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.
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.
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
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'm curious why you think otherwise.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.
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