Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco apartments

Re:Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco a... by timr on Monday May 16, 2016 @06:20PM (#11710098)

This was addressed by the source article. It happens a bit, but it isn't magic: one of the author's models found that for every 1% increase in housing, rents dropped by 1.7%.

Lowering rents enough to make SF affordable for poor people requires construction on a scale that isn't just impractical -- it's economically impossible. No developer would choose to build into such a market with fixed construction costs at hundreds of dollars per square foot.

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Re:Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco a... by harryh on Monday May 16, 2016 @06:26PM (#11710136)

Indeed construction costs are far too high! Significant zoning changes are needed to make SF more affordable for large swaths of the economic spectrum. And even then, unfortunately, it will take time. Buildings don't go up overnight. The problems that SF is experiencing today are due to decades of mistakes.

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Re:Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco a... by irq11 on Monday May 16, 2016 @07:15PM (#11710343)

The costs he is citing are fixed. They don't have anything to do with zoning or past decisions by San Francisco.

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