"Literally anywhere else" is going to be facing the same challenges and questions. SF is not the only city with a housing shortage. Why should SF be specially interested in preserving high rents and driving away the children of its residents?

> SF is not the only city with a housing shortage.

And? There are dozens of cities that don't have a housing shortage. Living in the city of your choice isn't a human right.

Freezing your city in amber isn't a human right either.

It literally is your right to do what you want with your property, subject to whatever covenants were in place when you acquired it.

IMO, the bay area is well beyond carrying capacity. The last time I stayed in a hotel there, the water out of the shower was a bare mist.

How many people should we try to pack into that area? Double the current housing? Triple it? Where do you stop?

The only reason it is beyond capacity is because the ability to expand capacity has been blocked. The bay is nowhere near maximum possible density.

"The hotel had bad water pressure so the Bay is full".

I very much doubt SF is limited in expanded by water pipe capacity. Total water use, sure, but people use less water in a city then the suburbs anyways so it will be a net savings of water.

Traffic, transit, and the water and sewer systems disagree.

The Bay Area has a whole is nowhere near carrying capacity, what?

We "stop" where it is natural to, like any other place in human history: lack of resources, lack of space*, there's better places to move to, etc. And if the only thing holding back the Bay Area's development is artificial zoning laws -- we are certainly not at its "natural" equilibrium.

While CA has had its generational water supply issues, only 10% of it is used for residential purposes; 90% of it is used for agriculture. Adding more people in SF, or Palo Alto or Berkeley, does not put special strain on CA versus anywhere else. Not to mention, single family homes often consume _much_ more water per family than those in apartments or condos (yards, many bathrooms, etc).

*Lack of space, for what is a _city_, is not "it's too populated here for me to have a backyard without paying a ton of money"

This comes at a huge opportunity cost for all of us. People earn more in places like SF because the value of their labor is higher there. Making them mover elsewhere rather than creating more room in the place where they generate the most value costs everyone substantial loss of economic growth. I think it was Jenny Schuetz in Fixer Upper (not 100% certain) who mentioned estimates that we've lost out on 30% GDP growth by not building enough.

This is what I say to anyone in the Bay Are who suggests people live somewhere else because of high housing costs: lead by example.

I don't live in the Bay Area, but I could. I choose not to.

Sure, then everyone can complain about the Californians pushing up prices and destroying their town. It doesn’t solve anything.

Yes I agree the people who cannot stand anything besides detached density controlled development should move to less productive and jobs rich regions of the country.

Why do you get to say where they live?

Nobody has an inherent right to live anywhere. It doesn't matter if your parents live there. Your grandparents. Your friends. You don't have any inherent right to be their neighbor. You don't have a right to buy across the street or even across town. It's a free market and if 100 other people want to live in the same place and are willing to pay more than you, then you're not going to live their either.

After this zoning change goes through and new houses are built, I'd wager those new houses will still be still priced out of reach of people that want to live in a given area. I'm not saying it's not going to help, but it's not going to magically create 10x the housing density in a given area and bring housing prices down to the point where a low income worker can afford a home. That's a pipe dream.

Why's it got to be about rights? It's possible to decide it's nicer if people can live near their parents and grandparents and friends, than not, and change systems and policies such that that's a more-accessible way of living, without it being a right.

[EDIT] And that's putting aside that "right" just means "thing we like a bunch", anyway.

Nobody has an inherent right to live anywhere but people have the right to control their neighbors' property through zoning?

You could make this argument about other laws too. Do you have a right to control your neighbors ability to cook meth? It’s bad for the rest of us if they do, so we ban it.

Society creates laws that affect each other and zoning is no different.

If I live in a cute little community and my neighbors all agree that we like it how it is, we can collectively agree to keep it like that.

If that little neighborhood had a dense block of apartment buildings, many of the people who originally lived there wouldn’t want to stay.

Now, all that in mind, I generally agree that we need to fix zoning. I’m not a homeowner and want to buy property in places that are currently too expensive for me..

But I completely understand that people would be upset to build a community somewhere, then gradually be pushed away because a few of their neighbors sold to a big company, and their neighborhood doesn’t fit their needs anymore.

Even if the majority want to stay, they get forced away by a few using their land in ways that are bad for the rest of the group.

If the majority want to keep their community unchanged, they can buy out their neighbors who want to sell.

Builder's remedy or state-imposed zoning has no power if no one ever sells to a developer, right?

Plus you're comparing living in a more dense neighborhood to cooking meth. I can't take you seriously at all.

I was using the cooking meth as an example of something that negatively impacts a community even if it seem to only impact the individual at first glance. Maybe a little too extreme of a comparison, but I was just trying to make a point that it’s not unprecedented to make laws that limit other people’s ability to do things with their property.

And I do prefer dense walkable neighborhoods personally, but I just also understand the frustration of a community living somewhere because of some quality of that neighborhood, then having that quality ripped away just because a small number of previous inhabitants left.

There are no guarantees in life. You could allow hyper-local zoning and still have some terrible neighbors that don't pick up dog shit and have loud parties all night. People trying to "keep property values up" has also led to some terribly discriminatory behavior in the past - we should be glad that such kinds of exclusion are no longer legal.

If "quality of neighborhood" is so important then said neighborhood should, as I stated above, put their money where their mouth is. Maintain a common fund, and commit to match any offer for any house going up for sale in the community. Stop using everyone else's taxpayer dollars to have cities pass and enforce laws to do it.

I think it is pretty clear from an ethical perspective that whatever rights people have to housing are stronger than whatever rights people have to block housing in their neighborhood. It takes a weird sort of mental gymnastics to simultaneously argue that no one has a right to housing but also that people have a right to using zoning laws to block housing.

I agree with you on that. I never said they have a right to live there.

I asked OP why the people who don't own that property, and have no ties to it (other than potentially living near it), should be able to decide that others _can't_ live there through restrictive zoning.

If it's actually a free market, and people have interest and money to afford to live in an area, and a property owner has property and interest to build housing they can afford, why should people with no interest in the property get to decide they should live elsewhere?

Mild disagree — not everything has to be about über-capitalism and the free market. Sometimes we should just make it easy to live in places (within reason) just for the sake of being human. We all share this earth, together.

We don't need a housing market where buying a small fixer upper costs millions. That's unjust.

> Nobody has an inherent right to live anywhere

But you have an inherent right to deny someone to live somewhere?

I’d like to live where I grew up though.

The counter argument is: it wouldn't be where you grew up anymore.

It seems like you're defining "where you grew up" with long/lag proximity, while attaching lots of unrelated personal concepts to it. How much can an area change before you've, for all practical purposes, moved somewhere else.

I'm fine with communities deciding for themselves how they grow and change. I really only take issue when they decide to grow office space and not housing, or when employers take office space meant for 100 workers and cram 300 into it.

Can confirm. I am almost 10years out from my "home town" (more or less, socially speaking) and it took me some time to reflect and realize, that "home town" is (for me) a romanticized, emotional concept and "what I experienced" can literally never occur again in that specific geographical location (at least not in 2 lifetimes) due to change.

That being said - I do wish my children were able to see their extended family more than once a year (travel costs/calendar coordination/ etc... being the impediments)

Places change. Where I grew up there was a nice mall. It is still there. But 0 of the stores in that mall are the same. The map from the early 80s does not match with the current one in any way. It was a mall with at least 200 stores. The buildings that surrounded that mall are all different/gone/rebuilt. The parks in that city are dumpy junk now, weeds everywhere. The places I remember from a kid are gone. The buildings are there but what made it 'my city' is gone. Replaced ship theseus style with something else. Is it better? Some ways yes. Is it worse? Some ways yes.

Having the option for the people who want to stay there and retain more of your community is a huge value and maybe the main value.

It won’t be where he grew up in any case, because it won’t have the same mix of people in it. It will only be older people and wealthy professionals.

Well here’s the funny thing: communities are changing anyways. When short sighted communities don’t build, it doesn’t stop people elsewhere from moving in if they have enough money. Even during redlining this was the case. It just pushes out the poorer segments of the existing community. NIMBY-ism is the thing that destroys neighborhood character, because a neighborhood is its people and culture, not its architecture.

I think the place will change either way. Either because renters have been pushed out, or because the population has increased with a ton of new people, requiring functional changes (the neighborhood market has become a whole foods, etc.), or both.

Building more doesn't stop the makeup of a community from changing. If anything it accelerates it.

I sympathize but it's not people born in the Bay Area who are driving up demand. If there had not been an influx of people from other areas (including other areas of Calif) there would not be such housing crunch --and likely there would have been a pop. reduction without an influx. What's the fertility rate per woman in the Bay Area, I'm pretty sure it's below the 2.1 figure to sustain a pop.

The local native population without an influx would not be in such dire housing situation.

Yes, the area is very attractive and is a magnet but without that influx the population would have plateaued.

Fortunately, we don't have internal passports in the United States

Sure, but it does not mean it's the local pop driving the growth, it's the newcomers who are driving growth and causing pain for the locals.

You are wrong. San Francisco does not even build enough homes to match natural population growth. Neither do most cities on the Peninsula.

As I posted below, here are the natural growth rates:

Look at the figures: https://www.newgeography.com/content/007550-total-fertility-....

SF: 1.49

SJ: 1.59

That's not growth, it's decline.

Which is flat out insane given the economy

Your link 404s, and fertility rates are not measures of net new natural population growth. If everyone lives longer, you can still have more births than deaths with sub replacement fertility.

In any case, the California Department of Finance gives counts of births and deaths by county, and you are wrong: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Forecasting/Demographi...

There's almost no natural population growth in the US. It's all coming from immigrants.

There was not a single year in 2010-2019 where California had more deaths than births.

From [1]:

> A rate of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to maintain a population at its current level (immigration and migration aside). California and the nation had fertility rates near population replacement levels in 2008, but every state falls below those levels today. California has fallen faster than most, dropping from 2.15 to 1.52

Well below replacement rates on births. I imagine a very large portion of the births are immigrant births as well, which would push the rate even lower.

1: https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-plunging-birth-rates/

Why is everyone trying to infer net new births from fertility rates? We have the exact data: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Forecasting/Demographi...

People can live longer, and natural population increase can persist long after fertility drops below replacement.

Why does that matter? Unless you're proposing unconstitutional restrictions on internal migration, people are going to want to move to places with jobs, culture, friendly politics, etc. and housing demand will reflect that for locals and new arrivals alike.

I was replying to poster saying he or she wanted to live (afford a house) where they grew up. I'm saying, it wasn't natural pop growth that caused the situation but rather influx that was not met with commensurate housing development/construction.

TBH, "I have a right to live where my parents did" is flat untrue, and while not a uniquely American pathology, something I observe my fellow countrymen believing without evidence.

I grew up in a town with an economic implosion. Very few people born here during the '70s stayed, and there was not, is not, and should not be a mechanism to bend the economics of the entire country to enable them to do so (if for no other reason than their industry collapsed for a compelling counter-concern: it was killing us. Pollution controls went in and the best companies in town could no longer compete while maintaining air quality standards and shuttered operations. So now people were out of work but the work was also not shortening their lives by a decade).

I think there's a big difference between "I want to be paid to live in an economically collapsed community because I was born here" and "I want to be able to afford to live in an economically thriving community because my friends and family are here". Especially when considering government policy.

What is the big difference?

1) Generally speaking, family and friend communities offer support structures that increase individual success and decrease antisocial behavior. Keeping those communities together is worthwhile both from a social welfare perspective and an economic efficiency one.

2) Reducing obstacles to building is free (in the long term, it's revenue-positive). Propping up a dying town is expensive.

Since your data is wrong, I can only imagine you’re going to change your mind right?

This is not really true. Many Bay Area cities have severely underbuilt even their own demographic processes. Berkeley, for example, needed to add 40% more homes just to accommodate its own longevity increases and birth rate since 1970. Casual observers severely underestimate the housing implications of longer old age, and birth rates were well above replacement until quite recently.

Just completely made up. There is no way a region with great weather year round was ever going to see population reduction. Even if you were to assume SF would, Oakland and the rest of the more diverse bay is filled with the demographics that are driving US population growth as a whole.

Look at the figures: https://www.newgeography.com/content/007550-total-fertility-....

SF: 1.49

SJ: 1.59

The population would only reduce if the parents die immediately after the kid is born. Until the parents die, the population would still grow.

Thank about what the Fertility rate means.

>the TFR is based on the age-specific fertility rates of women in their "child-bearing years", which in conventional international statistical usage is ages 15–44.

>The TFR is, therefore, a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year. The TFR represents the average number of children a woman would potentially have, were she to fast-forward through all her childbearing years in a single year, under all the age-specific fertility rates for that year. In other words, this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year and survives throughout all her childbearing years.

Is the assumption that there are no existing 60, 70, 80 and 90-year olds...?

A measurement of fertility rate with high earning women in tech included in two of the most popular-in-tech cities in the Bay Area is not an argument in favor of the native population being unwilling to have children.

Ignoring the argument around whether showing up before the population density is high confers some special “native-ness” and ownership (which I think would need to be fleshed out significantly to be really compelling), the math doesn’t really make sense.

Typically people’s lifetimes overlap their kids’ significantly. I mean most people meet their grandparents, so if you have a fertility rate of 1, and an area becomes attractive to early-career people who are just settling down and starting families, and the existing housing become taken up by that group, then I guess the area will have to house the original population, plus their kids, plus their grandkids, so we’ll need housing for 175% of the original population, total.

Of course the area is, by not accepting new immigrants to get back to replacement rate, setting itself up for long-term unpleasantness as the tax base ages into retirement. But hey I guess that’s their right…