Regional governance seems to be the answer, but making that happen seems like an impossible task.
Companies are focused too much on silicon valley. People are willing to live like animals putting up with appaling conditions and subjecting themselves to insane costs and commutes. They would certainly move a few hundred miles for the same job with decent rent 10 min from the office even with a pay cut. The market can fix this problem right now without deregulation. But it won't get fixed until more companies actually start hiring outside of SV.
As we have seen here, regulation like rent control is much more harmful than helpful. Rather than needing to cough up an extra $50 per month for example, you wait until the market rent is double what you're paying now - and naturally, get kicked out for one reason or another.
If zoning was dramatically curtained and / or abolished, the housing problem would be solved almost overnight. The high property prices ARE a market signal saying, build more houses. Regulation is preventing efficient markets.
Given the geographical constraints and the velocity of tech growth, it's really unlikely that a free market would build so many units that all the high-paid tech workers who could possibly come to the Bay Area were situated, and landlords were forced to start catering to the working poor. We have to force them to, because market incentives won't.
Without the restrictions on development (which are designed to keep the area desirable, and succeed at that, as shown by market prices) desirability would drop -- because you'd have more people, and less money for services per person -- along with prices, and tech companies would be more likely to locate elsewhere.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Developer-pulls-o...
Aren't "cities" just manifestations of players within the greater market system coming together to assert their interests and preferences?
Or is this an example of how a group can act to block the proper functioning of a market, kind of like a cartel?
In San Francisco, the latest new regulation against housing was passed by a simple majority of the vote, with 8.5% of San Francisco residents voting in favor. In the latest election, the moderate District 3 supervisor was replaced by a rabid anti-growth supervisor with the approval of 12% of the district’s residents.
This is actually sort of by design. Americans in general are pathetic (I do not mean apathetic) about their civic responsibilities, but aggressive home ownership policies were pushed partly to get people more involved in politics. Turns out that this promotes narrow-minded personal interest rather than the good of society.
Removing the regulation would move us further towards "people with money can get housing." I want a livable city for everyone, including those without the resources to outbid me, and that requires different kinds of regulation.
Not to fully respond to your trollbait, but the market isn't god. Its just smarter (i.e. crowdsourced) than a few government officials about establishing what society wants.
When market participants are playing with roughly similar amounts of money, or at least roughly normally distributed amounts of money, sure. Markets give us the best consumer products. Part of how they do that is slicing the "budget" and "luxury" segments away into their own little worlds, where they don't do too much damage to everything else.
Inequality in the Bay Area housing market is so extreme that the best use of capital (in a market sense) is to exhaust it on the luxury segment and leave everyone else out in the cold. This might be "what society wants, weighted by salary" but that is importantly different from "what society wants" in this case.
Imagine if general income inequality was such that the auto industry found it optimal to produce only a few thousand Bugatti Veyrons, leaving everyone else in the cold. At the very least, we'd have to force it to produce some tanks and aircraft engines in case of war.
These are scapegoats. If the city started building social housing the shortage would be over.
If those pesky zoning regulations were eliminated property developers would flood in and build thousands of luxury apartments which would be bought by Chinese investors and left empty much like all the other property they've bought.
For everybody else it's a (rather poor) allocation mechanism that implicitly favors monopoly power, wealth and corruption. Great if you happen to have a lot of wealth thanks to your connections in the Chinese Communist Party I guess, and are looking for an American bolthole. Not so great if you're an American primary school teacher who grew up in the Bay Area.
The reason is (as the paragraphs just below this line indicate) in fact the same reason for a great deal of issues in the Bay Area: lack of regional planning.
Planning in the Bay Area is far too localized. Cities constantly pawn off problems on each other. There are cities that approve thousands of new units of office space but zero housing. Transit systems don't connect to each other. Sports stadiums are constructed with no thought as to how people will arrive. Freeways have lanes that appear and disappear at various county boundaries, causing dangerous congestion. On and on. It's also why so many cities don't have enough shelters and just seem to expect (as the article states) that other nearby cities will pick up the slack.
What is needed is for the disparate cities of the Bay Area to stop passing the buck and come together as a region and plan together. Continuing to hope someone else does the hard work of solving problems will continue to result in them not getting solved.