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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

I don't know Toronto, but your description is the exact opposite of what is happening in San Francisco.

All residential development has been frozen. There are a few small areas where very modest amount of housing has been built, but even there it has been with an abundance of retail, that takes a long time to find retail tenants. And because most of the city is blocked from any development; and only small areas get what look like massive changes, it take many years to adapt.

The entire western side of SF is basically unchanged in the 20 years I've been in the area, and the age of the buildings say that it's been unchanged for decades more.

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Toronto's problems are very different from San Francisco's. Toronto currently has more cranes in the sky than New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston combined.

1: https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/07/toronto-c...

So there's lots of construction, but prices and rents keep going up. But there are signs of it softening a little.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/07/12/apartment-vacanc...

Maybe I’m missing something but 120 buildings doesn’t seem a lot. Also only 27 new buildings in the whole New York seems wrong by at least an order of magnitude. What am I missing with this crane index?

It may seem like a lot of cranes and a lot of construction, but like tigershark notes below, on a relative basis it’s not even close to the amount of construction needed to meet demand (and thereby induce lower prices). Today’s building boom is a pittance relative to population.

North beach, Russian hill, marina, cow hollow, telegraph hill are all basically unchanged too.

Mission bay and soma are the two places where residential is being built but it’s all expensive high rise esque units that middle income can not afford.

When you limit building, the most expensive forms of building get built first, and existing buildings go to those who can pay the most.

The only other way to deal with the mismatch of shortages is to have waiting lists or lotteries. Both of those are used for subsidized housing in SF, and the lotteries are ridiculously lopsided, to a tragically comic degree.

The only people who benefit from the shortage are landowners, and boy do they take it in.

I have never understood the mindset that new housing has to be cheap or "affordable" to middle income people. New things whether it be a car or a home is always going to be more expensive and it being in the bay increases that immensely.

I grew up in the bay and now live elsewhere because the price of living in the bay became unjustifiable to me. I don't see why so many people feel that they are entitled to live in a place that they do not own and feel its the role of the gov't to ensure that they have a place to live.

I'm glad that you escaped before the economic system got as messed up as it currently is, but there's a lot wrong with your point of view on this.

Those of us who live here do not exist as islands. We all participate in a rich economic web that requires exchanging services with lots of people. Teachers, bus drivers, delivery people, shop keepers, mechanics, plumbers, police officers... it takes a lot of people to run a society.

Typically the "not everybody has to be able to afford to live here" mindset has worked only when there is a wealthy exclusive enclave that tries to keep out poorer people and races they don't like, but when that community can still draw workers from more affordable places nearby.

The Bay Area has taken that "these people we depend upon for our lifestyle don't deserve to live here" attitude and applied it a region so large that people can no longer commute in. It leads to extremely dysfunctional societies.

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