| > I don't understand how progressives took up the mantle of "no more housing thanks we're good, let's just apply rent control" as if rent control actually helps. In the face of an expanding population this is outright regressive policy. Studies in SF show that it reduced supply and increased prices. [2] If you have enough supply, prices don't increase, so you don't need rent control. I think this is mostly a caricature. Certainly there are people who don't understand the economics, but I think there are very few people who are saying "no more housing". However, what housing do we build and for whom? Who gets to live there and who profits? We're in this broken system where: - local politicians do some amount of lip service to the need for affordable or below-market housing, and then roll back requirements for affordable unit percentages - projects that get approved often find some way to reneg on their initial claims about how much of a project will be affordable, or do weird shenanigans like arrange to get their affordable units put in some other building, possibly in a different neighborhood. We have big affordable projects landing in Treasure Island (there's no public transit to speak of, the soil is toxic, and it's a food desert). I don't have the receipts on this, but I've been told some of the affordable units on Treasure Island were to let buildings on Yerba Buena meet their requirements without actually having BMR units in the building. Cuz rich people don't want to use the same elevator as non-rich people? - a bunch of the "affordable" units don't make any financial sense and are effectively inaccessible, e.g. b/c the HOA fees mean that someone who meets the income requirements can't cover the mortgage + HOA + taxes. - we have, depending on estimates, >52k vacant units in the city, including many luxury condos, which I think makes people reasonably skeptical about the efficacy of "trickle-down" housing making stuff accessible to people at the lower end of the market. ... so a new building might need to have 12% affordable units (they'll round down) which they'll try to put in the worst place they can find, and people who meet the income requirements to buy them may not even be able to actually afford them. Meanwhile, Parcel K in Hayes Valley, despite having been designated for affordable housing for literally decades, has seen no development and many who have historically claimed the YIMBY label advocate against building housing there, because the people who can already afford the neighborhood prefer it as an open space. In that context, I think most new residential buildings are extremely ineffective as a response to the housing affordability crisis. If they're not good at housing people who can't already get housing, what are they good at? I guess in some years they make money, which is, after all, what they were designed for. A progressive stance of wanting to build housing that more directly meets the greatest need, rather than more luxury units that rich people no longer want to buy, seems totally appropriate. Also, when the price of market-rate vacant condos drops below the per-unit construction cost for affordable units (which I've heard is often > 1M), the city should have some mechanism to buy them at market rate and convert them to BMRs. |