[jfengel]

A thing I haven't heard addressed: housing is more than walls. Building houses also requires more utilities, more schools, and above all more roads. San Francisco currently has the 7th worst traffic in the US. If you build more walls for people to live in, will the rest of the city's resources be able to keep up?

I realize that we're talking about a situation where people are already living there and putting strains on those resources even if they don't have walls around them. And we do want them to have those walls, to keep them safe and make the city more livable for everybody.

But San Francisco especially is simply limited in where you can build more roads (and schools and playgrounds and other things). Even if we could create new housing with the snap of a finger, wouldn't the city still have enormous resource problems?

I'd expect a city that wants to build new housing would demand a charge to help cover those costs. That's going to make the housing more expensive. So would it actually end up solving any of the problems of homelessness?

(I do apologize that "just asking questions" often looks insincere. I don't live in SF and I'm not an expert on housing or homelessness. You seem to know what you're talking about and I'd be interested in filling in these gaps.)

[km3r]

SF being the tech capital of the world is going to have a very high amount of workers who are now remote. This creates a unique opportunity to build more housing that can use the existing now less utilized infrastructure. The then higher ratio of workers paying taxes to infrastructure should allow additional improvements to that infrastructure.