Zoom out for a second and consider how wild it is that we turned a life necessity (shelter) into a speculative plaything.
It’s cities that are turning housing into an investment through laws turning it into a scarce resource. (Not just laws against building, but laws against short term rentals, boarding houses, tenements, etc.). It’s unsurprising that homelessness is actually decreasing in the US as a whole, whole increasing in wealthy cities: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/19/homelessn....
But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem. In 2015, about 10,000 people in San Francisco experienced homelessness at any time in the past year. That’s 112 per 10,000 people. (This is a different, and better, measure than the “homeless on a given night” instantaneous measure.) That same figure in Iowa is about 9 per 10,000. The national average is around 20-25 per 10,000.
Yes, this is a very good point. You don't see people vilifying farmers for making profits on food, even though some people go hungry. But for some reason people hate developers for making a profit on housing. (In my opinion, all of the NIMBY arguments, very much including the vacancy one in the article, are just attempts to mask the real reason for opposing housing—a preference for the suburban lifestyle.)
> But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem.
It's not just a San Francisco and New York problem. Add Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Austin, Miami, and Boston/Cambridge to that list, just to name a few. That's not even counting non-US cities like Vancouver, London, Paris, etc.
I agree that housing shortages are unevenly distributed, of course.
I remember being in Penn Station in NYC on many nights when homeless people slept in the waiting rooms. Police would routinely come by and kick them out. When this happened during the winters in sub-zero temperatures this meant a very real risk of death for the homeless who were forced to sleep outside.
I wonder if it's the same in other parts of the nation, and if the reason there are only 25 homeless per 10,000 nationwide is that the rest have died of exposure during their winters (or from other types of neglect).
This is wrong. There is no distribution problem with housing. It's not that people can't find a house to live in, or a house has to be shipped across the country and the rail line is broken.
The problem is that people can't afford housing. And they can't afford it because demand has increased dramatically while supply has been artificially constrained by government.
The solution is to remove the government constraints on supply which will lower prices. Now obviously the trick is that existing owners don't want to do this, and they have a lot of political power. So I don't really see this happening, but if it somehow could happen that would be the path to the answer.
The statistic about vacancies is only meaningful if you assume that the only demand for housing in SF comes from the homeless, which is clearly absurd.
In a society with decommodified housing, some amount of housing will need to be built to keep up with local immigration. That is massively below the amount that would need to be built to try to prod second-order market effects to do what we want.
We don't need all people experiencing homelessness to be able to afford market-rate housing. That's what subsidized affordable housing is for. If market rate housing were much cheaper, though, many people who are homeless would be able to afford market-rate housing, and then the scarce affordable housing dollars that we have would be sufficient to cover the rest.
> Thinking you can build your way out of this housing crisis is the definition of insanity.
No, it's what cities that don't have housing crises like Houston do. Objectively, Houston is doing everything better than San Francisco when it comes to housing. What do they do? Allow a lot more building, with less red tape and restrictive zoning.
San Franciscans need to take a long hard look at what cities like Chicago and Dallas are doing when it comes to housing, and have the humility to recognize that their policies have failed and that they must change. I say this as a San Franciscan who's proud of his city in a lot of other ways.
> In a society with decommodified housing, some amount of housing will need to be built to keep up with local immigration. That is massively below the amount that would need to be built to try to prod second-order market effects to do what we want.
That doesn't make sense to me. Demand is demand; you need a lot of housing no matter what. Unless you try to curb that demand by instituting a hukou system (which a lot of Californians seem to want to do).
This is not true because you aren't counting the vast number of people who want to relocate to the Bay Area.
The article also ignores the fact that you will always have some % of empty homes. People move out and it takes time to find new tenants. People want to remodel. New buildings take time to fill up. People have second homes. Overall vacancy rates in SF and the Bay Area in general are TINY.
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jo...
The idea that 0% vacancy is achievable (or even desirable) is wrong.
How do you decide who gets to live in SF (or insert city here)? Prioritize people who were born there? Whose family has history? People who have jobs there? What about self-employed people? People with kids? A lottery system?
It is (mostly) one of supply, though. California has massively underbuilt over the past decade.
If an empty condo were an asset that didn't appreciate in value because of the scarcity of housing, maybe those wealthy people would sell them and invest in the market or companies or something else.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...
Every necessity is a speculative plaything. There are futures and commodities markets for every consumable you could imagine. That's the beauty and cruelty of a (relatively) free market.
What’s your thesis for this? If the supply suddenly quintupled in the Bay Area and the population halved, I doubt we’d be calling it a “housing crisis”. Prices would fall dramatically because of supply.