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jack9

> 2,000 more residential option

That the vast majority can't afford, leaving the current status quo.

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>That the vast majority can't afford, leaving the current status quo.

is this a comment on how new housing is supposedly "luxury" housing that is only available to the richest?

As someone currently living in a "luxury" apartment in San Francisco and has lived in normal apartments in several other cities across the US for significantly less money. The only thing luxurious about San Francisco apartments is their price. Build enough houses and the prices of these supposedly luxury apartment buildings will fall. Then they will begin to offer real luxury amenities like a 24/7 doorman, heated floors, etc.

The problem currently is, that high demand cities are too free to add any amount of office space without mandating expanding the residental space by an according amount. If there was a house available for every office place, the market prices wouldn't be that inflated.

They can’t afford them because all San Francisco housing is in high demand, not because new apartments have some irredeemably extravagant physical features. Granite countertops do not take a 700sqft box from $1200 to $4800.

If only wealthy employees can buy the 2000 new housing units close to the big corporate campus, then that means those 2000 workers are moving out of housing that's farther away, lowering prices (or at least slowing price rise) in those farther suburbs.

So yeah, maybe the company janitor can't afford the $1.2M luxury apartment next to campus, but maybe he can afford a $600K house 15 miles away instead of living in his $400K house 30 miles away.

There's some misunderstanding about housing markets illustrated by this comment which seems intuitive to me. Given the luxury pricing, not all the units will be rented (or not for long) because they don't need to be to keep the property profitable. Of those individuals that could afford the price, a large amount will move into the more affordable housing out of personal self-interest. The trickle down doesn't work in the manner described, in any meaningful way. Historically (rather than regionally) it has been working out this way for at least my lifetime.

One could of course tax empty housing. In Hamburg, Germany, you can leave an appartment empty for up to 3 months after that, you are taxed on the base of its rental value, whether you get that paid or not.

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