Hacker News Reader

"the bill requires cities to opt into the program."

How many cities will ever sign up for this?

Yeah, it’s unlikely that San Francisco’s current majority at the Board of Supervisors would opt in to this program. Both because they are hostile to housing in general and because they have a special aversion to condominiums (which they likely conflate with an unrelated displacement issue when existing apartments are converted to condos and the tenants are evicted).

To be fair, however, they did pass an ordinance that allows up to 6 units per lot and condo subdivision, but the catch is that the extra units are rent controlled, making them less appealing for unsophisticated buyers (https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/o0210-22.pdf).

Rent control (and to a lesser degree below market rate units) itself seems to be a huge problem that's impossible to unwind, since all it does is arbitrarily grant exemptions to the rising cost of housing while exacerbating the overall problem. There are plenty of affluent people who have a have a rent controlled pied a terre in SF that they've had for 20 years while spending most of their time in their house in Sonoma.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com