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Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

No amount of money can circumvent the pidgeonhole principle. If the city wants to house all it's residents, then it needs to start by building more housing. Sure, some homeless need extra services, but if there aren't enough units the whole effort is moot.

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This solution doesn't take into account basic supply & demand though.

There is a significant demand for housing in SF & the bay area. If housing is provided for free or even below market, demand will come from far & wide. Barrier-to-entry is basically a bus ticket.

Any real solution needs to at least attempt to balance supply & demand.

The solution isn't too just give away housing for free, it's too remove government obstruction of housing construction and let the market correct itself.

Every single time someone says this, I want to ask them which obstructions they would like to see removed, because everyone answers differently.

So let me ask you, which government obstructions would you like to see removed?

Earthquake restrictions for one.

Seriously though, I was reading just yesterday about how they're developing Treasure Island and it has a high chance of liquefaction (not to mention radioactive waste) because demand for land is that high.

The reports I remember from years ago (circa 2010 or 2012, forget the exact year) were that the city wants to build Treasure Island up to support about 30K people, give or take. The renderings were pretty cool, till you consider the stability of the ground in an earthquake, the radioactive waste and rising sea levels.

This was shortly after the plans for what would become the Transbay Transit Center[1], the Salesforce Tower and the Millennium Tower were approved.

Make your case though, why ditch earthquake restrictions?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/17/us/san-franci...

Height limits

When you want to knock down a one-story building to put 75 apartments next to a train station, the city shouldn't waste four years on stuff like "maybe that laundromat is historically significant?"

Agreed.

Height restrictions are a big one, as is reducing the ability for neighborhoods to reject housing construction. Plenty of groups, like Calle 24, use this in an extortionary manner and block housing unless the developer makes donations to the group or its affiliates.

You and I would probably agree right off the bat on reducing the ability for neighborhoods to reduce housing construction.

However, I have to ask you about height restrictions. There's height restrictions because not everyone wants to live next to a skyscraper, which is well, debatable. I can debate both sides of that.

There's also height restrictions because the bedrock of San Francisco is not uniform across the city. In many areas of the city, I don't think you even can build skyscrapers and expect them to remain stable, as we are seeing with the Millennium Tower and the incomplete dome on the Salesforce Tower.

I could consider reducing height restrictions, certainly, but I don't think you can eliminate them completely.

I think rent control a is a big reason why this attitude exists. A large segment of rents (~70% of them) live in rent controlled units, and thus have no direct incentive to lower rents. In practice, most people probably wouldn't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars extra per month for a better view. But in SF, residents are shielded from that sort of tradeoff by rent control, and the costs of obstructing development are passed off to other people. If residents actually felt the impact of rising rents, the discussion around development would be a very different story.

In cities without rent control, like Seattle, development happens a lot quicker. Over the course of half a decade (2010-2015 IIRC) Seattle added more than twice the number of housing units as SF. Rent control's perverse system of incentives leads cities like SF to shoot themselves in the foot.

Wouldn't it be much cheaper to bus them to a place that doesn't cost much to live?

You probably could make a real nice camp on some dirt cheap woodland for 200 million.

Stack shipping containers 3 high, have one person live in each and have a shower block for every 15-30 residents. Cook cheap in large badges, get some teach for america out there to help them learn to read and write, require each person to spend a certain amount of hours working in exchange for food and housing...

> If the city wants to house all it's residents

The city wants to enable all of its homeless to escape homelessness.

It probably doesn't particularly want to house all of them, either directly (that is, the city itself) provides housing, or even have them housed within the geographic boundaries of the city. Having them acheive stable housing outside of the city would be just as much of a win.

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