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Comment by dougabug | Hacker News Reader

Well, for one costs are much higher, availability of labor and land are far more constrained. Also, while their states (Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina) might be slightly red, those cities, like all large American cities, lean blue.

The climate is fairly hospitable year round in the Bay Area. If I were homeless I doubt that I'd choose to live in Arizona or Texas in Summer or Winter. The concentration of disposable wealth and a generally liberal population in San Francisco probably makes panhandling easier, I would guess.

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> costs are much higher

Much of this is caused by the high cost of housing. Everyone needs to be paid enough to live here or enough to be worth commuting long distances.

> availability of labor and land are extremely constrained

That's not really true. There's not a lot of empty land, but there's huge swaths of underutilized land. Only zoning law prevents it from becoming more useful. Instead we get crumbling single family homes a few miles from a growing number of skyscrapers.

Zoning could arguably mitigate the problem, but geography strongly constrains the Bay Area in a way that simply does not apply to major metropolitan areas with vastly lower property values. Ironically, it really is pretty much supply and demand.

It's wishful thinking that the rest of America's real estate market is much more affordable due to wise zoning choices.

A lot of the land that seems underutilized is contaminated (SuperFund sites, ex-military, industrial, etc) and requires significant remediation. Even so, Peninsula residents still spend $1M for townhouses and condos built on former SuperFund sites. That's the discount price...

That supply and demand would change greatly if the 20 miles outside of the city center wasn't restricted to 3 stories.. Artificially tilts supply to nothing. Local owners want to keep it cause their prop value would drop and not in my backyard. Really really simple. If the state would override the locals, and zone it better, sf wouldn't be the most unaffordable city.

3/4 of residential land in SF is zoned for single family. We're not to the point where we need to talk about geography or the superfund sites.

When we actually use our land wisely, then it will be easy to build more around train stations. The measure of distance that matters is not miles, but minutes.

> It's wishful thinking that the rest of America's real estate market is much more affordable due to wise zoning choices.

SF jobs are more concentrated in a down town area. Offices in cities that were built post car culture are more sprawled out. It's terrible for the environment, but it postpones the problems that SF is running into.

> Ironically, it really is pretty much supply and demand.

Well, cheers to agreeing on something. Sucks that this is a debated thing here.

> 3/4 of residential land in SF is zoned for single family. We're not to the point where we need to talk about geography or the superfund sites.

But this is hardly a property unique to the Bay Area. Most American metropolitan areas share this lopsided bias towards single family zoning.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities...

Also, consider that this zoning problem surely existed long before home prices skyrocketed across the Bay Area and spread to other tech hubs such as Seattle. The fact that the top 5 tech companies alone in those two metropolitan areas (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook) have a combined market cap of $7.5T, is just one manifestation of the vast wealth generated by the tech industry which has warped property values.

It's a problem that comes with economic success and SF got there first. That doesn't mean other cities aren't on the same trajectory. And the fact that it's a 19th century city not designed for cars makes a big difference.

>Even so, Peninsula residents still spend $1M for townhouses and condos built on former SuperFund sites.

Their gardens must offer a unique taste of computing history.

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