No, it wouldn't, for at least two big reasons. First: SFBA has geographical and political constraints that make housing particularly problematic. Other major US cities, and even college towns like Ann Arbor, don't have those same problems.

Secondly, the Bay Area housing shortage is a phenomenon of hundreds of companies being located in the same area. No one company, even Google, could have that same impact on another metro area. You're only going to stand a chance of recreating the SFBA housing shortage (and it's a small chance) if the whole Bay Area market moves wholesale to a single new place.

I can name a number of USA cities that are experiencing housing shortages and rent/costs inflating far beyond where they would be if there wasn't a huge flight out of CA along with local political issues (NIMBYs, not allowing smaller vertical growth land lots). Austin, Seattle, Portland, Denver. All of these cities have been affected by this. My house value has gone up $40k in the last year. It's gone from sub 100s to a half a million over the last 5 years.

This is far and away not only an SFBA regional issue.

http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2017/02/16/austins-ho...

Our problem with Austin has always been the city council artificially limiting development. We didn't allow 10k sq foot lots until last year which means we're JUST now starting to build those 3-4 story townhouses near downtown. If you go to Dallas or Houston they are all over the place and little neighborhoods will feel vastly more populated than they do in Austin. The unfortunate part of this is that now younger people who could afford these townhouses are pushed into tiny studio apartments downtown or into houses 12-20 miles away from downtown. There was no in between if you didn't have millions to spend but wanted to live in/near downtown like there is in Houston/Dallas currently.

The biggest constraint would seem to be political or specifically lack of willingness to update building codes in one of the largest cities by area in ca -SJ. Land is so very underutilized in San Jose. Its development on the surface looks more like an agglomeration of suburbs rather than a city proper. If they allowed for new code to allow density in the city of San Jose alone, it would go a good way to alleviating the housing shortage.

SJ is over 3x the surface area of SF but has barely 20% more residents in that area. Imagine if they just doubled density --you'd allow for the absorption of an extra million residents. If they only upped the density by 50% they'd allow for over an extra 500,000 residents --that would alleviate the issue by itself.

There is so much poorly built stock from the 60s and 70s that it would not only renew the city but it would become the undisputed powerhouse of the bay area.

Why not just encourage Facebook, Google et al. to move some divisions a little bit east to the San Joaquine Valley? I'm guessing the city governments of Stockton, Tracy, Fresno, Visalia would be amiable.

For that matter they could move up to places with better weather like Eureka or Reading. However, given that companies prefer to stay in the local scene and there is underutilized land, it would seem like something worth looking into given the demand as well as availability, if not government willingness.

SFBA's issue are entirely political.

A housing shortage is trivially easy to recreate; just stop building housing while trying to pack more and more people in the same space. An SFBA-grade housing shortage isn't that much harder then, you just need to convince a small handful of people on city and county boards to stop building housing, while trying to put more people in the same space. Sprinkle some income inequality that makes Rwanda look equitable and you've got a plot of dirt going for $200k in South San Francisco.

You could pack half the Bay Area's population into Santa Clara county if you made it as dense as San Francisco but there's not the will to go even that far, never mind somewhere actually dense. New York's not even all that dense in the scheme of things, but at that level of density, you could fit almost 36 million people into Santa Clara county alone, or the whole Bay Area, and then 3 more of them.

Hundreds of companies being located in the same area isn't the problem, the refusal to build more housing is.

This is exactly correct.

There is no rational reason why Palo Alto should have detached houses with lawns, or Sausalito be a little town, except for terrible political decisions about land use and mass transit.

You're contending with some very intractable land use and land economics issues, and effectively addressing them will be very difficult without addressing some of these issues, like preferential access to capital over many other asset classes, preferential terms, preferential tax treatment, preferential infrastructure treatment, etc. This doesn't even start to get into the fact that out of all asset classes, property is an extremely common and popular asset class held and upholds a substantial portion of the wealth of most of the political class around the world. Legislating against property as wealth goes directly against their personal financial interests.

Practical solutions that have a hope of actually taking effect within the next 2-3 years must be deployable without the aid of legislation. One way to mitigate speculators is to put up a credible threat that you (the company) wield the ability to unilaterally and virtually overnight make their speculation worthless. If you are able to structure a company town such that it is Google-level amenities and infrastructure attractive and physically entirely self-contained (even water sourcing, water treatment, energy generation, recycling/waste management, schools, parks, restaurants, and retail shops, etc., are part of the company town), then demonstrate the capability to move everything at a moment's notice within a month or two and leave behind just bare foundation ties, then after the first such move that bankrupts the speculators that call the company's bluff, future speculators will find it extraordinarily difficult to secure loans to speculate with.

Lots and lots of details I'm leaving out, and this wouldn't be without its problems and challenges, but if you really want to slice the Gordian Knot of high property prices inflating employee compensation, then it will take an outside-the-box action of this magnitude to do so.

> The first solution that comes to mind is to legislate that certain pieces of property must be the legal primary residence of the owner.

I am not sure I understand this solution. Are you saying that San Francisco's housing problems are not caused by demand that far outstrips supply? This proposal would just mean that prices stay high, but more people buy instead of rent.

How about legalizing building? SF could easily accommodate far more people.

Even if it was easier to build in SF, the cost of investment is SO HUGE, that the only way to recoup it is to make it a luxury high-rise that does nothing for the non-wealthy residents of the city.

Developers of new buildings absolutely do not want rents to drop, because otherwise there would be no reason to develop the area. The cost of land is extremely high.

This doesn't make sense. If I build a ton of luxury apartments and fill them with willing buyers, then won't those buyers be giving up their own housing?

Overall, the total amount of housing increases which should drop prices.

If it costs you 500,000,000 dollars to build a building, you need to charge a certain amount of rent for the investment to pan out. Hint: it won't be cheap.