In my experience, affordable housing activists want to make sure that if development happens it's price-controlled, but are fine with zero or a token level of development. It's the YIMBYs who are pushing for volume/scale for all kinds of projects. That's where the blows come. Percentage vs. quantity.
Under inelastic pricing conditions simply building more market rate housing alone will not alleviate the crisis of the working class. The only solution is to build and protect affordable housing.
The question is not which type we will build, but how much, and where. All San Francisco, including District 6, saw a net growth of 4,441 housing units in 2017 [0]. It needed more like 10-20x that just to tread water. So effectively zero. The battleground now is to increase the zoned capacity across the board, so that net-new hybrid housing stock has somewhere to go at scale.
[0] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/17/17247340/san-francisco-housi...
We can agree that height limits are an opportunity to negotiate for affordable housing. I’d further suggest we prefer development in neighborhoods with less rent controlled housing so as to minimize the impact on existing affordable housing.
Market rate housing does not spontaneously generate high income workers. Industry recruits them, regardless of housing construction. Those tens of thousands of workers are coming either way; the variable that can be controlled here is whether they gentrify existing buildings or divert to new ones. They're going to create more affordable-housing need by displacing people in existing units than they would in infill.
Do you agree that there is a limit at which developers will just refuse to build more housing, affordable or not?
Yeah, until Jane Kim raised the affordable housing percentage so high that the pipeline is now virtually stopped, in a bid to (unsuccessfully, I might add) try to win an election against Scott Wiener.
Any affordable housing for the service industry would be dirt cheap for tech industry workers. If SF was dirt cheap again and the tech boom was still underway, who in the industry wouldn’t move here or start their next company here? That’s how deep the demand goes. That creates price inelastic conditions. It’s Economics 101 for those who actually paid attention.
If we want a vibrant restaurant scene moving forward, or housing for teachers and homeless and whatnot, we need to look beyond just building more market rate supply. There needs to be means tested and/or price controlled housing for the working class (or homeless, etc), and that’s where the market YIMBYs and affordable housing activists come to blows.
That doesn’t equate to making SF unattractive to tech at all. Marc Benioff came around on a local issue here about funding housing for the homeless (prop c). He saw it as an existential threat to Salesforce. Maybe Salesforce is just a more mature (longer term) company than most startups. But he saw that homelessness was actually threatening their bottom line in SF.. in addition to being this huge moral imperative. It’s kind of the same thing with restaurants and that type of quality of life: you can optimize for lowest taxes and maximum housing for tech workers, or you can see the longer term macroeconomic picture.