The homeless people here expect and receive a steady income from people on the street as well city services. I remember the first time I was in San Francisco and someone came up to me and demanded money for food. He said "I don't eat meat!". I was stunned, both at a stranger coming up to me and asking for money and also about why they can be so picky about their diet. I gave him $1. He looked at me like I insulted him and said "Salads cost more than meat". The homeless in San Francisco are really quite aggressive in comparison to other cities, and just like the rest of my fellow San Franciscans, there is a strong feeling of entitlement. There is just no price at which the number of homeless will decrease -- only when we start paying the homeless to live in houses will that happen.

The only thing I can think of is fully funded group homes that are mandatory to live in -- basically prisons with nice amenities and educational programs that you can graduate out of based on demonstrating a track record of being able to provide for yourself. Because as long as we give people the option of living on the street, there is a certain small subset of the population that will prefer to do that over the other options available to them, and San Francisco will be home to an outsized share of that population.

I have had an actual college class on homelessness and public policy. There is no single cause of homelessness, but sky high housing costs definitely contribute to homelessness. There has been a serious and growing lack of affordable housing in the U.S. going back decades, about 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s at a time when they weren't really needed for demographic reasons but they were never replaced, and average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped. Meanwhile, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for years.

No, high housing costs do not single handedly and directly cause homelessness. But that's because there is no single cause of homelessness. But high housing costs are absolutely a contributing factor.

Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.

Here, I am talking about the chronic homeless, which are the root of the problem. Not families that may need to sleep in the car because they are in between housing or people crashing on couches while they straighten themselves out. I mean people with tents.

The one person I knew the longest was basically camping out around Palo Alto. The reason why you don't see so many homeless in the suburbs is because the Police are fairly effective at driving them out with beatdowns and destroying their property. This is the reality of not forcing them into group living situations -- let them live on the streets creating a lot of quality of life issues or have an unspoken policy of police brutality. So I would say that what we have now is dystopian.

The last homeless man I let live with me I ended up asking to leave, because he was unable to keep steady work. I just asked him to do something, anything -- it didn't have to be full time -- and he could keep the money himself. But he was able bodied and needed to work. I drove him to his job. At the end of the day, he was pretty blunt in telling me that at his age -- he was in his 50s -- he couldn't stand doing menial work and being ordered around by some kid. For him, it was either a high paying job or camping out. So I finally asked him to leave and he's been camping out (assuming he's still alive at this point -- it's been a while).

I think it's cute you took a college class and now understand the issue. But housing costs have nothing to do it. You can today find a place to live in the U.S. for a few hundred a month. No, not in San Francisco or Manhattan or Monaco, but most of the country is incredibly cheap.

Look at rent prices in the middle of the country. For example, in Phoenix, real rental costs have not increased for 30 years. They've been basically flat. But in Phoenix, the homeless don't have the same access to city services as in San Francisco, or NYC.

We are getting healthier and I have been paying down debt. My student loan was paid off just days ago and things will start getting better for me in July because of that. In fact, they have been getting gradually, slowly better the entire time I have been on the street.

I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I have been interviewed by reporters on 3 different occasions because of it, though, so far, none of that has resulted in a published article promoting my work.

The class I took involved an internship in a homeless shelter in Vacaville and I continued to do volunteer work there after the class ended. I was instrumental in getting them a proper website set up.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-to-effec...

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I am sorry you are bitter and were never able to figure out how to effectively help people solve the root causes of homelessness in their lives. That is not evidence that I am clueless.

There is a very small percentage -- basically 0.03% of the population are chronically homeless -- that are unable or unwilling to meet their obligations. There will always be some Bartlebys with us, who when presented with their obligations as members of a community respond with "I prefer not to". I prefer not to live in the shelter because it's unpleasant. I prefer not to move to where housing is cheaper because this is my home. I prefer not to live in a supervised environment because I like being in control of my life. I prefer not to take this medication that will stop me from screaming because I don't like how tired it makes me feel. And with these Bartlebys the choices are prison, banishment, and forced compliance -- institutionalization. Because a society is not a collection of isolated individuals, it's a web of obligations that are, at heart, mandatory. Some people view this as a dystopian nightmare. They are naive. It is living in a rooted world. From the beginning of civilization if you did not meet the obligations placed on you, the society expelled you, whether by death or banishment. What I don't understand is why people who have no problem enforcing laws banning camping in national parks or forcing people to pay taxes under threat of jail are unwilling to ban camping on the street in a high density city. If you want a nature preserve or other area outside of society in which all the individuals who are unable to comply with our rules can do whatever they want, that's fine. But you will find that with enough people filling up that area, a government will form, a society will form, and you will be back in trouble if you start violating the new expectations placed on you in that new society.

I don't disagree that we shouldn't allow people who are homeless to camp openly on city streets and generally be a public nuisance. I don't do either of those things, so I don't believe it is a given that being homeless must equate to such behavior.

Historically, the more desperately that governments try to control people, the more people find ways around it. This is the origin of Martial Arts. Governments denied the peasants access to weapons, so they learned to use their hands and feet and farming tools as lethal weapons. You couldn't reasonably deny them those things. They needed them in order to produce food for the nation.

I don't agree that imprisoning all homeless people merely for being poor is at all a humane solution. I also don't agree with general trends towards criminalizing behaviors in such a way as to be a kind of Jim Crow law for homeless people. You don't solve this problem by trying to get them to just leave your city and go elsewhere. All that does is shift it around. It doesn't get people off the street.

There is a tremendous housing crisis going on in the U.S. today. Evictions are at very high rates and young people are basically expected to live with roommates because there are almost no spaces suitable for a single, young person to live alone, like there once were. Returning to historical practices of making market rate housing available that single young people can afford on an entry level salary will not solve homelessness, but it will take some of the pressure off.

Homelessness occurs when someone has more problems than solutions. The more solutions we can make available, the more feasible it is for people to make their lives work, even if they have serious personal problems for which there are no ready solutions.

I was born with my medical condition. For many years, I was a full time wife and mom. This gave me a middle class role in society, even though I was actually too sick to hold down a paid position. At some point, I expect to return to a more conventional life. My condition is not curable, but that doesn't mean my life cannot be made to work. It did in the past. It will again in the future, at some point. As the number of problems I have shrinks and the number of solutions I have grows, at some point, it will cross some tipping point.

Let me stop here and thank you for being so generous for a decade of your life. I am sorry it has made you so very cynical. But I don't think your cynicism is actual evidence that more affordable housing cannot play a role in helping get this problem under control.

You might focus more on what you're sure you know, and not what you think someone else does, doesn't, or ought.

I could afford about $400 a month in the near future. I am trying to find a way to get off the street now that my student loan is paid off and that frees up enough money where I could afford that much for shelter in the near future.

But these homeless programs that just keep the homeless subsisting are better than nothing but sill aren't helping the ones who could escape.

The super short version is that I don't want to live in a van because I no longer drive due to my medical condition. There are other factors, but that's a big one.

Unsolicited personal commentary or life advice quickly crosses into incivility. Your comment is way into the red on that. Even if you don't mean such comments as personal attacks, they easily read like it—because of the underlying assumption that you know better about someone else's life than they do—and will almost certainly will land that way with the person(s) whose life you're prescribing. That's bad and leads to worse, so we should all just not do it.

I took that class because I was pursuing a BS in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing. It was intended as preparation for a Masters in Urban Planning. I was studying in earnest to make a career of solving housing issues. I also have an Certificate in GIS, the equivalent of master's level work.

Contempt and condescension don't belong on Hacker News.

There's a Star Trek episode that explores this idea. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District

It's difficult to think of ways of combating homelessness. To get them on their feet, you might need to redefine what a job is. A normal job requires some common elements: a shower, the ability to be there on a regular schedule, some productive task to do. But homeless people don't really have the ability to do any of those, except perhaps show up during regular hours.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the only solution is to give them money, and that most of them will just spend it on drugs or alcohol. But that's too heartless of an outlook. Some people who fall into homelessness are just like you or me. When your family connections fail and you have a debilitating illness, homelessness tends to result. And those kinds of people could be pulled out, if only we could figure out how.

There are homeless people that are essentially unsalvageable, though, and it's hard to know what to do with them. No family, no home, but most critically no willingness to help themselves even when given a small opportunity. But they still have friends, and if we focus on helping their friends out of homelessness, they might want to follow.

I am homeless and have had a class on homelessness and these are two of my websites:

http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I also started a Reddit recently called Housing Works and I have various related little blogs, like Project SRO. I am still kind of throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks, but the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide is a thing I started for myself in order to keep track of useful info I needed while homeless in downtown San Diego and I abandoned it after I left downtown. It was not updated at all for six months and then I realized it had organic traffic. It has the most organic traffic of any site I run because there is need for the info.

A lot of people who have spent time homeless are ashamed of that fact and don't volunteer that information normally. Even those who are not ashamed and not actively hiding it, well, you don't know just from looking at someone that they used to be homeless. Lots of people do get off the street. It is not a permanent situation for everyone.

However, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for some years now and it does concern me that there are larger forces at play here that are causing it to be more of an uphill battle than it used to be.

2/3 of the chronic homeless have mental or physical disabilities. 1/3 have drug problems. You are talking about 83,000 people in a population of 320 million, but these 83,000 people are creating huge quality of life problems in all of our major cities. In San Francisco, you have 300 million dollars spent fighting a problem created by 2,000 people. The non-profit and social services mafia employs more people to "care" for the homeless -- or more cynically exploit them -- than the actual number of chronically homeless.

First, we can go after the low hanging fruit of helping people who are more easily helped. More availability of actual affordable housing would help with this issue. Some people who are homeless do have income, just not enough to pay for a middle class American lifestyle.

Second there are things that work to help rehabilitate people with serious, entrenched personal issues. I raised and homeschooled my two gifted learning disabled sons, one of whom has the same medical condition I have.

I know quite a lot about this problem space and I see it as solvable. It will take time, but it can be done. Writing people off as hopeless does not help the problem at all. It just compounds it.

Your endeavors seem promising.

Best.

I've read this many times, bigger houses have contributed a great deal to rising housing costs. But do we have any data on the cost of materials and labor now vs. then as well as the cost of land and regulations now vs. then?

I've always had an inkling that materials/labor costs haven't actually risen that much even as houses grew larger.

Yes, there is data on such things. There are a number of reasons that housing has gone up in cost, but size inflation is absolutely a contributing factor.

This could explain a jump from $200k to $250k. Not from $50k to $200k.

I actually think his solution makes sense.

For the really impoverished people who are willing and capable to work their way up, this would be exactly what they want; for those who really don't want a roof over their heads, they should really be put into some sort of institution with restricted freedom and mental illness help.

If we have $300mil budget to help 10 thousand homeless, that's $30k per person, enough to support a decent standards of living in a cheap part of the country.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-new-count-shows-h...

While housing prices are a little different, zoning is most certainly an issue as many would much prefer to stay in any type of housing. You suggest making it a requirement but I contest that as that wouldn't actually be constitutional and most of the homeless here would love a place to stay. In NYC there are TONS of places for the homeless to stay but in SF, many shelters will have lines out the door well into the night and into the morning. There just isn't much shelter for them here. Attempting to build new homeless housing is always faced with NIMBY opposition.

My startup adventures have prompted many visits to San Fran and in turn I witnessed the plight of the homeless there. It does not exist on any scale like it does there whether it's in Baltimore or New York City where I lived a year after college.

There's not much you can do re: the homeless in San Francisco, but it bothers me and makes me feel bad.

Overall not a fan of San Francisco for a variety of reasons.

You're advocating for in-prisoning people who cannot afford or, for whatever reason, can't live in a home. That's really awful and lacking in empathy. That's almost like debtors prison.

The vast majority of these people will actually stay in a home if you provide one. The majority of them in SF, however, do not have access to any type of shelter because the existing shelters are far too overcrowded and any attempts at building new shelters get held up for years by people who don't want homeless people in their neighborhoods.

The solution to helping someone is providing them with healthcare (preventative is far cheaper than reactionary care for the tax payer) and providing them with a place to stay. Currently we don't really do either, especially in SF.

In my hometown there are people that quite there jobs to panhandle, because they make more money doing it. It's not common, but it happens and it shows that it's not a simple issue.

FYI mental illness is also common in the homeless population and for them I'm very much in favor of looking at any solution that'll help them have the success they desire in their lives. *Just saying.

All of the nearby locations with panhandlers are setup this way, maybe a couple hundred spots in the city. Sometimes I wonder how many people there are running the system...

One of the observations is that homeless populations tend to self select into encampments. And part of the expense and challenge is that where they choose to camp does not facilitate maintenance (cleaning, services, etc). I have not found any papers or articles on municipalities that have built infrastructure that specifically designed for hosting a homeless encampment. Could you build a system that would support a locally hosted infrastructure? Passive sanitation systems, trash depositories and collection points, water supplies?

Perhaps it depends on the neighborhood. In the Tenderloin and parts of SOMA, there is an abundance of drug addicts and people with mental health issues living on the streets. I'm randomly screamed at or verbally threatened, but they don't ask for money.

Then I realized that there are roughly four different people working BART station entrances along Market Street, who collectively account for 100% of the times I've been asked for money.

Sounds like a great premise for a dystopian short story

And seriously, locking up people for not living in homes and working? We used to do that in my country back in the late 19th century, it was a very handy law for the government to dust off when you had to jail protesters or strikers in the street.

For what it's worth, 70% of SF's homeless population lived in SF in homes before they were on the street. It's probably fair to assume that if rents were lower, more of those people would still be in homes.

  very high medical costs are substantially reduced by giving them stable housing

I also know that health crises for homeless people tend to hard to resolve and cost a lot more than for people who are housed. Medical advice like "stay off your foot and soak it twice a day" simply cannot be complied with if you are homeless. The health issues of the homeless tend to compound and get incredibly expensive, in most cases.

Source: I have had a class on homelessness and public policy, I am homeless, I run a few websites pertinent to this problem space. (In essence, I am kind of a SME here.)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/24/the-hot-spotter...

For example the "it is known" premise that the ACA and Medicaid expansion would result in lower consumption of medical care overall. The opposite has happened.

One example, with data:

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/21/emergency-room-visits-...

The relevant question is: is any resulting consumption of medical care dollars reduced by more than the cost of these frequent in-home care visits? Generally, personnel costs (especially in public agencies) far outweigh the cost of (mostly generic) meds.

I see no hard numbers for either statistic. What did I miss?

"After several months, he had recovered enough to be discharged. But, out in the world, his life was simply another hospitalization waiting to happen."

Hospitalizations can cost thousands of dollar per day. So this stay cost in the several hundred thousand dollar range.

[skipping some paragraphs]. He is given a stable housing environment:

"I spoke to Hendricks recently. He has gone without alcohol for a year, cocaine for two years, and smoking for three years. He lives with his girlfriend in a safer neighborhood, goes to church, and weathers family crises. He cooks his own meals now. His diabetes and congestive heart failure are under much better control. He’s lost two hundred and twenty pounds, which means, among other things, that if he falls he can pick himself up, rather than having to call for an ambulance."

The entire article is about this sort of thing and about many cases.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-e...

One issue is that in the US, we treat housing as the primary source of wealth for middle class people. So everyone is expected to be a homeowner. A world where the price of your primary wealth asset is rising is good! And a world in which its value is flat or falling is disastrous. And so local laws get shaped so as to keep housing prices high; in practice that means choking the supply of new more dense housing. After all, any change might harm the value of your home!

Is there even ONE city in the US that does it this way?

Can't we talk San Francisco into trying this approach? What are the objections?

Who cares how much relative space the roads take up?

I agree, you personally will experience better air in the suburbs. Everyone in aggregate will experience worse air due to your drive between the city and suburbs.

That's a variable that affects travel time (because even moreso less stuff within a given radius).

The most bizarre thing about the Narrow Streets proposal is, how they hell are bikes or buses supposed to work at reasonable speed if the streets are choked with them (and pedestrians, who would apparently have right of way on the same paths as bikes and buses, rather than parallel sidewalks).

The general response is "it creates problems" -- traffic, congestion, auto-centric neighbourhoods (which are poor places for children, the elderly, the disabled), and pollution.

I find more compelling the case laid out in the StrongTowns blog, by Charles Marohn, over several articles, that sprawl 1) costs more in the long term and 2) ultimately creates an unsustainable expenses-to-revenues balance.

Suburbs developed with cars, when cheap gasoline and asphalt made distance, rather than height (as in New York City) cheap. Homes were dropped on quarter-acre lots, retail centralised, and (in the US model) land use generally restricted to single-use: a lot is either commercial or residential, and industrial uses are kept widely separated.

Before that, cities were dense, because virtually all movement was on foot, by hand-cart, or, if you were wealthy, by a horse-drawn cart or carriage. Cities were also limited in size, because everything that went in had to come out, and that also generally happened by one or more of the above means -- no electrical sewerage pumping substations. Cholera and typhoid were killing tens of thousands of people per year in mid-19th century New York and London.

Space means you need more of everything: power lines, water mains, sewer lines, gas, cable, internet, streets, ... And maintenance for all of the above. At the same time, densities are too low to support intensive use -- think factory or even office jobs, or dense retail. Reliance instead is on moving people to retail centres -- built at a remove from either housing or city centres.

If you've got the resources (and cheap fuel), the spread-out life is ... relatively pleasant. If you cannot afford a car, or have had your licence revoked (drink driving, tickets, in some cases a penalty for failure to pay child support, or miscellaneous infractions), or can no longer drive (blind, disabled, epilepsy, ...), not so much. Transit options are almost always poor, and options such as walking or cycling not well supported.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

Fully pricing in deferred future costs might help.

Out of the millions of property owners in the US who benefit from artificially propped-up real estate prices, you chose to single out this individual why?

If schools were voluntary and private then it wouldn't matter which school district your house is in. The quality of local government schools (and therefore the good school's district) often is a large factor in house prices.

>Also how do you align the long term goals of educating those kids with often short term profit motivated KPIs.

I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.

anecdotally i went through almost all of my k-12 in public school and it seems like the opposite: that areas with more expensive houses pay more in local taxes which fund nicer schools and governments. meaning the "quality" of the local government is a function of the wealth held by its residents. this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families. i don't see why privatization would be a better alternative.

> I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.

saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.

Decoupling property values from school quality has a lot of liberal appeal. SFUSD does it. Unfortunately, SFUSD's experiment has largely failed because parents who draw bad schools in the lottery system opt out and move to the East Bay, where they can reliably buy their way into good school districts.

(If they stayed, their children would likely turn those bad schools into good schools, or at least okay schools).

Privatizing education wouldn't remove school quality as a function of wealth, but it would let you pay directly for school quality, and disentangle it from the real estate market.

I think you are arguing that school quality is a function of the kinds of students that attend the school, rather than the value the school itself adds. In that case I agree with you.

>saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.

My hypothesis is that schools could be run much more cheaply and be as effective as they are today. Therefore the money not spent on public schools (or on expensive homes in good school districts) could be gainfully invested elsewhere in the economy which would make everyone more wealthy.

Then it is a government inefficiency, not a market inefficiency

Pick up a microeconomics book and it will explain. In microeconomics market inefficiencies or market failures have 3 causes: 1) rent-seeking, 2) negative externalities, 3) information asymmetry.

As I explained somewhere else in this post, Economist David Ricardo first discussed this problem of rent-seeking about 200 years ago. In this case, the wealthy landlords work to pass laws that give them wealth paid for by society or in this case renters.

David Ricardo first discussed rent-seeking with the Corn Laws of Britain which had a tariff on all grains which increased the wealth of landowners at the cost of other members of society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo#Protectionism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

There are import tariffs on sugar that benefits sugar producers while "harming" society (and other countries that want to import sugar).

The Asian cultures have centuries more experience dealing with high density people situations. Violence is not as legitimized as a method of boundary enforcement for example because people have learned to deal with each other without killing each other. Sure it creates super thick-skinned rudeness (China/NYC/India) or super thin-skinned rule following (Japan) but boundary enforcement based on things like status markers(Like LV bags and iPhones) or rules or much better than those based on violence.

The U.S. is unique in its sheer mix of cultures but also because of the presence of its youngest culture (African American culture) that is today still reeling from the shock of being torn from its mother culture in Africa. Racism and the lack of a reliable justice system for them has forced their culture to rebuild from 0, going through stages where each person had to have the ability to dole out personal-justice/violence.

What's normal in China becomes rude in the U.S. What's justice in one culture is violence in another.

The locals who call a place home see this and want to preserve their own culture. Despite economic incentive allowing them to move anywhere else, their dollar is limited by their software in what it can do. It's like a project that has github dependencies forced to only use dependencies on some other place like gitlab. The project might as well die and start over. And though projects and start over, people can only die, and they will go down swinging.

Younger and newer cultures learn to be more flexible and adaptable. The software/culture limitation that prevented their parents from living like kings in Thailand is removed because their dependencies aren't as rooted. Some are even completely standalone and super flexible at the cost of having no way of influencing things. (eternal vagabonds w/ no long relationships)

Meanwhile new dense hardware developments can only be populated by software that can deal with the density and find it worthwhile. Thus you get H1B 'slave houses' filled with Indians/Chinese.

That said, as good as your point is about African American culture, it's far from our youngest; there's also the Chinese and Italian migration waves, the Armenian refugee wave... On the west coast, you would definitely also have to consider the effects of Japanese internment during WWII. That might be the most recent, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was another wave between now and then.

This doesn't detract from your overall point, or the severity of the effect on specifically African American culture, but I don't think you can call that America's youngest culture.

Further, there's evidence being brought out that there actually were aboriginal Americans that we would call black.

A simple example is being good at multiplication in kindergarten. This small advantage can become a desire for continuous academic excellence via courage towards math. If a child's parents are stereotypically prudish, another "advantage" is the ability to sidestep distractions of athletics/sex.

If the natural momentum a culture can build isn't appreciated, people become shallow and hoarding. In my family for example, the idea that Asians are naturally smarter and Blacks dumber is common and was the impetus for my thoughts in this area. I see a greed and lack of empathy developing that is difficult to watch.

The most common actual real world usage I get out of explaining this model is more support for affirmative action. Perhaps other people can see it as having other value. No need to trash it. All models are simplifications of reality and thus "wrong".

Another example is limits on taxicab medallions (which we have in NYC) so that medallions in NYC were valued at $1.2 million each and higher fares for passengers but that scarcity was fixed by competition from Uber/Lyft so that now medallions are only worth $700,000 or less and fares are less expensive than they were.

Another example is labor unions. Various forms of tariffs also create scarcity benefiting the special interests over the needs of the general population. Many jobs have extraordinary educational or licensing requirements to create scarcity and limit competition.

When it comes to housing wealthy landlords want their land to appreciate so they lobby politicians to pass these regressive laws. Without spending a cent, simply reversing the artificial scarcity in housing means that renters pay less for rent and more for goods and services, the construction trades have jobs, etc.

https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40509-yimbys-the-alt-righ...

Can you quantify?

These restrictions (nearly all carried out as zoning) could easily be removed and allow a wave of development to occur, lowering housing costs and keeping many people from ending up homeless in the first place.

As with any political matter, binary assertions like this oversimplify issues. A counter argument in this case is that strict zoning laws serve to control an influx of citizens to a location. Those influxes can fundamentally change the culture for the present residents.

Is that a bad thing? I think it's worthy of debate. But blanket statements risk dismissing reasonable arguments before they are even presented.

San Francisco has not managed the ironclad rent control part, and as you'd expect, landlords found various ways to get rid of low-rent tenants in favor of high-rent tenants. When you have the ability to drag your feet on repairs, the mechanism is obvious. When your tenants are poor and you're constantly forgiving them for being late/short with the rent, all you have to do is stop doing that.

Zoning by itself is just destructive. Zoning and rent control could theoretically work, though I'm not sure it ever has, because landlords are so much more clever about getting rid of tenants than cities are about designing rent control laws.

Your blanket statement seems to shut down debate far more than OP's original comment.

It feels weird to invoke patriotism here, but if there's an influx of citizens to a location, the individuals within it are doing the most American thing you possibly can: chasing opportunity.

To lock the doors, to hoard the opportunity for yourself because you were born in the right place or got there first, is the most deeply un-American thing you can possibly do.

We should be celebrating, encouraging, and facilitating the largest possible influxes we can get to our ascendant cities.

The resulting higher density of land-use would likely result in each landowners property becoming even more valuable. Imagine owning a single-family-housing-sized lot in the middle of New York City, for example.

These four items are deemed by society as wrong or bad and therefore it "wrong" as you say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo

I've read stories on HN of start-ups living or operating out of literal closets because they can't find or afford an alternative. Surely there's some size which is safe and liveable, but smaller than what is available now? And can be designed in a way that isn't a charmless, stifling box?

It doesn't. There are far more people who want to live in the Valley than there are homes and building homes won't solve that problem. If anything, they need to stop building so people are forced to relocate to other parts of the world. The insane concentration of technologists in one area is not good for the world.

And yes 300sqft is small.

Bringing some Tokyo public transport wouldn't hurt, right? That would help with the commutes and make living further out viable.

I just don't like the knee-jerk reaction from others (not you necessarily) who just call everything NIMBYism as if people who own property have 0 rights or concerns. I own and live in a small condo. Like under 100k in value. I have a cool little view of the city, nothing special. I bought it because of that and other factor. You're damn right I would be upset if somebody wanted to build a skyscraper blocking my view, it literally affects the quality of my life. Now, that certainly isn't justification in itself to block construction, but on the other end it very much seems as though, from the other end of the discussion, that my concerns would be deemed irrelevant.

How would you (not you specifically) if people started tearing down trees in your neighborhood to turn it into a strip mall so cars could get through? How bullshit is that?

Overall I just want to see a more balanced discussion, so I call out what I see.

Well, there's also the fact that, unlike NYC and SF much of that city was destroyed during what Wikipedia calls "the single most destructive bombing raid in human history". So it's not like they had all that much historic architecture to protect, anyway.

Apples and oranges, in other words.

These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump.

Oh please. The Trumps made their money through, first, being notorious slumlords; then through mob connections and tax loopholes; and finally, as money launderers for the post-Soviet elite.

Not through the "overuse of historic landmark status", by even the most fantastic stretch of the imagination. (As an illustration, look into the history of the building that preceded Trump Tower at the same location).

Much of the post-fire development used unreinforced masonry and was built on poor-quality fill. We saw the effects of this during the 1989 quake in areas like the Marina district.

The preponderance of fill (and depth to bedrock) in the densest areas of SF is well-illustrated by the Millennium Tower fiasco[0]. The MT's pilings do not even reach bedrock!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...

Also, the issue of some buildings being built to (allegedly) inadequate standards is a red herring. If that were the case, the city would be more than happy to have them condemned, and all manner of more useful structures (for affordable housing or otherwise, put in their place).

A comparatively tiny portion of the city actually. But anyway, this is far afield from the original topic of this thread.