Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying: there's a shortage of housing, and there's not a shortage of economy cars. But that's not a rebuttal to the argument I'm making. The question is whether or not new luxury housing makes rents cheaper for poor folks, today. Even here, in the epicenter of a housing crisis, there's not a lot of evidence that it does. But there's evidence that preferentially building low-income housi…
Is there a coherent argument you can make that doesn't depend on upper-income people shunning lower-income neighborhoods in San Francisco? Because the evidence strongly suggests that they don't: that when luxury housing is unavailable, upper-income people in the Bay Area move on to claim lower-income housing. (I lived in Bayview for a bit, and I was hardly the only tech person I knew who lived there.)
I'm not claiming that they do. I'm arguing the opposite: if you build only luxury, it doesn't help poor people much, because most people will try to get the cheapest, nicest housing they can find. Building luxury units helps only to the extent that building anything here helps -- and if we believe the OP, it doesn't help very much at all.
Basically, this: you lived in Bayview, so you know who lives there. Knocking down every existing low-density home in Bayview and replacing it with market-rate housing would displace a huge number of poor folks. It probably also helps lower aggregate rents for everyone in SF by $40 a month or whatever, but that's thin gruel to the people who were there before.
This is the fundamental dilemma facing all construction in San Francisco.