SF Mayor Lurie to tech CEOs: 'How can we get you back?' | Hacker News Reader

SF Mayor Lurie to tech CEOs: 'How can we get you back?'

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45 pointsrntn69 comments

Housing. Like, deregulate permitting for residential construction for ten years.

Every entrepreneur I know who lived in and loved San Francisco had to move out because of the cost of housing and private schools (apparently the middle schools are either super competitive to get into or lined with metal detectors).

That's gonna be a tough row to hoe given where they currently are:

https://x.com/sp6runderrated/status/1879257360344199255

Which is why I suggest deregulating permitting, not permitting reform. You need automatic permitting as long as state building codes are met, and even then, let the state enforce them. The human cost of the housing crisis is worth the risk that a dodgy developer puts up a Millennium Tower.

This. I still live here and you can really feel it. I like your solution - much cleaner while we're trying to reform permitting.

Berkeley just nearly got it done but got stuck in committees https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/the-big-zoning-battle-of... - we need a faster solution.

Edit: reading the article, Lurie is proposing this:

- https://www.sf.gov/mayor-lurie-launches-permit-reform-effort...

- https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/lurie-housing-rezonin...

Note to self: Read the article before diving into the comments.

I am once again advocating for federalized zoning rules. The federal government should invalidate all local punitive zoning regulations under the dormant commerce clause. Housing is interstate commerce. This is the same basis that enables the Fair Housing Act, and of course, the FCC's ruling on Chicago satellite dishes.

Individuals should have a right to build exactly what they want on their own property, and to charge whatever they want to tenants.

If your neighbors object, they can buy you out.

If the city thinks we need rent controlled housing, they can buy you out, put up a tenement and charge exactly what they want.

This whole city council telling you how much you can list your place for and what color your facade can be is wild. If it meets code, you should have a right to build it, and charge whatever you want.

The regulatory capture by existing landowners has to end. It's utterly un-American.

There's no need for the federal government to get involved. It's already way too large and intrusive; giving it more power and authority would be utterly un-American. Zoning problems can be completely fixed at the state government level, and the optimal solutions are likely to be different in each state.

> Zoning problems can be completely fixed at the state government level, and the optimal solutions are likely to be different in each state

States and local governments have dropped the ball. You know who knows better than the state what to do with their property? The people who own it.

> giving it more power and authority would be utterly un-American

No need. You’d just limit what states can do (if they want highway funds or whatever).

This sort of logic is why half of Silicon Valley is a Superfund site.

> this sort of logic is why half the South Bay sits on Superfund sites

You think zoning solved our industrial environmental problems?

Building industrial plants close to residential housing has led to an extortionate amount of pain and suffering over the years: cancers, fertility issues, etc.

Sure, the people who owned that land knew what to do with it. They wanted to manufacture chips as quickly as possible, which involved (intentionally or inadvertently) dumping chemical waste into the ground. Guess that's the free market for you.

> Building industrial plants close to residential housing has led to an extortionate amount of pain and suffering over the years: cancers, fertility issues, etc.

Regulating environmental effluence saved a lot more lives than zoning. You’re arguing a false dichotomy between deregulated residential permitting and unregulated industrial construction.

At the end of the day, housing unaffordability is a political choice. It is currently one the Bay Area is making at the expense of a lot of lives. Those chickens will come home to roost, and the form they will take is a loss of local political power and service cuts. (My guess is San Francisco loses local zoning and rent-control powers. People will fight and die or whatever. But more people won’t listen.)

I think it’s smarter to react today than wait for the overreaction. But I suppose I know Bay Area politics prohibit that.

Highway funding mechanisms are also problematic. State residents pay federal income tax only for the federal government to turn around and transfer highway grants back to the states. It's inefficient and un-American, essentially an end run around how our republic was intended to operate. Let's cut out the middleman and crush the federal government down to its appropriate size and level of authority.

It's totally appropriate for the federal government to fund real interstate highways. But there's little real need for them to get involved in most intrastate transportation. This just serves as a backdoor mechanism to exert excessive levels of federal control and waste more taxpayer dollars.

Tell me you want overpriced shoeboxes without telling me you want overpriced shoeboxes.

Some things just don’t work, because people are greedy. That’s mostly why we can’t have nice things.

There’s absolutely a place in the market for small apartments. In fact the end of SROs is a large contributor to homelessness. But hey if you don’t want to live in one don’t buy one.

Your position amounts to “you can only buy what I consider nice, and if you can’t afford that, then you get nothing — get out.” It doesn’t make nicer housing more affordable, it makes all housing less affordable. Zoning imposes a $400,000 per unit premium in SF.

Which is exactly how we got single family zoning, btw. It was created in early 1900s Berkeley to prevent minorities and the poor from living there by making sure the kind of housing they could afford wasn’t built.

Bruh it's econ 101 and has been empirically validated across the world: ceteris paribus more housing supply = lower housing prices.

Housing supply constrictions like housing regulation & zoning are responsible for all of the rise in measured inequality since the 70's, have prevented roughly %50 of the growth in incomes we'd have achieved if housing supply was built out, are partially responsible for the explosion of homelessness and the decline of family formation.

Zoning needs to be a little more nuanced than "build whatever you want."

I'd be happy to see multi-family dwellings in my neighborhood but there's a few steps between that and buying out my neighbors to build an ammonia processing plant.

Sure, do what Japan does ezpz. Also note there’s no ammonia processing plants in Houston (where there’s no zoning) because it doesn’t make sense to put low density industrial on land that would offer a higher premium as high density residential.

> Zoning needs to be a little more nuanced than "build whatever you want."

Why? It worked. People didn’t build plants near houses as soon as transportation technology let factories be built on cheap, remote land.

Also, I suggested deregulating residential permitting. If people build houses by ammonia plants and people still choose to live in them, that’s sort of a striking damnation of the current system, isn’t it?

>Why?

"Home" is a powerful American concept. People will kill and die to prevent it being ruined. This is the other side of the coin (where the first side is "rich assholes want their property to be worth a lot").

> "Home" is a powerful American concept. People will kill and die to prevent it being ruined

People will also kill and die to get it.

I own my home. I get it. But the power of that concept pulls both ways, mediated only by turnout and municipal solvency.

By what twisted logic is housing “interstate commerce”? It’s local commerce by definition.

> If the city thinks we need rent controlled housing, they can buy you out, put up a tenement and charge exactly what they want.

Eliminating rent control would likely force me and my friends out of a city we’ve lived in for years. You bet your ass we’d fight anything like this tooth and nail. (Fortunately, the policy you describe would be illegal while we still have democracy.)

You can look up the arguments for housing being interstate commerce in the FCC case I alluded to and in the arguments supporting the fair housing act.

> The Attorney General testified that "the housing business is substantially interstate and subject to the commerce clause" because of the interstate movement of building materials, mortgage funds, and advertising, as well as the interstate movement of workers and their families. [1]

A meaningful challenge to this would invalidate the fair housing act. This falls squarely under the dormant commerce clause.

Further, rent control has been shown in studies of San Francisco to decrease supply, unit quality and increase prices. There’s no market on earth that honors the price you would have paid when you first showed up no matter how long you sit there and no matter how it hurts others, by law. [2]

In a market where supply and demand meet prices don’t go up, and rent control is unncessary. See Japan. [3] In a market where supply and demand are forbidden from meeting rent control creates further harm to the market, and only masks the problem for a vocal minority.

Unfortunately for all of us popular policy is not necessarily good policy.

Eliminating the zoning premium would bring houses down in price by $400,000 each. I suspect you’d be able to afford to buy, and yes, rent would come down a lot.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/crt/housing-and-civil-enforcement-ca...

[2] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24181/w241...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JPNCPIHOUQINMEI

I don't have citations on hand, but as I recall, studies on rent control have shown both positive and negative effects. Proponents/opponents like to pick and choose the studies that back their existing convictions. But the whole must be considered.

I'll tell you from personal experience that not having to worry about arbitrary rent increases and evictions is a massive relief that I imagine few renters in other American cities get to experience. Frankly, it's unconscionable for people to be pushed out of their homes due to market forces outside their control. I strongly support building new housing, but not at the expense of renter security — even if it means that some new people don't get to move to the city.

> Eliminating the zoning premium would bring houses down in price by $400,000 each. I suspect you’d be able to afford to buy.

No, I can't afford a $2M home and I won't be able to afford a $1.6M home either. And it won't happen right away, if it ever does.

I cited the specific study on San Francisco that supports my argument as [2] — I edited it in for posterity so it may not have been there when you looked.

We can just end rent control for anyone who doesn’t have it but ending it is strictly good policy. There’s no rational basis in economics to support it.

Rent prices wouldn’t go up if supply and demand were allowed to meet making rent control unnecessary anyways. You get both security and lower prices if you just build. If you want to lock in the price negotiate such a lease directly or buy, but don’t leverage the state to force it.

> Rent prices wouldn’t go up if supply and demand were allowed to meet making rent control unnecessary anyways. You get both security and lower prices if you just build. If you want to lock in the price negotiate such a lease directly or buy.

You can do other things to increase supply (rezone, force vacant properties to be rented, offer subsidies to developers, etc.) while still maintaining rent control. The end result will be the same once the market stabilizes, except rent control has the benefit of protecting renters again unforeseen future market distortions, such as your neighborhood suddenly becoming popular with the nouveau riche.

I see the elimination of rent control as a blatantly anti-renter, pro-landlord policy that's dressed up as pro-renter market correction.

Again rent control has no economic basis, and when supply and demand meet rent prices don’t rise anyways.

Labor rights don't have an economic basis, either. Some policies put the human first instead of capital.

Sure they do.

But again when supply and demand meet there’s no use for rent control anyways. Rent control is favoring some people at the expense of everybody else on the basis that they happen to get there early. It’s not a rational policy. It’s the same irrational policy that guarantees existing landowners a massive return.

Btw a 2M house in SF these days is a mansion. You can get a 3bed 2bath for like $899K.

Take $400K off and you’re cooking with gas.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/148-Peralta-Ave-A-San-Fra...

You can get a 5bed 4bath for $1.8

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1959-19th-Ave-San-Francis...

> Sure they do.

How? Child labor, unbounded workdays and workweeks, hazardous work conditions, hiring discrimination, firing without cause, etc. make complete economic sense. Workers didn't like that very much, though, and so a lot of blood was spilled to win the rights we enjoy today.

> But again when supply and demand meet there’s no use for rent control anyways.

As I alluded to earlier, a stable market isn't guaranteed to remain that way and will have distortions over time. If a bunch of millionaires suddenly decide that some neighborhood is the place to be, it's unconscionable for long-time renters in that neighborhood to be forced to move out. (Not everyone is a spry 20-something with no pets or dependents, minimal furniture and belongings, ephemeral local ties, and flexible work hours.) Yes, the policy favors existing renters at the expense of new ones. It's difficult for me to see that as unfair or irrational.

> Child labor, unbounded workdays and workweeks, hazardous work conditions, hiring discrimination, firing without cause, etc. make complete economic sense

No, they don’t. (Where did you read this?)

Child labour decreases GDP/capita by compromising education. Hazardous work conditions, meanwhile, chew through a trained workforce. A good example of the competitiveness of good working conditions is a modern air force—they go out of their way to keep pilots safe not because every modern military is made up of nice people, but because there is a competitive advantage to protecting a trained workforce.

> Individuals should have a right to build exactly what they want on their own property, and to charge whatever they want to tenants.

You say individuals, but this would get abused by megacorporations buying up everything and building whatever is most profitable, which might not be what you think. It would be quite the dystopia.

In addition to housing, most parents of school age children also hate the school lottery system. Even if you can afford a home there's no guarantee that your child will be able to attend the closest public school. There's a reason why SF has more dogs than children.

Relevant.

https://sfstandard.com/2022/09/13/how-san-francisco-makes-it...

This doesn't matter.

Look, SF voters are not going to vote for this. It's not going to happen. The people you're courting—by definition—don't live there. The existing economic base is fine.

Well-paid tech employees aren't civically engaged and their salaries are enough to cover their housing. Until they aren't, like when starting a family, at which point many move out of the city and no longer have a vote.

The major, high-turnout voters are _home owners_. They do not want cheaper permitting because it will drive down their property values. That's the whole point!

It's the same as the homelessness epidemic in SF. Everyone theoretically supports it but in a strong council system, no supervisor (their equivalent of a city council member) will support it for their district. "I support homeless shelters and de-regulation, just not in my district" is the prevailing take, which means neither will ever pass.

> "We want our entrepreneurs starting businesses and then staying here," said Lurie. "That means streamlining permitting, making it easier to start a restaurant, a bar, or a startup."

I really wish the emphasis was on high-tech manufacturing startups, and the degree of automation isn't really that important. Prototype shops, specialty manufacturing, etc. should all be encouraged.

SF is not the place for that, from a shipping and logistics perspective (imho). Memphis, TN or Louisville, KY is where you’d want to be (FedEx and UPS primary hubs, respectively). This enables having output in the hands of consumers or partners in <24 hours from completion.

Manufacturers don't need direct shipping access to consumers.

I am an investor in an advanced manufacturing enterprise for spray nozzles (think beverage, ag, fuel applications). Time to end user is a consideration in the business the org does, based on my conversations with account managers. I admit how relevant this is is going to be a function of customer requirements and expectations, particularly around prototyping feedback loop (edit: a part being manufactured using an advanced CNC machine at ~4pm central time can be in the hands of a customer by 8am the next day, for example).

Why not have that?

If you manufacture in the Midwest you have a labor force and education institute already oriented toward manufacturing, you have shipping proximity, low wages, and low cost of land and materials.

What are you getting out of the Bay Area in comparison?

SF’s bigger problem is convincing software tech companies (which are far more profitable than advanced manufacturing) to stay rather than leaving for lower cost talent-concentrated areas like Austin, the east coast, the Carolinas, and even offshoring into Costa Rica, Poland, and other hotspots for software talent.

If you hire an entry level software engineer in Ohio or Indiana you can pay them five figures and they’ll buy a single family home for $300,000 or maybe even less.

I think it's important for tech entrepreneurs to be able to interact with the manufacturing process, in order to:

a) understand how to design their products to leverage manufacturing processes, and

b) develop technologies that improve manufacturing itself.

So either that means more manufacturing in San Francisco, or more tech startups in Louisville.

Wouldn’t Fresno or elsewhere in the Central Valley also work for in-California?

> or more tech startups in Louisville.

Strongly agree, the Midwest is the future of advanced manufacturing, not California. Rivian is in Normal, IL, and expanding currently [1] for example. If we're going to spend the next 5-10 years building China's equivalent supply chain, the Midwest is a better location imho (cost of living, land costs, logistics, etc). If you were an investor, where would you build? Very wealthy people couldn't get California Forever built [2], and that was mostly non industrial residential/commercial development.

[1] Rivian: Building for R2 - Expanding our manufacturing footprint in Illinois - https://stories.rivian.com/r2-expansion-03-2025

[2] HN Search: California Forever - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

> manufacturing startups

Oxymoron? VC money chases high growth, high margin businesses.

How would a manufacturing business fit the VC funded model?

Aside: article with an interesting take on VC -- unfortunately however with an extremely long-winded intro. https://pivotal.substack.com/p/making-markets-in-time

I'll never understand why they put the jobs on land surrounded by a moat on three sides. I had a supervisor 10 years ago who had a then-new 2 bedroom apartment in Mission Bay with her husband and child for $4900/mo. That's great if you're earning engineering manager money and your spouse is _also_ an engineer, but for those of us with children less than $200K household income, it's unaffordable.

What I want to hear about is startups surrounded on all 4 sides by affordable housing and decent public transit dropping you off within two blocks of work. Waking up in the morning and getting on that screeching BART train sucked away my will to put in 100% every day.

A good friend of mine bought an apartment in Hayes Valley 6 or 7 years back. They’ve had their doorbell stolen, trash left in the street, and just yesterday had to call 311 because a man was in their street yelling and they couldn’t leave.

Yesterday here in Sydney it was a nice autumn day - I walked down the hill from home and took a nap on the sand of Bondi Beach with my phone and my stuff in a bag next to me. Was napping a good hour in the sun, never thought twice about my phone. Got home and my car had not been broken into. In fact I don’t know anyone in Australia who has ever had their car broken into. Not one.

I lived in SF 2013-2019. Mid-Market & Tenderloin is hard to explain but makes sense once you live there. SF has pockets that are stunning, but nowhere offers the quality of life I found by moving away. Sad to be further from the epicenter of tech, but your day to day happiness and stress levels have to take priority.

To the latest mayor promising to do better: we see you, we know you are doing your best. Thankyou for caring - unpicking this knot of social problems is going to take a long time of consistently caring.

Improve the quality of life for everyone equally. When policies end up deteriorating the living experience of the taxpayer base and making business more difficult, people and businesses flee.

The homeless problem, rampant petty crime, and the school district are why I will never move my family into SF. Life is much better further down the peninsula.

Announcing initiatives and proposing laws is a good start. Unfortunately these problems are decades in the making and won’t be fixed overnight.

This makes no sense. CEO’s are inherently capitalist, but SF is a communist city, so her appeal is absurd on its face.

Support for entrepreneurs and small businesses is great, but the last thing I want is for the CEOs and VCs who hate our city and gleefully put us in our current political predicament to make a triumphant return from their Texan silos.

Keep them out or get voted out. Let them go build their Network State or whatever-the-fuck somewhere else.

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