[weberc2]

> It's not at all a SF problem, it's a metropolitan city problem. NYC, Boston, Denver, Austin, Boise, both Portlands, etc all have the same housing crisis.

I was responding to the claim that it's a state- or national-level problem. Perhaps you would argue that this meets some criteria for being a 'national-level' problem, but it's not obvious to me.

[ng12]

Oh -- do you mean to ask how state/national politics play into San Francisco's housing crisis?

California state law is a big part of the problem: it gives individual cities way too much power to decide what gets built and what doesn't, severely restricting supply. For example, neighborhood associations can filibuster new development into nothingness, even for contradictory reasons like not having enough parking but also not being public-transport friendly enough. Additionally, California has wildly skewed tax law that disincentivizes people from moving or downsizing (look up Prop 13). Add in a lack of public transportation, zoning restrictions, and massive corporate subsidies and you've got a housing crisis brewing.

[btilly]

More than that, Prop 13 incentivizes cities to have commercial real estate instead of residential. Thereby forcing housing to be ever farther from workplaces.

[mikevp]

But before Prop 13, people on fixed incomes were getting taxed out of their paid-off homes they'd lived in for decades.

[redis_mlc]

Downsizing as you get older is a normal thing in the other 49 states.

Also, Prop 13 inexplicably applies to commercial real estate, and inherited property.

[Gibbon1]

Nothing inexplicable about the application to commercial real estate. The major backers of the law were corporate interests.

Also the inherited property bit was a separate amendment. And there is no limit either.

[ng12]

Which is in itself a symptom of the housing crisis. Instead of fixing the root problem they accelerated it.

[chipotle_coyote]

It isn't necessarily obvious, but in some ways that's because the San Francisco Bay area is such an outlier that it's easy to miss how fast housing costs in metro areas around the country have been rising relative to salaries. The median home value in Sacramento, for instance, is $330K, compared to San Francisco's staggering $1.3M -- but the home price in San Francisco in November 2011 was $633K, whereas in Sacramento it was $183K. (This is according to Zillow, and I picked those points because they're about the lowest points in the last eight years, just before the CA housing market had started to recover.) Housing prices in Sacramento have been going up slightly faster than they have in San Francisco -- and they're not flooded with techies making $200K+ annual salaries. (Granted, there are some techies from here who are probably willing to commute from there at this point.)

And this isn't just a California thing.

"Home prices are rising at twice the wage of growth." https://www.curbed.com/2019/5/15/18617763/affordable-housing...

"Low-cost housing is disappearing from the market." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/housing-crisis-inequality-har...

You can find a lot of these articles around without much effort.

[unethical_ban]

They're pointing out that in their opinion, the premise you're questioning is invalid, and if you wish to find the answer, look to a new premise.