there are 7 billion people who want to live in free tiny private flat in San Francisco and US in general. More lanes - more traffic - more traffic jams.
That's kinda the whole point, but noone is framing that situation as the problem. They would rather think that homeless people are innately inferior and thus deserve to suffer, rather than victims of circumstance in one way or another.
No one is framing it that way because it misses the nuance of these homeless peoples individual issues and how we might actually treat them. When people complain about homeless people in their neighborhood, they aren’t talking about the invisible homeless who are only homeless due to economic circumstance and might be couch surfing or living in their car. They are talking almost exclusively about the most visible population of homeless people, those who have severe mental health or drug addictions and need in patient services for potentially all their life.
I meant here, though I think there is also tendency in general
As a side note I think the state of current discourse has shown that anything other than concrete language presents too much opportunity to talk past each other. So I don't think talking about yimbys is specific enough (and its too tempting to strawman). Same for magas and libs, they are broad labels for a broad spectrum of people
I just went to apartments.com. Palo Alto (not the cheapest place), shows loads of 1 and 2 bedroom apartments under and at 3k/month. That's under $40k/year.
This tax calculator shows the generic case of $120k (low 'six figures'), as being more than $80k takehome:
That means less than 1/2 of a 'low end' engineering salary is taken for housing, and that's without a room-mate. Something most people have at the start of their career, and before being married (which is another way to have a room mate).
Do you actually live in the region? Why do you think almost $4k/month of cash in hand, left over after rent paid and taxes paid, isn't much?
Why do you think no one can find a place to live, when apartments.com show places aplenty?
Are you referring to a specific area, instead of a more central place such as Palo Alto?
Well, in the US the median pre-tax household income is $80k and the median renter spends <35% of their income on rent.
Imagine singlehandedly earning 150% of what the average family earns, in one of the richest countries in the world and living in a one-bedroom apartment - and such a low standard of living isn't even cheap.
The landlords must be laughing all the way to the bank!
I was responding to an assertion that engineers making 6 figures could not afford apartments.
I validated that they certainly can, on their own, and in an expensive area (Palo Alto) too.
I then said that the dynamic is even better with a room mate.
From this you infer I spoke of all affordability?
Why?
Understand, making wild unsubstantiatable and exaggerative assertions about affordability can invalidate a discussion. Stating fact instead of hyperbole is more appropriate.
Sure you can many countries have a social housing program... Cities across the world run into the same problems SF does you know it is not particularly unique or unusual.
Although I am a bit perturbed that there is still such a huge problem with drugs when the economy is booming and unemployment so low.
It points to deeper problems within the fabric of American society.
> Although I am a bit perturbed that there is still such a huge problem with drugs when the economy is booming and unemployment so low. It points to deeper problems within the fabric of American society.
I think you’re coming at this from the wrong angle. A lot of people just really like drugs (and alcohol) and it has nothing to do with society getting them down. Surely there are plenty of people abusing substances as a coping mechanism but I think there are likely a lot more who just want to have a good time.
No I don't believe anyone voluntarily chooses to become a drug zombie. I think that if you were able to communicate with these people you would hear a lot of sob stories.
A prerequisite to building social housing is to allow building housing at all. Social housing projects also have to pay for artificially inflated land prices and wait years to obtain permits. SF has spent billions of dollars on building new social housing in the past decade, but that doesn't make a difference when they cost millions of dollars a unit to construct.
Well that's your first problem. We're hiding the underemplyment crisis with "but unemployment is so low!". Quality of life for underemplyment is a lot closer to homelessness than middle class.
The deeper problem that America is more and more trying to focus on the elite over the working class.
What causes NIMBYism, though? ("lot of things, but...")
My pet theory is that cars are a substantial cause - people don't want more housing because it will result in more traffic and more people using the nearby 'free' parking. Cities that are less car-centric will therefore have less NIMBYism.
Lawmakers not having the moral courage to stand up to NIMBYs are part of the problem, along with people not voting for them. Cutting people off at the knees to make the grass taller is not a solution.
I can't agree with this. At various times over the last 30 years, there has been roughly two classes of people in SF: "tech workers", and "everyone else." The "everyone else" comprises teachers, restaurant workers, retail workers, delivery drivers, and others, who cater to the whims of "tech workers." "Everyone else" works in industries subject to competition, market forces, and the ruthless demand for profitability (try keeping a restaurant open for 3 losing quarters). "Tech workers" work in an industry often shielded from these exigencies, cossetted in a pillowy cocoon of VC money. "Everyone else" serves the local community. "Tech workers", if they serve anybody, tend to be disconnected from the local economy and serve national or global markets. Relatedly, "tech workers" are paid high salaries that rise quickly. "Everyone else" is paid much more modest salaries that tend to stagnate. To add insult to injury, not only did this set of circumstances arrive in SF, it also arrived quickly, in waves, representing a series of shocks. Then came the last and possibly the most serious shock: remote work. Altogether, this is a recipe for: spiraling costs, social fragmentation, homelessness, and political turbulence.
Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to make a difference. Make it two thimbles, ten thimbles, a hundred thimbles, it's still going to leave a mess.
Every time I read this sort of stuff, I ask - do you think that the demand to live in San Francisco is infinite? For a city that’s less than one-half as densely populated as Brooklyn, NY, no less? This problem was solved 150 years ago.
Even if demand was so large as to be practically infinite, all it would mean is that San Francisco becomes the local Manhattan equivalent on the West Coast. Which in turn means big-government California progressives gets a whole lot of additional tax revenue to play with, at zero extra cost to the rest of the economy. How is that supposed to be a bad thing, exactly?
>do you think that the demand to live in San Francisco is infinite?
In practical terms, because of the inevitable feedback loop, yes. Building more housing creates more demand for housing.
If SF built more houses, then rent would drop and thus more businesses/jobs could be profitable at the same standard of living. The more jobs there are, the more demand for housing there is. And if people move into those new houses then the city has a larger userbase for any locally-focused businesses.
This whole loop is why cities keep growing.
In other words, meeting the demand for housing creates more demand for housing.
> Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to make a difference.
So? The problem is not "too much money", it's too little housing. Having lots of highly-paid folks around is good for local workers' incomes; housing scarcity is really bad for them. Homelessness happens when people can't afford to pay for a home.
> Having lots of highly-paid folks around is good for local workers' incomes
You're describing income inequality. Personally, I don't believe income inequality is good for everybody. I think it tends to benefit some people at the expense of others.
> At various times over the last 30 years, there has been roughly two classes of people in SF: "tech workers", and "everyone else."
You can always arbitrarily divide people into two groups by making one "everybody else", but the two groups you name are not coherent classes. (Not even the first, which overlaps both [a relatively well paid segment of] the working class and the petite bourgeoisie, but especially not the second, which spans from the lowest of the working class to the highest end of the rentier/capitalist class.)
> the two groups you name are not coherent classes
Sure, they are. "tech workers" tend to work in tech companies. "everyone else" tend not to work in tech companies. It's quite coherent. Are there exceptions? Of course. Does the presence of exceptions mean the classes are incoherent? Of course not.
Why are you curious? I didn't say there were only two classes. I said there's been "roughly" two classes over the last 30 years. Add other classes if you want (billionaire tech owners who don't code, billionaires in non-tech fields like real estate or agriculture or petroleum, old-money San Franciscans, millionaire non-working property owners who don't know how to open a Google Doc), it doesn't affect the conclusions: "tech workers" (and the "tech owners" who pay them) are an important factor causing many of the problems in SF.
The problem with rich people is not that they are rich, it's the side effects of them being rich which cause other people to be poorer. I have no problem with Elon owning 10 megayachts if he wants to. Unless he's buying so much steel to build his megayachts that no one else can get steel things. Then it's a problem. And only then.
Even then, the problem could be Elon buying so much steel, or it could be steel manufacturers deliberately limiting steel production and only selling it to Elon to keep prices high. The latter is what is happening with landlords and building restrictions.
Except that the "side effects" of being rich aren't "side effects", they're the essential effects. Being richer than other people by definition means you can outcompete those other people for goods and services. That's the whole purpose.
Elon owning 10 megayachts means 10 megayachts (as much as $5 billion) worth of productive capacity being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people, to a use that is frivolous insofar as it largely benefits just one person.
Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people - such as EV cars, or low-cost space launches. It's a wash. Oh wait, actually it isn't because every trade of goods and services is advantageous to both parties by definition.
(There are of course some who only got rich by transferring wealth away from others - but they're not the ones people mostly complain about wrt. 'the rich'.)
zozbot234, why do you say that Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people? What I mean is, what do you expect your readers to infer from this, or what do you hope us to conclude from it?