It doesn’t matter if that housing is for high-income residents or low-income residents. Every housing unit built helps make a city more affordable.

https://gizmodo.com/how-building-expensive-new-housing-actua...

Isn't it technically that they need to build massive housing that can get to the jobs in SF in a reasonable commute time? So either they need to figure out a way to get commuters into the city quickly (a mass transit solution) or they need to build a lot more housing where current single family housing is.

I guess if they want the look of the city to stay the same they really need a get-them-in-and-out plan that actually works.

However, if you look at a heat map of housing prices, the entire SF Bay Area is very expensive. This is likely in part because what you are proposing is already how SF handles things: Just fob the housing issue off onto neighboring cities, not my problem. We just do crazy high paid jobs and fuck you when it comes to housing.

It's part of why their homeless problem is so very bad that I have read articles about how much visitors to the city express horror to the hotel staff and even indicate "I don't ever want to come back here again!" So the odds are good that there is a real cost involved in acting like this is not their problem.

I left California to find more affordable housing. I was homeless in California for some years and willing to move to find affordable housing. I moved from San Diego County to Fresno, which has much more affordable housing than most of California. I've done a lot of research into housing issues for many years, starting well before I became homeless because I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I've also done a lot of research into housing options within California in specific before I threw my hands up and left the state.

California has about 25% of the nation's homeless population while having only about 12% of the nation's overall population. Surveys suggest that about 90% of the homeless were residents of California prior to ending up on the street. They have more people sleeping rough than is typical of other states and, IIRC, they have more chronic homeless.

There are lots of problems that grow out of that. There is a nationwide spike in Hepatitis, which can be deadly, and can be potentially traced to San Diego as its origin and potentially to the homeless population there. The CDC has kept that on the down low, so most people aren't aware of this spike and the death's associated with it.

I think San Francisco and California are both making big, big mistakes in acting like this is not really a thing they need to buckle down and resolve. California is importing rich people, exporting poor people and dealing with increasingly intense crises of various sorts.

I left. There probably isn't a week that goes by where I don't say (or hear from one of my sons) "Thank god, we moved to civilization. Life is so much better here." So it isn't really my problem anymore. But I think folks there who are refusing to really deal with this in some kind of effective manner are idiots, cutting their own throats.

I'm not familiar with San Francisco's "Inclusionary zoning," but in Chicago, developers are required to have 20% of their residences meet affordable housing guidelines.

If the developer doesn't want to have 20% "poors" living in the building, the developer can build those units in another building within one mile. If that doesn't work, the developer can a make payment in cash to the Chicago Housing Authority and it will build the housing. This payment must be made before the developer's building permits are issued.

For a typical 40-story residential skyscraper, the payment is about $2 million, and is what most developers seem to choose.

Chicago still has affordability issues, but these payments aren't stopping development at all. The city continues on a high-rise residential development boom.

This is the type of thinking that puts these failed programs into reality in the first place. "We don't immediately see anything wrong, so let's keep going".

Fundamentally, it's a huge cost for developers and that money has to come from somewhere.

And there's 0 proof that these mandates are curtailing development. Why do you presume one and not the other?

I think it would be really interesting to see more government policies that are designed to be self-correcting in a way that's more akin to how markets work (or at least how they work in econ textbooks). For example, inclusionary zoning requirements could dynamically change depending on how much new housing is being built. When less is being built, requirements would go down and when a lot is being built they could go up.

One would hope that this would also work well in another way: when more is being built, it's likely that housing costs are rising and so more affordable housing is needed.

It's really impossible to know how much housing isn't getting built or how much more expensive market-rate apartments are because of these programs. It's a hidden cost - and probably why it's so popular.

We've been doing it in NYC for decades, it works just fine.

Of course it only works if you understand the premise that buildings can be more than three stories tall.

Because it certainly is not in New York City.