Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year

Re:Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year by whakim on Monday December 28, 2020 @05:37PM (#25564088)

This is a mischaracterization of the YIMBY position. Most YIMBYs are not opposed to raising taxes so that the city can pay for the construction of affordable housing units. (Note that the city doesn't build housing even if they pay for it - developers still do!) YIMBYs also believe, however, that we need housing of all kinds, including market rate housing. That is where YIMBYs and progressives disagree.

Separately, developers are already required to build a certain number of affordable housing units in every development.

If you require developers to build units that are mostly or solely composed of affordable housing, those developers will not earn enough money to make it worth building the units in the first place. This leads to progressives holding up all kinds of development with endless planning meetings and environmental impact assessments. The result is no housing gets built - no affordable housing, no market-rate housing. They allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.

We need to work with developers to build housing units of all kinds, including affordable housing, rather than demonizing the very developers who are going to end up building those affordable housing developments that I think we all want.

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Re:Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year by abalone on Monday December 28, 2020 @11:23PM (#25566695)

> This is a mischaracterization of the YIMBY position. Most YIMBYs are not opposed to raising taxes so that the city can pay for the construction of affordable housing units.

This is false. YIMBYs opposed the recent prop I to tax >$10M real estate sales to fund “emergency rent relief and permanently affordable housing.”[1]

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

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Re:Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year by whakim on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @01:34AM (#25567345)

You stated that "progressive supervisors are focused on public investment in affordable housing and taxing the rich to fund it." This is not what Prop I does.

Instead, the >$10M real estate tax would mostly be paid by developers, not homeowners, because most property sales in San Francisco that are >$10M are apartment buildings rather than houses owned by rich people. Not only that, but it would be a tax paid twice by developers, because they have to buy the land and then sell the finished development.

The reason YIMBYs opposed that proposition is for exactly this reason. It wouldn't be a tax on rich people, but yet another obstacle to the construction of housing, both affordable and market-rate.

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Re:Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year by abalone on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @01:51AM (#25579296)

Literally is a tax specifically constructed to target sellers (not buyers) of >$10M properties, otherwise known as rich people. With an exemption for sales to affordable housing nonprofits. This issue, passed by a wide margin, demonstrated that SF YIMBY is little more than a real estate lobby front at this point.

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Re:Average Rent in San Francisco Has Dropped $1k This Year by whakim on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @10:09AM (#25582285)

Again, developers != rich people. Developers are just businesses like everything else, not some evil cabal. Developers build the housing units that we both claim to want, and if you make it harder for them to build anything then no housing of any kind gets built.

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