54% of San Francisco homes are in buildings that would be illegal to build today

That's how property ownership works, after all. Extending the same benefits to renters has a lot of obvious appeal even if it does nothing to fix overall price increase trends.

[0] Unless the place is not actually worth striving to live in, but in that case you probably don't have a rent price problem.

Rent control and the heritability of Prop 13 are the best California can do to prioritize incumbents. They do work somewhat, but the next generation of natives is still as screwed as prospective migrants re: forming their own households in the place, at least while their parents are still alive.

1. Picking who is worthy of living in San Francisco as determined by the City and County of San Francisco

2. Removing current residents that don’t fit the criteria

And 3. Controlling who may then migrate in?

You tell me, Ford. You tell me. I have faith that you can do it. I’ll give you exactly one hint: San Francisco is not a country.

At that point where do they go? Presumably other cities will be allowed such caps so they can't move to those either.

Then there are historical population control tools like redlining, and racist applications of eminent domain used to remove "undesirable" (a euphemism for black) neighborhoods.

By placing a cap on population you ensure that the victims of that discrimination never have the opportunity to return to the places they used to live - and as an added bonus you get to claim that your policy isn't racist because it has no stated racial bias.

Say your rental lease is up, and the only place you can find to rent is Colma. Now you've left SF are you ever allowed to return. What if someone else moved into SF while you were away thus taking your position under the cap? Honestly if anything this possibly right here could easily cause rental and housing prices to go up even more.

Then there's SF's claim to be an open and welcoming multicultural city - you can't claim that well disallowing new residents, and so new cultures, from entering.

The only real way to reduce hoisin cost is to build more housing. Where and what type you build are the only actual questions that you need to answer.

Then suddenly it's not a good solution for him anymore.

Yes.

> Well, that is the job of a social worker, not me

Yes.

> That is the government's job, not mine

Yes.

>> So you are going to vote for someone who says they will fix this, and that is about all you are going to do?

Yes I will. I pay my taxes, it's not my fault the government wastes my money on the military and law enforcement. When there are candidates that pledge to fix this I donate to them and vote for them.

You’re giving my friends too much credit. They just don’t like outsiders.

Most people, surprisingly, don’t take an engineering mindset to solving everything, nor do they want to, and even get offended if you do it too much. This past time of mine among many other things taught me that lesson the hard way.

So a few points on this:

1. Depends how you define overpopulation. Can we still feed all of us? Yes. Do we? No, because while we can easily grow enough food, 50% more than our current population at least, people still starve, just not due to lack of food in the world. I think when we get to the point that we’re seeing a mass die-off of humans because of resource exhaustion, you can start calling us overpopulated. This is not to discount the possibility that we may become overpopulated, but I don’t think we know where that threshold actually is yet.

2. That said, population does tend to level off once the people of a country are well off enough, and so some countries are facing population contractions. Even within countries which are technically growing, subsets of their populations have leveled off and part of the difference is being made up in immigration. We may never actually reach overpopulation if that trend continues.

3. This is the part I hate when discussing population concerns. Let’s throw away my arguments above that we are probably not overpopulated, and suppose you are right. Then what? Genocide? Eugenics? Voluntary societal suicide either directly or by mass scale vasectomy? Just do nothing until something gives?

Acceptance of the idea that there are too many people leads you down to a much more uncomfortable conversation.

Also: all of this is off-topic. San Francisco could support plenty more people. Both California and the United States grow enough food to be net exporters, and California specializes in cash crops. Doing so would require upzoning. Upzoning would lead to neighborhood change, and that’s really the thing San Franciscans are fighting against. Every single time the Earth’s population vs carrying capacity is brought up in the context of San Francisco’s seeming inability to build more homes, it is a distraction.

We could, but we make it as difficult and expensive as we can to keep people out because San Franciscans taken as a whole don’t like outsiders and don’t like change. We’re not the only populace or locality that doesn’t like these things, but we are some of the whiniest and most hypocritical.

Simply going for growth-at-all-costs gets you a more crowded but still expensive city. That may be better for the people running the cities and their budgets, but it's not clear to me it's better for anyone else than having things spread out to more places across the state or country.

That seems an insanely dystopian outcome.

If the costs are skyrocketing doesn't that mean demand has been going up, not that it already existed at these levels?

How many more tech offices are in SF now than fifteen years ago? Has the city's commercial growth policies been considering in sync with their residential growth policies? Or have they let the one fan the flames of the other? They should've preemptively bombed the tech headquarters, to tweak your suggestion. ;)

But my money says that even if they had unleashed a bunch more residential construction fifteen years ago, it would've only been accompanied by even more business and commercial growth. Coastal hub cities have a fundamental demand aspect with how cheap cross-country (or even global) travel is these days - there is a lot of built-in appeal that's going to attract people there, even if only for second homes or investment housing, etc, and keep a lot of pressure on the price floor.

Have we consider the use of organic cullers instead?

I think i may have overstate the "save the old". Its not just about age, although we should save nice things that are old. Its primarily that "big" buildings (new or old) tend to be less human-scale than smaller ones (new or old).

If SF residents want to knock down homes to build parks, or build skyscrapers, all the power to them.

In contrast, SFH-only zoning is exclusionary.

How do you think zoning laws came into place?

"White communities are more likely to have strict land use regulations (and whites are more likely to support those regulations).[25][26] Strict land use regulations are an important driver of housing segregation along racial lines in the United States.[25]"

Further reading: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...

Also, newer homes are amazing in terms of heath retention and isolation. Having lived in buildings from before the war with either none of very little isolation.or even worse, i once lived in a home with a split in the wall thanks to a WW2 bmobin raid. The crack was not an issue in regards to the structural integrity, but it made isolation mood.

It's just regulation promoting low density is bad.

Libertarians love this example to troll the statist left that the state can't be trusted to control things wisely, but I'm just happy to hope undoing these things can be bipartisan, because the real estate lobby is so strong it's needed.

I'm fairly certain you could buy an apartment building in Manhattan, demolish it, and build a picket-fence house there. It was just lose you tens or hundreds of millions of dollars so no one has done it.

From what I can tell the way that interactive was constructed it would also highlight a lot if it fell into the category you mentioned but I can't find any where this is the case. It is a one-side problem and to pretend like it is two-sided is a bit detached from reality.