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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

If you think paying $1 for every $8 in funding for housing is too much, just move to a different city? Apparently San Francisco is worth it, if it wasn't VC's would have stopped funding startups in SF a long time ago.

There's a bunch of graphs showing rents increase, but no real reason for why that's a bad thing. The big number that's supposed to sway us is the rent increasing by 30%, as funding increases by 300%. Maybe there's better numbers somewhere else, but this just tells me rents are not really a problem, at least for the tech industry.

And the solution? It's just build more houses, so the rents go down (a little). Do you really want more houses? The NIMBY people don't seem to. Infinite high density cities aren't all necessarily the best thing. Maybe if you think too much money is disappearing in these wealthy people's vaults, raise taxes?

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> Infinite high density cities aren't all necessarily the best thing.

Then SF shouldn't have permitted the office space that brought all these people. City planing needs proportions. When a city adds offices, it needs home, schools, grocery stores, etc

We're not talking about Manhattan-esque high rises. 3/4 of the city is limited by law to single family homes. Allowing mid-rise buildings like Amsterdam and Paris would more than solve the problem

> And the solution? It's just build more houses, so the rents go down

Right, but the problem is that it's largely illegal to actually build more houses in San Francisco.

This right here. The price of housing is solely a supply-side issue, and it's all artificial constraints.

The reality is that owners are older, wealthier, stronger-rooted voters -- while renters are younger, transient and don't vote. This is the result.

Things like height restrictions, "shade" restrictions, NIMBY-ism, red-tape -- all the way down to mortgage interest tax deductions -- are to the benefit of owners and to the detriment of renters. They're all political issues that can be resolved but we choose not to.

I don't think it is necessarily as simple as just, "build more housing".

Rent costs are complicated. A big part of the reason that SF housing is so expensive is that it is so desirable to live and work there. Companies want to be there because that is where the talent and capital is, and talent wants to be there because that is where companies and capital is, and capital wants to be there because that is where the companies and talent are. High cost is what keeps some companies/talent/capital away DESPITE the benefits of being in the area... but if we lower real property costs, MORE companies/talent/capital will want to be there and the cost saving won't persist. There is latent demand ready to fill up any extra housing you build.

There have also been studies that ask this same question, and they have found that opening up housing development in high rent areas just means developers build more luxury living places, and costs don't go down.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/05/housing-supply-home-p...

This article is really buried but fantastic. It makes a lot of sense that knowledge workers and wages are really driving the prices.

San Francisco's desirability is not skyrocketing the way its property values are. The views and weather were there in 2011 too, when things were at half their current level. And of course making it cheaper means making it accessible to more people; that's the point.

If desirability is not skyrocketing, why are people prepared to pay the property prices?

It is not views and weather, it is access to the startup environment, venture capital, tech talent and so on.

And some speculation. I see first hand a lot of high end apartments bought that sit vacant. Maybe the owners live in Asia or EU 9 months of the year, I dunno. But in some of the swanky towers downtown there are entire floors with at most one owner present year round.

In a normal market, I suppose speculation would help increase supply - by driving prices up, it would become more attractive to build. Of course if no building is possible, that won't work.

Nevertheless, there has to be a ceiling to the prices. If no space for living is available, eventually the tech companies won't be able to grow further because they can't hire more people.

> "If you think paying $1 for every $8 in funding for housing is too much, just move to a different city?"

What a useless, unconstructive comment. It's sad that when anyone wants to improve anything in this world, people like you come out of the bushes and say "if you don't like it, why don't you just move!"

> "There's a bunch of graphs showing rents increase, but no real reason for why that's a bad thing."

How thick and delusional can one be to say something like this? Have you taken a look at San Francisco recently? It's littered with homeless people and feces.

> Infinite high density cities aren't all necessarily the best thing

Right, because there's no medium between San Francisco and "infinite high density cities"

> "Maybe if you think too much money is disappearing in these wealthy people's vaults, raise taxes?"

A Land Value Tax would be a great idea. Further burdening the working class laborers who are already being raped by landlords with tax increases would only be more destructive.

Do you really believe homeless people will suddenly become not homeless if you build more houses? What are you going to do, give them to them?

Building more houses will do just one thing, let more people live there, which means more people will move in, maybe rents go down a little for rich programmers, and the homeless will stay homeless.

But yeah, please do complain both about feces in the streets and homeless people and taxes at the same time.

Building more homes is a “necessary but not sufficient” condition. @buss is also campaigning for more funding for affordable housing, but all the funding in the world is not worth squat if it’s not legal to build the homes.

They really buried the lede.

"Politics is an organizational problem, not a technological one."

If we could just build more houses by saying that we decree them into existence, we wouldn't have this problem. The author proposes some ways to bolster the pro-housing community and get tech voters involved in local politics (including joining https://yimbyaction.org/), and here we are still wondering whether we want to have lower rents or not.

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