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Comment by romed | Hacker News Reader

Kinda seeing Jack's side of the argument. Why do we need the voters to partition up the city budget in perpetuity? It's a bad way to run the government.

The city has a far better, far cheaper lever by which it can fix the homelessness crisis: nuke the housing market by permitting 45-foot-tall multifamily buildings on every parcel in the city. The fact that they will never do this tells you everything about that city.

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Yup, exactly. It's a terrible idea to start passing piecemeal tax increases to fund specific programs. And Prop C will only put an expensive bandaid on the housing crisis, absent an actual increase in the housing stock; any homeless you house will just result in displacing lower middle class people.

It's been tried. Huge failures. See Robert Taylor Homes (Chicago)[1], Pruett-Igoe (St. Louis) [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe

Both you and the user notfromhere seem to be interpreting the GP post as suggesting the solution is large public housing projects, it's possible my reading comprehension is really off today but I see no such suggestion. To me the GP seems to be saying that so much as high housing costs are responsible for at least part of the homeless crisis, perhaps less restrictive zoning might help considering that large portions of SF and very large portions of the Bay Area as a whole are pretty low density, at least compared to other global urban centers.

Those are public housing projects. Lifting zoning requirements is a different solution.

Neither you nor the sibling comment I'm not going to bother responding to expended one iota of brainpower parsing my post. This is what an ordinary 45-foot-tall apartment building looks like in San Francisco. This type of building houses the overwhelming majority of San Franciscans, while occupying relatively little land:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7759476,-122.4242439,3a,75y,...

Most of the land in San Francisco is limited by law to short, detached, single-family dwellings. Erasing that regulation will make housing dramatically cheaper.

For other in this thread: 45ft is 4 or 5 stories, not a tower.

Housing at risk populations in huge towers has already been tried tons of times.

Look up Cabrini-Green

45 feet is not a huge tower.

True, but I read it as 45 stories (and thought, maybe not everywhere). Probably others did also.

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