[navytank]

You can't fill a city entirely with bankers, tech workers, and other professionals. What about teachers? Police? Those in the restaurant industry?

I don't think anyone is claiming that everyone should have a "human right" to live in SF. But when looking at the city as a systems problem, creating a sustainable system may require these kinds of measures to allow the right mix of people to live in the city.

[Retric]

> teachers? Police? Those in the restaurant industry?

If they can't afford to live in the city then you could not fill the jobs without increasing wages. It's a self balancing problem. Further, higher wages increases the costs of restaurants etc which feeds back into pay.

Planned economies don't work because economies are ridiculously complex. Yet people always want to say 'just this once we need subsidies' for say corn production while ignoring the huge negatives associated with such choices.

[boulos]

I asked this of Ed Lee directly at an event at work and he hemmed and hawed and said "how can you be against teachers?". At which I reiterated, "Your new affordability test would allow a new college grad software engineer at Google to get below-market rent; why can't we just pay specific people, say teachers and firefighters with families more?". He had no answer.

My conclusion is that most of our policies are driven by a combination of people not thinking through the consequences and people giving handouts to developers. Sometimes those are the same people :).

[skybrian]

It's expensive and all the money ends up in landlords' bank accounts. Not sure taxpayers are into that?

(If the funding came out of property taxes, then at least the money would be both coming and going to land owners, but Prop 13 prevents that.)

[Retric]

It's still ends up in federal taxes, and considering social security benefits are based on income it would directly help workers long term.

It would also act as downward pressure on rents as people left the city for better opportunities elsewhere.

[trav4225]

What a perfectly rational explanation. Thank you for not instantly appealing to vague notions of social justice.

Dishearteningly, however, people still do this. When people demand affordable rent but do not get it, many still cry "injustice!". This seems to me to be counterproductive as it causes others to wonder what, if anything, such people do not consider to be a human right.

edit: accidentally left out "not" in first paragraph

[bad_alloc]

> When people demand affordable rent but do not get it, many still cry "injustice!".

Well, it can be interpreted as an injustice. If you have a society that can realistically provide housing and food for everybody, is it not injust to deny handing these things out? The answer depends on what society you're going for. The optimum path is probably neither the extreme of the state providing everybody with everything he needs , nor a dog-eat-dog world in which the idividual gets nothing, no matter his situation.

[trav4225]

I hear ya. We probably differ on semantics. To me, the modern notion of "justice" seems to be concerned with the answer to the question "What does my fellow man owe me?". The answer to that question is always "nothing". On the other hand, the answer to the question "How ought my fellow man show compassion to me?" is a different question altogether (to me at least). :)

[azemetre]

uhh they are directly appealing to social justice. Class issues are social issues.

I'm curious why you think otherwise.

[trav4225]

Hmm. I read the comment as addressing the goal of healthy, functioning cities rather than the goal of artificially leveling playing fields.

[Apocryphon]

It's sort of like when the subject of human rights gets brought in the discussion of taxation. There are pragmatic concerns being brought up here for social order. Arguing about rights distracts from practical needs to ensure the public good.

[segmondy]

Yes you can. If you fill an entire city with bankers and tech workers, then guess what? They will leave when they have no police, teachers or janitors. OR they will start paying those police, teachers & janitors an appropriate amount.

[rm_-rf_slash]

That’s a reasonable answer, although I think the better solution for those people would be to pay them more. Increase taxes and prices.

I read the other day on the nytimes that a fire chief in the Bay Area makes $500k. Doesn’t it make more sense to pay people better than to create separate classes of people who either pay real world prices or those who get subsidized.

[JumpCrisscross]

Also, artists et cetera are fun to have around. Look up the history of the Hotel Chelsea, originally sold as luxury long-stay rooms where wealthy folk could mingle with artists staying in subsidised apartments. The model is coming back into favour in New York.

[kofejnik]

> measures to allow the right mix of people to live in the city.

So, human engineering, with totally good intentions. Can you define 'right mix of people' in a non-totalitarian way?

[travmatt]

The people who work in that city shouldn’t be forced to commute 3 hours in and out?

[kofejnik]

Nobody's forcing them, if their wages do not justify the commute time, they are totally free to stop commuting. Market pressure will do the rest.

[travmatt]

You’re completely missing the point, the market pressures are broken by restrictive zoning laws which artificially restrict supply.

That’s why you have 6,580 people who are bidding on 95 affordably priced homes.

The fact that you have 70 people applying per home is what we’d call a signal that those homes are in demand, the problem preventing more supply coming on line to meet that demand is the zoning laws, again.

[xref]

> 70 people applying per home is what we’d call a signal that those homes are in demand

uh, well sure I mean there is probably a ton of demand for $100 4Runners too

[travmatt]

Car companies frequently introduce smaller and more affordable options when they notice strong sales in baseline models - Honda introduced the HRV because people wanted a cheaper CRV. The tone of your comment suggests you disbelieve my remark but then you made an analogy that supports my comment so I’m not really what point your point is?

Unless your idea is that companies shouldn’t take steps to meet demand and instead try to artificially restrict supply?

[lovich]

Can you survive in a city with no one but bankers and tech people? No police, no resturaunts, no firefighters, no cleaners, app because the closest place they can afford is 4+ hours away? Are you going to take turns with your co-workers to clean the bathroom everyday, take out the trash, and clean the floors? Are you able to pull the long hours tech jobs require and still have time to cook food everyday? How would you even get that food if supermarkets can't keep employees around to stock the shelves?

This is all the extreme end of the situation, and we're not there yet, but it's the path we're on in many cities with San Francisco being at the forefront.

You can't have every worker specialize in to a narrow niche and then suddenly remove half of those niches from your society with no replacement and expect it to run smoothly

[kofejnik]

Wow what a nice strawman you have here! All the horrors you've described in so much detail can and will be fixed very nicely by market pressure (if no one is there to clean the bathroom, suddenly janitors will be in high demand and command a nice salary, etc).

Forcing 'the right mix of people' _reeks_ of totalitarian state. Who gets to decide?

Are there going to be income/education quotas? Male vs female? Racial quotes?

[lovich]

Market pressures aren't fixing it, at least not fast enough to prevent a lot of pain to actual living humans. Yea in the long term it might be fixed, but in the here and now people are hurting. When I was out of college and stuck in retail I had to decide whether I was stealing food or medicine that week or going without, because those jobs don't pay enough to live. I am lucky enough to be talented enough at software to get a job doing it, but you can't expect everyone in the population to have those skills.

Expecting market pressure to take care of everyone is condemning people to die. I agree that the market is more efficient, but that efficiency comes without any sort of humanity. There are people who have no talents that are worth enough in our current economic configuration to earn enough to live at market clearing wages. Should we just let them starve or go homeless because of it?

I also agree that planning a 'right mix' of people does reek of totalitarianism, but the other choice isn't any better.

I don't see how letting the rich choose who gets to live a decent life based on whose most useful to them is any less totalarian when our society is channeling more and more wealth everyday to a small group of people.

[tripletao]

(1) The usual argument against below-market housing here isn't "screw the poor". It's "this is an ineffective show at a fix for a problem that the market would resolve if we could build to the higher density that current zoning prohibits".

(2) Even if you have only market-rate housing, that doesn't mean the people who can't afford it end up homeless. You can just give them or their landlords money. In the USA, that's Section 8.

Economists generally like Section 8. It gets a bad reputation, because the apartments tend to be shabby; but that's a question of the amount of the subsidy, not the delivery mechanism. For a given total to spend, I'd rather put two people in a run-down $1.5k apartment each than flip a coin, put one of them in a $3k apartment, and leave the other on the street.

[kofejnik]

> I'd rather put two people in a run-down $1.5k apartment each than flip a coin, put one of them in a $3k apartment, and leave the other on the street.

Do you want to get USSR? Because one committee plays God and regulates who lives where. Then some other committee, no doubt well-intentioned, will apply the same logic to groceries. And cars. And salaries. And this is how you become USSR.

[lovich]

Ah, I thought you were just saying the market should sort it all out. Yea giving money to people whoever need housing so they can find the best fit for themselves does seem like a better choice than just having a few winners and the rest get nothing.

The real answer is that more housing needs to be built if demand is this high, but for various reasons that seems politically unfeasible for most US cities

[soneil]

I don't honestly believe "we'll just end up paying janitors more" actually works out.

You pay teachers more, you pay policemen more, and your taxes go up. You start paying all the waitresses more, the supermarket workers more, the janitors more, your cost of living just goes up.

Wage isn't really an absolute, it's a ratio to the cost of living. So in response to all their food getting more expensive, their taxes going up, etc, you end up paying all your darling tech/finance workers more. Then you're right back where you started. You've solved absolutely nothing, you've just embiggened some numbers.

[ImSkeptical]

No, I couldn't live in such a city. If there was nobody to take out the trash we would have to raise more money to increase salaries for garbage men, etc. Some of it, I could live with less of, and some I'd pay more for.

Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.

[wolco]

Enough people with the right skillsets to fill the roles society needs to function.

[jbob2000]

Affordable Rent policies block the free market from increasing wages in the city. Instead of paying workers more, we've asked landlords to make up the difference between a living wage and a poverty one.

[setpatchaddress]

is this sarcasm? If not, do you have a reference?

The usual argument is that sf needs more housing supply to meet demand, period, let alone affordable housing.

Edit: see zkms, below.

[losteric]

I think they're referring to rent controlled apartment... not sure why they think landlords "make up the difference", the landlord simply charges other renters more.

I'm not aware of any studies, but it does seem logical from a system perspective...

The relatively fixed supply of rent-controlled apartments is a random cost-of-living subsidy for low-income workers. Those that "win" can accept lower wages, while the "losers" are forced to compete despite higher cost-of-living (commute or rent). The latter group will get a little more, but not as much as if there was no rent-control. On the employment side, employers may hold jobs open longer hoping for a rent-controlled applicant that will accept lower wages.

Ideally we would have no rent-controlled apartments or enough for everyone that needs it, but anywhere in between is a distorted market that hurts consumers and employees. Eliminating rent control would be my preference, it seems more efficient than subsidizing everyone that needs it (as individuals can choose how to spend their higher wages, whereas rent subsidies always go to rent).

[DrScump]

  The relatively fixed supply of rent-controlled apartments is a random cost-of-living subsidy for low-income workers

Rent-controlled units are generally not preferentially occupied by low-income workers. They are generally first-come-first-served or are obtained via "connections".