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by olliej 1911 days ago
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.

2 comments

> 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.

Don't we have birthrate below replacement levels?

> racist applications of eminent domain used to remove "undesirable" (a euphemism for black) neighborhoods

I'm sure white trash neighbourhoods were not welcome there as well.

Anyway, I'm not ready to continue conversation where everything is considered racist, sorry.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/living/article/Anti-Asian-and-an...

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.

Deeper dive into the history:

https://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/system/tdf/haasinstitute_...

Frisco isn't special here, for example, Seattle's timeline (including these covenants still being on the books) is pretty much the same

https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants.htm

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.