What laws do we see being passed? Plastic bag bans. Plastic straw bans. Scooter bans. Tech company cafeteria bans. Laws that demonstrate a total lack of knowledge of economics, incentives, or any sort of numerical analysis.

I've given up on the bay area and am preparing to move. I know the tech jobs and community won't be as good, and I'll miss my friends, but I can no longer stand being governed by complete nincompoops.

1. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre...

2. There are approximately 7,500 homeless in SF according to http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...

It's driven by ML using Meetup, Eventbrite, and a bunch of other data sources. And always open to feedback. Feel free to drop me a note. :)

Don't forget NIMBY residents. Just down the street from me is a building that used to be a church. The church wanted to start providing services and shelter for homeless LGBTQ teens. The neighbors threw a shitfit, the shelter never happened, the church closed and moved, and now the building is a dentist's office.

That's fine, I'm not interested in #notalldevelopment reasoning because my point was not to ascribe all of the behavior to NIMBYs. I was only countering the idea that "politicians, amirite?" is the problem.

i guess i don't have any more hard evidence at hand than what you present here, but my gut feeling is totally the opposite on this. i think there are a lot of people in SF (in the SF bay area in general or the city in particular) who would get behind this sort of program in principle, but who would be scared to be close to the implementation of such a program.

i think this particular flavor of NIMBYism (overblown fears about e.g. safety and/or property values) is more prevalent in the burbs, and especially the more affluent suburbs, but i'm sure you get some of it in the more affluent neighborhoods and gentrified pockets of other neighborhoods in SF and oakland too.

You don't know anybody in city government, then.

  > Over the past decade, the bay area has gotten so much worse. The cost of living has skyrocketed.

I'm not saying that the housing costs aren't crazy (I paid 2900 for a 600sqft studio in SOMA in 2013), but 10 years a go was an extremely low point.

Why does San Francisco have more homeless than Houston despite Houston being far bigger? We could argue housing costs, however many homeless in San Francisco aren’t even from the area, they gravitate there, in my opinion, because of permissive policies. San Francisco’s homeless problem is among the worst in the country, with Portland and Seattle quickly closing the gap. Less “progressive” places seem to have a much lower level of homelessness. Camping on sidewalks, shooting up, and shitting in doorways is rarely tolerated in most other places in the country, yet at least we’re working to stop plastic straws!

It might seem that San Francisco is more apt to arrest smugglers of plastic straws long before they arrest those shooting up in public and tossing their needles on the sidewalk. You are more likely to get fined for a polluting car than you would for smashing the windows of that same car.

One factor is weather.

Is it strange to anyone else that the more you spend on the homeless, the more homeless you seem to get?

The Shirky Principle:

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"

And a few thoughts on that and homelessness in specific.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-...

Good public administration isn't cheap, and excellent public administration is expensive. The benefits are enormous, of course.

There's another key element: government officials are also required to open their personal finances to public inspection. This goes a long way to rein in corruption and graft.

Compensation does matter, but it's not the be-all-end-all.

The net result is the same as if the government paid mechanics or doctors substandard wages: Some good talent would join out of civic duty, but the overall effect would be to lower the quality of workers relative to the private sector.

I think it's more likely that a series of cultural, historical, systemic and environmental issues have lead to the current situation, and that our politicians are generally average in competence and intelligence compared to other similarly sized cities, but are dealing with some particularly challenging issues.

Some possible factors:

Cultural: Other cities, such as NYC, house many people in large shelters, on cots, outside of the city center. SF wants to put people in a higher standard of living than a room full of cots, so we can only afford to house about half the people who need it. (Much of that $250M/year we spend goes to housing people) It's hard for the BART police to kick people out of the stations because homeless advocacy organizations complain about abuse. So the problem stays visibile. Places like Salt Lake City also see the Mormon church active in improving these problems. I don't think there is any such non-govermental organization working at such scale in SF. Generally we think it's the goverments problem to solve, other places think it's a community problem, and take action. We seem to tolerate people visibily using drugs, leaving needles around. More conservative cities would not let that happen a block from city hall.

Historical: Most of SF's services, such as shelters, needle exchange, healthcare, etc, are downtown, this makes the problem very visible. NYC pushes this out of Manhattan and has for years. Neighborhood groups in SF usually protest adding a navigation center to their neghborhood. Imagine if we started putting shelters and navigation centers in the richmond?

Systemic: This could be an essay alone. Rising housing costs, due to downzoning, prop13, discrtionary review, etc etc, and then a job loss, and you can't make rent, you lose your apartment. Now you're out on the street. The city doesn't have enough shelters. And see previous mention of neghorhoods not wanting navigation centers or shelters near them. The city actually has to go in front of the planning comission, just like a private developer, to argue for a new navigation center. Not only do we have a system that makes it hard to build new high end housing, it's hard to build navgation centers, because of all the process involved.

Environmental: California cities have a much higher rate of unsheltered homelessness. NYC has a legal right to shelter. I do wonder if part of this has to do with climate. If NYC had the same number of people living unsheltered through the winter, they would have thousands of people freezing to death. NYC has 75K people experiencing homelessness at any given time. This creates the political will to house people.

So you're elected to the board of supervisors, or as the mayor, you have all this history, all these factors that are making your job of reducing homeless, very hard. What do you do? We've had many many bonds to increase funding to provide housing for people experiencing homelessness, but the electorate consistently votes them down. So your hands are also fairly tied with regards to money. You're left with small incremental imrovements over many years.

I can see why you'd be fed up with San Francisco for these reasons. I just don't think it's fair to blame it entirly on stupid politicians. All that said, I do agree with you that I'd rather see the time spent on more pressing issues than tech company cafeteria bans, and plastic bag bans. Part of this is because we elect people like Aaron Peskin who seem very interested in 1. having the ear of local small business groups, and passing protectionist laws. 2. Putting forward sensational laws that get a lot of media attention. Peskin and his ilk operate on the emotional appeal side of politics. Things that sound good as long as you don't think too hard about them. We'll find those types of politicans everywhere. We have to work to expose them for what they are.

There's the boondoggle that has been the Central Subway, which has gone overbudget by 3x (over $1 billion) and taken a decade longer than planned. Muni's own projections put the increase in ridership at less than 1%, since the area is already served by busses.

There's the ineffective school system, which puts students of all levels in the same classes and prevents bright students from taking algebra before high school.[1] Anyone who can afford it sends their kids to private school.

The city budget has increased from $6.4 billion in 2010 to over $11 billion this year.[2] In that same time, the population of SF has gone from 805,000 to 864,000. That's a 72% increase in budget for a 7% increase in population.

$11 billion, and at least once a week I'm stepping around used needles or human feces. Could it be any more obvious that the city government is utterly dysfunctional?

1. https://www.kqed.org/news/10610214/san-francisco-middle-scho...

2. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-budget-soar...

Read this sentence a few times and then tell me again how your politicians aren’t stupid or evil.

"The Navigation Center, which opened in March 2015, is a successful program designed to shelter San Francisco’s highly vulnerable and long-term homeless residents who are often fearful of accessing traditional shelter and services. Navigation Centers provide these otherwise unsheltered San Franciscans room and board while case managers work to connect them to income, public benefits, health services, shelter, and housing. Navigation Centers are different from traditional shelters in that they have few barriers to entry and intensive case management. Unlike traditional shelters, people with partners, pets and possessions are welcome at Navigation Centers. The purpose of a Navigation Center is to offer a respite from life on the street and to support people in changing their lives by making lasting social service and housing connections."

[0]: http://hsh.sfgov.org/services/emergencyshelter/navigation-ce...

Labels in politics are used to demonise - but nothing is ever that simple.

I'm not disagreeing with your comment, just adding on to it. You are 100% right that homelessness is a complex issue with lots of causes. But I think it's also fair to say at the end of the day that SF is completely failing at fixing the problem - both for the safety of the homeless people and for the safety of other citizens. It's a public health crisis in my opinion when you look at the basic numbers.

Here's some numbers:

San Francisco population: 884,363 (2017/Wikipedia)

San Francisco unsheltered population (conservative): 6,600 (7,499 SF self-reported homeless count * 88.2% HUD estimated unsheltered rate)

Unsheltered population rate (conservative): ~0.75% of residents (my calculation) - nearly 1 in 100!

Compare that with London, another city also experiencing a homelessness epidemic due to explosively rising housing costs:

London population: 8,825,000 (2017/Wikipedia)

London unsheltered population: 1,137 (homeless.org.uk)

Unsheltered rate: ~0.01% of residents (my calculation)

So obviously homelessness rates in SF are absurdly high. In fact, there are more unsheltered homeless people in SF than the entire country of England:

San Francisco unsheltered population: 6,600 (2017)

England unsheltered population: 4,751 (2017)

I'm not saying they are equivalent situations, but somehow a country with a population greater than the state of California manages to have fewer homeless people than one relatively tiny city in California.

And people say things like NYC has a much higher homeless population of 76,501, but according to HUD, only 5.1% of NYC homeless are unsheltered. In SF, the unsheltered rate according to HUD is almost 90% - nearly the worst in the country. That means NYC actually has fewer unshelted people than SF on the streets despite a much larger population.

I'm not saying these numbers are perfect, but it gives us an idea of the scale of the problem. Politicians may or may not be smart, but at the end of the day they are doing a terrible job of fixing this issue in a meaningful way. Someone needs to step up and treat this like the public health crisis that it is, even if that means bringing in more federal resources or changing the strategy significantly.

On a related note, I feel the same thing holds true for LA and Southern California's car traffic problem.

This will be true after you move too.

This is a disingenuous way to represent spending. Much of the spending goes to keeping people off the streets, to shelters, and to medical care.

If you spent a money and everybody but 1 person got off the street, would you say that they spent a quarter billion dollars on 1 homeless person? No.

We got into this affordability situation by passing a series of laws at the state and local levels, over many years. We're never going to be as cheap as Akron OH, but we can slow the price growth, and maybe reduce it some by making it easier, and cheaper to build, by changing state and local laws to allow that.

Finally, local politicians are actually quite accessible, so your voice can be heard. And groups like SF YIMBY help to amplify that voice. Fundamentally, most politicians do what they think will get them votes, so it helps to find a group of like minded individuals.

> As a result of these landlord reactions, rent-controlled buildings saw a 15 percent decline in the number of renter residents, and a 25 percent decline in those living in the rent-controlled units, compared to 1994 levels. In other words, rent control had a counterproductive effect.

Fewer residents mean less supply of housing, meaning higher prices overall. Rent control effectively subsidizes current tenants with money from future tenants.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-18/yup-rent-...

2. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/rent-control-a-reckon...

Right now the market is bifurcated into the lucky ones who have absurdly cheap housing and the unlucky ones that have absurdly expensive housing. Without rent control, the equilibrium state would be something in between.

It incentivizes tenants with artificial low rent to stay beyond what were needed. People with low rent hang on to the units even when they have bought houses (I actually know people doing it).

It decentivizes landlords to keep the buildings as rentals. It decentivizes investors to add more housing supplies.

Rent control hurts affordable housing because it incentivizes over-consumption of affordable housing. Without rent control, average rents would rise, but it would be easier to find apartments at the low end of the market.

So, there’d have to be a massive increase in housing to exceed the demand (probably millions of people wanting to move there).

I mean, I’m all for giving it a try, but I think people’s expectations are way too high.

Thats the opposite of inelastic.

Inelastic means that as one side increases, the other side does not respond much. Food, for example, has inelastic demand in the US. If food prices get cut in half, people aren't going to eat twice as much.

But even if housing demand is elastic, thats a good thing, not a bad thing. That means that if we build lots of houses, then there are lots and lots of people out there who could benefit from moving here. These people want to move here, but are unable to do so right now. We could help them so much by giving people the opportunity to move to a place, that is apparently so amazing that lots of people want to come here.

Same goes for housing. And in San Francisco in particular. Unless supply meets demand (which it won’t for a very long time), prices will be pegged upward. I can’t see prices falling unless demand decreases, although I’m as hopeful as you.

That means that if supply drops, then price goes way up.

Now think about the reverse direction. IE, if supply for gasoline goes up, what happens to the price? prices goes way down.

Inelasticity of demand means that price will change a lot, if supply changes. Supply goes up, prices goes way down. Supply goes down, price goes way up.

If housing has inelastic demand, that means that if we build a small amount of housing, then price would go down a lot immediately.

People talk a lot about the idea of "pent up demand". "Pent up demand" is the idea that if price changes, then a bunch of people will move to SF to immediately live in those new homes. That is an example of elastic supply.

Inelastic would be the idea that nobody at all would move to SF to live in those houses if we built them, and they would just sit empty.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-perfectly-inela...

Here is a quote from one of the answers in the quora question that you posted, saying exactly what I stated:

" If demand for a good is perfectly elastic in regards to price, the smallest change in price will change the amount demanded by an infinite value - if the price goes down a single cent, demand will grow to infinity (assuming a normal good whose demand is inversely correlated to price). If demand for a good is perfectly inelastic in regards to price, it means that no matter how the price changes, the demand will stay the same (if the price goes for 1 dollar to 1 million, the demand is the same)."

IE, perfectly inelastic demand means that no matter how much supply/price changes, then demand doesn't change. If supply goes up, Nobody buys any more houses (because its inelastic). And price crashes.

Inelastic demand applies to both the case of supply going up (therefore price goes down), and the case of supply going down (therefore prices going up).

So if supply goes down, prices go way way up, and if supply goes up, then prices go way way down.

Or in other words, if there is not enough of so

Long term interest rates have been pretty stagnant recently even as the Fed has been raising the short term rate steadily, but they've only just begun winding down their QE assets so if there isn't a recession in the next few years we should see house prices ease off.

density is the answer though, demand will always be there and is harder to control

The real reason is that there are too many tech companies that refuse to build equivalent headquarters in other cities. It's concentrating the wealth of companies that gather money from around the world in a tiny area, and that by definition will create inflation.

If Google, Facebook, etc, created equivalent headquarters in Kansas City, in Cleveland, etc (as in, they have equal say as the main HQ and just as good projects), then I believe the wealth could be spread over the entire country or globe, and everyone would benefit.

People NEED to move away from Silicon Valley. Having so many rich, tech workers living in a small area is toxic, just like Wall Street and Manhattan is toxic.

Once the pressure of adding thousands of 6 figure engineers coming to the Bay Area recedes, then housing will fall to a more rational level.

I've been living the in Bay Area since the dot com boom. Housing prices were always high, but never this toxic, until frankly the FANG stocks started breaking out in around 2011/2012. You can see this in the stock market as well. When these global internet companies started consolidating their power and consequently their wealth, it created a mass migration to the Bay Area of tech workers who were paid well above the average, and caused massive inflation.

You want to start a company? Go somewhere else. Be a part of the solution, not part of the problem.

http://www.assessor.saccounty.net/LowerMyTaxes/BaseYearValue...

If you're leaving the Bay Area, you're going to a far less expensive property, plus a dozen or so counties accept transfers of Jarvis-Gann protections anyway. But the tax hit is the crippling factor.

Its a big country. Its a big state.

[edit]: Anybody care to explain (or speculate) why this is being downvoted?

Prop 13 was not created in a vacuum, it exists to solve a very real problem. And don’t forget, the young people that mostly don’t feel this problem don’t vote nearly as much as the older people for whom this problem is most keenly evident.

It is nativist homeowners that oppose new building because it reduces home appreciation and brings traffic and ethnically different people to the neighborhood / city.

What if those pesky younger people did vote? What if they outvoted all of these older NextDoor-Angry people?

It will remove the immoral handout landlords have gotten themselves in the name of the residents facing unexpected increase in property taxes.

If you're wealthy and can afford to pay a market rate property tax, then you pay it.

If the point is simply to raise income for the state, that’s an interesting discussion that we can chat about. But the topic is housing availability and I don’t see how this proposal would affect that with real means testing. People who can afford it won’t move and landlords will simply pass the costs on to renters.

Furthermore, landlords shouldn't be able to raise rent faster than their property taxes go up.

https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/2018/pdf/consu...

This document interestingly shows that motor vehicles have been getting cheaper in the bay area, even before adjusting for inflation.

That's cause wages of other workers go up, because the supply of workers dwindles if wages don't keep up with housing costs (people wouldn't work here if they weren't payed enough to afford to live within say an hour and a half of work).

Sure, if tech workers stopped living there then there would not be as significant a problem, because housing prices would have to fall.

On one hand, spreading work around the country/world is good, on the other hand there are real productivity gains by having people in physical proximity, as we can see from the fact that cities are the most productive parts of the world.

Also, one would think it is pretty clear that there is a correlation between SF's "culture" (like permissiveness about drug use) and the amount of excrement and needles on the streets.

pfarnsworth is spot on. Either pay the market rate, or move somewhere cheaper. This is primarily the fault of large tech employers who refuse to relocate jobs elsewhere. They are causing the housing inflation with their deep pockets for worker salaries.

Edit: toomuchtodo brings up a good point. I was thinking more in terms of a higher pay after adjusting for cost of living (e.g. being payed the same amount as an engineer in SF while living in Cleveland). Otherwise it seems like I would be taking both a pay cut and a cost of living cut.

Bay Area tech salaries are already the highest in the nation; you could make the pitch to an employer, but I think you'd be hard pressed to get a higher salary for living in the midwest (considering the much lower cost of living). Midwest workers (tech workers anywhere outside of the Bay Area really) would be thrilled to get SFBA salaries where they live.

> Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook is negotiating to lease more than 200,000 square feet in a recently constructed office tower at 151 N. Franklin St. in the Loop, according to sources.

> Meanwhile, sources said, Google plans to add more than 100,000 square feet of office space in the city’s Fulton Market district, where the company already has a large Midwest headquarters.

> The new Facebook space alone would be large enough to accommodate more than 1,000 employees.

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/ori/ct-biz...

Not just the lower cost of living. Being compensated for living through winters is a novel idea, but if you're thinking about the soft factors that don't directly involve salary and cost of living, not having to deal with the bay area commutes is pretty strong compensation in and of itself.

Having to take a pay cut and live through a season you get to ignore in CA could be kind of a bummer for some people. Getting as much as 20% of your waking life back in time spent not commuting can be a pretty strong compensation for it, though.

edit: please do comment in addition to downvoting, if you see a problem with the logic here

Yes, I am sure that this is what the home owners who own multi-million dollar properties would want. Either leave or drive up their housing prices.

But another solution is to vote for new laws that would increase their taxes (an thus incentive them to sell), or vote for laws that would drive down the price of their investment.

The renters in the city are slowly but surely increasing in voting power, as less and less people are able to afford owning property, until we are soon able to outvote the rich property owners. And when that happens we can pass laws that will reduce prices, raise taxes on the rich property owners, and ruin their investments.

But who cares about them as long as current renters get to take their homes? /s

They will still have a house to live in.

If instead it is an "investment", well that's the risk of investing. Nobody is forcing them to sell.

It is actually literally the opposite. It is that other people want to have a right to build stuff on property that they own, and the other home owner wants to force people not to do thie, in order to protect their investment.

How about people are instead allowed to build things on property that they own and nobody forces them to do otherwise?

The problem is that Silicon Valley is awash in money.

We want society to be more wealthy, and the tech industry has been a huge creator of wealth. The other thing about the tech industry is it's fairly unique in how widely it distributes that wealth. What other industry gives stock options to low-level employees? Sure tech founders get a disproportionate share, but look at a different industry, and it would be rare to see any ownership extended beyond higher level employees, but in tech, stock compensation is ubiquitous.

(this may be due to a labor shortage, and yes you can point at things like Amazon's warehouse workers as a counter example)

The trouble is now we have quickly raising housing costs, and a large portion of the population who's quite wealthy, living next to many who are not doing nearly as well. Crime and general unhappiness are not necessarily linked to poverty; it's highly linked to inequality. This is likely why we have so much property crime in San Francisco. Income inequality. When you see the person next to you is doing much better, you get mad.

Frame this so it's not about limiting wealth creation, but about limiting income inequality.

Same thing with wealth creation. Too much wealth creation is the problem, the same way having too many users is the problem. It's a good problem. It's a problem you're delighted to have. But it is a problem, and one you have to solve.

Disclaimer: I have very little idea how to get SF to scale. I don't even live there.

Ask the citizens of Portland why they are so angry at Californians moving into the area. It's because a small number of Californians are moving into the area, and they are considerably richer than Portlandians, so they drive up the housing prices for everyone. The exact same phenomenon is happening right now there, and Seattle where rents and house prices are skyrocketing because of wealth.

I'm genuinely interested in which companies offer stock options to their cleaning staff, security staff and receptionists.

We can agree to disagree.

I just hope that the people that really believe in the merits of San Francisco, believes in its future and does not want to leave will work with me to make it more affordable for everyone.

Look at the stock market of FANGs since Jan 2011. Google has gone up 8x including splits. Amazon is up 11x. Facebook is up 6x since IPO. Netflix is up 15x. Apple is up 28x (including 7:1 split). Even legacy companies like eBay are up 7x. Microsoft is up 6x. There are a lot of regular employees who are extremely wealthy of the last several years. They are driving up the prices everywhere for housing. There is an insatiable amount of inordinantly rich tech workers that are ruining it for everyone. I'm one of them as well. So are you.

If you really want to do the right thing, go to the Midwest like Kansas City, with a good university and great fiber infrastructure. Or go to Detroit. But you won't because similar to NIMBYs, you're a "Not for my Startup" mentality thinks you need to be in SF to become a billionaire. Then you're part of the problem.

What would you do if you had "the start-up dream", move as you prescribe to the parent comment or stay and "be part of the problem"?

Ya’ll need to start acting like a major city rather than stamping your collective feet while shouting “I won’t grow up!”

And if you refuse either Sacramento or Washington DC should force the issue for the good of the state and country respectively.

Almost the entire country is filled with places to live in detached houses on significant fractions of an acre (or more). The NIMBYs can sell to developers for huge amounts of money and move to any one of them.

Ok now, joking aside (though the 2 examples I mentioned are 100% true, they opposed a late-night bus because it would cause noise + somehow degrade road quality. Who can reason with old-bitter people with too much time on their hands?).

The issue I am seeing with them selling to developers for huge amounts of money, is that the developers will want to make that that amount of money++ back. Current zoning laws limit the height of buildings, so... their only option is to only build small insanely overpriced condos and grant permissions only to super-upscale businesses, that only rich or rich-young-tech people can afford and want. Perhaps the market will correct that in time, but powerful people as aways will fight for that to not happen.

I feel we need more relaxed zoning laws, let people build bigger and higher.

Bingo. If there is currently a detached house of 1500 sq ft that can be torn down and in its place can be put up a six story building apartments totaling 8000 sq ft of livable space, there’s plenty of room for profit for the prior homeowner, the developer, and also for the new units to be more affordable than what was there before. Increasing the supply is a win-win-win.

As I said, if necessary—-and it looks like it is—-higher levels of governments should step in to prevent local, narrow minded, parochial interests from killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

This is an "easy" fix in theory: gut the previous system and just build anew. The problem is, that would be such an enormous undertaking (b/c you have to divert sewage during the whole process, etc) that the city is effectively forced to apply what amounts to band-aid fixes in its place.

It's definitely not win-win if that shadow falls on your beloved back yard, ruining your legal cannabis plot. Or if you live in the top floor of the five-story building that was built prior and your view will now be of the six-story building.

NIMBY works ("works") because most people put their own specific self interest before community when the former is threatened. They do this pretty reliably, and on the individual level it's usually pretty rational.

(Also, I might have reasons other than economics to keep my 1500 sq ft house from being torn down.)

The answer, as mentioned, is go to a higher level of government where there are even more people to outvote Mr. “But Muh Views”.

In the case of CA there’s seven million people in the Bay Area and 33 million in the rest of the state that would benefit from continued growth there and don’t care at all about shaded backyards in Palo Alto. That sounds like a referendum waiting to happen to me.

That would come up against the same forces that fuel NIMBY-ism, i.e. the relative political clout of home owners and the power of the story that it's my back yard today, but it's gonna be YOUR back yard in the next shadow.