I remember when I lived there everyone was so against the “manhattanization” of the city, so it was a big uproar every time a new building went in. I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable
In my early 20s I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable. Got a lot of proposals that essentially boiled down to “control who can live here, kick out everyone that doesn’t fit and cap the city’s population”. Don’t ask me how, I never got a straight answer whenever I pointed out the problems. People can express what they want, they can’t usually tell you how they would obtain it.
Me: 'Please go ahead and convince that homeless person to go to a Doctor's office, after you set up the appointment, and then follow up to make sure they take their medicine every day.'
Complainer: 'Well, that is the job of a social worker, not me'
Me: 'Are you going to go hire the social worker and let them know that they need to do this?'
Complainer: 'That is the government's job, not mine'
Answer: 'So you are going to vote for someone who says they will fix this, and that is about all you are going to do?'
Complainer: 'I'm very busy'
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.
SanFrancisco spends lots on homeless programs [0], more than almost every city, but they are ineffective. So government is failing at this problem.
[0] https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-home...
At some point you have to ask yourself what problem is supposed to be solved if people come up with ideas like that. I mean, the reason why affordable housing is a problem is precisely because lack of it kicks out people, controls who can live there and caps the city's population.
So basically you have a person that wants the symptoms of unaffordable housing but also the virtue signalling that they "solved" the problem. Considering the entire state of California is following the path of San Francisco this is not an answer.
The reason why people come up with nonsensical things like "induced demand" is because the entire housing market of California is under a prisoners dilemma. Staying silent is building housing. Betraying the other is not building and coming up with random ideas to sweep the problem under the rug. Everyone is betraying each other so any specific city who ends up building will face the brunt of the population growth. Every city has to build for this to work and that means statewide reforms in California.
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.
What are the problems?
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.
This is causing huge problems in Utah right now. Great if you have a house (or condo/etc) you don't want, bad if you have a house you like because you might get taxed out of it, terrible if you want a house. Every house and condo has dozens of unconditional cash offers on day one.
It's really a shame that any evenly applied attempt to privilege existing residents (not necessarily property owners) runs into legal issue.
Obviously we don’t always live up to that ideal. But this would be a big step in the wrong direction.
It's really bad for a community and a country when there is massive forced migration due to price pressure.
When new graduates are detached from their support networks, they have to pay more for things and services they could have shared with their family/friends/community. When new couples are detached from their support networks, they and their kids suffer from higher costs and reduced mentorship from extended family.
When there is a constant flux in and out, like I saw while I was living in SF, nobody has any commitment to the area, and nobody has lived there long enough to know what "normal" is.
When people who invest their entire lives into a community are forced out of it, and/or their kids are displaced by lucky rich in-migrants, you amplify people's natural defensiveness and, whatever points you may have had, they will oppose you on everything. Those communities are desirable places to live because of the years of time invested by those who came before, and they deserve not to be forced out by people with no prior stake.
When every avenue for just starting a life, let alone advancing it, is closed off to people, especially because of outsiders trouncing in with no appreciation for the history of a place, you have all the ingredients for revolt and revolution.
----
In places where there is ample land (like my native Utah), but supply targeted at natural growth can't keep up with in-migration and investor speculation, I would favor policies that significantly bias toward natives. Keeping churn low, but not zero, is absolutely essential for the health of communities.
- Favoring live-in owners over landlords, but still allowing for some renting
- Very strongly favoring live-in first-home owners over investors through tax, HOA, and zoning policy
- Breaking up the very large parcels currently owned by and being developed for billionaires -- hating on single-family housing is a scapegoat for this real issue
Mass internal migrations, like those that built the West in the first place, are an important part of American history. It is an incredible arrogance towards history to assert that now every town is the right size and everyone is in the right place, no more growth or movement.
It would be convenient if this were a financial problem, but it's a geometry problem. People are moving into boomtowns to actually live and work, they take up space, and if you don't add new space on the dimensions you have (e.g. vertical axis), the only possible result is to squeeze out others.
There's a lot of places where very few people can afford to live. Like Manhattan for example.
> Cities and states can't privilege natives over migrants.
If native own property they can continue living there as long as they wish.
Provided they can afford to pay the ever-rising property taxes. Your take may apply in some places, but it is certainly not universal.
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.
Don't we have birthrate below replacement levels?
I'm sure white trash neighbourhoods were not welcome there as well.
Anyway, I'm not ready to continue conversation where everything is considered racist, sorry.
Only, there are still racially restrictive covenants on many properties to this day. Yes, in San Francisco. Thankfully, they're unenforceable, but the evidence is writ large on the legal system. And no, they didn't forbid white people from living anywhere -- if you've got reams of evidence to contradict that, show it.
Deeper dive into the history:
https://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/system/tdf/haasinstitute_...
Frisco isn't special here, for example, Seattle's timeline (including these covenants still being on the books) is pretty much the same
[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.
Why is that a problem?
> if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich
Why is that a problem?
Shelter is one of the few goods which a society necessarily needs. The alternatives (being homeless) are unacceptable. People give up food, electricity and healthcare before they give up shelter.
It's fine at a micro scale (oceanfront is expensive, but a few blocks away is affordable), but causes incredible problems at a macro scale as the bay area demonstrates (people not able to live within 50+ miles of their support networks). It is VERY hard to uproot an entire life and move to an area where cost of living is lower, especially when you are poor. People in poverty form informal local support networks (neighbors watching kids, friends that can loan you $5 to top up your phone), making it that much harder to move to a lower cost area.
This is like asking why high prices for food or health care are problems.
It's a necessity of life, man. Do we really need to explain why basic necessities being very expensive is bad?
The grand-grandparent stated:
> I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable.
So, when the solution results in increased pricing, his challenge was inherently failed.
It doesn't achieve the goal, in fact further distances it.
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.
No it is decided by the free market.
> 2. Removing current residents that don’t fit the criteria
Only those who rent. People who own property can continue to live there as long as they wish.
I apologize for the sarcasm in light of this. Cheers!
Then suddenly it's not a good solution for him anymore.
It is easy, there is no absolutely no desire to keep housing "affordable" by anyone that owns property in SF.
This is a problem through the US. Property owners vote and do things that are in their favor while renters and people that are trying to enter the market scream it is too expensive.
Imagine fitting an extra 100K people without adding any buildings higher than 3 stories.
It's like how building wider freeways doesn't solve traffic. Demand is not independent of what has been built.
The problem in the Bay Area isn't induced demand, almost by definition. Rather, the demand already exists, and that's precisely why costs keep skyrocketing despite very low supply growth. The only way out of the situation other than by increasing supply is to cut demand to live there by, e.g., bombing tech headquarters and unleashing roving bands of human culling robots so that people would have less motivation to move here.
An example of actual induced demand in the Bay Area might be homeless housing in San Francisco. Since circa 2005 SF has built enough units of homeless housing to house every homeless person enumerated in the circa 2005 homeless census. But the number of homeless on the street has stayed the same--which is to say, the total number of homeless has approximately doubled since that time, w/ half now living in city-built housing. Arguably this suggests that there may be something like a set carrying capacity of unsheltered homeless in the city, and no matter how many units of housing you provide, you'll always have that number of homeless on the streets.[1] Though, this is obviously just a conjecture. People argue vociferously about the origins and motivations of the homeless in SF. I certainly won't claim to have any concrete answers. But at least such a conjectured phenomenon would be consonant w/ the theory of induced demand.
[1] To be clear, the induced demand in this scenario is demand for the free housing units, not spots on the sidewalk.
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.
AFAIU, San Francisco has built more market and non-market housing than any other city in the Bay Area, despite being geographically quite small. Unfortunately, that's a relatively low bar in the context of the Bay Area considering so many cities just refuse to up-zone anything, or approve projects in up-zoned areas.
Have we consider the use of organic cullers instead?
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.
Edit: Just for comparison, the average two bedroom in San Francisco is $3500, and that's down $1000 from last year
and they are absolutely correct that this gentrifying transplant (aka anybody that signs a new lease, shrug) would find San Francisco unappealing
I mean I find it unappealing now too, but would have found it more so unappealing
Every single currently desirable neighborhood was an undesirable neighborhood within the last 30 years. "But the culture and the artists are gone" yeah, so is a gigantic abandoned highway through Hayes Valley replaced by ice cream shops eeeeeverywhere. There isn't a coherent consensus, just angst.
This kind of thing is true of many (most?) cities in the US.
(Well, I don't know about every desirable neighborhood. Pacific Heights is going to be nice on either side of 30 years.)
If you go to a lot of cities in between coasts the revitalization of downtown areas is most definitely a "last decade or two" trend.
Remember that New York nearly went bankrupt in the 70s. Then the crack epidemic in the 80s. Crime was much worse and cities were seen as undesirable.
It’s more of a desire to “keep housing affordable [for me without decreasing quality of life by attracting more people]”.
I recall seeing some article in which people were arguing that a council relaxing zoning laws to make more/cheaper housing possible was a "government taking" as it would reduce the value of their homes. Unfortunately I don't recall where/when so I can't guarantee it's not my mind merging unrelated stories.
Or (because it's insane) the onion :D
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.
If someone is in a rent-controlled situation, they were simply lucky to get there first, and there is no mechanism in place for anybody else to rotate into that position.
There's tons of ways to make housing affordable without resorting to policies that have been rejected almost unanimously by economists.
TLDR: I would rather have SF as it is now (because i like it now and dislike change) than an affordable SF. "Manhattanization" is worse than the attempt of keeping it affordable.
I would rather (to a limit) have an expensive SF than an SF that has more people in it. The manhattanization is not likely to drive down prices significantly. I read a article (cant find source) that said there would need to be ~4x the number of rental units in the city before prices fell meaningfully due to supply/demand. Even if the actual number isn't true, demand is so high that i don't believe any achievable increase in housing would help at any meaningful way.
If you accept the premise that prices won't go down (this is an assumption of course), you need to consider if more people would be better. Of course more people can enjoy it, and that is good, but here is why i think it will make the city a worse city:
SF is great in many ways. There are so many parks, all so close together so its very fun and walkable. So many restaurants and shops all so close. Walking SF is a joy compared to many cities, where most of SF is great for walking while some cities only have a few neighborhoods that are great for walking. This is my opinion on SF, not all agree.
The "manhattanization" of SF would destroy some of that by changing the "street view" details of the city. Sure, its just more people and likely no fewer "things", but bigger facades that change less "per foot" are more boring - bigger buildings tend to have fewer doors and things per foot of sidewalk frontage. Not universally true, but often true. Also, SF has some great historic architecture, and that would get lost as new building destroy the existing "feel" of a neighborhood. Some neighborhoods this would be good, but some are great how they are, and new buildings should improve not deteriorate the beauty of the city.
But museums are full of dead things.
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).
Ok, but this requires governments to build competitive cities where the less well off can thrive. The way California is going is that literally every city is thinking the exact same thing you just said. There is nowhere to go.
They can disagree about it sure, but it should't be remotely hard to 'understand'.
America is a very large places, there are tons of places for people to build out and build up if that's a primary issue.
The most vertical city in the US - NYC - is one of the least affordable.
In fact - the 'most dense' places tend to be the least affordable, paradoxically.
So even in the event affordability becomes a primary concern, even then the answers may not be more obvious.
More than likely getting different companies to move to adjacent areas might be a more suitable problem to the affordability crisis.
Surely Morgan Hill, Pleasanton, Fremont or Santa Rosa could equally opt to 'build up'.
If SF residents want to knock down homes to build parks, or build skyscrapers, all the power to them.