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Comment by askafriend | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to a one bedroom unit in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world. Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements.

There are several reasons why the prices have gotten so high (lack of supply, politics, etc).

But don’t expect to move your Texas ranch or Midwestern single-family-house lifestyle to SF with no compromises.

But in return for your compromises, you will get quite a bit in return.

Is it worth it? That’s a very personal decision. For many, it’s not. For many, it is.

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Roommates and alternative living situations are necessary because our housing policy is to preserve the Texan/Midwestern single-family-house lifestyles of existing homeowners. And not just to preserve them, but to keep sightlines clear of evidence that someone else might be living a different lifestyle nearby.

People are not entitled to 1BRs, but they are even less entitled to streets curated for 1-2 story detached houses at trivial distances from that human epicenter.

> On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to a one bedroom in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world. Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements.

New York is the “human epicenter” in the US. San Francisco is in the same tier as Houston or DC: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2018t.html.

Paying New York/London prices to live in a city that is not New York or London is just sad.

> Paying New York/London prices to live in a city that is not New York or London is just sad.

I’m coming to this point. If I’m going to pay a New York level rent I might was well enjoy a 24/7 subway, a plethora of good restaurants and a beach that’s actually warm in the summer.

SF maximizes technological intelligence, Wall Street maximizes financial intelligence. Plenty of overlap, but the top talent stays where the rest of the top talent is.

Having technological intelligence doesn’t make San Francisco a “human epicenter” (whatever that is). I wouldn’t even call San Francisco a technological epicenter. Even within computer technology, much of the most important technological intelligence in the US is outside San Francisco: in Portland (Intel), Seattle (Microsoft), San Diego (Qualcomm), and maybe San Jose (Cisco). Put differently, what cities would be most devastating (in terms of impact on US technological capabilities) to lose early in WWIII? I’d put Boston or Seattle ahead of San Francisco.

Agreed, SF has a lot of tech companies, but a lot of them don't do things that ate very valuable for society, many are social networking/advertising.

I think consumer tech is valuable in the sense that our peace-time economy is based on consumption, and San Francisco is great at helping us consume. But when I hear the word epicenter I’m thinking “what’d put us back in the Stone Age if we didn’t have it?”

I don't think a significant proportion of the people who want to live in New York would cite Wall Street in their explanation.

It's not about whether any specific person deserves to live in a specific place.

There is a cost to society in effectively pricing out half of the population from an entire city. Is the benefit of mitigating that worth the cost?

For what it's worth, I think that it probably is.

> It's not about whether any specific person deserves to live in a specific place.

I never said anything about if someone deserves to live somewhere.

A 1-bedroom apartment is a very specific type of unit and that's part of what I wanted to point out. You can also rent studios, converted rooms, or get roommates in a bigger place with more rooms. There's a lot of other options I'm leaving out too, but I reject the premise that everyone in SF absolutely requires a 1-bedroom apt as an essential. It's nice to have certainly, and having roommates isn't for everyone...but there are tradeoffs to every place you live. You can absolutely make SF work if that was your desire and you knew the tradeoffs.

The price for a studio isn't going to be far behind a 1 bedroom, and rooms in houses aren't really an option for for people who aren't single in most cases. Even if you wanted to cram multiple people into one 12x12 room, most cheap rooms for rent are explicit about 1 person only.

Look at median household income, San Francisco is effectively off limits to most people.

Point taken. We definitely have a problem but I really don’t see any solution anytime soon. Even if we committed to building a ton of new supply tomorrow, it’d still take years to get approved and actually physically built.

I’ll push back a little on your point back alternatives not being too far behind the price of a 1 bedroom though. I know several people with units <$1800. Some converted rooms go for <$1500.

A median price of $3,700 doesn't imply that single bedrooms cheaper than that don't exist.

>don’t see any solution anytime soon

There's not. But a solution 5 years from now is better than never.

> Even if we committed to building a ton of new supply tomorrow, it’d still take years to get approved and actually physically built.

Would you argue we shouldn't do anything about climate change because that will take years of approval and political decisions before anything gets done?

I mean, yeah, it would be better to start ten years ago than today, but starting today must be better than never right?

That’s not my viewpoint at all. I think we SHOULD build as much supply as possible.

However I’m not holding my breath nor am I optimistic about the short-medium term reality.

What is that cost? There's an enclave in my city where I can't afford to live, and I live in a neighborhood where others can't afford to live.

Now in my case, the people who are shut out of my neighborhood arguably have less access to things like good schools, so in principle I'm uncomfortable with exclusionary zoning and economic segregation. But I don't know if that's the case in SF. Are the elementary schools in SF that much better than in surrounding towns?

No, the schools aren’t that good. And it’s not an enclave, the entire peninsula is extremely expensive except for a few patches (San Bruno, parts of Redwood City, Santa Clara) - and there’s not much availability in those places. The only place close to what most people outside of California would consider affordable is deep east Oakland or Richmond, after that you need to go to Tracy or Vallejo or past San José.

You have to drive several hours in extreme traffic to reach a substantially different housing market, which obviously involves air pollution, climate change, energy cost, road infrastructure, parking space, collisions, and a substantial portion of your life and productive capacity. The same situation in San Francisco plays out in its suburbs, only worse, since a meaningful growth in housing capacity would be an even bigger change for them.

There's a great deal of city-by-city, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, unit-by-unit variation, but the crisis is that even the floor is so high.

> What is that cost?

By some estimates it's double digit percentage points off US GDP

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulatio...

Searching that opinion piece for "study", "studies" and related keywords returns no results.

https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/chang-tai.hsieh/research/gr...

What is that cost?

Part of the cost is that tech companies have to find more and more money to pay staff in order to maintain the growth their investors demand, which leads them to do less and less ethical things like spying on people.

While such a large portion of tech company revenue is going to landlords (via staff wages) tech companies will continue to get worse at things like privacy.

This is more expensive than Manhattan, Tokyo, every European capital, etc. It's more expensive because unlike most other cities San Francisco has very few residential apartment buildings. Make SF into Manhattan and watch prices fall.

>Make SF into Manhattan and watch prices fall.

I don't see how that follows. Manhattan is Manhattan, and yet prices still rise, families and communities are still displaced, and there are still people that are un or under-housed.

In America, housing is an asset that appreciates in value for the purpose of resale. For the middle class, housing has been the primary means of accruing wealth and for many is the entirety of their retirement savings.

A society that guaranteed housing to every citizen would be fundamentally, structurally different than the one we live in today. It's not a simple urban planning problem.

You don't understand how Manhattan optimized for density before prices rose this high?

The parent is saying if SF had the housing density of Manhattan it would take decades of more growth before prices reach NYC levels.

People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property. As Silicon Valley is ruled by rent seekers who make building illegal, people have every right to complain.

> People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property

Not in a world where zoning and nuisance laws exist, with good reasons.

No one's proposing to build a sewage treatment plant on this land. It's just more housing, in a city where people go without a roof over their head because it's too expensive. There's no "nuisance" here, only landowners trying to assert rights over their neighbors' property.

"Rent seekers who make building illegal"? I don't think it's the people seeking rent who would make building illegal.

"Rent seeking" is a specific term in economics referring to people who seek to extract wealth from the economy without adding to it in any way, e.g. "make building illegal" in order to force up the value of their own property.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

Thanks for sharing, did not know of that term, but I must say it's a rather confusing choice of words!

You're welcome! I went down a wikipedia black hole on economics a while back. The most memorable term I learned was moral hazard, which also sounds confusing.

The term is somewhat dated, but the usage makes sense in context. Historically there has been a noble class awarded privileges via mechanisms external to the market that leveraged those privileges to extract revenue from the market. Generally this consisted of renting out some right like the right to farm certain land or draw water from certain wells or dock ships in certain harbors. From this we get the modern economic usage of the term "rents" to mean the additional cost someone can charge for something due to their exclusive or semi-exclusive ability to provide it. Think patents, copyrights, monopolies, trade secrets, and ownership of scarce finite resources (like land in SF). From this comes the term "rent seeking" to describe the behavior of obtaining market privileges through means external to the market. This (mostly) consists of trying to influence laws to be in your own favor, like patent owners trying to get patents extended or homeowners opposing upzoning.

This only applies if you’re a single person. How is someone supposed to start a family and afford to live anywhere near that area?

I think we are reaching a really depressing future if only the wealthy can afford to have a family.

Bay Area is the most extreme example but we see it everywhere with no government mandated leave policies and childcare costs are insane. Again, only the wealthy get these services because they work at companies that use them for recruiting purposes and to retain talent.

Gotta ask, because this issue comes up in many major cities:

And what if the service workers who make substantially less than the higher earners who so rely on them?

Does the cost go down that much for a 4 bedroom split between four people on minimum wage? In a lot of places it doesn’t.

The service workers move somewhere else where they can afford to live. The ones that remain can demand a higher price for their work

...When they are actually working. But if you are fired from the job, you still need to pay rent for the time it takes to find a new job.

Having high rent reduces your personal “runway”. This makes bootstrapped startups hard and it makes like as a lower-income worker very risky/stressful

If you don't like the risk/stress there are plenty of other places to live. If you choose to live in SF when you can't afford it then that just not a wise decision. Eventually the prices will even out and you will just have to pay $30 for a sandwich.

Is that happening? Are service workers in SF paid a living wage?

Or are people like fast food workers being paid minimum wage and commuting 2 hours?

That is their choice. The market will only correct if people make rational choices.

For a lot of people, it isn't a choice. That's where the problem sneaks in.

The market you believe in doesn't exist in a vacuum. The world is far more complex than that.

Chances are you know someone who is on rent control and you’ll pay $700-$800 for a room. Not too many service workers move to SF if they don’t know someone there already..

Hell I know someone paying $850 for a one bedroom in Duboce.

>no one is entitled to a one bedroom

I’m curious how do you mean this? There are a plenty of reasons as to why I wouldn’t want to have a roommate and a 2bd is not affordable.

Basically if you can't afford it then you're not a victim...

Entitled is not the same as just getting what you want. If you can afford it, great. If you can’t afford it, nothing else entitles you to have it.

There's nothing inherent in that. Any more than it's inherent that in a system that awards apartments based on time on a waiting list, that time on a waiting list entitles you to an apartment in that system.

The argument is whether we should somehow alter what entitles you to an apartment in our system.

You cut off the important bit "in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world."

It's about location, not living space.

> Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements.

Is “alternate living arrangements” a euphemism for homelessness?

Except for rent controlled tenants that is

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