San Francisco Progressives Declare War on Affordable Housing

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-02/san-francisco-progressives-declare-war-on-affordable-housing

by joshlittle • 10 years ago

72 68 10 years ago

bloomberg.com

HillaryBriss2• 10 years ago

If we’re going to create cities where everyone can live and work, we need density -- there’s just no way around it.

Is it safe to say that, in US cities, quality of life generally gets worse with increases in population density?

If so, is it because US local and state governments are pretty bad at managing population increase, in general?

mmagin• 10 years ago

I think that's true, except for the rich and powerful that can enjoy comfortable living in higher (average) density areas. Comfortably isolated from the grime and noise and poor mass transit.

enf4• 10 years ago

Not without being explicit about what you mean by "quality of life." There are amenities of density and there are amenities of sparseness and people disagree about the relative importance of those amenities.

eagsalazar2• 10 years ago

I would say that is not safe to say at all.

ergothus3• 10 years ago

Is it safe to say that, in US cities, quality of life generally gets worse with increases in population density?

I'd have a hard time saying that.

First, you have "in US cities", so you've already stepped up your density from a non-city situation. Moving to Seattle from smaller East Coast towns and cities was a notable increase in quality of life for me. (more to do, more people that share my interests, less effort/travel involved in doing things, more medical/food resources of various types, better public transit, etc). Historically, urban centers (more dense) have always represented more opportunities than rural areas (less dense). Without a doubt, some people in these dense areas have lower quality of life. But enough have the opposite that it keeps happening.

Second, you'll have lots of individual variation. I've seen HN posters that LOVE their small-town areas, and others that love having everything needed in a high density 10 block areas. Very hard to make a generalization.

All anecdotal, but there it is.

If so, is it because US local and state governments are pretty bad at managing population increase, in general?

That's a statement I'd generally back. Govts represent the current populace, and the smaller the govt body, the more short-term the vision usually is. Whether it's putting in building height restrictions, avoiding loud construction, or losing a ton of money on stadium construction, there are a lot of examples of poor management. (I suspect there are examples of GOOD management, but that's much harder to _notice_.)

I recall reading a condemnation of cul-de-sacs (they promote heavy car use and tend to create unwalkable neighborhoods, and thus drive away small shops and stores towards stripmalls at best). Despite this, they were (are?) heavily promoted by the federal govt, and you can see from aerial views of areas when they were built. (some areas have cul-de-sacs off the roads. 10 years later you see a fern-like structure of roads having roads off of them that have cul-de-sacs off of them. 10 years after that you gets these fractalish spiraling structures of roads of roads of roads of cul-de-sacs). In my view, poor management repeated over and over again.

Retric• 10 years ago

I would say the opposite, quality of life increases with density. NYC being the prime example. It's just not linear and takes good infrastructure. DC for example is a horrible 'city' due to height restrictions and poor infrastructure, but it's suburbs are much worse.

The advantage to density is people don't need to travel as far to do things so you can support a lot more niche activities. Making it easer to connect with people and get a bite to eat at 4AM.

Or put another way, you need density to overcome the downsides. Sprawl means you get the same amenitys as a small city which has better traffic and lower costs.

hkmurakami4• 10 years ago

A density increase is often a side effect of other strong factors that push the QoL upwards.

ergothus3• 10 years ago

Progressives on the city’s Board of Supervisors recently called for certain height limit restrictions to be lifted only for developments that include 100 percent below-market-rate housing (the current policy sets the number at 30 percent). Obviously, developing housing at entirely below-market rates is impossible without heavy government subsidies, so this proposal would effectively stop all new construction in many areas of the city.

I must be missing something - housing prices are combination of "affordable minimum" due to costs, and "what the market will bare". In a market with scarce housing and huge housing prices, it should be very doable to offer below-market-rate housing and still be profitable, all without subsidies. Right?

That said, I'm all in favor of increasing density. I forget where I read it, but I saw a great analysis about how it's "cheap" to get city councils to pass limitations on future growth (Nimby), but getting them to pass actions (new housing, etc) often requires they show how it is paid for. As those limitations have an opportunity cost, they too should be justified.

Still though, I don't understand the above part of the article. Help?

enf4• 10 years ago

"100% affordable" means that every apartment is priced below market rate, and in this case is also below the cost of buying the land and constructing the apartment. The extra money has to come from somewhere.

With "30% affordable," the extra money comes from making the other 70% of the apartments more expensive. With "100% affordable" there is no built-in source for the extra money so it needs to come from some other source.

ergothus3• 10 years ago

Still lost. Is "market rate" what you'd otherwise pay for housing? If so, you can still sell that housing 100% below market rate (but above what is needed for maintenance costs) and make a profit in a scarce housing situation. You'd absolutely be below what someone getting market rate would get (be it by 100% market rate or a 30% below, 70% above ratio), but it'd still be profitable.

Unless you mean that the cost of the land would be priced off of market rate, so the land cost alone would make this undoable. That makes sense.

eschaton• 10 years ago

You're conflating the cost to construct and maintain the landlord's building with the amount of money the landlord can charge to rent the apartments in it. The construction and maintenance costs just put a floor on the rent below which the landlord would lose money. The market-rate rent is otherwise unconstrained, and the difference is the landlord's profit.

Just because the supervisors are saying they want below market rate housing doesn't mean they're saying they want landlords to actually lose money. They're instead saying they want landlords to be willing to make some amount less than the theoretical maximum profit on some number of units (whether 5% or 100% of units in a building) in exchange for being allowed to build a whole lot more of them.

That doesn't seem like such an unfair trade-off.

abannin2• 10 years ago

"Below Market Rate" is in reference to a specific program in the City of San Francisco that subsidizes housing for qualifying residents based on income. New developments have to provide 30% of units for the program, but have a buy out option.

http://sfmohcd.org/current-listings-below-market-rate-owners...

VanillaCafe• 10 years ago

The article lost me on the first line, "The U.S. is running out of places for people to live."

That's just not true.

An trending increase in the national average monthly cost of rent shows that people are competing more for housing. But, that can be explained by a migration to major metropolitan centers and/or tech centers. Which is a totally different mechanism than "running out of housing".

twinkletwinkle• 10 years ago

It's not that far off. It should read "The US is running out of places for people to live and work"

aminorex3• 10 years ago

Or just work.

sotojuan• 10 years ago

Should've been "Big cities in the U.S. are running out of places to live".

somenomadicguy• 10 years ago

Or perhaps, handful of highly trendy and desirable cities are running out of places to live.

aminorex3• 10 years ago

Or perhaps: "too many rich people".

econner• 10 years ago

Seems pretty similar to me. There either needs to be more affordable housing where the jobs are, or more jobs where the housing is. You need both to have viable housing.

hkmurakami4• 10 years ago

I was in suburban Baltimore for a good friend's wedding this weekend. Housing is affordable and the jobs, while not red-hot-insane like the valley, are solid and offer interesting challenges. (defense can be a headache but they do tackle some hard problems, and research university spinouts can be found here and there)

A mutual friend is renting a 1br in the city (which has some great food options) for $1400/mo. He was my lab mate in college and the best programmer in our class. He has no intent to move out to higher cost cities.

"Shockingly livable" was my takeaway.

isuckatcoding• 10 years ago

Jeez 1400?! That's insanely expensive for Baltimore isn't it? I pay about that much in the East Bay.

TACIXAT• 10 years ago

My mortgage for a 2br house is ~$1200/mo. on the city / county border. Friends are paying 400$ / mo. in roommate situations.

infinite8s• 10 years ago

Baltimore is a probably the cheapest big city on the East Coast. At one point in American history more immigrants were coming through Baltimore than NYC. I think Baltimore suffered because of it's proximity to DC - most major cities are more than 40 miles apart.

Part of Baltimore's cheapness is that it has one of the highest crime rates per capita. In addition, the dangerous areas are much more interspersed and distributed - at one moment you can be walking down a nice block and the very next block is all boarded up. I've lived in both Baltimore and NYC and definitely never felt unsafe in NYC, whereas there have been multiple times that I had a sudden sense of danger in Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins medical school would routinely post security bulletins about people being mugged a few blocks from campus in the middle of the day.

If it wasn't for Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Medical school there wouldn't be much to Baltimore.

throwaway201607• 10 years ago

First figure is pretty bad too: "How average U.S. rent has changed relative to median income." ... Why compare mean to median?

Simple example that shows this could be no big deal .

incomes = [2,4,8,500, 500] median income = 8

rents = [1,2,4, 250, 250 ] average rent = 101.4

OMG !!! SO MUCH MORE THAN AVERAGE INCOME.

aminorex3• 10 years ago

Average is not mean, it is ambiguous. For that matter, so is "income".

woah2• 10 years ago

Mid-brow dismissal. You're focusing on one phrase and yelling "gotcha!".

Let me make it easier to understand: "The U.S. is running out of places that people want to live."

We're realizing that living in an anonymous suburb on a tract of cheap land a 90 minute drive from where we work is stupid. It's terrible for the environment, it stunts social and business opportunities, and it is boring. More people in cities is good for the environment, good for economic equality, and good for sanity.

There are an infinite number of places that you "could" live, so your use of "running out of housing" is a straw man. By your definition, it's not even possible to "run out of housing".

vinceguidry3• 10 years ago

So build more cities.

zaccus• 10 years ago

So the problem is that people feel entitled to live in places they can't afford to live, because they can't deal with the "boredom" of suburbs or smaller cities/towns?

Cry me a river.

tmnvix2• 10 years ago

The article lost me on the first line, "The U.S. is running out of places for people to live."

Which was followed by:

land-value taxation...is basically just the idea of giving property tax exemptions for urban buildings.

That is almost the exact opposite of what LVT does.

runamok• 10 years ago

It is poorly worded but I think effectively it's true. If I understand correctly a 10000 sq ft lot would be taxed the same regardless if it was a 1 story house or a 6 story condo... So effectively it's a discount compared to the way normal property tax is levied that values the cost of the structure on the land... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

bufordsharkley2• 10 years ago

It creates the incentives for creating more housing, in that land is most likely to be brought into efficient use.

It won't create more square-footage of land in which people can live, but it makes it more likely that cities will grow in ways to sustain more people.

rorykoehler2• 10 years ago

It lost me on the headline. Only curiosity brings me here to read the comments however I do wonder what it says about the American psyche that 'war on...' is such a prevalent term?

stuaxo• 10 years ago

Not only that but recently everything is 'Killing it' 'smashing it' as well

rbanffy• 10 years ago

I'm confused by the use of the word "progressive" here.

a13n• 10 years ago

Yeah I generally think of tech workers as progressives and thought at first that this article was arguing that tech workers are nimbys. In my experience almost every tech worker I've met is a yimby and the nimbys are those who want to drive tech out of the city...

alwaysdoit• 10 years ago

You know, the standard definition of progressive: trying to put things back the way they were, to make SF great again.

flomo• 10 years ago

It's the standard way of referring to the 'opposition party' in local SF politics.

hkmurakami4• 10 years ago

The capital class and environmentalist / preservationalist camps have heavy overlap in the Bay Area and use the latter brand to further their interests in the former.

If not furthering their capital, they will use their environmentalism clout to further their world view. It's a less visible but analogous dynamic to the Koch brothers using capital to shape the world after their vision.

HillaryBriss2• 10 years ago

SF progressives are people who work to maintain the status quo and make sure that change doesn't happen. SF progressives are people who would be called 'conservatives' in another context.

seehafer• 10 years ago

"Progressive" in SF == "f#$* you, I've got mine already".

draw_down• 10 years ago

Yes, they are people who think they are on the left, but are actually conservatives.

notadoc• 10 years ago

SF needs to approve and build a ton of high rise condos and apartments. Period. Problem solved.

abannin2• 10 years ago

Not necessarily high rise, so much of the city below 4 stories. Just upzoning to 8-12 stories would triple density.

rorykoehler2• 10 years ago

If you're going to build 12 why not build 30 or 50 etc?

paulddraper3• 10 years ago

SF employers need to hire and approve a ton of remote employees. Period. Problem solved.

beatpanda• 10 years ago

Oakland passed an eviction moratorium because there is an epidemic of illegal evictions of long-term tenants from rent-controlled units, and activists wanted to force the city government to actually enforce the city's laws. Characterizing this as part of a move to "kick tech out of the city" misses the point by several thousand miles.

It is true that San Francisco's "left" is against housing construction. It is also true that San Francisco politics are an inverted world where "left" and "right" cease to even have meaning. So we need competent writers to try to sort this out. But writing articles like this that just plow through the nuance and make elementary mistakes, like apparently not even reading the language of or rational for Oakland's eviction moratorium, make it harder to get to a bargain on this stuff.

chris_va• 10 years ago

This is not a well researched article. Various sweeping comments like:

"Rent control is in effect, but that has just increased the incentive for evictions"

... ignore so many issues that it makes it hard to believe the core argument.

paulddraper3• 10 years ago

Yes, the biggest problem with rent control is not evictions, but shortages.

Price ceilings cause shortages. Always.

gozur88• 10 years ago

I don't think it's unreasonable for people who like a place to try to preserve the things they like about it. People living in San Francisco would be living in Manhattan if they wanted to live in Manhattan. Why would you expect them to quietly acquiesce to efforts aimed at turning SF into Manhattan West?

kafkaesq• 10 years ago

What a puerile and intellectually dishonest rant.

Basically they're taking a situation that is notoriously complex and entrenched, with multiple interlocking tradeoffs and feedback loops; cherry picking a few of the driving factors, and throwing in a few offhand observations about the positions that "progressives" (as if this were an identifiable, let alone unified group) supposedly take in regard to these issues; and concluding with the innuendo that this "Them", this "Other", is "declaring war" on not just affordable housing, but on economic growth and progress itself.

And also:

Unlike progressives in New York City, who are often big supporters of density, San Francisco progressives have decided to focus on kicking the tech industry out of the city.

No, not bending over for every regulatory or other concession certain elements of an industry might want does not equal a drive to "kick them out." This is a scare card, pure and simple; it's meant to befuddle and distract, and sheds no light on the complex issues at root.

vinceguidry3• 10 years ago

The U.S. is running out of places for people to live.

Just when you thought you heard it all, journalists find another way to sound supremely stupid. The US ranks 182 out of 244 on the list of countries by population density.

If you took the entire world's population and crammed it into the continental US, we'd be midway between Bangladesh and Taiwan.

Anasufovic• 10 years ago

As mentioned by others its more about desirable places to live. People are moving to cities and the cities are not keeping up.

vinceguidry3• 10 years ago

And as I already said, we can simply build more cities. It's what already happens anyway.

paulddraper3• 10 years ago

I apparently don't know what "Progressive" means anymore.

Maybe I'll start calling everyone progressive. They all have opinions about something.

San Francisco Progressives Declare War on Affordable Housing

Related Stories