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.
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.