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).
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.
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).
You think zoning solved our industrial environmental problems?
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.
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.
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.
Some things just don’t work, because people are greedy. That’s mostly why we can’t have nice things.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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").
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.
> 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.)
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.