The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

Re:The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It by more_corn on Thursday April 07, 2016 @09:31PM (#11452013)

I don't think you thought this all the way though. True, each new unit reduces the delta between supply and demand. But for prices to actually drop that delta would have to be reduced dramatically. Also the housing market has interesting striations.

Reducing demand at the top prevents the demand for high-end from overflowing into mid and low end. This does little good if the majority of people moving to SF are middle class. (Which they probably are because bell curves) To make a real difference you have to also add massive quantities of mid and low end --quantities about an order of magnitude higher than SF is currently planning. (going by the 10x disparity between population growth and housing supply creation)

And here comes the hard part: it's hard to build middle end and affordable units when neighborhood associations block the building permit until the developer pays multi-million dollar bribes (sorry donations). http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

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Re:The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It by shkkmo on Friday April 08, 2016 @03:41AM (#11453182)

> Reducing demand at the top prevents the demand for high-end from overflowing into mid and low end. This does little good if the majority of people moving to SF are middle class.

It does plenty of good because there will be fewer mid and low-end units occupied by high-income individuals and thus more available to mid and low income residents. This only has an effect up to the point where high-income supply catches up with demand, but we are a long ways off from that point.

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