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Re:Does Adding Expensive Housing Help the Little Guy? by ChuckMcM on Thursday September 28, 2017 @08:32PM (#15361901)
You can run the simulation yourself, but the bottom line is if the total number of houses grows, more people get housed in all income groups. That is a tremendously powerful message for city supervisors. They only have to look at one thing "After this change will there be more or fewer houses?" if the answer is 'more' then the change will be positive for people trying to find housing, if it is 'less' then the change will be negative. A very simple and objective proposition.

Say someone proposes to demolish a 100 unit SRO hotel in the Mission and replace with with a high rise luxury condo building with 250 market rate units. There will be a big protest about how gentrification is pushing the people out of their own neighborhood and where will the people in those 100 SRO units move to? etc etc etc.

What this tells you is that after adding an additional 150 houses all income groups will have more housing opportunities period. That might seem non-intuitive but the model works.

Re:Does Adding Expensive Housing Help the Little Guy? by Kalium on Thursday September 28, 2017 @08:33PM (#15361908)
The politics in some parts of SF favor people whose response to the simulations will tend to be "That's nice, but what if all of those units were permanently subsidized?"
Re:Does Adding Expensive Housing Help the Little Guy? by InternetGerbil on Saturday September 30, 2017 @11:41AM (#15373362)
You can't demolish 100 unit SRO in the mission, rightly so, without a development agreement that would relocate the current SRO tenants into a new building without interruption.

There's no reason to have this kind of thing be an example scenario because that's not how housing gets built. SF isn't tearing down 100 unit SROs, they're tearing down one story commercial.

Re:Does Adding Expensive Housing Help the Little Guy? by irq11 on Thursday September 28, 2017 @08:53PM (#15361985)
The “simulation” is garbage. I’ve pointed out one limitation, but there are many others. For example: rental markets are not auctions. Landlords set prices, and renters pay them, or do not.

What happens when you replace 150 SROs with market rate condos? You make 150 of the poorest people in the city homeless, and you remove a tiny bit of competition (maybe) at the higher end of the market. (You’ll note that this post doesn’t discuss who is evicted.)

At a minimum, it is the responsibility of the simulator to show that their simulation reconstitutes reality before it is to be trusted for any form of prediction.

The only “powerful message” here is that Sonja Trauss is running for office on a pro-development agenda.

Re:Does Adding Expensive Housing Help the Little Guy? by ChuckMcM on Thursday September 28, 2017 @11:07PM (#15362466)
It is a model, not a simulation, and it is traditional to argue the flaws in the methodology or assumptions of the model if you seek to invalidate. What I heard you to say was: “what if you have to knock down N affordable units to build M market-rate units?”

And the model exactly models this, showing that as long is M > N, everyone will will get more housing. If you run the simulation you can see how it does this, market rate housing captures people who can afford it, they move out of mid-tier housing, which captures the folks who want mid-tier, which frees up affordable units that were being occupied by people who could move up.