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Comment by slykat | Hacker News Reader

I think it'd be more productive if the city was more focused on improving regulation to build more housing in the city for actual residents rather than trying to stem the loss of units to permanent Airbnb'ing. It seems like every policy maker and lobbying group seems to be ignoring the biggest elephant in the room which is this city needs dramatically MORE HOUSING than it is building (and the infrastructure that goes along with it).

Build more housing please.

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I can count off the top of my head at least 8 different housing projects/towers being built. It's going up, and the city is doing everything it can (whist being actively undermined by NIMBY groups).

Also addressing the rampant issue of people taking up rental units with quasi-illegal short term rentals is perfectly fine.

By the numbers, SF simply isn't building fast enough, nor has it over the last 20 years.

  Units built in 2014: 3,514 
  Jobs created in 2014: 23400
  Permitted units (at any stage): 3756
  Submitted units for review (not permitted): 8000

Source: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2015/04/housing-productio...

Further, many of the buildings are squat, short, and low density, even near transit. SF suffers from 20 years of planning failure.

Read the last 10 Socketsite articles to get an idea how criminally mismanaged SF's planning is. The AirBNB regulations are to make the city's power brokers look like they can do something about growth other than build.

For comparison: Manhattan issued permits for 4,856 new housing units in 2013 [1], despite having half the land area of SF and already supporting 4 times the population density.

[1] http://www.nycrgb.org/downloads/research/pdf_reports/14HSR.p...

It's definitely going up, but not at any rate close to actual population growth:

http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/04/14/sad_chart_confirms_...

There is additional issue that even if units are going up, a significant percentage is being purchased by foreign investors who are not occupying the units. Maybe I expect too much, but I don't believe the city is doing everything it can. I do understand that this is probably largely due to entrenched interests who are prioritizing preserving property values over the future health, economic growth, & infrastructure of the city.

Surprisingly Techcrunch covered a lot of the policy issues quite comprehensively: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

Most of the policy problems they mentioned are not going away anytime soon.

That likely isn't sufficient to absorb the current population growth, let alone make inroads into the demand/supply imbalance that has built up.

You probably need 3x that construction to start to have any effect.

I don't buy the 'nowhere to put it' argument either. There is tons of ex-industrial land around San Francisco that could be repurposed into high density neighbourhoods. Look at the Canary Wharf development in London for a good example.

I think it's more an issue of proportion and scale than number of towers. If there are 8 new projects, but the population looks to grow enough to fill 10 new projects, then there still need to be more.

http://www.spur.org/blog/2015-02-20/top-analysts-predict-ano...

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