The main problem with "control who can live here" is that you would generally like children born in the place to be on the shortlist, but this would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Cities and states can't privilege natives over migrants.
Rent control and the heritability of Prop 13 are the best California can do to prioritize incumbents. They do work somewhat, but the next generation of natives is still as screwed as prospective migrants re: forming their own households in the place, at least while their parents are still alive.
Cities and states can't privilege natives over migrants.
This is causing huge problems in Utah right now. Great if you have a house (or condo/etc) you don't want, bad if you have a house you like because you might get taxed out of it, terrible if you want a house. Every house and condo has dozens of unconditional cash offers on day one.
Good, as it should be. The idea that you should get priority to live somewhere just because you were born there runs totally counter to America's founding principles. Building more housing to house more people and create more opportunity is the only morally conscionable way forward
A cohort with birthright priority access to the most desirable, productive places is a kind of nobility. Hereditary privileges around land are an Old World European thing. In the American ideal the identity of your parents does not determine where you can live or what kind of life you can have.
Obviously we don’t always live up to that ideal. But this would be a big step in the wrong direction.
Every family on a quarter acre was not a sustainable plan anyway, I'm not sure how much of a "shame" it really is that the economics are crying out for more compact, walkable communities.
San Francisco would like housing to remain scarce but be allocated to its favorite people, who are quite distinct from those with the highest ability to pay. This part is best achieved by an immigration policy. But that’s not allowed, so they’re stuck with imperfect substitutes. We can protect our favorite people from displacement, but it’s harder to make homes that change hands flow to them vs. tech workers.
I'm sorry I don't follow this point. Who exactly are these "favorite people" exactly, and how does California expect these "favorite people" to, overlaps notwithstanding, compete with those with the highest ability to pay all while being able to keep the state budget in tact?
The influx of relatively privileged, relatively boring tech workers is seen as destroying the city's unique value as a haven for counterculture, artists, activists, LGBTQ, etc. A common complaint is that "mainstream" people want to move here because those things make the city special, but in doing so they cause a regression to the mean.
Who gets to decide who is kicked out? at some point there will be a bunch of people born in the city who want to buy a house but can't but of the cap. You have to consider (and policies like this don't) what happens even if no one moves into the city. In that scenario the population will still rise, until it hits the cap, at which point people have to leave.
At that point where do they go? Presumably other cities will be allowed such caps so they can't move to those either.
Then there are historical population control tools like redlining, and racist applications of eminent domain used to remove "undesirable" (a euphemism for black) neighborhoods.
By placing a cap on population you ensure that the victims of that discrimination never have the opportunity to return to the places they used to live - and as an added bonus you get to claim that your policy isn't racist because it has no stated racial bias.
Say your rental lease is up, and the only place you can find to rent is Colma. Now you've left SF are you ever allowed to return. What if someone else moved into SF while you were away thus taking your position under the cap? Honestly if anything this possibly right here could easily cause rental and housing prices to go up even more.
Then there's SF's claim to be an open and welcoming multicultural city - you can't claim that well disallowing new residents, and so new cultures, from entering.
The only real way to reduce hoisin cost is to build more housing. Where and what type you build are the only actual questions that you need to answer.
> what happens even if no one moves into the city. In that scenario the population will still rise, until it hits the cap, at which point people have to leave.
Only, there are still racially restrictive covenants on many properties to this day. Yes, in San Francisco. Thankfully, they're unenforceable, but the evidence is writ large on the legal system. And no, they didn't forbid white people from living anywhere -- if you've got reams of evidence to contradict that, show it.
The Bay Area (the area this article is about) was heavily redlined, and almost all (maybe actually all?) uses of eminent domain for 580 and the MacArthur maze in the Bay Area were in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Not the OP, but the ones that come immediately to mind is that a) capping the population will reduce the market and therefore increase prices and b) if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich [0] one way or another, making the market even more competitive.
[0] Unless the place is not actually worth striving to live in, but in that case you probably don't have a rent price problem.
Shelter is one of the few goods which a society necessarily needs. The alternatives (being homeless) are unacceptable. People give up food, electricity and healthcare before they give up shelter.
It's fine at a micro scale (oceanfront is expensive, but a few blocks away is affordable), but causes incredible problems at a macro scale as the bay area demonstrates (people not able to live within 50+ miles of their support networks). It is VERY hard to uproot an entire life and move to an area where cost of living is lower, especially when you are poor. People in poverty form informal local support networks (neighbors watching kids, friends that can loan you $5 to top up your phone), making it that much harder to move to a lower cost area.
How are you going to keep people out of the city without raising prices? Also how is that fair to people who didn't have the privilege of being born in a nice city?
Rent control and the heritability of Prop 13 are the best California can do to prioritize incumbents. They do work somewhat, but the next generation of natives is still as screwed as prospective migrants re: forming their own households in the place, at least while their parents are still alive.