Preston should listen to research, not insult researchers | Hacker News Reader

Preston should listen to research, not insult researchers

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115 pointsnopal_tornado93 comments

Preston is unique in that although he probably isn't the biggest obstacle to housing in the super HCOL US cities, he is the only anti-housing politician who makes an attempt to portray himself as pro-housing.

It's not surprising he makes people so upset. He is pretty much the perfect avatar of wrapping yourself up in progressive language and pretending to care - while working behind the scenes to find excuses to veto virtually every new housing project (high-end and low-end) that is proposed in the city.

NIMBYism is how polite erudite folk implement red lining with plausible deniability.

First off, “NIMBY” is just an offensive pejorative that fails to recognize in good faith that many people like their existing lifestyle, community, and neighborhood character. People buy houses in certain locations or remain in certain locations seeking these qualities. There’s nothing wrong with that and incumbent residents shouldn’t be under any obligation to alter their governance and give up their lifestyle to accommodate new residents that feel entitled to live in a highly desirable location at low cost.

Secondly, the accusation that people in cities today are actively seeking to racially discriminate using policy is without evidence. This is just a stretch that attempts to recast valid personal lifestyle preferences into some kind of oppressor-victim class warfare narrative, thereby painting those with differing opinions as something far worse. It’s simply not a civil perspective to hold.

Should have stuck with the second paragraph.

The connection between redlining and NIMBYism is somewhere between dubious and risible. But "give up their lifestyle to accommodate new residents" and "not in my backyard"? Same thing. You can howl offense all you want; the shoe fits.

They aren’t the same thing. One has the positive connotation of preserving something good. The other has a negative connotation of preventing something, when that isn’t where the motivation comes from. It is a subtle but significant difference that tries to paint people who like the life they’ve built with a caricature, just like other modern pejoratives such as “Karen”.

You know what?

I don't care if the NIMBYs get their feelings hurt. I'm past the point of caring.

Your username says "sea" in it which reminds me of Seattle, where I live. Where, even on the very good salary of a technology industry employee, I am just about priced out of.

How can it be that someone who makes a "modest six figure income," to quote a person running for office in Seattle right now, is continually under the threat of a $3,000-or-more monthly bill to rent a place where a car is not required?

My spouse cannot drive; I strongly prefer not to. Should be easy to find a place where someone can live and be transit-dependent, what with all of this transit expansion projects? Yet, for some inexplicable reason, we're spending billions of dollars to build a mass transit system that is either solely next to a freeway or goes through areas of the city that are next to golf courses and single-family housing.

So, yeah, I don't really care about "preserving something good" when that "good" is turning into a MEDIAN house price of just short of ONE MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS and yet neither myself nor another family member--who also works in tech and has a salary that would be monumentally great everywhere in the country except here--can feel secure about the cost of living.

It sucks.

And how ironic to use a throwaway to deny its existence.

Maybe move to a different city where people aren't clueless?

We probably will, now that my employer has made noises about allowing remote work from anywhere. My spouse is a citizen of an EU country where my employer has an office so we might just move there.

If the NIMBYs want everybody who wasn't alive the last time housing prices were "cheap" in Seattle to GTFO, I suppose that's the only thing we can do. Because there's no damn way I'm scrimping and saving to pay seven figures to someone whose sole contribution to that property was that they were born before I was and got there first to stand in the way of everyone else.

I’m not sure I understand. I recently saved and strategized and worked hard to buy a not-cheap house in Seattle. Who said I was entitled to specifically what I worked hard to get? I’m very fortunate to have what I want, and by no means is it my right to be exactly where I am in the structure that I want.

Perhaps I can help.

Some of the sticker price of your not-cheap house is the quality of the house itself, and its desirable location.

Some is a cynical campaign to prevent owners of land from building more housing on land which, again, they own, through political maneuvering.

I would assert that your right to buy what you want implies their right to build what they want on the land they have bought, within reasonable limits, that the zoning regime in big West Coast cities is nothing resembling reasonable, and that we should change it so that those cities can have more, cheaper housing.

If you disagree, that's fine, that's democracy, but I consider you a NIMBY, an authoritarian busybody who handwaves about "neighborhood character" to disguise the fact that they feel entitled to prevent a lot owner from putting up a four-story building with eight condos in it.

Of the places with great wages in this country, Seattle has probably the most clued-in people and governance. They are changing their development patterns to allow for more urban living, enabling great public transit to further cut down on emissions, and are making the most progress.

The people I know that are living there are frustrated with bad governance too, but they feel a lot better when they see what's going on in California.

I'd love for a California city to be as forward thinking and reality-based as Seattle, making policy primarily o enable the good of all instead of transferring wealth from those with less to those that own land.

Seattle and Jersey City are great. The Squamish Nation in Vancouver is also doing AMAZING governance, they should just return all Vancouver government to Squamish Nation, IMHO. That is a land-back movement that would greatly increase human happiness.

You mention the high prices you face as being problematic. If you can’t afford it why don’t you move elsewhere instead of requiring everyone else around you to take a hit to their lifestyle to accommodate you? You want taller or more buildings, but that would change parameters like traffic, noise, crime, character, and so on that others don’t want to deal with. Many long term residents have lived in- and contributed to- their neighborhood and city, through good and bad times, to turn them into the desirable and attractive areas they are now, and it seems reasonable to want to retain that. Why are their desires invalid while yours are so valid?

The attitude of feeling like you are owed great housing in a great location at a great price feels like entitlement to me. And I get it - we all have our own things that we feel entitled to, myself included. But there’s an entire country’s worth of desirable places to live in. You may not have the exact job or conditions you want in all of those locations, but I am betting you can make life work in many other places. Being mad that people who have built a particular community and lifestyle want to preserve some key parts of it doesn’t make sense to me, because I understand why they want to protect those things. You’re asking them to lose something they value so you can gain something you value, and I don’t see why you feel you hold a moral high ground.

You contradict yourself. You raise the question of why those who are there need to suffer a change of lifestyle, then you tell someone who lives there that they should simply leave and move somewhere else.

The basic problem here is that there is a limited resource: land that is close to the downtown area where most of the workplaces and other attractions are. Some people (such as yourself) want that land to be filled with a certain kind of housing, and others ("YIMBYs") want that land to be filled with a different, much more dense kind of housing. They both have their advantages and drawbacks. The sparse areas have advantages like less traffic, less noise, and lower crime rate per capita (I haven't actually read any studies on that last one, but I'll take your word for it). The dense areas have the advantage that they can house a heck of a lot more people. Also the prices are cheaper in the dense areas, so you're more likely to be able to live next to your friends and family, even if they make less money than you. Different types of people will tend to like different types of housing. A wealthy and noise sensitive person might prefer the sparse housing, while a poorer extrovert might prefer the high density kind.

In a command economy, deciding which of the two types to build would be a very contentious issue. In a market economy, it's no problem. Just let people buy land and build what they want on it. Some regions of sparse housing will be built to cater to the folks who like that, and some regions of dense housing will be built to cater to everyone else. The low density folks tend to pay a premium for the fact that they're occupying an area of land that could house 40 times more people, but in general, everyone is happy.

The problem comes when one group or the other tries to bring a bit of the command economy back into it. They institute bans on building high density housing, or require a quota of parking spots to be built with new construction. This artificially decreases the supply of housing, which jacks up prices. This makes landlords happy, but pretty much everyone else is hurting on rent. Fewer people are able to be housed, and it's costing them more. Similarly, if laws were passed requiring all new housing to be high density, we'd end up with loads of dirt cheap apartment buildings, but the low density preferring folks wouldn't be happy, even though they're willing to pay a premium.

You seem confused.

You bought a plot of land, presumably with a house on it.

You didn't buy a lifestyle. You don't have a deed to a lifestyle, you have a deed to land and a house.

You very much did not buy your neighbor's land. So if your neighbor wants to build some dense housing, what on Earth makes you think you have the right to stop her?

Now you may have the power to say "yep, not in my back yard! I'm going to file a bunch of stop orders and vote for politicians who are hostile to upzoning (and who happen to own some property whose sticker price they're afraid of disturbing)!"

The reason I consider this desire invalid is because it isn't your land. What you're doing is abusing zoning, which is supposed to keep factories away from human habitation, to prevent other property owners from building the kind of housing they want on their own property.

I've decided that I'm glad you consider NIMBY an insult, you NIMBY. Your kind deserve to be insulted, and those of us who think it's disgusting to tell a productive citizen of our cities "move away if you can't afford an apartment" plan to defeat you and get back to building.

> The attitude of feeling like you are owed great housing in a great location at a great price feels like entitlement to me.

Have a look in the mirror, NIMBY.

There’s no good faith in limiting housing - it’s completely untenable. We have to let our cities grow upward as quickly as possible; letting people live in high density reduces energy use, carbon, even birthrate.

Every opposition to building more housing pretends it’s special. Every opposition to building more housing puts people on the street and accelerates climate change.

I respect your heart but there _are_ situations where limiting housing could be in good faith.

Overcrowding and resource depletion are such situations that are currently playing out in the California and several other Western states as water and resources are being stretched to near breaking points.

I don't think high density infinite economic growth is green or progressive but I do know it's untenable.

Resource use is still lower at higher density, across all of the axes you’re discussing. Most of the water usage in western states is for farming, not individual use. It is vastly less resource-intensive to get water to someone living in downtown San Francisco in a condo than to get them water in Phoenix in a house - and that’s very commonly the trade here.

Overcrowding is a word that doesn’t really mean anything. No Western US city is nearly as dense as most of the major cities in the world.

When you say infinite economic growth and density, in the same sentence, I think you are ascribing a bunch of values that aren’t really related to density. To get to a steady state of resource use would require us to live in far higher density than we do today.

While all of these seem on their face to be good faith arguments, and you certainly employ them in good faith!, they have relatively easy answers, and yet they are propagating the same way all misinformation does.

According to UN Habitat, cities consume 78 per cent of the world's energy and produce more than 60 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Population growth and corresponding high density cities are the driving force behind resource consumption. Those farms only use water so humans can eat. If they just stopped then we'd be starved instead of thirsty.

The efficiency of a city is exactly the cause of resource depletion. Land limitations used to be a limiting factor that would put breaks on run away growth. We are not unlike animals in this regard. Higher density is a taller geometry and less stable. Whether other megacities are more dense is moot.

I am not saying this because I have some solution. I am not saying this because cities and people are bad. I'm saying as a fact humans and our resource consumption has put the planet on a perilous path that will not end well.

Our problem is carrying capacity and if an area is reaching its max stable carrying capacity it may be time to limit housing. If housing is not limited and controlled a population can overshoot because the illusion of a kind climate that is actually only temporary.

Perhaps this is not the case for SF but it is and will be the case for many places.

If I told you that you were wrong, and I could show you why, would you want to listen? Because it seems like you’re doubling down on a strong opinion you have, and looking for information that could support it.

"There’s no good faith in limiting housing."

Nope. You can not convince me that statement is always true.

That's okay though! It would be boring if everyone agreed on everything. Cheers!

All of the things you brought up are better with higher density - they aren't really debatable as much as I think you are misinformed.

On the contrary.

I am familiar with the argument you're making and the flawed government funded research that lead you (and many media) to believe that I am the one that is misinformed.

This thread is old but before it closes I'd implore future netizens to check out the work from John W. Day and Charles Hall. The article [1] The Myth of the Sustainable City is a good summary of the work.

If I had to summarize it it's a mix of [2] Goodharts Law and the [3] Outsourcing of Pollution.

When a state imports energy (or materials) from another state to make its own state's pollution stats look better it's just outsourcing pollution. Not reducing it. And it obscures the region's actual climate impact. It's a shell game but it can't be played much longer. The gig is up.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-s...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[3] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/clim...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_conc...

Limiting birthrate is not necessarily a good thing. It just means you have made life harder.

My wife has been getting into local politics here in California, and it has been really disheartening to see how thin the 'progressive' layer is for so many people here.

California likes to think of itself as a very liberal state, but that really only changes how we frame what are still conservative and insular policies.

What's conservative about corruption and kleptocracy?

One of the ways politicians like Preston cement their power is by convincing their constituents that the 'other team' are literal demons.

I can disagree with someone's politics but still be confident that they can govern reasonably. Just because you clothe yourself in the memes you think I like doesn't win my vote.

Preston doesn't have to do any convincing - the national republican party might as well be literal demons, so you could the most reasonable republican ever and people would refuse to vote for them just to prevent the national republican party from even having an iota of more power. National strategy has effectively poisoned local races. You could run as independent but you would be a very uphill battle against very well funded opponents. Ultimately there seems to be little hope for progressive economic ideas.

The California Republican Party has stances on issues that are past what SF voters in the majority will accept.

He doesn’t have to paint them as demons because their stated positions on abortion and gay marriage will make them untenable to SF voters and place SF voters in vocal opposition. Any demonic painting is unlikely to move the needle.

This is merely a claim of fact about the CA GOP and SF, not a position on whether they are demons. It is not a claim that the CA GOP are evil because of these stances.

Please don't take HN threads into tedious partisan flamewar. It's predictable and therefore boring, and inevitably turns nasty. We're trying to avoid that kind of thing here. I know the GP started it, but there's a difference between dipping a toe and jumping in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Huh. I genuinely didn’t think I was doing that. I had to look the issues up on the website to quote them.

The point isn’t that I disagree or think they’re demons or whatever. The point is that SF residents are vocally opposed to CA GOP stances. “Painting them as demons” isn’t necessary because their stated aim is already past the Overton window for SF residents.

It’s like saying “he’s painting non-vegans as demons to prevent them from being voted in at the vegan conference”. They’re vegans. You don’t have to paint the non-vegans as demons. The perfectly non-demonic non-vegan falls outside the window! Pointing that out isn’t flaming! It’s factual.

Considering I’m pretty right wing, it’s a bit perplexing that you’ve gone and assumed I’m making a partisan attack on Republicans. I have a Gadsden flag, mate. And currently live in Texas.

But whatever, it’s your site. Run it how you want.

Ok, I believe you and I clearly misread your comment—sorry! But in terms of the dynamics of flamewar, it's likely a distinction without a difference because others would also misread it and we'd get the same effect. If you're posting something that might be mistaken for flamebait, the burden is on you (not you personally, of course—it applies the same way to all of us) to disambiguate from that:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Edit: if you're going to edit a comment after someone has replied to it, it's best to make it clear where the edits are. Otherwise you can easily change the meaning of the reply, which can be unfair to others (not only to the user who replied, but also to readers).

I think you’re starting at shadows, like a cop who sees a gun in every man reaching for his wallet merely because he’s seen men reaching for guns a hundred times before.

That’s your life to lead but it is well worth asking oneself if there is truly some fifth column here or if one has convinced oneself into some Great Purge.

But your house, your rules. Edited the comment so that we can ensure that those primed for arson won’t use this particular lamp to light their torches.

I don't see how regulating the supply of housing is conservative. If laissez faire treatment of markets is a conservative idea, then this cannot be.

Blocking new housing is resisting change. Maintaining the status quo is conservative. Pushing for change is progressive.

> Pushing for change is progressive.

Or regressive, depending on the nature and effect of the change.

Are you being serious with this linguistic game? One might just as well argue that stopping the construction gravy train would be the progressive push for change, while letting it continue even to absurd conclusions like empty skyscrapers and bridges to nowhere is the conservative position.

I seem to remember a conservative Alaska senator championing a bridge to nowhere.

So by this definition, if I want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare and let the elderly and sick fend for themselves - I'm a progressive.

You can't make an omelet without bankrupting a few old birds.

Or is it "Move fast and bankrupt stuff".

IDK.

> I don't see how regulating the supply of housing is conservative.

In the article, it's not blanket regulation - it's increasing-the-housing-supply regulation.

Increasing the supply lowers prices which means individual's property value goes down - very anti-conservative.

An oversimplification of conservative values is to keep the status quo or increase the current value. Do nothing to lower that value.

If you look at the polling data for blocking apartment buildings or new housing, it cross-cuts parties fairly well, but conservatives are a bit more likely to oppose more housing than liberals. A slightly bigger difference than the liberal/conservative opinion spilt it that split between people who live in detached houses versus apartments/condos/townhouses. Those who live in detached housing oppose housing more vigorously.

Political ideology, about markets or reducing racial equality, are overridden by the housing preferences.

"I don't see how regulating the supply of housing is conservative. If laissez faire treatment of markets is a conservative idea, then this cannot be."

Your confusion is understandable and to be expected.

"Conservative" in the United States has been co-opted by pro business narratives to mean the opposite of what it means by definition.

In your example, "laissez faire treatment of (anything)" is by definition, a liberal policy. Regulation, rules, guidelines - these are impulses in the conservative direction.

21st century politics in the United States has this nomenclature backwards.

Gun rights are another example of this. The United States has extremely liberal gun policies and the second amendment is almost off the charts in terms of liberalism. And yet we refer to it as "conservative" - and we refer to gun control and gun regulation, etc., as "liberal" policies.

It may not be economiclly conservative, but Donald Trump and his Housing & Urban Development secretary Ben Carson both talked about saving the suburbs and single family zoning.

Further, if one looks at the voting records of Calforina Republicans on zoning reform, they tend to not support it at a state level. It's most Democrats who are voting for these changes.

Housing is weird politically, it breaks a bunch of typical political assumptions.

Or maybe this is just where progressive politics leads to?

San Francisco really has no excuses. It’s been a solidly Democrat city for the past 40+ years. Voters are overwhelmingly left of center and typically vote for a selection of left of center candidates.

There is no Republican representation in the whole city govt. The possibilities for passing progressive legislation are endless, yet what we end up with is a massively dysfunctional govt with a heavy dose of corruption.

Not trying to troll, but what are examples of progressive or soft-socialist governance working well, anywhere in the world at any time in history?

Small european countries with massive sovereign wealth funds maybe?

Finland?

What? "soft-socialist" by American standards would include pretty much all of western-Europe.

> Not trying to troll, but what are examples of progressive or soft-socialist governance working well, anywhere in the world at any time in history?

I think if you want to find historical examples of success you're going to need to have a highly inclusive definition of "soft socialist" or consider cases where people are fed and clothed but living miserably under the thumb of the government as "working well"

Historically blue cities in the US have been run by authoritarians with varying visions of what they want the place to look like who are supported by a bunch of boot lickers who believe in the vision. Examples abound on the US east coast. Recently it's become less fashionable to rule with an iron fist. This has lead to some serious problems where "crime with a victim" and "this behavior makes things seriously miserable for everyone around" laws and go unenforced but I think that some cities will see the West coast examples decide they do not want and then go strike a good balance between the extremes.

I always called it “performative progressive” politics.

This feels like a good summary of the Bay Area to me.

Worst of all, valuable conservative language in progressive discussion is baulked without thought.

I don't disagree, however, Preston is merely representing the will of his constituents. If I was a NIMBY I would think he was doing a very fine job, and I don't blame him for doing what he was hired to do.

Here's the most frustrating part though: SF has a massive pool of voters that could easily overpower NIMBYs and basically rezone much of it to build as much housing as necessary. IIRC SF is ~2/3 renters, many of which are paying an insane amount in rent — but crucially, many aren't because of rent control.

It seems those that are doing just fine in their rent controlled apartments remain apathetic to the whole situation and aren't lobbying their representatives like the NIMBYs are, and everyone else is paying the price. It's basically "FU, got mine" very much the same way NIMBYs are.

Until this apathy is resolved, nothing else will, unless the state starts to overwrite local control.

Yes! Rent control turns renters into NIMBYs.

> Here's the most frustrating part though: SF has a massive pool of voters that could easily overpower NIMBYs and basically rezone much of it to build as much housing as necessary

The unfortunate part is that Preston doesn't think that these people are his constituents, instead he represents the interests of wealthy homeowners like him. With a fig leaf of tenant advocacy to cover up the larger theft of tenant power that happens via the housing shortage.

The objective failure of SF housing policy has led me to the conclusion that those enacting it have exactly no interest in fixing the problem. It stretches credulity to believe that these politicians are just accidentally repeating the same policies again and again while being shocked as rents keep rising. The only reasonable conclusion is that the policies are indeed working as expected, but the politicians are lying about the aim.

As long as housing continues to be treated like an investment, people will do whatever it takes (however slimy it may be) to protect and grow that investment. Unfortunately I only see this problem getting worse as time goes on.

Probably the only way to deal with it would be to overturn the super-racist original court decision that decided zoning was constitutional. It likely shouldn’t be.

I suggest changing the title to clarify that "SF" refers to San Francisco, which is currently unclear. (I initially read it as "speculative fiction" aka "science fiction")

I love that HN's audience has grown to the point that such a clarification is necessary. San Francisco is such a tiny part of the world, but it used to be massive in the world of HN.

I clicked on the article thinking “Let’s see who this Preston guy is and how he’s holding Science Fiction back…”.

Same, I thought this was going to be more Hugo drama.

From TFA, it seems like it's hard for gays to understand how straights think about hosing and for straights to understand how gays think about housing. I somehow doubt that the type of sex you enjoy is so influential in the type of housing development you prefer.

The association is more San Francisco and gay people, not housing thoughts and gay people. SF has long been a haven for LGBTQ people that are threatened and unwelcome where they grew up. Can't be yourself without death threats, beatings, or general ostracization in your home town? Move to SF and find your community. And if you're family has rejected you, find yourself new family in SF.

Of course, when SF has decided that only the wealthiest should be let in, that changes things.

As for Preston, he is a bully, ignorant, and only sometimes has progressive positions, but always wraps himself in the flag of supposedly progressive language. SF would be far better off with somebody more welcoming, but he's so good at woke-washing the desires of wealthy residents of SF that I don't think he'll lose his seat.

I think it’s that San Francisco has no substitute for gays the way that other cities have for straights (although an analogue could be made for “techies.”) If you live as a closeted gay man in Kansas, San Francisco occupies the mindspace of a holy land, but the prices in the city create a barrier like the Vatican charging Catholics $10,000 for a ticket to St. Peter’s Basilica would.

I believe it, although only by correlation, of course. Often gay couples can have increased incomes from two male wage earners and a lower percentage of couples with kids.

There's a book on this, "There Goes the Gayborhood". There's also a New York Times article with the same title. The New York Times had an article "Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being Passé.” back in 2007.[1] It's not just SF. It's Greenwich Village, West Hollywood, Boystown in Chicago...

Time moves on, and with it, so do subcultures. Hippies and punks have faded away or merged into the mainstream. Now it's the turn of gay culture.

Next, Chinatowns, which are stuck in the past of a China that no longer exists. There are modern Chinatowns, such as Cupertino, much more integrated into both mainstream America and mainstream China.

[1] https://www.heraldtribune.com/article/LK/20071030/News/60523...

I apologize in advance, it’s entirely likely that I’ve misunderstood this article.

Is the premise here that “market rate housing” makes housing more affordable but “affordable housing” does not? I thought affordable housing was cheaper?

No need to apologize, it's precisely this double speak that Preston (and Peskin) use to advance their own political agendas at the expense of vulnerable communities here in SF. There is also a component of semi legally siphoning off public money to hand over to private developers from which said government officials take a rake, but let's ignore this portion (If you're curious though, you can read more here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/sf-city-hall-corru...).

First, in San Francisco, to qualify for "affordable housing", you have to make under the poverty line in San Francisco. That means under 110k for a family of 4. If a builder were to want to build affordable housing to help these populations, it is not financially feasible without the government paying for it b/c one would have to sell or rent this newly built housing at significantly below what they paid for it.

So then enter rich white elitists like Preston and Peskin (with ties to the real estate lobby / land owners themselves) who want to enrich themselves by increasing the value of their own land. What do they do? They block all new housing development in San Francisco so the supply is permanently depressed and gate it on building "affordable housing". They package that up as a news story in helping vulnerable communities by making a few affordable homes but in in reality, housing gets more expensive and unaffordable for everyone.

Just so a few richly compensated officials can enrich themselves even more, at the expense of the poorest residents.

To be more explicit- first they object to housing unless it is fifteen percent affordable housing. When they get that, it goes to 25 percent. Then to 50. Whatever number is needed to get the project cancelled.

It's a positive feedback loop. The higher the cost of the exactions, the more the market rate of the remaining units in a project grows to cover the price, the fewer overall projects, the greater the uproar about luxury developments.

This is really confusing for me. The author of the article seems to be making the point that affordable housing is inherently expensive and market rate is inherently cheaper. If I were to follow this line of reasoning, I’d find myself advocating for no affordable housing at all.

But then I read about the issue actually being about housing supply. I somewhat understand that this article is framed in such a way as to seem like it’s about one individual politician, but the points made here seem to be very black and white about the very concept of affordable housing.

It kind of seems that pro- and anti- affordable housing folks are accusing each other of the same thing: valuing their own property value highest.

I’m but a humble country bumpkin that grew up in affordable housing and have very little expertise about “doublespeak” but generally speaking I’ve found that when somebody makes and sells something for less, that means that the price is lower (less money required = lower cost).

Sadly, it is intentionally confusing, hence the double-speak.

The truth is that there's no such thing as conjuring up affordable housing in expensive cities at-will. Expensive housing will be built and subsidized so that it is affordable for some, but not others.

- or -

Expensive (market rate) housing will be built unsubsidized and it will compete with all other housing stock. If there is little competition, the price will not be affordable, because why would it without competition. Once there's enough housing supply, then new housing stock will be competing with existing housing, and put downward pressure on prices.

A third element at play here is that wealthier residents are able to afford housing regardless of price, so the key question existing residents must ask is: Do you want them to compete with you on a likely rent-controlled unit, or do you want them to take a look at the fancy new apartment with all the expensive amenities, and isn't rent controlled. Remember that all housing stock was once new and more expensive before it became affordable to everyone else. This isn't a comment for or against rent control but it is a factor that must be considered.

Blocking new housing unless it's "affordable" is just NIMBYism with better optics.

So they’re both NIMBYism but one is better than the other due to having poorer optics?

Just because the author brought race into it doesn't justify it.

Affordable housing: control prices on a subset of the housing stock, and leave the rest to the market.

Market rate housing: let developers build housing if it's profitable for them to do so.

The former results in some members of a favoured class getting cheap access to housing, whilst preserving/increasing the value of the remaining 'market rate' housing.

The latter seeks to allocate housing based on willingness to pay, whilst increasing the housing stock to stop/reverse the trend of price increases.

The way people use the word 'affordable' wrt to housing makes it sound like it's an intrinsic property of the houses. When it actually refers to a non-market allocation mechanism. 'Affordable housing' sounds better than 'price caps allocated to a lucky subset of the folks we deem deserving'.

> The former results in some members of a favoured class getting cheap access to housing, whilst preserving/increasing the value of the remaining 'market rate' housing.

To clarify, the favored class here are people at or near the poverty line? And their existence drives up prices for anybody else?

Not necessarily people near the poverty line. You could be earning 6 figures and still be eligible.

There's a lottery system which is 'fair' for some definition of fair, but doesn't solve the problem, which is limited housing supply, and doesn't help all who want to live here.

That’s awful that the supply is so small. It would be great if there was a big enough supply of affordable housing such that they could do away with the unfair lottery.

A big enough supply of ANY housing would make housing affordable.

'Affordable' isn't an intrinsic property of a house. It's an outcome of the allocation system.

I assumed that “affordable” was an intrinsic property of a house in that it’s an objective number (cost) assigned to a property.

Again it’s awful that there is a housing shortage, but “market rate” seems to mean “charges more than what would be considered to be ‘affordable’”. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that “more than affordable” and “more affordable” aren’t the same thing.

Edit: I’m not really sure why I can’t respond to the child’s comment from this but I apologize. I thought we were talking about housing (eg a house one can afford vs a house that one cannot), not the minutiae of the English language. To clarify, I’m asking about housing that lower income people can move into vs other types of housing. I have zero interest in litigating “intrinsic vs extrinsic” on a topic as simple and self-obvious as “who gets to live in SF”

You and I may be using these words differently:

- intrinsic (vs. extrinsic)

- price (vs. cost)

And your wording (like the use of the word 'charges') may suggest that you consider that suppliers of housing unilaterally set prices. When, in fact, a transaction can take place only when a buyer and a seller can agree on a price.

Sorry, for some reason it took a long time before I was granted the ability to respond to this particular post (30min+ afaik). I’ve included my response to this post in an edit to the comment you’ve responded to.

Also political activists who know how the lottery system works far better than the rest of the population: https://apnews.com/article/cad8b58711d54b178660a0ce379288a4

The problem is when people block the development of ANY new housing on the basis that it's "not affordable housing".

Adding market rate housing is better than adding no housing at all.

And unfortunately in order to have cheap market rate housing, you need to have built a ton of luxury housing a few decades ago. Today’s luxury flats are tomorrow’s aging affordable units, even if SF fixed it’s zoning rules it will take a while before housing prices stabilize.

The gist is that is significantly harder to build “affordable” housing (where prices are kept artificially low).

So if you mandate only affordable housing, then you help a few people, but restrict the overall housing market, which makes rent prices go up for most people.

(To be clear, affordable housing isn’t bad; but restricting the supply of housing by building 100 affordable units instead 80,000 market rate ones is)

Why is it not possible to build more than 100 affordable units? Do “market rate” houses generate 800x the revenue? That’s an enormous chasm in profitability that should be addressed. I couldn’t imagine being forced to build a house wherein for every dollar I I recoup, my neighbor recoups eight hundred of them.

It’s more that many people who don’t want to build more housing use “affordable housing” as a way to do so.

If they build a few “affordable” units, it’s a way to still seem like you’re pro-housing.

To be clear, I think most pro-affordable housing folks genuinely would like to build lots of affordable housing.

This position is precisely why I’m baffled. The general consensus here is genuinely that anybody who says they want affordable housing is telling on themselves that they actually, in fact, do not want affordable housing?

There is genuinely no scenario in which a person can actually want the construction of affordable units?

This honestly sounds like some wild mental gymnastics in order to justify… keeping property values higher. Just like many are accusing the other side of doing.

> There is genuinely no scenario in which a person can actually want the construction of affordable units?

Not at all, I'm saying Preston in particular has historically ran on the construction of affordable units, and then worked to block them throughout his time in office.

How many units of affordable housing (from 0 to infinity) do you support building in SF?

millions, preferably

The problem is that developers won’t build affordable housing unless they’re heavily incentivized to do so (why take a big risk to build something if you won’t profit from it, developers usually aren’t charities) but in practice lots of development get blocked for not having enough affordable units while simultaneously not being nearly subsidized enough to incentivize it. In fact SF’s permitting process is so arcane and silly that just thinking about developing anything will cost you millions in legal fees, let alone the insanely high price of the land, so the payoff better be good.

In practice people crying for 100% affordable housing are in reality demanding that nothing gets built at all.

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