technical attribution of fault.

Cheap is an excellent attribute to have, we should all be so lucky, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as housing. In growing cities, it's a sign that market economies are working and that supply is allowed to increase, the way it should.

Despite what some may think, expensive housing doesn't benefit anyone, not even those who own the housing. Not, unless you're willing to leave the area, then you can cash out and live like a king.

The dynamic I'm talking about is that, say, a house in Palo Alto costs 2.5 million dollars, whereas one in Bend might cost 500,000 - and be completely unaffordable to many people here. It'd be nice, in an ideal world, if the person moving from Palo Alto came because they like Bend for what it is, rather than 'oh gosh I can buy a house and live on the rest', if that makes sense?

But ... that's one of the things they like about it!

Or Denver and others could build more housing. This increasingly isn't just a California problem, even New Orleans is facing supply constraints causing measures of relative affordability to go in the wrong direction [0]

0: http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/new_orleans_ex...

Yep! There's a reason YIMBY groups are popping up all over the place.

It continues to boggle my mind that people say things about domestic migration that they'd never say about foreign migration.

Let's get this straight: migration happens many places, and for many reasons. The population of California is increasing, not decreasing. The population of the entire country is increasing. Urban areas are growing at the expense of rural areas (and, to a lesser extent, suburban areas).

There is no such thing as California "driving their own residents out". People moving from CA to other places may have been born here, or they may have only lived here for a few years. It's not a zero sum game. Populations are increasing. Migration is happening, everywhere.

I moved to California from the Northwest, where I was born and raised. Where folks who have lived there for 10 years whine about Californians "ruining the place", but have never thanked me for leaving. The majority of people I know moved to CA from out of state, but we don't blame Michigan or Ohio for our problems. We have a strong economy, and we're trying to accommodate people.

Demand drives up costs if supply doesn't keep up. They were blaming California when I lived in the Northwest in the 80s. They're blaming it now.

I was listening to an NPR show just last night, about alleviating housing concerns. One pertinent quote was that, when you buy a house, you are not entitled for the view out your window to never change ever, for the traffic to never change ever. This is the YIMBY movement -- to accommodate additional people. This is exactly the opposite of what people like yourself are doing. It's pretty ironic that, in an article about trying to solve housing problems by accommodating people, you're being petty and negative and playing the blame game. All of the same things that lead to these exact same problems.

Say what you want about California, but we're not blaming outsiders for our problems, unlike other populated regions in the west.

> There is no such thing as California "driving their own residents out".

This just isn't true? It's pretty easy to quantify in terms of net inflows or outflows. And it turns out, California is a net people exporter[0]:

> Last year, California had 142,932 more residents exit to live in other states than arrive, according to an analysis of a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau, released Wednesday, Nov. 15. This “domestic net outmigration” was the second-largest outflow in the nation behind New York and just ahead of Illinois and New Jersey. And it was up 11 percent (13,699 net departures) vs. 2015.

> California’s net outmigration has been ongoing for two-decades-plus.

[0]: https://www.ocregister.com/2017/11/16/census-142932-more-peo...

Still growing.

"How? Primarily through foreign immigration — 332,197 new residents from other lands in 2016 — and more births than deaths."

My comment and complaint was with the characterization of "their own residents", which sounds an awful lot like "you people", and the attendant implications that it's the fault of "the other", and that Oregon/Washington/Colorado/wherever are victims rather than merely other states impacted by the same factors California is -- namely, a booming economy, inflows to more urban areas, rising property values, growing wage gaps, etc.

But the attitude we get from the "victims" is that they have a god-given right to have their regions remain the same as they've ever been, and must therefore find a scapegoat (California) for all of their problems.

> Still growing.

Right. Doesn't change the inflow/outflow dynamic.

> it's the fault of "the other", and that Oregon/Washington/Colorado/wherever are victims rather than merely other states impacted by the same factors California is -- namely, a booming economy, inflows to more urban areas, rising property values, growing wage gaps, etc.

Sure, I follow you. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that outflows from CA would be lower if CA housing were less expensive (because supply was less constrained) is a reasonable one, IMO. Do you disagree?

In that context, it is arguably correct to attribute (some) inflows from the state to CA's expensive housing policies, which are in many ways worse than other states.

So... California should pursue YIMBY policies to incorporate population growth so that the other 49 can keep population grown to a minimum (ie., can say No to YIMBY policies)?

When people leave California, because there is not enough housing, and move to Texas, which sprawls into floodplains, they double or triple their greenhouse gas emissions. Even with all the greenhouse gases from super-commutes, I prefer to have people stay in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_carbon_...

Texas has very high per capita carbon emissions, but Oregon and Washington, which is where a lot of the complaining comes from, are pretty comparable to California.

Now, city dwellers do evidently have lower carbon emissions per capita. As you can see from the chart, New York state and Washington DC have very low carbon emissions per capita, driven by large urban populations.

https://www.iied.org/cities-produce-surprisingly-low-carbon-....

California does have a favorable climate that keeps energy use and emissions down. But so does much of the Northwest, and urbanization clearly has a lot to do with per capita emissions.

In short, if you're concerned about carbon emissions, you should probably support density everywhere, not just in California.

Yes, but supporting density is not YIMBY exactly. In Houston, the main problem is not NIMBY, but unsustainable development patterns. StrongTowns is a more universal message. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/5/1/the-living-city...

Many more people leave California to go to Arizona and Texas than to Oregon and Washington. https://www.ocregister.com/2017/11/16/census-142932-more-peo... http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/p/what-is-closed-acce...

Those are interesting links. For me, San Francisco's decision to demolish the Fillmore comes to mind immediately when reading the bit on living vs mechanical cities. SF's ultimately (Imo) harmful decision to require garages and parking also seems to fall under the mechanical rather than living city idea (http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2008-06-01...)

Your links about where people move are interesting, but I don't think they support the notion that the big problem is people moving out of California per se. California "keeps" a very high percent of it's population - only Michigan and Texas are higher. This is a little tricky to measure - California (and Texas) are big states, with several large urban centers. When someone moves from SF to Los Angeles (or from Dallas to Houston), that's considered in "in-state" move, whereas when someone moves from New York to New Jersey, that's an out of state move. That could throw off the numbers. The links do show higher domestic out-migration from California in absolute numbers, but there's still a lot of in-migration as well (perhaps higher as a percentage of population? Not sure...). And Oregon and Washington are up high on the list of out as well as in-migration, even if they aren't at the absolute top (again, keep in mind, Texas is a big state - you'd expect a lot of movement between two large states like this).

One very important thing to keep in mind is from your link about "close access" and "contagion" cities. The idea (for anyone who doesn't want to follow, though I do encourage you to read the links) is that places like SF or LA are closed off because they're so expensive, but sprawl into inland California occurs.

Within this context, from an emissions point of view, Californians moving to Seattle or Portland could be more desirable than staying in CA if they're moving to sprawl inland. Then again, this may cause displacement into sprawl elsewhere.

I'm pretty sure we agree that it's undesirable for people to leave California (or sprawl into inland areas) because of NIMBY building codes. The part I can't get behind is that people should stay in California rather than moving elsewhere for carbon emissions purposes. The data you showed overwhelmingly supports the notion that certain types of density are desirable, but again, the notion that CA should pursue this kind of growth so that other cities don't have to (while the US accepts 1.2 million immigrants a year)? Nope, I completely reject that idea.

I support it here, but Seattle, Denver, Portland are going to need to grow, intelligently too. I'm not interested in doing this so others can keep people out.

This is awesome to see and I really hope more companies and institutions follow suit! Building housing should be the number one issue for every politician in the Bay Area and California.

Are you concerned that the optics here of tech companies funding CA YIMBY will be bad, particularly since it is already seen as a tech employee group by opponents such as the existing low income housing advocacy groups?

If you're already accruing the supposed negatives of being associated with the industry (and I emphasize supposed, given that tech is also the region's biggest economic driver these days), you might as well have the dollars too. Tech companies are struggling to hire people in the Bay because of the housing crisis, it's entirely rational that they would start supporting efforts to fix the problem. At least in this case corporate interests are mostly aligned with public interests.

This assumes that your only two options are give them the money or not give them the money.

They could give that money to someone else, e.g. to some of the low income housing groups that have existed for a while and who have not been pegged as tech proxies already.

> to some of the low income housing groups that have existed for a while

And that group is now pegged as a tech proxy.

That doesn't help with the problem that the companies are trying to address, which is that their own employees and hires are having trouble finding housing.

If these policies disproportionally hurt non-white people it should be (relatively) straightforward to get them overturned under the Civil Rights Act.

Is anyone pursuing that?

Thanks for taking a leadership role on this while so many others refuse to.

Larry, Sergey, Mark, Marc, Marc, and Larry all should be actively helping these efforts to make housing more affordable to their employees and those of the companies that they invest in. And they all can afford a similar contribution far more easily than you and Stripe can.

Agreed entirely. It's shameful how big tech corporations have not been doing enough to champion better housing and transportation in the neighborhoods they are located in, while spending feel good PR initiatives on endeavors abroad, or lobbying in D.C. for regulation that benefits them directly.

The Bay Area big tech companies are putting a lot into housing.

This article is about a big-ish tech company championing YIMBY. Google is building 10,000 housing units ( https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/12/googles-massive-housi... ), Facebook is building 1,500 ( https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/07/investing-in-menlo-park... ) and Apple put forward $75 million to improve transit in Cupertino ( http://www.cupertino.org/home/showdocument?id=15623 ).

Many of them are, actually. See: https://www.spur.org/

A fair number of tech companies donate to SPUR, which does policy analysis/writing, advocacy, etc., including Dropbox, Salesforce, Netflix, and others.

That said, I was disappointed to see last year that Google apparently joined about the month I did (as opposed to, say, a decade ago) and were donating at some small level (sub-50k/year, Microsoft was in a higher donation bracket ffs). The amount of fighting Google is willing to do in Mountain View while ignoring the rest of the bay astounds me.

https://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2017-08-2...

https://www.spur.org/join-renew-give/business-membership/spu...

Plus with respect to Google there's this: https://www.curbed.com/2017/12/5/16738120/google-san-jose-ca...

Google’s plans may turn Diridon Station—an expanding transit hub with a high-speed rail stop in the works—into the Grand Central of the west. The move could catalyze an even more urbanized San Jose, and signal that density transit-oriented development is part of the Valley’s future.

The developing urban core of the largest city in Silicon Valley, a region stuck in a mostly suburban mindset, adjacent to what will be the confluence of seven different rail and bus lines.

Off topic, but curious who all the Larrys and Marcs are?

I'm guessing Page, Ellison, Zuck, Andreesen, ...

But that leaves another Marc?

Benioff.

I figured that it's only fair to call out multi billionaires who are currently running companies/funds. While Andreessen is supposedly not much richer than PC, Marc is rather more liquid, runs a huge VC firm, and his father in law is kind of a big deal in Valley commercial real estate.

Really enjoyed hearing you talk on the Knowledge Project Interview: Earning your Stripes [0].

0: http://theknowledgeproject.libsyn.com/earning-your-stripes-m...

The rent control portion of sb827 may act as a deterrent to building new apartments. If you have to keep rents the same or pay 4 years rent to everyone in the building, it may be difficult to have the new, larger building pencil out.

SB827 died quietly in committee.

That was sort of the point. The bill was not authorizing anybody to raze existing homes to create new homes. It was not changing demolition controls, and it was not changing any approval processes. It was about setting baseline numbers for what would be legal to build. Scott Wiener is a nerdy guy and his policies are very nerdy.

SB 827 was about allowing dense housing near transit. Wiener’s political rival held an anti-SB-827 rally next to a major transit stop with 3 light-rail train lines and a major bus line (and several minor bus lines). That location has a 26-foot height limit. If SB 827 had passed, those 1-story boutique shops could be replaced by 4-story apartments over retail.

https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/offering-no-solutions-jane-...

This is one reason why I support London Breed for mayor.

>Bad housing policy is one of the biggest impediments to overall economic growth[1] and to individual economic opportunity[2][3] in the US.

I would say it is the defining problem of our generation. The 20-30 year olds now who grew up in the bay area and aren't involved in tech have three options: Live with your parents until they die, work 40 hours a week just to feed yourself and pay the rent (split with random roommates), or move away from your entire family and support network. They live in a world where literally just being able to afford your own place is considered "bougie". It's insane. They can't even comprehend that there is a world where grown adults can live on there own and afford a respectable place to live while (gasp!) also saving for the future.

Idk about _the_ problem. Healthcare might be a bigger problem than housing - especially since astronomical medical bills and lack of insurance can cause people who had homes to lose them

Just looking at GDP (in the US), medical expenses do account for more of GDP than housing; however, a lot of those medical expenses come from Medicaid & Medicare, and are not directly out of pocket. I'd love to try to find the % GDP of out of pocket / Premium expenses in the USA as a comparison.

I think you could make a clean argument it's a 1a / 1b sort of problem. Housing & healthcare are two of the most basic needs in a modern society, and both have systemic issues across much of the country.

Medicare and Medicare costs may not be out of the recipients pocket, but they are paid out of someone’s pocket.

However, housing costs affect young people more than Medicaid/Medicare, and younger people contribute more to GDP than Medicaid/Medicare recipients. So, when talking about GDP growth, housing is likely much more significant.

Not everybody needs health care. Everybody needs a home.

Housing is also a root cause of a lot of other issues. Equity. Environment. Health. Upward/downward mobility. Ethnic integration. And so on.

> Not everybody needs health care

Everybody needs health care. Perhaps there's someone who wins the lottery and makes it through life without a doctor - though most don't get through their very first moments without one - that doesn't seem like something to plan on.

Obama did push those healthcare legistlations...

It’s not a lottery, there are a lot of preventative measures. There are however a number of random serious illnesses that could occur, so everyone does need healthcare.

And those preventative measures often utilize health care, from doctor's checkups to cancer screenings to immunizations.

Also, there are non-illnesses, such as giving birth, where a doctor is needed.

And there are accidents ...

No, everybody does not need health care. 90% (made-up as my wife, two daughters and me haven't been to the doctor in 2 years) if not more of health related issues while you are under 40 (maybe higher) can be taken care of through over the counter medications. However, we still require shelter, particularly since we live in an area that is under 32 degrees for 2 - 3 months out of the year.

Globally, it seems to be the most defining problem, at least that I hear about. Australia, New Zealand, UK, Canada, US are all grappling with "housing affordability".

One can "just" get a job with good health insurance, whereas homeownership in productive cities has surpassed wage territory (even for professionals) and now requires intergenerational wealth. Helathcare is highly unequal; housing (in job-rich regions) is uniformly impossible for those of us born too late.

> homeownership in productive cities has surpassed wage territory (even for professionals) and now requires intergenerational wealth.

In NYC, saving up for the down payment on an apartment with a 30-year lease basically requires being able to hold a reasonably high-paying job for 3 years. Real estate is definitely way overpriced, but it's not exactly insane either.

NYC has a much better functioning real estate market than SF/Bay Area from what I can tell. With the exception of the remaining rent controlled apartments, there is not an unwillingness to build high density housing. There is a much better match between housing prices and the supply/demand curve.

Is it the defining problem of our generation, or the defining problem for West Coasters of our generation?

I don't mean to take any stance on whether it's the singular outlier in magnitude, but https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/the-global-housing-cr... makes a strong case for it being broader than a West Coast issue.

It's an interesting article but it doesn't really support the lede (that housing is problematic in Detroit) with evidence. It'd be interesting to cross the median multiple metric for American cities with economic growth, to see the extent to which housing is locking people out of access to opportunity.

It would to me be weird to see an argument that there is a housing shortage problem in Chicago, which has a pretty reasonable median home price, and where the median home is within a much more reasonable commute to the city center than most SFBA homes.

I assume (without evidence!) that this is true throughout the midwest and throughout the 2nd tier of US cities.

It's a problem in many cities around the world that are experiencing housing price shocks. A list of some of these cities: Vancouver, London, Toronto, SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, Berlin, Austin, Boulder, Sydney, Auckland.

And the housing contagion spreads. For example most of the province of BC that Vancouver has similar housing affordability issues. Same with Toronto and many hours away from it. About %70 of the Canadian population lives somewhere heavily unaffordable.

Then you add the problem that most jobs are in these cities and it makes it even worse.

EDIT:

Look at this list of unaffordable metros for example: http://time.com/money/4193804/hong-kong-least-affordable-cit...

The US stands out as having a good collection of affordable metros, the but rest of the world is worse and california is horrible.

Ok, but those US cities are only something like 16% of the US urban population in cities over 100,000 residents.

I was pointing out that it's an international problem not just the USA. Thus making it more of a generational issue.

But the point is that it's not a problem in most of the US, which makes it an issue only for people that demand to live in a few select cities.

I don't know about the US, but my experience from Europe is that many smaller cities have become, at least relatively, unaffordable as well. It seems like almost anywhere with decent density and transportation has now become part of the global credit, property and holiday rental market.

I don't know about those other cities but both Vancouver and now recently Toronto, have rent control.

Yes, real estate prices are heavily inflated but you can rent for a decent price in both of those metropolitan areas. I would find it very difficult to believe 70% of the population around the GTA can not afford to live where they are.

Rent control isn't the solution to everything. If housing is consistently available at a discount to market price, it will fill up and stay full. New entrants to the housing market, such as the younger generation, are still screwed.

It could work if the city is constantly building enough new housing -- but if the city has the will to allow that, they wouldn't have needed rent control.

Rent control isn't a solution at all. It's just a lottery to pay for some people lucky enough to get it.

Not if there isn't significantly more demand that supply. Rent control has worked well to mitigate housing issues in Paris during the last few years. It didn't solve everyone's problems: more and more students are moving to the close suburbs, and getting an apartment can be highly dependant on whether your landlord deems your income stable enough. But it has also prevented rent escalation - which we're currently seeing now that a court has repealed rent control [1].

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/logement/article/2017/11/28/apres-lil...

The problem is it works in the short term, but makes the problem much worse in the long term. It reduces the returns of future apartments, so fewer apartments are built.

> Vancouver, London, Toronto, SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, Berlin, Austin, Boulder, Sydney, Auckland.

Fortunately there are tens of millions of other metros to live in

I don't think there are quite that many. 7billion/20million (smallest plural 10 of million) get's us 350 people per "metro" this is assuming no one on the planet lives rurally (about half do). There is perhaps thousands of metros on the planet.

On a more serious note, realistically this number is much smaller for each person. After you take into account the ones you could legally live in, ones you can speak the language for, ones with good job prospects. A person in the USA is lucky to have tens of options. For people in smaller countries the options are likely to be under a dozen.

There are studies like this one [0] that argue just about the entire increase in inequality in the past few decards (in Piketty's "r > g" sense) can be explained by increases in the housing market.

It's interesting to hear Chicago doesn't have a housing shortage though, having pretty much all my roots and social ties in coastal cities it does feel to me like this problem is everywhere.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...

I bought a 3-bed, 1-bath, 900-sqft bungalow in a solidly working-class St. Louis neighborhood in 2016 for $72k. I rented a nice 1100-sqft 1-bedroom in a nearby neighborhood for $625/mo a couple years before that. (Rents have not meaningfully changed in those neighborhoods).

I now rent a run-down, 350-sqft apartment in NYC for $2k/mo.

People on the coasts seem wildly out of touch with the housing situation in the Midwest. Cheap housing is the norm. It's simply not a problem in most of the country.

Well, it does actually come up pretty quickly and consistently when discussing this generation across the board.

Right, but that wouldn't surprise us if the sampling of that generation we're getting comes principally from Internet message boards, where SFBA-class residents and SFBA-class aspirants are heavily represented.

(I'm not sniping at what Stripe is doing; I think SFBA housing is a worthy problem in its own right.)

The west coast, well, many urban areas, often are leaders in showing trends then end up spreading more widely.

Yes, the weak and the old are usually the first to fall when an epidemic strikes

Not really. There are plenty of other quickly growing cities that aren't filled with NIMBYs destroying the housing stock (e.g. Phoenix, Indianapolis, Dallas, San Antonio, Las Vegas, etc).

Those cities are at different margins away from fundamental constraints. Because of geography, SF and SV were sort of locked into smaller footprints vs commute distances. Seattle/LA is just behind that with a bigger sprawl/commute margin but they're close to some limit at which property values spike up. Those other cities you name are wider flatter areas, with similarly wider margins, but they might hit other constraints soon... water for some of them. After they hit the constraint, their property values will spike too.

California’s housing issues are caused by uniquely California legal issues, some of which were good ideas at the time. Infill development can use advocates everywhere, but nowhere has such demand and yet so much opposition.

The West Coast has the worst case of this disease but it's a widespread problem especially in cities. Look at house prices vs. median income across the country. Normal is considered 3-4X. 5X is considered high. Today above 5X is the norm, which is considered "loony."

Above 5x is not in fact the norm for the overwhelming majority of urban Americans.

West coast investors seem to think it's a coastal thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742917

Considering that rent in major metropolises such as... Madison, Wisconsin is at the same level as Tokyo (and teachers are definitely being paid less), it's definitely a huge problem.

Almost all major American cities are having the bottom fall out in slow motion, and it ends up having repercussions everywhere. The absurdity of someone having to have 2 jobs to survive being a _real thing people say to people struggling in cities_ is the most American response to a problem.

It's obviously not just "rezone all the things", but the fact that people care so much about real estate, and that there are so many people who have vested interests in making it hard for poor people to be able to live at least somewhat close to their jobs is awful.

I want to believe it's a hard problem (because we haven't fixed it yet). But at this point I have seen soooooo many places outside the US that have almost no problem with this issue that I now have a hard time thinking it's anything other than rich white people wanting what they want.

“rich white people"? Why not just "rich people"?

Because decades of discriminatory lending practices and policy mean that there's a strong racial component to where people live. There's a trite statement about how desegregation never happened in the North, because black people end up basically stuck in poorer areas of town anyways.

The thing about systemic racism is that even if every participant is legitimately trying to give everyone a fair chance, the existing systems (artifacts of redlining, for example) are still biased in a certain direction, and will end up giving discriminatory results.

"Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000."[0]

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-rac...

This looks like a legitimate complaint, but the way you worded it leads one to believe it is some innate quality of being white that makes people do selfish things, rather than circumstance; in this case, preventing poor people from finding favorable housing.

That's a good point. While there are a lot of cases of people in city council meetings saying overtly racist things as justification for these policies (mostly making equivalent poor, POC, and criminals). But I imagine a lot of people are basically just looking out for their own well being.At most being selfish, not discriminatory

There is still the issue that many POC don't even get this opportunity to be selfish, but that discussion doesn't lead to much

I do not believe that an apples-apples comparison between the Tokyo and Madison real estate markets would justify the equivalence you've drawn.

Yeah this might be exagerated. I'm also being very "armchair social scientist" about all of this, but I have heard this narrative multiple times.

It's very likely I'm falling into the trap of the compelling narrative that matches a worldview, but I used to not have this worldview...

There are so many stories that ultimately end up with some narrative like "people with $2 million homes don't want to let other people have $200,000 apartments", and reading that over and over makes me pretty jaded about prospects.

Greetings from Sydney, where it's definitely a problem here too.

i'm not a west coaster, or even an american. just a 30-year-old who works a full time software engineering job and can't afford a house.

In this instance, the problem really is bigger than just silicon valley's bubble.

4th option: get in Tech.

The wealthiest people I know in the Bay Area are natives not in tech. Most operate or work with family businesses. Their families tend to own A LOT of property (homes and land) as well.

They do make quite a bit of income off tech workers though.

Yep, as a native in the bay area born and raised, I'm fortunate to have landed into tech. Although it's sad to see friends leave due to the tech in which they blame me and others for rising prices.

On the flip side they will inherit millions from their parents.

Climate change is probably the problem of the generation, but amazingly, allowing more housing near transit solves that one, too!

Moving away for a new life has been a recurring theme throughout the history of the US. The only thing that seems to be new is an entitlement to live where you were born.

> I would say it is the defining problem of our generation.

Respectfully disagree. I would say it is a defining symptom. The problem is centralisation and the insistence that people need to show up to an office to do their work. There is plenty of cheap housing even in the US, the issue is to let people work from where the housing is rather than insisting they move to "where the jobs are".

IMO Stripes money would be better spent on telecommuting policy and technology.

There will always be area's more popular for whatever reason. Those that want to spend their money on an address can do so but every-one else needs some assistance to work from an address that suits them and their budget.

My parents’ generation paved over the apricot orchards of “the Valley of Heart's Delight”, rechristening it as “Silicon Valley”. Now that we have suburbs and commutes sprawling all the way to Tracey in the Central Valley and to Gilroy to the south, I believe it is not unreasonable to once again transform this fertile valley. This time into housing that is a little denser than single family homes. This would match the current trend of building office buildings that are a little bigger than the tilt-ups that defined the original Silicon Valley.

I guess to more specifically address your proposal of having jobs elsewhere via remote working, I would say, why not more density here. We did it once before, turning prime farmland into suburbs. Is the current configuration really the end of history for this valley? I would argue not, if only by counter-example of cities allowing ever larger office buildings to be built along 237.

I am a huge fan of remote work, but this is just wrong. The current state of remote work is not sufficient to replace the office environment for most tech cases, especially not small startups where low communication latency and overhead, high degree of alignment among team members, and spontaneity are important. Not to mention the numerous non-tech jobs where being physically present is literally a job requirement.

This also ignores the non-work reasons people might want to live in an area, as well as the positive network effects from higher urban density.

Not everyone has the aync communication skills to remote work nearly as effectively as they do in-person.

Telecommuting as a long-term solution to the housing problem is similar to the vision of autonomous cars solving transportation issues. Those approaches could work in some cases, but overly relies on technology and ignores working examples in big cities, like commuter rail and cheaper/smaller housing in Tokyo.

I have worked remotely for a number of years, and it's not for everyone. I didn't like it until after I got used to the loneliness and would look forward to going to the office. To repeat an observation from another reply, not all jobs can be performed from a remote location.

I used to be a pro-telecommuting as a long term solution. But having experienced telecommuting and also car-optional cities, I've since changed my stance. There is a big difference between online buzz and the buzz of being in the middle of a busy, safe mixed-use neighborhood.

> I would say it is the defining problem of our generation

Only because the economic urge to live in one place has become compelling.

> work 40 hours a week just to feed yourself and pay the rent (split with random roommates)

Actually I don't understand why it's bad option especially if you replace random roommates with friend/gf/bf.

Because it's not fair. The effort to feed and house yourself in reality only takes a few hours a week. The rest is rent (in the economic sense--no value provided; just paying someone who got there first and put up a gate).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent

Life is not fair. Feel free to be the first one somewhere else.

Nobody said life was fair. But law and legislation is supposed to be fair.

True, nothing in nature guarantees fairness.

But I believe that one purpose of civilization is to make life fair.

Not to give everyone an equal slice, but to give them an adequate slice so that they have a fair shot at having a healthy, productive, satisfying life. As someone who has more than I need (not by a ton, but all my bills are paid, and I have some surplus), I want to share it effectively at least with those who are struggling through no fault of their own.

> work 40 hours a week just to feed yourself and pay the rent

The problem isn't actually doing that, the problem is when you can't actually pay the rent on the money you earn. Both you and your potential employer lose out when you're hired because you're perhaps not quite good enough to warrant the $150k+[1] salary required, or because there's always going to be someone a bit better at that rate. It's not about not wanting to take the job at $80k[1], or the company not wanting you at that rate, it's that you can't afford a sustainable lifestyle at that salary. Never making it onto the first ladder, you're never going to climb it (or, you're going to climb it much, much slower). This also feeds into education credentialism as a "shortcut" to access this ladder - etc, etc.

The people who actually make it onto the ladder are for the most part going to be fine.

1: Adjust for the numbers that are true, these are just rough ballpark figures. The point it, that threshold exists.

Is there a way techies can volunteer their skills to help out?

> Our current restrictive policies disproportionately hurt poorer, younger, and (frequently) non-white[4] people.

There is massive opposition within the poorer, non-white bay area community to the political group that Stripe is funding here. CA YIMBY [EDIT: correction, should read YIMBY Action] literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest. The LA Times just published a good overview of this issue yesterday. The title: "A major California housing bill failed after opposition from the low-income residents it aimed to help. Here's how it went wrong"[1]

Money quote: "'The YIMBY movement has a white privilege problem,' said Anya Lawler, a lobbyist with the Western Center on Law & Poverty, a legal advocacy group and adversary of SB 827. 'I don't think they recognize it. They don't understand poverty. They don't understand what that's like, who our clients really are and what their lived experience is.'"

Concessions to protect low-income residents were added to the failed bill only after substantial protest from the community. Let's hope next time around, instead of just claiming to act on behalf on poorer and non-white people, they actually try listening to them.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu...

> CA YIMBY literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest.

There should be a ton of videos accompanying this, right? All I could find was https://www.facebook.com/groups/vote123equity2018/permalink/... which looks like pretty standard protesting to me.

EDIT: I apologize, yes, that's YIMBY Action not CA YIMBY in the video. So there was shouting down minority speakers at the protest, but from a different YIMBY group.

-----

Yes, here is video of CA YIMBY shouting down minority affordable housing activists.[1] The executive director of CA YIMBY apologized for her organization's behavior.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WrVEYKVtfU

[2] https://twitter.com/NeverSassyLaura/status/98190146492995174...

That's not CA YIMBY's ED. CA YIMBY was not involved in that protest.

I mean, that still looks like typical protesting. Is everyone supposed to shut up because the guy at the mic isn't white?

It would be helpful for these groups opposing SB 827 on "equity" grounds to propose alternatives that will have a similar impact on housing affordability. I read that article, and those linked from it, and could not find a single proposal to that end.

This is best survey of the literature that I know on the topic:

http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Been%20Ellen%20O'...

They do; you just don't hear about them if you mainly get your news from pro-YIMBY sources, which love to misrepresent their opposition as exclusively old, white NIMBYs. In fact it is CA YIMBY that is mostly white.

The DSA has a detailed stance on this which lays out what they want in a pro-housing bill.[1] Well worth a read.

[1] http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827

Having more nuanced reasoning behind your opposition to all practical projects, and hypothetically supporting “decommodified” projects for which no funding is on the table, don’t meaningfully distinguish the DSA’s position from other forms of NIMBYism in terms of actual effects. Purity of intention, maybe.

I'm not sure what being white has to do with anything, but the NIMBY/YIMBY groups, with the YIMBY being slightly more libertarian and NIMBY being a bet more liberal and idealistic.

The crux of the disagreement comes from YIMBY pursuing housing at all costs believing the market, and prior art (such as other cities like Tokyo), showing that it will work out, and NIMBY wanting to preserve the lives of people that could become displaced by new housing.

I'm actually a great example of someone who has something to lose if YIMBY people get their way, but full disclosure: I support YIMBY. I'm living in a rent-controlled building in San Francisco, paying rent from 7 years ago (aka greatly below market) about 6 minutes walking to a BART station. I probably wouldn't be classified as "poor", but if new housing is built, most likely my unit could be torn down and replaced with a higher density building and I could be "displaced" (losing my rent control). But to get the deal I have you do not have to be in any way "poor"; you just have to be here first/a long time. In no way does NIMBY policy of preserving my right to stay here help poor people (as a group). In my opinion NIMBY's are protecting the "original" residents of an area that stand to have their rents increased because they are underpaying in a prime location.

SB827, and most pro-housing initiatives will cause many areas to be upzoned, increasing the market rates of certain areas, but more importantly, decreasing market rates overall. Of course this means that people like me living in prime areas at below market rates will lose out on this great deal.

NIMBY's prime argument seems to be that a lot of these people living in prime areas at below market rates tend to be poor people, but this is completely false. It has nothing to do with poor people. It only has to do about people who've been here first/a long time. This is the main point of their "preserving the character" of the neighborhood behind their rhetoric. That's why their platform is based around "affordable" housing, which means preserving these lower than market rate units for people that are already there.

If you want to help poor people, you'd increase housing overall to decrease rent overall, which is what YIMBY is after. From a poor person's perspective, they don't need to live in a prime area downtown, but for someone paying below market rent they would definitely want to keep that deal. If you want to help grandfather people into their below market rent, you support NIMBY.

no yimby orgs are gonna have a goal of displacing people like you, who live in rent controlled or otherwise affordable housing, and they actively support policies that protect tenants. The controversy is that they also support policies that build more housing, and many in the "no more growth" group think that any market rate housing built anywhere will just make the current housing crises worse.

Unfortunately, the economic argument to help poor people is extremely adverse in the Bay Area. It’s easy to see why: the opportunity cost of providing housing to someone who has low marginal economic value is much higher in the Bay Area than almost anywhere else in the world. The big asterisk on YIMBYism is that it’s meant to incentivize highly-skilled laborers in roughly the 95th through 99th percentiles who are increasingly walking away from the Bay Area because their overall optionality is improving while CoL in the region is skyrocketing.

Among the biggest threats right now to Bay Area tech companies are smart people (the only kind they’re trying to hire) crunching the numbers.

So yea poor people aren’t really under consideration other than for optics purposes.It’s high salary people versus high net worth people.

Highly cynical and all around awful? Yes.

However annecdotal - I moved out of SF and will not return for exactly this reason. At this point I almost laugh whenever someone approaches me for a position where the main office is in SF and they have a "no remote employees" policy.

It's not just "poor non white" people who are struggling with housing. It's becoming so frustrating to see the conversation constantly re-centered on this group.

There are plenty of YOUNG people (yes, including white people, successful people) who are struggling with housing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a push to fix housing for middle class workers. The conversation does not always, all the time, need to be about poor non-white people. Yes, they need help too, and YES we should work on solutions that benefit both groups. But constantly re-centering the conversation on the poor, means it's the middle class who consistently miss out on reform.

> There is massive opposition within the poorer, non-white bay area community to the political group that Stripe is funding here. CA YIMBY literally shouted down minority activists who were opposed to a housing bill at a recent protest.

While no group is homogeneous in beliefs, polling very clearly shows that minority groups strongly support increased housing construction. (As does an overall majority of Californians.) On the micro level, groups like The 200 (community leaders of color) and experts like Richard Rothstein (author of Color of Law) have endorsed CA YIMBY's pro-housing policy work. See more at https://cayimby.org/endorsement/fair-housing-advocates/.

CA YIMBY was not involved in the protest you mention. I think you're confusing them with other groups.

I believe you are misrepresenting that letter when you say it "endorsed CA YIMBY's work." To quote it,

"We note that some affordable housing and tenants' rights organizations have expressed concerns over SB 827. Recent amendments designed to safeguard local inclusionary zoning ordinances, protect local residents from displacement through a statutory 'right to remain' guarantee, and prohibit demolition of rent-controlled housing, which we applaud, helps to address some of these concerns."

None of these amendments would have happened without protest from low-income and minority housing advocates against CA YIMBY's work. The letter "applauds" these changes and even supports "additional legislation to expand inclusionary zoning." It merely concludes that "the perfect must not be the enemy of the good" and recommends a compromise.

This is far from an endorsement of CA YIMBY's work. In fact it reads as an endorsement of the opposition and resulting amendments.

> While no group is homogeneous in beliefs, polling very clearly shows that minority groups strongly support increased housing construction.

The minority groups who opposed SB 827 support increased housing construction -- just with better protections against displacement than what CA YIMBY has been pushing. To suggest otherwise is a false dichotomy.

Thank you for the correction on which YIMBY group shouted down the minority housing activists.

> The minority groups who opposed SB 827 support increased housing construction -- just with better protections against displacement than what CA YIMBY has been pushing. To suggest otherwise is a false dichotomy.

No, they don't. Organizations like SFTU do not support construction of any market-rate housing.

You conflated housing construction with market-rate housing. And it’s not true. SFTU simply notes that for every market rate unit you need 0.25 BMR units simply to accommodate the resulting job creation (retail, restaurant, public service, etc.) That’s just to keep things where they are, which is already a huge staffing crisis for the service industry in SF. More like 0.5 BMR to make an appreciable impact.[1]

This is something we all should care about if we’re not just here to make a quick buck. Long term we need teachers and cooks and waiters and artists to keep SF a desirable place to live.

As PG himself said, “These independent restaurants and cafes are not just feeding people. They're making there be a there here.”[2]

[1] https://www.sftu.org/2018/04/market-rate-housing-makes-crisi...

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html

>This is something we all should care about if we’re not just here to make a quick buck. Long term we need teachers and cooks and waiters and artists to keep SF a desirable place to live.

The problem could also be solved, (assuming building more at market rate housing) by simply paying the cooks and waiters and artists more. I mean, I'm a sysadmin, which is also 'support staff' and also doesn't require a degree... and I'm getting like twice here what I would elsewhere. I don't see why waiters should be any different.

That’s a nice thought, but obviously you would see massive price hikes at restaurants and stores, and it’s likely that consumers would patronize them less. Macroeconomics rarely have such simple solutions. SF already leads the nation in raising the minimum wage. Tech businesses are a bad compare because the revenue per employee is typically much higher than the service industry.

> That’s a nice thought, but obviously you would see massive price hikes at restaurants and stores, and it’s likely that consumers would patronize them less.

I dunno about the last part. I personally perceive service and food around here to be incredibly cheap (compared to rent and wages for the sort of work I do) - There is, of course a demand curve, and raising prices will somewhat lower demand for the more optional kinds of service work, but we don't really know where that demand curve goes; personally, you'd have to double prices before I changed my consumption of locally produced services other than uber much at all.

Right now, my perception is that area stores and restaurants are massively understaffed and open very limited hours, presumably because they aren't charging enough to pay enough to hire enough people.

>Tech businesses are a bad compare because the revenue per employee is typically much higher than the service industry.

That was kind of my point. right now, local services are under-priced compared to tech worker wages and compared to rent. Of course, this is going to result in dramatically lower revenue per employee than if they charged a lot more.

A lot of the tech industry is also 1 on 1 service stuff. Depending on the day, my own work is more than half 1 on 1 kind of work that "doesn't scale" - but I still get paid a lot because the people I'm helping are valuable. Same principle applies to other kinds of support staff. If you support someone more valuable... you usually get paid more.

> local services are under-priced compared to tech worker wages

Okay, but if you 'fixed' that, then local services would be over-priced compared to non-tech-worker wages. Then where would non-tech-workers get haircuts or cognitive behavioral therapy?

The argument I'm putting forth is that raising the costs (and pay) for service work, if that could be done without raising the rent, would be a net positive for said service workers, just 'cause they spend a disproportionately large percentage of their income on rent (compared to tech workers) -

But they're still going to have really long commutes because they can't find housing near where they live unless they outbid software engineers, which would raise the rent. And then the software companies will just have to raise salaries to beat them and more money will go toward the landlords.

If you have a mostly-fixed supply and you subsidize buying that supply, you just raise the price. In order to increase the number of people who are able to live their jobs, you need to change the physical structure of area near their jobs to have more housing.

You can't turn money into housing by just adding money. Only construction can do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16991980

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16992481

I was responding to the objection that even if we were building unlimited new housing, the new stuff would be unaffordable to those on the bottom. And one solution to that is to pay them more relative to those on the top.

I think it's obvious to people who don't own or live in rent controlled places that we need more housing overall. I was just responding to the fair objection that more housing, by itself, isn't enough to house people who are massively underpaid.

Ah yes, point taken.

> you'd have to double prices before I changed my consumption of locally produced services other than uber much at all.

So you’d pay $26 per cocktail and $68 for a pork chop, but $15 is too expensive for an Uber. I find that hard to believe.

Even if true, you are not representative of SF consumers. A Harvard study notes, “higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants. Higher minimum wages also reduce the rate at which new restaurants open by 4-6% per $1 increase in the minimum.”[1]

[1] cited in https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/number-of-restaurants-in-san-f...

(I don't think anyone in my income tax bracket is giving up uber when drinking. I'm mostly talking about uber-as-commute rides, which is a minority of uber riders, but is over-represented in number of rides, just 'cause most of us go to work a lot more often than we go out drinking. The uber as drunk taxi business is pretty safe. The uber as commuting tool business is rather more vulnerable.)

>So you’d pay $26 per cocktail and $68 for a pork chop, but $15 is too expensive for an Uber. I find that hard to believe.

I take uber to work every day. My boss is paying for a parking spot at work, my apartment is paying for a parking spot at home, so uber is competing with me, you know, buying a honda. Most of the infrastructure; most of the expensive part of owning a cheap car already exists and is being paid for regardless of my car ownership status.

Right now, Uber to work is usually unshared, as I'm usually in a hurry, and thats usually more than $10, less than $15. (the ride home is usually under $5, as it's the shared service.) - When I need to haul things, I rent a car or use a service. right now I'm already paying a reasonably high premium to sit in the back and read vs. owning and driving that honda. Would I pay twice that for an everyday commute? probably not.

I work at a place that prepares free (and really quite good) food for me three times a day, so I mostly only eat out on the weekends; I eat out a lot less than I use uber. A lot less, as sometimes I even cook for myself on the weekends (It's... kind of novel, after getting fed all week.)

Of course, even at 3x the price, I'd still use uber when I go drinking... it's just that I don't do that very often compared to how often I use uber to get to where I need to go every day.

(as another aside, I seem to have a higher threshold for cocktail prices than most people and a lower threshold for food prices than most people, I mean, compared with others with similar 'entertainment budget' - I think this is partly an awareness on my part of how expensive alcohol is in performance degradation... but also just personal preference. I really enjoy a good cocktail, and feel that there's a pretty big difference in enjoyment between a really good cocktail and a meh cocktail.)

>Even if true, you are not representative of SF consumers.

I... don't think my situation is that unusual for silicon valley customers. Most homes and most jobs come with free parking, (making the 'tipping point' for using uber much closer than in areas without abundant parking) and a smaller (but still large) number of jobs come with free food. (meaning we eat out less, and therefore can spend more when we do... also, I think, that we demand better food when we eat out. eating at IHOP is super disappointing after getting fed much better food every day as a simple reward for showing up to work before 10:30)

No economist agrees with Tim Redmond, who is a millionaire homeowner on the westside who unfortunately is very good at couching his own financial and personal interests in the veneer of progressive language in order to co-opt groups like SFTU into working against their constituents' long-term self-interest.

High-end condos don't generate jobs. They provide housing for the jobs that are already here and the new ones that are being created every day.

Raising the inclusionary zoning percentage to 50% will simply make it financially infeasible to construct housing. The City's own study confirms this. Tim knows this too, and that is why he advocates for it.

> High-end condos don't generate jobs. They provide housing for the jobs that are already here and the new ones that are being created every day.

You completely missed the point. You are simply not taking into account the service industry jobs that arise to serve the new "high-end condo" residents. Baristas and teachers need BMR housing.

> a millionaire... who unfortunately is very good at couching his own financial and personal interests in the veneer of progressive language in order to co-opt groups... into working against their constituents' long-term self-interest.

Exactly the same criticism could be made of tech-millionare-backed, largely white YIMBY groups. The difference is minority and low-income housing activists are broadly opposed to YIMBY policies. Your only explanation is that they are victims of a rich white puppetmaster.

You should try listening to them better. You completely misrepresented their position earlier; even those that supported the passage of SB 827 did so after substantial amendments that arose from protesting the YIMBY-backed original bill.

> You completely missed the point. You are simply not taking into account the service industry jobs that arise to serve the new "high-end condo" residents. Baristas and teachers need BMR housing.

Tim's article is yet another misuse of the Residential Nexus Analysis. For more info as to how that paper is abused:

https://blog.yonathan.org/posts/2017-04-stop-quoting-the-res...

https://www.nahb.org/en/research/nahb-priorities/zoning-and-... (an academic analysis)

Key point: "The Residential Nexus Analysis gets around all this by assuming that a new development of 100 units does not compete against existing housing but somehow attracts new residents who would not otherwise have looked for existing housing. At the same time, it assumes that the new housing units receive their price from the market. A more reasonable model would make the cost of housing endogenous by considering the new development a part of San Francisco’s housing stock which is desirable by existing residents."

In fact, I'm a walking example of this. I'm moving out of a rent controlled apartment in SF into a new condo in SF, freeing up my old relatively-affordable unit. If NIMBYs had their way, then I'd continue to be living there instead of someone who really needs that studio apartment.

Again: There is no debate among economists about whether California needs to build more market rate housing. The only debates are in the political sphere. This is an open and shut case.

> Exactly the same criticism could be made of tech-millionare-backed, largely white YIMBY groups.

YIMBY groups are diverse and reflect the diversity of the Bay Area, with LGBT especially well-represented. Their opponents like to erase representation of minorities to score political points, which is extremely disrespectful. For example, Gay Shame claims that you can't be "queer" unless you agree with their anti-development politics, which is at best bullying and at worst homophobic.

Notice I wasn't referring to anyone other than Tim Redmond. I'm well aware that NIMBY groups are also diverse.

> The difference is minority and low-income housing activists are broadly opposed to YIMBY policies. Your only explanation is that they are victims of a rich white puppetmaster.

Some minority and low-income housing activists are opposed to development. Others, such as nonprofit developers, supported SB 827.

It is not a controversial statement among anyone other than Bay Area activists that the lines cross against development in a bizarre way unique to San Francisco. It is not a controversial statement among economists that artificially restricting the supply of housing hurts the most vulnerable. From listening to SF "progressives" talk, you'd think that economists weren't completely united in opposition to rent control, which, of course, they are (and I'm not opposed to smart rent control, by the way).

> You should try listening to them better.

I have listened. I understand the concerns about gentrification and displacement. That doesn't change the fact that tenants' activists are wrong about what causes it.

Your arguments are extremely disingenuous. You know that rent-controlled units reset to market when vacated. A barista or a teacher is not going to move into your studio. It's probably going to go to another tech worker.

You dismiss Tim Redmond's analysis based on his vested "millionaire" homeowner interest. Yet you cite an "academic" analysis paid for by the California Homebuilding Foundation. Completely hypocritical.

You attempt to paint the YIMBY groups as diverse and representative of low-income minority groups by citing only their LGBT representation. This blatantly disregards Latinx, AA and other minority groups that are disproportionately affected by the housing crisis.

You mischaracterize BMR as "rent control," then simplistically argue against that straw man. But economists do in fact argue that SF affordable housing developer fees can "improve housing affordability for low- and middle-income households, despite some loss of market-rate housing construction" because "prices are less important than land use controls in explaining whether a parcel will develop new housing."[1] And even economists who argue against the downsides of rent control recognize it has "benefits" and argue for other forms of government "protection against rent increases."[2]

[1] http://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Docum...

[2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/rent-controls-winners-...

> You know that rent-controlled units reset to market when vacated. A barista or a teacher is not going to move into your studio. It's probably going to go to another tech worker.

It's sure a lot more affordable than the "luxury condos" everyone complains about. And, besides, the reason why it's likely to go to another tech worker is that there isn't enough housing. If the city were to cap the rent at $1,000 (post-Costa-Hawkins-repeal), then the units would still go to tech workers, because if there are many applicants landlords will nearly always rent to the richest.

> You dismiss Tim Redmond's analysis based on his vested "millionaire" homeowner interest. Yet you cite an "academic" analysis paid for by the California Homebuilding Foundation. Completely hypocritical.

I dismiss Tim Redmond's "analysis" because it's wrong and is based on talking points that have been debunked, as I explained. Tim has a history of making specious arguments, always in favor of NIMBYism. For example, Tim made a ludicrous claim a while back that most "luxury condos" are vacant, based on classifying of any listing of a homeowner with a different address as "vacant" (which excludes all rentals!)

The paper I described is academic, because it's written by an academic. Tim is not one.

> You attempt to paint the YIMBY groups as diverse and representative of low-income minority groups by citing only their LGBT representation.

Because it would be weird to namedrop people I don't know well in order to win an an argument on a message board that YIMBY groups are diverse. You are welcome to do your own research to confirm that there are plenty of ethnic minorities in YIMBY groups.

> You mischaracterize BMR as "rent control,"

I never said BMR/inclusionary zoning is rent control. Nor do I disagree with rent control, if implemented properly (see below)!

The problem with high inclusionary zoning percentages is that if they become too high developers won't construct housing at all. Developments have to pencil out, unless we fund them at public expense. (I want to do that as well, but that will be very hard in the current political environment, so in the meantime we have to pursue realistic policies.) Exclusionary suburbs know this—they create unrealistically high IZ requirements in order to prevent new housing from being built.

> And even economists who argue against the downsides of rent control recognize it has "benefits" and argue for other forms of government "protection against rent increases."

It's simply a fact that economists disagree with rent control. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-18/yup-rent-...

Government protection against rent increases is a good idea, as long as it's means-tested—tech workers like me shouldn't stand to benefit from it. For example, a progressive tax credit, as suggested in that paper, would be a great idea that would protect vulnerable renters.

> And, besides, the reason why [my studio is] likely to go to another tech worker is that there isn't enough housing.

Thank you for conceding that your studio is going to go to another tech worker. There goes the (non-academic) argument you just presented against Residential Nexus Analysis. The point stands that baristas and teachers need BMR housing.

> Because it would be weird to namedrop people I don't know well in order to win an an argument on a message board that YIMBY groups are diverse. You are welcome to do your own research to confirm that there are plenty of ethnic minorities in YIMBY groups.

You clearly lost this argument. You were going to "namedrop" some minorities? YIMBY groups are overwhelmingly white. An attendee of the first national YIMBY conference in Boulder noted "it's wealthy and tremendously (88 percent) white; and YIMBY’s racial demographics reflected that."[1] YIMBY activists shouted down minority speakers at a recent protest. YIMBY "has a white privilege problem,"[2] and your comments only serve to reinforce that.

[1] http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/yes-in-my-backya...

[2] Anya Lawler, Western Center on Law & Poverty quoted in http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu...

> Thank you for conceding that your studio is going to go to another tech worker. There goes the (non-academic) argument you just presented against Residential Nexus Analysis. The point stands that baristas and teachers need BMR housing.

What I said is true in the aggregate. You're trying to argue that, because my one unit won't solve the housing crisis, we shouldn't build anything at all. That's silly. If we build enough market-rate housing, then eventually tech workers won't have to look downmarket. That will free up the lower end for others and lower rents to affordable levels. There aren't infinite tech workers.

The problem is that tech workers are competing for lower-end units at all. We will only solve that one unit at a time, by building a lot more housing at all levels.

Do you want tech workers like you and me to be taking up rent controlled studios?

> YIMBY activists shouted down minority speakers at a recent protest.

Sonja and Laura shouldn't have apologized for that, because they didn't "shout them down". They were simply chanting "read the bill". That is important, because the bill allows more construction of BMR housing. Since we agree BMR housing is important, telling protestors to read the bill is perfectly reasonable.

I find it hard to believe that "poor non-white people" have the political clout necessary to block SB 827 and housing in general, nor would it serve their interests. I think this is a false flag being proposed and the people against housing are mostly long term residents that don't want to see change because it will get rid of their current under-market pricing housing.

There were two constituencies that would most directly benefit from SB 827 that did not support it this year, that most likely will in the future:

* construction labor - no construction bill is going to get by without their approval

* tenant advocates - without their support it's quite unlikely that the bill will make it through all the way

Municipalities almost universally opposed SB 827, and state legislatures generally cede to them, but with the above two groups, SB 827 probably has fantastic chances.

Construction labor opposed it because currently the discretionary review process is where prevailing wages concessions can be extracted from a developer; construction labor doesn't want to miss out on that. Adding prevailing wages to SB 35 is what brought that group to the table. If labor can be brought on board for SB 827 like they were for SB 35, it's going to go far.

Tenant advocates are nervous about development in general, for very good reason, because that has been the primary way that low income neighborhoods have been destroyed. For SB 827 to come through, it has to be shown that it won't cause the same problems that past development focused on "blighted" areas caused. I think it's quite likely that this will happen because the non-profits that build affordable housing tend to like SB 827. Since SB 827 only hits current neighborhoods in a very few places, there are only a few neighborhoods to protect, so it seems possible to ensure proper protections directly in the bill or through other means.

It seems likely that SB 827 didn't have these groups included yet because the bill sponsors were surprised by the huge amount of press (including national!!) it received and momentum it gained. Given the very short amount of time to coordinate with these interest groups, I don't 100% blame the committee chair for killing it so soon. But with enough time some sort of transit-oriented development bill come through. It has to, both for California's housing crisis and for California's climate goals.

Based on my reading it seemed like SB 827 was doomed because there was no way municipalities were going to support it (it basically removed their power to decide on the matter), even if they believe in the policies it enforced.

Yes, I'm certain that municipalities will oppose almost anything that lessens local control. However that alone is not enough to stop legislation; the housing package of bills got through last year!

Also, it seems likely that "transit" oriented development will be weakened to just "rail" oriented development. In that case, the vast majority of municipalities won't be directly affected, and may actually have reason to support it. That's because it forces their neighbors who are slacking to actually allow people to build, and this should benefit all the municipalities that aren't affected. So it may be possible to split them.

Municipalities are a bit different from just NIMBYs though too, municipalities typically want office space and other business related development because it brings in tax revenue. Housing is seen as a negative to the city budgets, oddly, because of Prop 13.

NIMBY groups (which I am trying to use without an pejorative meaning, simply in reference to neighborhood groups), typically don't act at the state level, except through forcing their municipality to support or oppose specific measures. At least as far as I can tell. I'm still new to this landscape.

If you want to blame state law for not setting aside enough low-income housing, it seems to me that the original sin was the zoning powers that the state conferred to local governments a hundred years ago. SB 827 itself would have taken back minimal powers from local governments—namely, the right to set arbitrarily restrictive height limits, single-family density restrictions, and parking minimums near transit. Of course, SB 827 could have included any number of additional changes (e.g. eviction reform, low-income funding, tax reform, price controls), but these are each worthwhile policies in and of themselves and are complementary to SB 827, not opposed to it.

They shouted them down because their concern is stupid. Opening up more housing will allow more people of all kinds to move in. All it does is shift the price curve down. How much it shifts down depends on how much more housing you allow.

This is just using social justice language to rationalize NIMBYism, which is basically the default tactic for all SF politics. The facts do not support it:

"77% of Latinos, 69% of African Americans, and 64% of Asian Americans support building more housing in their local areas, compared with 53% of whites." Support for the same question is highest for those with incomes under $40,000 and lowest for those with incomes over $80,000.

http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-aff...

YIMBY and tenant activism are solving different problems that happen to be conflated under the term “housing crisis.” YIMBYism is about the ease of becoming comfortably housed in the Bay Area; tenant activism is about staying that way. YIMBYs would do well to acknowledge that the left wing’s solutions are more effective in terms of its community-preservation goals, communicate why mobility and urbanism are also worthy goals, and to search for solutions that optimize all three. You’re 100% right: at the moment, it’s tone deaf. Rent control is absolutely a better way to keep people in their apartments, and no one is going to be convinced otherwise.

Such an excellent way to pose this, thank you.

There's huge amount of sentiment in California to keep new people out. So in order to punish newcomers some people are very willing to take on the negatives of rent control for those that have it--namely a huge lack of mobility once you have a place. Unfortunately that leaves all young people in the lurch, in addition to the newcomers from other places.

The idea of making it easier for people to move here is an absolutely radical and terrible idea, according to a large number of people here.

Most poor advocacy groups keep pushing low income subsidized housing.

Which is a small band-aid that will never work. It creates lotteries where literally hundreds of people apply for a single home and one lucky person gets it. So one person is helped but the majority get nothing.

We need to actually fix the system, not create lotto winners.

There's definitely a role for bandaids while the longer term fix has its effect. I think it's really important to approach these with a "yes-and-" type of thinking rather than choosing a single direction and sticking to that alone.

Building more housing is a long term fix; even if we start building tomorrow with our maximum construction capacity, it's going to take a minimum of 15-20 years to make a really significant dent.

In the interim, protecting those who are most at risk is essential. And that means not only assistance at 60% of area median income (AMI), but also all the way up to 80% and even some amount of 120% AMI, in order to preserve some amount of economic breadth in communities like San Francisco.

The bandaids can't be the only policy, neither really can zoning be the only policy. It's going to take time to attract enough construction laborers to build everything we need to build!

>it's going to take a minimum of 15-20 years to make a really significant dent.

According to what data?

This was article was making the rounds a few days ago, as the amount needed to bring housing costs down to a normal amount of average income:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-are...

Take it al with a grain of salt of course, it's just a newspaper columnist and not a full analysis but it's the best I've seen and he cites his sources.

The build rate required to hit that is about 65,000 units/year, which was about the rate that the Bay Area built at in 1971, which has severely tapered off since then:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/8g7qyk/to_sol...

That trend on not building in recent decades is state wide too:

https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/05/03/82720/five-reasons-cali...

However, everybody I hear talking about remodeling or building is saying that right now there's a construction labor shortage in the Bay Area, and we're nowhere near building 65k units per year, so it's going to take many years to build up the labor force and construction capacity too.

Building is a long term, but necessary fix to the housing crisis.

So why not just build social housing at a larger scale? It'd put actual downward force on the market by turning publicly-owned housing from a lottery into legitimate competition with privately-owned housing.

The money for market-rate development is so abundant that we feel a need to suppress it. Getting the public funding for significant social housing would be a revolution all by itself. San Francisco’s entire $10B budget could only build 20k affordable homes at a cost of $500k each (which is low, by a cursory Google for recent projects) if it suspended all other services.

Cause that would require billions of dollars and a new state bureaucracy. I think building tons and tons of affordable housing would be great, but where's the money? I don't think the public support for an enormous housing bond is there yet.

And of course any time you tried to put down an affordable housing complex, you'd have to fight the neighborhood. SF had a proposed 100% affordable housing complex in the Mission that got shot down by the neighbors. Even if the money was there, you'd have to deal with the fact that people hate living next to poor people. So we'd probably need another state assembly bill that said something like, "if this complex has 80% affordable housing units no municipality can block it," and given the inability to pass SB827...there's no way that's going to pass.

These are the kinds of things people should talk about, to move the Overton window. But anyway, as of now, building tons of public housing just isn't politically feasible.

The legislators did pass a bill last year, SB 35, that says if a project has enough inclusionary housing, and it complies with all the zoning codes, and the city has been falling behind on affordable housing, then the municipality can’t block it. It has been proposed for use to convert a mall in “the circumstances are not dire” Cupertino to a mixed-use project with 50% affordable housing. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/2/7/16986422/cupertino-darcy-paul... https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/28/17173010/cupertino-mall-hous...

The problem in San Francisco is that a lot of the affordable housing projects require zoning changes, and are therefore ineligible for SB 35 streamlining. http://www.sfexaminer.com/city-pulls-funding-150-unit-forest...

You should totally support California YIMBY, still. A weakness in the Housing Accountability Act is that the housing goals are very weak and unrealistically low. SB 828 would require the numbers to be more realistic. https://cayimby.org/policy/

Being a “minority activist” does not make you immune to corruption. The protest was organized for the ambitious elected official Jane Kim, and she invited “minority activists” to speak out-and-out lies. Things like, “SB 827 does not have tenant protections.”

I’ve been at neighborhood meetings, where people working for the Planning Department asked minorities what they wanted. The minorities, every single one, wanted the opposite of what the activists wanted.

http://www.beyondchron.org/special-report-sb-827-failed/

Ironically, it is NIMBYism that really has the white privilege problem. It was white people that invented zoning laws in response to desegregation: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/02/zonings-racist-roots-s....

It continues to be primarily privileged white people who use zoning to prevent building of low-cost housing, discouraging multi-family units, discouraging non-traditional housing situations for workers, etc.

It is entirely believable to me that both of them have giant white privilege problems.

Yeah. I despise NIMBY behaviors, so I expected to be hugely in favor of the YIMBY movement when I first heard of it. But it seems like every time I come across an advocate for it they're young, upper-middle to upper-class young white people who are relatively new to the community and have a very "fuck your feelings" approach to things. It's mainly been a disappointment to me.

I am an admirer of the YIMBY movement, but I do have an issue with the idea. You seem to be assuming that, by building more units and increasing density, normal supply/demand forces will normalize the housing market. But, and here's my issue, what incentive is there for the landlord to lower prices before everyone who can't afford the current rates leave the SF area forever? I see the possibility of a landlord bringing more units online but still charging $3-4k a month rent just because they can. I also see the possibility of possible market collusion in order to keep rents high (multiple landlords colluding with each other to maximize profit) at the continued expense of tenants. With these possibilities in mind, just building more apartments may not be enough.

I feel that the YIMBY idea is a good first step, but it is far from an end all solution.

You're 100% correct that allowing more housing will not fix things overnight - it'll take time.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

I don't think collusion is easy in a market with so many landlords. Here's an article about Denver prices dipping a few years back due to - you guessed it - lots of supply:

https://www.curbed.com/2017/1/25/14342828/denver-rents-affor...

You started off saying one thing: >You seem to be assuming that, by building more units and increasing density, normal supply/demand forces will normalize the housing market.

And then proceeded to say a bunch of stuff that makes me think you don't believe this assumption.

Think through your own example. Even if landlords collude, "still charging $3-4k a month rent", and more units open up, eventually some of those units will not be rented. Dormant units do not generate revenue, regardless of the asking price. If even more units are added, more landlords will continue to collect $0 on their dormant units.

Landlords then have two options: continue to ask for $X dollars and get $0 or ask for $X-Y dollars and get $X-Y dollars. If $(X-Y) > $0, the law of large numbers, empirical studies, and common sense dictate that landlords will choose option B.

Prices could stay high, however, if more people move to the area, increasing demand to match supply.

SF's strong renter's rights mean that $0 can be a better deal for the landlord.

There exist values for X and Y where $X * 12 months < $Y * 8 months, and if the landlord believes the market will be that much higher in 4 months, then the unit stays empty.

>if the landlord believes the market will be that much higher in 4 months

This is a well-founded belief only because demand is increasing faster than supply.

You see this in commercial real-estate, too, where there is nothing like rent control, especially in downturns. in the late aughts/early teens I was looking for commercial space. Being a capitalist, I would target places that had been vacant for over a year, then offer 30-40% less than asking for a 1-3 year lease, with the value proposition being that I'd give them something for the downturn and they could kick me out if things picked up after a few years.

No takers; the real-estate folks thought that prices were going back up and that they'd be better off with empty buildings, primed for when the economy recovered than accepting money from the likes of me.

(The other bit is that rent control is not the whole of this... In california, rent control mostly doesn't apply to anything modern.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa%E2%80%93Hawkins_Rental_H...

You really gotta understand that law to understand this debate; that law is essentially why the poor oppose most of these 'yimby' ordinances; the buildings that would be demolished are rent controlled in SF, and under that law would be replaced by units that are not rent control.

If you don't understand that,the opposition from the poor simply doesn't make sense, because more units, in a free market, wouldn't drive up rents for anyone... but in a market with rent control, if you demolish rent control housing and replace it with market rate housing, you have less housing available for the poor.

(scott wiener and other yimby types often respond by adding a certain number of affordable housing units and/or prohibit tearing down existing rent controlled places. The latter pushes new construction to more commercial/industrial spaces, which if you ask me, is just fine, as it usually means more mixed-use kind of construction)

This idea that the demand for housing in a certain area is literally infinite is so strange to me. Yes, it takes a long time to build 50,000 apartments, and prices will not immediately normalize. Yes, a very large percentage of the new construction will be luxury. But the prices will not keep going up the more units that are built that’s mathematically insane.

To quote the last sentence of the comment you're replying to:

> Prices could stay high, however, if more people move to the area, increasing demand to match supply.

I think that's key. Places that are seen as the most desirable to live in tend to attract people. If housing got (temporarily) cheaper, more people would move in and it would return to a similar equilibrium.

I think this problem is best fixed by creating more desirable places to live, not by trying to find a way to pack more people in (though efforts to reduce housing prices are admirable and worth doing).

Something I've wondered a lot about is if it's possible to create desirable cities deliberately, rather than let them spring up naturally. (Obviously a lot of developers have tried to do that as a way of making money, but I suspect you could get better results if you set out with the primary aim of creating a pleasant place to live and work and structured it as a non-profit.)

>by creating more desirable places to live, not by trying to find a way to pack more people in

There's effectively infinitely much suburbia in America already. It's the "packed in" experience (walkable streetscapes, transit-connected mid- and high-rise housing, etc) that's scarce, and that we need more of.

If one believes density is a good thing that makes for better living, then adding more units should make it a more desirable place to live, driving more demand, and increasing prices. SOMA might be an interesting example of this, where it used to be cheap and undesirable, but after a critical mass of housing was built, it became much more livable and expensive. Of course, there are hundreds of things having simultaneous impacts, so it is impossible to isolate the effects of one.

One things that needs to be considered though is how does lower rental prices affect those that are currently renting in dense living situations (3/4 roommates)?

If we assume prices are lowered maybe John decides room with Matthew only instead of with Matthew, Ashley and Jaheim.

Rents in SF dropped during the financial crisis and they can drop again.

Supply and demand. Demand dropped during the financial crisis. They would also drop with enough supply.

I cannot thank you guys enough.

I use Stripe for my small business and it has been nothing short of incredible.

Now to hear that you're jumping into this housing crisis is absolutely amazing. It gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, if more big players get behind this movement, some REAL CHANGE might happen in California.

You guys didn't have to do this, but you're doing it because it's the right thing to do and that is awsome.

So I just want to extend a sincere thank you.

Thank you for doing this. I've always believed that the organizations employing workers in the Bay Area (and generating tax revenue for the state and municipalities) are the best suited for helping ensure that sufficient housing is built to provide affordable housing for their employees and everyone else in the Bay Area.

Patrick - a strong statement indeed, kudos you guys! To to diminish from it, but even stronger statement would be for Stripe to relocate the HQ to another state, or at least to a city lake Vallejo. It may be impractical at this point, but ...

If Vallejo had BART or the Capitol Corridor this could make sense. As it stands now getting there could be nearly more painful than getting to downtown Davis or Sacramento.

Can I ask what do you think is the impediment to changing housing policy and how you think those impediments might be addressed? Most of these proposals and organizations lack realpolitik.

Thanks a lot for your work on this issue, and for your references - especially [1].

I had a conversation with a friend a week back where we tried to estimate what is the reduction in economic growth due to the lack of a sane housing policy, and am happy to see that [1] addresses this question.

Thank you. I’m an owner and I’m a strong believer in this raising a tide that raises all boats. Lets let SF and the Bay Area become the hub of excellence. That starts with affordable housing for all who want to be here.

You mean you’d rather not have to pay higher wages, so you are looking for others to subsidize a fix.

Curious why this was a corporate donation instead of a personal donation?

Patrick, I disagree with your stance. You are looking to trade in one problem (housing prices) for more traffic, congestion and a lower quality of life.

I feel like we need avoid latching onto the simplest solution to every problem and think outside of the box on this one.

If you can live near work you don't need a car. How did you come to the conclusion that affordable housing increases traffic?

One of the biggest reasons I left the US was because I wanted:

* A decent paying job in tech

* In a neighborhood where I could walk to do things with my friends

* But my friends didn't all have astronomical salaries

* I could ride a bike without getting screamed at

* My child could ride her bike to school without getting run over by a car

* (Unrelated but while I'm at it) - I could take a true vacation or weekend and nobody would dream of asking me how they reach me on said vacation.

I don't know of a single place in the US that meets these criteria. At one point I might have said Portland but the nicer areas there are getting very, very expensive.

Can I ask what such city you found?

I'm guessing it's in Europe.

To be completely honest, the city I'm in now doesn't meet those criteria as well as I'd like, but I'm currently in Dublin.

It falls flat on housing, though, mostly because rents and buying costs are up 80% or so in the last few years. When I moved here it was quite affordable.

It also fails badly on:

* My child could ride her bike to school without getting run over by a car

But I'm in the Dublin Cycling Campaign and pushing to make that better.

If I were moving _now_ I'd be looking closely at Utrecht. Another person mentioned Lausanne which I admit has me a bit envious too; looks to be quite reasonable https://www.immoscout24.ch/en/flat/rent/city-lausanne

As mentioned in another comment, Amsterdam actually checks all the boxes.

Ditto. I just moved from the Bay Area to Lausanne for many of the same reasons (except the vacations: still working for the same awesome employer).

Would love to hear about your experience moving. Do you speak French (or German?) Have been contemplating the continent as Dublin gets very expensive.

I realize this counters my own statement (after all Dublin IE has some of the same problems as the bay wrt housing) but there are still cities in Europe offering what I stated.

Amsterdam meets all of those requirements. I can't recommend Amsterdam highly enough, I'm so incredibly happy here and life is so much easier.

It's really pretty shockingly easy to move here as a US expat too. I'd be happy to talk to people about how to do it (or if you want to work at Apollo Agriculture we can really just do it all for you.)

I live in Eastern WA/Northern ID and have all of that.

Where? Would love to hear more.

Sorry for the late response.

I live in near the Spokane/CDA region. Spokane is the major city, an hour from where I live, as I live in a rural area. Boise is also nice and would offer the same.

Patrick,

Although generally supportive of the Yimby movement in cities and the need to increase density, I am concerned that SB 827 (and similar) will steamroll the will of voters in smaller counties where staunch opposition remains.

Marin County, just across the bridge from San Francisco, is a good example: they have a strong history of opposition to housing development and density[1], and the overwhelming majority of Marin residents are opposed to top-down State measures to impose density requirements. This is quite different to San Francisco, where the YIMBY movement appears to have majority support (including me) and where a local jobs boom and office space increase has created a housing imbalance.

I would prefer that this is handled locally and am genuinely curious to know why the state government should be the interlocutor and arbiter?

1. http://rebelsdocumentary.org/

Places like Marin county are nice to live in. More people would be very happy to move there. This could happen if Marin county built more housing, but the residents who currently live there can vote against it. The YIMBY movement identifies this key problem: only people who live in a county have any say in the local politics. The people who would benefit from looser zoning laws have no say in the matter. If you let every county make choose on its own: stay exclusionary or build more, then every county votes to stay exclusionary, and you end up with the situation we see today.

If want to do what's best for everyone as a whole, you need higher levels of government to step in and represent those people who don't otherwise have a voice.

Local control (and the perverse incentives that operate at that level) is exactly what's causing the problem. State-level intervention is the achievable way to fix it.

Homeowners in a city have an incentive to block housing construction. That hurts everyone who commutes into that city; those people deserve a say too, and they have one at the state level.

> That hurts everyone who commutes into that city; those people deserve a say too, and they have one at the state level.

That's a fair point. (Although I would prefer to see it solved through fiscal incentives since the state is the one paying for transit construction.)

Zoning is an instance of local government oppressing individuals. “Local control” means the person who owns a property cannot build an apartment. Marin County is so adverse to housing development, they illegally stopped even one new home from being added. Now it can go forward because of state law.

https://carlaef.org/2018/04/20/we-sued-sausalito-and-then-we...

The Bay Area has really dysfunctional governance. We have 9 counties and lots of cities. Each one independently has incentives to attract jobs and offload housing to the other counties; though, some towns were incorporated specifically to prevent integration for racist reasons. The total result is that we have way more jobs than homes in the region, and unfunded pension liabilities, and mega-commutes, and advanced gentrification. It’s in the best interests for California as a state to override this whole mess with some reasonable baseline standards. That is what SB 827 was about.

https://sf.curbed.com/2016/10/12/12945854/bay-area-cities-jo...

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-unfunded/ https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-raise-gdp-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/us/california-today-super...

https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/sb-827-retains-an-awful-lot...

I'm not sure Marin County ever strove to be a center of commerce, or to offload housing onto other counties as a result. This is the main point here: surrounding counties caused this mess, they should fix it.

I would prefer to see state measures that require cities to tie housing development to commercial development and jobs growth. Or even for SB-827 to be modified to exclude cities/counties that have maintained a balance. This would exclude Marin from SB-827, but would certainly still include SF and Cupertino.

(The Sausalito lawsuit is a separate matter to this discussion; its success demonstrated the effectiveness of existing state laws for that particular development.)

To be fair, I imagine you must realize these exact same problems affect Ireland.

California and the Bay Area is so screwed. The Powers-that-be looked at SB827 like it was the work of lunatics, and did not engage in any of the significant concessions that were made. The bill was completely impotent at the end ... local demolition control + 4-5 story buildings. It drew no interest nor alternative proposals to actually help solve the housing crisis.

So yeah we're going to end up with middle class social housing lotteries, 1.5 hour commutes and crazy inflation of basic service costs ($3k/month child care, anyone?).

Every neighborhood can't be a wealthy enclave of SFH. There is literally no where to live in the central Bay Area on teachers salary much less a Social Security Disability paycheck. The homelessness epidemic will grow.

It's a rentier economy of land owners and the rent-controlled incumbents. How "Progressive".

You can substitute "Bay Area" with many of the major centers in the US at this point - Seattle, LA, Denver, Austin all have the same issues, they're just a few years behind the Bay. We need fixes to zoning and development rules and tax laws, they help cities be more liveable as it will help everyone. Cities overseas have figured this out, to some degree - rent as a % of income is lower in both Europe and Asia, generally, and it's a lot easier to build effective mass transit when housing densities are a bit higher. The single family home is one of the worst things to happen to the US, and it's slowly killing us with traffic and spiraling housing prices.

> You can substitute "Bay Area" with many of the major centers in the US at this point - Seattle, LA, Denver, Austin all have the same issues, they're just a few years behind the Bay.

Not the same issues. Seattle doesn't have anything like Prop 13, or nearly as bad height restrictions. City residents and council are much more supportive of upzoning than SFBA — as in, it actually happens.[0]

Plenty of actual issues, and development still lags demand. But the situation is not nearly as dire as SFBA, and it's not getting worse quite as fast.

[0]: https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/11/9/16629248/seattle-hala-m...

Maybe to not the same degree, but the same issues - NIMBYism, a focus on SFH, a sense that established residents are pursuing housing policy that punishes younger / newer residents. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/upshot/zoning-housing-pro...

Yep, you are absolutely right that there is still (some) NIMBYism and an overemphasis on SFH in Seattle. The distinction I want to draw with SFBA is the degree.

There's a tipping point where the NIMBYs have enough power to block all or most upzoning and development, and I think — fortunately for us — Seattle has not passed that threshold. SFBA has.

To say the final bill was impotent is unfair. It still removed parking requirements within 1/4 mile of transit stops and reduced it 0.5 automobiles elsewhere. It exempted projects from density maximums and some FAR maximums.

In effect, it would've converted a lot of the Bay Area's SFH into much denser condominiums.

not if the local planning department refuses to issue demolition permits for the existing structures

Prop 13 to me seems to be at the root of all these problems.

I'm almost finished with Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century, and Prop 13 seems to be a godsend for rentiers seeking the inequality of 1900-1910.

Overturning Prop 13 isn't realistic since voters are selfish. Prop 13 has GOT to be the biggest reason behind NIMBY-ism. If the little old lady in the 3 bedroom $2M house had to pay $20K a year in taxes, she'd have sold a long time ago. But because of Prop 13, her taxes are likely less than $1K a year.

But the sick thing about Prop 13 is that it applies to landlords. You know why LA is filled with all these single-story rental properties from the 70s in prime locations? Because the taxes hardly budge, so they're paying about $1 per year per square foot in taxes. Even if they sold for the huge premium, it'd be impossible to re-invest that money into something with a higher rate of return.

It also applies to businesses. It's why you see a lot of car washes making < $1M/year sitting on land worth $20M.

We could potentially modify Prop 13 to eliminate the benefits for rental properties and have the benefits only apply to the first $1M of real estate. That'd only affect the top 5%, and only marginally.

But it could eliminate a lot of NIMBYism, I think.

Proposition 13 as a whole needs to go, it has horribly distorted the market, and moved the property tax burden onto those who own the least land. Meanwhile, schools, towns and counties are desperately revenue starved due to Prop 13.

> Proposition 13 as a whole needs to go

Well, the limitation on increases in tax basis value probably needs to go, but I think the case is less clear for the tax rate limits and other parts of it.

The tax rate limits have also turned out to be problematic. They limit how much taxes can be, relative to property value, but they haven’t limited taxes overall. We now have a whole lot of parcel taxes, and Mello-Roos taxes, where a stick hut pays just as much as a mansion, to pay for a lot of city services. It’s incredibly regressive.

Do you know of studies of what the effect would be if it was removed? I think it's a third-rail sort of thing... but also, I think the larger issue is really the supply problem.

More relevant, it has made it economically unattractive for municipalities to zone for or approve housing construction (housing is a net loser generally because of school district costs, and Prop 13 just torpedoes future school funding) and only allow commercial or office development. That's why cities with market power in the Valley (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale) have 3+ jobs per resident.

This. Prop. 13 created incentives to never move out, and thus killed dynamism in CA. Young people need homes near work. Older people need cheaper homes and can be further from city centers.

Homesteading tax breaks are one thing, but applying them to all property is absolutely insane. This is easily the worst thing about it, and it has to go.

As to homesteading, even for homesteading the property taxes need to be able to go up with housing inflation somewhat at least.

It would be quite different if it was only the actual percentage tax rate that was limited in growth. I'd want that for income taxes too.

A brake on one kind of tax will spill into another kind. Thus, e.g., in TX property taxes function as an income tax via the Robin Hood school funding plan. It would be better to have a proper income tax, but no one will vote for such a thing without a hard constitutional brake on rates.

> Older people need cheaper homes

Why do older people need cheaper homes? Older people have paid off their mortgages and have 100% equity.

Property taxes and home repairs on fixed incomes.

Older people are on average on fixed incomes, sure. They're also on average the wealthiest age demographic in the US.

> They're also on average the wealthiest age demographic in the US.

That's true, but it's a bit misleading IMO. Older folks might have accrued more wealth than younger demographics, but they're not really adding to it each year.

For example, the 65-69 age range has a median net worth of ~$194k[0]. However, somebody in that age range is likely retired and will be living off of that $194k for the remainder of their life. Conversely, somebody under 35 might only have a net worth of $6.6k but will likely be bringing in ~$4,000 each month. Were an individual in the 65-69 age range to withdraw $4,000 per month, they'd be out of money in 4 years. Realistically, most might withdraw around $2,000 per month (before or after Social Security). That's where my parents are at. They really have much less to spend even though they have a lot saved up.

If you take into consideration home equity, it's more apparent why property taxes and such are a big deal to older folks: upwards of 80% of their assets are in their house[1].

[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-net-worth-o... [1]: https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/593580d679474c17018b6...

Great explanation.

Retirement starts to get scary when your parents are thinking about it. You start asking them just how much they have saved, and you start thinking about how much more income you'll need if you end up having to supplement theirs.

If you retire at 72 today you might well live twenty more years. That's a lot of time to live of fixed income. You'll get sicker as you get older, so you know your healthcare costs will go up. That expensive house with high property taxes (if you don't have prop 13 to have made them close to zero for you over 40 or 50 years) starts looking like a burden, and also a source of funds.

Easy solution is to make it such that Prop 13 only applies to primary residences of people that are on social security.

I think the premise is that "older people" don't "need" as much space (interior or exterior) as they did when they presumably were raising children in the home.

Then again, few people "need" SUVs.

They need less space. Having too much space is a cost of opportunity, since presumably a big house is more valuable than a small one. Selling one's big house and buying a smaller house, then investing the difference, may well be better than holding on to the house -- for society as a whole that's almost certainly true since now someone who needs more space can use that particular house's extra space.

And at some point many elderly people start needing to tap their equity. Sure, you can use a reverse mortgage to do that, but downsizing works too, so some do that.

In any case, "we're retiring and moving to the middle of nowhere, where land and homes are cheap" is a common thing I see. Property taxes are a big reason for this, because even with senior homesteading property tax breaks, it can be a big savings to live farther out, and that's a big deal when your retirement savings aren't as big as you might have hoped.

California's old people are already paying 10% income tax which they can easily avoid by moving to Oregon. Lower property taxes is a result of higher taxes.

Also property taxes are not there to decide who leaves and who stays. The only reason why we have property taxes is to pay for Police, Public schools and other bare minimum public services.

Prop 13 is such garbage, especially for rentals. My landlady was charging me $2500/mo and paid $650/year in property taxes. I think she used that property tax transfer for 55+ older from an even older place she must have purchased a long time ago, because the assessed value is now $60k, but the property is worth at least 500k. Bullshit. Not to mention the insane appreciation on the property. It was a poorly maintained dump of a place. She had no interest in fixing it or taking care of it, but had every incentive to hang onto it because it cost her NOTHING.

Prop 13 has many, many pernicious effects but it doesn't drive NIMBYism. The pernicious effects are a slowdown in the velocity of the housing market (keeping your low taxes) and pushing local governments to very strongly prefer commercial over residential development. Every new house is a net loss to local government on a long term budget basis.

One of Prop 13s benefits from a planning perspectives is that your property taxes are isolated from the decisions of your neighbors. So if adjacent properties turn into condos or commercial, you won't see your taxes rocket, so you have less of an incentive to oppose development.

CEQA and the California Coastal Commission are weapons that NIMBYs use, but what drives NIMBYs in CA is the same as everywhere else. The hippy/champagne communists of SF just make it stronger (damn those evil developers making a profit! boo hiss!!!!) and elect malevolent local politicians, but it's the same drivers as anywhere else.

Even just removing it for commercial properties, and residential properties that are not owned by an occupant would fix 80% of the problem from an overall tax revenue perspective, while retaining the most support with voters. How does it make sense that a regular McDonalds pays less in property taxes than a single family home, while being larger and in a more desirable location?

  Overturning Prop 13 isn't realistic since voters are selfish.

Overturning Prop 13 for everything but one's legitimate primary residence would be a lead-pipe cinch. Yet neither the legislature nor any deep-pocket funder for a relevant initiative constitutional amendment (cough Tom Steyer cough) has come forward.

Agreed. Prop 13 is also the reason municipalities zone more commercial. Ever wonder why so many hundred thousand sq ft office space is going up around transbay terminal without a balance of housing? Don’t think that’s the dreaded straw man”NIMBY”. Its the city trying to make sure the services are financially solvent 20 yrs from now.

So I just bought a house (condo actually) in Oakland and I have to agree.

There's a huge class of people who aren't particularly impressive, hard-working, or otherwise "deserving" in my admittedly-morally-loaded-sense of the term, who happened to buy a ton of real estate over the last 30 years, and are now earning eye-popping rates of return (20%+/year on millions of invested capital) owing to the combination of increased desire to live in city centers, and prop 13.

It's really shocking. If you look at most small towns in America, the wealthy people tend to be small business owners, successful professionals, and perhaps a few landowners. Here in the SFBA, the serious peninsula wealth is all tech (early employees and execs) and everywhere else it's landowners by a mile. Here in Oakland, restaurants are closing practically every day because this rentier class is bleeding them dry of any profit. Both directly through rents, and indirectly by the wages employees are demanding to live in an area where prevailing rents are 2-3k/month.

I wouldn't even be mad about this except that they're using bad government policy to line their pockets, and they're just shameless about it. It boils my blood. These people are just leeching off of the huge south bay productivity engines (Google, facebook, Apple, etc) and taking a pound of flesh by restricting supply of a necessary good. Their entire livelihood rests with the stubbornness of execs at the big tech companies to stay here and put up with it. These companies end up paying exorbitant salaries just so that this rentier class can line their pockets with what would otherwise be shareholder profit or personal income of employees.

Best thing a tech company can do to solve CA housing crisis is let workers who desire to do so work remotely from other states without taking a pay cut (beyond actual reduction in productivity, if any). Market forces will take care of the rest.

The effect will be many-fold:

- Increase in employee satisfaction and quality of life. Those who leave will have a much lower cost of living and can enjoy the extra money. Those who stay here will be here because it's worth the money to them.

- Lower real estate costs for employer.

- Reduction in employment and resulting housing demand in California.

- Increase in tech populations in other areas leading to networking effects and economies of scale, making them more attractive to work at, further reducing housing demand in CA.

- Better distribution of tech talent and benefits in the country, reducing anti-tech resentment and political backlash.

- Loss of (tens of?) thousands of dollars in income and sales tax revenue for CA, per employee, imposing a real fiscal cost for not implementing housing supply friendly policies, and creating proper political incentives.

- Loss of demand for local businesses and services, leading to a negative feedback loop to reduce local opposition to increasing housing supply.

- Opportunities for tech and other businesses that embrace and help facilitate remote work.

- Tech companies being closer to average people, aware and solving their real world problems instead of SF techies' scooter and/or food delivery needs.

Stuffing more employees into the Bay Area and throwing a few bucks to YIMBY is not a serious solution, it's a fig leaf.

Remote work would be hugely beneficial, even with a pay cut.

Cost of living adjustments are market distortions that lead to things like this housing affordability crisis. Landlords jack up rents because of high local pay, cost of living goes up, and instead of letting employees move elsewhere and work remotely at existing pay, companies increase local pay more to compensate, and landlords just jack up rent again. That cycle needs to be broken before things change. Pay people for their productivity, not how much their landlords want for rent. If someone is less productive due to less spontaneous coworker interaction, then fine, pay them less to work remotely. But if they are delivering same results, they should be paid same.

Even for new grads or junior employees?

In this day and age, it is beyond my comprehension why anyone would choose waste a major part of their day in long commutes, pay extortionate amounts to rent and be bound to a single location. Most coders are way more productive away from the usual hassle of office space and politics.

If your company believes you can telecommute, it's not a small step for them to eventually believe that you can be outsourced more inexpensively.

If being able to work for any company remotely means I have to compete with the whole world, I’m ok with it.

Would you be willing to compete wage wise? It's completely possible to find programmers that speak English for single digit hourly wages.

I wouldn't be competing with the single digit programmers, but yes. Geography still matters for remote employees (due to time zones and the need for an occasional face time) as does the level of English and obviously the level of experience. The pool of people that fit that description isn't so large that I would have to work for minimum wage from the comfort of my mountain cabin.

You either can be outsourced inexpensively, or you can't. If you can, but your physical presence in a Bay Area office is effective in stopping your employer from figuring it out, then you should probably stay here.

At least in the Bay Area, it's because, for a lot of engineers, the earnings so far outpace other places that the math just doesn't work. Believe you me, I've got a very fancy spreadsheet that runs through all sorts of models to get me out of here, but if I want to retire ASAP, it makes sense to stay.

For some. In my experience since leaving my earning nearly doubled and my cost of living took a nose dive. Plus other benefits.

I dislike working from home. I am more productive in the office, and I like having a concrete work/life balance.

Beyond that, the simple answer to your question is that most companies don't allow remote work.

I'm also much more productive at work, but I suspect I could do roughly as well at a decent co-working space in a cheap city.

Housing a persistent issue that comes up a lot on HN. It seems to me that as tech-workers, we feel the guilt associated with economic pressure adversely affecting the civic-environment we coexist in but strangely feel that it is inappropriate (inconvenient?) to take part in the political machinery that addresses these tragedy-of-the-commons-type problems.

Perhaps there is a collective disillusion with how slow building civic-consensus is (i.e. too much bureaucracy). For those who may feel this way, I strongly encourage your support of political action groups like YIMBY. They provide a low-cost way for you to associate yourself with a group of people focused on trying to fix NIMBY forces within the housing market.

Also make sure to reward politicians who support Yimbi and other pro-housing policies. For example London Breed and Jeff Sheehy are both endorsed by Yimbi. If housing is important to you, make sure to take these endorsements into account in the upcoming election.

I wish SF had a better mayoral candidate. I feel like I'm stuck choosing between sane housing policy (Breed) or sane bike/transit policy (Kim). And I'm sure there are plenty of other dimensions where they're both bad.

In my opinion housing comes first. Breed's bike policy seemed reasonable but maybe I missed something?

The most critical transit issues are at the scale of the Bay area, and the SF mayor doesn't have the authority or budgets to solve them alone. That will require strong action at the state level, or the emergence of a new layer of government with the mandate and budgets to bypass the petty squabbles of cities and impose a sane bay area transit infrastructure development roadmap. One can dream...

>That will require strong action at the state level, or the emergence of a new layer of government with the mandate and budgets to bypass the petty squabbles of cities and impose a sane bay area transit infrastructure development roadmap. One can dream...

Controlling what people can and can't build on their property at the city level was created to prevent the same problems that exist on the city level back when they were on the neighborhood level.

I don't see state or county level zoning as anything more than recursion that will just keep bringing the problem to a different level without solving it.

The fundamental issue is that people are not allowed to or the regulations make it economically impossible to build housing at high density.

I don't think adding another layer of bureaucracy will make it easier to build the necessary density of housing.

I'm not talking about housing or zoning (although in some cases state intervention can be useful there too, for different reasons), I'm talking about transit. The bay area mass transit infrastructure is a joke, it is nowhere near the level required to support its growth in population and economic activity. We need more intercity mass transit, and bay area cities have a clear track record of being incapable of building them through collaboration. They need an authority above them to make the calls and provide the funds. That is how other successful urban mega-hubs do it: Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.

She actually has a fairly good track record and platform on mobility: https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/transportation-that-works-fo.... I wish she had come out with this post much earlier, but better late than never.

The tipping point for me is to consider how they do their work.

London Breed is trying to make San Francisco a city for everyone, and she does not let personal feelings get in the way of good policy.

Jane Kim may know how to say the right things, but get on her bad side and she will abandon your policy and destroy your company’s projects.

This is cute. You should see the candidates in my hometown, reddest district in Wisconsin.

Is there a list of Bay Area local politicians voting record/views on housing? Seems like a good first step in terms of organizing to vote for people that are pro building.

I think more people discussing housing on HN are angry at the entrenched, intractable housing and local government cartel that is making housing so expensive. Tech workers are paid well, but a) home ownership is lower in CA + NY, b) home ownership is lower in big cities, c) home ownership skews older to begin with and that has been increasing over time, d) HN skews young and is largely people in big cities, so it's safe to assume that lots of readers are sending a big chunk of that big fat tech money to a landlord.

The housing fight is largely older, wealthier, entrenched, long-term owners vs younger newcomers who haven't been able to put down roots. It's no surprise that it has been a political rout.

I wish the YIMBYs well. The numbers could be on their side but the structure of the political contest is not.

Wait, why would “sending a big chunk of that fat tech money to a landlord” make someone not interested in fixing the housing crisis?

I'm saying that's why many urban tech workers are angry about housing policy, as opposed to the parent comment that suggested they feel guilty about it.

Anger doesnt change anything. Activism, involvement and donations do. Young tech workers have energy, money (compared to their peers) and incentive to change the system. If they won’t act, they suffer more than anyone else.

Tech workers are still a minority in the bay area.

This could not be more true

  > trying to fix NIMBY forces

This is probably bad word choice. If not, why is it that you feel you need to "fix" others' opinions? You believe A, they believe B (B != A). Neither needs to be fixed. They just differ.

[bring on the disagreement downvotes, my point stands!]

I think opinion is not a great word to use because while, yes, people have opinions that inform their world views this is a question of action. Inaction reinforces the status quo, which is bad, and "YIMBY" people believe they have a prescription for those undesirable conditions. I guess if you accept the premise that housing is in crisis then it's not ultimately about what you believe, per say, it's about deciding on what to do. From there I think it's easy to imagine that proponents may diagnose the opposition as having drawn incorrect conclusions about the world around them that need rectifying.

   > if you accept the premise that housing is in crisis

s/accept/believe/g

I mean I think you know what i'm getting at here. This seems like needless hairsplitting, tbh: you either accept/believe/admit/conclude/concede that premise or you don't.

some of Their opinions are based on mis-information (for example: that fixing housing would increase traffic, when actually the opposite is true, or that increasing the supply of housing increases prices, etc - there's an enormous amount of misinformation out there).

It's like back in the 60s when people were told Smoking was healthy. many changed their opinion about smoking when they found out it wasn't actually healthy.

this is why, the opinions need "fixing"

"some of Their opinions are based on mis-information (for example: that fixing housing would increase traffic, when actually the opposite is true, or that increasing the supply of housing increases prices, etc - there's an enormous amount of misinformation out there)."

So basically, you have opinions that differ from them, and you think you're right, and they're wrong. But you offer no evidence beyond your own assertions.

Nobody reasonable is arguing that "increasing the supply of housing increases prices" (that's a strawman), but there's a lot of evidence that, for example, "fixing housing" leads to traffic problems if you don't deal with transit before you build (cf. the highway situation in Seattle).

There are also lots of examples where gentrification displaces poor and vulnerable populations. These are real problems with development, and it does no good to simply assert that they're not real.

> Nobody reasonable is arguing that "increasing the supply of housing increases prices" (that's a strawman)

That is not a strawman. That is literally what the old-school tenant activists in San Francisco say, providing political cover for NIMBY homeowners to also reject housing supply. It’s not reasonable, but politics is not won on reason. See this hit piece: http://www.sfexaminer.com/excelsior-community-concerned-affo...

> There are also lots of examples where gentrification displaces poor and vulnerable populations. These are real problems with development, and it does no good to simply assert that they're not real.

That is confusing cause and effect. It’s not the new development that is causing gentrification. It is the lack of building elsewhere, especially in rich neighborhoods, that is causing gentrification in poor neighborhoods.

And then gentrification allows expensive new housing to become economically feasible, allowing development. The regulations that cause all new housing to be expensive are also a problem.

"That is not a strawman. That is literally what the old-school tenant activists in San Francisco say"

The strawman is that you're mischaracterizing the argument and it's commonality. Nobody is arguing that "supply increases prices". They're arguing that gentrification increases prices. And they aren't wrong.

Are there goofballs who argue obviously counterfactual things? I'm sure you can find them. But the serious people have a different argument that you're mischaracterizing here.

If you're disavowing the "more luxury condos make the city more expensive" crowd, there aren't a lot of people left to be called "serious" on the anti-growth side of the house.

Smoking is not a good comparison. There’s not an objective truth that is the “right” policy for housing. Different groups are trying to optimise for different things.

Saying “not in my backyard” is acknowledging that a problem is real, but hoping that solutions can be achieved in a way that doesn’t affect their lifestyle.

>Different groups are trying to optimise for different things.

While this is true, there is an objective truth about the directionality and magnitude of the cause-and-effect relationships involved, and contradictory statements about these relationships (some of which are necessarily false) dominate the discourse.

In my experience it's not that people feel as though it's inappropriate to participate in political machinery. They believe that "politics" are inefficient and, as such, a waste of their time. I believe the incorrect notion that "politics" can (or should be) avoided is to blame here.

Politics can be avoided. Instead of asking for the system to do something for you, you just find a way to achieve your goals by whatever means necessary.

You just think of the law as a machine to be hacked. It’s illegal to sell raw milk. I could try to convince some legislators that it’s important (not likely) or just find a way way to operate a raw milk business that doesn’t involve sales.

Some problems may be temporary insoluable, but I find I have plenty of problems to solve. No use worrying about the ones that are fundamentally at odds with statutes.

I accept this as an ideological position, though I disagree with it.

I'm not sure this is the best medium to wade into the specifics but tl;r: I have found that the really interesting problems require working together with other people and sometimes to do so you must act against your own immediate self interests. I also think this type of extreme individualism starts to fall apart when someone starts to act in a way that causes you or others indirect harm and you want to get them to stop.

That said laws are the programming language of our society! People should never imagine them to be anything else. I think, and I don't mean this in an aggressive way, that when you talk about "hacking" laws you're simply engaging in politics :) Albeit with a starkly different ideological grounding and aesthetics. The reason I put that word in quotes in the comment you responded to was to imply suspicion about reductive definitions of the term that seem to categorize it only as "something that happens on the senate floor."

I have to disagree with this statement. Tech workers may feel the guilt, but many of the YIMBYs have no care in the world for the people they may be displacing, are in favor of removing rent control because it would then give poorer residents the skin in the game needed for them to demand more housing.

I can go on and on about this. Yes NIMBYism is a problem, but this goes well beyond the more market rate housing debate, people being against public transit improvements, housing for the homeless, and clinic for drug addicts are ones that come to mind.

That is definitely not true at all the leadership level (ie podcasts, official communications. In my experience it's not at all true at the local either.

However, it is a common mischaracterization by outsiders that reflexively oppose YIMBY. For a while, it was common to say that YIMBYs opposes BMR and affordable housing in general, which is completely untrue.

I guess it's shifted now to say that YIMBYs are pro-gentrification instead, which is absolutely counter to any high level communication or leadership discussion I've heard, or any local desires.

If you have links to such statements, or people that I can talk to, I'd love to jump in on that discussion and point out with documentation how that supposed YIMBY is not representing a YIMBY viewpoint.

Yes, the group California Yimby supports these things, but it absolutely hurts the Yimby movements credibility where they have allows people who spew the "Luxury housing will trickle prices down to the poor" shpiel are given a platform by them to display their beliefs. At best, any new construction that impacts costs will just lead to more upper middle class tech workers being in the bay area while continuing with the current pace of displacement we've seen already.

YIMBYism isn't pro gentrification, but those who are pro gentrification will always be YIMBYs.

And I can't provide direct links, just this sort of thing is all over YIMBY/NIMBY/PHIMBY facebook and twitter.

Got it, those are venues that I avoid, preferring to look more at actual policy. I'd never step into facebook, but it could be beneficial to Twitter stuff, since it's fully public.

How can CA YIMBY "allow" people to spew things? Are you honestly interested an assessment of YIMBY, or just looking for ways to discount them?

If a neighborhood group has official communications that run counter to what a member says, do you go with what the member says or the group itself?

Or, more pertinently, if a member of a tenants advocacy group lies about core YIMBY beliefs, does that discredit the entire group? No, of course not.

Then again, this may just be the political naïveté of people that don't typically get into politics. Optics are not something that YIMBYs have really cared about, caring more for pragmatism. However, in California politics, optics seems to be more important than action or results. This leads to a lot of duplicitousness.

That last point is absolutely what I'm trying to get at, and it's not that they are allowing anyone to spew anything, but people are using the word YIMBY to mean what is essentially a "pro gentrification belief system". The word YIMBY has become toxic to the cause.

If that's the case then it would be disastrous to abandon the YIMBY label and try a new one, because it capitulates to the false accusations, and completely tarnishes all of the ideas of the movement.

No, the only counter is to further show the true YIMBY values through policy proposals, discussions, and political legislation.

For example, the core YIMBY success so far is SB-35, "Planning and zoning: affordable housing: streamlined approval process."

The same people that last year were complaining that YIMBYs are anti-affordable housing have now finally stopped saying that and have moved on to other misrepresentations of YIMBY. And in fact, they often now support SB 35, particularly as a way to prevent actions like SB 827. In the future, they will come to like SB 827, or at least some will.

There's a ton of reactionary conservatism in nearly all political movements in California, even the leftist ones, because there's lots of older folks that run them and can't countenance a shift in the political landscape, particularly the emergence of a new political force.

There will be lots of rhetoric, but that won't stop the change. So much in politics seems impossible until its done. Gay marriage in California was a similar through the looking glass experience.

Housing will come around too. The more people say "that's impossible," the more optimistic I am that they will be proven wrong. Because that's just an admission that they hadn't really considered the possibility, the idea was just outside the realm of feasibility and thought. Eventually, the slow reactionary mind becomes comfortable with it, and reason breaks through.

It will take several years, several years that we shouldn't have to waste, but there will be more housing in California.

The phrase “trickle down housing” is an anti-YIMBY smear. It’s the logical fallacy, reasoning by analogy.

The real issue is simply N > M, where N is the number of bedrooms needed in San Francisco, and M is the number of bedrooms in existence in San Francisco. As long as N > M, then there will be winners and losers.

In most of the market, the winners are decided by price, the highest bid wins. In a small part of the market, the winners are decided by luck, 100 applicants in the lottery for every 1 affordable housing unit. Everybody else loses. The goal of YIMBY is to make everybody into winners.

It doesn’t matter whether the units are built as luxury. Run-down shacks in boring neighborhoods are going for multi-millions of dollars. There are not enough homes.

"The real issue is simply N > M, where N is the number of bedrooms needed in San Francisco, and M is the number of bedrooms in existence in San Francisco. As long as N > M, then there will be winners and losers."

No. This is a toy economic model that doesn't account for time or land constraints.

The benefits of construction do not immediately and equally accrue to all market participants. In cities where essentially all new construction is infill (i.e. San Francisco), new units will displace older, cheaper units (not always, but it does happen). Therefore, until supply actually exceeds demand, you will have winners and losers, and you must account for the losers.

Additionally, an any realistic model of housing, you will see that new construction will continue not until housing is as affordable as existing stock, but only until it is no longer profitable to build. It is expensive to do infill development, and therefore unlikely that any builder will continue to generate supply until prices match those of older properties. It could easily take decades for new construction to lower housing prices. For example, New York, Paris and Tokyo are far more dense than San Francisco, with more liberal development rules, yet are the some of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live.

It is thin gruel to say "I'm sorry you lost your currently affordable housing, but come back in 20 years, and everything will be affordable!" But this is essentially the response you are making.

N > M. We need more homes than we have. That is not an economic model. That is a simple, relatable, metric.

That is the best property of the YIMBY movement. Whether “missing middle” small apartment buildings or “social housing” hundred-unit buildings, all of those are illegal in places where they should be legal. It can be summed up in a simple metric. We need more homes than we have.

If we need 20 years of building, then we better get started now.

>This is a toy economic model

No, it's the pigeonhole principle. There is no level of economic sophistication that can sidestep the basic problem of an insufficient number of homes in the area.

That is just ignoring even the most basic economics. The quantity isn't relevant without price. The problem here isn't economic sophistication so much as few people other than timr seems to have actually read just a normal economics textbook and understood what it actually says. That most of his comments are downvoted without relevant rebuttal just shows that.

>“The quantity isn’t relevant without price”

The price depends on the quantity. Price is not baked into the walls, but comes from market conditions. How you can deny that and then claim the high ground about understanding economics is beyond me. This is incredibly easy to check: physically identical homes go for wildly different sums in different markets.

Timr argues above that 1) construction will take time, and 2) it will only continue as long as it’s profitable. No disagreement there. We need to be planning for the long term as well as the short term, and profit margins have a long way to fall before reaching zero.

No, what he is essentially saying is that far earlier than you can produce enough housing so everyone can live in the bay area, the cost of production will be higher than what people who want to live there can afford.

I have a different proposal I'd like to run by you... I'm concerned about congestion on California's roads. The issue is simple: at rush hour, for many popular routes, N > M, where N is the number of cars on the road, and M is the number of cars there are space for at any given time. Let's solve this problem--build more roads!!

Oh wait: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/11/californias-d...

...

In all seriousness, I am on your side--zoning laws which never change create lots of incentive problems and prevent central and desirable areas from sensibly adding density. But let's not pretend this is a simple math problem where nobody with sense can disagree--it just leads to demonizing the other side (which there is lots of here).

Among other things, it will almost surely never be the case, no matter how successful YIMBY is, that N=M in the bay area, because adding more housing will increase demand--people will stop leaving to take jobs in Denver/Seattle/Portland, more people will find it doable to move to the bay area, etc.

The big difference here is that I think a lot more people in San Francisco is a good thing, and a lot more cars on the road is a bad thing.

I never specified that N = the number of people currently living in San Francisco. The outflow of people is somewhat greater than the inflow, as children of existing residents (and often their parents, too) move out and new people move in, limited by the slow growth of homes. However, when we have so many employed homeless people in the streets, it’s pretty obvious that whatever N is, N > M. https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612746/sf-math-teacher-hou...

If we actually built housing in accordance with demand, then the population of San Francisco would be much, much higher, but it wouldn’t be unlimited. I wish San Francisco would get over itself; not everybody wants to live here. Patrick Wolff estimated that we would need 50% more homes in the next 20 years to make housing affordable. http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-are...

There’s no way we can get 50% more homes with our current system, project by project, 500 units here, 1,000 units there. We need about 200,000 units in San Francisco alone. We can get there by eliminating the density limits. Just look at the zoning maps, how much of the city is restricted to single-family homes. With the more ambitious versions of SB 827, we could have achieved 50% more homes by converting half of the single-family homes into quad-plexes, as was traditional before zoning was invented to keep poor people out of nice neighborhoods. http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/sunday/zoning-law...

Adding more housing will lower prices, and lower prices will increase quantity demanded. Yes, more people will be able to stay in and move to the area. That's the point. You've not made an argument for why additional housing would increase demand (i.e. desire to move, willingness to pay).

Road expansion boosts capacity just fine. Not as cost-effectively as public transit, but it works. What it doesn't do is fix congestion. I'd argue that there really isn't anything like congestion in the housing market. Homes are discrete; you have one or you don't. There's no such thing as "extra" people in the neighborhood shrinking all the existing homes.

Belatedly... yes, you are right, I haven't described any shift in the demand curve. But so what? I was responding to a suggestion that the reason there is a housing "issue" is that demand is relatively inelastic, and exceeds supply, which is also relatively inelastic. My point is simply that demand could actually be fairly elastic, and so we should not describe the problem in this simplified way, because if that's the case, increasing supply will not reduce price very much, and so increased housing won't solve many of the problems the YIMBY cause is hoping to address which are caused by high housing prices.

In the road analogy, congestion on roads is akin to a price--people are paying for trips with their time. I was trying to make the point that adding more roads doesn't bring down the "price" of a trip substantially, just like adding some more housing in SF may not bring down the price of housing substantially.

OP responded by noting that, in their view, having more people in SF is a good thing in and of itself. If you agree, then we have no argument (this is almost surely a result of building more housing). But if you think that adding more housing would be good because it would allow low-paid workers to live closer to where they work, or many of the other reasons advanced in this thread, my point is simply that the analysis of this policy proposal requires more nuance than the kind of N > M analysis OP was conducting.

I'm not sure I follow. The whole point of YIMBY is to increase the supply of housing such that new residents don't displace residents. If 10,000 people move into the city and move into 10,000 newly built apartments then no displacement needs to occur. Conversely, if NIMBYs block housing and 10,000 people move into the city with only 1,000 newly built apartments then 9,000 people are displaced.

Sure, this is an oversimplification; people can live in converted living rooms, put bunk beds into 1BR apartments, etc. But the point remains YIMBYism helps prevent displacement, NIMBYism helps cause it.

Tech workers can generally find private sector jobs that pay an incredible amount of money. This naturally discourages them from seeking Government jobs which tend to pay less (and most of the times have an inflexible, bureaucratic nature).

But I agree with participation in that we should be voting and funding political programs that we believe in.

I don't think it has anything to do with guilt. Housing costs affect people across the entire income spectrum. those paid the least have few if no options other than to win the housing lottery. Those paid the most, will also pay the most for housing too: because those jobs are only in places where houses are more than 2 million a piece. It' a problem for everyone who doesn't own a house yet.

SF YIMBY endorses London Breed for Mayor. You can volunteer to help get her elected:

""" Phone Banking: This is one of the best ways to get out the vote, and a really nice opportunity to chat with other San Franciscans. We'll be phone banking every Tuesday & Thursday from 6 - 8:30 at YIMBY headquarters (1260 Mission St) from now through the 31st to help get out the vote for London.

May 12th Event: Campaign event with YIMBY & London Saturday May 12, 11:30-1:30 at the Mission Bay food trucks near the ballpark. (601 Mission Bay Blvd)

Slate Card: A great tool for talking with your friends about the YIMBY's endorsements for the June ballot. Available on our website, here: https://yimbyaction.org/endorsements/

Ballots go out next week and we'd love your help getting the word about the election - hope you can join us! """

Investing in better public transportation is important too so that people can live further away from the city and commute in a reasonable time.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/14/bay-area-cities-...

better public transportation would only alleviate the problem if it goes to places where additional supply gets built. otherwise it will just drive up prices in the places to which it adds accessibility. imagine a teleporter in stockton that goes anywhere in the bay. unless stockton allows additional housing near the teleporter, it will just become even more expensive than san francisco.

> better public transportation would only alleviate the problem if it goes to places where additional supply gets built.

You have to have zoning that allows density around transit hubs, which NIMBYs oppose. So, I think you have to have the housing fight regardless.

Who said anything about teleporters?

Edit: My point is that a train is not a teleporter. A train spreads population density over a larger area, with multiple stops and takes more time to move people than an imaginary sci-fi device. The comparison is not fair and pointless. Why not just talk about how trains would work instead of using an imprecise analogy.

A teleporter is the spherical cow of transportation - it allows for simplified thought experiments.

Replace with "a bus line to"/"a train to", the outcome is the same. Unless places with connection to the public transportation system build more housing, prices there will just be driven up as well. (Housing shortage in the Bay is that bad)

My point is that a train is not a teleporter. A train spreads population density over a larger area, with multiple stops and takes more time to move people than an imaginary sci-fi device. The comparison is not fair and pointless. Why not just talk about how trains would work instead of using an imprecise analogy.

Not sure what is left to explain.

In the ways that a system of teleporters/portals is different from a system of train stations, the former are entirely superior to the latter; if the former can't solve a problem neither can the latter. The idea is: no transportation solution (even a perfect, immediate one) provides a supply of anything; it can only connect a market with a demand to a market with a supply.

You would need to argue that on the other side of a hypothetical transportation investment that there is a supply, or that it's easier to create a supply in those market(s).

But why would op choose to talk about teleporters when train suffices and is the actual thing we are talking about. No simplification is required and a conversation about public transportation is better if it's actually about public transportation that exists.

Also people seem to have not seen the word 'too' in my original post.

"the former are entirely superior to the latter" and that trains have more downside than teleportation is exactly why Stockton wouldn't become as expensive as SF and the analogy is bad in the first place.

Teleporter was used as a literary device. No one was actually supporting a teleporter. The point was that unless additional housing is built around the transit hubs, the problem still remains.

You can get slow teleporters. Teleporters on dial up.

Everything has to make sense financially. Currently, we have huge investments in transit going out to huge surface parking lots in the middle of single-family detached housing. Expanding this model of development is economic suicide.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/30/transits-chick...

I'm all for YIMBYism, but it's framed in a couple ways that I often disagree with.

First, I actually doubt that loosening zoning restrictions to allow multi apartment dwellings will harm owners of SFR properties. It'll change the neighborhood, and may lower housing costs per square foot of living space. I personally thing that it it's done properly, SF will be a more interesting place (outside of SF, I've lived in NY and Paris, and the denser places were nicer and more interesting to me).

The other thing is... well, NY (Manhattan) and Paris (left bank) are also the only places I've lived that are more expensive than SF. And the higher density neighborhoods in SF are among the most expensive per square foot.

I think a YIMBY SF could well turn out to be more interesting, more livable, and, more expensive. More density might just amplify network effects and create even more economic activity.

This is why I do think that for affordable housing, we really do need a first class light rail and subway, like Paris and New York (and a few others). Just building density isn't going to do it.

You're right in thinking that it's not a simple solution of simply adding density.

More supply is good, but care needs to be taken that it's the right sort of supply and regulations are in place. Without care, more density may simply juice speculation. Both Vancouver and Seattle create lots of new residential buildings, but only Seattle is seeing significant increases in vacancy.

YIMBY activists are on the right track, but they need to ensure they focus on increasing vacancy, not just increasing building construction.

Density is a response to high housing prices, not a cause.

I'm not sure I agree. I think that density can lead to more desirable urban neighborhoods, which in turn attract higher income workers. Also, network effects can be dramatic. A higher concentration of knowledge workers can end up generating a higher level of economic activity, and knowledge workers can increase their economic output by living in close proximity to each other. A larger concentration of high income workers can absolutely fuel higher housing prices. This is why I'm not sure that higher density will lower housing prices in SF in the long run.

paris and manhattan are now less expensive than SF

This makes sense for companies to back: how many billions of their investors dollars just go straight to rent?

But once those dollars are given to the employees, why does it matter where they end up? Why would a company care if it goes to a mortgage or rent?

Because if more $$$ are in the employees pockets, the employees are easier to attract and happier, and the company is more competitive.

Because high rents cancel out the benefits of a high salary. It's simple arithmetic. Why give up 30k of a 100k salary to work and live in SF, when I could give up 10k of an 90k salary in Austin instead? (These are just illustrative figures.) And the high price of housing means that even tech workers who want families can't afford the space to raise them.

My case is interesting. I have big student loan payments that don't adjust to my income or salary. I feel tethered to high CoL areas because those areas offer higher salaries with more take-home income, despite a higher median rent.

The best balance for me is a high salary in a low CoL so I don't burn my take-home on rent, but I'd rather be given a larger salary, spend some more on rent, and have more money left over to pay off my debt.

What about working remotely?

Cause it's usually 30k of a 180k salary.

People will quibble with the exact trade-off in CoL and salary between SFBA and other locations. I don't think there is one general answer — you have to do the math for your specific situation to find out where you earn more money after expenses.

Keep in mind Federal graduated taxes don't have any relief for high CoL renters (and the tax benefit for mortgage-holders has been diminished somewhat in the latest tax reforms). Don't forget state income tax, too.

Employers might care about the fact it's taking longer and longer to get employees to work, which is directly cutting into productive time and adding costs to their employee commute programs (extra shuttle miles, extra trips, etc). You know, on top of the terrible hit to quality of life and general morale that longer commutes generate.

High rent prices have priced out even relatively highly paid professionals in cities like Palo Alto and Mountain View where many of these companies are headquartered. That's a tremendous red flag about just how broken the state of housing is in the Bay Area - if the highly paid tech employees can't live there, neither can anyone earning less than them (read: pretty much everyone else). How is that building a sustainable local community and economy?

Paying $4000 a month on a one bedroom apt, means throwing 48k away a year. Tax is about 35% so your take home income from 150k senior salary is ~50k. That’s not a lot of money for “all other expenses”.

I feel that, if they did care, it's a lot easier to spin up an office in a different part of the country.

Office space is outrageous also, it's not just employees.

Investors are paying directly to overhead/opex instead to capital/product. No thanks.

Noted investor Peter Thiel claims that the majority of capital invested in Silicon Valley startups just flows to landlords instead of funding real innovation.

https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...

Then why not go somewhere else?

For short-term competitiveness. The largest pool of technical jobs is here, so the largest pool of technical workers is here, so the largest pool of technical knowledge is here. Each generating more of the other. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/glaeser-triumph-o...

On a selfish personal level, I prefer my home city to remain solvent and a viable place to live. Without the tech jobs, the city government would be even more in the red, services would have to be cut, and the various support industries would have to move out. I would prefer for my city not to collapse. http://www.sfexaminer.com/san-francisco-officially-10-billio...

If you are in California I would suggest you look up Michael Schellenberger. He is a democrat running for office and pro Nuclear.

Here is a good interview with him where he lays out some of his opinions on amongst other things the problem with NIMBY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-7DIv3AU1o

More and more young people come to CA to start their careers, but then take the experience (and ability to command high salaries) and move to a cheaper state. We're eroding our talent pool with the crazy high cost of living. The area will just become full of transient college grads.

Simple summary of YIMBY and NIMBY platforms:

YIMBY: Build more housing and higher density in desirable places (places next to transit, places close to work). This will raise rents in areas that are more desirable (to market rates) and lower rents overall as there is more supply in the city. This will also deplete supply of rent-controlled buildings as it becomes profitable to demolish old buildings.

NIMBY: Preserve the right of people already living in a neighborhood to continue living there. Obviously as a "desirable" area gets more residents and buildings, it will displace some existing residents. Keep in mind this doesn't specifically mean poor people (it is not a requirement to be poor to get rent control), but inevitably some of those residents will not be wealthy enough to continue staying in the same area due to simply market dynamics. They most likely will have to move to a slightly less desirable area. But since more housing is built, they most likely will not have to move that far. While new developments will cater to the higher income people, older housing will be vacated for lower income people.

The problem is without letting the market build housing where it makes senses (economically), which is in desirable areas, housing doesn't get built at all. Overall this hurts the whole economy as it increases average housing prices everywhere (while lowering average housing prices in desirable places), and makes it hard for people that weren't lucky enough to be in an area to have affordable housing.

> YIMBY: Build more housing and higher density in desirable places (places next to transit, places close to work). This will raise rents in areas that are more desirable (to market rates) and lower rents overall as there is more supply in the city.

Not entirely true. New units would cause rents to rise if rent has been kept artificially low by rent control, but for the last 23 years a California law has prevented vacant units from being rent controlled: Even rent-controlled units are market rate if you are trying to move to a new home. https://la.curbed.com/2018/1/12/16883276/rent-control-califo...

But building higher density is inherently how you get lower rents when land is restricted. http://marketurbanism.com/2018/02/05/density-working-poor-ou...

Yes YIMBYism will cause rents in certain places with artificially suppressed rent to rise, but otherwise generally reduce rents. In SF there's a lot of resistance since this would also cause landlords to tear down and rebuild otherwise rent-controlled units.

> Even rent-controlled units are market rate if you are trying to move to a new home.

And this is one of the primary holes in how "rent control" helps the poor. It just helps a lucky few (for no specific good reason).

There's also https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180503005513/en/Str... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16988367), which contains a bit more info, albeit in a press release.

Feels inappropriate for a payments processor to wade into general political fights. Stripe is becoming the backbone for payments processing and should strive to stay above politics.

It's unfortunate people are just gonna gloss over this comment because today it's a company supporting a commonly held belief on HN. Tomorrow when it's a company supporting something HN hates we'll be back on the "lobbying sucks, corporations aren't people and don't get 1st amendment rights" etc.

What are peoples longterm views on the viability of just expanding housing? The view currently seems to be that prices are so high, so if we enable x more housing units to be built, prices could come down. This might be true, but in the longrun housing prices are high because it's a desirable area to live in and they'll inextricably skyrocket back on up as those x become entrenched and now a new 2x want in.

Take Hong Kong as the extreme example of this issue. It's currently the 4th most densely populated area in the world with 7.4 million people spread around 427 square miles. But that density didn't solve anything as its economic desirability remains high and it is also one of the most expensive areas in the world. The same was true of Tokyo decades ago when Japan was the effective technological leader of the world - the main reason housing is somewhat affordable there now is because they've gone through decades of recession and decline.

Anyhow, I'm not sure if I'm missing something here because I think this issue is fairly self evident, but seems rarely discussed.

Expanding housing causing expanding demand is not rarely discussed. It is implicit to a lot of NIMBYism here.

The issue is to be always responsive to needs. Every place that has become unaffordable, started as a place that was affordable but then stopped building. Hong Kong is the 4th most densely populated area? Then it has room to grow. Hong Kong used to build lots of public housing for the growing population, but I heard that they stopped.

Tokyo is an interesting example. Despite the recession, it is growing, not shrinking. It’s expensive, but a detached single-family home in Tokyo is cheaper than an apartment in San Francisco. I hear that average apartment size, indicating how much space people can afford, is actually going up. We think it’s because zoning law is national in Japan, and also it legalizes mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, compared to the HOA-level car-is-supreme laws in the United States. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

If the idea is that you have to plan to be ahead of demand, then the history of California is that the plan is too timid and unenforceable. https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/of-california-citi...

I'm not so sure there. There seems to be an almost certainly causal relationship between the cost of living in an area and the economic potential in that area. When people come to an area because there is potential to make lots of money, the cost of living is going to inevitably skyrocket. This is absolutely the Bay Area in a nutshell.

Recession is not about population growth, but economic growth. The reason Japan became a [relatively] affordable place to live is because its economy has been doing very poorly for decades now. To take things to an extreme, Cairo is growing incredibly rapidly and has a huge density yet the cost of living is negligible, and that's because the economic potential there is quite awful. By contrast Hong Kong is still booming and so costs will continue to increase. When economies do well you get economic migrants, in the sense that people move to a place because it's economically desirable. And this is the bay area in a nutshell.

Let's imagine in some crazy world that the Bay Area makes it possible to regularly find housing for let's say $1500/month. $1500 month with the regular availability of 6 figure salaries for development means you're going to get pretty much every developer in tech looking for a job moving there either until the price of housing starts becoming unaffordable, or the city is no longer economically desirable.

California is already is the state with the largest population by a long way. Sure you could squeeze a few more million into the bay area but SF has geographic restrictions, esp with water. Surely it would be smarter to encourage more tech firms to move to places where there is more space, like Denver, Chicago, Austin. Basically anywhere off the coasts. Just give on on SF already.

The city of Tokyo added more housing than the entire state of California in 2014: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

Also, no, California really isn't that crowded. Italy has something like 30% more people on less land, and still manages to be a massive tourist destination because it is amazingly wonderful and beautiful, from the mountains to the cities to the seashores.

And Tokyo is in a huge water crisis and could very soon run out of fresh drinking water for all of their citizens. California, with substantially fewer people moving in, is already in a water shortage. Do you think they can support Toyko-style housing numbers?

I say this as someone who lives in the one of the states that West Coast politicians want to steal the water from. Instead of shipping our water across the country to feed the desert, you can... you know... just move here. So the water is fed back where it came from.

Most of the water in CA goes to agricultural uses if I'm not mistaken. Denser cities are far more efficient in environmental terms: no lawns, less fossil fuel usage and so on.

Sure, some jobs will go elsewhere, but there are big returns to being where everyone else is. This book does a good job explaining why:

https://amzn.to/2KymJj6

85%+ of available water in California goes to commercial agriculture

SF residents use 50 gallons/day of water. Compared to 85 gal/day average across the state.

I live in a suburb of LA and roughly 70% of my yearly water consumption goes to irrigation. Another 5% goes to the pool. You could rip all that out, quadruple the density, and get the same water usage.

Sure but this is a great example of why you'd want to push back against increasing density. Surely your life is better with the pool and space. Why encourage growing the population of the city? Its not like there aren't lots of other places in the US to live.

Residential water never made up any significant portion of water usage.

Feel free to take long showers, and water your lawn. It is a literal "drop in the bucket" when compared to the actual large industrial water users.

Tokyo sprawls across a massive floodplain, and mostly comprises 1-2 story construction. It is not especially dense, and it has spectacular regional transit.

Tokyo is not a counterargument to the parent’s point that geographical constraints dominate housing costs in the bay area.

The comparison was between Tokyo, and the ENTIRE STATE of California if that didn't jump out at you the first time.

San Francisco's never going to have 10 million people, but the Bay Area could sure add a lot more. Look at, say, Palo Alto with all its single family housing.

That’s a ridiculous comparison. I’m certain that the rate of housing construction in Turlock has little/nothing to do with statewide housing medians.

Obviously, the vast majority of those California permits are going into the major cities, which are the places that have the geographic constraints.

If you want to make the comparison, do it on a properly normalized basis.

> Tokyo sprawls across a massive floodplain, and mostly comprises 1-2 story construction. It is not especially dense

You know nothing about Tokyo, especially its housing.

I lived there.

Enough money to sway 0.5 a typical SV household.

Enough money to sway 0.1 a typical Bay Area native multi home owner.

Below comment from nytimes (and linked article/tweet thread) captures the stupidity of the SF politics very well.

-----------------

These are the kind of people Square is supporting: racist, ageist developer shills.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sb-827-rallies-end-yimbys-shouting...

As economic opportunity becomes further concentrated in urban areas this issue will only become more significant. Tech companies have a strong incentive to combat malignant housing policy in cities like SF so that they can continue to attract talent. Stripe is doing a great thing here and I hope other companies follow suit.

Startups could further help this issue by hiring remote and/or setting up shops in low cost areas. (I have no clue if Stripe does this already.) The only reason for startups to be in high tax, high cost SFBA is to raise money. Once you hit escape velocity there’s no reason to stay.

If you believe housing prices are a core problem to the growth of your business why continue to grow in the bay area rather than try and move to a less expensive region of the country?

Massive growth in the SF housing supply is just politically infeasible at this time, a million dollar donation won't change that.

> less expensive region of the country

I don't live in CA, but I get why people want to. Where would you propose? Where else has a strong economy, good universities, nice weather, a well educated/talented work force, legal frameworks amenable to tech, good food, and interesting culture? There just aren't a lot of candidates, and if everyone moves hypothetically and never grapples with NIMBY policy, they'll just bring the problem with them.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two places: Raleigh, NC and Austin, TX.

they're both undergoing a housing crises right now

Nashville, TN, Research Triangle Park in NC, Austin/San Antonio, TX with Tampa/Orlando, FL coming in as runner up as growing tech hubs.

A quick googling of `${city} housing crisis`:

https://www.nashville.gov/Portals/0/SiteContent/Human%20Real...

https://www.wral.com/officials-describe-wake-county-as-affor...

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2018-02-02/whose-afford...

https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/03/15/orla...

Unless (in America) we start approaching housing differently, we'll see the same problem happen over and over again, until the whole economy is choked by housing costs and wealth is transferred from productive uses to land owners seeking rents.

This is very HN-centric thinking (rational but not scalable). People move to Silicon Valley to "move to Silicon Valley". They're chasing a dream and they want to be in the thick of it.

Sure you might find a couple good job opportunities in Nashville or Tampa, but its hard to compare that to being in the thick of tech industry where you're right in the middle of the world's top companies, surrounded by lots of talent to push you further.

While that will always exist, the majority of people moving to the bay area are moving to work for a company like Facebook or Google rather than to work on their own startup.

Invest in technologies and processes to make remote work a reality so you don't have to be in Silicon Valley to work there.

Remote work is fine, and should be more available, but agglomeration effects are real. Putting a lot of smart interesting people in a few dense places just makes sense.

Agreed. Imagine what might be possible if SV employers were willing to spend $15k per employee annually on making remote teams awesome, as opposed to paying (I'm just guessing) $25k/year in salary and rent to keep them in SV.

I don't know what a real solution would cost, but it's a question worth asking IMO.

The technology isn't the problem. It's the companies.

I'm from near Research Triangle Park in NC and have to say that the weather is miserable all summer, just horrible. The traffic is abysmal, and everything is strip malls and McMansions. You can top that off with the insane gerrymandering in NC that prevents the most populace areas from having any political power. Locals are quite hostile to new-comers, and the government keeps trying to tell people which bathrooms to use which is just bizarre. Yeah, BBQ is great, the schools are good, and low taxes are nice, but NC really misses the mark for me in a lot of ways. Having grown up in the area, I am not a fan.

I don't know too much about the other places.

> everything is strip malls and McMansions

Say what? I visited Durham recently and had a blast -- lots of cool local businesses (Fullsteam Brewery was an amazing find) and neat old warehouses and charming old houses and such. Carrboro was also great, people biking everywhere and local hippie markets and stuff.

Yes, Durham is very nice (and Fullsteam is pretty great), but the part you visited is very small and not representative of the rest of the region at all. Raleigh also has a tiny, and nice downtown. However, the region is still a snarl of highways and unsustainable suburban sprawl.

Minneapolis if you ignore the weather for 6 months..

Nashville, TN just voted down an important public transit initiative.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/what-went-wro...

I currently live in the Bay Area. I would never even consider any of the places you just listed, due to the weather alone.

> a well educated/talented work force

This one is the only part that's not really possible at this time. However, if a company is willing to invest directly in growing the housing supply in the bay area, they should be willing to make the effort to try and grow talent in other parts of the country.

And there are tons of other places that have some combinations of good universities, nice weather, good food and interesting cultures. Namely large parts of sunbelt region in addition to other cities which may not have as nice weather, but make up for it in business friendliness and cost of living. It's also important to remember that virtually all urban areas are liberal and diverse, even in conservative states such as Texas.

> This one is the only part that's not really possible at this time. However, if a company is willing to invest directly in growing the housing supply in the bay area, they should be willing to make the effort to try and grow talent in other parts of the country.

I don't know how to reliably "grow talent", and I'm not sure most companies would either. Building housing and attracting talent are solved problems, so why not try that first?

I'm not saying companies shouldn't be in Austin or Huston, far from it. However, SF and NYC are titanic economic engines that could be even more dynamic if they had more housing. There is an obvious solution to the not enough housing problem, difficult though it may be, it's probably worth solving.

You're ignoring the consequences that come from building large amounts of new housing at once, I should preface this by saying I'm very much in favor of new housing just we need to be careful about it.

First you grow talent the same way it grew in the bay area, by letting people work on challenging software products decade over decade.

Second, population growth leads to strains on civic infrastructure which in the bay area is way under invested in. Additionally, there is a very limited amount of infil available to build new housing on, so it would require that other housing get torn down in order to build said new housing. In areas with small lots, this is harder to do because you need to buy up a bunch of surrounding properties to build a larger building.

This often contributes to increased displacement as developers are buying up properties, using laws such as the ellis act to evict and redevelop properties. Oddly enough, the restricted zoning which keeps prices high, also reduces the amount of redevelopment that happens which keeps land values lower and maintains rent control that would not be allowed for new buildings under costa hawkins.

Additionally, the political infeasibility of San Francisco should not be overlooked. This is a city with a long history of anti-capitalist activity and capitalists should recognize this fact and go to places that will be more accepting of their investments.

I think your criticism is perfectly valid. I'm not suggesting that someone wave a wand and double supply tomorrow. I'm proposing that people should support increases in supply, changes to laws that make housing less affordable, and infrastructure spending to support new housing. You're right, it won't be easy, but I believe that moving the problem elsewhere, just moves the problem elsewhere. If everyone in tech goes to Austin for example without some plan for density, you'll either get an affordability crisis, or sprawl which is terrible in myriad other ways. Maybe SF is a lost cause, I don't really know.

Fine. Maybe the Bay Area is the best place for those types of people. Your illustration demonstrates why it should be more expensive to live there.

More expensive, yes; exponentially more expensive, no. Those market forces alone don’t account for the cost of living; that’s entirely down to zoning laws preventing high- or even medium-rises.

> should be more expensive to live there

I didn't say anything about should or shouldn't. I was putting forth the idea that it is uniquely attractive to companies and workers. If housing were a normal market, supply would rise to meet demand, and the market could arrive at some sort of equilibrium. The present situation only serves rent seeking interests, and I believe that as a matter of public policy we should prioritize a broader set of stakeholder needs. On a macro level, prioritizing the interests of rent seekers is economically sub optimal, and transfers wealth from workers, companies, and consumers to land owners.

Cleveland, OH meets at least most of those criteria.

This really blows my mind. It really can't be some sort of pretension or cliquish type of instinctual herding impulse ... can it ???

I've never understood the whole concentration of the tech industry in such dense clusters, it's quite literally not only the opposite of what all the wise men predicted technology and the internet would do and is also totally contrary to some fundamental technology concepts. Talk about putting all your eggs in a basket.

On the other hand, I also don't understand how other cities seem to be unable to attract a kind of threshold level of tech people to incubate something similar elsewhere.

It feels like it is seriously way past due that the big tech companies get broken up and their monopolies shattered in order to allow for competition and diversification of the market.

This problem is bigger than just Stripe's business. It hurts many Americans and the whole American economy when unemployment is 2% in San Francisco, 8% in Detroit, and yet the rent is so much more expensive in San Francisco, many people will stay jobless in a cheaper city rather than move there.

source for my stats:

https://www.google.com/search?q=detroit+unemployment+rate

https://www.google.com/search?q=san+francisco+unemployment+r...

Yes Detroit has a high unemployment rate, but it is in the best interest of companies to go to detroit, and bring their work forces with them which they are refusing to do due to the belief that you can only find talent in the bay area.

I believe that this is just a self fulfilling prophecy, if companies invested in new cities, it would lead to more and more tech workers choosing to live in those places rather than in California.

> bring their work forces with them

You can't just shackle them up and put them on a train though. Plenty of people don't want to live in Detroit, and have other opportunities in the Bay Area or elsewhere. Perhaps they prefer the climate in CA, or perhaps they want to be someplace where there are plenty of other opportunities if the one job doesn't work out.

I'm not saying everyone would need to move, but if you polled your work force, and asked them if they wanted to start a new office in a new city, who would be interested in moving to which cities from a list. I'm sure you'd find enough people to start a new engineering office with at least one team.

From there you can grow. This is sort of the logic I'm going by here.

Some of that is bound to happen, sure, but there are a lot of forces that push people to stay in a place that's already successful too. We should let both happen.

Sure, I'm also not saying that companies shouldn't keep what they have in the bay area, I'm just suggesting that they should target future growth in other regions instead.

If it's climate, access to outdoor activities, diverse population, downtown hipster living, near by university, maybe Sacramento, CA would be a good fit:

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-sac...

https://www.selectsacramento.com

Close to Tahoe, Sonoma Coast and Silicon Valley VCs.

Sacramento is really, really hot in the summer. This is one of the big reasons the population in CA clusters on the coast.

True, but its a pretty close approximation to Pleasanton, Dublin, Antioch, Concord, Brentwood, etc. I'd imagine its not that much hotter than anywhere in Texas, Arizona and not as dreary as the Pacific Northwest and not simultaneously extremely cold in the winters and extremely hot in the summer like the proposals for Minnesota/Detroit/Northeast. Plus solar panels can provide low cost HVAC when its really hot.

Some lively discussion: http://www.city-data.com/forum/city-vs-city/991635-austin-vs...

I wonder what fraction of Bay Area tech workers want to live there?

If every major tech company in the Bay Area switched to remote work, allowing employees to work from anywhere they wanted to as long as they stayed on the same schedule as those who remained in the Bay Area offices, my guess is that there would be a large exodus.

If I weren't constrained by work, I'd be looking for some place where • houses are far enough apart that I rarely hear my neighbors and they can't hear me if I decide to watch an action movie or listen to music at a good volume in the middle of the night, • there are enough trees, bushes, wild plants, and lawns in my neighborhood that plenty of wild critters hang out and are visible from my living room window, • it is not a long drive to reach some place with dark skies, • it is warmer than where I now am (Western Washington, west side of Puget Sound).

I currently have the first two (sonic isolation, wild critters). Here's the view out my living room window from my computer desk [1].

[1] https://imgur.com/LVna5KN

> If every major tech company in the Bay Area switched to remote work, allowing employees to work from anywhere they wanted to as long as they stayed on the same schedule as those who remained in the Bay Area offices, my guess is that there would be a large exodus.

Yes, but the problem is that many companies have found that remote work is significantly less efficient.

So if you need to cluster your work force somewhere, the Bay Area is probably where you'll have to given the desires of your top people to live there.

> If you believe housing prices are a core problem to the growth of your business why continue to grow in the bay area rather than try and move to a less expensive region of the country?

We also do that! Stripe is hiring engineers in both Seattle and Dublin, and for other roles in many other cities. Please apply :-). https://stripe.com/jobs

That said... this issue isn't just (or primarily) a Stripe issue. It's a broader social and economic problem. Even if Stripe is okay, we want to help fix the larger issue around us.

Do you see any value in a bunch of companies of different specialities planting a flag somewhere and building heir own infrastructure (university, town, housing)? It feels like it could be cheaper and better for everyone’s quality of life.

The history of corporate funded cities (or even government planned ones) is not good. It takes far too long to generate a real community / cultural center vs. the time spans corporations want to work in. Also, the city governments would be highly inclined to align with the interests of the companies, not the residents, which is not a recipe for a fun place to live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia

I’m definitely aware of the history! I’m wondering if there can be mitigation’s put in place for handle them

Places in the UK that come to mind are railway towns -- Crewe, Swindon, Doncaster, Ashford. They all tend to be doing fine now, despite starting off as a town built around a single employer.

I don't think anyone's come up with a great substitute for the decades of organic growth and iteration necessary to make a compelling city. Setting aside a deliberate corporate sponsor, how many compelling new cities really started in the last 30-40 years, even by accident? E.g. below 25K population at the start, over 250K at the end.

E.g. I looked through this list, and at least at quick glance it seems like they were all fairly major cities 100 years ago. http://www.businessinsider.com/us-news-best-places-to-live-i...

Much of SE Washington was built around government projects. A tech town with smart people, but low cost of living? Tbh I think it would go well, and possibly positively impact any existing communities near them.

Let's play this out. You create a city of say, 100K, composed of employees from Google, FB, Salesforce, etc. Where do they eat? How much will housing cost given your average income will be several times that of a "normal" city? Do you spread them all out in single family homes (and have massive traffic) or do you force them to live in high-rises?

Where do the restaurants, and arts, and culture they need come from? Who works at those institutions, and how do they afford to live in that city? (Or do they commute from somewhere else?) How do you fund the international airport that's going to be a must-have?

I think it's possible, but I'm unclear how it would actually lead to a low cost of living. It sounds like most company towns - sprawling, lacking the kind of culture that people want from a city... reminds me of Plano, TX, where JC Penny moved in the 80s, or Bentonville, AR, or Sidney, NE (where Cabela's is HQed).

Companies would have a really hard time hiring highly-educated, high demand workers to move there vs being able to live in say, NYC, London or SF. It's not enough to just offer cheap housing - you have to offer a high quality of life, plus jobs for spouses, and good schools for their kids.

You’re probably right. I’m wondering now if something smaller scale can happen in an established city but with lots of room to grow. If you need “critical mass” of talent on an area, send people there! Build things that keep educated people around.

That's really the problem, at least here in SF. The tech industry needs highly skilled employees, rather than local residents. So wherever they land, they bring in a bunch of new people who also need housing (and have high incomes.) I don't think that's inherently bad - but if your city has a bounded housing supply like SF, it's inevitably going to lead to rising rents and displacement of existing lower income residents.

(Contrast that with say, auto manufacturers, who would maybe bring in some managers when opening a plant but would also employ tens of thousands of locals, raising the incomes of the existing resident more than bringing in new transplants.)

Seattle isn't too far behind SF with regards to housing (according to recent press at least). I've been wondering for years: could the larger employers in SF do more to coordinate which cities are expanded to? I'd be willing to change locations if my (tech) employer gave me the option, but others might have concerns about putting 'their eggs in one basket'. If 10 SF based companies all opened an office in the same city, would more people consider the move? My hunch is yes and I'd love to see this theory tested :)

Rents in Seattle have stayed relatively constant over the past several years despite adding tens of thousands of residents because many new apartment buildings have been built.

However, home prices (including condos) have risen drastically because of the limited supply. There's no new space for single family homes, and because of a Washington law which increases liability for developers, few new condominium buildings are built.

Yes, SF has physical limitations related to the geography being surrounded by water on three sides and mountains on the fourth side.

Starting a 2nd Stripe Headquarters in Downtown San Jose near the proposed Didiron Transit Village like Google is would be huge [1]. Those without kids will be able to live in Downtown San Jose which is going through a mild renaissance (i.e. area around San Pedro Market) and those with kids will be able to commute in from Morgan Hill/Gilroy in 20 minutes, and Modesto in 20 minutes once HSR arrives. Execs/VCs could take Caltrain or an easy non-rush hour drive on 280 to shuttle between SF and SJ.

Downtown Sacramento is also pretty happening downtown these days with a mix of trendy historical areas that could easily go hipster. And has UC Davis providing a strong student inflow to the area.

[1] https://www.curbed.com/2017/12/5/16738120/google-san-jose-ca...

With all due respect to the people who think this is _the_ defining issue of our generation, I think you are wrong. Climate change is the biggest issue of our generation, period.

By housing, we really mean land use. We inherited from our grandparents a society built around cars, and restrictive zoning that prevents society from rebuilding away from cars. Just look at the zoning maps, how much of San Francisco is limited to 40 foot height limits (35 foot if you’re building a single-family house) and 1 or 2 homes per 2500 square feet parcel. http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps

Without enough homes near jobs, and by not allowing homes to be built without dedicating lots of space to parking, we encourage mega-commutes. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/22/1617782...

@pc: Any consideration to closing your SoMo office (similar to what Automattic did [1]) and migrating towards a fully remote org? That would improve the quality of life of your workers currently required to be near SF by allowing them to relocate to lower cost of living areas, as changing California housing policy and seeing the results in lower housing costs due to denser construction is going to take decades [2].

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/automattic-closes-san-francis...

[2] http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-are...

Disclosure: Worked for a popular and well run fully remote startup for two years.

> That would improve the quality of life of your workers currently required to be near SF by allowing them to relocate to lower cost of living areas

I don't think you can assume that people would consider this to be an improvement in overall quality of life, especially when many (or most?) current employees joined the companies presumably knowing they would work in SF.

I personally enjoy seeing my coworkers in person and I know others on my team have requested more face time with coworkers in other offices.

As long as you are comfortable knowing this problem won’t be fixed for you, but maybe your kids, that’s a fine stance to take.

It’s reasonable you spend your money as you choose. It’s irrational for a company to pay you more to be in SF when they can pay talent less that chooses to live elsewhere.

> It’s irrational for a company to pay you more to be in SF when they can pay talent less that chooses to live elsewhere.

There’s almost no way its true that they can get the same talent for less elsewhere. You’re arguing that somehow every major tech company is simultaneously irrationally acting against their own very strong profit motives.

I don't think many of them have bothered to try.

>I personally enjoy seeing my coworkers in person and I know others on my team have requested more face time with coworkers in other offices.

If you had to choose between the two... would you prefer seeing your co-workers, or being able to work literally anywhere you want?

I don't think you can just claim an improvement in quality of life. I'd guess that one component of choosing Stripe is because said workers want to live in/near SF.

So one thing I always have trouble with on this debate is that it feels totally one-sided. There's smart people on the YIMBY side making the case for building. But then NIMBYs are always portrayed as a caricature of the self-interested rich guy. So I read this article and then I click through to http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu... this article and I see lots of poor people opposed SB 827 as well. But even then there isn't really a strong op-ed or anything like that making the case against YIMBY. Where do I go to read that? If you're a YIMBY what's the toughest NIMBY article or argument you've come across?

The arguments I've come across fall into three buckets: neighborhood character, traffic/infrastructure, and (my personal favorite) supply and demand doesn't apply to housing. I suspect the real root is a fear of change mixed with greed.

The best I can find of the SB827 opponents is statements like this: http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827

The anti-development left is, for a variety of reasons, not terribly visible. Poor people of color lack visibility in the first place, and so do the more extreme leftists. So you multiply those together, and you're not going to get a movement that commands a lot of attention.

The other issue with finding unified op-eds against YIMBYs is that these battles are literally fought building by building. If you really want a detailed look at the debates that showcases both sides, you'll have to start reading more local news. NIMBYs are generally quite happy to acknowledge that there's a statewide housing crisis, but they'll refuse to build anything in their own neighborhoods. NIMBYs don't need to be a unified force to get their way. Whereas, YIMBYs seeking to enact statewide change via bills like SB827 do.

Poor people of color don't oppose development, it's mostly upper middle class whites:

"77% of Latinos, 69% of African Americans, and 64% of Asian Americans support building more housing in their local areas, compared with 53% of whites.”

http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-aff...

And that's why YIMBYs like me like to call the leftists who oppose building more housing "fauxgressives."

  ...oppose development, it's mostly upper middle class whites

Wait for it...

  53% of whites (*support* building more housing)

Your own quote literally belies your claim. A valid conclusion from that source is that "whites support more housing but at lower rates than (other ethnicities)", but that's not opposition.

Huh? The claim was that the people who oppose development are predominantly upper middle class whites, not that a majority of white people oppose development.

But the chosen quote doesn't support that claim.

You said it "literally belies it", not that it fails to support it.

"belie (trasitive verb)

1 a : to give a false impression of: "Her gentleness belies her strength."

b : to present an appearance not in agreement with: "His manner and appearance belie his age."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/belie

To say "it's mostly upper middle class whites" does give a false impression of what the study said.

Do you have other sources that support that statement?

Oh believe me, they are HIGHLY visible everywhere it counts: local committee meetings, elections, city hall, etc.

You just don't see them because "visible" to us here means posting on HN or Medium or Twitter.

There's just a huge gulf between the local and global people that we need to transcend.

Of course I know anti-development people are the ones most likely to show up to public meetings. I've gone to plenty in Palo Alto, and I canvassed for a pro-growth slate. I'm not the kind of apathetic techie who only reads social networking sites, and I'm annoyed that you seem to have missed the part where I suggest interested parties read more local news. But NIMBYs generally don't have a real argument against development the way anti-development leftists do, and that's what I meant by visibility. You're not going to see a NIMBY write a coherent statement, and publicize it to as wide an audience as possible, the way a DSA chapter would.

IMO,

When you account for political clout, the wealthy residents of Marin and Santa Monica have much more influence in the process than the tenants in Boyle Heights or East Oakland. The former uses the rhetoric and coopts the message of the latter to further their exclusive tendencies. When you look at the cross tab data, poorer people in California are much more likely to support more home building, and the people who skew "anti-building" are usually white home owners over 60 years old.

The big issue that we seem to have in SF is that the neighborhoods that historically the poorest and most neglected (the mission and soma) are basically the only neighborhoods that are zoned for a reasonable density of new construction, while the wealthiest neighborhoods (pac heights, west portal) have been able to get ahead of the planning process and ensure that they will be able to remain low density. We should be building new housing in wealthy exclusionary neighborhoods like the west side of LA, and much of SF instead of allowing it in a few formerly industrial areas.

* If you're a YIMBY what's the toughest NIMBY article or argument you've come across?

"We have 100 years of law, cultural, and financial precedent for our NIMBY actions and decisions, supported at all levels of government and the financial sector." When you're packing that kind of heat, your don't need a strong argument.

From my discussions with coworkers on the NIMBY side the real reason they were so interested in preventing new construction in their towns was to keep the children of poor people out of the schools their own kids were going to more than to raise the values of their houses. And some fears that the sort of people who would move into cheaper housing would cause higher crime rates.

NIMBYs deploy a range of shifting rhetorical arguments (concern trolling, strawman etc) but in my observation the principle motivation is fear of change and the negative externalities of increasing population ... traffic, parking, what if the new people are different from me, etc.

Money is part of it but less than many assume because (1) home equity is paper wealth and many owners can't afford to move due to Prop13. and (2) the way to actually maximize land value is to upzone, so NIMBYism not exactly optimal in terms of economic self-interest.

>traffic, parking, what if the new people are different from me

those all seem perfectly reasonable

not at the cost of decent housing options for people across a broad range of lower/middle incomes and also not accommodating baseline population growth regionally.

Not really. Your right to an unchanging neighborhood absolutely does not eclipse the right of a long-term renter's ability to stay in their community, or the right of a newcomer's desire to move to a better job. Plus, climate change. Sprawl and traffic are bad for the planet. California will never be able to meet its CO2 reduction targets if it does not discourage more driving, which we can only do by shortening the distances between where people live and where they work, and compressing the areas people live in.

"Your right to an unchanging neighborhood absolutely does not eclipse the right of a long-term renter's ability to stay in their community, or the right of a newcomer's desire to move to a better job"

Aren't the tech newcomers the ones that are threatening the long-term renters more?

The connection between NIMBYs and displacement goes like this: newcomers come in and increase prices of rentals, NIMBY homeowners refuse to build more housing, long-time renters are displaced by the newcomers who can afford more. Simple supply and demand.

Tech is certainly part of the problem, but California has been underbuilding for the past 30 years. This problem goes way back, and it was made much worse by Reagan's massive cuts to HUD back in the 80s.

And all perfectly addressable. YIMBY policies typically addresses housing first, but also understands that parking/traffic issues also happen when cities grow in size. The NIMBY point that "these things are bad and will only get worse!" presumes that there's not changes made to address those as well (increased public transit, bike initiatives, parking garages).

That said, if your issue is strictly xenophobic/culture shift, sorry but you can't legislate demographics (and maintain a moral high ground). The idea that new people will have a higher rate of criminal behavior, this can again be addressed with deterrents towards criminal behavior rather than deterrents towards population growth (which isn't going to be stopped, just exploited using by those in control of the current housing supply)

>you can't legislate demographics (and maintain a moral high ground)

You can indirectly, and you don't need to have a moral high ground. I wouldn't care about that, I would only care about my wellbeing, the wellbeing of my family, and the price of my house.

It depends on the type of housing being built. A lot of new housing being built is unaffordable two bed apartments aimed at higher earners. Along with the YIMBY campaign a percentage of the housing needs to be affordable to lower income people in a city.

Also better public transportation would help so people can live further away and easily commute to city jobs.

The DSA LA statement linked in a sibling is good, but the simplest argument against YIMBY-ism is that re-zoning is demonstrably not a panacea. America has weird laws, many other countries do not. Popular cities are still ultra-expensive around the world, in spite of development.

If you want to actually solve housing problems, you need a much much broader approach than simply allowing private development which, in absence of other incentives, will be almost entirely luxury apartments.

True dat. Supply is necessary but not sufficient. I don't think this is too popular amongst YIMBYs, but some of us do support limited rent-control for the sake of displacement protection.

There are a lot of different ways of adding supply:

http://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-w...

> Popular cities are still ultra-expensive around the world, in spite of development.

Not nearly as expensive than popular cities in the US.

To be more precise, many non-US popular cities have a lot more supply of rental units at low cost than most US popular cities. The cheapest apartment available to let immediately in many non-US cities is far cheaper than the cheapest apartment available to let immediately in, say, Los Angeles area or SF.

For instance, there's apartments you can let in Tokyo for $500 (or even less!) (https://resources.realestate.co.jp/rent/what-can-you-rent-fo...) but there's literally no equivalent in the US. Like at all (if you find a counterexample please let me know!).

That is why allowing dense and tall development (free of NIMBY interference) matters.

For one thing, those are single rooms--about $200 sq. ft. Also see Singapore and Hong Kong. (It's difficult to make these comparisons though because of different local wages and exchange rates.)

Yeah, but that's a shoebox.

It's an apartment with a kitchen and bathroom and bedroom, not a "shoebox". If you don't want to live in one, that's fine, but prohibiting this kind of housing altogether is a horrid idea.

In America, we don't even have the option to live in that sort of apartment, we instead can only 1) rent a room in someone else's house (and be at the mercy of their awful idiosyncracies and have negligible amounts of privacy) or 2) not have a place to live at all.

> but there's literally no equivalent in the US.

You’re kidding me, right? How hard did you actually look? You can find loads of $500 or less apartments (real ones, not like the shoebox you linked) in the US, and you don’t have to live in the middle of nowhere. Here’s a bunch in Raleigh, NC, which is part of a major tech hub (Research Triangle Park):

https://www.apartments.com/raleigh-nc/under-500/

The US doesn’t have a housing affordability problem, we have a problem with everyone and their brother, regardless of income level, thinking they should be able to live in heavily populated, high cost of living cities.

> The US doesn’t have a housing affordability problem, we have a problem with everyone and their brother, regardless of income level, thinking they should be able to live in heavily populated, high cost of living cities.

The US also has a problem with home-owner NIMBYs imposing their ideas with the force of law on what kind of housing should be allowable on other people's property.

Yes. I have come across a number of SF YIMBY types who used to live in NYC; they seem to think scoffing at SF's shorter buildings is sufficient argument. I've never understood their theory though. Is it that if we build up as high as Manhattan, we'll suddenly have Manhattan's low rents?

Their analysis often seems to me to be of the same level as the multitude that thinks the solution to traffic is building more freeways. Yes, the first-order effect is more capacity. But what are the second-order effects?

It’s ridiculous how Manhattan is always brought up as the thing to avoid, when Manhattan has much more humanity and interesting activities than San Francisco.

The problem with Manhattan is that zoning trapped Manhattan in amber, along with most of the cities in the US, so it is no longer responsive to grow with demand.

> It’s ridiculous how Manhattan is always brought up as the thing to avoid, when Manhattan has much more humanity and interesting activities than San Francisco.

Those are inherently subjective assessmentd, and I suspect thst people who choose to live in San Francisco instead of Manhattan often disagree with that subjective assessment.

I get that some people prefer Manhattan. I don't see that as an argument for why SF should become a clone of Manhattan.

This seems like an odd thing to say, in that I didn't say we should try to avoid Manhattan.

That's because the "debate" is a disingenuous farce. There is no such thing as a YIMBY. There are people who want something that someone else has and people who have something and are trying to keep it for themselves. There is literally no one volunteering their own backyard—it's always someone else's.

I've yet to see the YIMBY who rallies everyone in their building or on their block together and collectively agree to be voluntarily displaced so they can demo the building(s) they are in, build one that is taller, and move back in several years later.

I've yet to see the YIMBY who comes to a planning meeting and votes to have lot directly next to them rezoned so they can deal with construction for the next two years. I've yet to see the YIMBY who just purchased a home at the height of the market with a view of the GG bridge and who then votes in favor of rezoning the lot across the street so that it's taller and higher density than their unit, which blocks their view, natural sunlight, and decrease their property value.

All I see is people who live in Oakland trying to rally people to rezone areas of San Francisco. Or people who live in The Mission trying to rally people to rezone the areas around Golden Gate Park.

We need more housing. There are areas that, from a planning perspective, should definitely be rezoned for higher density housing. But the people who already live there don't want that. And well, they live there.

One of my favorite areas in the city is the Sea Cliff area. The one mile stretch of land that faces the water contains only about 30 homes. Half of them are vacant because they are investment properties. On any given there are probably like 20 or so people on those cliffs. That same amount of land in NYC would house thousands of people. But if you want to take the YIMBY movement to the extreme why don't go ahead and try to rezone that area. Displace a few dozen extremely rich people and we can house literally a thousand families.

I live in Oakland, in an expensive neighborhood near BART full of single family homes, and very much support rezoning my neighborhood to allow for 4-6 story buildings, and would take those buildings on my own block. No, I am not willing to tear down my own house and inconvenience myself for years while building a 4 story multi unit building. But I would wholeheartedly support a neighbor doing so. I want more people in this area, I want the commercial activity that higher density brings, I want the added demand for public transit investment, more restaurants, more diversity, etc. That is in stark contrast to the typical NIMBY view. So you can call it something else if you want, but there are definitely differences between mentalities.

Right, you support it on the other side of the neighborhood. You support in the case where you get all of the benefits and bear none of the costs. I do too. But I'm not so obtuse that I'm going to pretend that I'm part of the some kind of altruistic housing movement.

You keep expressing this false dichotomy up and down the thread. Please engage with charity.

The argument being made is that the law shouldn’t forbid, or through burueacratic heel dragging prevent, my neighbor from selling to a developer to build a tall building next to me.

You said, “The NIMBY’s and YIMBY’s are the same.” In this regard, dougmccune appears to very much disagree, and you’re just dismissing his argument that he’d be happy to have developers build next to him, by claiming that because he doesn’t plan on selling his house, he’s just being a NIMBY. That is very much not where the locus of the argument is.

No one is proposing that we eminent domain the whole of Nob Hill, and force everyone to move who doesn’t have any intention of selling.

The law doesn't forbid you from selling to a developer. It's not about personal property and who you can sell to. You can sell to whoever you like.

Local planning code determines what can and can't be done, not who you can sell to. This is true everywhere.

And I actually don't think eminent domain (over time) is a terrible idea. Make the area around Golden Gate Park look like Central Park and your housing problem is solved.

The law doesn’t forbid you from selling to a developer, but the law does forbid the developer from turning a single-unit house into an apartment. Or even a duplex, a lot of the time. Just look at the zoning maps. Around Golden Gate Park, the height limit is 40 feet, and a lot of it is single-family zoning. http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps

A lot of the time, it is more practical to take that single-family house and turn it into a fancy single-family house. Satisfying gentrification. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/25/17277290/glen-park-home-expe...

I literally said I support rezoning my block and support someone building a 4-6 story building next to my house.

> Right, you support it on the other side of the neighborhood.

He didn't say that at all. In fact, he said if his neighbor decided to build higher density he wouldn't oppose it.

You keep saying there is no difference, but there is a very simple and obvious difference: the YIMBY position supports upzoning everywhere, including where they live. The NIMBY position does not support that. It's about changing zoning to allow for more density, not about any particular new building in any particular location. Saying that one has to demolish their own home before they can support upzoning is nonsensical.

I live in the Mission in a three story building and would be fine with someone building a six story building next to or behind mine.

Do you own the house you live in?

Yes

Do you think the value of your house would go up or down with this zoning change? (totally fine if you think it would go up! I suspect it would up and am curious if you agree)

I honestly don't know. I can see arguments in both directions, maybe more building makes everything more affordable and my property becomes worth "less" or maybe it results in nothing but expensive condos and my fancy neighborhood just gets fancier. I'm in the incredibly lucky and privileged position to not have to care that much about my personal home's property value. I spend a lot of money to live where I live. If I was interested in choosing where I live in order to maximize my wealth I'd move to a state with no income tax. Instead I choose to live in a place I love (both the Bay Area regionally and Oakland locally) and want that place to be as great as it can be. I think more people makes this place better. I want kids for my kids to play with on our block. I want empty storefronts to be full of new restaurants. I'd like my neighborhood and the Bay Area to get more affordable so my friends don't have to move away when they have families and are hoping to upgrade from a one bedroom apartment. I'd take a sizable hit on my property value to make that happen.

I also live in Oakland.

It's interesting to think that if prop 13 was repealed, it would cause a ton of supply to come to market. So it wouldn't necessary "change anything" except all that supply might depress prices a bit. Funny how that works. Same house, same benefit, just a lot less price.

so your position is that neighbors should have defacto veto rights over their direct neighbor's property?

Also, do you count someone who is a tenant and not a land owner as "someone" in your diatribe above?

I support the position that the people who live in that locality should determine what happens there. In a sense, I support the status quo—because that's the way it is right now. But instead we call that NIMBYism. The whole YIMBY movement is trying to move things up a few levels so that people who live outside of a building/block/neighborhood/city can determine what happens within.

Again, how about the people who own the property should decide what happens with it?

The YIMBY movement is trying to move things down to the appropriate level.

It's literally not. The attempts to pass rezoning laws are moving up (e.g. SB 827) to the state level now because all local attempts are failing. Every time someone tries to build up outside of SOMA it fails and people cry about the NIMBYs. But NIMBY in almost all these cases is just another word for local resident. Just a few weeks ago a group called Mission YIMBY was advocating for rezoning the Sunset and Richmond. Like, how obtuse can you be?

I'm not talking about who sets the zoning laws, I'm talking about who makes decisions re: a particular property.

If you're into local control and people close to the ground making decisions, no one is closer and should know better than the literal property owner. If kicking zoning laws up to the state level helps empower property owners than it absolutely is giving more local control.

People who own property can't do whatever they want with it. That's true everywhere.

This is 100% about zoning laws. About what can be done with a particular piece of property and what can (and can not) be built.

The reality is when people buy a property, they buy a neighborhood too. That's true all around the US. You have the right to veto a liquor store popping up next door. You have a right to veto a lot of things. But naturally its a grey area. If you can get enough of your neighbors to agree, you can build a higher building too. The support needs to be there.

When someone is moving out of a property, they have very little attachment to what happens to it (other than profit) - unlike their neighbors. It makes sense the neighbors have some say.

No, it's not true all around the US. There are plenty of places where if somebody buys a property, it's theirs to do what they want within with rules set by the government. There are places in Texas, for example, that don't even have zoning laws. The interference by local communities is not a universal thing.

Texas still has deed restrictions that prevent corner stores in residential neighborhoods, density restrictions, buffering ordinances, historic preservation sites, lot size restrictions, and other things like work similar to zoning laws.

That would be a valid position if all the investment into local amenities were at local level. We all pay taxes to build a light rail line, or pave the streets, or maintain the parks, or even create enough demand for shops/restaurants on the main street of a central, single family zoned neighborhood that would never generate enough demand from locals only. The entity that creates the amenities (the city, or the state) should have a say about development around these amenities.

Another aspect of this is that upzoning will still allow locals to decide... it's not magic, the buildings don't just become skyscrapers when you upzone. The locals have to have a preference to sell to the developer who would build those. All you do with zoning is allow some locals dictate to others what they do with their land, based on semi-accidental status quo.

How can you try to claim the moral high ground re: "someone else's" property while supporting zoning laws literally prevent people from doing what they would like with the property they own?

I don't claim the moral high ground. I'm just saying that YIMBYism is a farce.

We need more housing. We should rezone certain areas. But we should be honest about it. This is a needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few argument, not some fake pseudo- altruistic bullshit.

> not some fake pseudo- altruistic bullshit

Ha! Welcome to SF. The city that pretends that letting homeless people shoot up and overdose in the street means that we are respecting their right to live the way they want. In any decent society we would be helping these people, and we would disrupt their destructive way of living, which is destructive not just to them but to society as a whole (public health concerns, needles and human excrements on the street, etc).

But...electric scooters are the current biggest problem for the city administration.

Edit: to the downvoters, care to explain your disagreement?

I did not downvote, but this seems like a tangent.

It appears you're saying that "A YIMBY's only valid political stance is to advocate for the destruction of the building they live in, otherwise they can be safely ignored."

I'm assuming I'm wrong, and I sincerely hope I am. "Saint or GTFO" arguments are pretty facile.

I'm saying drop the fake YIMBY nonsense and just be honest about it. Stop pretending like we are all in this together and you are going to bear the cost the same as everyone else. It's Yes-In-Your-Backyard. It always has been and there's nothing wrong with that.

I 100% support rezoning. Just not in my area.

Do you rent or own a home?

I rent.

Using a literalist expansion of YIMBY doesn't seem constructive.

Do you demand the same locality standard for people who block building housing and/or upzoning in places that aren't their domicile or directly adjacent to it?

In your view, how close does someone need to live to construction to have a preference about whether it happens or not? It sounds like your metric is "they should be made personally miserable, so that they regret asking for it in the first place.", which is begging the question a bit.

Don't call your movement YIMBY when the YIMBY position is the exact same as the NIMBY one, but you want to feel morally superior. Both support building as long as they don't have to bear the cost. NIMBYs in the Marina support building in The Mission the same way Mission YIMBY supports building in the Sunset and Richmond.

I live in Nob Hill. There's a unit going up across the street from me, but it's not that big and didn't affect me so I don't mind. I went to some of the meetings and had no comment.

I 100% support building in San Francisco. Just as long as it doesn't affect me. And the reality is that's true for everyone. So we should figure out how to actually deal with that reality.

It is absolutely not the same position.

A YIMBY person would say "Yes, I support allowing people to sell their house and build an apartment building".

A NIMBY person would say "No, I do not support allowing someone ELSE to sell THEIR house that THEY own, to build an apartment building".

It is about rules that effect other people's property, and rules that ALLOW people to sell their property.

A YIMBY person does not want the rules to exist, and a NIMBY person does want these rule to exist.

Both would say: I support apartments being built on land nowhere near my home.

I think the point being made is that YIMBYs don't have yards, and they're advocating for policies that they have been convinced could get them yards, and NIMBYs are advocating for policies that protect the yards that they have.

No, a YIMBY person would be perfectly in favor of everyone being allowed to do what they want with their own property.

A contradiction would be if a YIMBY person said "I DON'T want this person to be allowed to do what they want with their property."

No YIMBY person is arguing for restrictions. They are arguing for removing restrictions, everywhere, and yes that means for their neighbors.

I like the reframing to pretend like this is about personal property.

You can sell your property to whoever you want. But there person who buys it can't do whatever they want. That's how it works everywhere. This is about zoning, not who you can sell your property to.

It IS about property rights though.

I do not have the right to build whatever I want on my property, and I would like that to change.

I would also like other people to have the rights to build whatever they want things THEIR property.

How does arguing in favor of rights for property owners make YIMBY people hypocrits?

You are saying that YIMBY people are doing something contradictory. There is nothing contradictory of arguing in favor of everyone being allowed to do what they want with their property.

This is absolutely a moral argument, as it is about people being allowed to do what they want with property that they own. Arguments regarding rights are moral arguments.

Then don't buy property in an area where the community has decided that property rights should have certain limits.

If you want the "right to build whatever [you] want" go move out into an unincorporated area. Don't move to San Francisco and then try to force everyone around you to change so that YOU can do whatever YOU want.

Instead of doing that, I am just going to try and get the laws changed.

There are lots of people who care about affordable housing, and we are growing in political power.

The rich people who only care about protecting their property values and increasing their rent prices, are slowing being outnumbered by renters who will vote to increase supply.

We no longer live in a time where you have to be a property owner to vote. New people in an area have just as many political rights as property owners.

So no, I am not going to just shut up and do nothing. I am going to play to win. And that means voting and trying to change the law.

It will take time, but we are gaining in strength, because there are just so many people who are getting screwed by the establishment political interests. So I am confident that the supply problem will be solved eventually.

I am sorry that people participating in a democracy offends you. And a democracy means that everyone has the same political rights, regardless of whether they have just moved to a city or if they have been there for 30 years.

I'm the lead organizer of Mission YIMBY, and we support building everywhere. We have a particular focus on upzoning all of the exclusionary neighborhoods where apartments are illegal. We'd be happy if the entirety of San Francisco had the same zoning rules as the Mission, because it results in a healthy and vibrant neighborhood.

We want both subsidized Affordable and market-rate buildings built everywhere in the city, including the Mission. We don't show up at the Planning Commission to fight for the market-rate buildings in the neighborhood because they get built without our help. Neighbors still regularly fight subsidized Affordable housing, even in the Mission.

I kinda get the feeling you're misrepresenting a movement with which you have an ideological disagreement.

See, it's this kind of garbage right here. You support building everywhere, but with a focus on neighborhoods you don't live in.

The majority people in the Sunset and Richmond don't want that (as the voting shows).

You're clearly not engaging in good faith, but for everyone else: Grow The Richmond, Build the North, Progress Noe Valley, Castro for Housing, East Bay for Everyone, and all of the peninsula groups ALL advocate for building in their neighborhoods. There are some neighborhoods, like the Mission, Bayview, the Tenderloin, and Hunter's Point that have suffered under racist policies for decades. The same solution doesn't fit everywhere.

You'd know a lot about that since nothing you do is in good faith.

Exactly. In your backyard. Not on top of your home.

What is dishonest about YIMBY? I would totally be fine if the the 50+ year old 4 story apartment building I live in was replaced with a modern 8 story building.

There are plenty of places in SF without beautiful views where the density is low. People may choose to sell their four bed home to be developed into a high rise if the price is good but they are being stopped by zoning laws. Relax the zoning laws and we'll find out if you are right.

The people who live there don't want to relax the zoning laws. They like it the way it is. That's why they vote against it.

Then no one there will sell to build a high rise. What is the legislation for?

I bet no one votes to raise their own income taxes for just themselves. And yet, nearly everyone votes to raise everyone elses because it's supposedly for the common good.

Cost effective housing is for the common good to.

I support more development in my neighborhood.

Actually, in California what people did was vote to raise the property tax rates of people moving into the state without raising their own. That's Prop 13 in a nutshell.

I support more development in your neighborhood too.

So in reality its sounds more like "Yes in someone else's backyard". Which in principle is hardly any different than NIMBY

No one votes against their own self interest.

Plenty of renters vote to constrain and restrict the supply of housing, even in the face of increased demand. That is directly against their own self interest.

Seems to be a lot of caricature and rhetoric on both sides. It comes with any emotionally charged political topic. There are probably smart NIMBYs and dummy YIMBYs too. For some there is not an easy side to pick. Do I want lower housing prices in the Bay Area? Sure. Do I want dense apartments and town houses to be 90% of my options? No way. I’m not sure which side to support or whether to support a side.

The opposite of YIMBY isn't NIMBY per se. You'd need to look for BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) for the opposite view. Or don't, I think the acronym gives the game away.

The underlying motivation for NIMBY is that people who own houses want their value to go up, and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people so that their public schools will be well-funded and full of other upwardly mobile kids, and for their streets and parks not to be crowded.

It's a perfectly rational set of motivations. It's the same reason people move to nicer neighborhoods in the first place. With limited development over period of time you get the benefits of living in a more expensive neighborhood, without having paid the premium for it.

These arguments don't play well in public, especially in a socially progressive city like SF, so the rhetoric gets confusing. NIMBY groups sometimes float arguments such as: building more housing will make neighborhoods less affordable.

Some well-meaning progressive people who don't understand supply and demand are fooled by such arguments, and support NIMBY policies too, so it's not just homeowners. In the end, most people don't know what to think, and gravitate to the status-quo (ie, limited development.)

But if they want public infra to be well funded, then they have to pay their taxes. For the older houseowners, they're paying a fraction of the taxes they should be paying. They can't have their cake and eat it too!

This is a pernicious stereotype and mostly wrong. Have you ever actually talked to a NIMBY? The most committed NIMBYs have lived in the same place for decades and have no plans to sell. They don't care much about property values.

What they do care about are traffic, parking, noise, school overcrowding, and other quality of life issues. Some people simply don't like living in densely populated areas. If you want to win over the NIMBYs then you have to address their concerns rather than just demonizing them as greedy property owners.

It's probably not possible to win over NIMBYs. Incoming population will always create more traffic. Taller buildings always overshadow something. They have almost no interest in letting in more people.

The key is recognizing that it is an inherently selfish constituency, and you have to give voice to the people who don't yet live there or who are renters and less likely to vote or attend city council meetings. The homeownership rate in CA is already bordering just half (53.8%) and decreasing, so this is a growing constituency which just needs to be activated. That's why there's a need to remove local control on density limits, as the constituency probably exists at the state or regional level, but not so much at the individual neighborhood level.

My wife's grandmother is a CA NIMBY. Prop 13 and all.

She just wants things to continue how they are. Paying taxes on her 1970s property value, living in the same place, etc.

I'm pro-YIMBY but I can't say I don't see the NIMBY's point. If you're some average Joe who moved into Cupertino, and now some crazy number of people commute to work through your neighborhood, and you're going to get high-rises everywhere, and the prices of everything around you (groceries, restaurants, gas, etc) will skyrocket, you might not want it.

At bottom I view all of this as a tug-of-war between the whole tech employment system and CA's political environment. Overall I'm pro-YIMBY but you do have to admit the absurdity of trying to cram ever more people into smaller and smaller space when the work is perhaps the easiest to do remotely that there ever was. It all seems sort of silly.

LA/OC and SF are global mega-cities full of people who seem to want to live in small towns in the country, yet choose to live in global mega-cities. It's weird.

It's not weird. SF wasn't a "global mega city" until perhaps the late 90s (it's honestly pretty debatable that it is one today).

If you purchased property in a quaint, romantic seaside town in 1980, and starting in 2012 the global tech industry decided it wanted to make that small town into New York, why wouldn't you oppose it? I'm not saying I agree, but the motivation is perfectly rational.

Honestly, the only irrational thing here is the desire of the global tech industry to cram itself in a 50-square mile patch of land on a peninsula in the Pacific ocean when it could go literally anywhere in the world.

Yeah. I think you and I pretty much completely agree.

Like, I'm probably pro-development on balance, but it seems like a pretty two-sided issue to me. You can look at all the money the companies bring in, the tax revenue, the good jobs, but there are also 50 or 100 or whatever thousand people commuting to work every day. I don't think any town could manage that level of growth well without becoming a completely different place, and not what its residents signed up for. Then layer on all the knock-on effects, like escalating property taxes, overcrowding of schools, huge and growing demand for living spaces, escalating traffic everywhere, and a one-company monoculture overtaking your town, where every birthday party and backyard barbecue is going to turn into talking about work, and it doesn't seem like a great deal.

I think the tech industry is completely stupid to put up with this. It concentrates all the prosperity in one place, forces huge inflation due to contention for everything, and it all ultimately cascades to huge wage inflation.

I am so impressed by Amazon's HQ2 plan. They seem to be the one company willing to do what others aren't because it makes sense.

Hmm... yes I can see that perspective from long-time residents.

Thing is I grew up in the Midwest in the 90s-2000s and SF always felt like a global mega-city in my mind up there with New York and London. That's how I always pictured it mentally even though I knew it wasn't as big. I was just so influenced by the culture it had exported since the 60s counterculture all the way up through 80s-90s hacker/tech culture, etc.

Socioeconomically it's a city that is (was?) poised to become an "alpha global city," but it's possible that the NIMBY-driven excessive and premature housing cost explosion has destroyed that. I already feel like a lot of what made SF great has been driven away. I don't live there, which in a way might make my view more objective. The city no longer seems to be the beacon of culture or intellect that it once was. Maybe for the NIMBYs that was the goal, but in keeping the city the way it was physically they might have succeeded in destroying the way it was socially.

I live in SoCal now and like it down here too. I strongly support action on the housing crisis to prevent SF's real estate hyperinflation cancer from spreading down here. It already has to some extent, but San Angeles (what I call LA/OC/Riverside/SanDiego) has what may be a non-metastatic non-terminal case that could still be treated with a dose of chemo.

I don't actually oppose development (in SF, or California at large). I just hate the hypocrisy and callous, self-interested rhetoric around this subject, and don't believe construction will be effective at lowering prices on timescales meaningful to any of us. SF will have to continue building through at least a few more boom/bust cycles for that to happen.

"Socioeconomically it's a city that is (was?) poised to become an "alpha global city," but it's possible that the NIMBY-driven excessive and premature housing cost explosion has destroyed that. I already feel like a lot of what made SF great has been driven away."

I completely sympathize, but here's the thing: now that I've lived in a number of different cities, it's become obvious to me just how comically limited San Francisco actually is. If you go to London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris...you see these massive, sprawling cities with incredible transit systems and infrastructure. SF is a dinky little geographical backwater. It's landlocked (i.e. "supply limited"), with terrible transit and worse traffic. It's not a place that wants to be a global mega city, nor could it be one if it wanted to be.

I firmly believe that the real solution to the acute housing crisis in SF is other half of the demand equation: eventually, the tech industry is going to come to its senses and begin relocating. It has to happen.

Only when it has to. Nobody likes change.

Apple's going to be here for a while, they can afford the salaries people are demanding to be here.

The trend is already clear and accelerating for smaller firms. No startups can afford to hire here on a 500k seed. You'd be paying 200k/head all-in, you can't even run a 4-person company 18 months on that.

The bigcos will be slow and conservative like they are with everything. But change is already very obviously underway.

commercial enterprise in SF didn't start in 2012,

GAP global HQ, Levi Strauss global HQ, PG and E HQ, Wells Fargo global HQ, Charles Schwab global HQ, Pottery Barn/Williams Sonoma...

Yes, business existed in San Francisco prior to 2012.

This latest housing crisis began in 2012.

The top five US public companies are Apple, Google, facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Three of them are HQ'd here. Netflix isn't top-5 by market cap but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets there before long, maybe displacing Microsoft.

You can certainly make that argument but it's on a whole different level now. Apple is earning 60-80 billion in profit per quarter. Many of the companies you list don't even have market caps that high.

> This is a pernicious stereotype and mostly wrong. Have you ever actually talked to a NIMBY? The most committed NIMBYs have lived in the same place for decades and have no plans to sell. They don't care much about property values.

I have. Among other things, they like to ramble on about the importance of neighborhood character. They're also reliably very, very vague on what they actually think that means. In my experience, it's functionally impossible to address concerns that people refuse to communicate, no matter how much sympathy, empathy, compassion, and kindness you engage them with.

I often find myself thinking "neighborhood character" is code for "freeze my world in amber" and "keep people with different skin color away".

> Some well-meaning progressive people who don't understand supply and demand are fooled by such arguments, [...]

For the laws of supply and demand to be accurate they require that only quantity and price changes. The housing market in popular areas, other than being inelastic, tends to suffer from demand shifts. There is nothing in economics saying that building more housing can't result in neighborhoods being less affordable.

Can you explain the mechanism by which building more housing causes neighborhoods to become less affordable?

There's a popular meme that it makes an area more desirable, therefore increasing property prices. And there's probably some truth to that.

What this fails to consider is that, if a bunch of people are moving to an area, they have to go SOMEWHERE, so it's not a "here vs. there" question, it's "which here will it be?" Proponents like to believe they can somehow put people "elsewhere" without realizing the poor always get screwed when rents rise, and they absolutely will rise everywhere in an uncontrolled and chaotic fashion, if more supply doesn't come to market.

For plenty of people, so long as the answer is "not near me" then the details are irrelevant. You can see the policy mess that results.

Typical collective action problem. Everybody wants to move here but nobody wants to house them.

At some point the business community just has to pull a Bezos and be like, OK guys, fine, you don't want us here, we're packing up, bye. Then see what happens when all those pension and infrastructure payments come due. Hilarity will ensue.

As I said, a shift in demand. Yes, if you increase supply and if nothing else changes there is a decrease in price. But if you increase supply and the area therefor e.g. becomes more popular among people who earn more money or there is more investment in that area, then you have a shift in demand which can lead to an area becoming less affordable. [0]

[0] https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/3-2-shif...

The same mechanism that fills the new capacity realized by increasing the number of lanes on a highway. Utilization increases to fill available capacity.

That’s the fallacy here, that more housing is going to meet or exceed the demand hyper growth-focused companies will continue to produce for employees.

I think it's the other way around. Cities become more desirable to live in (thus causing housing prices to rise). Developers see a new market and capitalize on it.

> The underlying motivation for NIMBY is that people who own houses want their value to go up, and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people so that their public schools will be well-funded and full of other upwardly mobile kids, and for their streets and parks not to be crowded.

It's people who own houses that are YIMBYs, because removing zoning restrictions causes land value to go up. It's people who live in them who are NIMBYs, because they fear density in their neighborhoods will lower their quality of life, and that they will eventually be forced to sell due to a rise in property taxes as a result of their property values rising.

If they're old, that's a scary proposition. If they're young enough that they have kids in the public schools, they're probably young enough that they won't have a problem selling their home for a boatload of profit and moving to another exclusive neighborhood.

In California property taxes are fixed.

It depends on how supply is increased. If you allow single-unit housing stock to be converted to multi-unit, that causes existing homes to rise in price as you say. But rezoning industrial buildings to high-density residential causes existing homes to drop in price. I believe the solution in SF will mostly be the latter, such as converting warehouses in the Mission into lofts.

Also, California's weird laws mean that property taxes don't go up much even when the value of houses rise a lot.

So most NIMBY homeowners are genuinely defending against property values dropping.

I'm gonna say that anyone who throws out something like "people who don't understand supply and demand" likely doesn't understand them past the ultra-simplistic view presented in Econ 101.

The simplistic view is correct almost all time. Given a fixed demand curve, more supply leads to lower prices and less supply leads to higher prices. Exceptions can exist in special circumstances, but they are rare and usually short-term.

Not when it comes to human behavior it's not. The simplistic view tends to assume everyone is a perfectly rational actor, and that there aren't other forces at play.

Even if we accept the premise that the housing market mysteriously transcends the rules of supply and demand, the pidgeonhole principle is going to come into effect. How is San Francisco going to accommodate 5-10 thousand new residents each year when only 2-3 thousand units of housing are added each year. Even if we ignore price, there just isn't enough space unless we build more housing.

I'm saying that the rules of supply and demand are not as simple and as clear cut in reality as they are presented in Econ 101.

This exactly. Who doesn't want to live in a nice neighborhood and have their kids goto good schools? Publicly it may not be a popular stance, but you can bet your bucket that privately this is what most homeowners and aspiring homeowners desire.

And guess what? Most tech workers in the Bay Area want to own a home in a nice neighborhood if they don't own one already.

> and for their neighborhood to be too expensive for poor people

Come on, this (specifically) is untrue. Your average NIMBY homeowner isn't trying to maliciously price poor folks out. The closest you can get to that would be wanting to prevent their property value from decreasing because of eyesores.

While that can be problematic in its own right, it's not malice directed specifically towards folks who make less than $N per year. You'd find the same aversion if somebody making 2x their salary left their home in a shambles.

Folks buy homes partially as an investment, and understandably they have aversions to things that could damage their investment.

Great question. It only feels one-sided if you're getting most of your information from HN and the tech community. CA YIMBY wants you to believe that their opposition consists entirely of old, white NIMBYs opposed to development. That is a misrepresentation. In fact it is CA YIMBY that is mostly white.

The main opposition to YIMBY here is not anti-development. It just prioritizes "affordable" low-income housing development and protection of existing low income housing. Whereas YIMBY, while claiming to know what's best for low income folks, prioritizes building market-rate housing to accommodate the explosive growth of the tech industry. They disagree on the effects of building market-rate housing in lower income neighborhoods.

The best thing to read? That LA Times article is a good start. Others have noted the DSA's stance on this.[1] Here's an excerpt, where they lay out exactly what they'd like to see in a pro-development bill:

---------------

SB 827 can be improved further with the following additions:

Add measures to ensure that new development occurs in affluent single-family neighborhoods and not exclusively in low-income communities with a history of racialized divestment.

Mandate that a high percentage of the new transit-oriented development be designated affordable at extremely low-income, very low-income, and low-income levels.

Mandate that new units built from SB 827 accept housing vouchers.

Include value capture provisions such that value created by public transit development is returned to the public in taxes.

Impose a temporary rent freeze on buildings surrounding new development enabled by SB 827.

Pass legislation to raise funds from short term rentals and to mitigate the impact of short-term rental services, like AirBnB, taking units off the market.

Develop programs to ensure ownership opportunities of new housing in communities of color in order to combat the continued existence of redlining.

Target funding from the upcoming $3B November housing bond to be allocated for land acquisition and the construction of 100% subsidized, deeply affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color targeted by upzoning. Allow not-for-profit and public development proposals a first right of acquisition on upzoned parcels.

Amend the companion bill, SB 828, to study and analyze the racialized impacts of high-end development. Factor race and class impacts into regional housing needs allocation (RHNA) goals.

[1] http://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827

Turns out you don't have to be self-interested or rich to be a NIMBY. Plenty of poor people don't really have a good grasp on supply and demand.

Or maybe they feel that a lot of the tech boom is what caused the increase in population, and they don't trust those people to have their interests in mind when trying to create new housing.

Color that under "poor understanding of supply and demand."

Why? Why would a natural distrust of a group of people who has never seemed interested in their problems or wellbeing before be a "poor understanding of supply and demand"?

Your implication is that it is reasonable for this group to believe that NIMBYism will somehow prevent rents from rising, "because we don't trust tech workers," which is counterfactual. In this case, low- and high-pay renters' interests are almost entirely aligned.

My implication had nothing to do with NIMBYism. Just that they don't trust the tech workers to have their interests at heart.

Its entirely reasonable and possible to believe that neither group will promote an outcome that will help those people.

Not really. I understand that Econ 101 gives a lot of people a mystical belief in the power of supply and demand. But real economies are not governed by one or two simple equations. If they were, building more and bigger freeways would solve traffic problems. It doesn't. [1]

As an example, look at how many Bay Area companies over the past decades have vigorously opened offices elsewhere, often moving whole slices of their companies to lower-cost areas. They are quite explicit this is due to rising costs. If costs didn't rise, or were rising more slowly, we would have even more demand for housing here. Or, put differently, reasonable increases in supply might not actually help current residents. But they could well increase pain for current residents: more traffic, more gentrification, more destruction of existing buildings and neighborhoods.

So it may be less "poor understanding of certain shallow econ dogmas" and "a strong understanding of what they stand to lose, and how often they've lost at the hands of affluent white people who are sure they know how to fix things". Consider James Baldwin, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Abhj17kYU

[1] See, e.g.: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

I think they (correctly) feel that there is just so much demand that the middle class would quickly buy up available properties and they would be highly unlikely to hit prices affordable to the poor by market forces. This is simply because of the huge desirableness of living in CA and this weather. This would esp be true if the new units were in high enough quantity that the overall area would become safer.

And if the poor live in a rent controlled unit, they don't have any strong desire to live in a similar unit with more occupants on the same lot. They think more like an owner in that sense.

Supply & demand is a great concept but the supply will always be limited by a fixed quantity of land - whether its land in CA, land near transit, land with etc, etc. And some of them may feel the land they are on is hugely undervalued and unlikely to ever remain affordable.

I don't think your "correctly" parenthetical is apt — you are proposing that demand is infinite and therefore supply and demand does not apply. Clearly demand is not infinite because prices are finite. Also, if demand can eat up all of the supply, you are still supply-limited. That is supply and demand in action — you're imagining a scenario in which supply is still very constrained and claiming that prices will stay high. I agree! Supply needs to be less constrained than that to lower prices, which is kind of the general thrust of the YIMBYs.

Yes, rent control distorts supply and demand, leading to higher prices.

Land will eventually constrain, but at the moment SFBA has tons and tons of unused air that is kept off the market by zoning.

Your argument is not very clear to me. They may very correctly realize that when you take how large the demand is + how much land is up for sale + how much could possibly be built on it + which neighborhood they want to remain in... the chance the market will reduce those units to prices that affordable to them... the chances are very low. So its not really a surprise they become NIMBYs.

>will always be limited by a fixed quantity of land

Apartments exist in 3D space. A 2X height limit increase is as good as a 2X increase in available land.

In my city on the peninsula, the argument is that it will overwhelm the schools with all of the new residents' kids. There is also some concern that it will attract the "wrong crowd."

In the meanwhile, schools all over the peninsula are shutting down because of falling enrollment. It’s only about the “wrong crowd.”

Powerful local landowners support local YIMBYism, because it will make them far wealthier than they are already. Their financial clout allows them to dominate the media coverage, and their financing of YIMBY groups gives them an army of wealthy, educated, articulate young people to make supporting their right to build very large buildings look like a populist endeavor.

I think the caricature of the self-interested rich guy is really the most rational caricature. Preserve the neighborhood in amber, maintain home values; this makes sense, this is the majority of the United States. The activists supposedly fighting for low-income communities are so bizarrely wrong that they’re beyond caricature. Fight oppression by seizing control of the apparatus of oppression instead of by abolishing oppression.

A lot of the tenant orthodoxy in San Francisco is based on completely backwards economics. The idea is that building more market-rate housing will increase the demand for market-rate housing even more, so it’s futile to even attempt it. Only housing with guaranteed low prices should be allowed to be built. Completely ignore the hundreds of thousands of homes that used to be naturally affordable, but now are worth an average of over a million each. A major blog for this point of view is 48hills. https://48hills.org/2016/09/debunking-trickle-housing-fallac...

The self-interested rich people do come through, still. Dillon mentions the rally, but he doesn’t mention the wealthy white landlords standing at the head of the rally. He quotes Shanti, who was active in the SF chapter of the DSA, but now works full-time as an activist because of funding from the wealthy white-ish Dean Preston. He mentions a black tenant activist, but he doesn’t mention the bald-faced lies, nor the funding from wealthy white-ish Michael Weinstein. The San Francisco “progressive” movement, if judged by its results, well, rich landlords are successfully keeping their home values, but low-income communities are still being evicted.

The Filipina activist is interesting. I’ve clashed with her in other contexts, and the summary is that most non-English-speaking low-income people are for the ideas of SB 827, but the leadership of the organizations are against it. Some people from the Planning Department held an exercise where they asked whether we wanted more height and density along our transit corridors, and only the leaders said, “No, we are against developer giveaways.” The ordinary poor people want more affordable housing, and they recognized that affordable housing needs to be legal to be built. Loosening the height and density restrictions is how we legalize affordable housing.

In my neighborhood, I think the toughest NIMBY argument is that we are not the organized people of color. I’ve always had a YIMBY point of view, even though I grew up with poor parents, because I want to eliminate the structural causes of poverty. Several others in my neighborhood had a similar experience, and similarly promote more housing. The way the Filipina activist sees it, that makes us “privileged people of color,” so our opinions are not valid. We need to activate the still-poor people to be a constituency for housing; but her organizations have the institutional connections, to legal counsel from SFTU (which also promotes backwards economics), and to other non-housing activities such as immigration and community gardening. I don’t know how to work through this problem.

One of the things that tech companies could have done is to diversify the locations across USA instead of just investing in California. California is subject to earthquakes, potential attack from north korea, insane illegal immigration and overall leftist hippie policies.

It would have been great if all the large tech companies would invest also in Nevada, Oregon, Arizona etc. and give good competition to Calfornia.

I am worried and California's response to housing crisis might end up creating even more worse crisis for us.

YIMBYism, that is, additions to housing stock made by private developers, is a false fix. The idea that additional housing stock is needed is correct, but the idea that more and more powerful landlords and developers will create space for vulnerable people is plainly wrong. More luxury condos, buildings rented by foreign investors that never occupy them as a place to park money, and all the problems of the powerful setting the agenda for everyone develops.

Instead, we need public housing, strict regulation, and yes more units built at the behest of the state.

Plenty of YIMBYs are fine with "do both!": more market rate housing supply, and more subsidized housing for those who can't afford the former. The more of the former you produce, the more you can concentrate the latter on the truly needy, and not people like teachers, firefighters and so on who have good jobs that are important to society.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/03/01/gue...

That is explicitly what's being advocated by Scott Wiener.

While this idea seems appealing, I imagine the market rate housing will crowd out the public housing. I also think that it's fine to give public housing to those that can afford it if we take care of the needy people too. It would mean more money in the pockets of teachers, firefighters, etc.

Oh god I upvoted this for false fix and then saw public housing and strict regulation. Christ.

im not sure how its so easy to be off put by two extremely vague phrases.

just as an example (i'm not saying the implementation is perfect), Singapore's public housing program is/has been very successful

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

Public housing has been a disaster in the US, so it switched to Section 8 vouchers a while ago.

You can simply unvote. Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

You're making a bad faith argument about what YIMBYism is about. Yes, it means more market rate housing, but also more affordable housing development, and more transit.

You say this, but as someone whose a part of many yimby groups that have been polled, the majority of people are in favor of focusing everything being economically created.

I can't speak for individual YIMBY groups in SF, where I don't live. If that's the case in SF, then the movement there is being a bit short sighted.

I do still think the parent is incorrect in what appears to be the claim that market rate development isn't part of the solution at all. Also the claim that foreign investors rent apartments to "park money" is on its face wrong. You can't stash money in a rental unit you don't own. This sort of claim absent evidence borders on xenophobia, IMO.

Economically created housing has the benefit that it pays for itself. If we can’t even get housing that pays for itself, then the system is completely stupid. (Dennis Richards, take note.)

I have nothing against public housing but I don't see how it would help solve this problem. Any land on which the city would build such housing would cost a fortune (whatever a private developer would pay) and the city would either have to charge the current market rate (minus some small subsidy) to make up for this, or rent the units at a huge loss. Given that there'd need to be a huge amount of such housing to have any noticeable effect on the market, you're proposing to completely bankrupt the city.

Public housing can provide a nice subsidy for a small group of people at the bottom, but it can't be used on a giant scale to fix a failed market in which even wealthy tech workers can hardly afford a house. What's needed is to simply build more housing, and to make it cheaper for developers to do so (fewer permits, simpler processes) so that's it's actually economical to build non-luxury apartments.

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