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A comment on How Has San Francisco Run Out of Money for Affordable Housing?. Parent comment

Re:How Has San Francisco Run Out of Money for Affordable Hou... by reaperducer on Monday November 12, 2018 @03:57PM (#18435736)
If you goal is to make lots of cheap subsidized housing, mandating developers to give away 30% of their profits will certainly cause a ton of other issues.

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.

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Re:How Has San Francisco Run Out of Money for Affordable Hou... by matchbok on Monday November 12, 2018 @06:11PM (#18436861)
There is 0 proof that these mandates are not curtailing development. Sure, things are still getting built, but we have no idea what could be happening absent these mandates.

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.

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Re:How Has San Francisco Run Out of Money for Affordable Hou... by reaperducer on Monday November 12, 2018 @10:05PM (#18438141)
There is 0 proof that these mandates are not curtailing development

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

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Re:How Has San Francisco Run Out of Money for Affordable Hou... by matchbok on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @09:21AM (#18441097)
Because it's a distorted market. There has to be tradeoffs here otherwise developers would already be doing the things these laws are making them do.
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