In late July, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter’s photo of a legion of older, white people attending a neighborhood meeting regarding the towering housing development planned for the site of the Marina Safeway became the latest touchstone for rancorous online debate about San Francisco development.
These old people, we were told by charming internet housing warriors, are the reason your monthly rent exceeds the asking price of a decent used Lexus. These obstinate old people are the reason you can’t afford to live here.
Before we dissect this broad claim, it warrants mentioning that community meetings like the one depicted in the snapshot that launched a thousand quips are now merely a repository for performative outrage: Thanks to state law, resident complaints can’t really derail housing developments anymore. The online blowback? Reciprocal performative outrage.
But, to address the matter at hand, are greedy old people the reason you can’t afford to live here? Your humble narrator talked to around a dozen developers, architects, development professionals and land-use experts and the consensus is: They might be a reason. But not the reason.
“Housing costs,” says one former longtime Planning Department official, “are the compounding of at least three separate policy failures: federal affordable housing defunding since the 1980s, exclusionary zoning with racist roots, and a permitting process that legislated NIMBYism.”
“Picking one villain lets everyone else off the hook.”
The online vitriol directed at a roomful of old people nonplussed at the idea of a housing development bearing no small resemblance to the stern of a Princess Cruise ship largely came from young, pro-development, “common sense” moderates — YIMBYs, “Abundance” types, and others in the “Build, baby, build!” arm of the Democratic Party.
Of note, Mayor Daniel Lurie and Supervisor Stephen Sherrill are both relatively young, ostensibly pro-development, “common sense” moderates. They also oppose the project proposed atop Armistead Maupin’s “Social Safeway” site.
The invective should also, logically, extend to them.
And not just them: Yes, San Francisco made it unduly burdensome to build here. Until last year, vast swaths of San Francisco were height-restricted to 40 feet, with density controls that wouldn’t realistically even let you go that high.
But this was, spoiler alert, a “Murder on the Orient Express”-type problem: Everyone was guilty here. To single out older people on folding chairs and fail to indict a top-down, byzantine governmental building and permitting system makes for a hell of a hot take. But, again, it lets everyone else off the hook.
Not that long ago, remembers one development professional, simply being assigned a city planner to go over elements of the California Environmental Quality Act on your project could require almost a year. That is: almost a year of waiting to get the person who would then determine if you would have to wait even longer while undertaking endless studies and mitigations.
“That had nothing to do with old people,” he laughs. “Getting your building permits issued? It wasn’t little old ladies slowing that down. That was corruption that slowed that down.”
“The No. 1 impediment to building in San Francisco is the cost of land,” he continues. “No. 2 is the cost of capital. Then it’s the cost of materials and labor and then the time the government makes you take. I don’t know that I’d put cranky old neighbors in the top four or five.”
Yes, you can partially turn your ire on intransigent neighborhood people over the fact that, until recently, every permit in San Francisco was discretionary and could be challenged. But it’s harder to skewer neighborhood folks regarding the decades of scleroticism and corruption within the building department, which benefitted connected fixers.
Agonizing hard costs, meanwhile, are the result of factors well beyond the municipal level: “All the copper and switchgear,” says a longtime city developer, “it’s all going to these fucking AI data centers.”
Local builders are competing with everyone else here. And not just in hard costs: Private equity could put its money into housing or oil futures or frozen concentrated orange juice. Developers tell me that a project generally needs to pencil out to 20 percent gross profit to attract equity investors. Doing the simple math, the developer continues, if it costs $600,000 to $700,000 per unit to develop, the necessary profit is $140,000.
So, that’s a lot. And, in the present day, high interest rates have thrown off that equation. To spur development, the city has moved to slash the percentage of affordable housing required in mid-sized to large developments from 15 percent to 5 percent — but still very few are building. Labor and construction costs in San Francisco are high and, in the end, so are the rents and/or purchase prices required of new construction.
“People build based on maximum rent,” says a longtime city developer. Most builders, he adds “will hold units vacant until they can get those rents. The only way to get more affordable housing is to finance it and subsidize it.”
Something YIMBYs get right: A theme that emerges again and again talking with land-use experts is that the city put itself in a bad place with downzonings in the 1970s.
To buy into San Francisco, you presently need a pile of cash, a time machine or both. But if you could use that time machine to go back several generations and enable regional developers and mid-sized contractors to build the unremarkable 12-unit buildings that so many people desire to live in, it would’ve made a difference today.
But how much more affordable would San Francisco be if we’d built more? The answer, again, is more complicated than bros on Twitter would have you believe.
In 2001, the Planning Department commissioned a study tackling the question of what might happen to the cost of home ownership if, by some alchemy, 10 percent more units were dropped into the city overnight.
The answer: It would knock an estimated 4.1 percent off the price of buying a house. If you found this much money in a sack it would be like a gift from the leprechauns. But, in terms of real-estate purchasing, it is not transformational: Let’s say the median home sales price in San Francisco is $1.7 million. This would lower that by around $70,000 — to $1.63 million.
That 2001 study, however, looked at more. It also estimated that if the city’s per capita income were to jump by 10 percent, it would lead to a 7.5 percent increase in house prices.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about this because, while you’d need to be a conjurer to add 10 percent to the housing stock instantaneously, adding vast wealth to the city at a moment’s notice is hardly the stuff of magic. Since 2001 it has happened again and again and again — and the cost of housing has gone to infinity and beyond. Rents in San Francisco last month were up 26 percent from July 2025 — and they were already obscenely high in 2025.
A tsunami of cash is about to wash over San Francisco, once more. And, here we come ‘Lizbeth, it’s The Big One: The Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs promise perhaps $2 trillion of tech stocks in the next year, much of which will be convertible into cash for young engineers to throw around like King Jaffe Joffer and outbid anyone and everyone. This is an order of magnitude more than San Francisco, or any city, has ever dealt with.
If San Francisco had built more, it figures that this would have slowed down the rise in housing costs and helped us deal with the tech deluge. But the Planning Department’s own study indicates that it would only have mitigated the surge in costs, not actually lowered them — let alone kept housing “affordable.”
Sadly, we haven’t built all that much, and even City Hall’s best-laid plans won’t help a great deal: The city controller estimated that, in the most optimistic scenario, Mayor Lurie’s recent upzoning would usher in only 14,600 extra units over the next 20 years — and decrease rents by a maximum of $125 a month. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick but, again, not life-changing stuff.
Meanwhile, the city’s per-capita income has grown immensely.
Even if this city had an efficient and rational development process — which hasn’t been the case for quite some time — it would have been vulnerable to a housing crisis. Tech and AI are not manufacturing or even biotech: By and large, you don’t need warehouses or labs or factories and you’re not bound by supply chains. One VC can have an epiphany and decide an app is the wave of the future and 2,000 well-compensated people can be expediently summoned to San Francisco.
The problem of the massive and economically fortuitous Baby Boom generation holding the lion’s share of the state’s housing stock is one that is going to resolve in the coming years — gradually then suddenly. In the next decade, a tremendous amount of housing may yet come on the market. You all know why.
It’s not talked about enough how beneficial it would be to open more quality senior housing in this state; most every older person who moved in would open up a home for younger people.
So, again, it’s complicated. Meanwhile: Demonizing old people on the internet is fun and easy. Here’s a hot take about that photo of the Marina meeting: There is nothing new under the sun.
If, over the course of decades, from the 1970’s city-wide downzoning (for which you can thank the likes of Calvin Welch among Diane Feinstein for), you refuse to allow adequate housing to be created relative to demand, then the inevitable result will be chronic scarcity and runaway housing costs and, therefore massive gentrification, as those with more money outbid those with less for an artificially diminished and limited pool of housing.
The only way to sustainability address this problem is through the creation of more housing — a lot more housing. We went down the wrong path decades ago and now we must face up to the reality of our profound mistake and pivot as fast as possible to massively incentivize (as opposed to disincentivize as we currently still do) the creation of a massive amount of housing.
We did it before — in the wake of WW2– and we can do it again, albeit no longer via environmentally-damaging suburban sprawl, but rather via environmentally-sustainable urban infill and efficient land-use (i.e., densification supporting traditional walkable communities) within our existing urbanized footprint.
The best time to plant a tree is, of course, 5 decades ago — the next best time is now.
Karl, cogent post…thank you
I agree, we should be taxing things we don’t want, not taxing things we do want. But can we agree on what we don’t want?
I believe that most reasonable people do not want to have to competitively bid for a rental apartment on account of a ridiculously low ( ≈2%) vacancy rate (the lowest in the entire nation) that is the direct result of ill-conceived (anti) housing policies that continue to hamstring the creation of new housing.
Damn, I like a lot of your articles, but you liberals and conservatives are so into the ‘market’ solutions, you cannot address the obvious solution that most regular people want. Social Housing….built by the city, or the state, etc, that is off market forever and owned by ‘us’. That building is community organized…by local architects, near transit……..not those fucking towers like in Cabrini. You all just can’t imagine the government actually serve the bottom half of your own citizens. Always your damn markets and bank solutions. My god. After the past 20 years of corporate landlords, and US gov’t bailouts of the banks….still…ohh….there must be too much regulation?
“Most builders, he adds, ‘will hold units vacant until they can get those rents.'”
In other words, it is impossible to build enough housing to lower rents, because as soon as rents get too low, builders won’t build. The YIMBY narrative is snake oil.
So if building more housing doesn’t mitigate soaring housing costs then, by your logic, the inverse must be true, i.e., demolishing housing will mitigate soaring housing costs.
Brilliant!
The most affordable housing is existing housing. The only ones who oppose demolition these days are the historic preservationists, who are a dying breed.
Thanks for a balanced article. Here are a couple of thoughts:
All these old people everyone is mad at are going to die as Joe was kind enough not to so blatantly point out and all that housing they live in, either own or rent, will become available. How much of it will be snapped up by speculative developers and not “young families” remains to be seen.
How many units can be fit on the typical San Francisco lot? And how much will they cost when built and ready for occupancy?
In terms of unbuilt units apparently the 7200 units at Candlestick are moving forward per a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, so you can cross that off the list of undeveloped but approved sites with lots of housing. The Chronicle says the Power Plant site in Dogpatch is full steam ahead. Also whatever happened to the Schlage Lock site?
The real problem is the affordability problem particularly now as there is all this money in the pockets of a relatively few folks in SF. Hard to build your way out of it and create affordable housing as the stats in Joe’s article proved.
Why do people in these comments always blame Calvin Welch? It is ridiculous.
And some day everyone who is now young will be old.
Hardly ridiculous — if one understands the history of downzoning in SF and Mr. Welch’s “pioneering” malign role in it!
Calvin Welch was instrumental in getting the Haight-Ashbury (H-A) neighborhood downzoned in the early 1970’s.
Prior to the downzoning, ≈40% of the neighborhood was African American. In the decades after the downzoning the African American population dropped precipitously as follows: 1980’s: down ≈28% to 25%; 1990’s: down 15% to 12%; 2000’s: down 9% to 7%; 2010’s: down to 5%; 2020’s: down to <4%.
Basically, Calvin's stifling of housing creation gentrified blacks and others of modest means out of the Haight-Ashbury while during this period he accumulated a mini-real estate empire (that has skyrocketed in ill-gotten value) in the H-A where he and his family still live.
Calvin has benefited quite handsomely via his downzoning and gentrification efforts!
That's why it's essential that people do their research and understand the negative and hypocritical effects of the anti-housing creation policies that Calvin, to this day, continues to advocated for.
All this is happening to the backdrop of stalled projects at Stonestown, Treasure Island, Divis car wash, Lucky 13, a couple of towers at Market/Van Ness. Just of the top of my head, there’s more. That’s permitted and entitled and ready to go housing construction that should be yielding tens of thousands of homes. (One abandoned hole in the ground if you’re feeling pedantic). And yeah, that abomination in the Marina is going to get built and you got to think it’s like we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face.
If you want to get as much housing as possible to be actually built then you need to not just streamline planning approval, but also completely remove (not just incrementally reduce as we are currently doing) unfunded inclusionary housing mandates and the whole spectrum of impact fees and onerous transfer taxes that are specifically imposed on housing creation.
This entire ill-conceived approach, beginning in the wake of Prop 13 in the 70’s, has acted as a counterproductive drag on the creation of much-needed housing and has reached an untenable level.
All of these costs, if a community wants what they fund, should be broadly borne through taxes on that community; it should not be borne exclusively by new residents. To do so is both unfair and a drag on the longterm health of a locality, state and nation.
Let me get this straight, what you’re saying is that residents of a neighborhood should be taxed, heavily so, for the privilege of seeing housing added while getting squeezed out of services like schools, public transportation etc., because there are no impact fees to at least marginally improve those services. You’re proposing Fillmore 2.0, because people won;’t be able to hyper-increase their incomes to cover that neo-liberal blank check of yours. It’s not rocket science what that community would want, or rather, vehemently oppose, and that’s new housing on terms like that.
Besides, there is no need to build as much housing as possible. Executing the existing pipeline would suffice. Little of the grievances you field actually play a role in holding things up right now, it is interest rates and ballooning construction costs.
Daniel,
In the spirit of compromise, I’ll meet you half way.
How about eliminating the unfunded inclusionary housing mandates, development impact fees, and absurd transfer taxes on all of those “pipeline” housing projects that are stalled out on account of these mandates, fees and taxes?
That would be a good start to get things rolling.
P.S. And, no, the existing residents would not be “tax heavily” — as they would not have to pay anymore taxes that the new residents. Why do you not consider this fair?
SFUSD is underenrolled and closing schools. Transit ridership is down from pre-pandemic, and unlike driving, more riders mean better service. People who move into new homes already pay much more tax than average thanks to Prop 13.
Parents have increasingly been leaving SFUSD for private schools, b/c dysfunction. Muni for rideshares, robotaxis and eBike commuting. SFUSD and Muni are not coming back when you’re squeezing them even further, Ronald Reagan style.
Hold your boos while I explain something:
I work in software and handle a lot of real-estate management companies and owner’s of multiple properties. And, I also own some rental property in SF.
1. Cost and Price are **NOT** directly related. I have a 4plex with a mortgage of 10k and the units barely cover the price plus maint plus tax plus insurance, etc… One of my clients has a similar 4 plex, with no mortgage, but she charges the same rent. Because *that is what people are willing to pay*. Making it cheaper for developers does NOT reduce rent.
2. Building thousands of 2M condos does not reduce the average price of affordable housing unless you’re willing to wait a decade in hopes that trickle-down “filtering” works. The reality is that my clients make a PILE of money on luxury condos so they push that theory. It’s complete BS with a city that has Defined borders and is a “destination city”. The result is Singapore, not Austin.
3. The affordable housing we need is seriously not making a 2M condo 1.7M. We need $2000/month 2 bedroom units near public transport.
4. Empty units are everywhere. Seriously. There are a TON of empty apartments. Like piles and piles of them. Why? Because owners want to sell a rent-controlled building with as few occupied units as possible. And why is that a problem? Because the rent board protects tenants and rentcontrol reduces the movement of people. One tenant in my building (rent control) pays under 2k for a beautiful 2 bedroom with a full basement and a backyard about a block from 24th and Harrison. It’s nicer than my own apartment. And I AM OK WITH THAT! However, if I wanted to sell the place, it would reduce my sale price substantially. Evicting them (a douche move) is seriously difficult, and once they get older and seriously NEED that rent control, it’s even harder. So land lords (at least all the ones I’ve had to work with) would prefer to keep a unit off the market entirely rather than rent to someone over 50. The solution? Maybe find a way to make it easier to have people move around, perhaps subsidize rent control so someone getting a $5k/month apartment for $2k carries a 3k subsidy when they move? I dunno. Alternatively, this no-rent-control business – WOW. You would not BELIEVE the stuff these owners do. They’ll jack up the rent like crazy instead of evicting you. You’re 90yrs old and they want you out: Guess what, your rent is now 50k/month. Pay or get out. And landlords LOVE it. They push the limits and THAT makes the overall rent market go up.
5. BMR housing: Scam. This was a compromise made by developers and investors to let them build luxury condos and pretend they are helping. Who the heck is “below market” when they need to pay 800k + a $1k HOA for a 1 bedroom? And then, when you get it, it’s basically tainted and you can only sell it to other BRM people and you can’t rent it eather. So “the best investment” is now really not so hot. Mostly, these go to nepo kids who’s parents give them a fat pile of money for a down payment.
Anyway. The only thing you can be 100% certain of is that rent control apartments are affordable housing. Building more luxury condos “might” reduce the cost of luxury condos. Making it easier to evict people pretty much screws everyone. BMR housing doesn’t really do anything (and they’re cutting it to 5% now anyway, as if that makes much of a difference). We need apartment buildings full of rent controlled units.
And the biggest thing we need to do is to convince people who think this tiktok level solution of “build more” is utter crap for SF and that people who actually want affordable housing in OUR LIFETIME are not NIMBY, those are the people who literally complained about affordable housing projects in the Marina and NOW support this luxury safeway thing (which i think is fine, btw). The NIMBY is the one who WANTS more luxury and doesn’t want a homeless shelter or section 8 housing “IN THEIR BACK YARD”.
/Rant
Who killed housing affordability? It’s not a complicated question at all.
NIMBYs shoot down most projects. SF doesn’t build new housing. Then we elected a real DA and a mayor who is less tolerant of crime, just as the AI industry is taking off, bringing young highly paid people to the city.
SF is again a very desirable place to live but we refuse to build more housing. It’s that simple.
Sir or madam —
Sounds like you solved it. Jeez, I could’ve just written that. What a genius you are.
Best,
JE
First of all, there is nothing “moderate” about our corporate real estate drones!
They are extreme!
It is amazing to me that, in a tourist city, aesthetics (which attract visitors) and neighborhood character (something our neighborhoods have largely lost, compared to, say, 50 years ago, are not considered.
Instead, someone called Karl, above, says “build, build, build.”
But only truly affordable housing should be built (but it won’t, for the reasons outlined in Mr. Eskenazi’s cogent column). We have squandered the space needed for such housing to build horrendously tasteless high rises with premium rents.
Things are going to be very dysfunctional 20 years from now when all of those currently semi-reasonable apartments and flats (kept there by rent control) will have become vacant, and the rents will have gone up to current absurd levels!
Nothing will be done to prevent this.
The leadership believes that laser displays, tacky LED lights everywhere and horrendous EDM “concerts” will “bring the city back.”
It was not gone in the first place, but all of this will be counterproductive.
Especially with such steep hotel taxes and a sales tax that may be close to 10%. And absurd entry fees for museums, not to mention the new cable car fare!
“Things are going to be very dysfunctional 20 years from now when all of those currently semi-reasonable apartments and flats (kept there by rent control) will have become vacant, and the rents will have gone up to current absurd levels!”
Harry, I respectfully think that you have that 100% wrong. What will save SF housing affordability, if anything can, is that the Boomers currently hogging all the under-market rent-controlled housing will die off or move into care homes.
This will free up tens of thousands of housing units which will meet the demand from the hordes of people who move to SF, these days mostly for top jobs rather than because they never want to grow up.
Rent control drives up rents at the margin.
“Hogging????” “Die off???”
Personally, I’m planning to live forever in the house we put our hearts, souls, sweat, and money into, just to keep disrespectful, unempathetic punks from getting your paws on it. “Time’s up, Boomer!” Never, I tell you!
Not complicated indeed: There are tens of thousands of future homes permitted and entitled right here in San Francisco, good to get built, starting right now. The projects have all the considerations around the YIMBY/NIMBY chasm, Affordable quotas, CEQA, fees and taxes and what haveyou way behind them.
a roomful of old people nonplussed at the idea of a housing development bearing no small resemblance to the stern of a Princess Cruise ship — old people L❤️VE cruises, yet they oppose the Safeway hi-rise. Seriously, great article!
The longshoremen’s union built St. Francis Square Cooperative. Affordable decent housing can be built, you just need an entity with money to invest and a non predatory agenda.
There are a glut of San Francisco BMRs available for purchase. I wonder if people know about these…many of the income limits have been increased to stimulate sales. Many do not require the “lottery”, all that’s needed is to meet the income requirements and the ability to qualify for a loan.
Interesting article on the costs of unfunded inclusionary zoning: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/should-we-bribe-the-nimbys
Great reporting. This is all true, yet local residents protesting new housing development does affect what’s built. I’ve watched it first hand in berkeley where a rezoning project for some of the wealthier neighborhoods has been incredibly diluted because of outrage from residents who have benefited from redlining for decades. Sure, the city is still trying to meet state mandates, but their original plans to build thousands of units have dwindled to the bare minimum, and to the point where it will take years to find a developer who can or wants to actually do it. Those older activists still have the power to disrupt development they don’t want. And, yes, there’s still the old permitting processes and the market forces and the other forces at work, to the point where I’m starting to see (very late) that the market ain’t doing it. We need government investment in housing, and every neighborhood has to be included. No passes for the richer, historically exempt neighborhoods, even Pacific Heights (gasp!).
I encourage you to check out the “Who is SF building for” report from People Power Media and the Race & Equity in All Planning Coalition. It is a bit disappointing to not see any affordable housing advocates get any space in your column, especially when there’s existing research. Especially when I’m fairly certain you know about both PPM and the REP Coalition already.
Agreed, the affordability problem is very complicated, and it may be too late to unravel the global view by investors that housing must be as profitable as possible.
The conclusion here, that building more won’t really help San Francisco itself become more affordable, is on target. We need planners and leaders, rather than investors, with real vision for aligning jobs and transportation more widely. The Bay Area used to work well, with dedicated rail (the dismantled Key System) and plenty of industry (C&H Sugar, for one).
It turns out that old-fashioned city planning works, and doesn’t require putting elders on ice floes at age 50.
“Old-fashioned city planning” means “rife with corruption.” Is new city planning corruption-free?
Anything can be corrupted, especially when profits are involved.
If you’re against means testing rent controlled units then don’t ask why supply and demand keep prices sky high for #1…land
In their comments above, D3 states, “there are empty units everywhere.” In my experience this is true, a factor that must have a significant impact on housing affordability. Yet, in numerous reports and studies about housing in San Francisco, I have rarely heard mention of empty units as a factor in the housing affordability crisis. My experience is anecdotal; I wonder if there is data to support this observation.
I don’t imagine I’m the only San Franciscan who would love to see Joe Eskenazi and the capable Mission Local journalists address how the growing number of empty units affects the housing crisis.
Thank you Joe got a well researched and reasoned article
Hilarious that the author obliquely references the “Who killed Hannibal” meme, then without irony asks a “former longtime Planning Department official” what the cause of the housing crisis is. Old white people attending planning meetings is a well-researched and documented contributor to the housing crisis, it’s not just a “maybe” as the author contends. There is one underappreciated cause of the housing crisis not listed here: years of journalistic malpractice leading to a misinformed electorate and misguided housing policy. This article does little to rectify that.
Sir or madam –
I don’t know that meme, so you start out in the wrong place and keep losing ground from there.
Best,
JE
You cite a 2001 study modeling a hypothetical one time 10 percent supply bump and conclude building doesn’t move the needle much. Meanwhile Austin ran the actual decade long experiment: 30 percent stock growth from 2015 to 2024, triple the national rate. Median rent went from $1,546 to $1,296. That’s not a footnote, that’s a 16 percent decline in a city that was also absorbing a massive tech boom of its own. Rents in the cheap old buildings fell too, not just the glass towers. If you’re going to build a “supply doesn’t really work” argument, maybe don’t build it entirely on a 25 year old academic hypothetical while ignoring the city that just proved it wrong in real time.
And sure, SF has worse land costs and geography than Austin. Nobody’s arguing SF becomes Austin. But “we can’t build at Austin’s scale” and “building doesn’t lower rents” are two completely different claims, and the column spends 1,500 words quietly swapping one for the other so the second one sounds like it survived contact with evidence. It didn’t.
Also, “developers quoted anonymously say old people aren’t the real problem” is not exactly a peer reviewed finding. It’s a guy on background covering for a permitting system his industry has spent decades learning to route around, usually with a check.
Sir or madam —
It is hard to foresee San Francisco rapidly adding 30 percent to its housing stock like Austin — a city with seven times the square mileage and far lower land and labor costs. On top of that, real-estate professionals noted that the investors behind Austin’s building boom vastly overestimated the rents they could receive and took a massive bath on the process. As such, experts saw it as unlikely that this set of circumstances, which worked out great for renters in Austin, would be repeated in San Francisco.
San Francisco can — and must — add housing. Doing so in a way that meaningfully mitigates the surge in housing costs brought about by the vast influx of wealth will be a challenge.
Best,
JE
Totally understand Joe – but do you agree that it is true that building more housing would necessarily reduce rents?
Sir or madam —
I think building housing reduces rents but I think what jumps off the page both in the study and in lived experience is that per-capita wealth increasing gooses the price of housing more quickly and to a more extreme degree than adding to the housing supply. And wealth can come crashing into the city quickly while building is … slow.
I also think that lived experience will show that, to a large degree, housing prices are set by what the market will bear and not by development costs. I think the city should not make development like driving with the parking brake on, but I think it’d be naive to believe that, just because development costs are reduced, the asking price for housing will be reduced.
Does this mean we shouldn’t build? No, that’d be absurd. But it means we shouldn’t overpromise the results of building.
JE
To what extent was the downzoning of the 70s informed and shaped by urban renewal from the 50s and 60s?
It seems like there’s a history of this kind of miscalculated citywide makeover paired with an equally shortsighted overreaction to it.
Wiener is responsible !!!
Hard to believe that you wrote two articles explaining that the big problem for those complaining about this and other such projects which are legal because of state laws driven by one guy that you did not mention that the guy who did this thorough shaft job on San Francisco is Scott Wiener.
Why’d you leave that out, Joe ?
It might have changed a vote or two.
Or, a few thousand.
go Niners !!
h.
Really everyone needs to travel more and see how others live . There’s only like 20-30 World Class cities in the world .. you could debate that S.F. is very affordable for a GLOBAL City . SF is first class . Financial Samurai has a good read “The Cheapest International City “