also the local far left does not believe that scarcity and prices are related, and attempts to block new housing on that basis. E.g., greedy developers and/or rich people will never "allow" prices to fall.
Most local politicians are just struggling to placate and/or not piss off a large enough cross-section of those few weirdos that are actually active in local politics so that they can continue their career in politics.
You want to place the buildings right in front of the most expensive ones today. Blocking whatever view they have.
This would instantly cut the value of those places in half or more.
Which for the left should be a huge win. Sticking it to rich people and providing more affordable housing for the normies and probably good set of the super poor.
New buildings wils have to allocate 12% or so of their units to low income housing. Think apartments rental units mixed with ownable ones. Or just all rent.
People use Japan as an example of smart planning leading to more reasonable housing prices over time. In reality what happened to Japan is this [2]. That's the GDP of Japan. Many people do not know that Japan is now going on 30 years in recession. Their GDP was higher 25 years ago than it is today. And so prices naturally declined over time. The reason I mention this is because the same is true of San Francisco. If you want housing prices to decline you'd need to see a general recession sending all prices, including wages, down. Otherwise anytime you create affordable housing it will quickly become affordable as people race to spend somewhat sane prices on housing while earning $75k waiting tables.
Further, the structure of their real estate markets are completely different.
Increasing supply will put downward pressure on price. Econ 101. That other factors apply upward pressure does not negate this.
You may be right about flooding the market with more workers but you forgot to keep going. If all the sudden there are a ton of people applying for these jobs it will drive the wages down.
We have to pay people those high wages because there is a lack of people willing to work for lower wages because of high housing prices.
I'm as commie pinko liberal as can be, aka pragmatic (maximum benefit most efficient way possible).
From where I'm sitting, there is no "Left". Just some temporary coalitions around some topics. I've heard some of the most patronizing, condescending views and beliefs from otherwise "liberal" people. Not even "conservative" (eg traditional principled defensible positions). Just regressive beliefs.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that outside of a small basket of issues, "left" and "right" is case by case, and a person's position on one issue is a poor predictor for other issues.
Without more information, what you just described sounds to me exactly like a supply-constrained scenario. Population can’t grow, so prices skyrocket.
https://sfist.com/2015/12/31/the_worst_and_saddest_of_apartm...
The only remedy to this problem is to increase housing supply.
Good luck...