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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

You have described why the housing "crisis" will never be solved in CA. The homeowners will vote down every new apartment complex, every new developer plan, every rezone. It will never end, ever. Current home owners will never vote for less money, ever. The only way CA can fix this is by a state wide vote - demanding housing to be allowed. Home owners in CA love new Panera Breads and new Chipotles - tie any new commercial properties to new housing. New 1brdm condos will never be built ever. This cannot be fought at a county NIMBY level: this must be statewide. %46 of CA do not own homes - the vote count is almost there. I await my downvotes.

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Precisely! I've linked a great article from Vox about how home ownership changes people. In a nutshell, most peoples' largest asset is their home, so they have strong incentives to protect its value. Because the housing crisis is fundamentally a supply crisis, it also causes them to take on a scarcity mindset. This leads to your classic NIMBY behavior, wherein homeowners show up at city council meetings to oppose literally anything going up in their neighborhoods. The end result is that NIMBYism does prop up home values, but, mostly because existing homeowners oppose the building of any more homes in their neighborhoods, thus perpetuating the crisis that caused them to behave this way.

You can read about this, plus some background on relevant research here: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22597947/homeowner-nimby-affor...

> The homeowners will vote down every new apartment complex, every new developer plan, every rezone.

Homeowners don't get to vote or have any say on such things. The city planning commission will approve, or not, whatever they will.

In the rare case where a vote is relevant, every resident gets one vote regardless of housing owner or renter status.

Bonus points if those politicians own land. That's how you get corruption. Each home owner is basically a tiny bit corrupt.

I lazily Googled and disproved you in five seconds:

> San Francisco and the East Bay should see 7,872 new apartments open in 2021, an increase of 36% from the previous year. It's the highest number of apartments — 13,497 units — added to the region in the last five years.

Surprised?

We can’t solve mental illness with more quarter million dollar condos. I don’t know why this is still being peddled.

A lot of folks enter into mental health crisis from the stress, sleep deprivation and other issues caused by being homeless. Certainly not all. But having gone through a time period dealing with stress and sleep deprivation from the comfort of my home, I can empathize.

“Unhoused” — esp families — are rapidly rehoused in SF. Those experiencing “chronic homelessness” (the ‘visible’ humans, who deserve the same amount of love and respect) are more often tied to mental health…just different things are helpful for the different groups.

Even the chronically homeless with mental health issues benefit greatly from having housing. The key is to make it housing they actually can use, let them have their belongings, their pets foe support, let people come and go as they please so they are not prisoners, and don't force people out of the housing everyday.

A lot of the existing housing solutions for the chronically homeless have terrible terrible restrictions that make the housing not work for people, sadly.

Yeah, you know it's almost like those SROs that basically don't exist anymore actually served a purpose. That type of housing is perfect for getting people off the street and into a warm bed at night, while not imposing very many restrictions on them.

You are assuming they were born homeless.

Housing First policies are a huge boon to helping people out of homelessness who are dealing with mental illness.

What you derisively call "quarter million dollar condos" are of course helpful for this. It is either from directly housing the currently homeless with mental illness in these homes.

And if these homes do not directly house the homeless, new additional homes, where people's rent goes towards construction and labor rather than merely the pockets of a rentier landlord that just sees their rents ever increase is a huge help. Productive creation of new housing, especially if it increases the vacancy rate, is crucial to reigning in the housing market, a market which is failing our people, and in which landlords and homeowners are profiting from people's misery through perpetual shortages.

And if vacancy rates are not increasing, then we haven't built enough of those "quarter million dollar condos." Keep on building them until there's a surplus and they government can buy them on the cheap and provide housing as a human right.

Anybody who says that we do not need more housing is the very source of our homelessness problem. More housing makes everything easier, and the only cost is that some busybodies don't want to see it. Why pay attention to those people at the cost of helping everybody else?

No but you can prevent people from being evicted and forced onto the street. If the faucet of mental illness is closed then the burden of those who are still there is greatly diminished.

You are both kind of right.

Parts of California, like SF and the East Bay, have started building a lot of housing. Late, and still not enough to make up for the shortfall, but building nonetheless.

The problem is that places like Silicon Valley that have seen the lion's share of job growth haven't built commensurate levels of housing.

lol. Hilarious. 7,872 new apartments open in 2021. That should cover the bay area housing crisis. I am sure we will see a sharp drop in prices next year - due to those nice apartments in Avalon at Mission Bay. lol. Was this a joke? The bay area has a population of 7.7 million. Ill let you get back to your lazy detective work. You are sarcastic right? Hahaha.

Lol that's nothing. Try 100,000. California is more than 1,000,000 units short of what is being demanded.

^ This! The California population is 39 million. The bay area population is 7.7 million. With the 7,000 new apartments coming online we should see a sharp housing price decrease. Problem solved. lol.

This could be rewritten without any loss of impact.

>^ This! The California population is 39 million. The bay area population is 7.7 million. With the 7,000 new apartments coming online we should see a sharp housing price decrease. Problem solved!

The sarcasm is implied and doesn't need a "lol" which just looks immature.

Insulting the poster decreases the quality of discourse and encourages indecency. It increases the chance that the next person who finds you to be in the wrong will likewise be indecent.

Furthermore it drives away people who despite merely being incorrect in one case may have other useful information to share.

Your manner of speaking is a larger negative than someone merely being wrong and it will end up getting you booted from the site because it violates hacker news rules.

"I lazily Googled and disproved you in five seconds"

Are you kidding? That was their opening sentence to me. I am insulting? What a joke. I have never been treated like that on HN in 8 years. Spare me the lecture.

I’m glad GP posted that because I certainly benefitted from it. Somehow I’d been lulled into thinking people agree to assume good faith here so I got a little lackadaisical. Looking at your tone here I clearly need to change something.

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