Comment by yonran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yonran | Hacker News Reader

The housing supply has been very inelastic in the Bay Area. And every business and individual who wants to be here starts out life short on housing. So I would group his approaches to staying in the Bay Area into three main categories:

#1, #6: Cover the short by hoarding enough of the fixed amount of housing for yourself and taking that out of the market.

#2, #3, #4: Help employees cover their short. I think it is smart that of him to try to do so in a targeted way to help new employees with downpayment and loans rather than ratcheting up everyone’s salary.

#5: Build more housing. This is the positive sum approach. I wish he elaborated on this because there are many roadblocks to San Francisco’s failure to convert high incomes into more housing (zoning restrictions, slow entitlement process, high fees, high construction labor costs), and it would help for more leaders to be part of the conversation on how to solve these problems for everyone, not just for his own nonprofit.

concerning point #5, the voting public is beyond greedy. they'll sue the sh out of any builder that wants to build anything, and there's soo many zoning laws and so many restrictions and taxes. At the end of the day, people who don't have houses yet end up paying for all this.

I think Remote work is by far the best option. If you can live in a lower cost city like Houston, TX or Chicago, it's a great way to go. Places like CA are so far beyond repair, there's no more hope, at all.

So long as companies pay proportionally less when you work from a lower cost-of-living place, as most seem to do, it's not going to become especially popular to work from a cheaper location. And why should they -- being able to work remotely is something workers want, and companies have the perfect information of your permanent address; supply and demand dictates companies will continue to be able to get away with this kind of policy. If it works the other way around, and companies will pay more when you move to a more expensive area, I expect California to become _more_ popular, not less.

It's not so bad. I'd gladdly take a 33% pay cut to save over a million dollars on a house. Plus many of your other COL will be half too. Plus, you'll pay less in taxes too. Earning a decent income in a high COL area can be quite punitive.

I think you are discounting the differences in quality/types of living between locations. Even if the an employer pegged compensation to regional median income, you can have differences. Median income in sf might afford a small apartment while median income in Wisconsin might afford a large house. Some people may prefer the latter.

For in demand jobs, the employee has the leverage and cost of living adjustments go away.

I did consider this. There are many things (especially consumer goods, like cars) that cost more-or-less the same regardless of where you live. And that's to say nothing of intangible advantages of many of the more desirable / more dense areas. Your point is taken, but I think for every person who prefers the cheaper location, you'll find one who prefers the more expensive location. And so I stand behind my previous comment.

I don’t have any data on what people will prefer in that situation, and am happy to cede the point. However, this is only the case in when the employer has all the leverage. When I have to fill a hard to fill position, I don’t care about local cost of living. This is especially true for contract and consulting work

Or may be we should face the sad truth: it's only so many people can be accommodated in SF.

Granted, we can build taller houses. It will cause huge influx of people, transport collapse, school and health care systems overload.

At this point it may be easier to just build another city.

This makes my head boil.

The Bay Area can also build more of those schools and infrastructure as well. There are so many metro areas, probably hundreds, that have done it before. It’s entirely a political problem. I always hear the NIMBYs complaining about these made up problems and other people choosing to live in “shoebox apartments” as if they’re real problems and not simply them imposing restrictions on everyone else

You are absolutely right: NIMBY.

Apparently due to some reasons local people do not want to live in a beehive.

Go and build somewhere else. California is a large state with lots of unoccupied land.

I’m saying the problem needs to be addressed in good faith, because NIMBY people will put up nonsensical arguments like other people living in small apartments or needing to build new schools (to support an expanding tax base...) as problems rather than the actual problems they have motivating them to politically oppose urbanization

You are solving the wrong problem. No matter how hard we try there's no way to squeeze all the United States in SF.

May be instead just make other places livable?

The Bay Area could host the entire population of the United States with ~850 sq ft of land area per person.

As it is, we currently allocate ~29,500 sq ft of land area per person.

Surely we can find a middle ground somewhere in the name of access to opportunity and in the name resolving our severe housing shortage.

> it's only so many people can be accommodated in S

This is true but not very important today; as has been clearly demonstrated in many different contexts, that number is a large multiple of the current population.

San Francisco has a population density of 7,000/km2.

Manhattan has a density of 27,000/km2.

San Mateo has a density of 1,000/km2

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