yonran

A few wealthy people try to get involved, but there is a strong segment of the electorate and press who are extremely skeptical of wealth (other than their own house). Ron Conway has been portrayed as a boogeyman for many years for his contributions to candidates (https://48hills.org/tag/ron-conway/). Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman has been making donations in favor of relaxing zoning. I think it just takes a long time to convince voters that housing supply is an important issue when they are insulated from the housing market due to rent control, benefit from unaffordability because they own real estate, or have read too much misinformation from the “progressive” press who deny that supply affects rent.

> all those "new tech" people hate new tech in their own areas

Unfortunately, the recent generation of tech workers have not been represented in local politics. As far as I know, none of the supervisors or mayors in recent memory in San Francisco have worked in technology; they typically come from nonprofits, unions, or just landed gentry. It is not young tech workers who refuse to rezone and amend the building code for affordability, it is older homeowners and nonprofit special interests. The Board of Supervisors (the city council) has been rather hostile to tech for the past decade or more.

I see now that you are making the distinction between single-family homes, which are primarily owner-occupied, and multifamily homes, which are primarily rental, and you are saying that the shift of some single-family homes to rental is a bad thing. First, there’s nothing wrong with a household buying a condo or renting a single-family house, so I don’t see why one should be banned.

But to explain the increasing share of rental housing, the book Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up explains that the problem is not investors overinvesting in houses, but residents who are locked out of the mortgage market due to post-Great Financial Crisis regulations that killed the homebuilding industry across the country. If residents had the same access to credit that they did before the GFC, then they would be able to outcompete investors. There’s no point in suppressing rental investment just because we mistakenly suppressed mortgages.

But whether you are looking to buy or looking to rent, more supply helps, so that is the underlying problem to address.

Again, the article is about rents being too high. If you force investors to sell existing housing stock to owner-occupiers, what direction do rents go? Up. If you are anti-rental property investor, then you are also anti-renter.

Instead of pitting renters against homeowners, think of policies that reduce costs for both renters and homeowners by adding supply. E.g., relax zoning to raise height limits and allow apartments, allow more worker visas and encourage people to work in the trades, subsidize construction loans.

I’m surprised by all the anti-landlord talk in this forum. If we “increase in property taxes for home which are not the primary residence”, or prohibit “own[ing] more than one property in which they do not reside”, these are policies that give an advantage to homeownership over renting but do not stimulate new supply. So they may lower house sale prices but only at the expense of raising the rent, exacerbating the problem that the article is about.

If you want the rent to go down, you should make it profitable for investors to build lots of supply of housing, rental or ownership. Lots of non-owner-occupied houses is a good thing if you rent.

What is the value that Google derives from third-party contractor middlemen (vs. hiring directly)? Is it the ability to give workers the choice of more pay but fewer benefits? Is it the ability to have on-demand workers that can be laid off without damaging Google’s brand name? What laws, if repealed, would encourage Google to hire the employees directly?

Edit: To clarify, I’m wondering about workers who contribute to Google’s own core competency of creating software, not bus drivers, janitors, etc. for which Google’s benefits would be a larger fraction of their pay.

The Tech Equity Collaborative has a report giving some reasons (https://techequitycollaborative.org/download-the-contract-wo...), but they seem to boil down to big companies are so inefficient at hiring (e.g. “adding full-time, direct employees requires multiple levels of sign-off, budgetary allocations, and often numerous reviews and approvals”) that they are leaving money on the table (“tech companies often pay contracting agencies enough for the agencies to offer family-supporting wages”). I’m not sure I buy that.

According to the CBC building code, a high-rise building is a building whose top floor is more than 75 feet above the ground floor, so about 8 stories or higher (https://up.codes/viewer/california/ca-building-code-2022/cha...)

> As an aside, standard search engines were no help in my research into the Fn key’s first appearance. ChatGPT scored a win, however, by identifying the PowerBook G3 Series on its first try—yes, I confirmed it with keyboard photos

Alas, now that I ask ChatGPT with GPT-4 (“With DALL·E, browsing and analysis” as that is my only GPT-4 option now) “Which Mac first had a Fn key? Please provide a source”, this blog post itself is the source that it recursively cites. I wonder how it knew that information before.

Every plan should be on the table to provide more safe, affordable, community-oriented housing than is available today. Artificial light and ventilation in bedrooms are routine (e.g., every skyscraper in the winter) and should not have been a dealbreaker, especially if this is one choice out of many for the students.

> you don’t need to be economic illiterate to think something fishy will happen

It’s not the city’s job to make good things illegal because they are too good to pencil out.

But by “economic illiteracy”, I was referring to tenant groups’ reasons for opposing unsubsidized housing. Excuses such as that San Francisco had increased vacancies during the pandemic and thus not need any more housing. Or that San Francisco already met its RHNA housing quota for 2014-2022 (which was way too low since it was calculated based on outdated population growth trends rather than rents). Or denial that housing construction has any affect on rent. These are not fringe positions; these are the canon of the self-proclaimed “progressive” faction in San Francisco (see Supervisor Peskin’s statements in https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6412806... and https://twitter.com/_fruchtose/status/1729280621313511602 and basically any article on 48hills.org). The set of policies they support are basically to reduce for-profit apartment development by increasing neighbor veto points, ask for increased funding for favored nonprofits, increase tenant protections, and watch as rents rise.

SB 330 defines “Equivalent size” as same number of bedrooms. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

> will it be rent control with new rent price baseline?

It would be a new baseline, but at a rent that would be calculated to be affordable to the tenant’s income: “The developer agrees to provide … right of first refusal … at an affordable rent” https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm.... For low-income tenants, this would most likely be even lower than the rent controlled rent. For very-low income tenants who do not qualify for any other program (other programs such as Inclusionary Housing typically have narrow income bands as a % of AMI), they would have a home almost for free. For higher-income renters, they could see a rent increase.

> Where people from demolished apartments will be living until new apartment will be built?

SB 330 requires “Relocation benefits” according to §7260, but I think San Francisco’s local relocation payments are already higher (currently $7,540/tenant, up to $22,618/unit, plus $5,027 per elderly/disabled tenant https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/579%20Multilingua...)

The stupid thing is that the groups that reflexively oppose private housing in San Francisco (namely REP Coalition, CCHO, SFTU) chose “don’t demolish rent controlled housing” as their rallying cry for why they are calling to oppose this ordinance that streamlines new apartment buildings, which sometimes requires tearing down an old building. Which means that they are foregoing the Costa-Hawkins exemption in SB 330 (2019) that allows and requires demolished rent controlled apartment units to be replaced by brand new rent controlled units (which are the type of rental units that they like). They are foregoing win-win solutions due to extreme tribalism and economic illiteracy.

> I don't really see how naming the specific individual improved the argument

I disagree. Good articles should make specific propositions about specific exemplars. The alternative is to make generalities that are hard to falsify.

Radiolab also covered Persistent Surveillance Systems but noted that the Baltimore program was ruled unconstitutional because the police had the ability to track everyone even when not suspected of a crime. https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky-2306

1031 exchange by itself only defers taxes (which can be helpful for cash flow purposes). People combine it with the stepped up basis loophole to avoid taxes completely.

As for Proposition 13/58 inheritance, note that Proposition 19 (2020) restricted the inheritance benefit to only family homes and farms, so I don’t think inheritance is a widespread benefit anymore. Proposition 19 also made the property tax basis portable, so the increasing property tax is no longer an impediment to grandma moving.

> and their second-class ADU "owners" who live in the fancy shed behind their home

The primary home is not upper class; it’s the worse of the two units. It just becomes two houses without backyards. I’ve seen such houses for sale in Seattle. An old house with a big yard on a 5000 sqft lot turns into an old house + a new house, both without backyard. The new unit is not second-class; it is a nice house but just without backyard.

I wish reporters highlighted the stepped up basis tax loophole that causes the bizarre behavior, rather than claiming that grandmothers just can’t “afford” to sell. Many grandmothers would “afford” to sell their house if there were no tax benefit to holding it until death. Same with the “Buy, borrow, die” behavior that ProPublica reported on (https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...). Instead of advocating for an esoteric unconstitutional wealth tax, why didn’t they advocate for closing the loophole that creates the incentive?

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).

This is straight out of FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan’s original article Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado.... Amazon is willing to match any competitor’s price in order to build market share while not triggering predatory pricing antitrust review (which did not consider network effects). But the price is low only as long as the competitor is there. When small competitors finally give up (since they cannot offer the same free shipping variety as Amazon) and drop out of the market, Amazon will raise the price in the long run and capture monopolistic profits. Repeat for each new market that they compete in.

And for old devices, letsencrypt should force nameConstraints to be a critical extension so that old devices will just fail to accept it so that it won't be used “rogue”ly.

Someone posted an example of a self-driving Cruise car that appeared to run a red light https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/14wyyzw/just_.... Although in that example, technically the self-driving car was guilty of entering the intersection without sufficient space on the other side, rather than of crossing the limit line while facing a red light.

I listened to the Sam Harris interview (the free part). I was disappointed that Marc Andreessen seemed to misunderstand the AI safety concerns of the alignment problem (undesirable subgoals of AI) and does not acknowledge the possibility that AI will use deception. I still think his essay is a good counter to the generally negative coverage of AI in the media and from effective altruism communities. I think catastrophic AI alignment is a much smaller risk than the people who own the AIs being unaligned (arms races with hostile countries, terrorists, other antisocial people using AIs).

> The laws for building new homes haven't changed much in a few decades

Not exactly true; the local ADU ordinance was added 2015-2017 (207(c)(4) https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...), and the state added an ADU law in 2016 (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....). And San Francisco has just passed the state-mandated Housing Element which promises to upzone more in the next 3 years (https://sfplanning.s3.amazonaws.com/archives/sfhousingelemen...). Moreover, I would support a virtuous cycle of incentivizing development and further upzoning.

> This is no less than state mandated stealing from who you perceive to be rich (homeowners), while creating no new homes; because homeowners aside from developers do not build homes.

That is a norm that can and should change. In a housing shortage, everyone and their mom should be figuring out how to add square footage to their house. All departments of the government should be oriented toward encouraging small homeowners to accommodate more residents.

> Do you know what happened in San Fran areas where they created and enforced the rental boards? Property values dropped, rentals dropped, everyone with options didn't invest in the area, business left, no jobs available, police couldn't be funded, and people regularly get killed as crime increases.

Huh? That sounds nothing like the present day. Property values are still near all time highs, particularly on single-family houses. Violent crime rates are near all time lows (although they could be better).

> For a regular home, it already increases each year by at least 7,000 dollars in property taxes

No, Proposition 13 (which I oppose) caps the tax rate to 1% and caps increases to min(CPI, 2%) per year. For the property tax to increase by $7000 in one year, your property would have to be worth at least 7000 / 0.02 * 100 = $35 million. Your numbers make no sense.

> roughly 32,000 goes to food right now

Again you’re off by about an order of magnitude.

No, you get to profit from increasing supply.

I think a price control scheme could be a useful component of an anti-inflation program if designed well. For example, in housing, you could cap the capital gains when an owner sells a property (e.g., in California, cap the sales price to the Proposition 13 basis), but have an exception if the owner has built new square footage or units. This would prevent a windfall when there is housing inflation unless the owner actively works to reduce the shortage. However, this solution would be very unpopular among homevoters and could have tricky edge cases.

> His argument is that feeling safe is as important, if not more important from a policymaking perspective

I’ll set aside his smear that opponents of crime come from suburbs and his strawman that those who oppose crime only want “more cops, stiffer sentences and a return to the Gov. Reagan-era incarceration of the mentally ill”.

His main argument is that by “objective” measures, San Francisco is safe and any increase in danger is only subjective “feelings”, but that “feelings” still affect tourism and politics. The first part (which is the same party line we have seen in the SF Chronicle) is the gaslighting. I want to distinguish between psychological feelings, and risk which can be real but not fully measurable. I hypothesize that for many residents, actual risk of injury, not just feelings, has increased over the past 5 years. There are many mechanisms by which risk may not show up in the citywide violence statistics. Crimes may shift from one neighborhood to another (e.g. to touristy places) or from one demographic to another (e.g. against Asians) while staying steady citywide. Armed robbers may primarily target wealthier people who give them what they want, but victims who have less to lose and resist are more likely to be attacked. Underage thieves may injure you through reckless driving instead of attacks. With fewer pedestrians commuting after COVID-19, a street that is more dangerous may get fewer violent incidents. Or victims may underreport crimes. The point is, when there are so many changes in behavior among commuters, thieves, and addicts, I don’t believe a couple citywide metrics give the whole picture.

> you have issues with him based on unrelated reporting on an issue you seem to care deeply about

That’s just the most egregious example. I learned to read Eskenazi’s articles skeptically because I often read him pushing one lazy narrative but not getting the details right or not getting the other side of the argument. Another example is this article on Proposition 22 https://missionlocal.org/2020/09/prop-22-chronicle-uber-lyft.... In it, he claims that “Airbnb and its ilk skirted paying hotel taxes for years… And they kept their money”, which is not true; Airbnb settled with the city to pay all the 15% hotel back taxes which exceeded their own 6% revenue during that time. And notice how overtly one-sided that article is; it makes no attempt to get the other side of the delivery issue and whether paying drivers who are are waiting at home with their app open makes any business sense for Uber or for taxi dispatch companies for that matter. Another example I recall is the reporting on HubHaus https://missionlocal.org/2019/08/san-francisco-rental-platfo... which claimed without evidence that the room share company was “exacerbating the already onerous cost of housing” and showed very little interest in what it would take to actually follow the definition of family, and whether the definition of family itself is what is exacerbating the housing crisis. He is good at ferreting out a certain kind of bureaucratic corruption (e.g. DBI), but he turns a blind eye to other kinds of corrupt rules that benefit incumbents that politicians like Arron Peskin (coincidentally one of his favorite sources) specialize in. In other words, he’s biased, and you often get only one side from his articles.

The top part of Joe Eskenazi’s earlier article https://missionlocal.org/2023/04/bob-lee-crazy-bob-mobilecoi... was good (where he reported evidence that the Bob Lee killing was not a robbery), but I agree with Garry Tan that the bottom part of the article (where he makes a broader commentary on whether San Francisco is “safe” unrelated to Bob Lee) is gaslighting and reductionist. It makes many claims and implications that are questionable: e.g., that rampant property crime does not make you unsafe (despite the fact that many thieves are armed), that festering drug addiction does not make you unsafe (which may have been a contributing factor to the car not stopping for the victim), that the problem with crime is “feelings” rather than real risk, and that those who are concerned about crime must have come from sheltered “suburbs”. And there’s no mention of anti-Asian robberies that got the previous DA recalled.

Eskenazi is a well-connected journalist, but he is also arrogant and often presents only one side of issues. For example, virtually nothing that he wrote in this article (anonymously sourced from disgruntled politicians) about the magnet school Lowell High school ended up being true (magnet schools do not violate state code as claimed, and the school did return to test-based admission which he claimed would not happen) https://missionlocal.org/2022/02/lowells-old-merit-based-adm.... So while his reporting is mostly good, you have to be aware of his bias.

See also this article from 4 days ago on Jo Boaler who uses San Francisco as a model for the rest of California https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319345 https://twitter.com/stephaniemlee/status/1640765521946902529

Here is Tyler Cowan’s take which I think clarifies things in terms of the 3 factors of production (land, labor, capital). Even if the LLMs themselves are not monopolized by a few companies, land and capital may still become more expensive relative to labor. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-28/how-ai... (paywalled)