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Comment by xefer | Hacker News Reader

It’s also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable.

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"It’s also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable."

I am an SFBA (Marin) resident with a fairly large financial and personal interest in the health and welfare of the city of San Francisco - so this is something I think a lot about.

I think your point is interesting and should be considered.

Obviously it isn't literally true - clearly there would be a point at which enough housing could be built in San Francisco to hit any arbitrary affordability number.

However, it's worth considering that any politically and physically feasible[1] amount of development might not satisfy the latent demand, nationwide, for a house in San Francisco. It is not inconceivable that there are literally 2 million people in the US that would like to immediately move to SF if housing prices were in line with, say, Minneapolis or Denver.

I also think there might be a corollary to this with regard to homelessness in the state of California. I have read with great interest about the successful "house the homeless" projects that have been implemented in places like Salt Lake City which appear to suggest that you can solve a cities homelessness problem by building enough units to house that population. But what if there are (essentially, not literally) an unlimited number of people willing to be homeless in California ? What if the Salt Lake program really only works because it gets cold and snowy there and, really, there are only so many people willing to be homeless there and you can, in fact, house them all ?

If either of those are the case, I don't know what a good solution looks like.

[1] Including the time dimension ...

What's odd is that you talk to people in the following places who are convinced that an "unlimited" number of people want to live in their area:

* The bay area

* Boulder

* Austin

* Portland

* Seattle

And so on and so forth - and even right here in Bend, Oregon!

I have a suspicion that everyone wanting to live in all those places probably isn't actually true.

There has been a general flocking back into the cities in the last ±20 years.

I don't know about Bend but all other cities you mentioned are desirable urban hotspots with (relatively) plenty of attractive jobs.

I find it very easy to imagine the supply of people interested in moving to all of them outstrips supply by so much as to practically be indistinguishable from unlimited.

There really are a lot of people around and there are as many in not more decaying/depopulating areas to compensate for the Austins and Berlins of the world.

Except for the fact that when you start looking at data instead of imagining, it turns out that it's possible to provide enough supply:

https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons-housin...

Housing in Portland is catching up to demand and rents are leveling off.

Seattle is seeing something similar. The bay area is not, because they fight housing tooth and nail.

>However, it's worth considering that any politically and physically feasible[1] amount of development might not satisfy the latent demand, nationwide, for a house in San Francisco. It is not inconceivable that there are literally 2 million people in the US that would like to immediately move to SF if housing prices were in line with, say, Minneapolis or Denver.

On the one hand, I really don't like San Fran and don't want to move there. On the other hand, well, NYC is eight million people.

I think this effect is a bit more understated for the Bay Area, because San Francisco is only really desirable domestically, and that’s a function of jobs, which the Bay already accommodates by incentivizing commercial over residential development. But there’s a realistic cap to that; eventually industrial boomtowns like Pittsburgh and Chicago reached a more steady rate of growth, and I would expect San Francisco to do the same.

The real places this effect kicks in are global status cities like New York or London, where it’s a status symbol in every country’s elite class to have a vacation home there. It may actually be impossible to supply both foreign and domestic demand for residential via the market.

"There's so much crime that no amount of crime reduction will eliminate it"

"There's so much corruption that no amount of anti-corruption drives will eliminate it"

"There's so much alcoholism that no amount of alcoholism reduction will eliminate alcoholism"

That was my knee-jerk reaction too, but if you read the comment carefully you’ll see “truly affordable”. That’s the key. If we keep doing what we’re doing now, affordability gets worse. If we build at a fevered pace we might be able to keep up with migration and keep prices where they are. Building enough to bring prices down in the Bay Area enough to make it truly affordable is probably not feasible. It’ll take a combination of rapid building and another crash to do that. Or the complete destruction of the tech industry. But it’s unlikely we’ll convince people to allow even a little bit more building, let alone the lots more we’d need to stop the rising prices.

If only half city that could be rezoned from 1 story houses, get some subway lines, and be paid for by taxing the richest people & companies in the world... Oh wait.

That is correct. It’s unlikely we could ever bring the prices down. But if we build new housing for every new job we create, we can at least stop the bleeding and keep it from getting worse. And it will get worse. More people keep coming because there are jobs here. The problem will keep getting worse till we build enough to keep up with migration in.

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