[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.