Prop 13, like many things for the last 50 years, has been a "kick the can down the road" style band-aid, for future generations to clean up after the primary benefactors die off.
These types only want highrise apartments. They advocate against home ownership and encourage renting your whole life. This is part of the "you'll own nothing and you'll enjoy it" oligarchy party line.
One of the most well-known consequences of rent control at the city level is that rents in non-controlled units make up for rents in the controlled units.
That’s why economists often say that rent control significantly impedes mobility. Edit. Those that have access to rent controlled units benefit. Others don’t. It’s a debate as to where the net benefits lie, but rent control does induce winners and losers.
The issue is that SF doesn't want to make building and increasing density easy. Rent control and prop13 are just bandaids for the regions desire to limit growth.
Prop 13 is why my friends family has a dozen dilapidated properties rotting in California — no incentive to improve the land. They pay none of the property taxes and own all of the property?
Market failure that constrains supply of housing units.
Probably a grandfathered tax limit. My grandparents lived in the area and were paying a couple grand in property taxes while all their neighbors who moved in later were paying 30k a year.
I don't think routine maintenance to prevent dilapidation will increase property taxes. You would need to make an actual improvement such as adding a pool or extending the living space, etc.
There's a great quote from a European economist that goes something like (paraphrasing from memory) "Except for bombing, rent control is the most efficient way to destroy a city."
Rent control doesn’t incentivize current residents to advocate for building more. If I like my neighborhood and my rent is fixed why should I want to put up with construction next door. If my rent keeps increasing and I’m looking for somewhere cheaper then I’m happy new units are coming online.
I get that argument. It doesn’t change the fact that some people would be living on the streets - including whole families - if there isn’t some kind of regulation.
There's still families that can't get a rent controlled apartment. Because there's not enough of them. If there were, you wouldn't need to control rent.
there simply would never be that many apartments that market rate is equivalent to a 30 year controlled rent. or if there are the local economy has completely crashed.
there literally wouldn’t be. at a certain point if the rent keeps going down, there’s also little incentive to build additional units. so there would never be so many new units to bring prices down 40-50%.
Homeless people dont get rent controlled units though the incumbents who already were renting them do. The people who already had housing get frozen in time at a specific cost while everyone who isn't in rent controlled housing pays the difference, pushing the homeless even further from being housed
It doesn't need to be fully unregulated, but obedctively, rent control on specific units comes at the expense of others. Even a throttled rate of increase, as opposed to a complete cap, would be a massive improvement.
Yeah, that's why I said that even this would be an improvement. The current of rent control is the worst possible solution, so bad in fact that even a different type of rent control would be an improvement, despite my personal opposition to all forms of such.
Sometimes it helps to actually engage with a person's point instead of focusing on pedantry.
The issue is that market rate has always been the product of price fixing. The inability for landlords to squeeze out extra money from tenants will never be an issue.
Okay, but how many ways are there to phrase "Getting rid of rent control comes at the expense of people with it?"
In the end, especially in a market like San Francisco, getting rid of rent control isn't significantly bringing other rents down because demand is too much higher than supply. The only people who benefit are landlords and wealthy renters who can't find a place.
>"Getting rid of rent control comes at the expense of people with it?"
If your housing solution only benefits a privileged class at the expense of others, it's not a good housing solution.
>getting rid of rent control isn't significantly bringing other rents down because demand is too much higher than supply.
Rent control actively discourages supply meeting demand due to acting as a disincentive on construction, among other measures in California. Even Prop 13, arguably, is a form of rent control, and its the biggest block right now in terms of socioeconomics.
>If your housing solution only benefits a privileged class at the expense of others, it's not a good housing solution.
There is going to be a privileged class regardless. You're not going to use your Harry Potter Magic Wand to vajazzle up equality. If someone is going to end up privileged, I'll always err on the side of working class people getting the break.
If you want to attack things that are decreasing supply and new construction, be my guest. But evicting people who can no longer afford their homes doesn't increase overall supply, just supply to a privileged few. An occupied home is 1:1, regardless of who lives in it.
As soon as they have to move they will be on the streets though along with all the other families. That’s a problem! If it’s hard to get in and you could lose it and be destitute because of that barrier that’s a problem. Could keep families in worse conditions out of fear of moving too.
You feel confident asserting that rent controls will never potentially CAUSE homelessness as an unintended consequence? The theory works in both ways. It could prevent certain groups from experiencing homelessness, while increasing the chances for others.
The number one predictor for homelessness rates is housing vacancy rates. Everything else, weather, drug use rates, whatever statistic you could think of, have weak to zero correlation.
If there's no housing, people end up on the street. Rent control reduces housing supply.
Usually rent control does not apply to new housing stock only existing housing. The goal is to keep people from being pushed into poverty by landlords looking for more profit.
Any new stock would become available at market rates so if anything it encourages building new.
Nobody builds new housing because its value is crushed by the rent control that will eventually apply to it. This is an extremely well documented phenomenon, if you’re hanging out on the Econ subreddit you’d be smart to read about this and get a better handle on the facts of the situation.
And how many people including whole families are living on the streets BECAUSE of rent control? Hard to suss out but it’s certainly not negligible.
More likely those people would simply have to move out of San Francisco rather than having to live on the streets. Which I don’t find too great a sacrifice compared to all of society paying the price.
Rents are universally the most expensive in cities with the strictest rent controls and building regulations (SF, NYC) and the least expensive in deregulated cities (Austin). Rent control makes rent more expensive overall. It's indisputable. A small minority of lottery winners benefit and the rest of society loses.
We already have cash assistance for rent for people who need it in the form of Section 8.
because whether we like it or not, the US is a capitalist economic system and nothing will get built if there's not a profit motive for builders and developers. other cities have repeatedly seen this work.
And I will counter that the profit motive has now been placed above the greater good. The pendulum has swung too far.
Downvotes are expected, and I’ll find few who will publicly agree with my assertion. There will be consequence from this period of allowing profit-seeking to override social needs. The pendulum will swing too far in the other direction, at some point.
I don't disagree at all, but that's an issue that will take years/decades to fix at a federal level. Incentivizing more building at a state and local level and actually doing it is a proven, common sense way to reduce costs and homelessness ASAP. We can risk mitigate while also working on longer term solutions.
right so the idea that the rents would go down isn’t that going against the profit motive? who is going to invest in that with the expectation that rents are headed downward?
A top one percent commenter to this sub believing rent control works despite what nearly every economist thinks is like a flat earther being a top commenter on the physics sub
And economists perpetually fail to take into account the speed of change. They hang their assertions on previously held beliefs, and place data, rightfully, as the support for their beliefs.
And I’m saying that no one is accurately taking into effect how quickly technology is beginning to override long held economic beliefs. Meanwhile, we’re side-stepping sleeping people on sidewalks, right now, this day.
And conservatives will always seek to protect the asset owner class, as this drives political contributions and retains political power, most importantly. Lmao
That is incorrect. They simply wouldn’t be living in San Francisco. And that’s ok, imo. We shouldn’t use government to bully private property owners into incurring losses just because we think some randos should get to permanently live in a city at the expense of someone else who could get a good job and pay to live in that unit.
And this is assuming rent controls don’t lower overall housing supply, which they do…
Who's going to tell him that the renter is taking an obvious loss by paying the maximum possible rent? Transactions are double-sided, and the more money paid into rent is less money that renter is paying back into the economy for their other needs and wants. Or eventually owning their own home.
If the landlord holding housing hostage is the one taking the loss then the response is... who cares? It's long past time we eliminated maximized rent-seeking as an investment.
> Oh, just like the books I read by Milton Friedman in college?
I love how you dopey fucks think we live in a world that looks anything CLOSE to what Friedman suggested.
We spend more on welfare and entitlements than EVER. The welfare state has only ever grown. Regulations abound. Ag subsidies, government grants, and spending on public healthcare and education has NEVER BEEN HIGEHR. Cities have doubled down on rent control and anfgordable housing mandates. Section 8 is SKYROCKETED. Homeless shelters have only gotten bigger and bigger. Anti-trust regulators have been suing the shit out of companies for the last 10 years.
Hyper-regulation and state-subsidized welfare doesn’t work. It drags us all down by distorting markets and inducing fraud and waste.
The neoliberal world you think we had never existed. You’re ignorant and wrong.
Very nice tantum, sweetie. And yet we briefly had a trillionaire and the wealth concentration at the upper percentages has long-eclipsed the Gilded Age. You just ranted and listed a bunch of things that have nothing to do with eachother, like you think you can gish-gallup your way to winning an argument, lol. Yeah, lots of stuff sucks, kiddo. Glad you noticed. Though you seem especially upset that stuff might suck for wealthy landholders and rent seekers, which, as I said earlier, who the fuck cares? I brought up Friedman because he's in a lot of books. Economics is an evolving science, it's not evolution or climate change. Sure, maybe we sued anti-trust regulators when Biden and Obama were President, and then we stopped when Trump was President. So let's start there. What was the point you were trying to make? What's that have to do with rent control? Or even directly to do with rents at all?
You're ignorant, wrong, and surly. None of which are good traits.
That's a socialist talking point. Capital doesn't care about your feelings, rent or street. Rent control is bad because it's anti-market. It creates winner and losers.
I'd suggest, abolish rent control. Have government funded subsidized housing (that isn't a slum). Tie it to income and have it mixed into mix development (again, no slumming). We could call it income assisted living or something. Demolish property as an asset class for lower income folks.
The issue in SF isn’t rent control lmao and to pretend it is is hilarious. The issue is that AI engineers are now making millions every year and there’s generally been no construction on homes in the entire country. SF is suffering because they have the highest proportion of insanely wealthy tech workers pricing out the rest of their population.
Rent control is exactly for times like these. It keeps people stable during price spikes like this. It's not a perfect solution if you have to move for other reasons of course.
The real lasting solution is to build more housing.
So go after the rent setting software they all use and remove the cartel that’s strangling the rental market. 25% happens via coordination, it’s not a normal thing to happen in the market in such a short amount of time
I mean that’s ridiculous to think that the rent seekers wouldn’t be doing exactly what they’re doing without rent control.
What market pressure would prevent them from jacking it 25% without rent control? Its an inelastic market with high demand and software jacking the prices on a schedule
When did I say anything contrary to the notion that regulated apartments would see rent increases (and likely quality increases as well) without control?
If you get rid of rent control you’re still going to have the same prices since we already proved you can get those prices it would just mean more high priced apartments and homes are at that point
The landlord does not go “what’s the portfolio of someone else with rent controlled apartments doing, hmm that price is too low for me I shall increase twice as much as I was intending to increase”
They’re rent seekers, they only price as high as they can get away with, never lower
And we already know the rent seeking class will leave units empty to make sure the price stays high instead of lowering
You’d need expanding supply which almost every city is not doing in their cores to create lower prices overall by getting rid of rent control
Yeah, no one listens to us. Certainly why we go completely unpaid.
Enjoy whatever low skill, low wage occupation you're relegated to. Something tells me your economic outcomes are purely endogenous.
And yes, rent went up IN UNREGULATED MARKETS. By 25% because that's a spillover when they can't raise rents in REGULATED MARKETS. My god, is walking and breathing at the same time a difficult exercise for you too?
And I’m still saying that the rent seekers would have raised the prices to that level anyway and you have still not made a single effort to explain how limited supply with high demand in a high income city would have broken the laws of rent seekers behavior because they were making more money somewhere else under the assumption that all players in the market share a portfolio that holds rent controlled and non rent controlled lol
Dude do an economics and explain why the greedy would be less greedy, go on do it
I make pretty good money actually, it’s okay but not surgeon level
Eliminating rent control just inverts the biggest winners and biggest losers. Except the only people losing on rent control are the parasite class of landlords and the wealthy people who want to displace the poorer people protected by rent control. Suggesting it "impedes mobility" suggests that these people would be mobile if rent control suddenly went away. It wouldn't in San Francisco. They would just lose their home to a wealthier person and then have to leave the city entirely. Sure, that's mobility, but not exactly the kind that anyone other than parasites and the wealthy look forward to.
Sure, it sucks for the working class who don't have rent control, but the rents aren't coming down significantly if rent control goes away. They still get priced out of the market regardless.
Until San Francisco develops enough higher-density housing to offset the demand, rent control at least helps some people who actually need help.
No one said anything about eliminating rent control. Don’t just invent things.
No, “wealthy” and “parasitic landlords” are not the only losers. Perhaps you could, you know, READ evidence in an area you appear to be woefully ignorant about?
Yes, rent control impedes mobility. Again, the evidence consistently suggests it. Why are you ignoring economics evidence on this sub? It’s treated as the gold standard.
Didn’t I say that we are unclear if the net benefits of rent control are positive? Huh. Again, you display a remarkably poor ability to actually read.
Sure, being forced to move out of town is definitely increased mobility, lol.
The fuck is "mobility" even a metric for? That's rich person talk.
Economics is an evolving science. Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman were implicitly trusted for decades. Didn't work out. If you'd like to discover reading, my last few sentences could be a boon for you.
“make up” for rents kind of implies there is a total number they are trying to reach and the non-rent controlled units make up the difference between rent controlled total and overall. but really what’s happening is the landlords are simply raising the rent as high as financially can be afforded by the next tenants.
"Apart from an evident and sometimes intended effect of reducing the revenues of landlords, it can also lead to rent increases for dwellings that are not subject to control."
I understand that. and in general yes it does. but in this situation not having rent control wouldn’t stop them. they aren’t raising the rents for any other reason than there’s people with enough money to pay it. not having rent control won’t change that part of the situation. it’s exploitative.
Without any additional supply, controls are needed to keep people from being homeless. Supply is artificiality low, demand is sky high. Controls are inplace to keep supply low so we need controls in place to keep rents low for certain number of units.
Sure rent control limits supply but that can be offset by new builds. But SF doesn't allow much(1-2k per year). Getting rid of rent control would be much worse for the city than just allowing 5-10k market rate units per year to be built.
If landlords could already charge more they would. One sector of an industry offering a lower price doesn’t mean the other sector charges more. They don’t “make up” for others’ discounts.
But as the demand grows, the rent controlled units are effectively off the market because nobody wants to leave them. So all that new demand (rent increases) are concentrated on fewer units (faster rent increases).
Typical response. I mean I have. Have you read the Massachusetts studies?
I also wouldn’t call the paper you linked as evidence. It’s a non-peer reviewed quick and dirty meta-analysis with very little of what you’d expect from a proper meta analysis.
People are acting like the property owners in San Francisco are liberal or support any progressive policies. The people renting and the people who own the properties are two different buckets of people
Which is why I said rent control and low housing, and the two are linked, with rent controlled communities being some of the biggest opponents to density.
It can often be interesting looking at stuff actually featuring landlords, as they tend to be crusty old working class, former handymen and supers who invested in the same way cooks save up to open their own restaurants. Their politics and attitude towards YUPpie renters often makes sense in that context, and their attitude towards basically any health and safety issue makes much more sense when you hear thick Russian accent.
They caused this mess by not building enough housing even when the state passed laws forcing cities to build. This is the result of decades of zoning laws and nimby activity.
So like what's the actual plan for when nobody can afford to live in the city? We know these companies hate remote work...so what do they want to happen when employees can't live where they work?
Economically speaking the government comes into help low income cohorts (yes that includes you not as well paid tech workers compared to the super AI workers exploding the market right now)
People moving to SF into market rate apartments today are struggling.
But you seem to not understand or know that rents in SF cratered from 2020-early 2026 and many people are living in rent controlled apartments from that time that were really quite reasonable.
Crazy how much SF just refuses to address supply. I remember seeing this post a few years ago, showing that the tallest building under construction in SF is a 15 floor University building. Milwaukee, Indianapolis and Kelowna are all building much taller. Tallest under construction building by city in the US and Canada : r/skyscrapers
Earthquakes, city built on shady landfill, traffic issues, infrastructure from the 1940s...
It is so expensive to build in SF.and takes forever. I manage construction projects in SF and we dont refuse to build profitable projects, it's just so expensive to do so.
The solution has always been “simple.” Deregulate all housing restrictions and build units up. Remove all rent control and similar policies that benefit selective tenants that are simply further restrictions on building incentives. That’s how you get very cheap rents like China and Japan. Unwilling to do these because of ideology and political deadlock? Well you deserve unaffordable living, that’s just how the world works.
One of the problems that both the Bay Area and LA have is that the sort of density required to build on a scale that actually lowers housing cost will require world class transit first, otherwise they will absolutely choke on traffic.
The political will for the necessary upzoning and transit upgrades doesn't exist. Until it does housing costs will remain astronomical.
This isn’t true. You can look at a real life case of Austin, TX which has built so many rental buildings the last few years that real rents are falling due to excessive inventory. No one has ever accused Austin of having a world class transit system.
SF just needs to allow very large apartment complexes to be built all over the city with less restrictions.
it is true, and so is your statement on rental inventory. transit needs are huge and complicated in the sf bay area and it definitely has an impact on rental rates
You're of course right that the political will for upzoning has been embarassingly scarce, but let's not pretend that transit is a valid excuse. Even if you totally deregulated today, it would take years for enough housing to appear to make a significant dent in transit capacity (or rents, for that matter). Building housing is an incremental process and there's plenty of time for transit to be developed alongside it, funded by revenue from new developments as they come online.
There are plenty of areas with strong existing transit access that could already support significant upzoning - notably the Muni central corridor in SF (van Ness/Church/Castro areas out to and including West Portal), as well as the Mission and most of the Bart and Caltrain corridors through the peninsula and east bay. In other areas like the Richmond and Sunset, you could do a lot with no new infrastructure simply by funding more frequent reliable bus service. A Geary subway would be great and we should do it, but in the meantime you could support quite a lot of development just by 5x'ing capacity on the 38R line. It's not like there's some insurmountable chicken-and-egg problem here.
Japan has a falling population. China massively over built because of government intervention and housing prices SKYROCKETED during these times. Neither of these is a valid example for what you're proposing.
No one is massively over building in the US without government intervention of some kind. Like messing with how loans are given out or insured like in the 2008 housing crisis.
After the crisis, home builders simply stopped building until supply met demand and then they continued on. But they all essentially stopped.
Housing regulations are there for MANY good reasons. To prevent someone from opening a slaughter house in some residential neighbourhood. To prevent someone from building some cardboard firebox next to a residential neighbourhood. The regulations ONLY cost builders money. Because a builder will sell for the MAXIMUM they can get, not the minimum, not at a discount, for the MAXIMUM they can get. Save them $50,000 in permits and they'll just pocket it. Which is the exact reason, after 2008 that they stopped building. It wasn't worth it.
Japan is a classic example of hyper dense construction in an area extremely similar to San Francisco area. Good for you to also acknowledge that massive government intervention is needed like China. Somehow somewhere a gigantic population and much denser than anything the US has is able to be housed for far cheaper. Try to learn something from them instead of being entrenched in ideology. Like I said, the solution has always been available. If people living in SF don’t want to copy it, then they simply deserve their COL crisis.
They massively over built because the government propped up housing and made sure it was always going up for decades. The same way as the 2008 bubble. So you're just proposing huge bubbles that burst every few years and wipe people out? I mean that is what it sounds like. The chinese now have properties they can't sell at any price and they've devalued them massively. They fall apart because regulations aren't followed.
It's the ultimate NIMBY nightmare. Those are both countries where they have absolutely no power over what gets built near them. Karens can cry all they want, but zoning is national in Japan and the CCP decides what gets built in China.
Asserting a singular answer to a complex topic is usually wrong. Deregulation for supply side is ONE answer, but second gen rent controls are likely to play a part.
Please tell me how supply is not the biggest problem. Please tell me how Japan and China are able to house billions for far cheaper? Home prices notwithstanding, rents in China are far far cheaper. How, when it has cyberpunk-level dense cities, if not due to supply? Visit China and you see huge skyscraper apartments everywhere. Visit SF or any other big city? Suburban sprawl and close to zero residential skyscrapers. The US has made this trade off and refuses to change, so yes the US will have forever unaffordable housing.
Ok first of all, the paper’s argument about inequality isn’t useful because “inequality” isn’t a bad thing because it’s a result of growth. It’s basically a rehashed version of the gentrification sentiment: places that are very poor are affordable and places that gentrify aren’t, so the conclusion is, don’t gentrify and remain poor?
Second, I would argue that compared to other emerging markets like China, inequality growth is far higher there than in the US. The biggest difference is of course regulations that allow for upzoning, so that when inequality due to growth or gentrification happens, because the government planned ahead, it was able to keep housing affordable despite major inequality increases.
It’s of course technically “correct” that the major issue of housing comes from inequality. But yes, a growing economy generates more inequality. People would rather live in gentrified areas more than not. So what’s the conclusion? Attempt to remove inequality and reduce growth as trade off? Or simply plan ahead and increase supply in gentrified areas?
A *little* bit more nuance. St Louis Fed has a good explanation of it.
"“Second-generation” controls cover only a subset of the rental market at the time of enactment and tend to allow more price flexibility for new leases. These rent-control policies often dictate the rate at which prices can increase on preexisting leases (usually indexed to a fraction of inflation); provide additional tenant protections against eviction; and limit mechanisms through which landlords can remove their units from control, such as major renovations, owner move-ins and condo conversions. In addition, landlords are sometimes restricted from being able to leave their units vacant or take them completely off the market arbitrarily."
I see. Ya I mean SF has a couple flavors in that vein.
We have one on very old buildings that is really strict and another thats like 10% that covers most but not all units.
Tbh, I think our tenant protections are too strong. Even as a renter.
A political negative effect we also have is that advocates and unions are really anti-redevelopment of rent control. We've tried in the past making deals where the current tenants keep rent control in the new building and it ends when they leave, but it still ends up dying to union pressure.
It seems the preference is for decaying rent controlled slums over it phasing out for newer and bigger buildings.
It's crazy out here. A lot of renter advocates are part of the poison pushing renters out.
A lot of people unironically support it, even though price caps have been a consistent failure since at least the times of ancient Romans. It just sounds like an extremely simple solution: prices too high? Let's ban high prices, no further thinking or evidence is necessary.
If San Francisco allowed people to "build up" it would be a massive humanitarian tragedy during the next major quake. A large portion of SF is in liquefaction zones because it's built on old sand dunes and garbage.
There is no "up" to build in SF, it's not like Manhattan with a solid granite bedrock to build into.
My friend I am not trying to be rude but this is entirely incorrect. I’m not sure where you heard this but geologists and structural engineers do not agree.
Admittedly it has been ~10 years but my source is city employees themselves. I wouldn't trust any tall buildings in those zones. That said I am surprised to see that Richmond and Sunset aren't fully liquefaction.
I will say that while this is a big concern, there is still plenty of land that is NOT in the liquidation zone that could be easily built up/upzoned as necessary, especially along BART/Caltrain so you get more housing without more traffic.
I don't know about Tokyo's geology but I'm guessing it's not built over liquefaction regions. It's in my second sentence of a three sentence post. You trolls are getting less literate.
Entire population of CA and then some lives in the greater Tokyo area and people will still be like "no we can't possibly build more housing in this one city in CA".
You can always improve the foundation with piles, drilled shafts, over-excavating, etc. We know how to do this these days. You don't just build up, you build down as well.
You're right that more supply is the solution. But there's a big difference between minimizing regulations and deregulating "all" housing restrictions. I don't think any place in the US has done the latter. And countries that do that tend to have a lot of problems with shitty construction and unintended consequences.
There was a great documentary, a while back on a guy who was trying to turn a laundromat into rentals in San Francisco, and it took him. I think about five years, and several million dollars just to get an answer. And he wasn't like he was wealthy, but he wasn't like a giant company or anything. So this was a lot of money that you're gambling on something you might not even be able to do. I think ultimately it was denied because it would cast a partial shadow over a playground
Works in Japan just like they said. It’s a simple supply issue, I don’t know why that’s so hard for people to understand. What do you think happens to market rents if the stock of housing doubles?
It works in Japan because large Tokyo is like 40% of the Japans population. Building more increases the global supply and decreases the global prices (global means country wide). When all of your population lives in Tokyo then building more in Tokyo will decrease global prices = decrease prices in Tokyo.
This will never be the case in SF, unless you are planning to house 150M people there. In SF building more would lead to higher prices in the medium-long run. Not lower. Just look at other big cities in the world.
Japan's population has also been shrinking for 15+ years now. That's an active reduction in demand, where as the us has only grown.
So building companies in Japan are forced to compete on price and quality to attract customers. Us has no shortage of demand, especially in metro areas. Simply removing regulations will just make building quality even worse than it already is.
Can you please tell me where in the US they have deregulated housing? Housing has been regulated since the 50s and redlining and other policies restricted home styles to larger and more specific styles to push minority owners out of major areas. Greenspan just supercharged it on the demand side with hyper expanding first time home buyer programs.
Something can't be labeled as never working when we really have arguably never tried it. The government has only been restricting supply with regulation, then incentivizing demand, with housing vouchers and home buying programs as well as tax breaks.
Then we keep wondering why the price goes up when basic economics 101 tells us what's going to happen.
The world is bigger than just the US. And even if there is no place in the US with totally unregulated housing the regulations itself could be different. If there is an easy to spot correlation with less housing regulations then where is the obvious data?
People really don't understand the deep US culture around homes. It basically started during the Whiskey rebellion.
The government made it a priority since 1790 to subsidize housing, to tax land, and for much of it's history it restricted the sale due to racism, home builder requirements, and other funny things.
Let's stop wasting each others time. Prices in Austin are increasing in the medium-long term. There was a huge pandemic bump and then a roll back, but the prices are still above pre pandemic.
Also there is a time lag in the process: You build more housing -> you attract more people -> they create more jobs -> desirability goes up -> prices go up. It is not an instant process. So mass building might lower prices locally in short term, but it does not work medium-long term.
There is no area in America where rents are lower then they were pre-pandemic without a significant population decrease. What a stupid data point.
The rate of growth is lower then the national average the state average and any comparably sized city on a post pandemic timeline.
I love being in an Econ sub and hearing people argue that raising supply actually doesn't decrease cost despite being shown evidence it does. Absolutely wild.
You are completely ignoring the pandemic. Which was a major event and obviously had a higher short term effect then any long term building policy.
If you think that building more works in medium-long term, then show me examples spanning at least couple of the decades. In fact, if your claim is true then taking any city should show us a clear and strong correlation.
>The solution has always been “simple.” ~~Deregulate all housing restrictions and build units up.~~ People need to leave San Franciso.
The solution isn't to lower the bar on regulation to zero so sleazy developers can come in and destroy the quality of life by building ghettos from which they will extract economic rents.
When prices are high, demand should decrease proportionally. The problem is people not adjusting their choices in the face of high prices - by voting with their feet and moving somewhere else with greater affordability.
An exodus from a city is the death of the city. If there is demand, it must be met, especially considering how relatively un-dense SF still us in the outer reaches.
No. An exodus from a city is the natural response to things in that city being unsustainable. The exodus reduces demand and then prices come down.
>If there is demand, it must be met,
No. It does not. Just because more people want a thing than the supply cannot meet doesn't mean they have a right to it. And acting like they do is wrong-headed.
Land and real estate in SF is limited. Too many people are competing for it, driving up prices. People just need to go somewhere else. I turned down jobs in LA, SF, Seattle and Chicago because of cost of living concerns. I chose to build my life in a place where the balance of job opportunities and cost of living made sense.
People need to not be stupid and selfish, moving to a place where the economics are broken and then demand the world fix it.
>An exodus from a city is the natural response to things in that city being unsustainable.
So create a system to sustain it. This is not that complicated.
>The exodus reduces demand
It also reduces quality of life. A city needs new people like the body needs blood. If you do not accommodate demand, you lose will lose workers, services, amenities. We're already seeing this in places like Cupertino, where schools are being closed due to the absence of teachers.
>doesn't mean they have a right to it.
This is r/economics. I am arguing out of economics rationalism, not "rights." Cities need to accommodate growth, or they die.
>Land and real estate in SF is limited.
Which is why it requires higher density. This is not difficult.
>. I turned down jobs in LA, SF, Seattle and Chicago because of cost of living concerns. I chose to build my life in a place where the balance of job opportunities and cost of living made sense.
It's crazy that you do not realize how sad this is. You are actively defending the economic phenomenon that forced you to say no to potential employment.
Yeah, lmao, this is just...fucking sad, man. I'm not interested in arguing with your trauma defense mechanism.
> So create a system to sustain it. This is not that complicated.
Apparently it IS complicated to create a system to sustain it. Otherwise it would have been done already.
>A city needs new people like the body needs blood.
No. At a certain point, uncontrolled growth overwhelms a community and it starts to run down. The people who are able leave, taking their money with them, and blight sets in.
>I am arguing out of economics rationalism, not "rights."
No, you really aren't. Economic rationalism would say demand is outstripping supply which drives prices up. And ultimately those prices will rise until demand abates. It is basic demand/price elasticity in action. People insisting on going to SF when they can't afford to live there is how you get a homeless problem. Insisting on sustaining the unsustainable is the opposite of economic rationalism.
>You are actively defending the economic phenomenon that forced you to say no to potential employment.
I'm not a dumbass who takes a job in a city I wouldn't be able to afford to live in, and then blame the world for not fixing things for my dumb ass.
I also defend the choice to not buy an $80K pickup truck because it would also be a stupid financial decision.
And you call that a "trauma defense mechanism". No. it is being a grown up with a working brain that can do math. I worked my way through school without ever getting student loans. I raised four kids. My house is paid for. I paid cash for my new Camry last year. I have no debt of any kind. I've worked from my home in the country for the last five years for a company located downtown. I live what I'm talking about.
You are stupidly arguing to fix the unfixable, claiming to argue from economic rationalism while insisting on something that is economically irrational and unsustainable. And I'm making the mistake of wrestling with the pig, where we both get muddy and the pig likes it.
Why would they need to build ghettos in the city experiencing an insane wealth influx? Nice new housing will be built, rich people will move to those, and existing supply will become much more affordable for everyone else.
> Nice new housing will be built, rich people will move to those, and existing supply will become much more affordable for everyone else.
Lol no. As long as demand outstrips supply, and you are only building new housing for rich people, prices will remain high and regular working folks will not get any relief.
But what you will do is fuel sprawl and turn SF into another Los Angeles, which remains exceptionally unaffordable but is also riddled with slums and crime.
Yes. High density housing is a better solution. Increased sprawl is never a good answer.
But honestly, if a lot of the demand is driven by tech companies and their workers, most of those jobs really don't require living in a specific place. They should seriously consider establishing communities in places where real estate is abundant and cheap, and instead invest in developing communities there with high speed telecommunications supporting the kind of tech work they want to do.
Wyoming and Montana are beautiful. Any FAANG company could explore doing like Gateway Computer did in the 90s when they built out their operations in Iowa and South Dakota. Lots of people would love to live on acreage in a rural setting instead of an urban rathole. And in our modern age of telecommunications and remote work, there simply is no need to chase housing in SF.
Nobody wants to live in nowhere, Midwest. People want to do be in cities. You should see how these people talk about SF. They’re in heaven being surrounded by each other.
No one will intentionally build slums for profit. If you have the highest earning population in the world with the most expensive real estate in the world, you're not going to build low quality shit. Especially when it costs nearly as much to build low quality shit compared to high quality shit.
Cheap housing is just old housing. To get cheap housing we need lots of new (usually nice) housing.
> No one will intentionally build slums for profit.
Oh my sweet Summer child. You really don't know how things really work do you.
>To get cheap housing we need lots of new (usually nice) housing.
So building expensive housing for rich people will somehow lower the cost of housing for everyone else?
Rich people can already afford expensive housing. You can't build your way out of this problem. There is simply too much wealth chasing a very limited supply of real estate. And not just Americans, but Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. all chasing that California real estate. All you'll succeed in doing is destroying the landscape by converting it all into suburban developments. There are other places to live than SF. People need to go to them.
What an insane take lmao. If the world actually worked the way that you're proposing then that wouldn't lower rents, it would just lead to tech bros being the only ones living here. Nah I'm good on SF being 100% made up of tech bros with 6 figure salaries actually
Denying the laws of basic economics is just ice skating uphill.
Let the tech bros try living in SF while not addressing the issue of everyone else not being able to afford to live there. If you are priced out of the market, move somewhere else.
Dystopia. As SF had somewhat corralled its homeless epidemic, so goes it again as shelter costs begin to consume all other net income of residents of the area.
Higher and higher. The sky is no limit. All for the ROI of the asset holder class. Nothing else matters.
Instead of talking about how we should build more housing for the overinflated wage earning workers of the economy benefiting from a decade plus long trend of low interest rates and speculative investment from Silicon Valley, where is the conversation about the consequences related to the societal failures born out of the lack of inclusion of all classes in the industries that create these type of headlines?
This story comes out of SF every other week, it’s a redundant “struggle” piece for the upper percentile earners of society and makes it seem as the only issue in The City is that urban inversion can’t happen fast enough, the wealthy can’t land as quick as they’d like, meanwhile the union pipe fitter can’t afford to shop at the same grocery store, nor can the family in section 8 in The Filmoe who just watched a new Trader Joe’s pop up next to where their cousins used to live.
Build baby build but the lack of coverage on every day people get snuffed out here due to the prices rising to match the wages of a certain industry or two is cold, cold blooded.
That goes without saying. Building is easy, I'm talking more about the inclusiveness of the workforce which is a more difficult and uncomfortable topic. Many grow up without being exposed to realities of poverty, economic diversity and frankly cultural diversity. Rather than work through the culture shock, they'd rather build over it which I see as a net-loss for humanity/society.
Sure thing but my original post includes “Build Baby Build” so I’m trying to redirect you back to the thread I’m pulling at versus what you’re going after independently in your original comment, that’s all.
The entire housing affordability crisis has basically been captured by and weaponized by landlord lobbies who are using the outrage to whine about rent control.
Isn't it so odd that in a city where poverty, struggle do exist, where kids have to navigate gangland and the pressures of that reality, that the victims here are the wealthy who can't find the housing they want? That this is the "crisis" of modern day San Francisco? What happened to progressive values and inclusion of all rungs of the economic ladder into society? Or was that all a sham to capture votes and posture for the sake of a moral high ground?
Can’t believe the top comments are taking about rent control which hasn’t changed in many years in SF and has only gotten weaker… instead of the obvious demand-side explanation of insane AI wages.
If you think rent control is correlated with SF housing prices then it’s a negative correlation. As rent control has weakened and the share of protected buildings has dwindled, rents have soared.
The real issue with SF is, like most American cities, a lack of housing in the right places. If the free market was left to it, there would be far more high and mid rises within public transport distance of where the jobs are, since higher densities are what's actually profitable for developers on expensive land.
They've made some recent improvements with zoning laws and eliminating parking minimums, but swathes of the city still exist under a planning policy intended to enrich existing homeowning elites, and it will take years for changes to zoning to result in more mid rises. The recent rise in interest rates hasn't helped, the 2010s would have been the perfect time for cities across the US to break the NIMBY stranglehold on growth.
In the same vein that all climate scientists agree that Climate change is real and manmade, all economists agree that rent control is harmful and regressive and only benefits tenets who already have that housing. It doesn't benefit landlords, prospective tenets, or tenets looking to move.
Economic research has shown that rent control limits mobility, limits building, and pushes up market rents.
This is not a single variable problem. It takes high demand and supply constraints (rent control is a supply constraint) to cause this increase in rents.
Saying rent control is not responsible for this is not true. Rent control is one of the causes. Not the only cause.
The problem with blaming rent control is that there’s uneven forces at play. In a perfect world we wouldn’t have rent control and the ROI on housing would be effectively zero as landlords are enticed to compete and add supply driving down profit as they reach equilibrium.
But obviously that’s not the case and despite high housing prices we aren’t getting more supply but landlords are taking more surplus because of lobbying, corruption, and corporate interests. As much as we want to pretend we live in a perfect world we don’t, which is why we have policies like rent control that help the most vulnerable people.
They couldn't do that either way. They wouldn't be able to afford the adjusted market rate anyway because there's not going to be some massive plummeting of rents. At least with rent control they have an apartment.
rent controlled units wouldn’t even matter if supply was kept up with the demand because who tf wants to live in an old 1970s apartment if there’s plentiful and new units available. the building restrictions are doing like 99% of the damage but everyone wants to blame 80 years olds in cheap apartments.
This, and these comments are 99.9% from people (or bots…) who don’t live here and don’t understand how fucked it would be living here day to day if there were no rent controlled apartments
Americans just sleep walking into a dystopian nightmare of billionaires and homelessness. No protests like France, we just take it up the butt from billionaires/politicians blatant corruption. Forget voting for your best interests. Let’s vote to “own our neighbor” like the good “Christian” nation we are!
This should be a RICO investigation. The only way rents jump that much is a conspiracy and price-fixing. Most of the conglomerate rental companies have been price-fixing at least since Covid.
Lots of people complain that "regulations" impede housing. The vast majority of regulations are the only thing keeping thieves from stealing your money. You can build a house in SF for 100k, but it will fall down the first time the earth shakes and the pipes will blow up the first time you take a dump. Now you don't have house and you lost what little savings you had.
The solution is to convert office buildings into dorms. Not apartments. Dorms. Shared bathrooms, shared kitchen space, limited windows. Office buildings already have all the safety codes you need for large groups of people. They already have most of the plumbing you need, and the ones with gyms have showers. You could literally solve two problems with one law that strips off all apartment rules off of commercial office space and makes it profitable to give young professionals a cheap place to live downtown.
I hear you. But the alternative is not a single family house for everyone. The alternative is.. this. Worse options for far more money, and the cycle continues.
The total amount of "regular" apartment building in desireable areas and not at luxury costs has been a possibility for decades. Has it worked? Have enough affordable apartments been built and rents gone down? No. Simply hoping someone decides to randomly go on a building spree has not worked.
Right now you have places where people want to live but cannot, and people who struggle to afford any housing option. Hope won't work. Gotta give those building owners a way to profit from making peanut butter meet jelly or else we will be having this same conversation for the next 40 years.
Part of this is caused by the AI buildout elsewhere. It's pulling construction labor/materials away from residential construction and towards data center buildouts.
We should be clear about what the problem actually is, not jumps of 25% or whatever.
The problem is that a certain sector of people (tech workers) who wish to reside in SF are out-competing other sectors. It is not so much that rents are unaffordable - units are being filled so it is definitely affordable to many. However those 'many' do not include key workers even at a professional level - e.g. teachers. Why are they out-competing other sectors? Because there is a vast amount of money funneling through their industry, enough to fuel a savage wage-rent spiral.
A big reason why there is still any variety is rent control - without rent control virtually all rental units would be housing tech workers. Regardless of our opinions on that demographic, to have such a narrow specialism taking all the housing is clearly detrimental to a well functioning city.
As it happens, the tech industry has over-reached itself with LLMs, and the consequent and impending total collapse will fix this issue - pretty much overnight.
Knerd5 | 2 hours ago
SF isn’t building housing, rent control or not, which is the entire problem.
Without a mechanism for forcing the construction of housing there will never be a solution to this problem.
Prop 13 has fucked California in the ass and until it’s clawed back to just primacy housing this issue will never sort itself out.
Judgementpumpkin | an hour ago
Prop 13, like many things for the last 50 years, has been a "kick the can down the road" style band-aid, for future generations to clean up after the primary benefactors die off.
downvotesyourcrap | 53 minutes ago
SF has the 2nd highest density in a major (>500k) city. Only NYC is more dense, how's the rental market there?
FiftyLoudCats | 11 minutes ago
You saying prop 13 has reduced building new units, why is that?
Cities charging more building fees to make up for lost tax revenue I’m guessing?
I’ve always heard the hurdles builders have to go through is one of the reasons for high rents, but never made the connection to prop 13.
fitzomania | 5 minutes ago
Prop 13 created a landed gentry of NIMBYS who generate all the political barriers to building more housing and diluting their personal wealth
jdvancesleftnut | an hour ago
So make it more expensive for people to own their homes?? Not sure what you're getting at
downvotesyourcrap | 50 minutes ago
These types only want highrise apartments. They advocate against home ownership and encourage renting your whole life. This is part of the "you'll own nothing and you'll enjoy it" oligarchy party line.
ihatedrivingbro | 22 minutes ago
Why not owning in high rises?
EconomistWithaD | 6 hours ago
One of the most well-known consequences of rent control at the city level is that rents in non-controlled units make up for rents in the controlled units.
That’s why economists often say that rent control significantly impedes mobility. Edit. Those that have access to rent controlled units benefit. Others don’t. It’s a debate as to where the net benefits lie, but rent control does induce winners and losers.
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Rent-Control-Does-it-work-Dr-Konstantin-A.-Kholodilin.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020
Skensis | 5 hours ago
The issue is that SF doesn't want to make building and increasing density easy. Rent control and prop13 are just bandaids for the regions desire to limit growth.
moonblaze95 | 4 hours ago
Prop 13 is why my friends family has a dozen dilapidated properties rotting in California — no incentive to improve the land. They pay none of the property taxes and own all of the property?
Market failure that constrains supply of housing units.
You can’t tax land out of existence.
diazegod | 3 hours ago
They aren’t paying property tax?
Koshindan | 3 hours ago
Probably a grandfathered tax limit. My grandparents lived in the area and were paying a couple grand in property taxes while all their neighbors who moved in later were paying 30k a year.
hopelesslysarcastic | an hour ago
Do you know what Prop13 was for? Lol
diazegod | 21 minutes ago
I didn’t, not from CA.
Kershiser22 | 3 hours ago
I don't think routine maintenance to prevent dilapidation will increase property taxes. You would need to make an actual improvement such as adding a pool or extending the living space, etc.
BobaLives01925 | 3 hours ago
They’re the opposite of bandaids, they take a wound and make it worse
mcsul | 2 hours ago
There's a great quote from a European economist that goes something like (paraphrasing from memory) "Except for bombing, rent control is the most efficient way to destroy a city."
sleepkitty | 3 hours ago
Rent control doesn’t incentivize current residents to advocate for building more. If I like my neighborhood and my rent is fixed why should I want to put up with construction next door. If my rent keeps increasing and I’m looking for somewhere cheaper then I’m happy new units are coming online.
juliankennedy23 | 2 hours ago
Rent control unfortunately increases the amount people have to pay in rent by reducing the supply.
SilkySmoothTesticles | 5 hours ago
I’ve never met someone that gave up a rent controlled apartment and put it back into the “free market”.
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
Yes. It’s why rent control impedes mobility.
ecethrowaway01 | 3 hours ago
Never? I have friends who have, though admittedly they're usually stinkers (think rotting Edwardian homes)
alQamar | 5 hours ago
I get that argument. It doesn’t change the fact that some people would be living on the streets - including whole families - if there isn’t some kind of regulation.
chabacanito | 5 hours ago
There's still families that can't get a rent controlled apartment. Because there's not enough of them. If there were, you wouldn't need to control rent.
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
They wouldn't be able to afford one at market rate regardless.
mickeyanonymousse | 2 hours ago
there simply would never be that many apartments that market rate is equivalent to a 30 year controlled rent. or if there are the local economy has completely crashed.
chabacanito | 2 hours ago
Of course it could be. Nobody really tried though.
mickeyanonymousse | an hour ago
there literally wouldn’t be. at a certain point if the rent keeps going down, there’s also little incentive to build additional units. so there would never be so many new units to bring prices down 40-50%.
FCKABRNLSUTN2 | 4 hours ago
You think those units would be vacant if they weren’t rent controlled?
GoodOlSticks | 5 hours ago
Homeless people dont get rent controlled units though the incumbents who already were renting them do. The people who already had housing get frozen in time at a specific cost while everyone who isn't in rent controlled housing pays the difference, pushing the homeless even further from being housed
mickeyanonymousse | 5 hours ago
those incumbents were paying market rate at the start of their tenancy just like anyone else
KosherSushirrito | 4 hours ago
They are no longer paying market rate. That's the issue.
pm_me_your_pay_slips | 3 hours ago
becuase itis silly to pretend that housing, something everyone needs would follow simplistic free market models if unregulated.
KosherSushirrito | 3 hours ago
It doesn't need to be fully unregulated, but obedctively, rent control on specific units comes at the expense of others. Even a throttled rate of increase, as opposed to a complete cap, would be a massive improvement.
pm_me_your_pay_slips | 3 hours ago
> Even a throttled rate of increase
This is RENT CONTROL
KosherSushirrito | 3 hours ago
Yeah, that's why I said that even this would be an improvement. The current of rent control is the worst possible solution, so bad in fact that even a different type of rent control would be an improvement, despite my personal opposition to all forms of such.
Sometimes it helps to actually engage with a person's point instead of focusing on pedantry.
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
The issue is that market rate has always been the product of price fixing. The inability for landlords to squeeze out extra money from tenants will never be an issue.
KosherSushirrito | 3 hours ago
Landlords are still squeezing money out of tenants. They're just doing so disproportionately from those lacking rent control.
I dunno how many ways there are to phrase "rent control comes at the expense of people without it."
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
Okay, but how many ways are there to phrase "Getting rid of rent control comes at the expense of people with it?"
In the end, especially in a market like San Francisco, getting rid of rent control isn't significantly bringing other rents down because demand is too much higher than supply. The only people who benefit are landlords and wealthy renters who can't find a place.
KosherSushirrito | 3 hours ago
>"Getting rid of rent control comes at the expense of people with it?"
If your housing solution only benefits a privileged class at the expense of others, it's not a good housing solution.
>getting rid of rent control isn't significantly bringing other rents down because demand is too much higher than supply.
Rent control actively discourages supply meeting demand due to acting as a disincentive on construction, among other measures in California. Even Prop 13, arguably, is a form of rent control, and its the biggest block right now in terms of socioeconomics.
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
>If your housing solution only benefits a privileged class at the expense of others, it's not a good housing solution.
There is going to be a privileged class regardless. You're not going to use your Harry Potter Magic Wand to vajazzle up equality. If someone is going to end up privileged, I'll always err on the side of working class people getting the break.
If you want to attack things that are decreasing supply and new construction, be my guest. But evicting people who can no longer afford their homes doesn't increase overall supply, just supply to a privileged few. An occupied home is 1:1, regardless of who lives in it.
Restart_Computer | 5 hours ago
As soon as they have to move they will be on the streets though along with all the other families. That’s a problem! If it’s hard to get in and you could lose it and be destitute because of that barrier that’s a problem. Could keep families in worse conditions out of fear of moving too.
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
You feel confident asserting that rent controls will never potentially CAUSE homelessness as an unintended consequence? The theory works in both ways. It could prevent certain groups from experiencing homelessness, while increasing the chances for others.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046298000349
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020
pm_me_your_pay_slips | 3 hours ago
this is exactly an argument for why an unregulated housing market causes homelessness...
EconomistWithaD | 3 hours ago
Pure unregulated can lead to homelessness. Rent control can lead to homelessness.
BobaLives01925 | 3 hours ago
It’s the opposite. Rent control just shifts around who becomes homeless, while incentivizing people to build actually decreases homelessness.
floormanifold | 5 hours ago
The number one predictor for homelessness rates is housing vacancy rates. Everything else, weather, drug use rates, whatever statistic you could think of, have weak to zero correlation.
If there's no housing, people end up on the street. Rent control reduces housing supply.
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
A house that is occupied is not reducing supply. It's exactly meeting demand.
pm_me_your_pay_slips | 3 hours ago
why rent control directly reduces housing supply?
floormanifold | 3 hours ago
Draw supply and demand curves
Add a price ceiling
Look at what happens to supply
schrodingers_gat | 2 hours ago
Supply is also limited by entrenched interests destroying competition. Price ceilings aren't needed in a market with sufficient competition.
BobaLives01925 | 3 hours ago
It makes it unprofitable to build housing, so supply freezes while demand continues to increase
schrodingers_gat | 2 hours ago
Usually rent control does not apply to new housing stock only existing housing. The goal is to keep people from being pushed into poverty by landlords looking for more profit.
Any new stock would become available at market rates so if anything it encourages building new.
BobaLives01925 | 2 hours ago
Nobody builds new housing because its value is crushed by the rent control that will eventually apply to it. This is an extremely well documented phenomenon, if you’re hanging out on the Econ subreddit you’d be smart to read about this and get a better handle on the facts of the situation.
mickeyanonymousse | an hour ago
rent control on 50 year old apartments isn’t what makes it unprofitable to build housing tho.
BobaLives01925 | 5 minutes ago
The newer buildings eventually get rent controlled too
Rizpam | 5 hours ago
And how many people including whole families are living on the streets BECAUSE of rent control? Hard to suss out but it’s certainly not negligible.
More likely those people would simply have to move out of San Francisco rather than having to live on the streets. Which I don’t find too great a sacrifice compared to all of society paying the price.
the_fozzy_one | 3 hours ago
Rents are universally the most expensive in cities with the strictest rent controls and building regulations (SF, NYC) and the least expensive in deregulated cities (Austin). Rent control makes rent more expensive overall. It's indisputable. A small minority of lottery winners benefit and the rest of society loses.
We already have cash assistance for rent for people who need it in the form of Section 8.
082426grateful | 5 hours ago
If the goal is to flush human inhabitants out of SF, then let’s get on with it. Double the rent. More and more to shelter.
Rizpam | 5 hours ago
Do you actually think rent control helps keep the overall price of shelter down and helps increase the city population?
082426grateful | 5 hours ago
Yes.
A question for you: why do you seek policies that protect the asset owner class and sacrifice all others?
IKnewThat45 | 4 hours ago
because whether we like it or not, the US is a capitalist economic system and nothing will get built if there's not a profit motive for builders and developers. other cities have repeatedly seen this work.
082426grateful | 4 hours ago
And I will counter that the profit motive has now been placed above the greater good. The pendulum has swung too far.
Downvotes are expected, and I’ll find few who will publicly agree with my assertion. There will be consequence from this period of allowing profit-seeking to override social needs. The pendulum will swing too far in the other direction, at some point.
IKnewThat45 | 4 hours ago
I don't disagree at all, but that's an issue that will take years/decades to fix at a federal level. Incentivizing more building at a state and local level and actually doing it is a proven, common sense way to reduce costs and homelessness ASAP. We can risk mitigate while also working on longer term solutions.
mickeyanonymousse | 2 hours ago
right so the idea that the rents would go down isn’t that going against the profit motive? who is going to invest in that with the expectation that rents are headed downward?
silvedude | 4 hours ago
A top one percent commenter to this sub believing rent control works despite what nearly every economist thinks is like a flat earther being a top commenter on the physics sub
082426grateful | 4 hours ago
And economists perpetually fail to take into account the speed of change. They hang their assertions on previously held beliefs, and place data, rightfully, as the support for their beliefs.
And I’m saying that no one is accurately taking into effect how quickly technology is beginning to override long held economic beliefs. Meanwhile, we’re side-stepping sleeping people on sidewalks, right now, this day.
silvedude | 4 hours ago
Tankies/socialists always sound like flat earthers when talking about economics. It never fails lmao
082426grateful | 4 hours ago
And conservatives will always seek to protect the asset owner class, as this drives political contributions and retains political power, most importantly. Lmao
nonamenomonet | 4 hours ago
But the people hurt would be the ones renting. Not the asset class.
rabouilethefirst | 4 hours ago
Or to cheaper areas...
SilkySmoothTesticles | 5 hours ago
Save one family at the cost of how many others?
coke_and_coffee | 4 hours ago
That is incorrect. They simply wouldn’t be living in San Francisco. And that’s ok, imo. We shouldn’t use government to bully private property owners into incurring losses just because we think some randos should get to permanently live in a city at the expense of someone else who could get a good job and pay to live in that unit.
And this is assuming rent controls don’t lower overall housing supply, which they do…
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
An occupied residence is exactly meeting demand. What's this NuMath that the parasite class wants to claim where 1-1 is -1 and not 0?
alQamar | 3 hours ago
Not making the maximum rent possible is obviously a loss!
coke_and_coffee | 3 hours ago
This but unironically. Price signals are good for an economy.
VeteranSergeant | 2 hours ago
Who's going to tell him that the renter is taking an obvious loss by paying the maximum possible rent? Transactions are double-sided, and the more money paid into rent is less money that renter is paying back into the economy for their other needs and wants. Or eventually owning their own home.
If the landlord holding housing hostage is the one taking the loss then the response is... who cares? It's long past time we eliminated maximized rent-seeking as an investment.
coke_and_coffee | 2 hours ago
Rent control doesn’t work. Reality doesn’t care how you wish the world worked.
Read a book
VeteranSergeant | 2 hours ago
Oh, just like the books I read by Milton Friedman in college? Those certainly worked out, lol. Reality definitely cared about your books, sweetie.
Coke and coffee are clearly affecting your sleeping patterns. Probably time to dial back.
coke_and_coffee | 2 hours ago
> Oh, just like the books I read by Milton Friedman in college?
I love how you dopey fucks think we live in a world that looks anything CLOSE to what Friedman suggested.
We spend more on welfare and entitlements than EVER. The welfare state has only ever grown. Regulations abound. Ag subsidies, government grants, and spending on public healthcare and education has NEVER BEEN HIGEHR. Cities have doubled down on rent control and anfgordable housing mandates. Section 8 is SKYROCKETED. Homeless shelters have only gotten bigger and bigger. Anti-trust regulators have been suing the shit out of companies for the last 10 years.
Hyper-regulation and state-subsidized welfare doesn’t work. It drags us all down by distorting markets and inducing fraud and waste.
The neoliberal world you think we had never existed. You’re ignorant and wrong.
VeteranSergeant | an hour ago
Very nice tantum, sweetie. And yet we briefly had a trillionaire and the wealth concentration at the upper percentages has long-eclipsed the Gilded Age. You just ranted and listed a bunch of things that have nothing to do with eachother, like you think you can gish-gallup your way to winning an argument, lol. Yeah, lots of stuff sucks, kiddo. Glad you noticed. Though you seem especially upset that stuff might suck for wealthy landholders and rent seekers, which, as I said earlier, who the fuck cares? I brought up Friedman because he's in a lot of books. Economics is an evolving science, it's not evolution or climate change. Sure, maybe we sued anti-trust regulators when Biden and Obama were President, and then we stopped when Trump was President. So let's start there. What was the point you were trying to make? What's that have to do with rent control? Or even directly to do with rents at all?
You're ignorant, wrong, and surly. None of which are good traits.
uselessdrain | 4 hours ago
That's a socialist talking point. Capital doesn't care about your feelings, rent or street. Rent control is bad because it's anti-market. It creates winner and losers.
I'd suggest, abolish rent control. Have government funded subsidized housing (that isn't a slum). Tie it to income and have it mixed into mix development (again, no slumming). We could call it income assisted living or something. Demolish property as an asset class for lower income folks.
PerfectZeong | 3 hours ago
Doesnt the market also create winners and losers?
Smooth_Phone2 | 50 minutes ago
Market pricing means families live on the street.
Renters control means even more families live on the street.
Gvillegator | 4 hours ago
The issue in SF isn’t rent control lmao and to pretend it is is hilarious. The issue is that AI engineers are now making millions every year and there’s generally been no construction on homes in the entire country. SF is suffering because they have the highest proportion of insanely wealthy tech workers pricing out the rest of their population.
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
Which means that spillovers are larger in the unregulated apartment market. Which is what the paper is about.
matjoeman | 5 hours ago
Rent control is exactly for times like these. It keeps people stable during price spikes like this. It's not a perfect solution if you have to move for other reasons of course.
The real lasting solution is to build more housing.
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
Times like these? Part of the reason why we are seeing such a rent hike is BECAUSE of rent control; the price increases in the unregulated market.
Edit: if you’re going to downvote, you should probably read the evidence I provided. Which seems to be the only post with proof of anything.
mickeyanonymousse | 5 hours ago
and rent control only is in place because of rent hikes in the past, it didn’t spawn out of nowhere.
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
1st or 2nd gen. Because they are different.
SilkySmoothTesticles | 5 hours ago
So go after the rent setting software they all use and remove the cartel that’s strangling the rental market. 25% happens via coordination, it’s not a normal thing to happen in the market in such a short amount of time
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
Cartel behavior can and should be eliminated.
It’s not all. As I said, PART is due to the spillovers. Well known.
Read the evidence provided.
tupacsnoducket | 3 hours ago
I mean that’s ridiculous to think that the rent seekers wouldn’t be doing exactly what they’re doing without rent control.
What market pressure would prevent them from jacking it 25% without rent control? Its an inelastic market with high demand and software jacking the prices on a schedule
EconomistWithaD | 2 hours ago
When did I say anything contrary to the notion that regulated apartments would see rent increases (and likely quality increases as well) without control?
tupacsnoducket | 58 minutes ago
If you get rid of rent control you’re still going to have the same prices since we already proved you can get those prices it would just mean more high priced apartments and homes are at that point
The landlord does not go “what’s the portfolio of someone else with rent controlled apartments doing, hmm that price is too low for me I shall increase twice as much as I was intending to increase”
They’re rent seekers, they only price as high as they can get away with, never lower
And we already know the rent seeking class will leave units empty to make sure the price stays high instead of lowering
You’d need expanding supply which almost every city is not doing in their cores to create lower prices overall by getting rid of rent control
EconomistWithaD | 57 minutes ago
Again, you're saying things I never said, or even intimated.
Like, seriously, can you string together cogent thoughts based on what I actually wrote, rather than some crackhead understanding?
tupacsnoducket | 54 minutes ago
You literally said with all caps rent control is why the price went up dumb dumb
This is why no one listens to economists, they literally only get it right with an open book test and in hind sight
EconomistWithaD | 52 minutes ago
Yeah, no one listens to us. Certainly why we go completely unpaid.
Enjoy whatever low skill, low wage occupation you're relegated to. Something tells me your economic outcomes are purely endogenous.
And yes, rent went up IN UNREGULATED MARKETS. By 25% because that's a spillover when they can't raise rents in REGULATED MARKETS. My god, is walking and breathing at the same time a difficult exercise for you too?
tupacsnoducket | 41 minutes ago
And I’m still saying that the rent seekers would have raised the prices to that level anyway and you have still not made a single effort to explain how limited supply with high demand in a high income city would have broken the laws of rent seekers behavior because they were making more money somewhere else under the assumption that all players in the market share a portfolio that holds rent controlled and non rent controlled lol
Dude do an economics and explain why the greedy would be less greedy, go on do it
I make pretty good money actually, it’s okay but not surgeon level
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
Eliminating rent control just inverts the biggest winners and biggest losers. Except the only people losing on rent control are the parasite class of landlords and the wealthy people who want to displace the poorer people protected by rent control. Suggesting it "impedes mobility" suggests that these people would be mobile if rent control suddenly went away. It wouldn't in San Francisco. They would just lose their home to a wealthier person and then have to leave the city entirely. Sure, that's mobility, but not exactly the kind that anyone other than parasites and the wealthy look forward to.
Sure, it sucks for the working class who don't have rent control, but the rents aren't coming down significantly if rent control goes away. They still get priced out of the market regardless.
Until San Francisco develops enough higher-density housing to offset the demand, rent control at least helps some people who actually need help.
EconomistWithaD | 3 hours ago
No one said anything about eliminating rent control. Don’t just invent things.
No, “wealthy” and “parasitic landlords” are not the only losers. Perhaps you could, you know, READ evidence in an area you appear to be woefully ignorant about?
Yes, rent control impedes mobility. Again, the evidence consistently suggests it. Why are you ignoring economics evidence on this sub? It’s treated as the gold standard.
Didn’t I say that we are unclear if the net benefits of rent control are positive? Huh. Again, you display a remarkably poor ability to actually read.
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
Sure, being forced to move out of town is definitely increased mobility, lol.
The fuck is "mobility" even a metric for? That's rich person talk.
Economics is an evolving science. Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman were implicitly trusted for decades. Didn't work out. If you'd like to discover reading, my last few sentences could be a boon for you.
mickeyanonymousse | 5 hours ago
“make up” for rents kind of implies there is a total number they are trying to reach and the non-rent controlled units make up the difference between rent controlled total and overall. but really what’s happening is the landlords are simply raising the rent as high as financially can be afforded by the next tenants.
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
No; read the evidence that I provided.
"Apart from an evident and sometimes intended effect of reducing the revenues of landlords, it can also lead to rent increases for dwellings that are not subject to control."
mickeyanonymousse | 5 hours ago
I understand that. and in general yes it does. but in this situation not having rent control wouldn’t stop them. they aren’t raising the rents for any other reason than there’s people with enough money to pay it. not having rent control won’t change that part of the situation. it’s exploitative.
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
Greed can play a part. But the article even says it’s at least partially demand driven.
So, you’re wrong. From both my evidence and the SFGate article
mickeyanonymousse | 3 hours ago
if they wanted to charge less they simply could.
burritomiles | 4 hours ago
Without any additional supply, controls are needed to keep people from being homeless. Supply is artificiality low, demand is sky high. Controls are inplace to keep supply low so we need controls in place to keep rents low for certain number of units.
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
Do you not think that rent control also limits supply? I mean, it’s in the links provided.
Fun story, both theory and evidence suggests that certain rent controls INCREASE homelessness.
burritomiles | 4 hours ago
Sure rent control limits supply but that can be offset by new builds. But SF doesn't allow much(1-2k per year). Getting rid of rent control would be much worse for the city than just allowing 5-10k market rate units per year to be built.
EconomistWithaD | 3 hours ago
No one said rent control should be eliminated.
ragold | 5 hours ago
If landlords could already charge more they would. One sector of an industry offering a lower price doesn’t mean the other sector charges more. They don’t “make up” for others’ discounts.
MrMacduggan | 5 hours ago
But as the demand grows, the rent controlled units are effectively off the market because nobody wants to leave them. So all that new demand (rent increases) are concentrated on fewer units (faster rent increases).
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
Why don’t you read the evidence. Until then, don’t talk.
ragold | 5 hours ago
Typical response. I mean I have. Have you read the Massachusetts studies?
I also wouldn’t call the paper you linked as evidence. It’s a non-peer reviewed quick and dirty meta-analysis with very little of what you’d expect from a proper meta analysis.
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
You mean the ones you haven’t linked to?
I mean, I linked to a 2024 meta analysis by a well known housing economics researcher.
You’ve said words.
ragold | 4 hours ago
If you were familiar with the evidence you would know about the MA studies.
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
So, you can’t link them. Is it because you don’t know what they are, or you’re too stupid to figure out how to do it?
I think it’s probably the latter, at which point I’ll simply block you.
ragold | 4 hours ago
Block away. But my point still stands.
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
That you’re an ignorant twat?
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
Also, the paper is peer reviewed, you illiterate twat.
I didn’t link the JHE page because then you idiots would bemoan “gatekeeping”.
But here it is. Learn. Talk less on this sub.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020
ragold | 4 hours ago
That is a different paper than the one you linked to. Obviously.
Moneyshot_ITF | 5 hours ago
People are acting like the property owners in San Francisco are liberal or support any progressive policies. The people renting and the people who own the properties are two different buckets of people
KosherSushirrito | 4 hours ago
People are acting like whether or not land owners are liberal has any impact on the basic fact thag low housing and rent control boosts prices.
Moneyshot_ITF | 3 hours ago
We cant ignore that rent prices were already out of control before rent control was a thing in California. To blame that is just misleading
KosherSushirrito | 3 hours ago
Which is why I said rent control and low housing, and the two are linked, with rent controlled communities being some of the biggest opponents to density.
Smooth_Phone2 | 3 hours ago
Some folks like to twist themselves into pretzels insisting the supply/demand/price signals are just entirely unrelated concepts.
CommitteeofMountains | an hour ago
It can often be interesting looking at stuff actually featuring landlords, as they tend to be crusty old working class, former handymen and supers who invested in the same way cooks save up to open their own restaurants. Their politics and attitude towards YUPpie renters often makes sense in that context, and their attitude towards basically any health and safety issue makes much more sense when you hear thick Russian accent.
TrekkiMonstr | 3 hours ago
The people renting vote too. Unfortunately, they often vote wrong.
discgman | 4 hours ago
They caused this mess by not building enough housing even when the state passed laws forcing cities to build. This is the result of decades of zoning laws and nimby activity.
Chispy | an hour ago
It's all just virtue signalling. Boomers gonna boom.
SterlingNano | 2 hours ago
So like what's the actual plan for when nobody can afford to live in the city? We know these companies hate remote work...so what do they want to happen when employees can't live where they work?
Rickbox | 2 hours ago
They get displaced further away and richer people come in to take their apartments. Been happening in NYC for years.
Danne660 | 2 hours ago
If people can't afford to live there then the price will stop going up.
ot_6fn | 2 hours ago
Work from home = bad Work from india / Philippines =good
Its_Pine | 16 minutes ago
I guess the reasoning is that they’ll allow work from home if you work for a lot less. 😔
erich1510 | 2 hours ago
Economically speaking the government comes into help low income cohorts (yes that includes you not as well paid tech workers compared to the super AI workers exploding the market right now)
https://www.reddit.com/r/austrian_economics/s/9zWMRiC3N5
Donkey_____ | an hour ago
People moving to SF into market rate apartments today are struggling.
But you seem to not understand or know that rents in SF cratered from 2020-early 2026 and many people are living in rent controlled apartments from that time that were really quite reasonable.
NewImportance8313 | an hour ago
It'll go up as high as people are willing able to pay. Other than that we could have a recession which would force rents down by job losses
No-Opinion273 | an hour ago
Landlords want less tenants and are making they can squeeze the ones that can keep it afloat as they believe they wont move.
GraphicBlandishments | 4 hours ago
Crazy how much SF just refuses to address supply. I remember seeing this post a few years ago, showing that the tallest building under construction in SF is a 15 floor University building. Milwaukee, Indianapolis and Kelowna are all building much taller.
Tallest under construction building by city in the US and Canada : r/skyscrapers
Moist_Pipe | 2 hours ago
Earthquakes, city built on shady landfill, traffic issues, infrastructure from the 1940s...
It is so expensive to build in SF.and takes forever. I manage construction projects in SF and we dont refuse to build profitable projects, it's just so expensive to do so.
-hedonium- | an hour ago
What are the most addressable costs that would allow more dense in-fill projects to go through?
tachyonvelocity | 6 hours ago
The solution has always been “simple.” Deregulate all housing restrictions and build units up. Remove all rent control and similar policies that benefit selective tenants that are simply further restrictions on building incentives. That’s how you get very cheap rents like China and Japan. Unwilling to do these because of ideology and political deadlock? Well you deserve unaffordable living, that’s just how the world works.
Somnifor | 4 hours ago
One of the problems that both the Bay Area and LA have is that the sort of density required to build on a scale that actually lowers housing cost will require world class transit first, otherwise they will absolutely choke on traffic.
The political will for the necessary upzoning and transit upgrades doesn't exist. Until it does housing costs will remain astronomical.
krakenbear | an hour ago
This isn’t true. You can look at a real life case of Austin, TX which has built so many rental buildings the last few years that real rents are falling due to excessive inventory. No one has ever accused Austin of having a world class transit system.
SF just needs to allow very large apartment complexes to be built all over the city with less restrictions.
Sauce: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-falling/
spandexrecks | an hour ago
Just food for thought: Austin is about 320 sq miles, SF is just shy of 47 sq miles
3d4f5g | 54 minutes ago
it is true, and so is your statement on rental inventory. transit needs are huge and complicated in the sf bay area and it definitely has an impact on rental rates
davmre | 58 minutes ago
You're of course right that the political will for upzoning has been embarassingly scarce, but let's not pretend that transit is a valid excuse. Even if you totally deregulated today, it would take years for enough housing to appear to make a significant dent in transit capacity (or rents, for that matter). Building housing is an incremental process and there's plenty of time for transit to be developed alongside it, funded by revenue from new developments as they come online.
There are plenty of areas with strong existing transit access that could already support significant upzoning - notably the Muni central corridor in SF (van Ness/Church/Castro areas out to and including West Portal), as well as the Mission and most of the Bart and Caltrain corridors through the peninsula and east bay. In other areas like the Richmond and Sunset, you could do a lot with no new infrastructure simply by funding more frequent reliable bus service. A Geary subway would be great and we should do it, but in the meantime you could support quite a lot of development just by 5x'ing capacity on the 38R line. It's not like there's some insurmountable chicken-and-egg problem here.
pkennedy | 5 hours ago
Japan has a falling population. China massively over built because of government intervention and housing prices SKYROCKETED during these times. Neither of these is a valid example for what you're proposing.
No one is massively over building in the US without government intervention of some kind. Like messing with how loans are given out or insured like in the 2008 housing crisis.
After the crisis, home builders simply stopped building until supply met demand and then they continued on. But they all essentially stopped.
Housing regulations are there for MANY good reasons. To prevent someone from opening a slaughter house in some residential neighbourhood. To prevent someone from building some cardboard firebox next to a residential neighbourhood. The regulations ONLY cost builders money. Because a builder will sell for the MAXIMUM they can get, not the minimum, not at a discount, for the MAXIMUM they can get. Save them $50,000 in permits and they'll just pocket it. Which is the exact reason, after 2008 that they stopped building. It wasn't worth it.
tachyonvelocity | 5 hours ago
Japan is a classic example of hyper dense construction in an area extremely similar to San Francisco area. Good for you to also acknowledge that massive government intervention is needed like China. Somehow somewhere a gigantic population and much denser than anything the US has is able to be housed for far cheaper. Try to learn something from them instead of being entrenched in ideology. Like I said, the solution has always been available. If people living in SF don’t want to copy it, then they simply deserve their COL crisis.
pkennedy | 5 hours ago
They massively over built because the government propped up housing and made sure it was always going up for decades. The same way as the 2008 bubble. So you're just proposing huge bubbles that burst every few years and wipe people out? I mean that is what it sounds like. The chinese now have properties they can't sell at any price and they've devalued them massively. They fall apart because regulations aren't followed.
IArgueForReality | 5 hours ago
I think he means for supply to meet demand.
Generalfrogspawn | 49 minutes ago
Yeah but they don’t suffer from homelessness. Which is a far greater issue.
ohh-welp | 4 hours ago
This is the ultimate liberal nightmare. The absolutists will never allow the word free-market to be used.
durrtyurr | 3 hours ago
It's the ultimate NIMBY nightmare. Those are both countries where they have absolutely no power over what gets built near them. Karens can cry all they want, but zoning is national in Japan and the CCP decides what gets built in China.
EconomistWithaD | 6 hours ago
Asserting a singular answer to a complex topic is usually wrong. Deregulation for supply side is ONE answer, but second gen rent controls are likely to play a part.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/95trz_v1
tachyonvelocity | 5 hours ago
Please tell me how supply is not the biggest problem. Please tell me how Japan and China are able to house billions for far cheaper? Home prices notwithstanding, rents in China are far far cheaper. How, when it has cyberpunk-level dense cities, if not due to supply? Visit China and you see huge skyscraper apartments everywhere. Visit SF or any other big city? Suburban sprawl and close to zero residential skyscrapers. The US has made this trade off and refuses to change, so yes the US will have forever unaffordable housing.
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
I didn't say supply wasn't the biggest issue. I said it's not a singular fix.
Read the link for the pitfalls.
tachyonvelocity | 4 hours ago
Ok first of all, the paper’s argument about inequality isn’t useful because “inequality” isn’t a bad thing because it’s a result of growth. It’s basically a rehashed version of the gentrification sentiment: places that are very poor are affordable and places that gentrify aren’t, so the conclusion is, don’t gentrify and remain poor?
Second, I would argue that compared to other emerging markets like China, inequality growth is far higher there than in the US. The biggest difference is of course regulations that allow for upzoning, so that when inequality due to growth or gentrification happens, because the government planned ahead, it was able to keep housing affordable despite major inequality increases.
It’s of course technically “correct” that the major issue of housing comes from inequality. But yes, a growing economy generates more inequality. People would rather live in gentrified areas more than not. So what’s the conclusion? Attempt to remove inequality and reduce growth as trade off? Or simply plan ahead and increase supply in gentrified areas?
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
Not all inequality is bad, correct. A lot is.
Nytshaed | 5 hours ago
Is that just broad rent stabilization or something else?
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
A *little* bit more nuance. St Louis Fed has a good explanation of it.
"“Second-generation” controls cover only a subset of the rental market at the time of enactment and tend to allow more price flexibility for new leases. These rent-control policies often dictate the rate at which prices can increase on preexisting leases (usually indexed to a fraction of inflation); provide additional tenant protections against eviction; and limit mechanisms through which landlords can remove their units from control, such as major renovations, owner move-ins and condo conversions. In addition, landlords are sometimes restricted from being able to leave their units vacant or take them completely off the market arbitrarily."
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/what-are-long-run-trade-offs-rent-control-policies
Nytshaed | 5 hours ago
I see. Ya I mean SF has a couple flavors in that vein.
We have one on very old buildings that is really strict and another thats like 10% that covers most but not all units.
Tbh, I think our tenant protections are too strong. Even as a renter.
A political negative effect we also have is that advocates and unions are really anti-redevelopment of rent control. We've tried in the past making deals where the current tenants keep rent control in the new building and it ends when they leave, but it still ends up dying to union pressure.
It seems the preference is for decaying rent controlled slums over it phasing out for newer and bigger buildings.
It's crazy out here. A lot of renter advocates are part of the poison pushing renters out.
Last_Surprise981 | 6 hours ago
If rent controls work, why not expand them, lets do bread control
DeArgonaut | 5 hours ago
If seat belts work why not put them on all chairs
Last_Surprise981 | 4 hours ago
But rent controls don't work, just leads to shortage.
kirime | 4 hours ago
>lets do bread control
A lot of people unironically support it, even though price caps have been a consistent failure since at least the times of ancient Romans. It just sounds like an extremely simple solution: prices too high? Let's ban high prices, no further thinking or evidence is necessary.
Last_Surprise981 | 4 hours ago
It goes back to Diocletian
matjoeman | 5 hours ago
Rent control doesn't solve the problem. It keeps people stable while other policies get more housing built.
Last_Surprise981 | 5 hours ago
So let's do bread control, it keeps people stable while more bread is produced.
CommunistsAreCancer | an hour ago
Fuck it let’s do wage control, you’re not allowed to have wages below 60k a year, surely nothing will go wrong
Nikoladge | 3 hours ago
Let's do ground control to Major Tom
nywse | 5 hours ago
What's bread control?
Treacle_Pendulum | 5 hours ago
It fixes the exchange rate between loaves of bread and circus tickets
EconomistWithaD | 5 hours ago
Do you understand the difference between 1st and 2nd gen rent control laws?
As I said in another comment, and found in this paper, rent control has tradeoffs. Policy can minimize the downsides without expanding rent control.
I didn’t say rent control “works”. I said second gen are likely to play a role.
I-cant_even | 6 hours ago
If San Francisco allowed people to "build up" it would be a massive humanitarian tragedy during the next major quake. A large portion of SF is in liquefaction zones because it's built on old sand dunes and garbage.
There is no "up" to build in SF, it's not like Manhattan with a solid granite bedrock to build into.
Malvania | 5 hours ago
Most of the Bay Area is not in a liquefaction zone. https://mtc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html
Are there some? Sure. And Foster City is going to sink. But the peninsula largely has relatively low risk.
I-cant_even | 5 hours ago
I referred specifically to San Francisco, Richmond/Sunsets and Dog Patch are liquefaction.
imperabo | 4 hours ago
Most of San Francisco is not that. And the city of San Francisco is on the peninsula
sargantbacon1 | 5 hours ago
My friend I am not trying to be rude but this is entirely incorrect. I’m not sure where you heard this but geologists and structural engineers do not agree.
I-cant_even | 5 hours ago
This is the map I'm looking at: https://data.sf.gov/-/San-Francisco-Seismic-Hazard-Zones/7ahv-68ap
Admittedly it has been ~10 years but my source is city employees themselves. I wouldn't trust any tall buildings in those zones. That said I am surprised to see that Richmond and Sunset aren't fully liquefaction.
Imaginary_Zone_4319 | 4 hours ago
You do know about foundations, right?
Outrageous_Calendar4 | 4 hours ago
I will say that while this is a big concern, there is still plenty of land that is NOT in the liquidation zone that could be easily built up/upzoned as necessary, especially along BART/Caltrain so you get more housing without more traffic.
FlyingStarShip | 5 hours ago
And Tokyo and entire Japan is not prone to earthquakes? give me a break
I-cant_even | 5 hours ago
I don't know about Tokyo's geology but I'm guessing it's not built over liquefaction regions. It's in my second sentence of a three sentence post. You trolls are getting less literate.
trustmebro5 | 5 hours ago
Buddy, major parts of Tokyo are in liquefaction regions. At least look it up before you start spouting nonsense.
herosavestheday | 4 hours ago
Entire population of CA and then some lives in the greater Tokyo area and people will still be like "no we can't possibly build more housing in this one city in CA".
discgman | 4 hours ago
So in your logic, Toyoko will lose all their buildings due to earthquakes?
b0bswaget | 5 hours ago
What’s going on now with lack of affordable market rate housing is also a massive humanitarian tragedy.
Coldfriction | 5 hours ago
You can always improve the foundation with piles, drilled shafts, over-excavating, etc. We know how to do this these days. You don't just build up, you build down as well.
Pizza-Pirate-6829 | 2 hours ago
Your post really triggered a lot of people but no one has a single legitimate counter point to it.
Doggleganger | an hour ago
You're right that more supply is the solution. But there's a big difference between minimizing regulations and deregulating "all" housing restrictions. I don't think any place in the US has done the latter. And countries that do that tend to have a lot of problems with shitty construction and unintended consequences.
Reasonable-Fee1945 | 24 minutes ago
There was a great documentary, a while back on a guy who was trying to turn a laundromat into rentals in San Francisco, and it took him. I think about five years, and several million dollars just to get an answer. And he wasn't like he was wealthy, but he wasn't like a giant company or anything. So this was a lot of money that you're gambling on something you might not even be able to do. I think ultimately it was denied because it would cast a partial shadow over a playground
pm_me_your_pay_slips | 3 hours ago
why not having the state build housing?
hasuuser | 4 hours ago
Why do you think that is the solution? Something that had never ever worked.
angelHOE | 4 hours ago
Works in Japan just like they said. It’s a simple supply issue, I don’t know why that’s so hard for people to understand. What do you think happens to market rents if the stock of housing doubles?
hasuuser | 4 hours ago
It works in Japan because large Tokyo is like 40% of the Japans population. Building more increases the global supply and decreases the global prices (global means country wide). When all of your population lives in Tokyo then building more in Tokyo will decrease global prices = decrease prices in Tokyo.
This will never be the case in SF, unless you are planning to house 150M people there. In SF building more would lead to higher prices in the medium-long run. Not lower. Just look at other big cities in the world.
angelHOE | 4 hours ago
This is basic economics I can’t believe you’re arguing increasing the supply of something would actually cause prices to go up.
silvedude | 3 hours ago
No no you don't get it building in a local area has a mass migration affect on the entire nation.
If you build in SF people from the entire country will try to migrate there and prices will actually go up!!!
hasuuser | 4 hours ago
Please reread what I wrote.
teshh | 4 hours ago
Japan's population has also been shrinking for 15+ years now. That's an active reduction in demand, where as the us has only grown.
So building companies in Japan are forced to compete on price and quality to attract customers. Us has no shortage of demand, especially in metro areas. Simply removing regulations will just make building quality even worse than it already is.
LeetcodeForBreakfast | 2 hours ago
tokyo has increased YoY due to rural migration to economic centers.
pm_me_your_pay_slips | 3 hours ago
housing is cheap in japan because there was a speculative bubble that popped in the 90s. that and the population is decreasing.
Fine-Comparison-2949 | 3 hours ago
Can you please tell me where in the US they have deregulated housing? Housing has been regulated since the 50s and redlining and other policies restricted home styles to larger and more specific styles to push minority owners out of major areas. Greenspan just supercharged it on the demand side with hyper expanding first time home buyer programs.
Something can't be labeled as never working when we really have arguably never tried it. The government has only been restricting supply with regulation, then incentivizing demand, with housing vouchers and home buying programs as well as tax breaks.
Then we keep wondering why the price goes up when basic economics 101 tells us what's going to happen.
hasuuser | 3 hours ago
The world is bigger than just the US. And even if there is no place in the US with totally unregulated housing the regulations itself could be different. If there is an easy to spot correlation with less housing regulations then where is the obvious data?
Fine-Comparison-2949 | 2 hours ago
Ah yes. True.
People really don't understand the deep US culture around homes. It basically started during the Whiskey rebellion.
The government made it a priority since 1790 to subsidize housing, to tax land, and for much of it's history it restricted the sale due to racism, home builder requirements, and other funny things.
Housing is guaranteed to go up.
silvedude | 4 hours ago
Austin.
hasuuser | 4 hours ago
What about it exactly?
silvedude | 4 hours ago
Chew on it a while. I'm sure you will figure it out.
hasuuser | 4 hours ago
Let's stop wasting each others time. Prices in Austin are increasing in the medium-long term. There was a huge pandemic bump and then a roll back, but the prices are still above pre pandemic.
Also there is a time lag in the process: You build more housing -> you attract more people -> they create more jobs -> desirability goes up -> prices go up. It is not an instant process. So mass building might lower prices locally in short term, but it does not work medium-long term.
silvedude | 4 hours ago
There is no area in America where rents are lower then they were pre-pandemic without a significant population decrease. What a stupid data point.
The rate of growth is lower then the national average the state average and any comparably sized city on a post pandemic timeline.
I love being in an Econ sub and hearing people argue that raising supply actually doesn't decrease cost despite being shown evidence it does. Absolutely wild.
hasuuser | 4 hours ago
You are completely ignoring the pandemic. Which was a major event and obviously had a higher short term effect then any long term building policy.
If you think that building more works in medium-long term, then show me examples spanning at least couple of the decades. In fact, if your claim is true then taking any city should show us a clear and strong correlation.
silvedude | 4 hours ago
Tokyo.
hasuuser | 4 hours ago
I have already addressed Tokyo.
HaloFever117 | 3 hours ago
I’m gonna’ say no to the urban hellscapes of China and Japan.
Pizza-Pirate-6829 | 2 hours ago
Then enjoy high rents. Tokyo is one of the most livable places I’ve been.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 5 hours ago
>The solution has always been “simple.” ~~Deregulate all housing restrictions and build units up.~~ People need to leave San Franciso.
The solution isn't to lower the bar on regulation to zero so sleazy developers can come in and destroy the quality of life by building ghettos from which they will extract economic rents.
When prices are high, demand should decrease proportionally. The problem is people not adjusting their choices in the face of high prices - by voting with their feet and moving somewhere else with greater affordability.
KosherSushirrito | 4 hours ago
An exodus from a city is the death of the city. If there is demand, it must be met, especially considering how relatively un-dense SF still us in the outer reaches.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 3 hours ago
> An exodus from a city is the death of the city.
No. An exodus from a city is the natural response to things in that city being unsustainable. The exodus reduces demand and then prices come down.
>If there is demand, it must be met,
No. It does not. Just because more people want a thing than the supply cannot meet doesn't mean they have a right to it. And acting like they do is wrong-headed.
Land and real estate in SF is limited. Too many people are competing for it, driving up prices. People just need to go somewhere else. I turned down jobs in LA, SF, Seattle and Chicago because of cost of living concerns. I chose to build my life in a place where the balance of job opportunities and cost of living made sense.
People need to not be stupid and selfish, moving to a place where the economics are broken and then demand the world fix it.
KosherSushirrito | 3 hours ago
>An exodus from a city is the natural response to things in that city being unsustainable.
So create a system to sustain it. This is not that complicated.
>The exodus reduces demand
It also reduces quality of life. A city needs new people like the body needs blood. If you do not accommodate demand, you lose will lose workers, services, amenities. We're already seeing this in places like Cupertino, where schools are being closed due to the absence of teachers.
>doesn't mean they have a right to it.
This is r/economics. I am arguing out of economics rationalism, not "rights." Cities need to accommodate growth, or they die.
>Land and real estate in SF is limited.
Which is why it requires higher density. This is not difficult.
>. I turned down jobs in LA, SF, Seattle and Chicago because of cost of living concerns. I chose to build my life in a place where the balance of job opportunities and cost of living made sense.
It's crazy that you do not realize how sad this is. You are actively defending the economic phenomenon that forced you to say no to potential employment.
Yeah, lmao, this is just...fucking sad, man. I'm not interested in arguing with your trauma defense mechanism.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 2 hours ago
> So create a system to sustain it. This is not that complicated.
Apparently it IS complicated to create a system to sustain it. Otherwise it would have been done already.
>A city needs new people like the body needs blood.
No. At a certain point, uncontrolled growth overwhelms a community and it starts to run down. The people who are able leave, taking their money with them, and blight sets in.
>I am arguing out of economics rationalism, not "rights."
No, you really aren't. Economic rationalism would say demand is outstripping supply which drives prices up. And ultimately those prices will rise until demand abates. It is basic demand/price elasticity in action. People insisting on going to SF when they can't afford to live there is how you get a homeless problem. Insisting on sustaining the unsustainable is the opposite of economic rationalism.
>You are actively defending the economic phenomenon that forced you to say no to potential employment.
I'm not a dumbass who takes a job in a city I wouldn't be able to afford to live in, and then blame the world for not fixing things for my dumb ass.
I also defend the choice to not buy an $80K pickup truck because it would also be a stupid financial decision.
And you call that a "trauma defense mechanism". No. it is being a grown up with a working brain that can do math. I worked my way through school without ever getting student loans. I raised four kids. My house is paid for. I paid cash for my new Camry last year. I have no debt of any kind. I've worked from my home in the country for the last five years for a company located downtown. I live what I'm talking about.
You are stupidly arguing to fix the unfixable, claiming to argue from economic rationalism while insisting on something that is economically irrational and unsustainable. And I'm making the mistake of wrestling with the pig, where we both get muddy and the pig likes it.
Good day to you sir or maam.
KosherSushirrito | 2 hours ago
My guy had to say no to a job because he couldn't find housing and then proceeded to form his entire personality around it.
BobaLives01925 | 3 hours ago
Why would they need to build ghettos in the city experiencing an insane wealth influx? Nice new housing will be built, rich people will move to those, and existing supply will become much more affordable for everyone else.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 3 hours ago
> Nice new housing will be built, rich people will move to those, and existing supply will become much more affordable for everyone else.
Lol no. As long as demand outstrips supply, and you are only building new housing for rich people, prices will remain high and regular working folks will not get any relief.
But what you will do is fuel sprawl and turn SF into another Los Angeles, which remains exceptionally unaffordable but is also riddled with slums and crime.
BobaLives01925 | 3 hours ago
Are you familiar with supply and demand?
Also, we can build up rather than out.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 3 hours ago
> we can build up rather than out.
Yes. High density housing is a better solution. Increased sprawl is never a good answer.
But honestly, if a lot of the demand is driven by tech companies and their workers, most of those jobs really don't require living in a specific place. They should seriously consider establishing communities in places where real estate is abundant and cheap, and instead invest in developing communities there with high speed telecommunications supporting the kind of tech work they want to do.
Wyoming and Montana are beautiful. Any FAANG company could explore doing like Gateway Computer did in the 90s when they built out their operations in Iowa and South Dakota. Lots of people would love to live on acreage in a rural setting instead of an urban rathole. And in our modern age of telecommunications and remote work, there simply is no need to chase housing in SF.
People need to use some imagination.
BobaLives01925 | 2 hours ago
Nobody wants to live in nowhere, Midwest. People want to do be in cities. You should see how these people talk about SF. They’re in heaven being surrounded by each other.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 9 minutes ago
> People want to do be in cities
Yeah, no. Not all people. Or even most people.
anonymousguy202296 | 3 hours ago
No one will intentionally build slums for profit. If you have the highest earning population in the world with the most expensive real estate in the world, you're not going to build low quality shit. Especially when it costs nearly as much to build low quality shit compared to high quality shit.
Cheap housing is just old housing. To get cheap housing we need lots of new (usually nice) housing.
Constant-Plant-9378 | 3 hours ago
> No one will intentionally build slums for profit.
Oh my sweet Summer child. You really don't know how things really work do you.
>To get cheap housing we need lots of new (usually nice) housing.
So building expensive housing for rich people will somehow lower the cost of housing for everyone else?
Rich people can already afford expensive housing. You can't build your way out of this problem. There is simply too much wealth chasing a very limited supply of real estate. And not just Americans, but Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. all chasing that California real estate. All you'll succeed in doing is destroying the landscape by converting it all into suburban developments. There are other places to live than SF. People need to go to them.
BlaxicanXIX | 4 hours ago
What an insane take lmao. If the world actually worked the way that you're proposing then that wouldn't lower rents, it would just lead to tech bros being the only ones living here. Nah I'm good on SF being 100% made up of tech bros with 6 figure salaries actually
Constant-Plant-9378 | 3 hours ago
Denying the laws of basic economics is just ice skating uphill.
Let the tech bros try living in SF while not addressing the issue of everyone else not being able to afford to live there. If you are priced out of the market, move somewhere else.
082426grateful | 5 hours ago
Dystopia. As SF had somewhat corralled its homeless epidemic, so goes it again as shelter costs begin to consume all other net income of residents of the area.
Higher and higher. The sky is no limit. All for the ROI of the asset holder class. Nothing else matters.
FogCity-Iside415 | 5 hours ago
Instead of talking about how we should build more housing for the overinflated wage earning workers of the economy benefiting from a decade plus long trend of low interest rates and speculative investment from Silicon Valley, where is the conversation about the consequences related to the societal failures born out of the lack of inclusion of all classes in the industries that create these type of headlines?
This story comes out of SF every other week, it’s a redundant “struggle” piece for the upper percentile earners of society and makes it seem as the only issue in The City is that urban inversion can’t happen fast enough, the wealthy can’t land as quick as they’d like, meanwhile the union pipe fitter can’t afford to shop at the same grocery store, nor can the family in section 8 in The Filmoe who just watched a new Trader Joe’s pop up next to where their cousins used to live.
Build baby build but the lack of coverage on every day people get snuffed out here due to the prices rising to match the wages of a certain industry or two is cold, cold blooded.
kenlubin | 5 hours ago
If you're not building new skyscrapers for the tech bros to live in, they have to outbid the union pipe fitters for apartments built in the 60s.
If SF started building enough housing for its population, that would be a lot of jobs in the construction trades.
FogCity-Iside415 | an hour ago
That goes without saying. Building is easy, I'm talking more about the inclusiveness of the workforce which is a more difficult and uncomfortable topic. Many grow up without being exposed to realities of poverty, economic diversity and frankly cultural diversity. Rather than work through the culture shock, they'd rather build over it which I see as a net-loss for humanity/society.
kenlubin | an hour ago
Building is currently illegal in most of the Bay Area, so I think you're overstating how easy it is.
FogCity-Iside415 | an hour ago
Sure thing but my original post includes “Build Baby Build” so I’m trying to redirect you back to the thread I’m pulling at versus what you’re going after independently in your original comment, that’s all.
kenlubin | 59 minutes ago
Meh. I think that building enough housing will improve a lot of these issues for everyone, even if 2nd tier tech bros will be the first to benefit.
FogCity-Iside415 | 46 minutes ago
Yawn. Ya and I mean the tech bros haven’t benefited enough yet. Have a good one.
kenlubin | 18 minutes ago
To reiterate the subject of this thread:
San Francisco rents jump 25% in a year, leaving even well-paid professionals struggling to find housing
The problem is so bad that even SF tech bros are getting squeezed out.
hasuuser | 4 hours ago
What’s up with victim mentality?
FogCity-Iside415 | an hour ago
You misread me, the "victims" in this article are the "well-paid professionals struggling to find housing".
BlaxicanXIX | 3 hours ago
The entire housing affordability crisis has basically been captured by and weaponized by landlord lobbies who are using the outrage to whine about rent control.
FogCity-Iside415 | an hour ago
Isn't it so odd that in a city where poverty, struggle do exist, where kids have to navigate gangland and the pressures of that reality, that the victims here are the wealthy who can't find the housing they want? That this is the "crisis" of modern day San Francisco? What happened to progressive values and inclusion of all rungs of the economic ladder into society? Or was that all a sham to capture votes and posture for the sake of a moral high ground?
ragold | 5 hours ago
Can’t believe the top comments are taking about rent control which hasn’t changed in many years in SF and has only gotten weaker… instead of the obvious demand-side explanation of insane AI wages.
If you think rent control is correlated with SF housing prices then it’s a negative correlation. As rent control has weakened and the share of protected buildings has dwindled, rents have soared.
Halbaras | 4 hours ago
The real issue with SF is, like most American cities, a lack of housing in the right places. If the free market was left to it, there would be far more high and mid rises within public transport distance of where the jobs are, since higher densities are what's actually profitable for developers on expensive land.
They've made some recent improvements with zoning laws and eliminating parking minimums, but swathes of the city still exist under a planning policy intended to enrich existing homeowning elites, and it will take years for changes to zoning to result in more mid rises. The recent rise in interest rates hasn't helped, the 2010s would have been the perfect time for cities across the US to break the NIMBY stranglehold on growth.
OverpricedGoods | 4 hours ago
In the same vein that all climate scientists agree that Climate change is real and manmade, all economists agree that rent control is harmful and regressive and only benefits tenets who already have that housing. It doesn't benefit landlords, prospective tenets, or tenets looking to move.
sad_boi_jazz | 3 hours ago
Ok chill w the rent control comments, it's a negligible factor and it's weird to keep hammering it as The Cause
poilkhgu | 3 hours ago
It’s not negligible
ironteddybear | 4 hours ago
Economic research has shown that rent control limits mobility, limits building, and pushes up market rents.
This is not a single variable problem. It takes high demand and supply constraints (rent control is a supply constraint) to cause this increase in rents.
Saying rent control is not responsible for this is not true. Rent control is one of the causes. Not the only cause.
BlaxicanXIX | 4 hours ago
Economic research has shown that rent control doesn't hurt the housing market nearly as much as prop 13 and zoning laws have
If rent control was removed tomorrow, rents would not decrease in SF, you would just displace lots of poor people
Anon-Knee-Moose | 2 hours ago
Would would put all of those apartments on the market, driving down rent prices.
ragold | 3 hours ago
Research from Massachusetts shows if rent control were removed, rents would go up in aggregate but also in never-controlled units.
mickeyanonymousse | 2 hours ago
at the end of the day I think that’s what they want because they don’t believe poor people should live where they “can’t afford”
Equivalent_Lunch_944 | 4 hours ago
The problem with blaming rent control is that there’s uneven forces at play. In a perfect world we wouldn’t have rent control and the ROI on housing would be effectively zero as landlords are enticed to compete and add supply driving down profit as they reach equilibrium.
But obviously that’s not the case and despite high housing prices we aren’t getting more supply but landlords are taking more surplus because of lobbying, corruption, and corporate interests. As much as we want to pretend we live in a perfect world we don’t, which is why we have policies like rent control that help the most vulnerable people.
ironteddybear | 4 hours ago
Rent control doesn’t help them though. It mostly just traps them. They can never leave that apartment.
VeteranSergeant | 3 hours ago
They couldn't do that either way. They wouldn't be able to afford the adjusted market rate anyway because there's not going to be some massive plummeting of rents. At least with rent control they have an apartment.
mickeyanonymousse | 2 hours ago
rent controlled units wouldn’t even matter if supply was kept up with the demand because who tf wants to live in an old 1970s apartment if there’s plentiful and new units available. the building restrictions are doing like 99% of the damage but everyone wants to blame 80 years olds in cheap apartments.
EconomistWithaD | 4 hours ago
Just ignorant
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.20181289&ref=mainstreem-dotcom
butter-scotchboy | 5 hours ago
they’re definitely bots trying to shift blame, when we all know what the real problem is.
yarnwhat | 2 hours ago
This, and these comments are 99.9% from people (or bots…) who don’t live here and don’t understand how fucked it would be living here day to day if there were no rent controlled apartments
portmanteaudition | 4 hours ago
This is why we should stop people who cannot distinguish causal inferences from correlations from having children and voting.
ohhhbooyy | 2 hours ago
You know what would help? More rent control and more restrictions on building housing.
You know that same game plan for the last few decades at least.
I’m sure if we keep doing the same thing for a few more decades rents will drop eventually.
cyberdude419 | 5 hours ago
Americans just sleep walking into a dystopian nightmare of billionaires and homelessness. No protests like France, we just take it up the butt from billionaires/politicians blatant corruption. Forget voting for your best interests. Let’s vote to “own our neighbor” like the good “Christian” nation we are!
redheadedandbold | 3 hours ago
This should be a RICO investigation. The only way rents jump that much is a conspiracy and price-fixing. Most of the conglomerate rental companies have been price-fixing at least since Covid.
TastySpermDispenser7 | 5 hours ago
Lots of people complain that "regulations" impede housing. The vast majority of regulations are the only thing keeping thieves from stealing your money. You can build a house in SF for 100k, but it will fall down the first time the earth shakes and the pipes will blow up the first time you take a dump. Now you don't have house and you lost what little savings you had.
The solution is to convert office buildings into dorms. Not apartments. Dorms. Shared bathrooms, shared kitchen space, limited windows. Office buildings already have all the safety codes you need for large groups of people. They already have most of the plumbing you need, and the ones with gyms have showers. You could literally solve two problems with one law that strips off all apartment rules off of commercial office space and makes it profitable to give young professionals a cheap place to live downtown.
HumbleHubris | 5 hours ago
Oh tenement housing, our old friend
TastySpermDispenser7 | 5 hours ago
I hear you. But the alternative is not a single family house for everyone. The alternative is.. this. Worse options for far more money, and the cycle continues.
HumbleHubris | 4 hours ago
I think the alternative is regular apartments. There is more than enough money in this world for people to have housing
We have to get away from the feudal system of Lords and serfs
TastySpermDispenser7 | 4 hours ago
The total amount of "regular" apartment building in desireable areas and not at luxury costs has been a possibility for decades. Has it worked? Have enough affordable apartments been built and rents gone down? No. Simply hoping someone decides to randomly go on a building spree has not worked.
Right now you have places where people want to live but cannot, and people who struggle to afford any housing option. Hope won't work. Gotta give those building owners a way to profit from making peanut butter meet jelly or else we will be having this same conversation for the next 40 years.
coolrivers | 4 hours ago
Part of this is caused by the AI buildout elsewhere. It's pulling construction labor/materials away from residential construction and towards data center buildouts.
some_where_else | 3 hours ago
We should be clear about what the problem actually is, not jumps of 25% or whatever.
The problem is that a certain sector of people (tech workers) who wish to reside in SF are out-competing other sectors. It is not so much that rents are unaffordable - units are being filled so it is definitely affordable to many. However those 'many' do not include key workers even at a professional level - e.g. teachers. Why are they out-competing other sectors? Because there is a vast amount of money funneling through their industry, enough to fuel a savage wage-rent spiral.
A big reason why there is still any variety is rent control - without rent control virtually all rental units would be housing tech workers. Regardless of our opinions on that demographic, to have such a narrow specialism taking all the housing is clearly detrimental to a well functioning city.
As it happens, the tech industry has over-reached itself with LLMs, and the consequent and impending total collapse will fix this issue - pretty much overnight.