More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people. But, when you think of them, you're thinking way too small. You need to think in terms of, like, literally doubling the number of apartments available, and they may then be in reach of normal people once more.
You also need to get yourself together and reverse that trend where your transit system has carried fewer people more slowly for more money since the eighties. (The bus-rapid-transit corridors are a good start, as they're much more transiting for much less money than new subways, but you're still thinking too small, and need to 10x your ambitions.)
Aren’t the sewers in SF literally over a century old?
No issues with adequate water supply and sewage treatment?
It also oddly erroneously equates water usage with some sort of negative thing in and of itself, akin to saying that rain is wasting water. It is not the use of water that is the problem, ignoring the rather minimal cost of things like moving the water, which is overwhelmingly a fixed, not variable cost. The real and only consequential problem is the contamination and pollution of water through things like significant quantities of soaps/surfactants, as well as almost unremovable harmful chemicals like birth control and other pharmaceuticals, preservatives from vehicle tires, and carcinogenic PFOA/PFOS that are now said to essentially be in EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET.
I can assure you that pumping a million gallons of water out of a well and letting it seep back into the ground is not nearly as destructive and damaging as the emission of various hormones into the municipal water system by women simply going to the bathroom.
In other words, if I were to use essentially nothing but moderate levels of natural surfactants, e.g., animal/plant fat produced soaps and did not take or use products created with "chemicals"; I could use tens of thousands of gallons of water per day and it would make no difference to the water cycle or availability. However, I could also use the amount and number of different destructive, polluting, toxic products that the average self-righteous person uses and I could pollute millions upon millions of gallons of water EVERY SINGLE DAY, all, while feeling self-righteous about my low water usage, while tossing new technology and plastic products produced by pumping tons of chemicals into Asian rivers.
A lot of these things are about perspective. You would ask that you take a step back and reexamine whether you are actually rational and using the scientific method that requires the questioning and reexamination of all assumptions and facts, or if you are being militant and extreme, aka an activist.
You can only reduce quality of life so much.
What I don't agree with is that this bad. These are minor inconveniences. Sometimes I have to use the plunger, and the shower is less relaxing. Not a big deal. I'd rather that than water rationing.
The positive externality is even more minor. You are suffering for no good reason.
This is clearly positive given that just a few years ago we were on the brink of water rationing, even with these measures in place.
TL;DR: Toilets clog more with lower GPF. Showers clean less effectively - you only need to go to a country with no "eco" pressure or flow rate limitations to notice this yourself. Washing machines and dishwashers perform poorly with low flow rate and no TSP.
Basically any appliance that people complain about and have a bad time with is only that way because of environmental regulations.
> I don't even know what an "inferior toilet" is
That's because you're used to using garbage and you've never experienced anything better.
Toilets are probably the least acute example, since they have mostly gotten them almost back up to their former reliability. Cleaning appliances, like showers and dishwashers, are the most acute.
I grew up in Pennsylvania for the first 21 years of my life, moved to SF for seven, and have lived in Chicago for 3. I've traveled pretty extensively. I can assure you I know how toilets, showers, sinks, washing machines, and dishwashers work. As someone with a breadth of life experience and full control of my faculties, I cannot say I've experienced any of the issues you describe. Do not make assumptions about my life experience.
If _anything_ the worst issue I've experienced in some parts of SF is low water pressure, which has nothing to do with fixtures or appliances and everything to do with infrastructure.
You failed to address anything regarding wastewater treatment.
80 million gallons per day treated with no rain, but rain, it can be 500 gallons.
So, will climate change put additional pressures on wastewater treatment as well?
Also, has SF only recently had a handle on wastewater treatment?
Was 1998 wastewater treatment capacity inadequate?
Also, if you have historical data on wastewater metrics, I would like to take a peek.
So, who pays for that? All the taxpayers, or the builders, or the potential new tenants?
And in SF, the "dig once" policy means that anytime something substantial is done, nearly everything is redone, which is why Van Ness has been under construction for sooooo long: utilities.
The property wealth in SF appreciates at absolutely massive rates, but they rely on poorer new entrants to fund everything. And that old property wealth is the same political power that stops the city from a accommodating new people, restricting entry to ever more wealthy new entrants.
Appreciated.
The city is losing 7 million gallons per day in leaks (this also includes firefighting).
Are there alot of fires daily?
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-04/documents...
It seems to be over 10% is lost, based on the numbers in your prior comment.
As long as most places are leaking more, it is ok? Infrastructure relativism?
Who pays for it? This is infrastructure 101 stuff. You want the people who use it to pay for it, so you finance it and have the new tenants pay for it.
BTW, utility tunnel is a thing, and places like SF can probably afford some, to prevent disruptions to the surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_tunnel
We have about 90 km of utility tunnels in Prague, with a plan to expand the network to 120 km. Really helps in the historic centre.
An entire city's entire sewer system isn't all built in one year. Real life isn't Sim City.
There is constant maintenance and replacement. You don't have to be an urban planner to know this, you just have to look at the construction going on in your own neighborhood.
What? No! Rent control is among other something that can lower the rent for normal people. I know SF has rent control, but currently it only applies as long as you don’t move.
Rent doesn't make housing affordable at all. Ownership does.
Put a plain 2BR in the Mission at, idk, $1500 a month (which Google tells me is a bit over the US median), and you'll have to hold a lottery to figure out which of the ten thousand families trying to get it, actually get it.
Maybe you don't always have a lottery, maybe the big winners are people who were in the right place at the right time as an accident of history. Either way these people are anything but normal. The normal people are the tens of thousands who can't get an apartment at that price. In the end it fails for the same reason that you can't "solve" poverty by running a state lottery and seeing a "normal" person win.
And even if we don't have a problem with this as inherently inequitable, it's just ... such tiny, tiny, small-scale thinking.
EDIT: I know it might seem unfair if you are a landlord or in the housing speculative market. But heck, you’ve had your chance to play a fair game, and seriously screwed us over. You’ve proven your self unworthy as a player in a fair market to a point that you shouldn’t be allowed to play it.
It can decrease your rent if you never move, but that decreases the liquidity of the market, and traps you in a crappy small apartment for longer than you’d live in it otherwise.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/
In the real world, places with rent control are the most expensive and have gotten more expensive. It does not help housing prices.
When it does manage to build public housing, SF spends approximately a million dollars a unit to do so. That's purely to get a habitable unit. It includes none of the maintenance costs, which will increase over time, or the social services required to make public housing work as intended.
With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does.
Incidentally, the Supes only actually get to control about $3.5bn of that. So now we're reduced to 3,500 units a year... in a city where population growth averages 11,000 people a year. And we still haven't talked about social services, maintenance, or how allocation of what will never be enough public housing units will work.
I think these numbers lay clear that public housing is unlikely to solve SF's housing woes. Don't hesitate to ask if anything is unclear!
You are skipping over the part where the government can change the relevant laws that make public housing expensive. Public housing also doesn't have to be built by the government directly so if private construction firms can do it cheaper the government can let them build the housing.
The items that make this expensive have to do with the standards that must be met, zoning and approval processes, and so on. These are things that a private construction firm, under contract with SF, does not find easier or cheaper.
Personally, I like the idea of SF maybe getting in the way of housing construction a bit less. But I also understand that voters seem to like the system as it is. Plus, only some of these laws are readily changed by SF - the plebiscite for public housing law is a state prop from the 70s. Many of the other requirements are also propositions at either state or local levels.
As you say, it's completely true that the government can change the relevant laws. It's just perhaps more subtle than that, as there are multiple levels of government involved and some of the relevant laws are quite challenging to change.
If anything, I would naively expect most of the relevant policies here to be things property developers would be quite strongly against. Perhaps you can enlighten me with critical factors I've overlooked?
Benioff Hospital would be unaffected, but only because it's in no way run by SF.
Even in Red Vienna or Singapore, there are still market-rate housing! And the only way they keep the market rate housing low is by having enough housing. Singapore, in particluar, is really good at building tons of public housing. And their policies would horrify all the preservationist fake-progressives in SF, because they just build build build, and do it at heights greater than three stories. And Vienna's public housing would similarly horrify the fake progressives in SF that stop all new housing.
Public housing is great, but if you're looking to see it happen in SF, look to the Mods, not the Progs.
The housing projects in the US were implemented in extremely racist ways: segregation, then don't maintain the public housing at all. Public housing for white people in the 1930s was great, then with the red scare, the government decided that subsidizing home ownership would prevent the spread of socialism in the US. It was quite effective, but access to cheap home loans and cheap new developments was racially segregated: only new developments that would be largely white would get the FHA-subsidizided home loans. This is the well-documented "red lining."
This led to the economic segregation where the housing projects were only for Black people, were in areas without access to good schools or jobs. It's no wonder the housing projects failed, because they were largely doomed to failure.
But it's only one, very small, tool in the arsenal to make cities work for the people. It must be accompanied by robust protections to new people as well. The flaw with rent control in isolation is that it assumes that people never move, are never born, and never die, and that cities never change. In order for rent control to be a useful tenant protection, it must be accompanied by robust rebuilding when more people need to live in the city.
Also rent control should not be the only measure. The county should also buy up housing and rent for cheaper to drive the market rate down, price gauging should be illegal (for everyone, not just foreign investors). etc.
Almost, buying up housing is fine if the government changes zoning and upzones existing properties. It is better to go one tiny step further and make the government guarantee housing for a fixed price because then it is truly forced to fix the problem.
Once you have done this important step the government has many options. It can either fix the demand side or the supply side.
The supply side is easy to fix by changing zoning laws to encourage taller residential buildings and then by actually building them.
The demand side can be fixed by changing the tax law so that commercial property is no longer the only source of property tax income. This lead to an imbalance of commercial vs residential property which then lead to lots of workers without housing which then lead to a race for apartments driving up prices.
Lets say that everything gets converted to rent-controlled in an area. A child becomes 18, graduates from high school, and wants to stay close to their family to maintain their emotional connections. If everything is rent-controlled, but not enough housing is built, they have to be on some sort of waitlist or lottery to stay in the area. This will push out so many people.
The only solution is to make enough housing for the people that want to live in an area. Without that, we are rationing it by price, by lottery, or by waitlist, and all of those will destroy the emotional connections that both you and I want to maintain.
And how is rent control supposed to follow tenants? They just show up to a unit costing $3,000/mo and say "my rent control rate is $800/mo, so you need to rent to me at that price." No sane developer would ever build in SF if that is the case, thus exacerbating point #1.
[0] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nychvs.html
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2017-hv...
[2] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/30/what-vacancy-r...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...
According to (1) average Tokyo apartment size is 20 square meters or a little over 400 square feet vs 700 square feet in San Francisco as found from a quick Google search.
Considering some Japanese rent and live in Cyber cafe cubes that are even smaller I'm not sure how fair a comparison really is between the two. Japan in particular seems to have small appliances geared towards smaller footprint apartments.
https://www.all-about-teaching-english-in-japan.com/Tokyoapa...
Joking aside, the lifestyle is also different. Tokyo and HK where I live are known for tiny apartments, but they're also cities where residents spend far less time at home, offering cheap options for eating out, many places to hang out outside home, reliable transit, and extreme safety from crime at all times of the day. I'm far more comfortable in a tiny HK flat than I would be in the same size in SF. Thankfully I have the luxury of a decent sized space in both now.
215 vs 700 is a very different story from 400 vs 700.
Pre-covid, I knew engineers making $100k+ living with four roommates in a somewhat run-down apartment. Sure, $100k isn't that much, but it's enough that they should be living somewhere nicer without the roommates. People who should be in high-end apartments are living in low-end apartments, displacing "normal" people who would normally live there. If you build only mid-high-end apartments, the priced will come down to the point that the average tech worker can afford them, and they'll move out of their four roommate situation. That will free up inventory at the lower end, and prices will drop.
This really is just supply and demand. It does funny things at times (see the backward bending supply curve of labor), but until there's a surplus of housing, this isn't one of them.
Why would they do that? Not to mention that NY is kinda big for developers to band together to manipulate this. My guess is that developers try to sell/rent units as fast as they can....and faster than the other guy.
You're only gonna get that big impact one time, but it goes to show that the tax was worth doing.
Doesn't solve the problem by itself, but the tax will help.
The amount of units that suddenly appeared showed that there was a small percent of units "leaking" from every new build that never hit the market.
Does SF have homestead property tax exemptions? Where I live property taxes are quite high, unless the property is owner occupied. The second homes and rentals subsidized the taxes of those who live here.
Any property tax, from vacant lot to strip mall to vacation home to industrial plant, can not rise above 2% per year. Meanwhile property values rise 5%-10% per year. The only way for property to get reassessed at market value is to build on it or sell it.
This subsidizes speculation. If you own a vacant lot since 1970, and pay an effective tax rate of 0.05%, and building on it raises your taxes to 1%, you're taking a huge risk by deciding to enter the market now. Similarly, that super old 6-unit apartment building from 1930 has a ridiculously low tax basis; upgrading to 20 units hugely increases taxes.
Presumably, the building company would be the owners for all the empty apartments which would make it easy to find and tax. It would be more difficult to detect someone buying a home/apartment as an "investment".
That isn't the reason rent is high in SF.
For example, obviously a smoke alarm is something that takes 15 minutes to install, so that wouldn't be when you start the clock.
You might be able to base it on when any single unit is sold in the block. That is "You sell 1 apartment, you've got a year to sell to rest or you are going to start seeing vacancy taxes".
See ‘homestead exemption’. Other states use this term, but it means different things.
WV, for instance, only allows the exemption for people above a certain age.
Further, the revenue from that tax could be used to fund public housing to further drive down housing costs.
[1] https://www.bookweb.org/news/san-francisco-approves-vacant-p...
But you know, that's last generation projects. What's the status on today's "affordable housing" projects? Oh, you say it costs $750,000 in construction costs alone for an "affordable" 2BR apartment? Oh dear me, that's rather ridiculously steep, isn't it...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/California-housing-cos...
I always thought that there were about 8 million illegal immigrants in California, then 9/11 happened, but even after 9/11 the number never dipped below 1 or 2 million -- and if it got that low, it was only for a few years.
Also, I thought that when the numbers have gone down, from 8 million to 4 million, say, it is more because of an increase in economic opportunity in Mexico than it is because of an increase in the effectiveness of US border control.
And I thought that even with all his talk, Trump didn't improve US border control significantly.
But I don't have any direct motive to stay informed on this issue. E.g., I don't hire cheap workers. So it is possible I am misinformed.
San Francisco as a political entity has neither the will nor the project management capacity to build anything at reasonable prices.
More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people.
Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly.
With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to buy... But it's still not possible here.