Lots of legal housing has been demolished or merged over the past five years. It happens all the time, you just don’t hear about it on pro-development blogs.
I have no particular problem with development, but Sonja Trauss is not an objective commentator, and this “simulation” is little more than opinion dressed up as data.
Merged units are not in this category. Merged units are when someone buys a duplex (or bigger) and removes all but one of the kitchens in the building and thereby makes one big house out of what used to be a house that was split into 2-4 apartments. That is not an example of housing being demolished in order to build new housing.
It has more specific numbers, like in 2015, the city built 3,000 units and tore down 25. 15 of those were single family houses, which is not a category of housing that is affordable by any measure in SF in 2015. Vastly more affordable units are lost in SF through merger, Owner Move In evictions or just the previous tenant moving out and the new tenant being charged more than by demolition.
It very much confuses the housing debate to believe or claim that every time a new apartment building goes up, it means by default that dozens of low income people were kicked out to make that happen. That is just not true.
The vast majority of new housing construction happens without the removal of any previous housing unit.
SF doesn’t have much infill development left. That’s the point. Arguing about what people did in the past isn’t relevant today.
Side note: >woman who has staked her career on a pro-housing political platform announces that market-rate redevelopment is good for everyone.
What's the point of this statement? Do you equally scoff at groups that delay housing construction to increase subsidized housing units and ludicrous when they advocate that slowing down housing construction benefits certain groups?