Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenie_beans | Hacker News Reader

reducing everything to zoning laws is lazy analysis. nobody will ever sell $4 lunch bowls in SF because the rent is too high. so these market incentives will influence/force the proprietor to sell them for more!

View on HN

failing to understand that the rent is too high because of zoning laws is lazy analysis.

if you are going to have a rebuttal, at least give a little bit why my take is lazy analysis. (and i'm aware your argument exists, and it's also wrong!)

why wrong? seems extremely obvious

* regulatory barriers to increasing supply lead to less supply

* less supply (at the same demand) leads to higher market clearing prices

really not complicated

also not complicated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46647791

The rent is too high because of zoning laws.

All things being equal, SF has some of the most desirable weather on the planet, so it will always have an high cost of living due to excess demand.

it's a great place to live and there will always be high demand.

there would be more supply if not for restrictive zoning laws. and more supply = lower prices

SF has a relatively high ratio of housing units to population compared to other cities in the US and a 9.7% vacancy rate. By the numbers, it has an oversupply of housing.

By just those numbers, sure.

How many are homeless?

What does the median worker spend in money and time commuting from somewhere further?

That is not a valid interpretation of the data. The ratio you cite, which is a pointless one, is mostly influenced by household size. SF has a relatively small household size compared to the state and nation. The vacancy rate you cite is also not a useful one that people generally understand. There were 19000 units for sale or rent during the last ACS survey, out of 418000 physical dwellings, and that's only 4.5% which is very low by historical standards.

housing units : population is not a very salient statistic

How do you square this bizarre and obviously false hypothesis with all the times that San Francisco did not have high cost of living, had declining population, etc?

What is obviously false about it? You can't just assert things as true. That's why the Democrats keep losing.

(See what I did there?)

There are plenty of other places with equally great weather and no needles on the streets.

the rent is too high because of the market incentives. zoning laws are one of several dynamics that influence the market.

we've built a ton of structures with existing zoning laws when the economy is good, more than we've built during this deregulation paradigm. we stop when the economy or market is bad. very simple concept.

One less dynamic would be helpful then.

There's also the other turd in California real estate policy: Prop 13.

fair point, and my original point doesn't negate that truth: reducing every problem to zoning laws is lazy analysis.

surely if NYC can do 99c slices, it's not as simple as high rent costs?

The day of the dollar slice in NYC is dead, most places have switched to $1.50 slices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com