Comment by sien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sien | Hacker News Reader

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There's plenty of affordable housing in America where people do want to live as well:

"According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, lightly-regulated Houston has seen its civilian labor force grow by 20 percent in the last decade, compared to the San Francisco metro area's 16 percent. Some 21 Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters in Houston. What's more, for every job the Houston metro area has added, it's also permitted another unit of housing. As a result, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $841, and home prices are below the national average."

From here :

https://reason.com/2019/11/05/bernie-sanders-blames-apple-fo...

It's not rocket science. If you want affordable housing make it easy for people to build and increase supply. It's remarkable how Silicon Valley is all about solving big problems for the world but demonstrates with Bay Area housing that some problems don't need technology, they just need reasonable government and if you don't have that, well, things don't work.

To be fair, this problem is global. Many places that are doing well that haven't allowed enough construction like London, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, Paris and other places demonstrate the same failure to enable enough housing construction.

Paris is actually making some progress: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...

I've always loved this article, which mentions Houston, and discusses that it's one of many ways to add enough supply: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

Paris's burbs are making process notably because they tend to override local towns opinion now.

My parents' hometown of 7000 in the (very lower middle class) exhurbs was slated for around 300 new housing next to the train station. As usual everyone was upset at the town halls because "it will add traffic" "they are too dense", "it will degrade our quality of life", they got overriden, the houses & apartments got built anyway, and good riddance.

I've been to the exact same town halls in the bay area with the same bullshit arguments, except people end up with the power to actually make those projects not happen.

Maybe the fact that Houston isn’t 49 square miles, surrounded by water on three sides, might have something to do with it.

When Houston wants another housing unit, they just sprawl out into the plains to make it happen. (Not incidentally, this is why the city was devastated by the last hurricane: huge portions of it sprawl into floodplains.)

Yes, and San Francisco is mostly zoned for no more than 4 stories in height. It would never be as cheap as Huston because it can't sprawl. But there is a ton of opportunity to build up.

The San Francisco height / bulk map is pretty enlightening. https://sfgov.org/sfplanningarchive/zoning-map-heightbulk-di...

All those light colored areas are max 40 feet.

Yes, that’s true. It’s also true that vertical construction is significantly more expensive than sprawling outward.

It’s why it’s cheaper to live in Brooklyn than Manhattan, even though Brooklyn is mostly low-rise construction.

I think you have that backwards. Brooklyn is cheap and low-rise because the land is not as desirable. Considering only first order effects, Manhattan would be even more expensive if it was low-rise.

However there are important second order effects to consider too. The density is a big part of the appeal of Manhattan. If it was lower then it might push economic activity away and make people not want to live there as much. Maybe finance sector might move to say Chicago. This would push prices down.

How is it “backwards”? Nothing you’ve said is inconsistent with what I wrote. I am certainly not trying to suggest that Manhattan is only expensive because skyscrapers.

Yes, Manhattan is more desirable than Brooklyn. It’s desirable for many different reasons; scarcity is a big reason.

Would Manhattan be even more expensive if it didn’t have skyscrapers? Sure. But it’s irrelevant to my point: skyscrapers are not a magical panacea to housing prices. Objectively, factually, a short subway commute lowers prices significantly in NYC, even if you’re commuting to a land of low-density construction. Thus, again we see that Land is the high-order bit on real estate prices. Aways was, always will be. Everything else is a detail.

If SF is to fix it’s housing crisis, there are exactly two ways: reduce demand, or increase accessible land area. The only way to effectively do the latter is good transit. All of the rest of this stuff is wishful thinking by people who don’t understand real estate.

>Maybe the fact that Houston isn’t 49 square miles, surrounded by water on three sides, might have something to do with it.

Neither is Silicon Valley.

And this has what to do with San Francisco?

The guy you were responding to was talking about Silicon Valley.

Maybe he edited it. When I replied, the comment was about SF.

The bay area (and california) housing issue isn't limited to the county of SF, and it isn't because of a lack of space to sprawl out with.

This is a tired argument that has been debunked many times before.

“debunked”, in the sense that nobody here wants to believe facts when they get in the way of a nice theory.

As soon as people view “San Francsico” and “the valley” as the same place, you might have an argument. Right now, the only people who believe this are people who haven’t spent any time there.

Building more housing in Palo Alto might help Palo Alto, but it won’t do much for prices in SF.

I've lived in the bay area for a decade, in the south bay, east bay and SF and have a partner who's lived here even longer. For a housing market, they are pretty much the same place since they are all within commuting distance of each other. Of course there are local variations, just like within SF itself, but it's all within a similar range.

And there is a lot of single family housing in SF alone that can be converted into 6 story apartment buildings. Plentttyyy of space available for the demand. By-right up zoning with a 30 day limit on permitting processes would do miracles for housing affordability here, but the Olds want to profit off the immigrants and cast their neighborhoods in amber.

Also the cheapest form of housing construction as far as sqft and price / unit is the fourplex. Housing cost is mostly land price & bureaucracy here, not the cost of construction, so many developers will find 6+ floor apartment buildings feasible.

I lived in SF for a decade. You’re simply not paying attention if you think they’re the same market.

Ask a 30-something FAANG employee living in SF if they’d take a nice Menlo Park apartment over their place in the Mission. Or Palo Alto. Or even South SF. It’s just bizarre to suggest that these are equivalent.

Being a 30-something BigTech employee who knows a lot of other 30-something BigTech employees, they would choose any of those places depending on what stage of life they are in, what their commute is like and what their preferences are. Some like the mission, some loathe it, same with menlo park. Some will live in SF and take long commutes to menlo park, some will live in sunnyvale and take long commutes to SF! I know all of these types personally.

But almost nobody will live in Reno, Salt Lake and commute daily via airplane to menlo park. You might find the 3 outliers on the news who do this, but I've never met or found anyone who actually does. The ones that have a life in a city that is a flight away will tend to rent a room in the work city and fly over once a week, thus participating in the local housing market.

This commute distance limitation creates the city labor and housing market, and thus people who work in Mountain View would consider living in Santa Cruz, Berkley or San Jose, but they won't actually live in New York and fly over daily to make a silly example.

Within any city itself, local variations exist. There are bad neighborhoods, nice neighborhoods. Party ones, not party ones. Big mansions and small studio apartments. Places close to lucrative jobs (mountain view) and ones that are far away but still commutable for the price a very long commute (Stockton). They will all be available in a housing market, but because they all participate in the same market, the supply / demand equation will still apply and thus set them all within a certain range of each other. An identical mansion in reno is a lot cheaper than the mansion in atherton for very good reasons.

Jobs are what determine the demand for housing in a city, and interaction of that demand with the supply of housing available is what sets the price of housing in a place.

Have you ever taken a economics class? I would suggest reading a book like order without design (twitter preview: https://twitter.com/devonzuegel/status/1079407914715103232 ) to understand how cities work and to take some sort of econmics 101 class with the many online resources out there.

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