These 95 Apartments Promised Affordable Rent in SF. Then 6,580 People Applied
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Living in San Francisco, or New York, or London is not a human right.
Note: I'm not trolling, I'm a left leaning person which favours basic income and national health insurance, I just don't understand why living in a mega-expensive city should be subventioned by the state. If you can't afford a Ferrari, you buy a Toyota. Why not move to a less expensive place?
Under Prop 13, the assessed value is X when you buy it and can only be increased by up to ~2% per year even if your home went up in value by much more. This chains together over long periods of time, so that if you bought a place 20 years ago you are now paying property tax on at most X * 1.02^20. If the new owner paid you 5X for the home, they now pay property tax against that value moving forward.
I don't think anyone is claiming that everyone should have a "human right" to live in SF. But when looking at the city as a systems problem, creating a sustainable system may require these kinds of measures to allow the right mix of people to live in the city.
The usual argument is that sf needs more housing supply to meet demand, period, let alone affordable housing.
Edit: see zkms, below.
I'm not aware of any studies, but it does seem logical from a system perspective...
The relatively fixed supply of rent-controlled apartments is a random cost-of-living subsidy for low-income workers. Those that "win" can accept lower wages, while the "losers" are forced to compete despite higher cost-of-living (commute or rent). The latter group will get a little more, but not as much as if there was no rent-control. On the employment side, employers may hold jobs open longer hoping for a rent-controlled applicant that will accept lower wages.
Ideally we would have no rent-controlled apartments or enough for everyone that needs it, but anywhere in between is a distorted market that hurts consumers and employees. Eliminating rent control would be my preference, it seems more efficient than subsidizing everyone that needs it (as individuals can choose how to spend their higher wages, whereas rent subsidies always go to rent).
The relatively fixed supply of rent-controlled apartments is a random cost-of-living subsidy for low-income workers
So, human engineering, with totally good intentions. Can you define 'right mix of people' in a non-totalitarian way?
That’s why you have 6,580 people who are bidding on 95 affordably priced homes.
The fact that you have 70 people applying per home is what we’d call a signal that those homes are in demand, the problem preventing more supply coming on line to meet that demand is the zoning laws, again.
uh, well sure I mean there is probably a ton of demand for $100 4Runners too
Unless your idea is that companies shouldn’t take steps to meet demand and instead try to artificially restrict supply?
Of course pretending you're one of the restricting supply businesses while in fact increasing supply (ie. Apple) beats both business models by an incredible margin.
And then there is the business model of enforcing your own position by having government goons (rules or actual goons) drive out the competition, which certainly restricts supply (Verizon/AT&T, Suez, Electrabel, Atos Worldline, Total, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Glencore, Gazprom, ING, AXA, BNP Paribas, ... and then there's this tiny little thing called "China")
There's certainly a place for all of these.
This is all the extreme end of the situation, and we're not there yet, but it's the path we're on in many cities with San Francisco being at the forefront.
You can't have every worker specialize in to a narrow niche and then suddenly remove half of those niches from your society with no replacement and expect it to run smoothly
Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.
Forcing 'the right mix of people' _reeks_ of totalitarian state. Who gets to decide?
Are there going to be income/education quotas? Male vs female? Racial quotes?
Expecting market pressure to take care of everyone is condemning people to die. I agree that the market is more efficient, but that efficiency comes without any sort of humanity. There are people who have no talents that are worth enough in our current economic configuration to earn enough to live at market clearing wages. Should we just let them starve or go homeless because of it?
I also agree that planning a 'right mix' of people does reek of totalitarianism, but the other choice isn't any better.
I don't see how letting the rich choose who gets to live a decent life based on whose most useful to them is any less totalarian when our society is channeling more and more wealth everyday to a small group of people.
(2) Even if you have only market-rate housing, that doesn't mean the people who can't afford it end up homeless. You can just give them or their landlords money. In the USA, that's Section 8.
Economists generally like Section 8. It gets a bad reputation, because the apartments tend to be shabby; but that's a question of the amount of the subsidy, not the delivery mechanism. For a given total to spend, I'd rather put two people in a run-down $1.5k apartment each than flip a coin, put one of them in a $3k apartment, and leave the other on the street.
The real answer is that more housing needs to be built if demand is this high, but for various reasons that seems politically unfeasible for most US cities
Do you want to get USSR? Because one committee plays God and regulates who lives where. Then some other committee, no doubt well-intentioned, will apply the same logic to groceries. And cars. And salaries. And this is how you become USSR.
I don't want people dying on the street. I think more permissive zoning laws would solve a lot of our housing affordability crisis, but not all of it. For the rest, I think subsidies for market-rate housing (like Section 8) are the most efficient and transparent solution, and much less USSR-like than what the linked article describes. What do you think?
You pay teachers more, you pay policemen more, and your taxes go up. You start paying all the waitresses more, the supermarket workers more, the janitors more, your cost of living just goes up.
Wage isn't really an absolute, it's a ratio to the cost of living. So in response to all their food getting more expensive, their taxes going up, etc, you end up paying all your darling tech/finance workers more. Then you're right back where you started. You've solved absolutely nothing, you've just embiggened some numbers.
Dishearteningly, however, people still do this. When people demand affordable rent but do not get it, many still cry "injustice!". This seems to me to be counterproductive as it causes others to wonder what, if anything, such people do not consider to be a human right.
edit: accidentally left out "not" in first paragraph
I'm curious why you think otherwise.
Well, it can be interpreted as an injustice. If you have a society that can realistically provide housing and food for everybody, is it not injust to deny handing these things out? The answer depends on what society you're going for. The optimum path is probably neither the extreme of the state providing everybody with everything he needs , nor a dog-eat-dog world in which the idividual gets nothing, no matter his situation.
I read the other day on the nytimes that a fire chief in the Bay Area makes $500k. Doesn’t it make more sense to pay people better than to create separate classes of people who either pay real world prices or those who get subsidized.
If they can't afford to live in the city then you could not fill the jobs without increasing wages. It's a self balancing problem. Further, higher wages increases the costs of restaurants etc which feeds back into pay.
Planned economies don't work because economies are ridiculously complex. Yet people always want to say 'just this once we need subsidies' for say corn production while ignoring the huge negatives associated with such choices.
My conclusion is that most of our policies are driven by a combination of people not thinking through the consequences and people giving handouts to developers. Sometimes those are the same people :).
(If the funding came out of property taxes, then at least the money would be both coming and going to land owners, but Prop 13 prevents that.)
It would also act as downward pressure on rents as people left the city for better opportunities elsewhere.
Teachers, nurses, police officers, etc.
No kids, no need for teachers or any kind of education system.
Example: every city the United States.
It’s like saying “traffic is good because it forces to government to build more roads.” No, it does not.
Supply and demand is very simple.
Keeping rents artificially cheap is just a backdoor way of keeping salaries artificially low.
...and they consider themselves "left leaning"
Living anywhere near my hometown is simply not an option; I doubt there is a single employed software engineer in a 30 mile radius, and certainly not at the same level of comp.
So, if I want to be a well paid software engineer, I can't live in Iowa. If I want to live in Iowa, I can't be a well paid software engineer. If you want to live in the Bay, don't be a teacher. If you want to be a teacher, don't live in the Bay. If enough folks follow that rationale, Bay Area teachers will get paid more.
These affordable places are "Toyotas". They're not million dollar apartments with doorman and valet.
It's okay to disagree, and these are not human rights in the sense that it's written into the constitution, or in UN conventions. Not everything governments do are related to human rights.
https://housing.sfgov.org/listings/a0W0P00000GRYOoUAP
Apartment #205, income-restricted to between $3258 and $3800/month for a single person, $1303/month. The market units are roughly 3x, though the interior finishes are often nicer. I'm guessing around $700k for a similar condo?
It's a kind of genius. If everyone getting screwed by the SF housing market united, then they could vote for land use changes that would solve the problem. Like, if SF abolished all zoning tomorrow, then a lot of terrible things would happen; but do you really doubt that housing prices would go down? We'd have problems, but not the one big central crushing problem that we have now.
Affordable housing policies divide those people, according to stuff like:
faith in government vs. market solutions
personal eligibility vs. ineligibility for the units
preference between a bad apartment vs. a lottery for a great one
That splits the landowners' natural enemies into warring factions, as we see here.
Because in large US cities, housing is artificially scarce (and thus pathologically expensive). This artificial scarcity is enforced by zoning laws; which prohibit SROs, rooming houses, and apartments with small floor areas, medium/high-rise apartments, non-family roommates, short-term rentals, buildings above a certain height; whilst requiring stuff like parking, solar panels on the roof, and minimum lot/room/floor areas (that have no justification in genuine safety concerns -- these are all regulations that mandate a certain level of aesthetic/luxury qualities).
The people who have a financial interest in maintaining these zoning laws (which prohibit/delay/obstruct construction of any kind of dense/tall/small/inexpensive housing, of the kind that exist without any problem in actual proper, non-US cities) are single-family homeowners who are making serious money off this artificial scarcity situation.
In this system, subsidised housing (which is generally inaccessible without decade-long waitlists, and meeting extremely narrow criteria (such as having proof of income that's in a narrow range between "low enough to qualify" but also "high enough to be twice the subsidised rent")) has a role as a safety valve to prevent enough coordination that could pose risk to this artificial-scarcity regime. This is not idle theorising -- it worked exactly like that to kill SB827 (a CA state law that would have preempted height limits encoded in local zoning law in areas very close to a subway/train/bus station); where "advocates" for subsidised housing concern-trolled the thing to death with concerns about "displacement".
What if you’re divorced and your children live there?
What if you don’t want to move your children away from their school and friends?
What if jobs in your profession aren’t available elsewhere?
What if you’re receiving medical treatment there that’s not available elsewhere?
What if you’re contractually obligated to be there?
There are a million reasons why someone might not be able to simply move to a new city. Nobody has a right to live in a particular building or neighborhood. But there should be somewhere for them to live within a city no matter what their income is. A city shouldn’t be allowed to ban classes of people.
This is a loss for the city because training is expensive. This movement is being repeated across professions.
Instead, the citizens become more likely to complain about the lack of responsiveness of police, and use it to justify their choices to not pay more taxes for those "lazy police."
Cops, teachers, janitors - these are poor candidates for "market forces".
Further there will always be a segment of the population who can't afford to house themselves (note this is much smaller than those who can't afford housing due to the dysfunctional market). As a society we should be looking out for people who need extra help.
Edit: I'm getting downvoted on this. That's fine, but can someone explain what I said wrong?
can someone explain what I said wrong?
How much more are you willing to pay at the grocery store to hire the checkers and stockers. At a restaurant for the cooks, waiters and waitresses, and cleaning staff? For your taxi, your delivery men, your trash men, your utilities, plumbing, construction, road work, and so forth.
Affordable rent helps to keep your costs, as a hypothetical citizen, low as well.
Affordable rent is a way (albeit deeply flawed) of trying to maintain the health of the system. A better way would be to cap profits on property through taxes. Make it too expensive to strip the system of its nutrients.. to continue with the mixed metaphor.
Allowing land to be treated as a gold bar like store of hoardable value will inevitably leads to a restricted supply.
NIMBYism in SF real estate is all about people protecting their $2+ million investments. If the "gold bar" suddenly becomes a major tax liability NIMBYism will dissipate.
Building regs are only a small part of the story.
Many people don't want to live in SOMA though, and the zoning in most of the city doesn't allow for the same kind of rapid, high-density construction.
At the same time, Weiner's plan to designate everything as "transit rich" was effectively crazy and DOA. If you're on the Market Street corridor, it makes sense to have denser housing. Being up to a mile away from "transit" in a city that is only 7 miles wide was a poorly reasoned stretch. He sadly threw the baby out with the bathwater, setting back any rational discussion of upzoning near actual transit.
[1] https://cs7.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2017/11/15/4/151072205515...
If San Franciscans want cheaper housing all they would have to do is allow building the housing already permitted under current zoning laws, and get rid of rent control.
The prices in San Francisco are absolutely insane. My mortgage on a 8,400 sqft commercial building costs as much as renting a closet in SF.
[0] http://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/San_Francisco_Const...
Surely not?