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Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

> This is a mischaracterization of the YIMBY position. Most YIMBYs are not opposed to raising taxes so that the city can pay for the construction of affordable housing units.

This is false. YIMBYs opposed the recent prop I to tax >$10M real estate sales to fund “emergency rent relief and permanently affordable housing.”[1]

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

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You stated that "progressive supervisors are focused on public investment in affordable housing and taxing the rich to fund it." This is not what Prop I does.

Instead, the >$10M real estate tax would mostly be paid by developers, not homeowners, because most property sales in San Francisco that are >$10M are apartment buildings rather than houses owned by rich people. Not only that, but it would be a tax paid twice by developers, because they have to buy the land and then sell the finished development.

The reason YIMBYs opposed that proposition is for exactly this reason. It wouldn't be a tax on rich people, but yet another obstacle to the construction of housing, both affordable and market-rate.

Literally is a tax specifically constructed to target sellers (not buyers) of >$10M properties, otherwise known as rich people. With an exemption for sales to affordable housing nonprofits. This issue, passed by a wide margin, demonstrated that SF YIMBY is little more than a real estate lobby front at this point.

Again, developers != rich people. Developers are just businesses like everything else, not some evil cabal. Developers build the housing units that we both claim to want, and if you make it harder for them to build anything then no housing of any kind gets built.

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