I'm very involved with YIMBY Action here in SF: I'm on the board of both YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law, and I'm also running for local office in the current election: https://buss2020.org
If you have any questions about YIMBY, send them my way!
When I researched this I couldn't find any strong evidence suggesting that more building would lead to more affordable housing.
You would think that more construction would lead to more affordable housing, but it seems like more construction doesn't just increase supply, it also increases demand, which can offset any price effects from the increase in supply.
This makes sense when you think that similar people want to live in proximity to people like themselves. So if there are more luxury condos in an area that's going to create demand for more high-end retail, which will enhance that neighborhood's appeals to wealthier customers which will then increase demand for more luxury residences.
Vienna and Singapore seems to be cities that have overcome this trend.
So I used to be an enthusiastic YIMBY, but there just doesn't appear to be any concrete evidence that more construction is going to lead to more affordable housing.
Having said that, I do believe we should promote more construction, I just don't think it's going to reduce the cost of living to a sustainable level.
The role of new construction in affordability is more direct. The people who live in the shiny new places will just bid up the price of the next best thing if it isn't available, and this ripples down until the people at the bottom are priced out. So by building it, you're preventing other things from being bid up.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
Please see this non-exhaustive list of things which all show building more housing leads to housing affordability.
* http://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-nei...
* https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/12/02/how...
* https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...
* https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...
* https://medium.com/land-buildings-identity-and-values/what-i...
* https://fee.org/articles/why-isnt-rent-in-tokyo-out-of-contr...
* https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/new-construction-...
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...
* https://medium.com/@eddiesun/no-vacancy-the-housing-crisis-l...
* https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1165339989774749696?s=...
It's not so much induced demand as it is pent-up demand. Lots more people would already love to live here — indeed, many have moved away solely because of housing costs.
This is especially true in California, due to Prop 13.
If we reformed the relevant rules, so cities profited from allowing new housing, I think a lot would change in this area!
Supposedly, the big selling point was that seniors on fixed incomes were getting priced out of their homes. But that would only happen because they have a substantial, appreciating asset. These aren't poor people who deserve our sympathy; they're relatively well-off people with a cash-flow problem! We could have solved their cash-flow problem without destroying our cities' tax bases by allowing them to defer some of their taxes [0] until their property was sold.
Here's a great article from 2014 that talks about it: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
As for cities profiting from allowing new housing, this might interest you: http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm
[0] For example, the amount of tax due immediately could be allowed to grow at 2% annually, following the Prop. 13 formula. Also, the tax due at sale could be limited to, say, 70% of the gain on the sale. That limit would probably never take effect, in practice, but I've learned from previous occasions where I've proposed this that people tend to get hung up on the possibility that one might owe more in tax than one stood to make on the sale. In fact, if you run the numbers, it takes some very strange assumptions to make the deferred tax even approach getting that large; but this rule should assuage that concern. (Basically, you'd need several years of strong price growth followed by a sudden, huge collapse.)
Eliminate prop 13 for all but one property, both for individuals and for businesses. This would eliminate the current tax loophole for investment properties, and demand that tech companies that have scaled to more than one campus pay their fair share to the communities they are located in.
Also, have prop 13 valuations reset whenever the property changes hands (including inheritance, and, for commercial real estate, this would get rid of the “sell via a holding company” loophole).
The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.
BUT you couldn’t move the people through the city and bay area with current infrastructure.
Money (in big amounts) needs to be taken away from roadwork and poured into public transport.
Why would any SF resident care even a little bit what non-residents think of their housing situation?
"The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity."
Have you considered that someone's home, their life is not a function of 'industrial prosperity'? And that they're not interested in having their neighbourhood turned into a bunch of skyscrapers hosting Facebook Engineers?
It's possible they do - but it's entirely up to the residents to decide.
In particular, tech people, or even the intelligentsia in general, tend to have an odd disregard for cultural issues and tend to see 'housing' as entirely an economic or civic function (i.e. numbers, pricing, density, affordability) while disregarding the nature of the fact that these are communities and homes. (Witness the fact that everyone on this thread, and in most reference articles tend to talk about issues such as 'price')
I watched in my lifetime the city of Vancouver get bulldozed over and replace with a zillion apartment buildings. The money is nice, but otherwise, it's a brutally garish city, the architecture is thoughtless, it's just another 'pop up' city of the theme of the New Millenium / Pacific Rim. It will not age well. What's more - even as Van has evolved towards this super-high density Hong Kong / New York physicality, costs have skyrocketed and affordability has plummeted. This should be of no surprise of course, as almost everyone in the Western world, more density generally implies less affordability and certainly 'less space'. Have a look [1]. Texan cities like Dallas are considerably more affordable and considerably less dense.
Bulldozing most of a beautiful city possibly against the wishes of its citizens to drive some kind of risky civic/industrial experiment is ... an extreme view.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Bay area housing is a ponzi scheme, and younger families have to choose between their careers and buying in at nonsensical pricing.
Local governments suppress housing starts and intentionally snarl the roads to keep the house of cards standing.
Sooner or later the older residents will be outnumbered by people that moved here, and the reckoning will probably be swift and severe. As you said, it’ll be up to the residents to decide.
A few years back, there were signs in Cupertino saying “no four story apartments”. I agree. If you’re within 0.25 miles of transit, it should be illegal to build (or improve) anything that short. I’m guessing this isn’t what the NIMBYs had in mind though.
Obviously HN skews towards tech but let’s not fall into the trap that SV is either representative or the center of “American prosperity” for the average citizen
Prices are set by the balance of demand and supply. The demand isn't going away. The supply is what we can do something about.
Even building expensive luxury apartments helps, unless no one can afford them at all (which is not what the builder wants to happen). The people who rent those aren't taking up spaces others could have afforded.
If housing prices were cut in half in SF you’d see WAY more people moving here.
Induced demand is "adding supply increased the price"
Build more freeways and you get more drivers.
> Build more freeways and you get more drivers.
That's like having a McDonalds without enough cashiers and then saying "hire more cashiers and you sell more hamburgers" is induced demand because the hamburgers cost the same but you sell more of them.
That's not induced demand, you're just changing the price. Having to wait in line (or sit in traffic) is a cost. If you reduce the cost, demand goes up, but that's just ordinary supply and demand again.
Prices are a function of demand and that's it.
Every city has to ultimately decide what kind of community they want to have and then act accordingly.
As SF is an attractive city, every home ever built there will essentially be bought or occupied, there is nearly an unlimited number of people who would like to live there - so it's merely a matter of what kind of density and price they choose to have.
Do they want SF to be a city of skyscrapers, with tiny expensive flats like NYC?
Or a neighbourhood of fairly expensive homes as it is now.
Nobody anywhere will doubt that 'building significantly more homes' will reduce the average cost of homes but ultimately SF residents will decide what they want to do: if they don't want skyscrapers or high-density style buildings, it's their business.
At a median home price of $1.7m, owning a home in SF is reserved for those grandfathered in or the wealthy.
Everyone deserves 'affordable housing' but not everyone deserves 'affordable housing' in the specific spot they want.
And FYI New York and Hong Kong even more expensive and much denser - should NYC 'triple its density'? Will that make thins better? Or maybe there's something missing from this logic.
There absolutely is. Here's a great paper studying the effect of removing rent control in Cambridge, MA (https://economics.mit.edu/files/9760) which found that rent in non-rent controlled units went up as a result of the removal. The effect is similar to what GP stated -- gentrification causes a feedback loop that can affect all housing.
All said, it is very possible (and I subscribe to the idea) that the Bay Area would not suffer from much induced demand because people are in the area for the economic opportunity, not for local amenities.
The sequence of events that lead to a rise in prices are similar - that is there is evidence that more affluent people moving in to a local area can result in rents going up for others in that same area.
In the rent control example, many people held on to RC apartments because they were a great deal, even though they weren't where they wanted to live. After RC ended, they moved to apartments they preferred (since there was no longer a big price differential), increasing demand (and thus price) for the originally non-RC apartments.
Tokyo's population has grown 1.5X over the last two decades while rents and property prices have been essentially flat.
It's time we stop blaming everyone else and start taking responsibility."
This is encouraging to see. I think Andrew Yang showed there's a real hunger for a solutions and data oriented approach, eschewing tribalism. Although perhaps still in a nascent stage, there finally seem to be signs of an increasing appetite for this.
Good luck!
The demise of Scott Wiener's SB50 this year has certainly been a disappointment, but we try not to pin our hopes on any single solution. It took us 50 years to get where we are, and we expect it'll take at least 10 to get out. That will be a combination of local, state, and federal action.
The thing I've learned being involved in SF politics and YIMBY for the past few years is that politicians don't make change. They don't shift the discourse. Instead, it's grassroots movements like YIMBY Action that build a parade that politicians then jump to the front of. (Of course, this isn't true for Scott. He's one of the few true believers!)
We're building a passionate and vocal community that can do the on-the-ground organizing necessary to make politicians court us. The way forward it to continue building a voting bloc. You only have as much power as the people you can turn out to vote.
- A Supervisor puts a proposition on the ballot - organizations funnel money into the campaign for the ballot prop - then when the ballot prop advertises they include names of the people running for office
It's why SF has _so_ _many_ ballot props: they are the legal way to bypass the fundraising limits we imposed on individual electoral campaigns. Ironically, if we repealed our campaign finance limits, there'd be less dark money and far fewer ballot props.
I don't have a ballot prop to attach my name to, so I have to do old-fashioned campaigning (with some modern, high-tech things, too :)