For such a "progressive" city, San Francisco sure is against progress.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Voters are getting exactly what the want: talk about affordability, and action to prevent building.
Their equity and net worth is both fragile and contingent upon vehemently impeding the construction of new housing.
The city isn't a monolith, its not all 1 person, and fixing it isn't always easy: state and federal laws have primacy over certain things, and lets face it "permitting reforms" is hardly the ballot box getter.
But things have gotten better, the parket situation got a lot better, new bike lines, walkable streets, etc. All it took was a deadly global pandemic! Yay progress!
Yes there is. If you want them housed, but not in your neighborhood, then you either want them out in a forest somewhere, or you want them in someone else's neighborhood. The former isn't actually housing them, and the latter is the contradiction.
Building _only_ housing, and leaving it derelict when the mentally ill eventually trash it leads to a drop in quality of life and safety for the entire neighborhood.
I really wonder how much of the progressive drama results from these highly educated folks working in overwhelmingly white/Asian industries and living in places like SF or NYC where nearly all the Black or brown people they meet are working service jobs for them.
The root cause is demand > supply. That's it. Everything gets more expensive, and those who can get paid a lot do, and everyone else has to make do.
Texas yes, but tell me about Austin... and how it has all the same problems of the bay area now, entirely because people moved there.
It’s also about what kind of industries each state chooses to cultivate. Economies based on knowledge work magnify class and racial disparities because they have high barriers to entry and tend to produce winner-take-all stratification. That directly produces the highly stratified and segregated environment you see in SF and NYC.
If person A leaves a location because of crap/idiotic policies/laws, moves to a new location, then votes in people that will institute those same crap/idiotic policies/laws the just fled again, is person A not the problem?
Look at the places people are moving to in Texas then look at those locations elections.
In this case I was thinking primarily of crime and some of the DA in Texas's big cities. Dallas in particular I remember a DA was elected that pissed off a lot of people on the right by stopping prosecution of lesser offences and setting low bails. The right argues that leads to more crime until its a common place.
Austin is liberal like SF and is known for restricting housing supply.
2.3 million people live in Houston, and only a million live in Austin yet Houston is far cheaper to live in than Austin.
Austin you say? Now just where did all those people in Austin come from one wonders...
Iowa is even better lovely because there is basically no upper middle class. Even the farmers who might have tens of millions in land are pretty cash poor.
1. San Juan
2. Atlanta
3. Miami
4. New Orleans
5. New York
6. Cleveland
7. Cincinatti
8. Dallas
9. Tampa
10. Chicago
No California city even appears in the top 10, and the list is dominated by non-finance-centers in red states.
Orlando was very similar when I lived there - with Disney World literally on the other side of the highway from extremely derelict project housing. I would drive through I-437 and just shake my head in sadness.
It's an eerie reminder of how fragile life is and how little we collectively care about solving these problems above making money for our individual selves.
I think people with capital would love to develop housing in SF which would ease the housing problem in SF. In fact, people with capital really are the only people that may be able to solve the housing problem in SF. And the reason why they can't do this is the local government. How is this some sort of problem with capitalism?
Then I can only logically concede that you are either blind, or intentionally ignorant of the blindingly obvious correlation.
Whether it’s Disney and projects across the highway or something like skid row in a state with the largest collection of wealth in the country, it all boils down to the same ‘I’m comfortable and I don’t want to have to think about not being comfortable’ attitude that allows this country to have billionaires and do absolutely nothing to help these people.
Communism isn’t a perfect system, but fundamentally; it’s supposed to care about the individual in a way capitalism has shown it is fundamentally incapable of.
It seems we currently have no political system that seems to balance progress with the needs of the people - but this preposterous 1%-bullshit capitalist system is so destined to collapse that if it wasn’t for said 1% so desperately clinging onto it so they can maintain wealth and power, it would have long ago.
It’s only greed and selfishness that powers the current American political and economic system.
To say it’s ‘disturbing’ would be an extremely shameful understatement.
Being incentivized to make money is not all it takes to make it capitalism. If the policy is a net-negative for the market as a whole then the market will work to get rid of the policy, because there will be more people excluded than benefit. The only reason it would stick around is if there are motivations excluding capital/market aspects, such as equity, altruism, and social good.
Yes. Markets incentivize anticompetitive behavior.
Government policy is far from the only way to exclude others from the market, so you'll want to pursue other strategies as well: dumping to destroy small competitors, merging to incorporate them, deals with peers to avoid competing head-on, etc. In theory these are all illegal, but in practice they are commonplace, so don't neglect them.
> Being incentivized to make money is not all it takes to make it capitalism.
No, but strong property rights and perpetual private ownership of land are very much capitalism things, as is tilting the power equation away from "people" and towards "owners." In theory this incentivizes good stewardship and investment, but in practice it also incentivizes cornering the market.
> If the policy is a net-negative for the market as a whole then the market will work to get rid of the policy
Why on earth would you think that? "Monopolize resource, drive up scarcity, profit" is a quintessential capitalist hustle. It leverages the same machinery used to incentivize types of investment that are actually productive, but it's a lot easier than being actually productive. You just have to get in early.
> The only reason it would stick around is if there are motivations excluding capital/market aspects, such as equity, altruism, and social good.
Lol, so homeowners who don't want to see their property values tank have nothing to do with the problem? NIMBYs are just a bunch of misguided altruistic do-gooders who need to be persuaded of the merits in free market capitalism?
My sides.
Though that’s only for dynamics in the domestic market. In the global market such behaviour simply weakens the position of the US overall and thus the global market self corrects, eventually. Typically this is done by the global markets via boosting another rising country or bloc to displace the position of the countries with less competitive markets.
Of course this is a very long term process that could take centuries, but there was never a guarantee that market forces would resolve itself within a single human lifespan.
That's what it has to do with capitalism.
California's housing situation is incredibly bad, there are some other bad parts too, like the water/fire situation, but there are some huge advantages to the state as well.
The high salaries is concertrated in very small part of the state. It is also purely accidental and due to historical reasons. On median basis, the state is among the poorest in the nation. Fire/water is only tip of the issues. The list goes on with school quality (outside of few pockets of ultra-rich neighbourhoods), enormous tax burden, bismal transportation, consistently failed multi-billion $ government projects etc.
High life expectancy, high salaries/strong economy, excellent weather, ethnic/cultural diversity, huge range of beautiful nature/geographic diversity, relatively progressive tax burden compared to other states, some labor-friendly regulations like parental leave and ban on non-competes, great food scenes in LA and the bay area, great public colleges/universities, lots of pro sports teams if you're into that.