Hacker News Reader

Comment by vgetr | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the problem (“wanting to freeze the city in amber”), but not the solution, at least as the author wants to implement it. The solution would be to deregulate housing (rent control, etc) and let scarcity take over. Yes it’ll be painful for a couple of years, but when all the people who can’t afford to work at the Starbucks leave the city, people are going to start to notice. Wages and home building would shoot up to meet the demand, and things would ultimately level off. This will never happen in SF (the quasi-regulated NIMBYism the author describes seems par for the course), but we’d see some fast results if it did.

View on HN

"Let it get really bad so people notice" isn't even close to a solution. We all know there's a housing crisis; the solution depends on who you ask.

Some folks are going to say "let's have high affordable housing requirements in new projects." They may genuinely want lots of affordable units, or they may want to freeze housing supply and thus preserve the value of their single-family homes. Pro-tenant renter groups may not care about a "neighborhood character" argument, but they may care quite a bit about a "gentrification" argument, which is almost the same thing. Depending on what kind of YIMBY you ask, you could get someone who cares deeply about affordability, or someone who believes the market will fix everything.

All of this to say: this is a political problem about getting enough different groups with distinct interests to work together. Nobody gets a magic wand to deregulate everything, nor would it help.

If creating that coalition is something you care about, join the group the author recommended: https://yimbyaction.org/

>Yes it’ll be painful for a couple of years, but when all the people who can’t afford to work at the Starbucks leave the city

But, that's not how reality works. Instead those people end up working two, maybe three jobs, cohabitating with multiple people and just end up having their quality of life continue to deteriorate. Leaving the city's not necessarily an option.

This isn't a solution. You're misattributing the effect with the cause.

Developers aren't building more _now_ because it's illegal in the majority of the city, and where it _is_ legal, your permits take about four years to get. By the time you're approved to build, the market has moved out from under you.

We have to change the laws that make building illegal, and to do that we have to change the politicians.

Capitalist dystopian dreams. Nyc has mostly unregulated real estate and it is still horrible. Large development corporations create artificial scarcity that rise the price of rent. Everything just rises in cost including minimum wage and just tracks whatever the developers can extract out of the economy.

If the solution doesn’t including bringing everyone along I don’t want it.

NYC real estate is far from unregulated. In fact, it faces arguably even stronger NIMBY pressures than San Francisco and indeed SF has authorized more building permits per capita than NYC for many years in the last decade. Its rental market also had many new controls added this past summer.

Yup, this is correct. NYC is very far from anything resembling a "deregulated" market.

Yeah not sure what that poster was basing his incorrect point on.

Except the supply here is necessarily constrained by the amount of land available to build on. You're treating this like microeconomics 101, which is a fundamentally flawed way to look at the problem.

That's not true at all.

Nearly 75% of land in San Francisco alone is zoned for low density single-family or duplex homes. 37% of it is just for single-family homes alone. [1]

Nearly 98%(!!) of land in San Jose is zoned for single-family homes. [2]

Replacing every ~10 single family homes with even a 6-7 story apartment building can easily increase the supply necessary to reach equilibrium, and that's ignoring the fact that you can build affordable apartments that are >20 stories (see: Long Island City, New York).

[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-single-family-zon...

[2] https://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/single-family-zoning-san-...

This is true, but zoning laws are ultimately determined by who owns land. Landlords and landowners are incentivized to increase the value of their property at the expense of everyone else. They use zoning laws to do this, which they indirectly control by being active in political lobbying.

No disagreements there.

Per the parent comment, the prescribed solution is to eliminate (or heavily curtail) such zoning laws. In other words: “deregulate housing”.

Now all you've got to do is to convince those ten families who enjoy having a backyard for their kids and dog to give it up for a vague "better good"

...or sell it? Today if I bought those houses at fair market value, it would still be illegal for me to build a 6-7 story apartment in their place.

Why would they sell a house they enjoy living in, near the school their kids attend, near the jobs they work at, in the city where their friend are? Or do you propose to force them out?

I think you misunderstand my position. Nobody is proposing proscribing single family homes, or forcing people out of their homes.

People will sell their homes in the market, as they do today. Today it is illegal for a buyer of such homes to build multi-story apartment buildings in their place. The argument is to simply allow such construction to happen.

And I am explaining to you why those 10 families will vote against any of your proposals. Because once you allow more building the next logical step is to force them out to make some money for developers who'll wreck their houses and build those condos.

Force them out... by giving them really good offers for their homes that they willingly accept?

You have a strange definition of "force".

Because if that land was able to be developed into MDUs, the value of the land would be so high that you'd be a fool to not take it.

For example, here in Chicago the value of land downtown is upwards of $40 million per acre. It has nothing to do with the location of the land or that we're completely maxed out for development. It has everything to do with the fact that you can build 250+ units on that plot of land.

Why would you build 250+ units on a plot of land? Because people would want to buy or rent it. Why would people want to buy or rent it? Because the location is good.

Real estate always has to do with the location.

If you were only able to build SFH on that land it would be worth a small fraction of what it would be otherwise worth when you can develop it.

Money convinces a lot of people, especially if the land goes from being only to support 1 family to 40+ because of vertical advantage.

  Nearly 98%(!!) of land in San Jose is zoned for single-family homes

You misquote your source (it says that NYT says that it is 94%, but that's hogwash given that far less than that is zoned for any form of housing). The referenced NYT article doesn't annotate a source.

More likely, the data says that 94% of precincts have at least one single family home.

Well over 10% of land is rights of way (e.g. streets, watersheds, etc.), easements, or is public property.

The link seems to indicate 94% of residential land in San Jose is zoned for SFH.

But even that could be misleading, since San Jose has massive city boundaries that includes hills and other places that really couldn't be built on regardless of what they were zoned for.

We have plenty of land; the problem is the regulations that make it illegal to build apartments in over 70% of the city. Check out http://sfzoning.com

Ever looked at SF from the air? 3/4 of the city is suburbs filled with bungalows. This is a patently false argument.

As someone who has lived in both Hong Kong and San Francisco, this comment made me chuckle.

We literally have hundreds of examples of "take away regulations" not working.

We have hundreds of examples of "come down on landlords like hawks and make them suffer" working.

Stop it. Do some research.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/la...

> Tokyo, Japan’s capital city, has a growing population of over 13 million people but house prices have hardly increased in twenty years. Why? Tokyo has a laissez-faire approach to land use that allows lots of building subject to only a few general regulations set nationally.

I don't get this argument. Right now, we literally have thousands of examples of "add regulations" not working.

That's not the same thing as coming down on landlords. We could criminalize slumlording and use civil forfeiture to turn slumlord's properties into public housing. We could put a hefty property tax on all rental properties. We could create a vacancy tax on all unoccupied units that would force prices down. The problem is landlords and land owners and their rent-seeking and speculative behavior. The solution is to stop enabling them by protecting their property rights over the well-being of the population.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com