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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

Prop C baby! Although definitely not “trivial” to pass or implement. Took Marc Benioff to pour in millions and own Jack Dorsey on his own website which was awesome. And a lot of grassroots activism too.

That targeted homelessness, the most urgent issue, and did so by taxing (tech) companies as opposed to wealthy individuals. More generally the approach the city uses is to negotiate with developers for affordable units as a condition of project approval. Taxing the wealthy is an interesting idea but very far from trivial.

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>Prop C baby! Although definitely not “trivial” to pass or implement. Took Marc Benioff to pour in millions and own Jack Dorsey on his own website which was awesome. And a lot of grassroots activism too.

And all that to raise a paltry $300 million a year, enough to build ~700 subsidized housing units, or a drop in the bucket.

>negotiate with developers for affordable units as a condition of project approval

A scheme in which affordable housing activists are motivated to minimize total development to preserve their negotiating leverage, and we "address the housing crisis" by encumbering development to make sure it will never catch up.

> And all that to raise a paltry $300 million a year, enough to build ~700 subsidized housing units

You cite no source and are grossly misinformed about prop C. It will build housing for 4k homeless with just half the budget and the rest goes to services specifically targeted at homelessness.[1]

[1] https://www.ourcityourhomesf.org/

$300m/year: https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

Cost per subsidized housing unit: https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/construction-costs-series

I presented a more optimistic view of what it could accomplish (produce 700 units a year), where your link indicates it will house 4,000 people in perpetuity. After 6 years, my “grossly misinformed” interpretation would have been a lot more bang for buck.

There are so many more than 4,000 people who struggle with housing that the framing of Prop C as some kind of victory is just bizarre. It’s like winning an increase of $5 per retiree in the pension system.

Nope, it’s less optimistic. The 4K of permanent units are funded by 50% the budget over 8 years; you’re suggesting 100% allocated to 5.6K units over the same time, a 30% worse bang for buck.

And you’ve cut the homeless out of the picture. The other half of funds is dedicated to mental health, addiction and other needed services for the homeless population. You’ve completely misunderstood the aims of Prop C.

So you're suggesting that this isn't enough money? Then we'll pass another prop C :)

I’m not suggesting it. Solving housing affordability with BMR requires provisioning a BMR unit for every struggling renter household, i.e. almost every renter household.

Prop C is self evidently not enough money to duplicate every rental apartment, or even half of them. You’re really unlikely to find that much tax revenue anywhere. But you’ll easily find that much private capital ready to build market rate projects with BMR set asides, if it’s allowed to.

This is a token effort, not a serious attempt to grapple with the problem. I’m happy for the handful of people who will be helped by it. But to the extent that it convinces others they are “on the right track” or “helping” it is doing more harm than good.

I think you're convincing no one by saying that it will be doing more harm than good. At this point anything would help the situation. SF is unlivable now.

It's yet another election cycle with the focus anywhere but the colors on this map [0], which are an explicit and unambiguous choice to have precisely the situation we have. This problem is not going to get fixed a few thousand units at at a time.

[0] http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf

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