Hacker News Reader

Comment by applecore | Hacker News Reader

> Airbnb has recently been attacked by San Francisco politicians for driving up the price of housing in the city.

The high price of housing in San Francisco is caused by one (and only one) thing: NIMBYism.

If supply is constrained and new high-rise developments are held back, there will always be higher prices and a distorted market.

In reality, Airbnb doesn't have any measurable effect on the price of housing. (Still, it may help alleviate the situation slightly for some people living in the city.)

View on HN

If people take residences that would otherwise be available to long-term tenants and make them only available as short-term rentals, how is that not further constraining the supply of housing?

I completely agree that the lack of new housing is a huge component of the high prices, but it is reductive to pretend that a particular pet issue is the only thing causing SF's housing shortage. It's a huge problem with myriad causes.

They address this in the article - less than 1 in 1000 residences are renting enough nights to break even on rent, implying that it's not a supply problem.

Residents in SF and the peninsula are pretty quick to try to put the housing-problem blame [1] on anything tech related, but traditionally haven't wanted to increase the supply (high density housing).

[1] http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/12/20/sf-and-oakland-activ...

There’s no strict need for high rises to satisfy Bay Area housing requirements. A modest proportion of 4–6 story low-rise apartments throughout the region would be entirely adequate. The problem is that the whole region is almost entirely zoned for single-family houses, and designed on the premise that everyone will commute by car.

Except that lack of high density is one of the City's more appealing attributes. I don't like the simple call for more housing without any acknowledgement of the consequences.

A CAP theorem for bay area housing policy: Charming, Affordable, Popular. Pick two. And, like Partition Tolerance, you can't drop Popular.

That's a great way to think about it. You can drop popular (eventually it gets to expensive that you reach a new equilibrium and people stop coming!), but it's hard to say at what point in the future that actually happens.

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

I wouldn't exactly say San Francisco lacks high density. It is true that it is not nearly as dense as New York, but it is pretty densely populated compared to other U.S. cities. I think it is right though when people say that San Francisco can still increase its density via 4-6 story housing ala Paris without destroying its charm, and without becoming Vancouver or NYC.

SOMA could probably go that route but I'm not sure it'd work elsewhere in the City.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com