Earlier quoted context omitted.
Years ago, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU. At the time, SF had about as many homeless as NY in a city with about one tenth the population, IIRC. I spent 6 years on the street. I blog about homelessness and have done at least a little paid writing on the subject. My blog and other online activities keep me in touch with homeless people. I have also been interviewed by reporters because of…
It’s very easy to contemplate how to solve this problem: make it easy to build extremely dense housing in SF. The problem is that the powers that be don’t want to make it easier, and they all have ultimately self serving excuses as to why. Every time a politician tells me more housing won’t make it cheaper, I posit the hypothetical “what if we built 100,000 more units? No? How about 1 million more? 5 million more?” T…
Since WW2, the vast majority of our financing mechanisms and housing policy has been aimed at creating family housing because that was what the parents of the Baby Boomers wanted and needed. Meanwhile, our population has diversified away from that. Plus there are myriad zoning policies, tax policies etc at all levels of government that are pieces of the puzzle for how SF has ended up this way.
There isn't anyone on the planet who actually knows exactly what needs to be dismantled to untangle this mess and trying to do so comes at high risk. It isn't at all unusual for the baby to be thrown out with the bath water when dealing with things as complicated as city planning.
I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. It is why I took a class on homelessness and public policy. I have a good grasp of what is generally wrong. I can't give you a point by pint list if instructions on how to fix it for SF.
San Francisco proper is physically much smaller than New York City, 231 sq. miles vs 468. Part of it is built on infill, reclaiming land from the waters around it. Such infill has serious structural limitations. You can't build on it like it is solid ground. San Francisco also needs to be built to withstand serious earthquakes. All of these geographic factors further constrain what you can realistically build there.
I generally agree that simply building more housing would help. But when I lived in Fairfield years ago, SROs in San Francisco were $1000/mo. San Francisco is one if the few US cities that still has more than a few SROs and it still is not cheap enough. I am not convinced the problem is as easy to solve as you suggest.
Easy fixes very often come at a hidden cost. That cost can be quite high, catastrophically so.