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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

SF politicians and the voters who keep them in office have "ruined" SF in the sense of driving up housing costs by restricting supply, and failing to build adequate transportation infrastructure expeditiously: https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget or https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/, to cite two examples.

Any time SF wants, it can allow the supply of housing to rise to meet demand, which will drastically improve the city's culture, diversity, and affordability. SF voters don't want that, though, and they've not yet been overruled at the state level.

Let's get the diagnosis right first.

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Have you read this, and, if so, what do you think of it?

https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...

> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.

> In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.

I think it would only take a few years (very few, as in low single digits) of 1.5% growth in housing supply to invalidate the extrapolations being used here.

As it stands now there's not enough construction capacity. Santa Rosa burns in a wildfire and you can't get a contractor to stucco a wall in SF that summer, eh?

However, we could do it: "Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days" Aug., 2018 https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/02/prefab-housing-compl...

> This new 22-unit project from local developer Patrick Kennedy (Panoramic Interests) is the first in the nation to be constructed of prefabricated all-steel modular units made in China.

An interesting detail: "Kennedy notes that the cost of trucking to Berkeley from the port of Oakland was more expensive than the cost of shipping from Hong Kong."

So yeah, if we really had the political will we could build arcologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

Clearly it's years of policy at the state and local level that got us here. I've read big chunks of the Environmental Impact Report for the major downsize that happened in SF in the late 70s. That EIR specifically called out that the downzone would make SF much more expensive in the future if we didn't shift to redeveloping much of the industrialized parts of SF.

That redevelopment didn't really happen, and now we're left with this result.

The really unfortunate thing is because of the artificially restricted housing supply (and commercial, thanks Prop M) it ends up creating these perverse incentives. I would think that normally if you have an industry that's growing really well, and creating tons of high paying jobs, you'd want them in your city. But, because we combined a strictly limited supply with great growth in high paying jobs, the reaction is to be hostile to those high paying jobs.

Of course, it's not just San Francisco, it's practically all cities in the Bay Area that strictly limit housing development but allow office construction.

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