What's the Matter with San Francisco?

As a resident of a growing city, I find it somewhat puzzling and inconvenient that it's taken as an article of faith that large city growth is a good thing. Growth is good, but it's also bad: it brings congestion, filth, and higher housing prices. Even with the development of affordable housing, housing prices still rise. Furthermore, the traffic associated with high-density houses places a strain on the transit system and other public infrastructure and services that the city is usually unequipped to handle. Transit is often upgraded far too late, long after congestion has negatively impacted the lives of residents. It's happening to me right now in my city: coworkers have reported their commute rising considerably over the past year.

So as the resident of a city who is happy with the way that it was, and is increasingly unhappy with the way it's becoming, what I'm wondering is: why should I not vote to block and prevent this growth? A lot of city politics talks as if growth is naturally a good thing that should always be pursued, but talk far less often of quality of life for residents. Growth often comes at the expense of current residents. (Gradual growth is healthy and necessary, but excess growth harms everyone.)

If discouraging high-density housing means higher housing prices, but buys me less congestion and a higher quality of life, then that seems like a good tradeoff to me as a resident. Otherwise, I get higher housing prices and more congestion and a worse quality of life. Cities should serve their current residents first, and prospective future immigrants second.

I suspect that the strategy that San Francisco residents are pursuing is a strategy designed specifically to make it expensive to live there, to discourage further immigration that they do not want.

When you restrict the supply of something scarce or the demand for it goes up, the price increases.

In this case the "something" is housing. It's essentially illegal to build anything in the bay area which means the supply isn't changing much. But the demand is skyrocketing. Therefore the price is skyrocketing.

This would all be fixed very quickly if it was legal to buy some land, demolish what's on there, and build a skyscraper instead. San Francisco would look like Manhattan within two years.

If you study the 1906 earthquake, you find that a lot of people suddenly didn't have homes. They were all rehoused within a couple of weeks. Today, being illegal to build anything, and with rent controls on what does exist, we'd have a lot of homeless people for a long time.

We all want everyone to have a nice life, and we intend well with these laws. Economics concerns itself with what actually happens when you incent people though, not what we intend by those incentives.

Actually it is possible. But the irony is that the person who came up with best idea that would have fixed/prevented this problem, has now been ostracized as a "fascist" by the left-wing tech community: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formali...

If circa 2007, San Francisco itself had been turned into a join-stock corporation, with all the existing residents given shares, then all residents would have grown wealthy as the city grew rich. Furthermore, the government would have had an incentive to allow new housing, since that would increase total tax revenues, and thus increased dividends for all residents. Right now, the politically powerful have no incentive to improve new building, since they do not directly benefit.