Blame Zoning, Not Tech, for San Francisco's Housing Crisis

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/03/are-wealthy-neighborhoods-to-blame-for-gentrification-of-poorer-ones/473349/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAtlanticCities+%28CityLab%29

by jseliger • 10 years ago

153 208 10 years ago

citylab.com

fiatmoney2• 10 years ago

Cash inflows from overseas are also a major contributor. The exemption of real estate from money laundering regulations makes it a sink for a lot of shady revenues.

bkjelden• 10 years ago

Are there any pieces of data quantifying how much of an effect this is having in San Francisco?

api• 10 years ago

Is the information public? Equity investments are visible in SEC filings, but can this even be quantified from public data?

linkregister7• 10 years ago

There's a very small amount of data available. It suggests that international purchasers are around 6% of the total cash buyers of real estate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11270279

Tempest19817• 10 years ago

This article throws around numbers like 15% for the Bay Area (not US), in 2014. Not sure about SF. http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/How-and-why-...

jseliger• 10 years ago

1. I'm not sure this is true.

2. Even if it is, housing is actually an amazing American export: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/19/exporting_hou..., though it's rarely recognized as such outside of the literature.

hardcandy• 10 years ago

Keep in mind neither tech nor entertainment was ever California's main industry. It is and always has been real estate. Money from real estate flows down stream into MANY pockets.

Finnucane3• 10 years ago

Sure, but if you have high prices and high demand, that's driven by money. Where's the money coming from? And, what happens when the money runs out?

simoncion3• 10 years ago

A year or two ago, ~8% of SF's population worked "in tech".

It seems like median tech salaries are in the very low six-figure range. 120k/year gross will (assuming no car or loan expenses) pay for -at most- $3500/month rent with typical utilities, Internet, and food expenditures. Even then, that leaves you with $2,500/year to save for emergencies or retirement.

Where's the money coming from? It's likely not coming from the majority of tech workers.

What happens when it runs out? I... really don't know. Whatever happens, it will take quite some time for landlords to adjust their rates to match the new reality. In the interim, I would expect even more "grassroots" hate generated for tech workers.

Finnucane3• 10 years ago

It doesn't have to come from the majority--the fact that there's a lot of it is what causes the distortions. I live in Cambridge, and there's a lot of money going through the biotech sector--that money is surely as unevenly distributed as the tech money in SF, but it's a lot of money going through a small space. Sure, you can build more housing where you can squeeze it in, but as long as the money hose is going full blast, there's no way to keep up with it.

The other problem that kind of gets lost here is that we have a few places where there is a lot of money, there are jobs, housing shortages, etc., and a lot of places in the country where the opposite is true. And that's not really good. I don't think it's really sustainable to think that a few coastal cities are going to be able to accommodate everyone who would like to live and/or work in them. We could actually relieve some of the pressure on these cities by making _other cities_ more desirable destinations.

pzone3• 10 years ago

Money doesn't "run out." It circulates. Unless you see less of a future for tech sector in SF in the future, waiting out this problem is not an option.

Finnucane3• 10 years ago

Yeah, in a global sense, it doesn't. But in its easy availability for spending in some particular direction, it does. Or do you not remember the end of the housing bubble?

nether• 10 years ago

I still hate the playas

mmanfrin5• 10 years ago

People don't want the truth, they wan't someone to blame. Rich 20-something white males from out of town are a very convenient and easy target.

Brogrammers ruining this city.

kafkaesq18• 10 years ago

Oh, the "bros" (and less sardonically, the tech crowd in general -- independent of age, ethnicity and gender) themselves aren't to blame. They are but passive agents.

However, the influx of their paychecks is quite obviously a factor. Attempts to deny this fact are just that... denial.

mmanfrin5• 10 years ago

Yeah, the middle class is such a damper on this city. How dare the middle class want to live in the Bay Area.

Also, let's completely ignore that medical wages are higher on average than tech in the city, and that the major redevelopment of China Basin s/Mission Bay/ was spurned by the med sector of the economy; tech worker's middle-class wages are to blame.

kafkaesq18• 10 years ago

What a simplistic article.

Any examination of the housing woes in SF will reveal multiple factors, playing out over decades. And yes, "new money" is definitely one of them.

jdavis7032• 10 years ago

Which the article says, "The new wealthy are ruining everything because the old wealthy decided not to let them live anywhere near them."

kafkaesq18• 10 years ago

No it doesn't.

It points to only two factors, and clearly implies that zoning (the decisions of "the old wealthy") was the more important of the two.

As if decades of voting patterns in this (once) famously and beautifully economically diverse city might not have also had something to do with it.

simoncion3• 10 years ago

Any examination of the housing woes in SF will reveal multiple factors, playing out over decades.

Is "new money" more or less significant than zoning restrictions? [0] If it's less significant, is it so much less significant as to be nearly insignificant when compared to the effect of zoning restrictions? (Spoiler alert: I expect that it is.)

[0] Restrictions which include the ability of SF residents to effectively veto new development that they don't want to happen, for whatever reason.

kafkaesq18• 10 years ago

You can debate that all you want.

But an article which attempts to explain the SF housing situation by listing just two factors (ignoring several other very obvious factors of equal or greater weight) -- just doesn't seem to explain very much.

beatpanda4• 10 years ago

It is mind-numbing the extent to which everyone playing a role in this housing crisis wants to wriggle out of their share of the blame more than they want to actually solve the problem.

I was one of the people constantly seeking a single source of blame for this until I read a book about systems thinking. Completely changed my life. The problem is I now see how the competing interests of all the players make this an almost completely intractable problem.

A huge influx of highly-paid workers is partially to blame for the housing crisis. So are activists who prevent any new construction. So are politicians who make policies making new construction prohibitively expensive. Etc etc etc. Everyone plays a role, but nobody wants to give anything up, so the people who lose, as always, are the people who are already marginalized.

We need less writing like this and more writing that gives people a bird's-eye view of the entire problem.

jdavis7032• 10 years ago

What was this book?

beatpanda4• 10 years ago

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

methodover• 10 years ago

Everyone plays a role, but nobody wants to give anything up,

I'm just curious, but what could new tech workers give up, exactly?

Entrenched local interests could ease up on building restrictions. That's what they'd give up.

Politicians who make anti-construction policies could stop doing that. That's what they'd give up.

I don't understand what migrants like myself (a programmer who moved here a few years ago to work at a startup) are supposed to give up.

existencebox• 10 years ago

Not necessarily the migrants themselves, but to pose a thought: The "broader tech community" could become more accepting of remote work, and focus more effort on removing the blockers people see in the way of allowing more remote work within their scope.

Us migrants (myself included) can have a role in this, we can give portions of our very limited free time in trying to find solutions to the remote problem, which may lie largely in the technical space we find our strengths.

(I understand the thrust of your statement, just positing some actionable steps that even those of us most at the whims of the existing powers that be can push towards a better outcome for ourselves.)

beatpanda4• 10 years ago

Instead of getting involved in bidding wars for apartments in prized locations and driving up the price, you could choose to live somewhere a little further away and commute, for instance.

Or VCs could give up forcing all of their portfolio companies to move to San Francisco and allow people to build businesses wherever they are.

Or tech CEOs could give up having everyone in the office and allow people to work from wherever they want.

Speaking for myself, I gave up a whole lot of comfort to live in a construction site while I'm building a tiny house in a friend's backyard. I am adding to the housing stock, instead of increasing the price of the existing housing stock.

Eridrus• 10 years ago

I just wish the tech industry had taken root somewhere less NIMBYish that actually wanted growth and I'm hoping that SF gets what it wants and the tech industry just leaves.

ghaff4• 10 years ago

The Bay area has grown enormously. There were fruit orchards in Silicon Valley not (relatively speaking) all that long ago. No, I don't see the tech industry leaving. A lot of people like the Bay area for reasons that have nothing to do with tech jobs. It's also the case however that it's simply not possible (or desirable) for everyone in tech to work and live in a geographically constrained peninsula and people/companies need to deal with that reality.

Tempest19817• 10 years ago

Maybe Vegas?

ThrustVectoring7• 10 years ago

Honestly, the end of the article gets into what's actually necessary to change to fix the housing situation. There's a ton of locally-optimal but globally-detrimental decisions to not build places - so what's necessary is a regional zoning czar for the Bay Area that can tell people to shut the hell up and allow people to build.

Nobody really has the power to do this, and the voters are demanding NIMBY policies, so I'm not holding my breath. The next best strategy is coming up with an acceptable measure of how many people a certain plot of land "should" house and taxing/subsidizing landowners based on how much housing they actually provide on the land. That's technically not an ad-valorem tax, so would dodge Prop 13, while still pricing out people who really should make room for better use of the land.

foota2• 10 years ago

That's an amazingly good idea imo.

bhickey• 10 years ago

It's generally called a 'land value tax'. Most of the value of land derives from the amenities provided around it. By taxing the land you encourage development and discourage speculation: excess land value will be extracted through taxation.

ThrustVectoring7• 10 years ago

The devil's in the details. It's hard to come up with measures and targets that are both fair and easily communicable.

If you go with number of people, well, that's the wrong measure (and hard to enforce // easy to fake). Number of bedrooms is also incorrect, as is square footage. Number of rentable units is also weird, since it encourages studio apartments and the like at the expense of splitting bigger units and sharing areas.

Another option is using a baseline of "however many people currently live there", but that favors parking lot owners and the like. "Average density of the local region" is unfair in that it suddenly imposes a new cost on the density hold-outs.

You can calculate a target based on something like distance-to-transit and local zones, but that gets complicated and political in a hurry. Land-value would be a good choice, since the price conveys really useful information - but that is likely illegal due to proposition 13.

My next-best idea is collective punishment: charge zoning districts based on the difference between how their residential and commercial/industrial construction. Mountain View is much less likely to vote to let Google expand their campus while blocking commensurate housing construction if it means they have to start subsidizing the places those workers start commuting from.

bufordsharkley4• 10 years ago

I don't understand why you think that what you're describing (essentially a land-value tax) isn't an ad-valorem tax.

ThrustVectoring7• 10 years ago

Thanks, fixed.

It's not an ad-valorem tax because it isn't based off of the price of the property. A $1M house next to a $1.5M house would have the same tax bill, so long as they have the same housing capacity and land area. If the price of a house doubles, their tax obligation would remain unchanged.

falsestprophet• 10 years ago

"Nobody really has the power to do this"

The State of California has the power to fix this and, presumably, the motivation to lift this albatross from the neck of the economy.

ThrustVectoring7• 10 years ago

The government is not a monolith - it's made up of people who follow incentives. Proposition 13 is basically the third rail of California politics, and there's very strong NIMBY tendencies in voters.

Fixing the housing issues in the Bay Area would be worth billions to the larger economy, but the people who make and influence the decisions are largely concerned with other matters (specifically, house prices and doing things that voters approve of).

nimby• 10 years ago

How about attaching a direct cost to NIMBYism?

Sure, you can vote against zoning or building high density housing, but it's going to cost you. The price will be your prorated cost share of moving the project somewhere else. Don't want that tower block next to your house? Fine, pay $1M to have it moved.

You could combine this with a reverse auction of subsidies. As in, yes, I'll take that tower block for $500k.

Eventually the market clears and the problems get solved.

tptacek5• 10 years ago

No matter where you'd like to pin the blame for the SF housing crisis, be it zoning, NIMBYism, new money, gentrification, or anything else, there is one thing I think we can be pretty confident about:

The only solution to the problem is for the city to build its way out of it.

There is no rent control regime that will, in the medium term, prevent money from ultimately swamping local concerns. Real estate is a good, not a moral principle, and most people who own real estate have a number.

I would be interested in anyone with a counterexample of a US metro area that withstood sustained market interest, without extensive new building, without skyrocket housing prices and the demographic shifts that come with them.

pj_mukh• 10 years ago

Talking to a few activists about this solution and most of them say that "building your way" out of it only makes sense if you are also building affordable housing.

I don't see a builder voluntarily building low-cost housing in the Mission district, just more luxury condos. A municipal ordinance that removes restrictions while imposing a requirement to build affordable housing along with more luxury condos might be the right solution.

rosser• 10 years ago

You'd think so, but we actually already have such a thing, and it's not doing anything to mitigate the issue it was designed to address.

A city ordnance was passed in the late 70s, IIRC, which says that for every SRO (Single-Room Occupancy, basically, long-term flop house) in the Tenderloin that a developer wants to tear down and replace with a high-rise hotel or whatever, that developer must also put up another building with an equivalent number of SRO units to the one being torn down, somewhere else within the 7x7. So, you have to build two buildings for the price of ... well, at least two.

Now, given the current rental market in SF, I can't imagine we're actually very far from (or even already over) the inflection point where that becomes economically viable, but it's demonstrably not affecting the new construction rate in any way I've noticed...

tptacek5• 10 years ago

Affordable housing requirements make sense to me, I don't think they're silly, and I'm glad to see them. But they make only a marginal difference.

The default trajectory for SF is towards pricing out the working class. Rich people can afford to live in SF even with its nosebleed prices, and they will hold a systemic and intractable advantage against the working class over the long term, because, again, real estate is a good, not a moral principle. When things get more expensive, rich people get more of those things.

I'm sure there are cases where this isn't true, but as a general rule, any opposition to new housing in SF concedes ground to wealthy owners at the expense of working-class renters.

If there's a place/time this scenario has played out differently elsewhere in the US, someone, please let me know.

foota2• 10 years ago

I think you just need to build more of everything. They're building luxury condos because there is demand for them. So let them have their fun building luxury condos (which are likely higher profit) but at the same time let them also build affordable housing, which they can also make a profit off of.

fweespee_ch• 10 years ago

I don't see a builder voluntarily building low-cost housing in the Mission district, just more luxury condos. A municipal ordinance that removes restrictions while imposing a requirement to build affordable housing along with more luxury condos might be the right solution.

Yeah, that is pretty much the only solution.

The other real option is going the NYC route of subsidized housing. However, I'm not sure SF really has the revenues for this to be viable tho.

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/nycha/eligibility/eligibility.page

twblalock5• 10 years ago

Talking to a few activists about this solution and most of them say that "building your way" out of it only makes sense if you are also building affordable housing.

They are incorrect. Building luxury housing will take some of the demand pressure off of non-luxury housing (which constitutes the vast majority of the housing in San Francisco), thereby lowering its price.

The only way this wouldn't work is if nobody could afford to live in the new luxury housing. But we know for sure that there are plenty of people who want to, can afford to, and are moving into the newer luxury developments as soon as they are available. The lower-quality housing those people move out of is now available for people who can't afford the new luxury housing.

akgerber• 10 years ago

Inclusionary zoning is both a perfectly reasonable idea and, by empirical evidence, dramatically insufficient to spur affordable housing production: http://cityobservatory.org/inclusionary-zoning-has-a-scale-p...

Much of the problem stems from undersupply driving formerly affordable housing to gentrify— that's why I, as a well-paid programmer, live in a formerly-abandoned tenement.

losteric• 10 years ago

That's why the city needs to support building across price ranges, without enforcing prices at a neighborhood level.

It's OK to have wealthier areas. The problem we want to avoid is forcing slightly less wealthy people to rent from areas that are significantly less wealthy... because that's what drives people away.

ThrustVectoring7• 10 years ago

All construction drives down housing prices in the region, by providing alternatives to bidding up any particular piece of housing. IMHO, "affordable housing" is a misnomer: all expansion of residential stock makes housing more affordable.

maerF0x03• 10 years ago

If everyone builds luxury condos then there is too much competition and the price declines, builders will seek to build more profitable units. So long as "affordable housing" is above cost, then eventually it will be the most attractive new good to provide the market.

It will take a long time for the process to work though, because it takes years to build things, plus a year for Leases to cycle. In the meantime I imagine NIMBYs will say "see? nothing improved".

Kalium3• 10 years ago

Talking to a few activists about this solution and most of them say that "building your way" out of it only makes sense if you are also building affordable housing.

That's because you're talking to the wrong people. Talk to urban planners instead. As a rule of thumb, activists lacking specialized technical education are useful for pointing to problems and useless for pointing to solutions.

nedwin• 10 years ago

It depends on the timeline you're looking at. If you think of the next 5 to 10 years then building luxury condos doesn't help.

However if you look at a 30 to 40 year timeline and we allow all the market rate houses to be built that developers want then those same "luxury" houses will become more affordable over time.

Instead we're sand bagging any development in favour of 25% affordable housing to be built by private developers.

duaneb2• 10 years ago

The only solution to the problem is for the city to build its way out of it.

I dunno, accepting that most other places on the planet would be a better place to {move|start a business} might be a decent place.

tptacek5• 10 years ago

Nobody is going to do that. They don't have to. There is absolutely no formal process to require them to. Is this really the endgame of the anti-tech movement in SF? To shame people out of the city? We are talking about people so shameless they can raise a 5MM seed round for a cat-sharing startup.

It seems to me --- and I'd welcome an argument to the contrary --- that simultaneously protesting tech and opposing new building is, in effect, a strategy to concede the whole city to the wealthy.

grillvogel2• 10 years ago

The only solution to the problem is for the city to build its way out of it.

no, the only solution is to improve transit and infrastructure

w1ntermute• 10 years ago

How about both?

CalRobert• 10 years ago

How does that help? We can build really nice trains to low density suburbia?

gozur882• 10 years ago

I wouldn't say this is the only solution, but I think it's the best one. "Affordable housing" gives you long waiting lists and too many opportunities for political patronage and graft.

Spooky232• 10 years ago

That's the SFO optimized solution.

Fortunately, the market isn't just SFO. Eventually the prices are so out of whack, and the governance and tax structure gets onerous enough that people and businesses head off to other places. New York City and State circa 1965 is a great example of this phenomenon.

There were sleepy small towns and farms within 15-20 miles of Manhattan welo into the 70s.

tryitnow4• 10 years ago

Do you have any citations for your assertion about NYC circa '65?

I'm not doubting you, I'm just curious and would like to read more about it.

vorg• 10 years ago

Zoning is a demand-side control residents use to raise rents and housing prices. Tech is a supply-side control residents use.

In other cities and countries, Tech is a proxy for Immigration -- it could be any industry drawing people in. There's other cities in the US, as well as virtually all of them in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the twin controls of demand-side zoning and supply-side immigration are used to raise housing costs, both sale prices and rents.

In New Zealand, because the largest city, Auckland, and the smaller ones surrounding it make up over half the country's population, this is seen very clearly because the city government and national government are virtually the same thing. Government representatives speak in a wink wink nudge nudge manner, talking about fast-tracking new housing stock in Auckland and controlling immigration, but making sure house owners know they're not serious so they don't lose votes.

So we should blame both demand-side Zoning and supply-side Tech (i.e. Immigration) for housing crises.

HaloZero• 10 years ago

I'm curious, how does a place like Hong Kong handle this? It's another large city that's locked on 3 sides by water (they do have other islands but I imagine the population is not signifiant on those).

I know rent in the city even in the fancy condos is expensive but they still have their working class workers. Where do they live?

santaclaus• 10 years ago

It's another large city that's locked on 3 sides by water

Or Manhattan, for that matter.

enjo• 10 years ago

In Manhattan's case the workers increasingly live off the island (as opposed to the northern slums).

ghaff4• 10 years ago

In Manhattan's case, there's a generally good public transit system that lets people commute to (relatively) inexpensive communities like Queens fairly easily.

ghaff4• 10 years ago

Short answer, it's not pretty:

http://www.hk-magazine.com/article/10676/coffin-homes-subdiv...

sbov• 10 years ago

Basically they don't. The average price per square foot in Hong Kong is insane despite their swarm of high rises.

linkregister7• 10 years ago

The amount of tech workers buying up housing is also up for debate. Though this article focuses on cash transactions (perhaps mortgaged ones don't contain occupational data?), it paints a picture of other white collar professions performing the majority of cash purchases of housing in the Bay Area.

The data was taken from a company that controls 10% of the real estate market in the Bay Area.

http://realestateconsulting.com/tech-buyers-only-a-small-por...

kafkaesq18• 10 years ago

Some of them -- most likely the majority -- rent also, you know.

linkregister7• 10 years ago

Right, so how could they be responsible for pushing up housing prices if most are renting?

grillvogel2• 10 years ago

this is a myth perpetuated by "urbanists" and developer shills. none of the new construction is "affordable". you can't build your way out of this problem. desirable areas will always be expensive.

infrastructure and improved transit are the solutions to these problems, not more housing.

cylinder• 10 years ago

I don't get it. Why does everyone need to live in San Francisco?

The real story here is poor commuting infrastructure. Not enough of it and the existing is slow or unreliable.

the_ancient2• 10 years ago

The Author is 1/2 Right

The answer is to build. Build more fucking housing, just like Nolan says. But the answer is also to zone: To take away land-use decisions from neighborhoods

that is where the statement should end, Take away land-use decisions from neighborhoods, and put them in the hands of property owners, if a developer wants to build something on land they legally acquired, then they should be free to do so even if the neighbors do not like it

maerF0x03• 10 years ago

And also facilitate a market for easements allowing the neighbors to cough up the dough if they care enough.

pbreit• 10 years ago

That's completely idiotic. Communities are completely within their right to dictate terms of their community. If prospective owners don't like the rules, they shouldn't purchase.

the_ancient2• 10 years ago

If the rules are put in place pre-sale, with the agreement of the owners wishing to sell sure..

My problem is that communities change the rules with out the consent of the property owners. I do not believe in Democracy, I do not believe that 50.1% of a community has the ethical right to impose rules on the other 49.9% of a community

guelo• 10 years ago

Whether to blame the supply or demand side seems almost like a philosophical question.

pzone3• 10 years ago

OK, but some philosophical questions have reasonably clear answers. Here's the philosophical difference. There's a realistic solution to zoning laws: fight hard to remove them. There's no "solution" that involves slowing down or constraining the growth of technology. That would not be a solution, that would be be a disaster. Therefore, appropriate moral blame rests on zoning, not tech.

eloff• 10 years ago

As someone from outside the US with no horse in the race, I'm seriously annoyed that entrenched landowners work hard to prevent new construction and that in turn keeps housing unaffordable for a generation of young people that are already worse off than their parents. Thanks guys...

forrestthewoods• 10 years ago

This week I saw exactly one building under construction between SFO and Menlo Park. That's utterly insane. I should have seen a couple dozen just from the highway.

twblalock5• 10 years ago

You should have got off the freeway. There is new construction everywhere in Redwood City, for example.

Most of the 101 corridor has been built up for decades. The construction is not happening right next to the freeway.

DrScump4• 10 years ago

Yet just 3 years ago, you could drive the length of Central Expressway and see more vacant commercial space than occupied space.

MrMullen• 10 years ago

Building up SF or SV is not the solution, High Speed Rail is the solution. Get on a HSR train, travel 20 - 40 miles out of the city in under 30 minutes. People would still have access to SF, SV and the jobs but would be scattered upwards of 40 - 60 miles from SF, SV. It also fixes NIMBY; you can either have HSR or be surrounded by large apartment blocks.

ilyanep2• 10 years ago

NIMBYs would just fight both. CEQA has been used to block public transit options all over the state.

jjawssd3• 10 years ago

Now _this_ is the real tragedy

tryitnow4• 10 years ago

I used to support the view articulated in this article, but I'm more skeptical now.

If higher density were the solution I would expect to see highly dense cities have cheaper real estate than less dense cities. Instead, it's just the opposite.

That's because of the other side of the economic equation: demand.

And therein lies the devil. I hypothesize that increasing the supply of housing in a city actually increases demand in such a way that the supply increase has little downward effect on housing costs.

It makes sense why this is the case. If more people live in a city, then there's more people who are likely to move there. If you know a bunch of classmates who are all moving to San Francisco after graduation that's going to make you more likely to move to San Francisco too.

So yes, supply exerts downward pressure on housing costs, but I would bet that heigthened density then causes a near commensurate increase in demand such that the supply increase has little effect.

brighteyes2• 10 years ago

The problem is that the increased density is happening anyway.

It isn't that if we build more housing, more people will come, which will bring more people in an exponential cycle. The reality is that tech workers are coming anyway, and paying whatever is required of them to live in SF. They aren't being stopped by high rents, because high as they are, they can afford them.

However, they are raising prices for people that can't afford it. That pushes other people out.

The result is that whether we build or not, tech workers will live in the city. Building more won't bring more of them. The only question is whether other people can live there too.

Tempest19817• 10 years ago

Similarly, I used to think that terrible traffic would discourage growth. Not really... people's tolerance is surprisingly high.

natrius2• 10 years ago

This is just wrong. Every reputable economist I've come across disagrees with what you're saying. As with climate change, if we ignore experts, we will needlessly careen toward disaster.

Conservative economists like Edward Glaeser have long opposed restrictive zoning[1]. President Obama’s Chief Economist sees that “income inequality across cities remains entrenched and may even be exacerbated” as a result of restrictive zoning[2]. According to Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, “this is an issue on which you don’t have to be a conservative to believe that we have too much regulation.”[3]

[1] http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_houston.html

[2] https://m.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/2015...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/opinion/inequality-and-the...

tryitnow4• 10 years ago

I live on the "urban frontier" in Oakland (east side of Lake Merritt) and it's pretty nice, I don't feel endangered at all.

South of me there's just huge swaths of residential and commercial land that can be developed - and I think will be developed. The main problem is that there are not enough professional/middle class people living there now. But once some move in, more will follow (as has happened in other parts of Oakland).

My point is that the Bay Area has quite a bit of capacity for further development once you step out of SF.

natrius2• 10 years ago

Low density zoning—especially suburban, single family zoning—is tantamount to segregation. We must end it. It forces people who want to save money by purchasing less land to live somewhere else. That is, it forces lower-income people to live in different neighborhoods than higher-income people. And given America's racial disparities in income, these laws segregate by race, too.

https://medium.com/@niranbabalola/we-must-repeal-our-segrega...

djillionsmix• 10 years ago

I'm not sure why San Francisco being an enormously popular place that lots of people want to live in is a reason why we need to raze San Francisco and build something else there instead, vs. and not a reason why we shouldn't go to one of the many other shite places that everyone hates, raze that, and build more San Francsico.

Other than myopic entitlement, I mean.

tostitos19792• 10 years ago

I have a basic question about prop 13. I though the point of not increasing property assessments is so that if rich people start bidding house prices around you, your property taxes don't start to increase.

But as I dug into this, this doesn't make sense. The community has certain expenses. These get divided based on the value of the homes. If all homes double in price but the community expenses stay the same, it is irrelevant to have different assessment amounts on homes. I've heard the term "mil rate" and am not sure what that is, but is perhaps relevant. Any experts willing to clarify?

jowiar• 10 years ago

"Mil rate" the number of thousandths of the property value assessed in tax each year. i.e. 20 mils = 2% of the annual property value is taxed. The actual property tax owed is rate x assessments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax

tostitos19792• 10 years ago

Cool. That makes sense. Is there a reason they use 1000? Just convenience/convention?

Also .. my question about prop 13 stands. Curious why increasing home values would cause an issue if municipal spending stays constant?

someguydave2• 10 years ago

San Francisco is going to be begging for the tech industry to return after it has all left because the city failed to accommodate employees with housing.

imh• 10 years ago

To really put this to the test, could we compare with cities in the bay area with different zoning laws? I know there are tons of places around here where housing prices have gone up like mad. Are the ones with more lax zoning exceptions?

Blame Zoning, Not Tech, for San Francisco's Housing Crisis

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