Currently the poor are homeless or enduring multi-hour mega-commutes or stuffing a bunch of people into a single studio apartment. Well-located "barely livable wage slave pods" would be a huge improvement for a lot of people. I agree that the race to the bottom effect is a problem, but I think even the worst-case scenario would still be better than our existing housing situation.

Correct. A fire in a nice, completely unremarkable neighborhood about 40 miles east of San Francisco destroyed 4 units and made 35 people homeless. Almost 9 people to a home. And this is a solid 3-hour roundtrip commute from San Francisco or Mountain View. "Dickensian" is the word for it. Not literally, perhaps, because the housing situation in Dickens's time was even worse, but there is human misery on a broad scale.

https://www.independentnews.com/news/chestnut-street-fire-in...

Indeed, it is only a problem in the sense that it is not a perfect solution.

> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods

At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away. Currently they can only choose the latter.

You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment. The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms. Those are mostly fixed costs, i.e. it costs the same to plumb a toilet, shower, and sink in a 50 sq foot bathroom as a 100 sq foot one. Only when you get to stupid high real estate cost does a ~300 sq foot pod start making sense over ~600 ft 1 bed or ~1000 sq ft 2 beds.

It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price. It's essentially impossible to build something new that will be cost competitive with something that already exists.

> The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms

Why does a pod need a kitchen and bathroom? If it had those it'd be called a studio apartment. A pod is essentially anything from a dorm room styled apartment to a half-height room big enough to have a bed to sleep in and a shelf for a few items (like the Japanese have). In any of those cases you'd have communal kitchens and bathrooms. This would actually also be good socially because as we become more digitally immersed it provides a public area to meet new people, just like how it was in college.

Years ago, they had what were called "SRO" (Single-Room Occupancy) apartments. These often had shared baths or showers on each floor.

These all went away by the late 60s in New York. They wouldn't be legal now. For one thing, buildings, or floors, were restricted to either men or women. And they didn't allow children, or more than one person/room. But they allowed people just getting started--working clearing tables, or washing dishes, etc--to be able to live near where they worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

> "Neighborhood groups in Seattle have criticized new micro apartment SRO units, arguing that they "harmed community character and provided ... inhumane living conditions; due to these concerns, the city passed regulations that outlawed micro apartment/SRO construction."

Annoying. I lived in a SRO (I just called it a studio apartment with a shared bathroom) for 3.5 years that was run by a co-op apartment building. This was in Seattle. Having a shared bathroom was an annoyance (shared between 4 men - never more than a sentence said to two of them) but I was more than happy to put up with it versus having to deal with roommates. It was also cheaper than having roommates in a variety of houses that I looked at. I had more space than all those rooms for rent I looked at. I often wish I could've kept that kind of housing when I moved to the bay area because everything here is so outlandishly expensive just to get your own bit of space and that housing was so cheap for me.

I lived in two of these in Madison, WI. I'm not sure if was legal, but my landlord rented each bedroom in half a house individually. Four men, one bathroom, beer cans in the shower (Why?), but the bedrooms all locked individually and we weren't mutually responsible for each others' rent.

Second one was a former HoJo parked while awaiting condo conversion. Imagine a hotel room stripped of all furniture, with a single kitchen per floor. Had to wash my dishes in the bathtub, but otherwise it worked for me.

Dorms are essentially that. Not sure why that is illegal and dorms are fine.

EDIT: just looked it up, xenophobia of course. New Yorkers didn't like immigrants living in Manhattan in 1955.

They still exist in many parts of the US, and many of them don't have the kinds of restrictions you mention.

These still exist in San Francisco. In fact one of my junior co-workers lives in one.

Doesn't this already exist in communal living places like Ollie in NYC?

Not quite. Ollie provides kitchens, along with other luxury amenities, which makes their price point still pretty high with the cheapest apartment being ~$2800/month.

> Why does a pod need a kitchen and bathroom?

Basic human dignity? Being forced to share an intimate thing such as a bathroom with strangers or depending on strangers not eating your food/trashing your stuff or not being able to feed yourself because another person is cooking a 5-rounds-meal is not something that should be acceptable in a developed nation.

As someone who has actually spent a few years in this type of living arrangement, having a communal bathroom when it is clean and there is no line was just fine for my dignity, and vastly preferable to having no house or spending 3+ hours and several dollars a day to commute.

I also have spent time in such an arrangement and let's keep it at "you're fucked when two or more people have diarrhea".

I lived in a college dorm for four years and I don’t consider my human rights to have been violated in the process.

I mean, it's affordable living, obviously there's going to be trade-offs just like there's trade-offs when you opt for a 1 bathroom home or apartment vs a 2 bathroom, a place with dedicated parking vs no dedicated parking, or personal laundry in-house vs external laundry facility.

A lot of older apartments don‘t have full kitchens, but that isn‘t a bad thing. Some people just don‘t need full kitchens, and you can get by with a hot plate and a rice cooker.

A full appliance package can be bought for under 2 grand retail. You can save a little bit of labor/material by eliminating the need for a couple circuits, but not that much. Not much extra work to pull additional wires if you already have to do one. So the savings just aren't there to meaningfully impact the housing cost.

You're talking out of both sides of your mouth here. You say that kitchens and bathrooms are the "big cost items" yet here you say that omitting or scaling them back doesn't save much. How can both things be true?

Appliances are cheap-ish. The structure and space for extra bathrooms or a full kitchen are much more expensive than a full appliance package.

So you can save money - but not much - by not having full appliances. You can save a lot more by not building a full kitchen and a second bathroom.

I think that maybe a lot of little, it doesn't cost much to add things ends up costing a lot.

Think about bathrooms; my childhood home and my grandparent's home both only had 1 bathroom. My grandparent's was on the second floor with enough room for a sink with a toilet on one side and bathtub on the other. Mine was toilet, sink and single standing shower.

Newer homes started having a guest toilet. Then guest/second bath and master bath. Now newer constructions seem to have 1 bathroom per bedroom as well a guest. All while increasing the size of the bathroom. And increasing the size of the bedroom. And the size of the closets. And so on.

I bought a 3 br 2 ba ranch. Currently my 2 sons are 1 and 6, I don't need the second bathroom. It's nice when we have guests but when we don't it just sits there.

I see many new constructions but not any that are even close in size or price to what I have. I also see the older lots being bought and redeveloped.

In most urban areas the cost of an apartment has more to do with the value of the land under it than the cost of actually building and furnishing the place.

Yeah, I think it’s silly when people complain about developers not building affordable housing.

Nobody expects car manufacturers to build new run-down clunkers they sell for $200... they build new cars and people who can’t afford them generally buy cheap used ones!

People complain about the lack of cheap new cars too. They also ignore the fact that a nicer used vehicle is a better value than a new cheap one.

Houses are the same way. A nice house built in the 80s is going to be way better than a cheap house built today. Outdated looking quality construction > modern looking cheap crap.

>> At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away.

> You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment.

Okay, so build normal size apartments then. Even if it's the same price as a house 2-3 hours away, you're removing 3-6 hours of commute time.

The important part is splitting land costs over tens of units instead of just one or two, not exactly how many tens.

a pod would be more like 50-75 sq ft, just enough for a bed and maybe a side table (with communal bathrooms; shared kitchen optional).

300 sq ft is a quite livable studio apartment, with enough room for a bathroom and (compact) kitchen.

with that said, yes, any additional housing is better than none.

>It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price

The problem is that housing in any location is not a closed system with fixed demand. It is an open system in which increased supply can generate increased demand.

When you build that housing for upper middle class and up, they vacate their homes, the price of their old homes goes down, then upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live in a cheaper area over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never fully flows down market to the poor people in the city. This is why the market approach to building more housing isn't going to solve the whole problem. You need to build new homes at every pricing level and the market generally doesn't do that without the government incentivizing them.

>upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live further away over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never trickles down to the poor people in the city

It does because the poor people move into the housing that the upper middle class vacated. Population growth is an independent confounding factor. In other words, housing cost can still go up due to population growth but they would go up less if the new luxury housing is built.

> You need to build new homes at every pricing level

But you can't. You have high fixed costs like land, hook ups to the city utilities, architect work, plumbing, electrical, permits, and HVAC. These are pretty much the same regardless of how big of a house you build. The stuff that varies directly with size like dry wall, paint, framing, flooring, etc. doesn't cost that much. And even then the more you do at one time the cheaper it gets. In other words, hanging the last section of drywall costs a lot less than hanging the first one because you incur all of the over head to hang that first sheet.

The end result is that you can't build a new house that a poor person can afford. They probably can't even afford the fixed costs. Even if you could, it wouldn't be economically viable. You're way better off spending the ~10% more to get a upper middle class house that you can sell for 50-100% more. It's still good for affordability because you've increase supply. Everybody takes one step up the ladder and the benefit will trickle down to the poor.

>It does because the poor people move into the housing that the upper middle class vacated

That only works if the system is closed. If housing in the bay area goes down in price, you get people moving in from New York, LA, Boston, Austin, etc who previously avoided the area due to costs. Do you just ship off those poor people to those vacated homes hundred or thousands of miles away?

>Population growth is an independent confounding factor. In other words, housing cost can still go up due to population growth but they would go up less if the new luxury housing is built.

This is of course true. The question is just will building new luxury housing increase population growth to an extent that swallows the whole price break before it ever flows down to the bottom of the market?

>But you can't. You have high fixed costs like land, hook ups to the city utilities, architect work, plumbing, electrical, permits, and HVAC.

The reason housing in the bay area is so high has nothing to do with fixed material costs or else housing everywhere would be that astronomical. The reason housing is so high is because demand is high and the supply of land is limited. Land is the primary costs. You fight that by building vertically. The higher the building, the lower the marginal cost of land for each unit and therefore things become more affordable. But like I said in my first post, this doesn't happen if everything is left up to the market because it isn't the way to be most profitable, so the government would need to be involved to incentivize this.

> If housing in the bay area goes down in price, you get people moving in from New York, LA, Boston, Austin

Yes, and the other direction too, if NYC dropped hugely in price probably a lot of people would move from SF. If a city manages to solve its housing problem in some enormous way some of the benefit would go to other cities.

The reverse is true too, SF building nowhere near enough will cause people to move away and drive up housing prices in other places like Austin. This sounds more like the reality today.

It's a real effect, but it seems like the best action for people who need housing is still to build more.

The main thing is does luxury housing act like a totally separate market. For example, if no affordable luxury 2bd apartments are available, will a software engineer move to Boston from SF instead of settling for an ordinary 2bd apartment. I'd expect the majority of the time high-income people who can't afford luxury apartments simply displace middle-income people in ordinary apartments rather than move cities, but I don't have hard data on it.

>That only works if the system is closed. If housing in the bay area goes down in price, you get people moving in from New York, LA, Boston, Austin

If that were true the bay area would have been empty long ago because of the ridiculous housing cost. Fact is most people won't change cities for lower housing cost.

>The reason housing in the bay area is so high has nothing to do with fixed material costs or else housing everywhere would be that astronomical. The reason housing is so high is because demand is high and the supply of land is limited. Land is the primary costs. You fight that by building vertically. The higher the building, the lower the marginal cost of land for each unit and therefore things become more affordable. But like I said in my first post, this doesn't happen if everything is left up to the market because it isn't the way to be most profitable, so the government would need to be involved to incentivize this.

Developers are putting 5 on 1 buildings every where they possibly can because it's the most economically efficient use of the land. They can't in the bay area because of zoning restrictions. Remove the zoning restrictions and you'd see skyrocketing density.

>If that were true the bay area would have been empty long ago because of the ridiculous housing cost. Fact is most people won't change cities for lower housing cost.

Do you genuinely think that housing costs don't factor into which cities people choose to live? I'm not sure this conversation can go anywhere beneficial if we can't agree on that fundamental and in my opinion obvious fact.

If you keep building, eventually you will meet the pent up demand. Your scenario might match the first batch of new housing, but it can't continue indefinitely. Eventually you have more houses than people.

There is a ton of pent-up demand in the bay area, because this has been going on for a long time. People who own houses there are going to fight you the whole way.

You are of course right in theory. There is some point in which things will stablize and demand is fully satisfied. However that is where your second paragraph comes into play too. It isn't just people who own the homes that are disincentivized from allowing that to happen, real estate developers also don't want housing to get to that point either. And who is the one deciding what gets built with a market approach to the problem? Developers. In a market approach, developers inherently want built up demand and therefore they will never build to a point in which demand is saturated. Once again, you need government intervention.

AFAIK developers have not formed a cabal that is trying to manipulate local real estate pricing.

Developers will build as long as it seems profitable to do so. Presumably this means that when the prices do go down, a few projects will end up in the red when they're done.

You forgot the third choice:

Fit the whole extended family into the 1br unit.

I've seen a craigslist ad in LA for barracks style bunk beds for rent near downtown in a shitty looking room, 500/mo.

Your suggestion is not in opposition to repealing zoning restrictions. You can do both, but one should happen first.

Zoning laws restrict what builders can build. Subsidies take funding. I find it unpalatable to have a portion of my income taken to solve a problem caused by rules which can be repealed for free.

An extreme example would be subsidizing gold plated homes. Gold plating adds no practical value and makes the house needlessly expensive. Tax dollars should not fund gold plated houses.

Replace the concept of gold platting with suburban zoning.

> 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas?

Right now we've got a scenario where the rich live in fifty-year-old units that really ought to be reasonably priced and the poorest live in alleyways. Having the poor in up-to-code micro-apartments would be a major step up. It would also help if the rich could also live in modern up-to-code units of luxurious size. That would free some of the stock of existing units for everyone else instead of them being pinched between the rich and the most vulnerable.

> I'm all for affordable housing but it seems too nuanced to allow market forces to take care of it. I think the correct solution revolves around government subsidized/funded housing but that's a whole other can of beans.

The US has a poor record of being capable of funding and running public housing, even after you get past the effects of concentrating poverty. The first major problem is often that permanently BMR units cost in excess of $800k each to construct in places like SF - and the city has to be able to afford a lot of those. Then you have the problem of funding ongoing costs, which has often been the problem in the US.

With this in mind, it's perhaps worth reconsidering why some might favor approachs that center on inclusing subsidized units into mixed-income properties.

Micro apartments are a straw man. The zoning codes all over California prohibit duplexes and triplexes, including over 85% of the area of the supposedly dense city of San Francisco. We don’t need weird innovative forms. We need the old forms.

I agree. This is a false dichotomy between the status quo and Judge Dreddesque super towers. I think changing zoning at the edge of the current sense areas could help a lot too. You'd likely need an increased investment in public transit to make that work.

We've already spent the money on the transportation and forgot the upzoning that should have accompanied it. For example we poured billions into BART to serve dispersed areas full of detached single-family homes. All areas within half a mile of a BART station should permit 5-story multi-family dwellings without mandatory parking. This was the point of SB50.

My city (Waterloo region Ontario) pretty much did exactly what you described. Approval to build light rail was tightly tied to automatic upzoning within a given radius of stations. The light rail itself took years to build and has been open less than 6 months, but the zoning fixes are already apparent. Density around many of the stations has shot up and the skyline would be almost unrecognizable to someone who lived here even 10 years ago.

Unfortunately, like the bay area we are very popular for tech and the all the new dense buildings going up hasn't been able to outpace demand from newcomers. Prices have been skyrocketing and it's really starting to squeeze the most vulnerable. Even more zoning restrictions need to be slashed and timelines for building permits approvals need to tumble.

I don't live in SF so I've only been on the BART in downtown. I didn't realize it ran out to so many suburban areas. Definitely seems like a no brainier to up-zone in at least a mile radius around every one of those stations.

1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings?

They are but they build and then sell off, developers develop, they tend not to own those units long-term. I believe this to be true regardless of market direction. Generally in the case of condos for sale, developers manage the complexes for a couple of years until enough units are sold off and the HOA takes them over.

If someone wants to run the whole building for rental, they can certainly still do that. You would just factor in that your rent would grow with inflation instead of geometrically when you're planning your building.

2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas?

Indeed, that is a risk, however the current solution of not providing these folks a place to live is a punt.

Re: government operation model, I actually agree with you wholeheartedly. Singapore's model where something like 80% of housing is built and managed by the HDB and 20% if totally free-market has worked very well there. I didn't want to bring that into the already-long-enough post as I felt it might distract from my point shrug. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

> You would just factor in that your rent would grow with inflation instead of geometrically when you're planning your building.

Compounded growth at inflation is geometric growth.

Yeah, I bit my thumb as I wrote that haha, better-than-linear in constant-dollars instead of geometric in constant-dollars :P

FWIW there are developers who build and hold long term, but it depends on their strategy and hoe their capital structure is set up.

Plenty of people would love to live in a micro-apartment. Just because it would make you feel poor to do so doesn’t mean it should be illegal!

> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas?

The poor can always move away if space becomes a real problem. Plenty of "SF-poor" people outside CA who are actually living in "abundant villas" in their preferred locations.

Moving isn't free. Most people you would assume to be not poor couldn't afford a move. Neither could they finance a move because of how leveraged they already are.

If you are an adult, and you have a car, you can move. If you have so many items that you can't "afford" to move, you sell some of those items and suddenly you not only have money for relocation, but less things to move as well. There will never be a country, society or civilization where the entire population can afford to live in the most expensive areas - and that's okay.

You're making it sound like it's easy to hock a bunch of stuff. Ever try to sell a bed? If you can't take it with you and can't sell it then you're paying disposal and transportation fees only to buy the same junk again. It kind of seems like you're arguing from a place of privilege not experienced with the consequences of moving a family without help, without savings, without adequate work.

In Oakland? You just pull the bed to the side of the road and it's gone within a day, tops. Same with most metro areas.

Also a lot of non-trash-strict places will take a mattress in the trash pickup if you just put it near the trash can and make it known it's trash. Also, for the same reason it's hard to sell a mattress, it's easy to buy one used in a new city. If you can afford to heat treat it, you can be sure theres no bed bugs, or if you have a job, buy a $200-$300 mattress from amazon - theyre surprisingly good these days.

I moved 10 times in the first 3 years I was on my own, and have done huge moves up/down since (up to a three bedroom, then decided I hated owning so much and downsized to a studio.) - no family, no savings, just a lot of manual labor/smart packing.

I think ops comment stands, unless you are used to some crazy nice cost of living (which is a different privilege).

>...pull the bed to the side of the road and it's gone within a day

That's littering. In most places this carries a substantial fine. Sure, you, might not get caught. I've known several tenants that got large disposal fee bills from their landlords for doing this. This happened whether they left their trash on the sidewalk, or by/in the bins.

>it's easy to buy one used in a new city. If you can afford to heat treat it, you can be sure theres no bed bugs, or if you have a job, buy a $200-$300 mattress from amazon - theyre surprisingly good these days.

Easy != free. Every expense adds up.

Deposit up front before getting back whatever's left after the previous landlord takes their scammy fees.

Lost wages. Costs of moving itself, and disposing of stuff that needs to be repurchased . Buying new stuff, even replacing a modest set of furnishings for a studio from second hand stores can pass $1k easily.

>no family, no savings, just a lot of manual labor/smart packing.

That has a price tag. You're not calculating it accurately. Just because you think you made all those moves cheaply doesn't mean you did.

Did you rent vehicles? Rebuy furniture? Stay at hotels? Mooch off friends or family? Did you eat out or sleep in your car?

These costs grow with a family. It might cost me $500 to move in a hurry. But it could cost a family $10k or more.

Did they stay long enough to build significant equity or make repairs? They might've lost money compared to renting. Some people do everything right and suffer bad luck forcing a move in bad conditions.

Do they need to rent or stay at hotels in between the move out and move in? It's not always possible to avoid this.

Even moving/re buying a minimal amount of furnishings for a family can cost thousands. Moving it is often cheaper. That adds time and labor either way. Or cost to avoid this. Some people also aren't physically capable of moving themselves.

It feels so easy and simple because you make these decisions for you and you alone.

> 1) Isn't a developer also making an investment when they build these high as hell micro-apartment apartment buildings?

The difference is that it's a value-creating investment rather than a purely speculative one. If you buy a piece of property for $500K and then build a dozen $300K condos on it, you come out with a sizeable profit, but each of the new residents gets the opportunity to live somewhere for $300K when they would have previously had to compete to pay $500K.

> 2) How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas?

You can't make someone's options worse by adding more of them. If you'd rather keep your existing two hour commute in exchange for a larger living space, that option continues to exist. But if people choose the closer, smaller apartment when given the choice, what does that tell you about whether having that option leaves them better off?

In terms of part two, legislating middle class comfort standards as a requirement mostly makes new housing only affordable to the middle class and up.

American localities have significantly larger minimum space requirements than peer cities around the world. A Parisian studio can be from 9-35 square meters, and that basically wouldn‘t be allowed as new construction in the vast majority of the country today.

Please don't sour the discourse by providing a false choice.

There are a lot of options (opportunities) between residential zoned single family dwellings with huge setbacks and love hotels.

Simply progressively incrementally upzoning areas, on a fixed 30 year schedule, is The Correct Answer. So that (for instance) Seattle would go from 75% zoned residential today to 70% in 2050.

That kind of long term planning makes the market predictable and protects current owner's investment and plans. eg Maybe someone wants to stay in their house until their kids go off to college, or stay in their house during their golden years, and it'd be nice to know they can afford to stay.

The idea that "allowing multifamily housing" is somehow different from "zoned residential" shows an interesting cognitive bias here.

> How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas

The “race to the bottom” is called the market price and quality. One of the big progressive mistakes was instituting all sorts of bans on cheap, low quality housing. Bans on week-by-week rentals, etc., made it hard for poor people to live near where jobs are. The alternative has become fighting for a tiny supply of subsidized housing, or going to locations where there are few jobs.

The problem with government subsidized housing is: where will you build it? At least the market creates an incentive to put the housing near where the jobs are. Political control of where housing gets built and how much results in poor people being segregated away from jobs, opportunity, etc.

This wasn't a progressive mistake. In California it's been consistently shown in opinion polls that Republicans (wealthy suburban Republican homeowners) are more strongly in favor of exclusionary zoning than Democrats are. It's just that the problem is most acute in big cities, which trend Democratic.

Right. The Republicans, who are in control of both California's state legislature and city governments, are blocking Democrats from passing any policies. The Democrats push hard to pass laws for more inclusive zoning, but since California is such a red stronghold, there's absolutely nothing they can do.

I’m not talking about zoning. I’m talking about regulations on housing quality. Tenement style housing wasn’t pleasant, but it was better than having no housing or only having housing far away from jobs.

> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas?

Given the abundance of "working homeless" (homeless people with jobs); I think we're already there. At least with cheap housing they can be insulated from the cold and such (unlike tents).

1) developers can make what’s called “development margin” on the improvement of the site (fixing a house, building a multi family on top of a vacant lot, etc.). The margin is the (sale price - acquisition cost - building cost - planning cost) / (total cost).

This is separate from the YoY post property tax equity appreciation of a housing unit by simply buying and holding.

> How do you avoid a race to the bottom in terms of housing quality when you allow said micro-apartments? Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods while the rich are living in abundant villas?

I don't see how this is worse than what we have right now. SF housing is already dystopian.

the fad of tiny homes shows what can be done with a limit amount of space and we must always be aware of one fact.

our bias as to what we would accept is not what others would accept. let alone what qualifies as a micro apartment, is the size the same world wide or even nation wide?

We already have a market that is effectively subsidized/funded by government and that is why we have the problem we do have. Government does not have to serve the market, it only has to serve the particular housing program put in place and no more.