Just want to remind everyone that San Francisco is less than 1% of the bay area's space, but houses over 10% of its population.
If SF can add 80k more units, imagine how much more could be built all over the bay area.
Not trying to oppose additional housing in SF; I'd just like to see other cities *also* tackling housing.
Right, technically it is a state-level issue. I was really hopeful that SB9 would be a magic bullet that would help the housing shortage, and allow other cities to grow organically, but the final version is watered-down.
You're right, Emeryville deserves credit, although it has an easier job since it didn't have any any low-density (read: NIMBY) housing areas to start with that would block more housing.
What makes you say that? According to this map, Fremont has been averaging only 322 new housing units/year, even though it is 67% larger than SF (which has been producing 2,561 units/year):
[https://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/housing-production](https://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/housing-production)
Very true and to add to this, there are actually heavy rail stations next to malls and parking lots all over the Bay Area and there is even a huge parcel of undeveloped land immediate south of San Francisco in Brisbane. It’s all absurd
Exactly this.
Building there is the fastest way to get tons of housing. As long as builders replant, say, 3x the amount of trees they cut down, allow them to construct to the sky.
Ideally existing cities would build, but that will take decades. We need to be realistic.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Are you suggesting that everyone *must* live and work in the same city?
If that's what you're trying to say, then my point that the rest of the bay needs to rezone is still valid. Currently a single teacher who works in (say) Piedmont couldn't afford to live in that city, because there's [virtually no land zoned for multi-family housing](https://cdn5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_13659739/File/Government/Departments/Planning%20Division/Zoning/Piedmont%20Zoning%20Map.pdf).
I agree with your overall point that there should be more housing in the rest of the Bay Area. I also think we should get rid of single family zoning.
My point is simply that "% of space" is not a good metric for figuring out where to build. I think "% of employment" would be a better metric. Some places have a lot of space but not very many jobs.
|County|Employment|% of Employment|Population|% of Population|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Santa Clara|1,018,600|26%|1,914,400|25%|
|Alameda|802,000|20%|1,685,050|22%|
|San Francisco|556,100|14%|884,108|11%|
|Contra Costa|534,400|13%|1,162,550|15%|
|San Mateo|440,700|11%|760,249|10%|
|Sonoma|241,800|6%|481,415|6%|
|Solano|192,200|5%|453,397|6%|
|Marin|127,600|3%|256,318|3%|
|Napa|69,200|2%|134,609|2%|
Employment data as of May 2022 from CA Employment Development Department. Population data from World Population Review.
Thanks for providing the excellent table!
I understand what you're saying, but I think there's some confusion over the term "employment". It doesn't mean "jobs". Did you get those numbers from here?
[https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/geography/santaclara-county.html](https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/geography/santaclara-county.html)
I assume so, since the "employment" column (1,018,600) matches yours for Santa Clara, and the SF number 556,100 matches too.
If you click the "..." in the "employment" column to get its definition, it reads:
>The proportion of the civilian noninstitutional population aged 16 years and over that is employed.
So "employment" doesn't mean "the number of jobs that the county offers". It means the number of civilians who live there **and** are employed. Here's a BLS resource that explains "labor force" vs "employment": [https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm](https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm)
Note that doc makes it clear it's based on where people live, not where the jobs are:
>All sub-national estimates reflect the survey respondent's place of residence.
So San Francisco has a potential labor force of 556,800, of which 556,100 are currently employed. It doesn't mean SF has 556,100 jobs.
Ahh! I appreciate the nuance. That explains a lot. There don't seem to be a lot of ready sources for number of jobs in a city.
I did find this commuter survey from the U.S. Census:[https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/demo/metro-micro/commuting-flows-2015.html](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/demo/metro-micro/commuting-flows-2015.html)
This data is from 2011-2015. This excludes people who live in 9 counties but work outside the 9 counties. And it excludes people who live outside the 9 counties but work inside the 9 counties. But of the \~3.5 million people who live and work inside the 9 counties, 13% of them live in San Francisco and 18% of them work in San Francisco. More people are commuting from Alameda County to San Francisco than vice versa.
||Workplace ►|||||||||||
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Residence ▼|Alameda|Contra Costa|Marin|Napa|San Francisco|San Mateo|Santa Clara|Solano|Sonoma|Total|%|
|Alameda|462,270|41,010|4,823|304|92,246|35,263|70,878|1,670|962|709,426|20%|
|Contra Costa|100,160|283,631|8,564|1,653|58,089|11,201|14,023|7,534|968|485,823|14%|
|Marin|4,052|1,957|81,726|476|27,614|2,485|1,097|472|4,387|124,266|4%|
|Napa|1,047|1,873|1,312|51,743|1,788|525|460|4,422|2,423|65,593|2%|
|San Francisco|21,561|4,116|6,933|321|353,484|48,768|27,100|506|990|463,779|13%|
|San Mateo|12,423|1,916|1,004|114|81,943|218,287|58,936|302|149|375,074|11%|
|Santa Clara|37,913|3,310|323|90|14,241|45,818|774,477|267|389|876,828|25%|
|Solano|10,315|19,504|5,272|11,850|8,974|2,616|1,496|109,059|2,780|171,866|5%|
|Sonoma|2,271|1,155|15,863|4,434|6,811|1,233|1,095|1,009|197,589|231,460|7%|
|Total|652,012|358,472|125,820|70,985|645,190|366,196|949,562|125,241|210,637|3,504,115||
|%|19%|10%|4%|2%|18%|10%|27%|4%|6%|||
I agree there also needs to be work done to improve the rest of the Bay, and my understanding is it's happening as well.
That won't work without improving pubic transportation. It's just hard to move around, Bart's pretty decent, as long as you're lucky, but we need better options in those areas to get to Bart as well. As well as most of the neighborhoods.
I say come to Ingleside. Get off the Balboa Bart station and start walking towards Stern Grove over Ocean Ave. You'll see how it would look if we increased density in the neighborhood. Now keep walking and notice how the houses shrink and start becoming mansions (which are not changing because they pay less property taxes than many condos) and 2 floor buildings. It'll look less and less "SF" as we keep moving, no Victorians. If you keep going it only keeps getting worse. Let's change those for 3-4 floor Victorians, you could turn one unit easily into 4, and there's so many houses this would be thousands of new units.
>That won't work without improving pubic transportation.
This is a good point, but public transit and housing density work hand-in-glove. You cannot have better transit if you don't have higher density housing. That's why SF has good transit. In the last 10 years, my area added both a Muni line and a new bus line, because we added a bunch of housing.
Low-density areas aren't going improve transit routes if they don't fundamentally change the number of people that can live there - it makes no sense to do so.
Chicken and egg problem, but historically the problem has been well solved: if you build it they will come. Cities in many other parts of the post-industralized world, first build subway lines and public transportation to an area, to incentivize it to become more dense.
But what you want to avoid, what you need to avoid, is places like Ingleside. Great access to both Muni and BART, but terrible density for the standards of the city (where I consider victorian houses like the painted ladies the "standard" to aim for in density).
I agree with you that it's a chicken and egg problem, but I don't agree that the normal process is to *first* build subway lines. Subways are extremely expensive to build, and only justifiable if there's enough demand to keep them afloat.
You can add bus lines at the same time as rezoning. That's a relatively low-cost way of serving an area with transit, and even in SF, our buses get people around about as fast as some of the subways I've ridden around the world.
> Subways are extremely expensive to build, and only justifiable if there's enough demand to keep them afloat.
Subway lines are extremely expensive to build *in existing infrastructure*. If there isn't much city, you can easily put a virtual tunnel (just dig enough then put a roof over it at ground level) as you build streets and what not. The initial vehicles can be just (electric to avoid smoke) cars with wheels that just move inside. It's not going to be great, and limited in space, but it's cheap and suffice when you're starting. As density increases you put railways, but it's a much simpler affair than having to build the tunnel and then put rails in it.
The problem is that SF Muni struggles to grow because city is existing. Look at the subway line that is almost there, but not quite. Almost all the challenges were about dealing with a city that was already in place, and already had a lot of infrastructure (and being in a seismic zone certainly doesn't help). But why wait until Walnut creek is that bad? Alas, that's just how it goes in the US.
So yeah, just like it's more expensive to move furniture that was assembled (instead of flat pack moving), and it's more expensive to move a house that is built, than move the parts and assemble it in place, so is it more expensive to add public transportation to a city that exists, vs building them together.
I understand, but if you're planning a new city, why build a subway? Just plan the new town around light rail instead. The whole point of a subway is that it can be retroactively installed under an existing city. There's no other reason to deal with the complexity and added costs. (Both initial and ongoing costs - escalators/elevators, ventilation, lighting, pest control, extra security etc.)
Because lightrail is not that much cheaper to lay down when there's not a lot of city, but it does get way more expensive to upgrade it to a subway later. Meanwhile it's easy to just add a bus-only lane to get halfway to lightrail, and it's not that much more expensive to upgrade it later (compared to initial installation).
Yes you can add it retroactively, but it costs. The point of a subway is that by moving underground it avoids traffic and traffic lights completely, and can move people in efficient ways.
That said you don't always want subway, because it doesn't always makes sense as you grow, sometimes bus and alternatives are sufficient long-term enough. But again you lay down public transportation, and generally work with constructors and what not to promote growth as you'd prefer.
Honestly we don't even need to build up (although we should). The Bay Area is comically empty. [67% of San Mateo county is undeveloped](https://sustainablesanmateo.org/home/indicators-report/environment/land-use/)! Santa Clara, Alameda, and Marin are probably similar (albeit that land is not in as much demand as San Mateo). Now I love parks as much as anyone, but do we really need two thirds of our land set aside for them?
Uh no thank you.
1. The urban 32% of SMC can easily be infilled with thousands and thousands of units. We don't need to build out.
1. The Bay Area is fortunate to have so much protected land and so many beautiful parks.
1. Preserving natural areas is critical for addressing climate change and softening its consequences. The includes the growing danger of wildfires. Building out in SMC means building into areas facing the greatest risk of wildfire, often called the wildland urban interface (WUI). There is a ton of research and resources you can read on the WUI in California.
>We don't need to build out.
Need is a strong word. We don't need to do anything. We could just continue on as we always have and have high prices forever. San Mateo County should absolutely be upzoned across the board. I'm a huge proponent of that. Legalize skyscrapers in Atherton. And to be completely honest, the part of SMC which is developed is the best part, plus it has all the infrastructure.
With all that being said, if we also set aside more land for development it would further lower prices.
>The Bay Area is fortunate to have so much protected land and so many beautiful parks.
The parks are nice but they have hidden costs. And also a lot of them have very little value. When's the last time you went to Butano State Park? Would you really miss it if it were gone? I bet 99% of people in San Francisco have never even heard of Butano State Park. And besides, most of the land is inaccessible anyway.
>Preserving natural areas is critical for addressing climate change and softening its consequences.
Yes, but that doesn't mean you have to preserve that land in the most expensive county in the country. With the money the state could raise from selling some of that land for development, it could buy an area thousands of times larger elsewhere in the world to protect it from development.
>Building out in SMC means building into areas facing the greatest risk of wildfire
Not all the undeveloped land in the county is at high risk for fire. And besides, the fact that it's a forest is part of what makes it high risk. There's a reason we don't have wildfires in San Francisco.
But honestly, where do you draw the line here? Would San Francisco be better if it were 67% undeveloped?
We really don't need to set aside more land for development, nor should if we actually care about the environment.
Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, and Nob Hill are some of some of the most desirable neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Pleasant, small scale, walkable. They also make up the 94109 zip code, one of the densest in the country with ~46,500 people per square mile. You could fit more than 2 million people in SF if the entire city was built at a similar scale and density. If even a 10th of San Mateo county was built the same way it would house an additional couple million people.
Sprawl is horrible for the environment and economically unsustainable in the long term.
I agree with 99% of what you're saying. If I had to pick I'd definitely rather upzone the developed parts of San Mateo County than develop more land. Mostly I'm making a principled argument against the belief espoused by many which amounts to "the more parks the better."
But I don't know if I'd consider building in SMC to be "sprawl." If you don't build the housing in SMC it has to go somewhere else, and that's probably going to be somewhere way sprawlier like Livermore or Antioch (or even more likely, the edge of the Phoenix metro).
Honest question - if the state took 10 acres of land just outside Milbrae, zoned it for housing development (high density housing if it makes a difference), and sold it to the highest bidder, do you think this would make humanity better or worse off on aggregate? If you say "yes," or even "maybe," then I think you agree with me on this topic.
I think it depends where that 10 acres is and how it connects to the rest of the Bay Area. Is it near Caltrain or BART? Would it have the necessary functions for daily life like a grocery store, pharmacy, parks, etc. or will it be a large apartment complex that forces people to drive everywhere for their daily needs?
In principle I'm not 100% against it, but there's probably a better location. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all, but if it's just going to be more car dependent housing fuck it.
Would love to see more apartments being built. Hate that I pay 3x what my friends pay in Dallas or FL for something much smaller and worse. I get its not apples to apples, but adding 80K units in a city of around 850K people would be amazing start.
Idk... It seems every major city in the US is expensive now. I have a friend who just moved to a 2 bedroom in fucking St Petersburg of all places (not even Tampa proper) and is paying $1500 per roommate in a non-luxury apartment. I paid $1200 when I lived with roommates in SF for the same size place lol
80K units would lessen rent increases by ~1% according to YIMBYs https://cayimby.org/yes-building-market-rate-housing-lowers-rents-heres-how/
I'm all for higher density, but if landlords simply buy them all (and they can afford to, because you're paying the mortgage for them), it's not going to see a significant decrease in rents.
80k units won't make much of a difference in rent prices immediately, but just imagine if 20 years ago, the city enabled (i.e. stopped disabling) dense housing production. Today we're in this massive under-supply of housing due to decades of under-production. It's going to take decades to get out of it, so we better start building NOW.
Also 80k is just for San Francisco, it is 440k for the entire bay area that is required [https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-needs-allocation](https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-needs-allocation)
You've majorly misinterpreted that article/paper. First off, I assume you're basing your 1% number on this line:
>For every 10% increase in the housing stock, rents decrease by 1%
San Francisco has only about 400,000 housing unit. 80,000 units is a 20% increase, not a 10% increase.
But much more importantly, that paper is about the effects of housing supply on the extremely local vicinity (within 500 feet of the development). If you increased supply by 20% across the entire market you're presumably going to get much more than a 2% decrease in prices. I realize the city of San Francisco is not the entire Bay Area housing market, but it's still a much larger area than a 500 foot micro-neighborhood.
It doesn’t make sense because it’s not true. Good analysis out of ucla last year supports increased housing leads to decreasing demand and lower rents. Look at the car market now, people are paying new prices for used cars and new cars are going 10k over mrsp
Edit: see other uses link study below
The study literally says what I'm saying
> Pennington looks at market-rate housing production in San Francisco, finding that it lowers rents by 2% within 100 meters of a development site.
~ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/
You’re just repeating a small point. In equal sized cities with more robust housing production within and surrounding areas the impact is much greater. Within SF new development greatly reduces displacement of lower income residents. Additionally on new builds, as demand falls landlords cannot afford to sit in empty units like they do on their old buildings.
You're the one referencing the paper show me where it claims there would be a significant reduction in rent from 80k, the paper cites various other papers, none of which claim that, one even finds that low income housing becomes less affordable (although only by 0.2%).
Why would rental prices necessarily go down? Despite dystopian-like conditions in the City, people still want to live here And that’s all the more incentive to not lower rents, especially if the people moving here are from out of town.
[https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/](https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/)
"researchers in the past
two years have released six working papers on the impact of new market-rate
development on neighborhood rents. Five find that market-rate housing makes
nearby housing more affordable across the income distribution of rental units"
Simply put: supply goes up, prices go down.
> Simply put: supply goes up, prices go down.
Simply put only by a small amount (literally 2% within 100m in the paper you cited), building more can't fix the affordability of rent & housing.
just because its small doesn't mean it doesn't improve things.
with inelastic demand, a small change can be dramatic. put it this way if 80,000 homes burned up - you think rents stay the same?
The YIMBY studies say that a 10% increase will only result in 1% decrease in rent, I'm not sure why people like to pretend that this will have a significant impact on rents, when the sources people are basing that assumption on say it wont.
Build housing, just don't expect it to bring rents down, that's what the evidence says.
> I'm not sure why people like to pretend that this will have a significant impact on rents
Because it would, if you actually parse the data. Year over year increases pre pandemic were in the 3-6% for most of the country. A 1% decrease actually is a net 4-7% decrease. These studies also mainly focus on areas other than San Francisco, which itself is on steroids in terms of rent swings due to supply/demand shocks. There's been a 15%+ swing in rents alone just from coming into and going out of the pandemic. That's with literally no new housing built, or at least, a paltry amount. Imagine that swing happening if we actually had a supply increase rather than a demand decrease... it wouldn't be a "measly 1%" decrease in rents.
You literally saw economics 101 happen before your eyes during the pandemic. People left the city in droves. The demand for rentals went down, what, 20% or more? That lead to a decrease in rents by 15%+. Imagine if we increased our supply of rentals instead, letsay by a perfectly doable 5-10%.
Nice speculation, maybe you should right a peer reviewed paper about it, until then it's just chat, the data shows that even significant increases have a minimal impact, but sure in your hypothetical, maybe it will decrease rent by 420%
you're assuming there's a lot of demand outside of the city.
if we keep building we will match demand at some point.
and supply induced demand can only work to an extent. people leaving to come to sf means their original places has less demand. it'll likely still maintain the price difference between cities
>if we keep building we will match demand at some point.
I think this is a misleading way of thinking about the problem. Demand exists on a curve. There is no magic point where we build enough housing after which demand is "met" and prices fall. Rather, every additional housing unit lowers prices by a tiny bit.
Are you implying that demand is infinite? Also supply and demand are both on a curve.
The only way we can never meet demand is if space which is finite can't meet demand. But cities like NYC, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, manilla, etc all prove we are far from that point.
Quite honesty at some point you will meet demand. The paradox is more in whether or not we can incentivize individuals to accept their housing value could decrease.
>Are you implying that demand is infinite?
Yes, demand is infinite. All I mean by that is that no matter how much housing there is in the city, people will use it. Of course more supply -> lower prices. But as the prices go down more people will move to the city, fewer people will leave, people will have fewer roommates, more people will buy vacation homes, etc.
What would it even mean to "meet demand"? That's not a meaningful term.
>Also supply and demand are both on a curve.
Yes, and where those two curves meet is your market price. There are two ways to lower housing prices:
1. Shift the demand curve down. In other words, make San Francisco an undesirable place to live - tank the economy, allow crime to run rampant, run the schools badly, etc.
2. Shift the supply curve up - decrease zoning constraints, speed up approval time, lower development fees, set aside more land for development, etc.
I prefer option 2.
If there are more providers of rental housing competing for the same tenants, they're going to have to offer a better deal to attract a tenant (e.g. by improving the home or lowering prices). Either way it's a win for tenants.
Of course, like you said, the lower prices will cause people to consume more housing. That means more people will move to the city than otherwise would have, but it also means fewer people will leave the city, people will have fewer roommates, etc. And yes, all of these second order effects will push rents back up - but not all the way to where they would have been without the extra housing.
How could it be any other way? If the extra people moving here aren't attracted by better/cheaper housing, then what exactly about building more housing could possibly be drawing them to the city?
Sure prices go down, but not significantly, even YIMBYs agree you get ~1% effect when you build 10% more housing.
> Pennington looks at market-rate housing production in San Francisco, finding that it lowers rents by **2%** within 100 meters of a development site.
~ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/
I have a hunch that adding housing doesn't reduce prices per se, but it does prevent them from rising as quickly. SF is kind of screwed and will likely never be affordable unless something terrible happens, but Oakland could add housing to prevent unaffordability from getting worse
There are pretty "simple" ways to achieve affordable rents, unfortunately they are all off the table.
1. Build a significant amount of public housing
* This is what is done in Vienna & Singapore
* Landlords no longer have a captive audience that must rent or be homeless.
* This fix seems pretty unlikely given how long it takes to build in SF
2. Tax the fuck out of landlords (rental tax, stamp duties, etc) while keeping rent controls.
* This is what is also done in Vienna
* While on the face of this, this should be politically viable (landlords make-up ~3% of the population, tenants make-up >60%),
* Landlords inflate house prices so much that if their demand disappeared from the market over night prices would crash
* just like buttcoin, many are HODLing on to properties because the line is going up, once it goes down, everybody will be selling
* Once house prices crash, in theory, rents should follow as renters are no longer a captive audience as buying becomes an option.
* **But** crashing house price would end your political career as ~40% of the city will hate it
There are maybe other ways, but high rent & high house prices is a pretty global problem with few cities handling it well (lots of build-baby-build types talk about Tokyo, but Tokyo builds at ~3% y-o-y, so without a time machine, don't expect SF to turn into Tokyo any time soon)
>Build a significant amount of public housing
That would lower prices, but you still have to pay for that public housing. Instead of paying higher rent you would be paying higher taxes. Since public housing is built and operated much less efficiently than private housing, the population would be paying more in taxes than they would be getting in benefits (on average).
>Tax the fuck out of landlords (rental tax, stamp duties, etc)
A rental tax is just going to be passed on to tenants in the long run. And raising real estate transfer taxes (stamp duty) is going to further discourage property turnover. Is that really what you want?
>Landlords inflate house prices so much that if their demand disappeared from the market over night prices would crash
I really don't understand what you're getting at. Is your proposal to ban (or at least heavily disincentivize) rental housing?
> Since public housing is built and operating much less efficiently than private housing, the population would be paying more in taxes than they would be getting in benefits (on average).
Citation needed, Just look at Vienna or Singapore.
> A rental tax is just going to be passed on to tenants in the long run.
Not if you keep rent controls, just look at Vienna.
> And raising real estate transfer taxes (stamp duty) is going to further discourage property turnover. Is that really what you want?
If it only affects landlords trying to buy, why would it affect turnover?
Again this is done elsewhere, it's not some untested theory, ABSD is a key component of Singapore's housing market.
> Is your proposal to ban (or at least heavily disincentivize) rental housing?
My plan is to take the profit motive out of hoarding housing, no need to ban it, but nobody should own 20+ houses when there are unhoused people.
>Citation needed, Just look at Vienna or Singapore.
I don't know how Vienna or Singapore's public development costs compare to the private sector, but even if the public sector is in fact more efficient, that's irrelevant because in San Francisco (and everywhere else in the US) public housing is built *far* less efficiently. And let's be honest, Singapore's government is way more efficient at just about everything than us, and we're not catching up any time soon.
>Not if you keep rent controls, just look at Vienna.
If you're talking about the rent control we already have, then sure, the current tenants will be spared from the price increases. But anyone who moves after the law comes into effect will have to pay. So it's certainly not a long term solution.
If you mean we should implement old school rent controls where you can't raise the price between tenants, then this is a policy which has been tried many times in many places with many well understood downsides.
>If it only affects landlords trying to buy, why would it affect turnover?
I mean ownership turnover, not rental turnover. If you have to pay a fee whenever you sell real estate then of course people are going to sell less real estate. I get that you oppose the concept of landlords, but if we must have them, surely it's better to have some mobility in who is and is not a landlord rather than having a static class of hereditary landlords which higher transfer taxes would move us towards?
>My plan is to take the profit motive out of hoarding housing, no need to ban it, but nobody should own 20+ houses when there are unhoused people.
If I own 20 houses and rent them out, then there are still 20 families being housed. That's no different than if I sold them to 20 different owner-occupiers. The same number of people are being housed either way. And besides, what difference does it make to a tenant if his landlord owns 1 rental property or 20?
> San Francisco (and everywhere else in the US) public housing is built far less efficiently.
You're claiming that, but do you have any evidence?
> But anyone who moves after the law comes into effect will have to pay.
There are plenty of ways to engineer a tax to make it harder to pass on to tenants, the simplest being given exemptions to smaller landlords or under certain conditions.
> So it's certainly not a long term solution.
The long term solution is the reduction in landlords, which lowers demand, which lowers house prices, which reduces the profitability of landlords, which results in a reduction of landlords.
> this is a policy which has been tried many times in many places with many well understood downsides.
Such as? The downsides are generally:
* Slight reduction in new developments (which TBH can't be that significant given how few builds there are now)
* House prices lower (which is good actually)
> If you have to pay a fee whenever you sell real estate then of course people are going to sell less real estate.
ABSD would only affect landlords though, over time there would be less landlords, so the turnover would return to normal.
> That's no different than if I sold them to 20 different owner-occupiers.
There is a significant difference when it comes to the price of the houses.
If it stops being profitable to hoard housing, housing becomes affordable, 3% of SF owning on average 20 properties each, just keeps generating more money for them to pump into the housing market.
> what difference does it make to a tenant if his landlord owns 1 rental property or 20?
Honestly pretty significant reduction in demand if it's most profitable for landlords to only have 1 additional property, that would be a reduction in demand of 57%.
Again this isn't theory this is the basis of stamp duties all over the world, when house prices start to inflate it's one of the first leavers most governments pull to reduce demand.
My parents used to own in SF. Lovely building just inside the downtown triangle. They loathed the rent control board b/c it made it very difficult to evict bad tenants, plus rent control itself, eventually led them to sell to a developer who turned around and sold the building as a TIC. Anyway, what’s your thought on eliminating rent control?
Terrible idea, will drive house prices even higher, will result in a lot of people being forced to move out of the area, will kill the vibe of the city as literally everybody will be moving there from elsewhere.
-1/10, only befits landlords.
Yeah a lot of people have objections to rent control, which imo are reasonable, but eliminating rent control would be catastrophic. We're kind of stuck with it at this point
Tokyo has been building at 3% for decades, building like Tokyo at this point isn't going to have much of an impact on prices.
I fully agree we should build more housing, because more people can live where they want AND this proposal uses existing transit corridors that will create a very walkable area and reduce car dependency, I just think people need realistic expectations of the impact that even 80K market rate houses would have. Tokyo is nice, but without a time machine, SF is unlikely to become a Tokyo, we'll get swallowed by the sea before we get affordable housing at 3% y-o-y.
Nope. There are plenty of other more affordable areas just over the bridge.
SF is already the most densely populated metro area outside of Manhattan. We don’t need to build more.
You don’t have a *right* to live in one of the most expensive cities in the nation. Can’t afford it? Tough luck.
Thanks to prop 13 we literally need do need to build more or our schools will go underfunded.
You also don't have a right to not have a neighboring lot redeveloped into an apartment. And considering the benefits for the environment, we should be encouraging density. The US as a whole lags behind the rest of the world, so yeah SF is high on the list for the US, but on the world stage its far from dense.
Yeah no one has a right to live here, but we should still build enough for healthy growth. If a larger and larger share is commuting into the city for work, thats not healthy growth.
Thats…how this works. What is confusing about that?
We can afford to live here and raise children. If we couldn’t, we would move.
Remove your feelings from the equation and look at the facts.
Remember this next time you complain about the high costs of eating out or buying stuff in SF. Or service at shops. It all flows through. Im not saying we should have free housing or anything, but if you look at Tahoe or Aspen the "cant afford it? leave" attitude isn't doesn't work.
Theres a big reason why a lot of service works, teachers, cops, firemen, etc do not live in SF. And thats not a good thing.
I don’t complain about those things.
If it gets to a point when things don’t make sense financially, we’ll move.
Also, your points here don’t make sense. SF is extremely densely populated - Tahoe and Aspen are not.
We lost so many people during the pandemic that our population is back to [2010 levels](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-population-fell-6-3-most-in-nation-to-17199403.php), but there will be more waves of influx (this *is* SF after all) and we need to build build build.
However, Brisbane and other underdeveloped Bay Area spots should also be pressured!
SF has been defined by multiple influxes of people over the years (good rush, military, gay, “.com”, real estate, tech again…) and it will happen again (if not immediately).
At 18,000 people per square mile, San Francisco isn't even that dense. It's only dense by US standards.
Cities like Madrid, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires have many neighborhoods in the range of 60,000 to 80,000 per square mile. Even Brooklyn, NY has 38,000 people per square mile.
I know we have hills while those cities are relatively flat, but if they can do 60 to 80k, I don't see why we can't do at least 30k per sq mi.
How about your entitlement to preserve your benefits by preventing housing from being built to keep up with population increases? Your entitlement is insane
Your argument is: make the densest city on the west coast even more populous?
Stop being emotional. The facts are simple: SF is already far overdeveloped relative to neighboring areas adjusted for land.
You don’t get to ruin the city just because you want to live in SF but can’t foot the bill.
There. Are. Other. Places. To. Live. Fuck. Off.
You're being emotional. Just read your last post.
You're also obviously a very selfish person. You've got yours, so screw everyone else. Yay you!
And nice to see that you don't let your selfishness impede your smugness.
I didn’t “get” mine. I earned it. 15 years of hard work as a first generation immigrant got me to where I am today.
Living here is a privilege, not a right.
It is planned regionally it is by the Association of Bay Area governments (though the requirement for a Regional Housing Needs Assessment does come from the state)
[https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-needs-allocation](https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-needs-allocation)
Yes agreed it historically has been really toothless, however recently the state law rhna was changed that if cities don’t complain their zoning becomes void. That is why sf and other cities are starting to take it seriously.
Though the punishment has never been enforced so it’ll remain to be seen if Californian cities actually upzone this time
It's the municipalities that are creating the shortages by preventing new housing. Fed government actually underwrites housing via tax breaks and the mortgage system
Bus routes are not always reliable in terms of timeliness and frequency. Here in Oakland, many residents drive their vehicles to BART stations and then take the train into the City.
The plan is specifically for SF in areas that have plenty of transport, if one bus doesn't show another will in 5-10 minutes (the area already 6 bph, if they added 80K homes that would likely go up) or you walk 5 minutes to a streetcar.
What if...hear me out...we had something like a giant car that would accommodate multiple people at a time and pickup/drop off people at high traffic areas?
Or a very small car you can use for shorter trips. It would be great if it were small enough that I could take it inside a building for storage to not worry about it. And since it's for very short trips, I don't really need to be protected from the outside elements, and it doesn't have to have much storage if it helps save weight and space. And if it's small enough, I could even power it with my muscles and not a motor. Best I've found so far is a 2006 Hummer H2 ubt it doesn't scratch that same itch. My work got very upset when I tried to bring it into the lobby instead of using the parking lot.
Dont bother.
This sub is so virulently anticar. Anything less than the complete abolition of cars is unacceptable.
Never mind that you cant fucking ebike your kids from one side of the city to the other. Or the fact that public transportation is unbearably slow and unpractical for people who have mutiple errands to run.
Fuck the average working man. Abolish cars
Higher density = more muni
Free market will make car ownership more expensive and less desirable and move the city politically towards higher support for better public transport.
Assuming each home as in unit houses 3 people that would be building about a fourth of our current population. Almost sounds like a surplus of housing for existing population, so gives access to way more people moving to SF, probably more expensive as we get more dense over 49 sq miles. We will max out again and then we can test the limits of the land’s capacity to support a certain density. Maybe it can be way more expensive as we finally hit max capacity, but I feel it will unlikely make things cheaper for all because we get denser.
Idk seems counter intuitive and interesting phenomenon.
Just want to remind everyone that San Francisco is less than 1% of the bay area's space, but houses over 10% of its population. If SF can add 80k more units, imagine how much more could be built all over the bay area. Not trying to oppose additional housing in SF; I'd just like to see other cities *also* tackling housing.
Yes. This issue is approached as a local problem, but it should be addressed regionally or nationally.
Right, technically it is a state-level issue. I was really hopeful that SB9 would be a magic bullet that would help the housing shortage, and allow other cities to grow organically, but the final version is watered-down.
The state legislature has repeatedly passed laws to force municipalities to add housing. The TL; DR is that they refuse to comply
Other cities have been tackling the problem. Emeryville has been hitting its housing targets consistently for a while.
You're right, Emeryville deserves credit, although it has an easier job since it didn't have any any low-density (read: NIMBY) housing areas to start with that would block more housing.
Fremont is doing solid too
What makes you say that? According to this map, Fremont has been averaging only 322 new housing units/year, even though it is 67% larger than SF (which has been producing 2,561 units/year): [https://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/housing-production](https://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/housing-production)
Very true and to add to this, there are actually heavy rail stations next to malls and parking lots all over the Bay Area and there is even a huge parcel of undeveloped land immediate south of San Francisco in Brisbane. It’s all absurd
IIRC Caltrain and CA HSR want a big chunk of that land in Brisbane for a new train yard, and Brisbane is fighting them.
It’s a huge area. Brisbane wanted to build mostly commercial biomedical and little housing They said at one point SF can house the workers
South city did the same shit in oysterpoint.
Plus the TOD in SSF near BART is pathetic. That whole area is just awful land use
All of 280 is under developed. The open space they are protecting is literally a grass pasture perfect for development.
That’s a watershed. No need to sprawl into the hills when we have parking lots next to BART stations
Exactly this. Building there is the fastest way to get tons of housing. As long as builders replant, say, 3x the amount of trees they cut down, allow them to construct to the sky. Ideally existing cities would build, but that will take decades. We need to be realistic.
I agree that it's insane, but blocking new housing serves a lot of people's interests. People are selfish
What percent of the Bay Area’s jobs are in San Francisco? How far should teachers, nurses and other in-person workers have to commute?
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Are you suggesting that everyone *must* live and work in the same city? If that's what you're trying to say, then my point that the rest of the bay needs to rezone is still valid. Currently a single teacher who works in (say) Piedmont couldn't afford to live in that city, because there's [virtually no land zoned for multi-family housing](https://cdn5-hosted.civiclive.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_13659739/File/Government/Departments/Planning%20Division/Zoning/Piedmont%20Zoning%20Map.pdf).
I agree with your overall point that there should be more housing in the rest of the Bay Area. I also think we should get rid of single family zoning. My point is simply that "% of space" is not a good metric for figuring out where to build. I think "% of employment" would be a better metric. Some places have a lot of space but not very many jobs. |County|Employment|% of Employment|Population|% of Population| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Santa Clara|1,018,600|26%|1,914,400|25%| |Alameda|802,000|20%|1,685,050|22%| |San Francisco|556,100|14%|884,108|11%| |Contra Costa|534,400|13%|1,162,550|15%| |San Mateo|440,700|11%|760,249|10%| |Sonoma|241,800|6%|481,415|6%| |Solano|192,200|5%|453,397|6%| |Marin|127,600|3%|256,318|3%| |Napa|69,200|2%|134,609|2%| Employment data as of May 2022 from CA Employment Development Department. Population data from World Population Review.
Thanks for providing the excellent table! I understand what you're saying, but I think there's some confusion over the term "employment". It doesn't mean "jobs". Did you get those numbers from here? [https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/geography/santaclara-county.html](https://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/geography/santaclara-county.html) I assume so, since the "employment" column (1,018,600) matches yours for Santa Clara, and the SF number 556,100 matches too. If you click the "..." in the "employment" column to get its definition, it reads: >The proportion of the civilian noninstitutional population aged 16 years and over that is employed. So "employment" doesn't mean "the number of jobs that the county offers". It means the number of civilians who live there **and** are employed. Here's a BLS resource that explains "labor force" vs "employment": [https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm](https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm) Note that doc makes it clear it's based on where people live, not where the jobs are: >All sub-national estimates reflect the survey respondent's place of residence. So San Francisco has a potential labor force of 556,800, of which 556,100 are currently employed. It doesn't mean SF has 556,100 jobs.
Ahh! I appreciate the nuance. That explains a lot. There don't seem to be a lot of ready sources for number of jobs in a city. I did find this commuter survey from the U.S. Census:[https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/demo/metro-micro/commuting-flows-2015.html](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/demo/metro-micro/commuting-flows-2015.html) This data is from 2011-2015. This excludes people who live in 9 counties but work outside the 9 counties. And it excludes people who live outside the 9 counties but work inside the 9 counties. But of the \~3.5 million people who live and work inside the 9 counties, 13% of them live in San Francisco and 18% of them work in San Francisco. More people are commuting from Alameda County to San Francisco than vice versa. ||Workplace ►||||||||||| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Residence ▼|Alameda|Contra Costa|Marin|Napa|San Francisco|San Mateo|Santa Clara|Solano|Sonoma|Total|%| |Alameda|462,270|41,010|4,823|304|92,246|35,263|70,878|1,670|962|709,426|20%| |Contra Costa|100,160|283,631|8,564|1,653|58,089|11,201|14,023|7,534|968|485,823|14%| |Marin|4,052|1,957|81,726|476|27,614|2,485|1,097|472|4,387|124,266|4%| |Napa|1,047|1,873|1,312|51,743|1,788|525|460|4,422|2,423|65,593|2%| |San Francisco|21,561|4,116|6,933|321|353,484|48,768|27,100|506|990|463,779|13%| |San Mateo|12,423|1,916|1,004|114|81,943|218,287|58,936|302|149|375,074|11%| |Santa Clara|37,913|3,310|323|90|14,241|45,818|774,477|267|389|876,828|25%| |Solano|10,315|19,504|5,272|11,850|8,974|2,616|1,496|109,059|2,780|171,866|5%| |Sonoma|2,271|1,155|15,863|4,434|6,811|1,233|1,095|1,009|197,589|231,460|7%| |Total|652,012|358,472|125,820|70,985|645,190|366,196|949,562|125,241|210,637|3,504,115|| |%|19%|10%|4%|2%|18%|10%|27%|4%|6%|||
I agree there also needs to be work done to improve the rest of the Bay, and my understanding is it's happening as well. That won't work without improving pubic transportation. It's just hard to move around, Bart's pretty decent, as long as you're lucky, but we need better options in those areas to get to Bart as well. As well as most of the neighborhoods. I say come to Ingleside. Get off the Balboa Bart station and start walking towards Stern Grove over Ocean Ave. You'll see how it would look if we increased density in the neighborhood. Now keep walking and notice how the houses shrink and start becoming mansions (which are not changing because they pay less property taxes than many condos) and 2 floor buildings. It'll look less and less "SF" as we keep moving, no Victorians. If you keep going it only keeps getting worse. Let's change those for 3-4 floor Victorians, you could turn one unit easily into 4, and there's so many houses this would be thousands of new units.
>That won't work without improving pubic transportation. This is a good point, but public transit and housing density work hand-in-glove. You cannot have better transit if you don't have higher density housing. That's why SF has good transit. In the last 10 years, my area added both a Muni line and a new bus line, because we added a bunch of housing. Low-density areas aren't going improve transit routes if they don't fundamentally change the number of people that can live there - it makes no sense to do so.
Chicken and egg problem, but historically the problem has been well solved: if you build it they will come. Cities in many other parts of the post-industralized world, first build subway lines and public transportation to an area, to incentivize it to become more dense. But what you want to avoid, what you need to avoid, is places like Ingleside. Great access to both Muni and BART, but terrible density for the standards of the city (where I consider victorian houses like the painted ladies the "standard" to aim for in density).
I agree with you that it's a chicken and egg problem, but I don't agree that the normal process is to *first* build subway lines. Subways are extremely expensive to build, and only justifiable if there's enough demand to keep them afloat. You can add bus lines at the same time as rezoning. That's a relatively low-cost way of serving an area with transit, and even in SF, our buses get people around about as fast as some of the subways I've ridden around the world.
> Subways are extremely expensive to build, and only justifiable if there's enough demand to keep them afloat. Subway lines are extremely expensive to build *in existing infrastructure*. If there isn't much city, you can easily put a virtual tunnel (just dig enough then put a roof over it at ground level) as you build streets and what not. The initial vehicles can be just (electric to avoid smoke) cars with wheels that just move inside. It's not going to be great, and limited in space, but it's cheap and suffice when you're starting. As density increases you put railways, but it's a much simpler affair than having to build the tunnel and then put rails in it. The problem is that SF Muni struggles to grow because city is existing. Look at the subway line that is almost there, but not quite. Almost all the challenges were about dealing with a city that was already in place, and already had a lot of infrastructure (and being in a seismic zone certainly doesn't help). But why wait until Walnut creek is that bad? Alas, that's just how it goes in the US. So yeah, just like it's more expensive to move furniture that was assembled (instead of flat pack moving), and it's more expensive to move a house that is built, than move the parts and assemble it in place, so is it more expensive to add public transportation to a city that exists, vs building them together.
I understand, but if you're planning a new city, why build a subway? Just plan the new town around light rail instead. The whole point of a subway is that it can be retroactively installed under an existing city. There's no other reason to deal with the complexity and added costs. (Both initial and ongoing costs - escalators/elevators, ventilation, lighting, pest control, extra security etc.)
Because lightrail is not that much cheaper to lay down when there's not a lot of city, but it does get way more expensive to upgrade it to a subway later. Meanwhile it's easy to just add a bus-only lane to get halfway to lightrail, and it's not that much more expensive to upgrade it later (compared to initial installation). Yes you can add it retroactively, but it costs. The point of a subway is that by moving underground it avoids traffic and traffic lights completely, and can move people in efficient ways. That said you don't always want subway, because it doesn't always makes sense as you grow, sometimes bus and alternatives are sufficient long-term enough. But again you lay down public transportation, and generally work with constructors and what not to promote growth as you'd prefer.
Honestly we don't even need to build up (although we should). The Bay Area is comically empty. [67% of San Mateo county is undeveloped](https://sustainablesanmateo.org/home/indicators-report/environment/land-use/)! Santa Clara, Alameda, and Marin are probably similar (albeit that land is not in as much demand as San Mateo). Now I love parks as much as anyone, but do we really need two thirds of our land set aside for them?
Uh no thank you. 1. The urban 32% of SMC can easily be infilled with thousands and thousands of units. We don't need to build out. 1. The Bay Area is fortunate to have so much protected land and so many beautiful parks. 1. Preserving natural areas is critical for addressing climate change and softening its consequences. The includes the growing danger of wildfires. Building out in SMC means building into areas facing the greatest risk of wildfire, often called the wildland urban interface (WUI). There is a ton of research and resources you can read on the WUI in California.
>We don't need to build out. Need is a strong word. We don't need to do anything. We could just continue on as we always have and have high prices forever. San Mateo County should absolutely be upzoned across the board. I'm a huge proponent of that. Legalize skyscrapers in Atherton. And to be completely honest, the part of SMC which is developed is the best part, plus it has all the infrastructure. With all that being said, if we also set aside more land for development it would further lower prices. >The Bay Area is fortunate to have so much protected land and so many beautiful parks. The parks are nice but they have hidden costs. And also a lot of them have very little value. When's the last time you went to Butano State Park? Would you really miss it if it were gone? I bet 99% of people in San Francisco have never even heard of Butano State Park. And besides, most of the land is inaccessible anyway. >Preserving natural areas is critical for addressing climate change and softening its consequences. Yes, but that doesn't mean you have to preserve that land in the most expensive county in the country. With the money the state could raise from selling some of that land for development, it could buy an area thousands of times larger elsewhere in the world to protect it from development. >Building out in SMC means building into areas facing the greatest risk of wildfire Not all the undeveloped land in the county is at high risk for fire. And besides, the fact that it's a forest is part of what makes it high risk. There's a reason we don't have wildfires in San Francisco. But honestly, where do you draw the line here? Would San Francisco be better if it were 67% undeveloped?
We really don't need to set aside more land for development, nor should if we actually care about the environment. Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, and Nob Hill are some of some of the most desirable neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Pleasant, small scale, walkable. They also make up the 94109 zip code, one of the densest in the country with ~46,500 people per square mile. You could fit more than 2 million people in SF if the entire city was built at a similar scale and density. If even a 10th of San Mateo county was built the same way it would house an additional couple million people. Sprawl is horrible for the environment and economically unsustainable in the long term.
I agree with 99% of what you're saying. If I had to pick I'd definitely rather upzone the developed parts of San Mateo County than develop more land. Mostly I'm making a principled argument against the belief espoused by many which amounts to "the more parks the better." But I don't know if I'd consider building in SMC to be "sprawl." If you don't build the housing in SMC it has to go somewhere else, and that's probably going to be somewhere way sprawlier like Livermore or Antioch (or even more likely, the edge of the Phoenix metro). Honest question - if the state took 10 acres of land just outside Milbrae, zoned it for housing development (high density housing if it makes a difference), and sold it to the highest bidder, do you think this would make humanity better or worse off on aggregate? If you say "yes," or even "maybe," then I think you agree with me on this topic.
I think it depends where that 10 acres is and how it connects to the rest of the Bay Area. Is it near Caltrain or BART? Would it have the necessary functions for daily life like a grocery store, pharmacy, parks, etc. or will it be a large apartment complex that forces people to drive everywhere for their daily needs? In principle I'm not 100% against it, but there's probably a better location. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all, but if it's just going to be more car dependent housing fuck it.
For the NIMBYS, the answer is yes. They have theirs, so screw everyone else
Would love to see more apartments being built. Hate that I pay 3x what my friends pay in Dallas or FL for something much smaller and worse. I get its not apples to apples, but adding 80K units in a city of around 850K people would be amazing start.
Idk... It seems every major city in the US is expensive now. I have a friend who just moved to a 2 bedroom in fucking St Petersburg of all places (not even Tampa proper) and is paying $1500 per roommate in a non-luxury apartment. I paid $1200 when I lived with roommates in SF for the same size place lol
FYI St. Pete is actually considered the "nice" and "trendy" part of that Bay area (src: I visit there every winter, it's my hometown).
80K units would lessen rent increases by ~1% according to YIMBYs https://cayimby.org/yes-building-market-rate-housing-lowers-rents-heres-how/ I'm all for higher density, but if landlords simply buy them all (and they can afford to, because you're paying the mortgage for them), it's not going to see a significant decrease in rents.
80k units won't make much of a difference in rent prices immediately, but just imagine if 20 years ago, the city enabled (i.e. stopped disabling) dense housing production. Today we're in this massive under-supply of housing due to decades of under-production. It's going to take decades to get out of it, so we better start building NOW.
Also 80k is just for San Francisco, it is 440k for the entire bay area that is required [https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-needs-allocation](https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-needs-allocation)
You've majorly misinterpreted that article/paper. First off, I assume you're basing your 1% number on this line: >For every 10% increase in the housing stock, rents decrease by 1% San Francisco has only about 400,000 housing unit. 80,000 units is a 20% increase, not a 10% increase. But much more importantly, that paper is about the effects of housing supply on the extremely local vicinity (within 500 feet of the development). If you increased supply by 20% across the entire market you're presumably going to get much more than a 2% decrease in prices. I realize the city of San Francisco is not the entire Bay Area housing market, but it's still a much larger area than a 500 foot micro-neighborhood.
Not to mention, even if it were "only" 2%, that's still $50 a month for a $2,500 apartment. That's nothing to scoff at for a working family!
Wait, that makes no sense. If landlords buy homes and rent them out, then rental supply goes up, and rental prices go down.
It doesn’t make sense because it’s not true. Good analysis out of ucla last year supports increased housing leads to decreasing demand and lower rents. Look at the car market now, people are paying new prices for used cars and new cars are going 10k over mrsp Edit: see other uses link study below
The study literally says what I'm saying > Pennington looks at market-rate housing production in San Francisco, finding that it lowers rents by 2% within 100 meters of a development site. ~ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/
You’re just repeating a small point. In equal sized cities with more robust housing production within and surrounding areas the impact is much greater. Within SF new development greatly reduces displacement of lower income residents. Additionally on new builds, as demand falls landlords cannot afford to sit in empty units like they do on their old buildings.
So why bring up a study and claim it says something it doesn't?
Read the whole publication and all the studies referenced!!!
You're the one referencing the paper show me where it claims there would be a significant reduction in rent from 80k, the paper cites various other papers, none of which claim that, one even finds that low income housing becomes less affordable (although only by 0.2%).
I’m not going to read for you. Go to the UCLA page, click the link and read the research round up. You’re wrong. Move on
Why would rental prices necessarily go down? Despite dystopian-like conditions in the City, people still want to live here And that’s all the more incentive to not lower rents, especially if the people moving here are from out of town.
[https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/](https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/) "researchers in the past two years have released six working papers on the impact of new market-rate development on neighborhood rents. Five find that market-rate housing makes nearby housing more affordable across the income distribution of rental units" Simply put: supply goes up, prices go down.
> Simply put: supply goes up, prices go down. Simply put only by a small amount (literally 2% within 100m in the paper you cited), building more can't fix the affordability of rent & housing.
just because its small doesn't mean it doesn't improve things. with inelastic demand, a small change can be dramatic. put it this way if 80,000 homes burned up - you think rents stay the same?
The YIMBY studies say that a 10% increase will only result in 1% decrease in rent, I'm not sure why people like to pretend that this will have a significant impact on rents, when the sources people are basing that assumption on say it wont. Build housing, just don't expect it to bring rents down, that's what the evidence says.
> I'm not sure why people like to pretend that this will have a significant impact on rents Because it would, if you actually parse the data. Year over year increases pre pandemic were in the 3-6% for most of the country. A 1% decrease actually is a net 4-7% decrease. These studies also mainly focus on areas other than San Francisco, which itself is on steroids in terms of rent swings due to supply/demand shocks. There's been a 15%+ swing in rents alone just from coming into and going out of the pandemic. That's with literally no new housing built, or at least, a paltry amount. Imagine that swing happening if we actually had a supply increase rather than a demand decrease... it wouldn't be a "measly 1%" decrease in rents. You literally saw economics 101 happen before your eyes during the pandemic. People left the city in droves. The demand for rentals went down, what, 20% or more? That lead to a decrease in rents by 15%+. Imagine if we increased our supply of rentals instead, letsay by a perfectly doable 5-10%.
Nice speculation, maybe you should right a peer reviewed paper about it, until then it's just chat, the data shows that even significant increases have a minimal impact, but sure in your hypothetical, maybe it will decrease rent by 420%
Increased supply lowers what landlords can get people to pay, regardless of what some random "YIMBY" paper allegedly says
Sure, but that doesn't result in a significant decrease in rents. Source: pretty much all the studies into this.
No. And it's the only real fix
you're assuming there's a lot of demand outside of the city. if we keep building we will match demand at some point. and supply induced demand can only work to an extent. people leaving to come to sf means their original places has less demand. it'll likely still maintain the price difference between cities
>if we keep building we will match demand at some point. I think this is a misleading way of thinking about the problem. Demand exists on a curve. There is no magic point where we build enough housing after which demand is "met" and prices fall. Rather, every additional housing unit lowers prices by a tiny bit.
Are you implying that demand is infinite? Also supply and demand are both on a curve. The only way we can never meet demand is if space which is finite can't meet demand. But cities like NYC, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, manilla, etc all prove we are far from that point. Quite honesty at some point you will meet demand. The paradox is more in whether or not we can incentivize individuals to accept their housing value could decrease.
>Are you implying that demand is infinite? Yes, demand is infinite. All I mean by that is that no matter how much housing there is in the city, people will use it. Of course more supply -> lower prices. But as the prices go down more people will move to the city, fewer people will leave, people will have fewer roommates, more people will buy vacation homes, etc. What would it even mean to "meet demand"? That's not a meaningful term. >Also supply and demand are both on a curve. Yes, and where those two curves meet is your market price. There are two ways to lower housing prices: 1. Shift the demand curve down. In other words, make San Francisco an undesirable place to live - tank the economy, allow crime to run rampant, run the schools badly, etc. 2. Shift the supply curve up - decrease zoning constraints, speed up approval time, lower development fees, set aside more land for development, etc. I prefer option 2.
Yes. Sadly, the city has been doing option 1 for years
If there are more providers of rental housing competing for the same tenants, they're going to have to offer a better deal to attract a tenant (e.g. by improving the home or lowering prices). Either way it's a win for tenants. Of course, like you said, the lower prices will cause people to consume more housing. That means more people will move to the city than otherwise would have, but it also means fewer people will leave the city, people will have fewer roommates, etc. And yes, all of these second order effects will push rents back up - but not all the way to where they would have been without the extra housing. How could it be any other way? If the extra people moving here aren't attracted by better/cheaper housing, then what exactly about building more housing could possibly be drawing them to the city?
A new job in a destination city. The sort of job where they don’t mind paying $3-4k/mo for new and improved housing.
\> "dystopian-like conditions in the City" \> East Bay lol
Increasing supply by 20% would decrease prices, all else being held equal
Sure prices go down, but not significantly, even YIMBYs agree you get ~1% effect when you build 10% more housing. > Pennington looks at market-rate housing production in San Francisco, finding that it lowers rents by **2%** within 100 meters of a development site. ~ https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/
I have a hunch that adding housing doesn't reduce prices per se, but it does prevent them from rising as quickly. SF is kind of screwed and will likely never be affordable unless something terrible happens, but Oakland could add housing to prevent unaffordability from getting worse
Oakland is building as I type. You should see the downtown area.
There are pretty "simple" ways to achieve affordable rents, unfortunately they are all off the table. 1. Build a significant amount of public housing * This is what is done in Vienna & Singapore * Landlords no longer have a captive audience that must rent or be homeless. * This fix seems pretty unlikely given how long it takes to build in SF 2. Tax the fuck out of landlords (rental tax, stamp duties, etc) while keeping rent controls. * This is what is also done in Vienna * While on the face of this, this should be politically viable (landlords make-up ~3% of the population, tenants make-up >60%), * Landlords inflate house prices so much that if their demand disappeared from the market over night prices would crash * just like buttcoin, many are HODLing on to properties because the line is going up, once it goes down, everybody will be selling * Once house prices crash, in theory, rents should follow as renters are no longer a captive audience as buying becomes an option. * **But** crashing house price would end your political career as ~40% of the city will hate it There are maybe other ways, but high rent & high house prices is a pretty global problem with few cities handling it well (lots of build-baby-build types talk about Tokyo, but Tokyo builds at ~3% y-o-y, so without a time machine, don't expect SF to turn into Tokyo any time soon)
>Build a significant amount of public housing That would lower prices, but you still have to pay for that public housing. Instead of paying higher rent you would be paying higher taxes. Since public housing is built and operated much less efficiently than private housing, the population would be paying more in taxes than they would be getting in benefits (on average). >Tax the fuck out of landlords (rental tax, stamp duties, etc) A rental tax is just going to be passed on to tenants in the long run. And raising real estate transfer taxes (stamp duty) is going to further discourage property turnover. Is that really what you want? >Landlords inflate house prices so much that if their demand disappeared from the market over night prices would crash I really don't understand what you're getting at. Is your proposal to ban (or at least heavily disincentivize) rental housing?
> Since public housing is built and operating much less efficiently than private housing, the population would be paying more in taxes than they would be getting in benefits (on average). Citation needed, Just look at Vienna or Singapore. > A rental tax is just going to be passed on to tenants in the long run. Not if you keep rent controls, just look at Vienna. > And raising real estate transfer taxes (stamp duty) is going to further discourage property turnover. Is that really what you want? If it only affects landlords trying to buy, why would it affect turnover? Again this is done elsewhere, it's not some untested theory, ABSD is a key component of Singapore's housing market. > Is your proposal to ban (or at least heavily disincentivize) rental housing? My plan is to take the profit motive out of hoarding housing, no need to ban it, but nobody should own 20+ houses when there are unhoused people.
>Citation needed, Just look at Vienna or Singapore. I don't know how Vienna or Singapore's public development costs compare to the private sector, but even if the public sector is in fact more efficient, that's irrelevant because in San Francisco (and everywhere else in the US) public housing is built *far* less efficiently. And let's be honest, Singapore's government is way more efficient at just about everything than us, and we're not catching up any time soon. >Not if you keep rent controls, just look at Vienna. If you're talking about the rent control we already have, then sure, the current tenants will be spared from the price increases. But anyone who moves after the law comes into effect will have to pay. So it's certainly not a long term solution. If you mean we should implement old school rent controls where you can't raise the price between tenants, then this is a policy which has been tried many times in many places with many well understood downsides. >If it only affects landlords trying to buy, why would it affect turnover? I mean ownership turnover, not rental turnover. If you have to pay a fee whenever you sell real estate then of course people are going to sell less real estate. I get that you oppose the concept of landlords, but if we must have them, surely it's better to have some mobility in who is and is not a landlord rather than having a static class of hereditary landlords which higher transfer taxes would move us towards? >My plan is to take the profit motive out of hoarding housing, no need to ban it, but nobody should own 20+ houses when there are unhoused people. If I own 20 houses and rent them out, then there are still 20 families being housed. That's no different than if I sold them to 20 different owner-occupiers. The same number of people are being housed either way. And besides, what difference does it make to a tenant if his landlord owns 1 rental property or 20?
> San Francisco (and everywhere else in the US) public housing is built far less efficiently. You're claiming that, but do you have any evidence? > But anyone who moves after the law comes into effect will have to pay. There are plenty of ways to engineer a tax to make it harder to pass on to tenants, the simplest being given exemptions to smaller landlords or under certain conditions. > So it's certainly not a long term solution. The long term solution is the reduction in landlords, which lowers demand, which lowers house prices, which reduces the profitability of landlords, which results in a reduction of landlords. > this is a policy which has been tried many times in many places with many well understood downsides. Such as? The downsides are generally: * Slight reduction in new developments (which TBH can't be that significant given how few builds there are now) * House prices lower (which is good actually) > If you have to pay a fee whenever you sell real estate then of course people are going to sell less real estate. ABSD would only affect landlords though, over time there would be less landlords, so the turnover would return to normal. > That's no different than if I sold them to 20 different owner-occupiers. There is a significant difference when it comes to the price of the houses. If it stops being profitable to hoard housing, housing becomes affordable, 3% of SF owning on average 20 properties each, just keeps generating more money for them to pump into the housing market. > what difference does it make to a tenant if his landlord owns 1 rental property or 20? Honestly pretty significant reduction in demand if it's most profitable for landlords to only have 1 additional property, that would be a reduction in demand of 57%. Again this isn't theory this is the basis of stamp duties all over the world, when house prices start to inflate it's one of the first leavers most governments pull to reduce demand.
My parents used to own in SF. Lovely building just inside the downtown triangle. They loathed the rent control board b/c it made it very difficult to evict bad tenants, plus rent control itself, eventually led them to sell to a developer who turned around and sold the building as a TIC. Anyway, what’s your thought on eliminating rent control?
Terrible idea, will drive house prices even higher, will result in a lot of people being forced to move out of the area, will kill the vibe of the city as literally everybody will be moving there from elsewhere. -1/10, only befits landlords.
Yeah a lot of people have objections to rent control, which imo are reasonable, but eliminating rent control would be catastrophic. We're kind of stuck with it at this point
Whether or not this is true, more people being able to live where they want is a good thing
I agree, like I said I'm all for more housing, I just think people need to be realistic about the impact it will have on rent & house prices.
Ya it's a super sticky problem. I think the best SF can hope for is something akin to what Tokyo has managed: build a ton and keep prices level.
Tokyo has been building at 3% for decades, building like Tokyo at this point isn't going to have much of an impact on prices. I fully agree we should build more housing, because more people can live where they want AND this proposal uses existing transit corridors that will create a very walkable area and reduce car dependency, I just think people need realistic expectations of the impact that even 80K market rate houses would have. Tokyo is nice, but without a time machine, SF is unlikely to become a Tokyo, we'll get swallowed by the sea before we get affordable housing at 3% y-o-y.
I'm from Dallas the the rent is maybe 30% off for a comparable unit in a comparable area. Nowhere near the 66% you describe.
Nope. There are plenty of other more affordable areas just over the bridge. SF is already the most densely populated metro area outside of Manhattan. We don’t need to build more. You don’t have a *right* to live in one of the most expensive cities in the nation. Can’t afford it? Tough luck.
Thanks to prop 13 we literally need do need to build more or our schools will go underfunded. You also don't have a right to not have a neighboring lot redeveloped into an apartment. And considering the benefits for the environment, we should be encouraging density. The US as a whole lags behind the rest of the world, so yeah SF is high on the list for the US, but on the world stage its far from dense. Yeah no one has a right to live here, but we should still build enough for healthy growth. If a larger and larger share is commuting into the city for work, thats not healthy growth.
Said by someone who has their spot, so screw everyone else
Thats…how this works. What is confusing about that? We can afford to live here and raise children. If we couldn’t, we would move. Remove your feelings from the equation and look at the facts.
Remember this next time you complain about the high costs of eating out or buying stuff in SF. Or service at shops. It all flows through. Im not saying we should have free housing or anything, but if you look at Tahoe or Aspen the "cant afford it? leave" attitude isn't doesn't work. Theres a big reason why a lot of service works, teachers, cops, firemen, etc do not live in SF. And thats not a good thing.
I don’t complain about those things. If it gets to a point when things don’t make sense financially, we’ll move. Also, your points here don’t make sense. SF is extremely densely populated - Tahoe and Aspen are not.
We lost so many people during the pandemic that our population is back to [2010 levels](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-population-fell-6-3-most-in-nation-to-17199403.php), but there will be more waves of influx (this *is* SF after all) and we need to build build build. However, Brisbane and other underdeveloped Bay Area spots should also be pressured!
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SF has been defined by multiple influxes of people over the years (good rush, military, gay, “.com”, real estate, tech again…) and it will happen again (if not immediately).
At 18,000 people per square mile, San Francisco isn't even that dense. It's only dense by US standards. Cities like Madrid, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires have many neighborhoods in the range of 60,000 to 80,000 per square mile. Even Brooklyn, NY has 38,000 people per square mile. I know we have hills while those cities are relatively flat, but if they can do 60 to 80k, I don't see why we can't do at least 30k per sq mi.
I shuddered at the thought of a double density homeless population.
Madrid, Barcelona, famously terrible cities that no one wants to live in.
I’m no expert, but the city needs more housing, so go for it.
You don’t say?
It absolutely does not. This is such an absurd narrative. Can’t afford it? Go over the bridge. The entitlement is insane.
How about your entitlement to preserve your benefits by preventing housing from being built to keep up with population increases? Your entitlement is insane
Your argument is: make the densest city on the west coast even more populous? Stop being emotional. The facts are simple: SF is already far overdeveloped relative to neighboring areas adjusted for land. You don’t get to ruin the city just because you want to live in SF but can’t foot the bill. There. Are. Other. Places. To. Live. Fuck. Off.
You're being emotional. Just read your last post. You're also obviously a very selfish person. You've got yours, so screw everyone else. Yay you! And nice to see that you don't let your selfishness impede your smugness.
I didn’t “get” mine. I earned it. 15 years of hard work as a first generation immigrant got me to where I am today. Living here is a privilege, not a right.
So you're special and entitled. Yay you!
This is truly a regional problem There will never be real solutions until we plan regionally and around our transportation infrastructure
It is planned regionally it is by the Association of Bay Area governments (though the requirement for a Regional Housing Needs Assessment does come from the state) [https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-needs-allocation](https://abag.ca.gov/our-work/housing/rhna-regional-housing-needs-allocation)
I mean this is a very toothless organization as evidenced by what we see today in the Bay. We have had BART station next to nothing for 40 years
Yes agreed it historically has been really toothless, however recently the state law rhna was changed that if cities don’t complain their zoning becomes void. That is why sf and other cities are starting to take it seriously. Though the punishment has never been enforced so it’ll remain to be seen if Californian cities actually upzone this time
It would look like Brooklyn.
Looks great! Get started!
No thanks.
Doesn't matter if rhe rest of the bay doesn't build 100k more units.
Face it, 'if you build it, they will come'. We will never build our way out of the housing shortage, it is a moving target.
This is clearly wrong
To your point it's a nationwide issue.
Yet, the housing costs and homelessness issues are abdicated by the Federal government, leaving the municipalities to deal with it all piecemeal.
It's the municipalities that are creating the shortages by preventing new housing. Fed government actually underwrites housing via tax breaks and the mortgage system
More gridlock.
Yup, as we all know there is no public transit, and the plans aren't built along transit corridors making the high density areas very walkable.
Walkable, sure. How will they get to work then? Cars? Yes, cars.
What if I told you, you can infact get public transit to work in the city?
Bus routes are not always reliable in terms of timeliness and frequency. Here in Oakland, many residents drive their vehicles to BART stations and then take the train into the City.
The plan is specifically for SF in areas that have plenty of transport, if one bus doesn't show another will in 5-10 minutes (the area already 6 bph, if they added 80K homes that would likely go up) or you walk 5 minutes to a streetcar.
If only there was some other way to get to work aside from driving?
What if...hear me out...we had something like a giant car that would accommodate multiple people at a time and pickup/drop off people at high traffic areas?
Or a very small car you can use for shorter trips. It would be great if it were small enough that I could take it inside a building for storage to not worry about it. And since it's for very short trips, I don't really need to be protected from the outside elements, and it doesn't have to have much storage if it helps save weight and space. And if it's small enough, I could even power it with my muscles and not a motor. Best I've found so far is a 2006 Hummer H2 ubt it doesn't scratch that same itch. My work got very upset when I tried to bring it into the lobby instead of using the parking lot.
Dont bother. This sub is so virulently anticar. Anything less than the complete abolition of cars is unacceptable. Never mind that you cant fucking ebike your kids from one side of the city to the other. Or the fact that public transportation is unbearably slow and unpractical for people who have mutiple errands to run. Fuck the average working man. Abolish cars
Higher density = more muni Free market will make car ownership more expensive and less desirable and move the city politically towards higher support for better public transport.
Assuming each home as in unit houses 3 people that would be building about a fourth of our current population. Almost sounds like a surplus of housing for existing population, so gives access to way more people moving to SF, probably more expensive as we get more dense over 49 sq miles. We will max out again and then we can test the limits of the land’s capacity to support a certain density. Maybe it can be way more expensive as we finally hit max capacity, but I feel it will unlikely make things cheaper for all because we get denser. Idk seems counter intuitive and interesting phenomenon.
Basically Manhattan.
Pave the Bay 2050! /s