[imtringued]

>In my early 20s I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable. Got a lot of proposals that essentially boiled down to “control who can live here, kick out everyone that doesn’t fit and cap the city’s population”.

At some point you have to ask yourself what problem is supposed to be solved if people come up with ideas like that. I mean, the reason why affordable housing is a problem is precisely because lack of it kicks out people, controls who can live there and caps the city's population.

So basically you have a person that wants the symptoms of unaffordable housing but also the virtue signalling that they "solved" the problem. Considering the entire state of California is following the path of San Francisco this is not an answer.

The reason why people come up with nonsensical things like "induced demand" is because the entire housing market of California is under a prisoners dilemma. Staying silent is building housing. Betraying the other is not building and coming up with random ideas to sweep the problem under the rug. Everyone is betraying each other so any specific city who ends up building will face the brunt of the population growth. Every city has to build for this to work and that means statewide reforms in California.

[SllX]

> At some point you have to ask yourself what problem is supposed to be solved if people come up with ideas like that.

You’re giving my friends too much credit. They just don’t like outsiders.

Most people, surprisingly, don’t take an engineering mindset to solving everything, nor do they want to, and even get offended if you do it too much. This past time of mine among many other things taught me that lesson the hard way.