Thing is, the entire Bay Area is seriously affected by the failure to build in SF. You can think of the SF Bay Area as a lower-population NYC with really shitty public transit.

> ...the upshot is closer to saying you couldn't live in Manhattan.

I'm not sure what you mean by "The upshot"?

Edit: I'm asking this question because I can't reply to the rest of your comment until I have its answer. I'm not snarking or trolling; I'm trying to have a productive conversation about a touchy topic with folks who probably don't share my views. I don't want to misinterpret what you were trying to say and say something incredibly dumb. :)

Sorry if the upshot line wasn't clear. What I meant was, given the size differences it makes sense for a New Yorker to translate "there would be no apartments in SF under $3k" to roughly "there would be no apartments in Manhattan under $3k" rather than "there would no apartments in New York City under $3k".

The latter would be dire, but the former not a particularly big deal. No needs to live in the trendy part of town.

Thanks for clarifying what you meant by "the upshot"! :)

From what I understand, folks in NYC can deal with hour-long commutes because of the reliability and continuous operation of the area's public transit systems. Perhaps I am mistaken? The public transit situation in the Bay Area is far more dire.

Because I have next-to-no knowledge of the character of each of NYC's boroughs, please excuse any such inaccuracies in the following hypothetical alternate-universe scenario:

Imagine that you live in The Bronx, and work and party in Manhattan. In order to get home from Manhattan in the late evening you either have to

* Be on the subway before midnight (because the subway shuts down from shortly after midnight till 04:00 every day of the week) [This assumes that you're lucky enough to live within walking distance of a subway stop] (the same caveats apply to the commuter heavy rail system),

* Hail and pay for a cab/Uber/Whatever, then spend 30->45 minutes inside of it,

* Or, -if you're spectacularly lucky- spend 45->90 minutes inside a bus, then walk for another 15->45 minutes to your apartment.

Your commute to work will be somewhat awful. Both the subway and the heavy rail is not infrequently late. The subway runs once every twenty minutes. [0] During rush hour, the heavy rail runs once every 15 minutes to once every 30. Outside of rush hour, it runs runs once per hour. Either system will be unable to get you to work at least twice a year due to service outages. Once you disembark from the subway or heavy rail, pray that your connecting bus is actually on time. If it's not, and your destination is within a 30 minute walk, you're almost certainly better off walking than waiting for the next bus.

The absolute best one-way doorstep-to-doorstep commute you can reasonably hope for here is 30 minutes, [1] but then -because of proximity to a subway station that's very close to Manhattan- your rent is almost the same as living in Manhattan.

If you decide to drive, remember that everyone wants to get into Manhattan, and that there are exactly three roads that serve the borough. If you don't like sitting in traffic for literal hours, make sure that you have a schedule that allows you to avoid the two+ hour stretch of rush hour traffic. Also, pray that there's not yet another accident on the damn road. ;) Also, make sure you can afford $3600/year in garage fees, as street parking is effectively impossible.

As an aside: I know that most of this can be considered #firstworldproblems complaining. I spent most of my life in both rural and urban Alabama. The best public transit available in the state was a few bus lines in Huntsville that took folks from downtown to the indoor shopping mall and back. ;) I know that the Bay Area has far better services for car-less people than most parts of the country. My reason for explaining all of this is to illustrate what I understand to be the vast gulf separating Bay Area public transit and public transit in many other major metropolitan areas, but NYC in particular.

[0] If you're lucky enough to live near a subway station that has multiple lines pass through it, this interval will be smaller.

[1] My absolute best one-way doorstep-to-doorstep commute time [2] was 90 minutes. My typical time was more like 120->150 minutes.

[2] Admittedly, from SF to a workplace ten to fifteen minutes away from a heavy rail station in San Mateo. However, reversing the commute direction would have had little-to-no impact on its total time, and surprisingly little impact on the rent I was paying.

Thanks for the detailed reply. That public transit system sounds downright awful.

I can't say you've convinced me on rent control but you have convinced me that the Bay Area has a somewhat different set of problems than greater NYC (though some of our regional transit systems -- e.g. LIRR + NICE bus -- have similar issues).

It's lots better than driving, but far, far, far worse than it could be.

I understand that designing and running a public transit system isn't easy. Having said that, I wish that public transit was universally recognized as a very important public service and an excellent stimulator for a region's economic growth. As it stands now, it seems that shortsightness and greed seriously impede the development of an effective system in the region.

In re: rent control: Remember that -in SF- rent control is actually rent stabilization. When a unit is vacated (or the last tenant on the original lease moves out), the landlord is free to set the price of that unit however he wishes.

Rent control was instituted in a time when rents were spiralling out of control. [0] AIUI, one of the reasons Prop 13 passed was that landlords made the claim that a dramatic cap in property tax increases would allow them to stop dramatically increasing rents; that the primary reason for the rent increases was property tax increases. Prop 13 passed, rents continued to spiral out of control, [1] and about a year later rent control was instituted. [2]

If it was the city's policy to construct enough new housing to meet demand, I would agree that rent control had no place in the market. However, in the past five years, for every five people added to the city's population, one new housing unit has been added. Even during the real estate boom from 2000 to 2008, the human population grew by ~2,700 units more than the housing population. [3][4]

[0] Much like now, heh.

[1] Surprise, surprise.

[2] For information on what cost increases landlords can recover from tenants in rent controlled units, see these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153973 For a big apartment construction project that managed to create a bunch of "market rate" units without removing rent controlled units, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150724 (Frankly, the city should be trumpeting this deal every chance it gets. This sort of thing is what's going to solve the rent crisis.)

[3] This is a HORRIBLE way to phrase this, but I can't word right now. If it doesn't make sense, I'm happy to clarify.

[4] Citation for these numbers is the Paragon Real Estate graphs found in this article: http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/02/04/sfs_population_is_g...