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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> “This is a win for San Francisco residents,” Herrera said. “Whether you’re a tenant or a landlord who has been following the law, this is a victory. This outcome frees up more homes for long-term tenants and stops unfair competition in the marketplace. The serious financial penalty is an important deterrent. It sends a clear message to those looking to illegally profit off of San Francisco’s housing crisis: Don’t try it. We will catch you. Most importantly, we preserved more than 45 housing units to be used as homes, not hotel rooms. We are fighting back against San Francisco’s housing crisis in every way possible.”

This city attorney seems... extra.

You know what else frees up more housing units? Letting people build housing does. You know who is responsible for the housing crisis? The city is.

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Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim.

But that’s beside the point, because this is a case about an unlicensed Airbnb. I don’t know what the laws are where you come from, but someone illegally turning their multi-tenant property in a residential neighborhood into a 24-hour motel isn’t someone I have any sympathy for.

Besides, Airbnb is no answer to the dearth of housing in any city. The lawyer is spouting facts. Those are 45 units that would be going to people who would live or work in SF and instead are used to price gouge visitors (relative to the going rent/mortgage rates) who want to save $50 on a hotel room.

Either they're being price gouged or they're saving $50 on a hotel room. You can't have it both ways.

The hotels can gouge them harder, or the hotels can be worth the $50 price, etc

> Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim.

If a government wants your land & they have the cash to pay for it according to some calculation, they can force you to sell via eminent domain. [1] A property owner that pisses off the government may not be a property owner indefinitely.

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

> Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim.

I don't know. Maybe this is just differing philosophies of government, but when I object to the government exercising an authority that only it has, I consider that to be directly a problem with government. Obviously it's useful to look into who else influences the government's decisions, but the direct problem is the exercise of power.

The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it. Maybe you're the home owner who would love to have your home demolished and replaced with a high rise, but the fact that you can't means your community doesn't want to be subject to that, and they've exercised that will through the legal framework where you, too, have a voice (albeit an outnumbered one). We trade authority to the government for it to stop you with legal means so that your neighbors don't stop you with clubs and pitchforks.

> The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it.

Perhaps it should be. That certainly doesn't mean that it is. Do the people of Flint want their water crisis?

> The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it.

That's awfully idealistic! Sure, it would be nice if that were true, as a pure expression of democracy, but I've never seen a real-world government which actually met that standard.

>gouge visitors

>save $50 on a hotel

how the hell can you simultaneously be gouged and save money?

what makes the long term resident more deserving than the short term visitor? why should the rootless pay a subsidy to the rooted?

I mean, that's a fairly easy question to answer.

The rooted pay taxes, provide stability to a neighborhood, and are invested in the upkeep of their properties.

They also tend to be better neighbors than a constant flow of random people who may not care whether they make noise, or disturb others.

I certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned their apartment into a miniature hotel and had random people coming in and out at all times of the day that I'd never seen before.

Beyond that, these units drive up rental prices, and avoid luxury taxes which can benefit locals to enrich the owners of AirBnB.

Visitors spend far more per day than long-term residents. I think there's a high likelihood that their overall contribution to the taxbase greatly exceeds the long-term residents per day of occupancy.

In other words, there's good reason to suspect that having a unit rented out to a succession of short term residents will produce more tax revenue for the city than having it occupied by one long-term resident.

As for stability, I don't think we're in any danger of destabilizing major cities from lack of long-term residents.

>>certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned their apartment into a miniature hotel

This should be decided by the contract you signed with your condo association when you purchased the property, not an arbitrary intervention in private contracts and property by the city.

Also, would it make any difference to you if the steady rotation of guests were not paying? If not, why not make the rule focused on the problematic condition, which is a large number of different people visiting/staying, rather than whether there was financial compensation?

It wouldn't matter if it was the condo across the hall or the house across the street. Just because you own a piece of property doesn't give you the right to do anything you want with it.

That's why we don't allow strip clubs next to schools. Because certain things should be in certain places and not others.

In this case, the people have stated by voting in representatives who've appointed officials who've created zoning laws that they don't want short term leasing without a permit in their residential neighborhoods.

And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.

Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.

It's poor exercise of government power to prohibit a money-making operation, as a way to stop a subset of that money-making operation that has harmful effects. Better to target the harmful activity directly.

>>And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.

That's a different topic. My point was that there's no good reason to assume long term residents contribute more to the tax base, given how much more tourists spend per day of occupancy.

But to your point: who said Airbnb means dodging luxury taxes? And why ignore the loss in tourism when you wipe out the low-cost accommodations market provided by home-sharing?

>>Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.

Remuneration from paying guests is not the only potential motivation for allowing a large number of people to stay at one's place in quick succession. The motivation should not be relevant if the problem is the quantity of people staying. Targeting remnunerated stays exclusively is biased.

When you bought a residential property, you agreed to operate it within certain levels of upkeep, within residential zoning ordinances, adhering to a list of rules the city imposes on you. You didn't settle a piece of land on some unclaimed frontier, and you don't get to change the rules your building, neighborhood, community, city, state, or country imposes on your property just because you don't like them. If you wanted to operate a hotel, buy property zoned for that purpose.

Good point. There is a case that house-use restrictions are consistent with voluntaryism given land is not man-made movable property. The community at large could reasonably argue it has a greater right to govern immovable natural property than the first person to homestead it, given the latter is not an act of creation the way the genesis of other types of private property is.

Anyway aside from the larger political question, I think it's more practical to leave these decisions to individual condo associations. No need to homogenize policy in a diverse landscape.

Why don’t they don’t let people build housing? Voters in the city.

While that's true, they don't have to bend over backwards for those voters. SF supervisors have a lot of leniency in clearing out the construction approval backlog.

It seems...foolish to not bend over backwards for those who control your destiny through democratic actions. Property owners have the most to lose, and therefore the most incentive to keep their neighborhood as-is. I find it hard to fault them for their actions (especially when you're investing seven figures into your home's purchase).

The core problem is that SF property owners value their homes, communities, and property values over the inclusion of additional residents, and that won't change without stripping this constituency of their property and voting rights (which is of course untenable in a functioning democracy).

SF really is in a situation where a regional development council needs to come in and clear out a lot of the low-density housing, but since that's unlikely to happen this story makes me quite happy.

Pardon my snark, but this sounds like eminent domain wearing a velvet glove.

Dude that’s eminent domain _prima facie_.

Look I had to be sure, I've never seen anyone actually suggest eminent domain so casually before. The only times I've seen it have been in grainy, fuzzy news reports from the 80's.

You’re kidding right?

Eminent domain is used daily in the US and around the world. It would literally be impossible to build and maintain a transportation network without it.

Okay but we're talking about razing houses and replacing it not with infrastructure and transportation networks but with more housing in a state with already a quarter of the nation's homeless population.

I have so many questions about what happens in that regional development council hypothetical with astronomically high housing prices and homelessness:

- Do you play benevolent city planner and let current residents in these low density zones stay, redevelop around them? This is already happening without much help needed from the city, hastening that seems to be a good way to add to the homeless population resulting from displaced families fleeing the inevitable raise in property value and therefore taxes, no?

- Do you play well meaning but forward marching city planner who has to watch families move out of their city acquired land and homes, sure probably with a check in hand and a pat on the back hoping they make it-when realistically the market probably, very likely (A) don't have room for them or (B) probably out of their financial range to even relocate to nearby neighborhoods?

I just don't see a path forward here for SF using eminent domain that doesn't come with some very painful outcomes that probably exacerbate the very problem it would intend to solve. An unforced error.

Perhaps I'm overthinking the conceit here, but it's an experience I've lived through, so maybe that explains why my eyebrow immediately shot up.

I don't understand the outcomes of the second scenario. Wouldn't adding housing stock A) make more room for them and B) as a result, lower the cost to stay within the neighborhood

Won't their checks be for fair market value of their expropriate property? So by definition, they should be able to relocate within the neighborhood?

>Won't their checks be for fair market value of their expropriate property?

As someone who's been on the short end of eminent domain for a freeway offramp in north LA, nope. The city tends to hire their own appraisers with their own way of looking at things. Considering that most eminent domain cases run through single family housing without existing homebuilder contracts with the city (at this point, we're talking homes before 1980), there are a litany of ways in which a city appraiser can devalue the house. Yes, of course you can hire an appraiser go to bat for you.

The short and sweet of it is that the city can use things like "you never applied for a permit to build this addition" or "your re-roofing was never replaced with high wind resistant (no joke) tar." At this point, we're talking multiple visits from an appraiser (assuming you can find one willing to deal with city bureaucracy), and lawyer fees to handle the entire case.

That doesn't even begin to address the emotional quagmire of the fact that they knocked on _your_ door. You'll probably need to need to talk to a counselor for that one.

> Okay but we're talking about razing houses and replacing it not with infrastructure and transportation networks but with more housing

Who’s talking about that?

All you have to do, literally, is just stop actively preventing people from building apartment buildings. The market will have no trouble taking care of the rest.

I don't think that's the plan op is talking about... the plan is if you change the housing rules so that the approval to build your apartment is state level rather than local level, then assuming it makes financial sense, developers can come in and buy single family homes on the open market and build something high density in their place.

There's a bill like this every few years, and it always gets shot down. The latest is SB827, which was shot down, too.

https://slate.com/business/2018/01/california-bill-sb827-res...

In general, the problem isn't with people being unwilling to sell to developers; the problem is that even after the developers get the property, they are prevented from developing it in a high density manner.

I actually understand it. Ironically, a San Francisco resident Uber driver explained it to me. She said something like "People like the small city feel without over-population, people like the view from almost anywhere in the city - we don't want to to be another new your.

And while the skeptic in me sees "Property owners don't want prices to go down," I also see the other side now. San Fran wouldn't be San Fran even if we dug deep to have a ton of housing without ruining the view.

There is something to be said for not seeing a single police car until going South at night (or getting pulled over for going South on some street starting with an S "after 9"). There is also something to be said for living around people who can afford to live there (I can't, so don't take this as some elitist techie failing to check his privilige).

After moving here, I see this point too. However, there's very clearly parts of the city that could look like Taipei and the city still wouldn't lose its look at feel.

Feel free to stick all of us Techies in Gigantic high-rises in Dogpatch and Mission-bay to bring the housing costs down everywhere else (and stop playing these band-aid games with Airbnb)

Right - those advocating for more housing have almost nothing to offer the people already locked in. This to me is the crux of the problem.

To be fair, the city attorney doesn’t get to set zoning laws

I read an article that did the math on the SF housing issue (it’s killing me that I can’t find it, but it was on HN).

It’s actually physically impossible to build housing at the rate that SF is growing. Even if you got rid of the politics. Even if there was unlimited land. The issue is that you literally cannot build housing at the skyrocketing rate of growth that SF is experiencing. That’s why this is a crisis, it’s essentially a mass migration to SF.

Please find article so I see check out their sources...

This one? http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/01/steelmanning-the-nimbys...

Yup, that’s the one! Thanks!

"Never let a crisis go to waste."

> This city attorney seems... extra.

Good. Extra is what you need to stand up to SV clout

How do you propose convincing propertyowners to finance their own vertical construction?

why should property owners do that?

Because it's their property

Building housing isn't the solution to solving the problem created by airbnb, as most airbnb units would be competing for tenants towards the bottom of the market, and would likely be rent controlled, when compared to new housing that competes for tenants at the top of the market.

There is good reason why its called the LAW of supply and demand.

It's not the city. The residents of the municipalities do not want to build new buildings.

Is it the residents (many of whom are tenants), or the owners specifically who are resistant to new housing?

I've always heard it was the owners, but as someone who doesn't live in SF, I can't verify.

With an attitude like this, SF will be the next Detroit. Exponential economic curves always turn out to be sigmoids, and when the sigmoid flattens and the economy is carrying tremendous dead weight predicated on future increasing prosperity, the city will be out of options.

Would actually be pretty cool - but SF is far more beautiful than Detroit so, doubtful that it will ever collapse to that extent.

Thats most SF politicians unfortunately.

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