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"Heck, I'd love to live in those areas if my job didn't require me to be in downtown SF everyday."

1. I'm not sure if you realize, most people are already living in those far off places, like Santa Rosa, and commuting to SF already. Most of those workers you see in the downtown area are commuters.

2. Section 8 vouchers take up a small percentage of the apartments you would likely want to live in. A lot of the units are run down chit boxes. Many just meet section 8 requirements. Very few landlords rent out to section 8 out of the goodness of their hearts. Yes--I know there's the exception.

2. Tech workers are living pretty well now. I really hope it lasts. I just know too many homless individuals who were once Programmers. I know a key developer of Word Star that's literally begging for money as I write this now. (Give him some money when you see him. He wears a Penquin costume, and strums a toy banjo. He is harassed by cops, and wasen't luckey enough to get section 8.)

3. What a lot of people don't relalize is the cost of living has gotten so outragious, even the requirements for section 8 seem ludicrous.

You would qualify for section 8 if you made less than $65,700 if you're single. If you have a wife, and kid your considered low income if you make less than $84,500.

4. My point is when the party dies, and we all know that time clock is ticking away--you might be the one applying for section 8? Good luck because they aren't even taking applications.

We all know there's not a barrier to entry into this profession, other than a lot of drive, and hard work. It's not like medicine, where there a huge barrier to entry. My point is one day you might be living in that subsidized apartment? In my twenties, I never considered putting myself on that section 8 waiting list, now I wish I did.

The reason why governments force construction companies to do this is because if they don't, it causes ghettoisation, through precisely the mechanism you describe.

As a society, we have experimented sufficiently with ghettos as a city design strategy, and determined that they are terrible in all ways. We do not need to repeat that experiment.

You don't solve the problem of high housing costs by getting rid of the poor people (if you are in the US, you may read that as "black people": that's what this policy has always turned out to mean in that country).

If you want to reduce the cost of living, build more houses.

I've been to Menlo Park. There are homeless people there. Facebook employs janitors and cafeteria workers as well as engineers. Affordable housing makes sense.

But the real problem with building in Menlo Park isn't your concern for poor people living there. It's the "village feel" attitude of the zoning commission, who won't let anything substantially larger than a single-family house be built there. In particular, Menlo Park is highly resistant to building vertically - the best way to get more units onto limited land.

> Heck, I'd love to live in those areas if my job didn't require me to be in downtown SF every day

> If you can't afford to live in a certain level of housing in a certain area at market prices, then you shouldn't live there, you should live somewhere cheaper. If the people companies want to hire can't afford to live within a reasonable distance then companies should pay more. If they can't pay more they should leave.

Sounds self correcting, then. Someday it may reach a point where you won't be able to afford to live where you can commute to downtown SF and your company will either have to pay you more or you'll have to leave.

There are a ton of externalities already priced into your rent. Not sure why you're singling out this one versus, say, the overwhelming source of high rents: lack of supply.

If it's self correcting then why does it not correct?

If lack of supply is a problem, then restricting that supply by 10-15% is part of the problem.

> If it's self correcting then why does it not correct?

It is. Due to government-mandated lack of supply, the market is working its magic to make you have to move to the east bay.

> If lack of supply is a problem, then restricting that supply by 10-15% is part of the problem.

Sure, and if taxes were cut 25% you'd save a lot of money too. You still haven't identified anything special about section 8 that is holding you back from your dreams of temporarily lower rent. What about proposition 13? What about insane zoning rules trying to preserve the "character" of generic suburban neighborhoods?

I have long supported offering free (tax-payer-funded) housing for the poor - studios or small apartments built in cheaper areas but with free internet. It seems like a win-win for everyone, for a lot of reasons.

I'm usually afraid to say it out loud though, because everyone accuses me of oppressing the poor or something similar.

> I have long supported offering free (tax-payer-funded) housing for the poor - studios or small apartments built in cheaper areas but with free internet.

It likely was subsidized housing for the poor in a cheaper area, but now its no longer cheap.

What isn't covered in your proposal is how to handle picking up and moving those poor people every 10 years when somewhere cheap becomes popular.

The result of making specific regions unavailable for people with lower income results in a separated society. It will mean that people with much money will live next to people with much money, and people with no money will live next to people with no money. The US has that already; you call it ghetto.

This is a great point. I'd love to own a Ferrari, but I don't because I can't afford one. The solution is that I buy a Honda--not for the government to step in and devise a "low income Ferrari" program.

That metaphor makes no sense at all. The commodity in question in that example would be "transportation" and the government can and should subsidize various forms of transportation for those with lower incomes. Nobody is proposing creating low income units that are incredibly high end in design and materials.

The government should definitely subsidize things like housing, transportation, and food. We're talking about creating low income luxury items. A house in Menlo Park is a luxury item, much like a Ferrari or Kobe beef.

A modest apartment is not a luxury item. It is a modest apartment in a place with expensive land values. Much like a packet of Oscar Mayer ham on dry white toast served at a five star restaurant is still a packet of Oscar Mayer ham on dry white toast.

The location in and of itself makes a house a luxury item. A cardboard box on a 20 square foot plot of land in SoMa is practically a luxury item.

But you can use the same roads as the Ferrari owners. Or should they have better roads than you?.

And I've been over by where FB is building the new apartments. It's nice. Lots of salt ponds around a hilly park that used to be a dump (hence the hill.) There's an old water treatment facility which I think still operates. There's a bit of a smell, thought I couldn't tell if that was from the facility or the wetlands. All told, it's a nice area and I'm guessing the dump, sewage treatment, and occasional smell are the reason people haven't built here before.

You have a point about raising housing costs for everyone else, but I can appreciate the intent to preserve some degree of income diversity even in expensive neighborhoods.

People who write about cities have often said that a city is most healthy when people of all walks of life are able to live in proximity with each other, and it's possible that without these assistance programs (as short-sighted as they may be), we'd see more cities turn into strictly playgrounds for the rich.

but I can appreciate the intent to preserve some degree of income diversity even in expensive neighborhoods

I agree, but it's not rich neighborhoods or rich people paying the price but the young middle class.

The system you are wishing for (i.e., live where the free market guides you) is already, in reality, the system we nearly exclusively live in.

The public effort to encourage mixed-income housing and mixed-income communities in order to fight the effects of concentrated poverty is not just about politics. There are real issues at play here, e.g., societal, economic, environmental, etc.

Also, consider the benefits, to yourself, of living in a mixed community instead of a socioeconomically homogenous cluster.

What you're describing would result in large ghettos of low-income people. It would be a nightmare in the end.

Wow, this shows that you don't think very highly of low-income people. I think a community of retired russian immigrants would be very pleasant.

I think they are referring to the effects of concentrated poverty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty

Not at all. The housing administration had some discriminatory practices in the past that did much of what the original suggestion was. It was a disaster. You want a community to be as diverse as possible across any sort of metric (income, race, religion, etc).

The "in my experience" raises instant warning signs to me. Anything that is strictly "in my experience" is susceptible to ridiculous amounts of survivor and confirmation bias.

So, do you have any numbers? I agree that your argument is appealing. But I really distrust appealing arguments nowdays.

wow, finally someone that can talk sense.

And their friends? Their support networks? Their families? The place they know and love?

It only makes sense from a fairly warped point of view.

I don't get to live by my family. I had to move for my job. I had to make new friends and travel to see old ones. When this job ends I'll probably have to move again. When I retire (God willing) and if I'm still in SF, I'll probably need to move to somewhere cheaper. I don't see why the same rules shouldn't apply to them.

If their friends and families care so much they should take them in, not put them on the public dole. As retirees they are probably better off living somewhere cheaper anyway, like a retirement community in an exurb, where everything, food, medical, and entertainment was a lot cheaper.

Empathy is a trait that, were you to cultivate it, would also likely help you tremendously in business, product design, understanding users, and many other things you find personally valuable in life, even beyond its intrinsic ability to make you more human.

Do you have something beyond a personal attack to offer?

If they truly loved or appreciated their location they would work enough to be able to afford to live there in retirement.

It is unethical and impractical to hold wealthier individuals accountable for the financial missteps of individuals. Especially when hardworking and financially responsible people get crowded out from living in a desirible location who could actually afford it.

Of course, this assumes that anyone can acquire as much wealth as they desire regardless of circumstance, which, as we have seen numerous times, is as much a "theory" as gravity is.

"It is unethical and impractical to hold wealthier individuals accountable"

Are a bunch of 20/30 something tech workers really wealthy? How much money do these kids have in the bank? How much school debt? What percent of their income do they have to spend on rent?

Since time is a resource, yes these 20/30 year olds are wealthier if we assume that everyone's time is equally valued - and that's an unrealistic assumption

I agree. That comment doesn't seem to take into account the human aspect of the problem.

The human aspect where 20/30 somethings can barely afford rent and school loans at the same time? Where the young have to move out of the city and commute in for their jobs?

There's two sides to that coin.

> The human aspect where 20/30 somethings can barely afford rent and school loans at the same time?

You could eliminate Section 8 today and this would not be solved in the bay area.

And what about personal responsibility?

In the calculus of renting vs buying a home you gain flexibility in renting. You can pick up and leave with minimal hassle. The risk you incur by doing so is that housing and rental prices might go up. You can't just reap the benefits of renting and then claim foul when the market prices them out and make others pay for it indirectly via externalities. If we're talking about people who are young enough that they've been priced out of home ownership in San Francisco their entire lives, then maybe they should have seen the writing on the wall and made a life for themselves somewhere they could afford it.

And, if their families want these people around so badly, why aren't they boarding them? It's the norm in plenty of other cultures.

Who's downvoting personal responsibility?

Yes, there are huge downsides to forcibly uprooting people.

But you don't need to throw out attacks like "warped." :-)

"And their friends? Their support networks? Their families? The place they know and love?"

This is the common retort.

Here's the thing: This goes for pretty much everyone ever born somewhere, so, uh, everyone.

You simply can't have everyone live somewhere. Imagine if everyone in the world wanted to live on a a small, 10 square mile island. You'd agree this is impossible (blah blah blah, current technology, blah blah blah), right?

How do you decide who gets to live there and who doesn't?

At least, IMHO, the best way is not "blood right" (IE i was born there, or spent most of my life there, i get to live there). It's essentially being "born lucky". It wouldn't work anyway. At the rate people have kids, you still run out of room. It's simply not a viable mechanism of deciding who gets to live where.

What is happening here is no different. If you have too many people who want to live in one place, you have to decide who gets to live there somehow. While i'm not necessarily a fan of "whoever pays the most", i'm even less of a fan of "because i spent 50 years there" or "i grew up there". Great, so you got to enjoy it for 50 years, let someone else have a turn.

Let's also add that the only reason, at all, those people are there in the first place, is because someone moved away. The likelihood that we are talking about people where generations of their family lived and died in the same place is very very low. In all likelihood, the only reason they have these "support networks", etc, is because someone uprooted the family and moved them somewhere else. After all, the vast majority of us are immigrants. How soon we seem to forget that.

Do i feel for folks who get displaced? Of course. But i don't believe in magic, and, eventually, you run out of room.

(now, there is a reasonable argument we aren't there yet, and we should do it to provide as nice an environment for people as long as we can, but in the end, someone is going to get screwed here)

Does it make sense to force a low income worker to commute from antioch to menlo park every day, while providing a subsidized menlo park apartment to an elderly person who doesn't participate in the work force?

If we're going to set aside subsidized apartments in newly constructed buildings close to job centers for low or moderate income people, I don't think it's especially callous or outrageous to insist that they be provided to people who need to be close to job centers for employment reasons.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like either outcome, really, I'd prefer to see an elderly person get to stay close to where he or she lived for many years. But I also see the effect that these brutal commutes have on low income workers who can'r afford to live near the job centers, how little they see their families or kids, how much it takes out of them. Seems like there's a lot of harm there you aren't really considering.

But what should happen when somebody retires? Stay working or get kicked out?

My impression was that we were talking about providing new construction in job centers for people who are not currently working. I would see a difference for someone who has already been there for many years, or was displaced recently.

Even in that case, though, I might be ok with telling people that they may have to transfer units if they are no longer working. We are talking about providing free or heavily subsidized housing for people who can't afford it, and there isn't a unlimited supply of this, especially near high cost job centers. There's pain in the displacement you have described, but I was responding to the comment that said that it is a warped point of view to prioritize working people when assigning spots in subsidized housing in job centers. There's a lot of pain in the commutes low income workers must endure to feed their families, too, a pretty heavy human toll involved in soul crushing commutes from the exurbs to the job centers. Would it warped to say to low income seniors: "we will continue to provide you with clean, safe housing, but now that you are no longer working, we will provide this further from the job centers, so that we can reserve the more expensive and scare units near the job centers so that low income workers don't have to commute two hours each way in traffic and rarely see their families."

Honestly, it does seem a reasonable allocation of scarce public resources to me.