The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
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The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
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Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#2Another political solution is for the state government to step in. Growing regional housing and transit is a prisoner's dilemma in the sense that no individual municipality wants put up it's fair share of the cost and necessary changes in zoning. Metro areas with highly fragmented governance like the Bay Area deal with these issues very poorly.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11370258/honan-zoning-reform-bil...
Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#3One issue he doesn't mention is traffic congestion.
A potential remedy could be a significant tax on parking. Perhaps very significant. Parking is ugly and a blight on the city, as well as a tremendous waste of space that could be more effectively used for housing.
Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#4I'd be interested to see projections of earthquake casualties before and after this increase in housing density.
Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#5I'd be interested to see projections of earthquake casualties before and after this increase in housing density.
Morbidly, I think a big earthquake will be the turning point for housing in the Bay Area. After a 6.5+, just about all the brick buildings will be degraded to the point of no return. We might see plenty of new steel / wood construction with the rebuilt (or 3d-printed) facades of old buildings, with new heights and efficiencies inside (better lighting, accessability, modularity).
Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#6While I agree with the post, I think the need for more housing is obvious and the root problem is political.
If you find a way to solve the political problem, I'd be impressed.
Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#7Biggest issue for me is public transit. If BART was more reliable/faster, it would be easy for people to live in Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro or anywhere along the line. I actually bought a house in Richmond because it was cheap and I could BART into the city. What was once a 30 minute ride usually takes a little over 40 now. We really need to fix transit in the bay area. More ferries would be great imo.
Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#8Another political solution is for the state government to step in. Growing regional housing and transit is a prisoner's dilemma in the sense that no individual municipality wants put up it's fair share of the cost and necessary changes in zoning. Metro areas with highly fragmented governance like the Bay Area deal with these issues very poorly. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/6/11370258/honan-zoning-reform-bil...
I think a tragedy of the commons is a better description of the problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) than the Prisoner's dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma). Individual home owners in the cities and towns dotting the Bay Area are still better off not coöperating with each other to increase housing supply.
Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#9One issue he doesn't mention is traffic congestion. A potential remedy could be a significant tax on parking. Perhaps very significant. Parking is ugly and a blight on the city, as well as a tremendous waste of space that could be more effectively used for housing.
You already have SF placing a maximum (not a minimum) amount on how much parking is built per new housing unit. Theoretically people are supposed to use mass transit more as a result, but the city government repeatedly cripples SFMTA, as I understand it.
Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
#10The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level.
Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of say, Pittsburgh PA, you can certainly expect your median home will cost ~$120,000 or less [2].
It's been my experience that while square footage cost may go down outside the city, you really end up paying around the same rent for a larger space. So if you can't afford a $3000/mo rent in the city, you probably still can't afford the $2800/mo rent you'll pay in Daly City.
I expect what would really happen if SF just went all in building new housing, is that prices would drop in the city slightly, allowing people to move back into the city, thus increasing demand and increasing prices back to where they were. The places where rent would drop are the suburbs, where people were pushed out to initially.
A way to look at it would be that SF's sphere of rent influence would end up shrinking, but the magnitude of the epicenter remains unaffected.
[1] - http://www.estately.com/bay-area-home-affordability-transit-... [2] - http://files.zillowstatic.com/research/public/realestate/ZHV...