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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

The property prices are due to "stunning incompetence of SF government"? I'm not buying that. Public officials are not in charge of—nor do they have any real control over—property values. Your co-worker who bought property elsewhere wasn't able to do so because the mayor of that town was incredibly competent. That had absolutely nothing to do with it.

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The board of supervisors routinely rejects housing projects, or puts them up for an absurd review process that involve things like banning buildings if they cast a sliver of shadow on a park (which would on the other hand be tremendously welcome these days). Several supervisors are landlords who are personally invested in keeping the supply low so that prices keep rising.

By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively. We could have had a Tokyo of the West. Instead, we're left with an emptying shell of a self-agrandizing suburb.

And who do you think effectively controls the BoS and planning commission? Voters. Landowning voters. Because by and large, they want to maintain the status quo.

(Full disclosure: I also own property in SF, but am in faor of all sorts of new housing, even that which will lower my home's value.)

Yes, especially in local elections, where participation is often ridiculously low, the electorate skews heavily toward long time, older residents, and more on the homeowner than the renter front. So the incentives are clear against new developments.

Edit: Thanks for supporting housing even against your financial interests. I’m on the same boat (across the bay). In my case I just want to live somewhere walkable without breaking the bank.

> By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively.

Do you live in Seattle? Because that's not what anyone who lives here who is not making a tech salary thinks.

There is enough new housing here that apt buildings went down in monthly cost last summer. People keep moving here so house prices have been stubbornly resilient.

According to this, Seattle rents doubled from 2010 to 2016 and have been fairly flat since then. SF seems to follow basically the same curve: up 1.5x from 2010 to 2016 then flat-ish.

https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-seattle-rent-tren...

https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...

That about matches this story, but some places had small drops and the hidden price reductions by keeping monthly price high but giving free months. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/renter-boo...

Maybe I was too much on the dropping side but the article says prices had been booming like you said for a decade and 10k units were filled and then prices stabilized.

The SF Board of Supervisors has a lot of control over the supply and has used it to make it very hard to build anything. High prices are a direct result of low supply.

I'm not sure I'd call it incompetence though, they are very motivated to keep existing landowners happy. Higher prices and fewer neighbors to deal with is an easy way to do that.

It's not incompetence, though thats what the BoS would like you believe of them. It's corruption, plain and simple, and it'll cost you a $50,000 bribe to start getting the permits. The latest expose is against Mohammed Nuru but look back across the decades and realize it's a recurring theme.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/It-st...

Example: Hillary Ronin is the supervisor for the mission. An area that was historically lower income minorities, now being displaced, in part due to a lack of housing units. She has fought for years to stop the construction of buildings that would add both affordable units and market rate units.

"Ronen fought to prevent the construction of a 75-unit building on the site of a laundromat. She argued that an environmental review of the building did not consider the impact of a shadow on a nearby schoolyard, even though an environmental review conducted by officials at the San Francisco Planning Department showed that the new construction, including its shadow, would not have an adverse impact on children at the schoolyard.]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Ronen

Starting at 7:41 in this video an interview with the same supervisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI&t=547s

The tax breaks that she is referring to were roughly $10mm/year. https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-state/twitter...

The city's budget increased by nearly $6bn during the time the tax breaks were active (largely fueled by the growth from tech boom).

Yeah, the SF Board of Supervisors refuses to change the current zoning regime.

It’s totally the bos and not the nimby residents. /s

It's not really the residents as a whole. It's a small number of loud people who block change.

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