The housing fight is largely older, wealthier, entrenched, long-term owners vs younger newcomers who haven't been able to put down roots. It's no surprise that it has been a political rout.
I wish the YIMBYs well. The numbers could be on their side but the structure of the political contest is not.
The most critical transit issues are at the scale of the Bay area, and the SF mayor doesn't have the authority or budgets to solve them alone. That will require strong action at the state level, or the emergence of a new layer of government with the mandate and budgets to bypass the petty squabbles of cities and impose a sane bay area transit infrastructure development roadmap. One can dream...
Controlling what people can and can't build on their property at the city level was created to prevent the same problems that exist on the city level back when they were on the neighborhood level.
I don't see state or county level zoning as anything more than recursion that will just keep bringing the problem to a different level without solving it.
The fundamental issue is that people are not allowed to or the regulations make it economically impossible to build housing at high density.
I don't think adding another layer of bureaucracy will make it easier to build the necessary density of housing.
London Breed is trying to make San Francisco a city for everyone, and she does not let personal feelings get in the way of good policy.
Jane Kim may know how to say the right things, but get on her bad side and she will abandon your policy and destroy your company’s projects.
You just think of the law as a machine to be hacked. It’s illegal to sell raw milk. I could try to convince some legislators that it’s important (not likely) or just find a way way to operate a raw milk business that doesn’t involve sales.
Some problems may be temporary insoluable, but I find I have plenty of problems to solve. No use worrying about the ones that are fundamentally at odds with statutes.
I'm not sure this is the best medium to wade into the specifics but tl;r: I have found that the really interesting problems require working together with other people and sometimes to do so you must act against your own immediate self interests. I also think this type of extreme individualism starts to fall apart when someone starts to act in a way that causes you or others indirect harm and you want to get them to stop.
That said laws are the programming language of our society! People should never imagine them to be anything else. I think, and I don't mean this in an aggressive way, that when you talk about "hacking" laws you're simply engaging in politics :) Albeit with a starkly different ideological grounding and aesthetics. The reason I put that word in quotes in the comment you responded to was to imply suspicion about reductive definitions of the term that seem to categorize it only as "something that happens on the senate floor."
""" Phone Banking: This is one of the best ways to get out the vote, and a really nice opportunity to chat with other San Franciscans. We'll be phone banking every Tuesday & Thursday from 6 - 8:30 at YIMBY headquarters (1260 Mission St) from now through the 31st to help get out the vote for London.
May 12th Event: Campaign event with YIMBY & London Saturday May 12, 11:30-1:30 at the Mission Bay food trucks near the ballpark. (601 Mission Bay Blvd)
Slate Card: A great tool for talking with your friends about the YIMBY's endorsements for the June ballot. Available on our website, here: https://yimbyaction.org/endorsements/
Ballots go out next week and we'd love your help getting the word about the election - hope you can join us! """
But I agree with participation in that we should be voting and funding political programs that we believe in.
> trying to fix NIMBY forces
[bring on the disagreement downvotes, my point stands!]
It's like back in the 60s when people were told Smoking was healthy. many changed their opinion about smoking when they found out it wasn't actually healthy.
this is why, the opinions need "fixing"
Saying “not in my backyard” is acknowledging that a problem is real, but hoping that solutions can be achieved in a way that doesn’t affect their lifestyle.
While this is true, there is an objective truth about the directionality and magnitude of the cause-and-effect relationships involved, and contradictory statements about these relationships (some of which are necessarily false) dominate the discourse.
So basically, you have opinions that differ from them, and you think you're right, and they're wrong. But you offer no evidence beyond your own assertions.
Nobody reasonable is arguing that "increasing the supply of housing increases prices" (that's a strawman), but there's a lot of evidence that, for example, "fixing housing" leads to traffic problems if you don't deal with transit before you build (cf. the highway situation in Seattle).
There are also lots of examples where gentrification displaces poor and vulnerable populations. These are real problems with development, and it does no good to simply assert that they're not real.
That is not a strawman. That is literally what the old-school tenant activists in San Francisco say, providing political cover for NIMBY homeowners to also reject housing supply. It’s not reasonable, but politics is not won on reason. See this hit piece: http://www.sfexaminer.com/excelsior-community-concerned-affo...
> There are also lots of examples where gentrification displaces poor and vulnerable populations. These are real problems with development, and it does no good to simply assert that they're not real.
That is confusing cause and effect. It’s not the new development that is causing gentrification. It is the lack of building elsewhere, especially in rich neighborhoods, that is causing gentrification in poor neighborhoods.
And then gentrification allows expensive new housing to become economically feasible, allowing development. The regulations that cause all new housing to be expensive are also a problem.
The strawman is that you're mischaracterizing the argument and it's commonality. Nobody is arguing that "supply increases prices". They're arguing that gentrification increases prices. And they aren't wrong.
Are there goofballs who argue obviously counterfactual things? I'm sure you can find them. But the serious people have a different argument that you're mischaracterizing here.
> if you accept the premise that housing is in crisis
I can go on and on about this. Yes NIMBYism is a problem, but this goes well beyond the more market rate housing debate, people being against public transit improvements, housing for the homeless, and clinic for drug addicts are ones that come to mind.
However, it is a common mischaracterization by outsiders that reflexively oppose YIMBY. For a while, it was common to say that YIMBYs opposes BMR and affordable housing in general, which is completely untrue.
I guess it's shifted now to say that YIMBYs are pro-gentrification instead, which is absolutely counter to any high level communication or leadership discussion I've heard, or any local desires.
If you have links to such statements, or people that I can talk to, I'd love to jump in on that discussion and point out with documentation how that supposed YIMBY is not representing a YIMBY viewpoint.
YIMBYism isn't pro gentrification, but those who are pro gentrification will always be YIMBYs.
And I can't provide direct links, just this sort of thing is all over YIMBY/NIMBY/PHIMBY facebook and twitter.
The real issue is simply N > M, where N is the number of bedrooms needed in San Francisco, and M is the number of bedrooms in existence in San Francisco. As long as N > M, then there will be winners and losers.
In most of the market, the winners are decided by price, the highest bid wins. In a small part of the market, the winners are decided by luck, 100 applicants in the lottery for every 1 affordable housing unit. Everybody else loses. The goal of YIMBY is to make everybody into winners.
It doesn’t matter whether the units are built as luxury. Run-down shacks in boring neighborhoods are going for multi-millions of dollars. There are not enough homes.
Oh wait: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/11/californias-d...
...
In all seriousness, I am on your side--zoning laws which never change create lots of incentive problems and prevent central and desirable areas from sensibly adding density. But let's not pretend this is a simple math problem where nobody with sense can disagree--it just leads to demonizing the other side (which there is lots of here).
Among other things, it will almost surely never be the case, no matter how successful YIMBY is, that N=M in the bay area, because adding more housing will increase demand--people will stop leaving to take jobs in Denver/Seattle/Portland, more people will find it doable to move to the bay area, etc.
Road expansion boosts capacity just fine. Not as cost-effectively as public transit, but it works. What it doesn't do is fix congestion. I'd argue that there really isn't anything like congestion in the housing market. Homes are discrete; you have one or you don't. There's no such thing as "extra" people in the neighborhood shrinking all the existing homes.
In the road analogy, congestion on roads is akin to a price--people are paying for trips with their time. I was trying to make the point that adding more roads doesn't bring down the "price" of a trip substantially, just like adding some more housing in SF may not bring down the price of housing substantially.
OP responded by noting that, in their view, having more people in SF is a good thing in and of itself. If you agree, then we have no argument (this is almost surely a result of building more housing). But if you think that adding more housing would be good because it would allow low-paid workers to live closer to where they work, or many of the other reasons advanced in this thread, my point is simply that the analysis of this policy proposal requires more nuance than the kind of N > M analysis OP was conducting.
I never specified that N = the number of people currently living in San Francisco. The outflow of people is somewhat greater than the inflow, as children of existing residents (and often their parents, too) move out and new people move in, limited by the slow growth of homes. However, when we have so many employed homeless people in the streets, it’s pretty obvious that whatever N is, N > M. https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/10/15612746/sf-math-teacher-hou...
If we actually built housing in accordance with demand, then the population of San Francisco would be much, much higher, but it wouldn’t be unlimited. I wish San Francisco would get over itself; not everybody wants to live here. Patrick Wolff estimated that we would need 50% more homes in the next 20 years to make housing affordable. http://www.sfexaminer.com/solve-affordability-crisis-bay-are...
There’s no way we can get 50% more homes with our current system, project by project, 500 units here, 1,000 units there. We need about 200,000 units in San Francisco alone. We can get there by eliminating the density limits. Just look at the zoning maps, how much of the city is restricted to single-family homes. With the more ambitious versions of SB 827, we could have achieved 50% more homes by converting half of the single-family homes into quad-plexes, as was traditional before zoning was invented to keep poor people out of nice neighborhoods. http://sf-planning.org/zoning-maps https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/sunday/zoning-law...
No. This is a toy economic model that doesn't account for time or land constraints.
The benefits of construction do not immediately and equally accrue to all market participants. In cities where essentially all new construction is infill (i.e. San Francisco), new units will displace older, cheaper units (not always, but it does happen). Therefore, until supply actually exceeds demand, you will have winners and losers, and you must account for the losers.
Additionally, an any realistic model of housing, you will see that new construction will continue not until housing is as affordable as existing stock, but only until it is no longer profitable to build. It is expensive to do infill development, and therefore unlikely that any builder will continue to generate supply until prices match those of older properties. It could easily take decades for new construction to lower housing prices. For example, New York, Paris and Tokyo are far more dense than San Francisco, with more liberal development rules, yet are the some of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live.
It is thin gruel to say "I'm sorry you lost your currently affordable housing, but come back in 20 years, and everything will be affordable!" But this is essentially the response you are making.
No, it's the pigeonhole principle. There is no level of economic sophistication that can sidestep the basic problem of an insufficient number of homes in the area.
The price depends on the quantity. Price is not baked into the walls, but comes from market conditions. How you can deny that and then claim the high ground about understanding economics is beyond me. This is incredibly easy to check: physically identical homes go for wildly different sums in different markets.
Timr argues above that 1) construction will take time, and 2) it will only continue as long as it’s profitable. No disagreement there. We need to be planning for the long term as well as the short term, and profit margins have a long way to fall before reaching zero.
That is the best property of the YIMBY movement. Whether “missing middle” small apartment buildings or “social housing” hundred-unit buildings, all of those are illegal in places where they should be legal. It can be summed up in a simple metric. We need more homes than we have.
If we need 20 years of building, then we better get started now.
How can CA YIMBY "allow" people to spew things? Are you honestly interested an assessment of YIMBY, or just looking for ways to discount them?
If a neighborhood group has official communications that run counter to what a member says, do you go with what the member says or the group itself?
Or, more pertinently, if a member of a tenants advocacy group lies about core YIMBY beliefs, does that discredit the entire group? No, of course not.
Then again, this may just be the political naïveté of people that don't typically get into politics. Optics are not something that YIMBYs have really cared about, caring more for pragmatism. However, in California politics, optics seems to be more important than action or results. This leads to a lot of duplicitousness.
No, the only counter is to further show the true YIMBY values through policy proposals, discussions, and political legislation.
For example, the core YIMBY success so far is SB-35, "Planning and zoning: affordable housing: streamlined approval process."
The same people that last year were complaining that YIMBYs are anti-affordable housing have now finally stopped saying that and have moved on to other misrepresentations of YIMBY. And in fact, they often now support SB 35, particularly as a way to prevent actions like SB 827. In the future, they will come to like SB 827, or at least some will.
There's a ton of reactionary conservatism in nearly all political movements in California, even the leftist ones, because there's lots of older folks that run them and can't countenance a shift in the political landscape, particularly the emergence of a new political force.
There will be lots of rhetoric, but that won't stop the change. So much in politics seems impossible until its done. Gay marriage in California was a similar through the looking glass experience.
Housing will come around too. The more people say "that's impossible," the more optimistic I am that they will be proven wrong. Because that's just an admission that they hadn't really considered the possibility, the idea was just outside the realm of feasibility and thought. Eventually, the slow reactionary mind becomes comfortable with it, and reason breaks through.
It will take several years, several years that we shouldn't have to waste, but there will be more housing in California.
Sure, this is an oversimplification; people can live in converted living rooms, put bunk beds into 1BR apartments, etc. But the point remains YIMBYism helps prevent displacement, NIMBYism helps cause it.
Perhaps there is a collective disillusion with how slow building civic-consensus is (i.e. too much bureaucracy). For those who may feel this way, I strongly encourage your support of political action groups like YIMBY. They provide a low-cost way for you to associate yourself with a group of people focused on trying to fix NIMBY forces within the housing market.