The solution is to remove control from local groups. That also would address a huge part of the many committees you need approval from to build something which is another massive driver of costs and deterrent to build especially cheaper units.
I think the other thing that's not talked about enough is that building more housing has benefits for incumbents. If more housing is built in my neighborhood, my neighborhood will support more local businesses and other amenities which I can enjoy. It also means there are more social connections available. Additionally, population growth drives economic growth, which ensures that their locality remains vibrant. The ideology where we view more humans as strictly a cost, and never a benefit drives a lot of problems in our society IMO.
- Great Britain, to the colonies
You'd better have a really, really darn good reason for throwing out democracy. Otherwise this is basically calling for taking away what someone else has just because we want it.
Rental prices are to the point where even apartments are out of range for the average person who lives here. If you rent they want your income to be 3x your rent price. So currently if you are a single individual looking to rent that means you need to earn ~$36k/year to be eligible (also, a clean criminal and financial record as well). Issue is the minimum wage is $7.25/hr still...and if you work foodservice they can pay you ~$3.50/hr because your tips offset it.
We have a steady influx of people buying houses at over the already inflated asking cost because it "seems cheap" to them compared to where they live. What they do not realize is that if they lose their remote job (or if their pay is scaled to the region) they will have little/no chance of finding employment locally which will pay the amount they need to simply "live".
About 4 years ago University of Idaho released a study saying that 22% of the people living in this town cannot afford to do so...I wonder what that rate is now. I am starting so see more and more people sleeping in cars parked near the recreational areas and parking lots. Tons of multi family houses. Things are going to get bad really soon.
I can't speak for every area of the country...but in our case I suspect a large part of this is the waves of real estate investors who came through in the last couple years to buy up homes and are leaving them vacant (or vacation rentals). It seems like inventory is being artificially limited. To the people investing it is a win-win...either the house is vacant and you make a ton of money...or it gets rented as an airbnb for $3k/mo and they make even more. I suspect if they were to impose a 2x property tax on any property vacant for more than 6mos or vacation rentals it would very quickly effect the issues we are facing...but being as this town was structured by the tourism/real estate industry I do not see much hope.
https://cdapress.com/news/2021/feb/22/housing-market-heats-n...
The housing pinch has already hit Twin Falls if you can believe that. One would have to move all the way to Idaho falls to know what it was like in the Boise area 10 years ago.
I wonder how many people would move to Coeur d'Alene if they would have made the lake a superfund site...like they did the Silver Valley which drains into it. The whole bottom of the lake is heavy metal contaminated...but they don't show you that in the real estate ads. :)
I make a lot of money as a software engineer and I don't think I'll get a home until I'm 45.
There is a large portion of the population in jobs like nursing, banking, tourism or real estate but they are not the ones who are doing the jobs we are talking about.
Who is going to serve/cook the food? Where will they live?
Teachers make $29-49k in my area. Nurses $39-68k. (based on glassdoor).
Average hourly rate is $17.39 (payscale.com)
If you work 2000hrs/year your pre tax income is ~$35k. Right now there are 1bd apartments going for $1100/mo (albeit brand new with amenities such as pool/weight room).
So if you are lucky enough to make the "average" pay in the area that means you can get a 1bd apt...assuming you qualify. A very low end house you need to make $75k/year to purchase...again assuming you qualify.
I think in many parts of western Europe average earners can’t even afford a 1bd apt.
Extreme inequality combined with familial support. It's not uncommon now to have one or more kids living with the parents into their 20s while they go to college and build up their career, right as the homemaker enters the workforce with limited professional experience so you get 2+ minimum wage earners and one established professional bringing in support. Throw in the gig economy, which hoists capital and operational risk onto the employees (sorry, "contractors"), and you've got a majority of the working population making minimum wage.
It's even worse in university towns, where the college kids are almost guaranteed to be working for minimum wage while receiving external funding from loans or parents which can skew the numbers even more.
But it is a right to work state. I suspect that is part of the issue. There is very much a "Good ol' boys club" in town which has a tendency to employ people due to favors or connections (regardless of qualifications).
Even in the 90s when we had Agilent, Itron, and several other large companies in Spokane the area directly across state line was significantly cheaper to operate in. So we ended up with a few electronics contract manufacturers who got their start being basically sweatshops (yes...solderers get started out at minimum wage or barely above it).
I know a person who in the 90s was making $50/hr as an EE...last I heard he was making $25/hr to do the same job now. (When Agilent shut down it flooded the local market with engineers and techs).
edit: Adding this link for more data. Look at the percentage of renters below poverty level http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Coeur-d-Alene-Idaho...
So yeah.
Here is a recent BLS study called "Characteristics of minimum wage workers" https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2019/home.htm
"In 2019, 82.3 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.1 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 392,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.2 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 1.9 percent of all hourly paid workers."
So I'd guess closer to 10% of people make the minimum wage in their jurisdiction (1.9% x 4 + I assume more people make min wage when it's higher)
Very interesting though that 3x as many people make below the min wage as actually earn the "minimum" wage.
More generally, I'd encourage you to question the mental model that made this sound like a potentially true claim in the first case. An economy where most people are paid minimum wage would be incredibly different than the one we actually have.
It is kind of fascinating that people have such wildly different ideas about what the objective facts are, and how that must flow downstream into their worldviews and politics. Between 51.6% and 2.3% is not a small difference! Those are very different worlds we could be living in!
[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm#....
San Francisco publishes its Housing Development Pipeline here https://sfplanning.org/project/pipeline-report#current-dashb...
They may not be adding capacity at a sufficient rate, but they have tens of thousands of units in the pipeline in every quarter.
[1] https://economics21.org/bay-area-the-land-of-many-jobs-and-t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage
I don’t understand why so many HN commenters seem to think it could magically become a dense metropolis like Manhattan or Chicago.
Even in the Gold Rush in the 1800s SF was unscalable the rent was unaffordable. It was always a high crime city. Just read about the history of the barbary coast.
Everybody who comes here purely for money wants this city to be something it just isn’t.
It’s 2021 and Covid-19 has shown that remote work is viable.
Back in the day large tech companies like Sun, Peoplesoft and Cisco built offices all over the bay so that people had the option to work at facilities close to their home.
SF wasn’t even a significant tech destination before 2007.
My wife and I are actually moving to Barcelona when Covid is over, under the Non-Lucrative residency permit. If you think San Franciscans have a Nimby attitude and hate outsiders then you should go visit Barcelona.
“Unremarkabe single family housing”. So what, you want to take peoples’ housing via eminent domain and build more of the hideously dugly condo boxes they’ve stuffed all over SOMA and the Missiom?
I happen to love my unremarkable home in the Sunset in which my family has lived for 55 years.
It’s quite rude to refer to housing for people as “droid housing.” What makes you any better than them?
“Droid housing” is san francisco slang for the soulless eyesore boxes containing cramped, slapshodnfaux “lofts”, usually painted a bluish slate grey or salmon pink on the outside, entirely devoid of character or quality.
Thankfully San Francisco’s direct democracy works well to keep this city small. There are many soulless sprawling cities which are seismically stable, devoid of character, flat and inhabited by people who don’t care enough to resist.
You seriously think San Francisco would be livable at 51,000 pe m^2? It would literally cost $500bn in infrastructure investment to make that possible just inside the city.
101 and 280 would need to be 15 lames wide each, bulldozing 1/8 of the peninsula. We would need a half a dozen new transbay bridges and tunnels.
SFO would probably need another couple of runways and terminals.
You’re talking trillions of dollars in investment because tech companies prefer open office spaces to Zoom.
Why would we need more freeways if amenities are local? In fact, we could probably demolish freeways if more people who worked in San Francisco could afford to live here.
People don’t disappear if you don’t have housing for them. Why is building infrastructure in Phoenix preferable to growing it here? There are returns to scale with all of this. OAK is underutilized as an airport as well.
Have you considered that San Francisco is a pleasant place to live, and people want to live here independently of their employment situation? Prices were high before technology employment.
The past 20 years is the lowest population growth the metro area has ever experienced. What it has experienced is growth in the wealth of the wealthiest part of that population, along with increased demand for office space, which competes for housing as a possible use of land.
The actual fast growing metro areas of the past several decades, i.e. San Antonio, DFW, Phoenix, Las Vegas, have also seen tremendous booms in housing construction.
The homelessness problem in San Francisco is not new, either. You can read about the history here: https://www.kqed.org/news/11765010/timeline-the-frustrating-...
It stands out to me in particular that the number of homeless people is about the same as it was in the 80s, but the public complaints being received have skyrocketed. What seems to have actually increased is the number of people either living or working in the city who aren't used to seeing homeless everywhere, presumably people from elsewhere displacing native San Franciscans. But both the absolute number of people in the city and the absolute number of homeless people in the city are not growing at any abnormal rate.
This is why San Francisco doesn't work anymore and isn't equitable until the electorate decides to build new housing. We shouldn't downplay a move to cities like Austin, Charlotte, and Atlanta that have no qualms with building lots of housing and affordable housing.
Why have a non-trivial percent of funding go to rent seekers, anyway?
Those other 3 cities have significantly more capacity both to build up and out. Blame the electorate all you want but geography is geography.
SF's infrastructure doesn't seem that it can handle more people. traffic is bad. Restaurants are full (have you been to a brunch?). Buses are full. More homeless than ever.
Letting the price rise, so people/companies will go elsewhere seems like an okay strategy.
Well, it's pretty clear from the explosion in housing prices that it's not growing nearly fast enough. I'd love to see some citation as to what "too fast" is and why you think SF is at risk of hitting that number.
> SF's infrastructure doesn't seem that it can handle more people. traffic is bad. Restaurants are full (have you been to a brunch?). Buses are full. More homeless than ever.
More housing = more people = more revenue. That revenue turns into more infrastructure, more restaurants, etc. In fact more density makes infrastructure more economical to operate on a per capita basis. Think Hong Kong.
Part of the reason there's more homeless people is they can't afford houses, which building units would help alleviate.
> Letting the price rise, so people/companies will go elsewhere seems like an okay strategy.
That's not a very free-market attitude!
The cost of upgrading infrastructure in a busy city is enormously expensive. San Francisco is on a peninsula with no room at all to expand outward. The only solution is to build up and that’s a real problem in an area prone to earthquakes.
Plus there are a lot of people that like the character of their neighbourhood and don’t want to live in an apartment building. It isn’t their fault that SF became the global tech capital.
So having more people to split that cost with would help! To be clear Hong Kong island is far harder to build on.
> Plus there are a lot of people that like the character of their neighbourhood and don’t want to live in an apartment building. It isn’t their fault that SF became the global tech capital.
They’re also not entitled to that. In a democracy the many decide.
Actually, yes they are. San Francisco is a participatory democracy. Between a large # of ballots voted for each November, we elect our board of supervisors and attend supervisor meetings to tell them how to vote.
If people don't vote, well, that's their fault.
I say that as someone who owns property in San Francisco.
In a democracy the people who inhabit a place decide. Not the people who want to inhabit it. That's not democracy, it's colonialism.
Colonialism: the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.
We did decide, and continue to do so in supervisor meetings and in the ballot box. You might want to read up on federalism.
People always ignore this fact. Infrastructure isn’t free. When all is said and done the Central Subway extension will likely have cost over $2bn for 1.7 miles of subway. [1] The new transit center cost $2.2bn [2]. Rebuilding 1/2 of the bay bridge cost $6.5bn. [3]
Consider that money for all of this is artificially restricted by Prop 13, and by California being a net-giver state, paying about $40bn per year more to the fed than we receive back, effectively being a piggy bank for poorer states.
> Plus there are a lot of people that like the character of their neighbourhood and don’t want to live in an apartment building.
Many commenters with a lot of hatred for San Francisco’s unique brand of dirext democracy are sadly OK with overruling the expressed will of the people not to turn our home into New York just so some tech billionaires can sell more banner ads.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_th...
> Many commenters with a lot of hatred for San Francisco’s unique brand of dirext democracy are sadly OK with overruling the expressed will of the people not to turn our home into New York just so some tech billionaires can sell more banner ads.
Who's our? Generally voters tend to be older, wealthier and landowners. The large pile of younger, less wealthy, more transient renters isn't represented well. I don't think the outcome means the system works.
Citation?
> Who's our? Generally voters tend to be older, wealthier and landowners. The large pile of younger, less wealthy, more transient renters isn't represented well. I don't think the outcome means the system works.
That’s how democracy works. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a voice.
All costs below are in $USD nominal per mile of fully-underground subway system.
NYC subway extension, east side: $3.7B per mile.
SF Central subway: $928M per mile.
Tokyo: $400M
Beijing: $240M
Berlin: $327M
Naples: $194M
Milan: $175M
This is backed up by a Citylab analysis:
Alon Levy at Citylab shows approximate range of underground rail construction costs in continental Europe and Japan is between $100 million per mile and $1 billion. Most subway lines cluster in the range of $200 million to $500 million per mile.
The US has a range of subway construction costs of $600 million to $2.6 billion per mile. The US median price cluster is $800 million to $1 billion per mile.
> That’s how democracy works. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a voice.
Indeed.
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2019/04/11/subways-us-expensive-...
[2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/subways-and-light-rail...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-26/the-u-s-g...
[4] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/08/22/construction-c...
[5] https://public.tableau.com/profile/romic2976#!/vizhome/EnoTr...
In an optimistic world, sure.
It can also be that you build a bunch of building. Then, there's an economic downturn, and SF is fucked and left with abandoned buildings.
There are cities that fell into this trap.
I'm not saying it will happen, but it can happen.
Growing slowly is a good way not to push yourself into that corner.
How slow? I dunno. I hope there's an expert that can evaluate it.
Homeless is a tough one. I'd say that reduced housing prices would help, but I think that will just reduce the rate of new homeless. I personally thing that we need to aggressively force them to seek help or get out of the most expensive city in the world. Saving up enough to find a place in SF in near impossible, and hacks like homeless shelters are often full of crime and reduce the housing supply for low income families.
We already fucked up the housing market with prop 13 throwing off the supply, we need to build a huge supply to counter that (unfortunately repealing prop 13 remains the 3rd rail in CA politics).
Maybe SF could credibly commit to adding more density in the near future, but not immediately? That way speculators open brunch places before the customers arise, and there isn't a brunch shortage?
I agree with your point, but you will often find the plight of the poor is.. low on the priority list. It should be higher based on the average presence of guillotines on various message boards I frequent, but I assume the well-off have some sort of survival plan.
In the U.S.A if you took EVERYTHING from all of the billionaires, there are ~700 of them you would net under $5T in total [1]. The existing debt of the USA today stands at a hair under $28T [2]. The estimated budget deficit for the next 10 years is $1.2T a year [1]! You do realize you can lop off all the heads you want, take all the money you want, and you will not have solved anything! You would still be a debt slave :( Raising taxes by itself will not solve anything you ALSO need to decrease spending, but no one wants to hear about fiscal responsibility.
The heads that need to go are those of corrupt politicians.
[1] https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pand... [2] https://www.pgpf.org/national-debt-clock
The goal of threatening to kill someone isn't to murder them for the sake of murder, it's to negotiate with them from the fairly sensible starting point of "give me what you want or I'll kill you". If what they want is "fair wages and a decent life," that seems reasonable enough.
edit: Come to think of it. You cannot ignore it precisely, because it is not rational. Rational people you can bargain with.
Demographics-wise, I assume people younger than me, but I may be oversimplifying it. In practical sense, the more you earn, the less likely you are to support tax increase on yourself so maybe it is more tied to socio-economic status. Sadly, I have no data to back this up.
Rich people will just have people they need to keep things running live on their own now-very-large properties; and arrangements where your workplace also provides your housing might start to gain traction.
All of these ideas to make workers more dependent on their benevolent overlords is basically creating a subservient population.
If company X is offering you a job, and you really need a job, and it's not enough to pay market rent, but X has company dorms available and it will be paid via a line item off of your paycheck, you might take it.
Anyone who needs this type of arrangement is likely going to get a refund at the end of the year anyway and doesn't care about the tax implications.
Amazon could start doing something like this to have labor for its warehouses if the housing market keeps pricing everyone out, for example. Maybe also office maintenance, food prep/delivery, etc. Didn't Foxconn house its workers at one point?
These could be the housing projects of the future if done at a big enough corporate scale. Would they decay into crime-ridden slums or would corporate housing police keep things in order, but in a dystopian manner?
1) I kind of despise the housing market, but you do at least earn equity instead of throwing money away to a landlord.
2) If the company owns the place, your rent goes right back to your employer, making them an even stronger entity.
3) If you are at risk of losing your house by pissing off your boss, it means you'll usually adapt your behavior in a variety of ways dramatic and subtle to fit in.
4) Switching employers means you definitely need to move instead of just probably.
5) It's just a weird vibe when you live in a hive that isn't yours and is owned by the same entity that controls everything else in your life even if they were benevolent. They're daddy and you're baby, except they have little interest in you beyond pure self-interest.
Comparing that scenario to serfdom is amusing. If the property is sold, you could say that the people "come with", though they needn't get permission from their Lord to travel or move (barring any legal contracts like leases).
I've lived in SF for over 15 years -- this is obviously false. You could argue "not enough" units, but if you haven't seen new construction of multiple large buildings in multiple neighborhoods (Hayes Valley, Mission, SOMA, Market st., Potrero Hill, Mission Bay), then you haven't been in SF.
Literally walking around on the street, you can see thousands of new units. There was a pretty big uptick sometime around 2014 or 2016 as well. That said, prices are still the about highest in in the nation from what I can see.
The funny thing is, all the rich people living in these cities would never be able to survive without all the poor people commuting into the city to support them. The more expensive the city gets, the longer those commutes get. It's a horribly regressive system because now the poor people are spending multiple hours a day commuting, which is a huge opportunity cost of time that they could have spent advancing their social mobility.
At some point something has to give. You can't just keep filling cities with rich people if nobody is there to keep them running.