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Comment by cobookman | Hacker News Reader

Why limit to affordable & teacher housing. Seems unfair and might not effect the current cost of living for those getting market rate housing....aka the tax payers.

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Because it would allow the opposition to trick housing-have-nots into opposing it, under the false rhetoric of, “You’re just looking for a blank check to build luxury bro frathouse towers for tech millionaires”.

If rational arguments about market-rate housing worked on the San Francisco electorate, the bad housing situation would never have developed there.

Because if you're putting something on the ballot, you've got to make the beneficiaries extra-sympathetic. Hopefully this will be extended after the initial proposition passes.

They tried, it got too much resistance. There are essentially two anti-housing groups:

1. People who have a vested interest in inflating housing prices, e.g. because they own property

2. People who seriously, genuinely believe that more market-rate housing won't help affordability

Targeting just affordable & teacher housing swings group (2), which combined with the YIMBYs is (hopefully) enough to get policy passed.

It seems like a lot of the problem is that, if you tell developers that they can build any housing they want, they'll mostly build high-end apartments because they can make more money off those. If you want affordable housing to exist in sufficient quantity, you have to incentivize it in some way.

You can pass rent controls as a separate measure. But I think adding high-end apartments will still open up some of the regular apartments and lower prices.

High-end apartments is still more housing. People moving into the high-end apartments will leave some other, perhaps cheaper apartments free.

In sf generally 15-30% of units built in a high end apartment building need to be affordable units.

So why restrict the measure for teacher and affordable income housing.

This measure could end up creating a ghetto.

Yes, production increases when incentivized by high prices. That’s the core of how markets are in any way useful.

The only meaningful difference between luxury and affordable housing is whether it’s allocated to the highest bidder or randomly among low bidders.

The website says "teachers and working families." Seems to me that that working families catches a decent chunk of the population. Single people will still benefit because with increased supply in another area will reduce the demand for regular apartments.

The specific language of the initiative is supposed to come out next week. I believe the teacher part is going to be defined as strictly referring to housing built on SFUSD-owned land and designated for teachers, and the working families part is going to be tied to income bands.

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