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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

The government is run by and for the benefit of the established land owners and they don't want housing, they want excess returns. Simple.

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> The government is run by and for the benefit of the established land owners and they don't want housing, they want excess returns. Simple.

Simple but simplistic, that's just a caricature. Reality is more complex, and regular homeowners don't care about returns, excess or otherwise. People buy homes to live in, to raise their kids in and to maybe retire in if health allows. Most people enjoy stability, so it's nice for the neighborhood to change slowly or not that much.

> government is run by and for the benefit of the established land owners

Do San Francisco’s renters fail to turn out to vote? (Serious question.)

To the extent that SF renters are organized, they're organized around groups and ideologies that don't prioritize supply a solution. They're focused on things like rent control, just cause eviction, foreign/institutional investor boogeymen, and preventing even substantially or fully below-market housing developments because they still threaten to upset what renters believe is a delicate balance their neighborhoods/communities depend on.

It makes sense, renters who are politically engaged and organized are more likely to be long-term residents, and being able to preserve your tenancy/community is a different thing from being able to easily move or upgrade.

> They're focused on things like rent control, just cause eviction, foreign/institutional investor boogeymen, and preventing even substantially or fully below-market housing developments

Which is funny, since every single thing here makes the situation worse, because it ensures that new developments will be more expensive and riskier.

San Francisco has a large transient population of renters. They drift in, party and work hard, and then leave when they have kids or want to settle down. This is because San Francisco is not very family friendly - it's a city with more dogs than kids -- with more drug addicts than kids. It's much more of a party town than a place where people can put down roots. The average renter lives in San Francisco for 6 years and then moves away. Don't think of San Francisco as a self-contained unit, it is a 7x7 mile square containing 800K people in a larger SF Bay Area containing 8 million people. People go to the Square when they are in the mid to late 20s to early 30s to party and then move to other places nearby when they have a family.

This transient population generally does not involve itself too much in local issues because it is not attached to city. That is why SF mayoral candidates and city council candidates spend a lot more time discussing how they will fight global warming and white supremacy rather than discussing local zoning. Because the transient population cares about these general non-local issues and generally don't bother too much with details of local issues. This has some hilarious consequences, for example, one rich family whose view would get blocked by new development managed to put on the ballot a measure to block the development, and got it to pass in the name of "Save our Waterfront From Greedy Corporations". That's why SF has a large parking lot and tennis courts on prime waterfront real estate. There is no one easier to manipulate than the uninformed do-gooders that is the SF voting population -- just link more housing development to "greedy corporations" or "gentrification" or "large carbon footprint" or complain about lack of diversity in the construction crew or administrative staff, or new residents, etc. So many ways to kill a project.

The result is that control over local issues -- e.g. what the city council actually does -- is handed over to a small core of residents that do care and have put down roots -- e.g. to homeowners. And homeowners want house prices to rise and for neighborhoods to not change radically. Therefore the SF city council and mayor are very conservative about things like zoning, even as they spend a lot of time espousing radical positions on generic lefty issues.

Congratulations on squeezing every toxic canard about "transient" renters into a single comment!

According to the Census American Community Survey of 2021, 43% of renters in San Francisco have lived in the same dwelling for ten years or more. It certainly is not typical that a person arrives and departs the city in just 6 years.

I will respond to the one factual claim buried in all the emotional outrage.

Let's look at the 2021 American Community Survey.

How long someone has lived in a unit is called "tenure". You want to look at tenure for renters, which is this table:

https://data.census.gov/table?q=san+francisco&t=Owner/Renter...

Here is the data:

    Renter occupied: 427300
        Moved in 2019 or later 170948
        Moved in 2015 to 2018 70878
        Moved in 2010 to 2014 64753
        Moved in 2000 to 2009 71281
        Moved in 1990 to 1999 31614
        Moved in 1989 or earlier 17826

What we see is that 40% of renters lived in their unit for 2 years or less. About 17% lived in their units for between 3-6 years. 15% lived in their unit for 7-11 years. 28% lived in their unit for 12 or more years. Therefore it's clearly false that 40% of renters have lived in their unit for 10 or more years.

Let's compare with the corresponding table for owner occupied housing, and you see the difference:

    Owner occupied: 370695
        Moved in 2019 or later 48657
        Moved in 2015 to 2018 50381
        Moved in 2010 to 2014 53299
        Moved in 2000 to 2009 91120
        Moved in 1990 to 1999 63382
        Moved in 1989 or earlier 63856

Here, the smallest category is 2 years or less, and the the largest is 12-21 years.

Yes, there are renters that are long term and have comparable roots (not 40%, but 28%). But they are a sufficiently small minority of renters that they are comfortably and easily outvoted by owners, which is why the city council reflects the views of owners and not renters.

Even though SF has more renters than owners, if you restrict yourself to the population that has tenure longer than 2 years, then owners outnumber renters 322K to 256K.

FYI your link doesn't go directly to the specific table you are using, which I believe is B25026.

I am using S2502.

Yes, B25026 has this data. Thanks for pointing out that the link doesn't go directly there, links to these SPAs often don't work well.

FYI, S2502 is not the right table to use because it is looking at housing units rather than people, whereas you want to measure people. So if there is a apartment that is owner occupied and rents out a room to a tenant, then this is an owner occupied unit for purposes of S2502. This also applies to in-laws.

Again, I'm not saying all renters are transient. There is certainly a core of renters -- I think 28% or 1/3 is a good estimate. That is, from living in SF for a while and spending a lot of time with this data, I'd say a good 1/3 of renters in SF are just there for a couple of years to have fun and will move out quickly. They have no roots at all. 1/3 are a bit in the middle, where they think they have roots but decide to leave when they have children or get married and the realities of family life in SF hit them. 1/3 are all in.

So even though you have a 60-40 split in terms of renters/owners, the actual split of people who care about zoning and local issues is heavily in favor of owners. This is why the city council is constituted as it is. It's not voter suppression. It's not dirty tricks. It's just reflecting the demands of the population that cares about these issues. That's why you have things like crazy shadow ordinances preventing tall buildings from being built, or why the 8 Washington debacle happened.

Children need bedrooms but don't generate any income, the typical adult who moves here can barely afford their own bedroom, so of course most people will have to leave when they have kids. It's not a revelation about the kind of people who move here or why, it's just a mechanical consequence of high prices.

I don't know about SF in particular, but nationwide, yes, renters turn out to vote at a far lower rate than homeowners[0] (67% vs 49%)

[0] https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/renter-voting-prefere...

> nationwide, yes, renters turn out to vote at a far lower rate than homeowners

Wider than I expected. Thank you.

Asking because in New York, renters turn out, and that drives policy outcomes. (They’re also less likely to think supply and demand is a myth.)

By and large, poorer people vote less than wealthy people. It is harder to vote in america as a poorer person in many areas, arguably on purpose.

> harder to vote in america as a poorer person in many areas, arguably on purpose

Is this true in San Francisco?

Unfortunately at this point, you've reached the end of my knowledge. I assume California has reasonable mail in voting procedures. That should make the "cost" of voting very very minimal. Do we still see poor people voting less there? I don't know actually.

Alternative question:

* do San Francisco renters turn out to Town Hall meetings, local elections, pester their representatives and put in as much #not-bribery as landowners?

Town Hall type meetings only take curated questions normally and heavily gatekeep who is allowed to speak.

> Town Hall type meetings only take curated questions normally and heavily gatekeep who is allowed to speak

Then it’s not a town hall. Town hall means anyone can ask questions. You may need to line up. But that’s it.

> Do San Francisco’s renters fail to turn out to vote?

They aren't the best but when thy do vote they've somehow managed to link voting for housing to being a form a racist gentrification.

Yes, they very much do. The voter turnout gap by housing tenure is about 20 percentage points (e.g. 70% turnout for owners and 50% for renters). Also the voter registration gap is massive because many renters are not eligible to vote or face hurdles registering due to lack of permanent address. Finally, the people who would benefit from new housing construction in a place like San Francisco are often registered to vote in some other jurisdiction. The people who already live in S.F. have no particular compelling interest in a new apartment tower, but the prospective tenants of those apartments who would vote for them aren't all voters in that city.

And lower income people are far more likely to be renters than landowners. Lower income jobs are less likely to provide time off to vote. Even if mail-in voting is allowed such low-income jobs are also less likely to provide time off to attend city council meetings or public hearings or other such things.

Yup. Census data shows that non voters with incomes less than $20k/year give transportation issues as the reason in 8% of cases, but only 0.1% of people with incomes over $100k give this reason.

That really make sense because if you own land high density buildings make land much more valuable.

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