Subsidies are almost never a good answer to anything. Just give low-income renters cash they can spend on whatever they want instead.
A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
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Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
then their payment would justify more houses being built, until the day they decide that they are overpaying for property, and stop the investment. This means they will sell, and thus, cause a drop in prices (and also cause a feedback loop). The existing residents would "lose value" if they chose not to sell, but new entrants to the market, looking to buy a place to utilize (not invest) will be happy.
There is a limited amount of land in desirable places - which is the flaw in your argument
I live in downtown Brooklyn on the 25th of 54 floors.
Just saying.
Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would San Francisco be better with 2 million people than with 1 million? Should it grow until it is as crowded as the cities people are fleeing in order to come to SF? What will happen is not that increased supply will have any effect but demand from talented people will drop as SF becomes as characterless as any other cheaper US city. As crowding rises the value of labor relative to land will fall, something ver…
Lets look at a list of megacities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul... Bangalore, Istanbul, London, Mumbai, NYC and Pune are all wonderful places and I'd be happy to live in any of them. Mumbai in particular is a place I actively plan to spend at least a year in. (I've already lived in NYC, London and Pune.) I can't say I love Delhi or Hyderabad, but you could certainly do worse. By the st…
So if India and all its cities had 4 times as many people would it be better off? The population is so high that wages are so low that talented people are fleeing the country.
Indeed if mega-cities were a good thing then Pakistan, Nigeria and the Congo should be doing better than Japan. Excepting just 6 out of 84, your list thoroughly proves my point; over crowding correlates with societies with suppressed labor value.
And by the way, in spite of adding endless supply of housing, none of these cities have cheaper real-estate than the rest of their country.
Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
In an unrestricted free market, someone would just buy up all the property in a constrained space to corner the market. That has definitely happened before in robber baron days. And honestly, if I wanted to live in a cess pool like Houston, I would move there. Houses are cheap enough (comparatively) but it is a huge icky sprawl.
That has definitely happened before in robber baron days. I'm curious, has it really happened at a city level? Seems to me that it would get prohibitively expensive, since other owners would see the massive demand and push up the prices, but that's really just a supposition.
It worked for Walt Disney in Florida.
Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#45It's not only a problem in SF, exploding rents is a problem all over the world. But is "barriers to new construction" the problem? No one ever explains those, just blames politicians. But for a property owning corporation it is obviously a poor idea to invest in new apartments because that would reduce the value of the ones they already got. It's not much different from OPEC not wanting to flood the market with oil.
> But for a property owning corporation it is obviously a poor idea to invest in new apartments because that would reduce the value of the ones they already got.
That doesn't seem sensible to me. One additional unit of housing will reduce prices by some very small amount, but rake in quite a bit of cash for the company owning it, in the current housing climate in SF. Closer to some kind of sane equilibrium, those numbers might start to balance out, but right now they're pretty far apart.
Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
"it doesn't favor the wealthy but it should" Wtf? How do you get to that conclusion when inequality has been growing for the last 40 years?
A wealthy software developer produces a lot of value in an hour, whereas a poor barista does not. If the developer lives 10 minutes from work while the barista commutes for 1 hour, the developer has more time to spend on productive activities. The world is then better off. This is of course completely tangential to the main point, namely that they both can live in SF if we build more housing .
> The world is then better off.
This conclusion doesn't follow from your premises, unless you include the hidden premise that more wealth in the world is the only criterion you're using.
Once you begin looking at things like wealth distribution or the like as measures of "better", your argument doesn't reach that conclusion.
Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#47It's not only a problem in SF, exploding rents is a problem all over the world. But is "barriers to new construction" the problem? No one ever explains those, just blames politicians. But for a property owning corporation it is obviously a poor idea to invest in new apartments because that would reduce the value of the ones they already got. It's not much different from OPEC not wanting to flood the market with oil.
No one ever explains those Examples: + Mission Street between 16th and Ceasar Chavez is a rail corridor. There was a proposal to limit this area to 8 story buildings. SF counterproposed and adopted a height limit which was on a per-property basis the lower of either a) what was presently built there or b) what city staff recommended, to preserve the character of the neighborhood. (Source: http://www.slate.com/blogs/m…
The proximate constraint on housing in your example is obsolescent uses [porn is free on the internet] that are occupying space in lieu of housing...three story development is dense when there is not significant open space devoted to automobiles. Going taller means higher per square foot construction costs and more automobile storage per square foot of land. Both drive up the cost of placing new dwelling units on the market.
Real estate economics is not fourth grade math.
Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
"it doesn't favor the wealthy but it should" Wtf? How do you get to that conclusion when inequality has been growing for the last 40 years?
A wealthy software developer produces a lot of value in an hour, whereas a poor barista does not. If the developer lives 10 minutes from work while the barista commutes for 1 hour, the developer has more time to spend on productive activities. The world is then better off. This is of course completely tangential to the main point, namely that they both can live in SF if we build more housing .
Business value does not equate true value. People have become rich doing things that have left the world worse off.
Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
A wealthy software developer produces a lot of value in an hour, whereas a poor barista does not. If the developer lives 10 minutes from work while the barista commutes for 1 hour, the developer has more time to spend on productive activities. The world is then better off. This is of course completely tangential to the main point, namely that they both can live in SF if we build more housing .
> The world is then better off. This conclusion doesn't follow from your premises, unless you include the hidden premise that more wealth in the world is the only criterion you're using. Once you begin looking at things like wealth distribution or the like as measures of "better", your argument doesn't reach that conclusion.
He also implies that the firemen, ambulances drives and nurses who protect a city subject to earthquakes shouldn't live in it (and thereby likely be absent when an earthquake isolates it by knocking down the bridges again).
But logic must take a backseat to ideology.
Re: A lot more market-rate construction helps low-income renters more than subsidies
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
As crowding rises the value of labor relative to land will fall, something very beneficial to the wealthy and harmful to the employed. It's also beneficial to the un employed who want to go to SF. Saying it's generally harmful to the workers is only true if you ignore those left out by the restrictions.
Very true. But the unemployed and their (inevitably reduced wages) are the result of a larger failed system. Effectively the market considers them excess population for their area. And as business expenses rise to cover the inflated cost of living (eg rent) there will be fewer and fewer jobs available (eg no unemployed teacher looks to San Francisco). And cost of living will rise with population density while wages f…
And cost of living will rise with population density
I don't see how you justify this, and therefore the rest of the argument. What mechanism do you see that implies that increasing population density leads to higher costs of living?
I think you are falling into a third cause fallacy mistake. While there is certainly correlation between higher pollution density and higher living costs, it's not one that causes the other, but a third factor that causes both: wanting to move there.
The reason rents are higher is because people are willing to bid more to live in SF; preventing population density will do nothing to curb that desire. But it can reduce costs of living, by allowing rents to drop and therefore reduce the need to bid higher and higher.