So this morning I’m reading a diary on the Great Orange Satan about political doings over in Bagdad By The Bay. Though I grew up in the San Francisco area, I’m not really current on what’s happening, aside from the fact that I couldn’t afford a shack in SF itself anymore — notamidst all those Twitter-, Apple-, and Google-erati. So I gobble down the story, assume/accept the big-city, big-money corruption narrative, and move on.
Sucker!
I do have friends and relatives back by the Bay, as it turns out, and one of them has worked in city government for a long time.
He’s got first hand knowledge of San Francisco’s allegedly lost progressive mindset as it works within local government, and he weighed in.
I’ll excerpt his comment below, but first I just want to say this was an object lesson for me, a reminder of how easy it is trip up in the way that I’ve criticized some of the most extreme of the Bernie camp for doing.
That is: there’s a ton wrong with our politics, our society, and our engagement with each other. It’s so tempting to leap from a clear problem — the impact on middle and low income residents of the gentrification of San Francisco (and elsewhere!) driven by extreme income inequality — and assume that political actors are obviously complicit.
The reality? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t, and it takes some effort to figure out the five Ws and the H in each case. Worse yet — if the problem is truly complex, then political action is at best an incomplete tool to deal with the issue.
Which is why, in the end, I think Obama is a truly great president: he gets all of that. The need for policy and politics; the insufficiency of politics on its own; the agonizing difficulty of addressing any truly major problem — which translates into rage-inducing slowness to see the change take shape; and the need to keep plugging away.
I feel that rage often enough, and I know that I don’t have the qualities of character our president does, the off-the-charts focus and persistence required to make sh*t happen, and to wait — years if necessary, decades — to see the results.
I have high hopes for Hillary on this score. Not that I’ll agree with her on everything — I don’t and won’t, just as I haven’t always with Barack Hussein Obama. But I trust her (yes, that word) to pay attention, to know her stuff, to hire good, smart folks, and to soldier on and on and on — as the job and the world requires.
Here the sermon endeth…and an excerpt from my old Bay Area companion’s comment takes over:
I’ve worked on the financial administration side for the City of San Francisco for many years, and the truth is that under successive mayors and Boards, San Francisco has put more money behind progressive goals than almost any other city in the country.
The City spends billions of dollars a year on its amazing public health programs, including a universal health access program for City residents that predates and goes well beyond Obamacare, and many hundreds of millions of dollars on programs to help the poor and homeless, including thousands of units of housing for the poorest of the poor and people with severe mental illness and other health problems. The City spends hundreds of millions a year subsidizing its transit system and setting aside funds for children. The City spends hundreds of millions a year subsidizing its transit system and setting aside funds for children.
Mayor Lee …supported not just measures to attract and keep higher-paying tech jobs but also continued one of the largest and best City subsidized jobs programs in the country…
These are great progressive achievements….
You can read more at the link. The writer goes on to acknowledge that despite all this, the reality is that San Francisco’s housing costs put enormous stress on too many, and argues that the drivers of that are at best barely subject to direct political control — and that policy responses offer very tricky alternatives. The challenge for progressives, among whom he numbers himself is thus to..
examine what housing policies we should we be pushing for that can help the most people of different income levels that need housing (not just the poorest of the poor).
TL:DR: electioneering — and definitely punditizing — is easy. Governating is damn hard, which is something to be mindful of at this and every season.
Over to y’all.
Image: J. W. M. Turner, Dido Building Carthage, 1815.
Redshift
One of the many things Obama and his people have been amazingly good at is setting changes in motion that will be hard to stop, and will produce really big effects well after he is out of office. Many of the pieces of Obamacare are like that, climate change policies, criminal justice changes, raising taxes on the rich, the list goes on. It has really given me a new appreciation for the whole approach; much as I want to see the things I’m sure are needed happen now, the fact is that big changes can produce a backlash, and big changes that are made all at once can be changed back if the backlash is strong enough. Big changes that happen piece by piece, ratchet-fashion, mean that people get used to them as “the way things are,” and those who want to undo them have to deal with justifying their own changes, not just “let’s get rid of that.”
Brachiator
Related to the SF housing crisis, perhaps, is this recent story.
This problem has got to be exacerbated in expensive cities like San Francisco.
Earl
And what wanking that reply is. This isn’t tball. You don’t get points for trying. You get points for succeeding. And sf has continued its transformation into probably the least affordable city in America because of a steadfast refusal to build housing. Plus all the social ills of excessive generosity to the homeless attracting them here, including states like Nevada busing their mental patients to sf then dumping them. It’s all cute until you have to regularly worry about personal safety in the middle of the afternoon while on Market St. Fiance chased around car by junkie high on who-knows attempting to stab her with screwdriver. Person stabbed next to me on muni. Coworker assaulted walking to work from bart. etc etc etc.
I lived in one of the most desirable locations in the city across from an abandoned gas station surrounded by chain link fence. There has been an EIGHT YEAR AND COUNTING fight over tearing down the gas station and building desperately needed housing. You wouldn’t even be taking any housing away because, again, abandoned gas station.
Oh, and if he wants to discuss subsidizing transit, let’s start with how ludicrously expensive muni is as compared to all similar cities per vehicle-mile, and the disastrous management of public transit by sf government.
Mai.naem.mobile
I don’t claim to know much about high speed rail except that they use it in Japan and Europe. Wouldn’t having heavily subsidized hsr in the Bay area help with housing affordabilitu in cheaper areas outside SF?
Gin & Tonic
@Earl:
I read this factoid a while back and have mentioned it here a couple of times. If San Francisco doubled its population it would be half as dense as Manhattan.
Major Major Major Major
SPOILER ALERT: LONG RANT
Politics in SF is exhausting. Every generation thinks it’s invented noticing homeless people, so they criticize whatever’s being done to address it right now because people should try [insert something they’ve already tried] instead. As an example. Meanwhile tech bros who just moved here complain about having to step on shit while they’re headed to work, so we should just… what, spray the homeless people away with firehoses? So they get to play the rotating villain, going back to the days of semiconductor factories.
SF is an insanely progressive city, it’s true. Like most super progressive places (looking at you, liberal arts colleges), we then find weird things to complain about. There was a restaurant at Church & Market streets, great real estate, called Home. It was OK. Then it closed. Chipotle wanted to go in, but everybody got all pissy about having a chain there (no chains in the Castro! There’s definitely not a Soulcycle that replaced the Diesel store at Castro & Market right below the giant rainbow flag, oh wait). So now the building’s been shuttered for years and that entire part of the corner is a mini-tent city. But hey, at least we stopped Chipotle.
There’s a park nearby, Dolores Park, second-biggest in the city. They recently started a pilot program to rent out reservations for parts of the grass, you know, like you do with picnic tables. The usual suspects (middle-class white people, for the most part, anecdata) got all pissy about this. Are there reasons to be mad about it? Sure, I guess. I can see how philosophically you could think we shouldn’t rent out park space, I suppose. But that’s not the form the complaints took. People were saying it’s a symptom of how we’re selling the city to the tech companies and First They Came For The Parks and blah blah blah, despite the fact that Dolores Park hasn’t been a community location for years. It’s middle- to upper-class white and Asian people who want a place to drink and smoke pot on a sunny day complaining that the city might be trying to raise revenue to clean up after their fucking messes by renting out some of the spaces to other middle- to upper-class white and Asian people to drink and smoke pot.
Anyway, this is in Scott Weiner’s district, who’s currently running for state senate against another supervisor, Jane Kim. She slammed the parks department for this pilot program. The progressive activists here hate Weiner with a passion worse than they hate Trump with, so I think this is how their fire got turned on him (that and they want their free rightful spot in Dolores Park). But hey, they stopped some park reservations to clean up the mess and they stopped Chipotle.
(Rant about housing follows.)
There’s a huge coalition of people who align against any new project. Landowners don’t want the competition. Affordable housing activists want a lower percent of market-rate construction, or no construction at all. Environmentalists are for the most part being used as useful idiots by the landowners; California has plenty of review already, SF even more. Building managers who like having tenants in a bind are more than happy to (for example, based on a meeting I overheard) astroturf for residents complaining about ‘oh where will we park?’ if new condos go in. NIMBY’s who are all for transit expansion suddenly aren’t when it goes to Mountain View. So Google and Genentech and everybody charters buses because the transit infrastructure sucks, and then people get mad at the buses! It’s so dumb! And then there’s the IGMFY crowd on the peninsula with their stuff like minimum yard size and height restrictions on housing that are a de facto ban on density.
When you don’t have enough housing, the housing goes to people with money. This isn’t Uber’s fault or Google’s fault for having people that work at them, it’s not Airbnb’s fault for having people rent out apartments, it’s the fucking housing stock and transit infrastructure.
eponymous coward
From the Big Orange Satan link:
Would I live in a big-ass apartment complex Hong Kong/Singapore style if it meant I could live in a particular urban area like SF or Seattle affordably? OH FUCK YEAH. BRING IT ON.
This is in essence what I do now; I’m in a Seattle midrise condo rented out by an owner, and I ditched the car NY style in order to afford it. Zipcar/Car2Go + a bunch of car rental places near where I live make this feasible (and such that I can still drive if I want to). And having that sort of density means you need good mass transit, like you do in Hong Kong/Singapore… and it works.
Luthe
One of the major issues in San Francisco is the knee-jerk opposition to amending zoning laws to allow for taller buildings and more density. Housing prices are through the roof because the supply of available units is so low compared to the number of people who want/need to move to the city. The insistence of the surrounding communities on retaining low densities compounds this problem, as do the sprawling, low-rise “campuses” of the various tech companies.
There is no “easy” policy solution here, even if all the NIMBYS could magically be converted to the side of higher density. Luxury apartments are the big development trend right now (as a nice place to park money for foreign investors), so the city would have to put controls on them in order for more middle-class housing to be built. z This runs into takings issues, unfortunately, complicating matters further.
It’s a giant planning clusterfuck that will take years to resolve, if it ever does.
Amir Khalid
@Mai.naem.mobile:
High speed rail works great for city-to-city connections, where the distances are long and trains have time to get up to (and stay at) speed.. Not so great for city-to-suburb connections where you need to have many stops, often within a mile of each other.
bemused senior
@Gin & Tonic: Two words: earth quakes.
Trollhattan
SF isn’t like any other American city and it’s useless to apply other models to it; in particular, the housing problems aren’t solvable. So it will continue in its role as Disneyland for grownups. The end.
Gin & Tonic
@bemused senior: One word: Tokyo.
Cacti
@srv:
Stupid street people. How dare they offend my middle class sensibilities by existing.
Major Major Major Major
@eponymous coward: That’s exactly what the “moderate” community (Scott Weiner for example) would like to push, but when it’s a herculean effort to build even a 60-unit four-story block of condos, and you get pilloried as a conservative sellout Enemy Of The People, well.
Can’t wait to vote for that guy.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@efgoldman: Every city in the United States that is not a Superfund site, gangland, methville, or bankrupt is suffering from this. And it isn’t just kids.
Major Major Major Major
@Trollhattan: That link does not say what you say it says. At all.
Jeffro
OT but wow: anti-abortion GOP candidate’s wife goes public w/ her own abortion story…falls into same old nonsense, recommends visiting deeply unethical ‘pregnancy crisis centers’, etc.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/chatfield-abortion-story-alleged-threats
“abortion for me, but not for thee”, I guess
bemused senior
@Gin & Tonic: Not solved in Tokyo. It’s very expensive to build tall buildings that are earthquake safe. Doesn’t comport well with affordable housing.
Cacti
@Jeffro:
God intended for her to have an abortion, for his own glorious future purposes.
Brachiator
@Trollhattan:
I don’t know. Some ways it seems similar to Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, Tokyo.
Major Major Major Major
Oakland build 765 units of housing in 2014. Way to address the problem, guys.
Poopyman
@eponymous coward:
But you wouldn’t. That kind of increase in density fundamentally changes the urban area.
Jeffro
@Cacti:
She actually says something to that effect in her FB post. How she reconciles with a god who’d have her be “taken advantage of”, resulting in pregnancy, resulting in an abortion, I’ll never understand. Even as an object lesson to others – couldn’t her god have inspired someone to write an amazing work of fiction w/ those events, instead of putting her through this and (in her view) taking a life? Silly and sad.
I have to wonder if anyone from PP, Emily’s List, or the like will point out: whatever ‘taken advantage of’ means, the woman in question did not want the child, had an abortion very early in the pregnancy (as 91% are), and was able to move on to a fulfilling life. My guess – zero, unfortunately.
Iowa Old Lady
@Jeffro: One of the most interesting dodges I’ve seen is the claim not just that it was fine for them to make their own choice, but that the medical procedure they had wasn’t an abortion at all. Ending an ectopic pregnancy, for instance, apparently doesn’t count though if you believe life begins when the egg is fertilized and everything after that is murder, it should.
dollared
@Brachiator: The word “American” is pretty important there.
D58826
The people have spoken. Is Bernie going to give back the delegate.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/25/1530827/-Here-s-one-more-big-reason-to-kill-the-caucuses
Cacti
@Jeffro:
Makes as much sense as calling the Bible a pro-life book, when Yahweh routinely slaughters children en masse or gives his chosen people sanction to do so.
Trollhattan
@Brachiator:
I don’t know the area of those cities, but SF is tiny at 46.87 sq mi, a peninsula physically connected only to another yoogely expensive county and having very limited transportation in and out. Double the housing units and I’ll bet my quatloos the housing affordability will remain below 10%.
Does the US have another metropolitan area where the city-county for which its named is such a small percentage of the area and population? SF simply is not important in itself, it’s the SF MSA that matters. 4.7 million vs 850k people; 2,500 vs. 47 sq mi; 1,880 vs 18,400 residents per square mile. I’m not seeing added SF housing density fixing anything.
Let’s not fuck with San Francisco–it has ten times the population density of the SF MSA. Make the whole MSA affordable and make it easier to commute to SF jobs. That’s the only viable strategy; trying to make SF affordable is something ignorant people fantasize about.
Trollhattan
@srv:
Wow, you’re dumber than I thought; which means at this point knowledge literally falls into you and is forever lost. You’re the Singularity of Stupid ™. There should be a tshirt in the BJuice store.
Kyle
@Major Major Major Major: I’ve lived in the Dogpatch in SF for seven years, and if it seems there is nothing but housing construction going on in the City, it seems that’s true everywhere in SF. It hasn’t seemed to help with the prices tho. There’s still a large number of people moving into the City.
I’ll second the didgust with Scott Weiner. While I’ve never had the inclination to stroll the streets nude, his drive to outlaw it was all I needed of him. If he wants to do crap like that, he can move to Texas. This is San Francisco, not Dallas.
Tom Levenson
@Trollhattan: I’m so going to steal “Singularity of Stupid”
Trollhattan
@Tom Levenson:
With my blessings, good sir!
CONGRATULATIONS!
After my last trip back up to the Bay Area two years ago I realized, as we were leaving, that I was fucking grateful I didn’t live in SF anymore. I’ll be taking one more trip up there this summer. I expect to never return.
Wish y’all could have seen it back in the 80s and 90s before the greedheads and techbros came in and turned it into the soulless catastrophe it is today. Used to be a workingman’s town, believe it or not. Solid middle class, most of it. It’s really sad.
Major Major Major Major
@Kyle: The nudity thing was dumb, but I’ll be voting for the candidate that likes building housing, which is Scott Weiner.
SF didn’t really start building stuff again until 2010, and while this is increasing it’s not exactly at a fevered pace and more people are moving in than capacity is being increased. We have a four-decade hole to build our way out of in the greater Bay Area. Like Trollhatan said, SF can’t do all of the heavy lifting, though it seems to be the only place willing to build. 3,500 or so housing units came online in SF in 2014 compared to 750 in all of Oakland.
Trollhattan
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
I began visiting in the days of Herb Caen, Tower Records (Columbus at Bay), Winterland (missed out on the Fillmore), Tommaso’s and the Condor Club. We could leave campus and be at the Broadway Exit in 80 minutes and then drive (and park!) wherever we needed to go (watch out for the BART excavations). Niners were ignored in favor of the then-blue collar Raiders. SF living was the dream of scores of friends, many of whom were able to do just that, “affordably” although even then the delta between living there and anywhere not named Atherton was darn big.
A twenty-something with the same goal had better be able to land a mid-six-figure salary or plan on hot-bunking with a dozen roommates. It’s sad, but not surprising given the growth across the Bay and to the south.
jl
Don’t see why we need to Hong-Kong-ize SF. The height limits in many neighborhoods are very low, and just another story or two would make a difference. Except then, where would be people park. The mass transit here is OK, but not really NYC OK for commuting. AFAIK, SF is the only large city that cannot pass a dedicated funding source for support, so it limps along out of the general fund (someone correct me if that has changed, but last I checked a lot big businesses located here benefit a lot from public money delivering workers to their doors, but they fight a dedicated transit tax tooth and nail). Landowners and tenants don’t want value of property and parcels reduced through loss of ‘viewshed’ and neighborhood amenities.
And SF always gets attention during booms, when the housing and parking problems become ridiculous. During recessions, the market tanks. Small and medium size developers take into account the extreme instability of the real estate market, and only want to invest when they see lower risk (ie. they try to guess beginning of a long boom). That is one reason big developers aiming for long time horizon deep pocket rich renters and buyers are such big players in the market. (Edit: being a very small, isolated tip of a peninsula has consequences during recessions as well as during booms)
Like other commenters, I think a lot of the SF City government is corrupt in a shiny new economy way. Airbnb has big influence in determining their lack of regulation in this city, and Lee is a big recipient of Airbnb money.
Sure, SF is progressive, but money talks very loudly here, as it does in other large cities, if you peek below the surface and that (often insufferably incoherent ans self righteous, and self-congratulatory) drivel our local pols pump out.
jl
@CONGRATULATIONS!: That is true. SF used to be a blue collar working person’s city. And very corrupt in an old style East Cost Big City sort of way. And always propped up by favors from state government because of rich people living here.
As I have typed before, the damn thing was almost destroyed during the first year of the Gold Rush, with people leaving to mine or do business in the gold fields. And shipping went to Antioch and Vallejo since SF had no good port for ocean going ships to offload cargo to river steamers or wagons with direct route to Sacramento. A few money bags invested in The Great Wharf Race, and won, which is why the whole eastern shore ended up a floating city of rotting wharves sitting over mudflats
I sometimes think it would have been better if the SF money bags had lost The Great Wharf Race and gone bust. Then we could have the SF Great Sand Dunes National Park, the The City would be real Golden Gate around Benicia, Martinez and Vallejo, the Istanbul of California. Seems like that would be fun. Weather suitable for human beings exists just two or three miles east of here.
Annie
I live in San Francisco, have since 1980. I’d like to point out that the City is 7 miles square. It’s bounded on 3 sides by water (and the southern boundary is another county). There’s limited space to build more housing unless you build up. I also think that city government gets blamed for a lot of things that a city alone can’t do much about.
This city is certainly not “Disneyland for grownups.” That’s the kind of silly epigraph that makes its author feel superior but doesn’t provide any information. There are plenty of people who live here and work ordinary jobs, we just don’t make headlines. Yes, I enjoy the museums and performing arts. So do a lot of people who live here. And for all the demonizing of AirBnb, some ordinary people are able to stay here because once in a while they list a spare room on AirBnb.
jl
@Annie:
“And for all the demonizing of AirBnb, some ordinary people are able to stay here because once in a while they list a spare room on AirBnb.”
That is fine. But what is happening is owners turning units into permanent AirBnb rooms, which is a result of inadequate regulation. IMHO, AirBnb bought a few pols around here (including Lee) and has run some dishonest PR campaigns to keep voters and sups from passing adequate regulations.
Edit: and regular people having trouble affording owning any property at all in SF is the underlying problem that needs to be solved. A significant proportion of ordinary working people and pensioners only getting by on AirBnb money for a spare room is like putting a bandaid on internal bleeding, IMHO. (edit2″ I predict that business plan for ordinary people will fail catastrophically, after the next big recession that hits the area heard, when empty rooms are all over the place for months at a time)
Edit: for other SFers, I speak as someone living out in the far W Avenues.
Kyle
@Annie: Your point is correct, but the City is 49 square miles (it’s 7 miles X 7 miles). I know this because I made the same error the other day and was corrected. :)
Trollhattan
@Annie:
If you say so, but steadily for at least half a century it’s become less “livable” due to the double-whammy of housing affordability and transportation in and out of the city. Show me when and how the trajectory of these factors reverse and perhaps then it can be reevaluated. “Superior” and realistic are sometimes confused for one another.
If it makes anybody feel better, Manhattan’s population density is 72,033 per square mile.
Major Major Major Major
@Trollhattan: that’s true. And if they’d spent the last half century building enough housing and transit infrastructure, we wouldn’t have this problem. No time like the present.
randy khan
@jl:
Sadly, it’s not the only city/metro area with this issue – D.C. is the same way. Essentially, the Metro board is forced to accept whatever level of funding the most penurious local jurisdiction is willing to provide. It’s scandalous, and one of the reasons for the current maintenance crisis.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: Right now, no new money for BART, no new money for buses, no new money for roads. And apparently no money for finishing some bikelane upgrades I see on my way to work. They are finishing a lot of intersection with new traffic lights, and finishing some resurfacing. BART got its order in for a fleet of new cars. We will have a palatial new transit terminal down town, but won;t do much unless bullet train gets here, or SF can spring for new subways. After that, nothing, and therefor nothing near what is needed in the future.
jl
@randy khan: The mayor before Willie Brown, Frank Jordan, tried to take advantage of that lack of funding to break muni union and maybe privatize it. He starved the muni in an attempt to foster public outrage and spark a muni driver and mechanic strike. The dopey plan failed miserably. Maybe partly because it got out that a bunch of new bus engines and light rail motors were sitting useless after Jordan cut funds to install them.
Not only does the lack of dedicated funding source prevent adequate planning, it make the transit system vulnerable to stupid political tricks.
Trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
The other factor that I believe locks in SF’s affordability and isolation: fifty years ago it was an expensive, crowded city surrounded by (mostly) much less expensive cities. Today it’s surrounded by very expensive to off-the-charts expensive cities. Without new heavily subsidized housing with significant low- and middle-income setasides (but, where?) I don’t see how the needle moves even a tiny amount. Ever since Saint Ronny and his followers dismantled HUD, there’s been no significant federal funding mechanism, and I don’t know the status of CalHFA but doubt they’re a big enough player.
I worked at a CDC developing affordable housing and water/wastewater systems for fifteen years, so this isn’t completely out of my wheelhouse. Planners may be even more depressing to be around than economists.
Tripod
@Trollhattan:
When and how? An event like 4/18/1906 is the how, when is the question.
Jeffro
@Iowa Old Lady:
I wonder how they rationalize this – maybe as an allowable ‘to save the life of the mother’ exception?
Amaranthine RBG
@jl: Depends you you define “used to be” I guess.
I’ve lived in SF for 30 years. It was never “affordable.” Even 30 years ago the “working class” ares of Glen Park, out Mission, etc. were not cheap. There have been a number of times when it was less extreme than it is now, but that’s it.
An old timer that lived next to me in Cole Valley many years ago talked about how he and his brothers used to hunt rabbits out in the sand dunes in the Sunset when they were kids.
The idea that everyone should be able to live in San Francisco if they want is just silly. Tech Bubble II is already starting to deflate a bit. This, too, shall pass.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Mai.naem.mobile: Or they could build more housing in the Bay proper so middle class people dont’have to live hundreds of miles away.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Amaranthine RBG: 30 years ago there were plenty of cheaper places to live around the Bay that weren’t in SF. Those overflow areas are disappearing.
jl
@Amaranthine RBG: 30 years ago was 1985. Gentrification under way. Before then, obviously. There were oldsters in my family who fled SF back in the 50s, 60s and 70s when they thought SF would become some run down working-poor (then, after the late 60s, hippie and drug addict infested ) slum like some big old ex-industrial cities in New Jersey.
jl
@Amaranthine RBG:
” everyone should be able to live in San Francisco if they want is just silly. ”
But also, having the cops, firefighters, teachers, nurses, cooks and other normal working people have to commute 40 miles or more into town is also silly, and bad for many reasons. SF is not what it is today by some law of economics or nature. Conscious decisions were made on what kind of development to subsidies, and how to subsidize it. And who to kick out with aforesaid subsidized commercial development, what exactly F-all would not be jack shit done at all to help the displaced.
Luthe
@randy khan: DC has the excuse of being run by Congress, with all the stupid and political maneuvering that comes with it. San Francisco has no such excuse.
@Trollhattan: Revitalizing publically-funded housing is basically the only way forward in a case like San Francisco. Increasing the supply of housing overall is not guaranteed to work because developers will put in the most expensive housing they can get away with, which doesn’t increase the affordable housing supply. Demanding set-asides in exchange for density bonuses will throw a few more affordable units into the mix, but a twenty percent set-aside in a hundred-unit development is still a drop in the bucket in the face of the demand for affordable units.
The market isn’t going to save us by building the way out of this mess. It has no incentive to.build housing for the poor and the middle-class. If you want housing for all, we need either 1) publicly built, publicly funded housing 2) public-private partnerships to build and fund housing, or 3) expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit to cover all municipalities and a much wider income range. The LIHTC strategy is the most politically palatable, as it works through the market and by giving rich people tax breaks, but it also relies on public housing authorities having their acts together.
As I said, tough nut to crack. /urban planner who has worked in affordable housing
Bill_D
@Cacti:
The general run of poor folks in SF look nothing like the street people.
@Kyle: Miles square =/= square miles. San Francisco is in fact approximately 7 miles square, and about 46 square miles (not 49, though there is a “49-mile drive” for tourists).
Chris T.
I live across the bay from SF.
Yes, we need more housing. We need better transportation, we need upgraded infrastructure, we need to replace 100+ year old sewer and water lines for instance, we need a ton of things.
But we also need fresh water. Even if we somehow solved the NIMBY issues overnight, and suddenly had affordable* housing everywhere (*meaning the median price would dip under $1m, perhaps … and perhaps I’d get some real estate tax relief, but now I’m just dreaming :-) ), where would we get the new water supplies?