Japan also has somewhat adverse housing regulations that waste a lot of construction. They are likely kept in place to stimulate economic activity - but it's not a particularly friendly environment for home ownership or environmental concerns.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/disposable-...

Americans think government is evil and all that. So there's no government rescue plan to build more housing because that's commie talk. So everyone's waiting for the market to fix it.

The market would absolutely produce more housing in a lot of places were there not a ton of regulations in place to stop it from doing so.

And I don't write that as a fingers-in-ears, market-will-solve-all-problems libertarian, but as a fairly left-wing guy.

There has to be an incentive for real estate developers.

There's a project at my former company that will redevelop a part of downtown SF. There was a massive back and forth and iterations that had to be done because the numbers guy at the real estate development company wanted to cut out all residential since commercial would be more profitable.

Those are the people you have to incentivize to make it work.

What SF probably needs is not huge projects downtown, but more incremental growth further out. In Europe, in a city that size, you'd see a lot more 4/5/6 story development, rather than the huge skyscrapers downtown and then 1/2/3 story in a lot of residential areas.

I agree. Same in LA. I was merely pointing out things I heard directly from people working with a major real estate developer there. I know from the design side that there was a major fight to try and get in some sort of affordable residential vs what the developer was hearing from their number crunchers.

Yeah, stuff in SF is complex. Could be that, yeah, if they decided to add some residential, they got more NIMBY pushback, or some kind of requirement to add N% 'affordable' that made it pencil out as less profitable.

It's possible but honestly I don't think that's a factor only that commercial real estate in downtown SF is going to get them more bang for their buck right now. Their timeline is looking 5-10 years out so they have their shit together (as well as experience) to deal with SF stuff.

You really think the problem of refusing to build more housing in San Francisco would be solved if only you could get rid of the right-wingers who have run the place for years? Oh if only leftists had a chance to run the government for a change, they'd build plenty of housing, but the right-wingers who have made all their policies for years call that "commie talk"....

> Tokyo added more housing than the entire state of California:

And anyone who wants to live in a 250 square foot apartment and get stuffed (literally!) into a subway every day to get to work is free to move there. But the people who find SV desirable move there in no small measure because it's not like Tokyo.