[TSiege]

Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas.

We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plentiful affordable housing without decoupling this idea. Houses are a poor financial investment once you remove all the incentives involved like mortgage tax credits, fixed mortgage rates, and obstructive zoning rules. Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.

[Volundr]

> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset.

And it's a really, really shitty one. My house has roughly doubled in value since I bought it, but in practice that's useless to me. I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. If anything it reduces my mobility by making it harder to move, since I really need to coordinate the sale of my current home with buying the new one to help absorb that $500k or whatever price tag.

My if house prices dropped by 50% or more drops my net worth on paper, but it doesn't actually change anything. I still have a place to live + my savings, investments, etc.

[Infinitesimus]

> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless.

HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.

[Volundr]

Sure, it increases one's borrowing power and that can be useful. But "I can use it to go deeper into debt" is pretty limited utility compared to other kinds of wealth.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

How does that help? If don't have enough cash now, then how will getting a loan that needs to be paid back with interest help with that. I will have cash for a little while, then I will have way way less as I have to make payments. Then I miss a few and they take my house and I'm homeless.

[beAbU]

Assuming the mortgage is paid off!

[rsynnott]

Yeah, I think people miss this. Generally, the only way to benefit from growth in value of your home is to either downsize or to _die_.

(Also, of course, depending on timescale, doubling may not be that impressive. If you'd put your money in a broad index fund about five years ago, it would also have doubled.)

[JKCalhoun]

"Downsize" can simply mean move to a region where the price of homes is less. Our home in Omaha is certainly not smaller in size than the one we left in San Jose.

[gogobio]

You conveniently exclude the third option which is to keep working your ass off, build a family with high total income and grow upwards. Your argument only accounts for personal and professional stagnation. Also - you could try dropping this insane San Fran pride linked to your identity and move to another area that is cheaper. The world is full of workarounds if you're not unreasonably vain, vapid, or lazy.

[rsynnott]

> which is to keep working your ass off, build a family with high total income and grow upwards.

Eh? If you're moving to a _larger_ house (I assume that's what you're talking about here) the last thing you want is house price growth; that would increase the cost delta between the smaller and larger house.

[JKCalhoun]

"I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless."

Well, you can move.

I went from the Bay Area to Omaha, Nebraska without going homeless. I retired though, so there's that. (But my wife was able to work from home with the move.)

(Next stop: perhaps a double-wide trailer in Eloy, Arizona.)

[pandaman]

> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless.

Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?

[Volundr]

I'm using it to mean someone who doesn't have a place to live. Like say someone who just sold their house and didn't go and use that money to buy a different house. Yes, that's very different than the person asking for change on the street corner, but I thought it was pretty clear from context which I'd be.

[pandaman]

Many people rent without ever owning a house, we don't call them "homeless" normally. Even if you owned a house they still allow you to rent. You can even rent while owning a house or several.

[Volundr]

I'm sorry my pun bothered you so.

[rvz]

> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset.

This conflation is a coping mechanism by home owners, especially the ones in SF (which the entire city from SF to San Jose) is sitting on a fault line.

The main problem is that building is being blocked by several other homeowners who are petrified of the value of their homes falling. No wonder young people are beginning to look to this policy in China [0] - "Houses are for living, not for speculation".

> Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.

In 2026, it is really a bad investment in the AI age and especially in HCOL areas like SF, given the layoffs and the jobs being off-shored. If you were part of the people who leveraged their RSUs to buy, well that is also a bad idea to do in 2026.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

[xnx]

China is a weird example because they massively overbuilt housing.

[crooked-v]

SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.

[orangecat]

Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.

[crooked-v]

If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far.

To me it feels much more like just a significant cadre who resist any change, of any kind, for any reason, who can ignore the personal side effects because of Prop 13 and because their family bought a house in the 80s and they don't give a shit about anyone else who wants or has to live in the city.

[scoofy]

>If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket.

They get this anyway, it's just unrealized capital gains.

[littlexsparkee]

Rent control is another potent disincentive for change, probably due to fears of OMI/Ellis Act or other downstream effects.

[pseudalopex]

People have non financial interests.

[lokar]

Even today the structure is a declining asset. It’s just that bad land use policy has forced land value up enough to overwhelm that.

[gruntled-worker]

I agree with everything you wrote. I'd like to add the pyramid angle.

Fancy mansions have always been overpriced. For property prices to grow faster than inflation, the pyramid needed to grow its bottom. Supply restrictionism was the ticket. Eventually, every shack was priced mansion-like. This required extracting ever larger fractions of the incomes of renters. Some renters wisened up and bought homes (when they still could). Changing sides, they beefed up the scheme's political backing.

No one cares if mansions are expensive, but basic housing should be extremely cheap. This sounds like a handout but isn't. It's what an unadulterated market would provide. It's what the pre-1970 market used to provide.

That's not to say that markets should be left alone. It's to say that the way this particular market was "regulated" was fundamentally corrupt. We could call it negative regulation.

[bombcar]

If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so.

Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.

[Schiendelman]

This take is actively destructive. We need to let people CHOOSE to live WHERE they want to live - and let people who buy land CHOOSE to build housing for demand they perceive. That's it. That's the problem and the solution. It should be unconstitutional to limit housing production arbitrarily.

[xnx]

How do we "CHOOSE" who gets to live in the most desirable areas?

[Schiendelman]

By letting people build upward. This is self solving, except for our arbitrary limits on how much housing a land owner is allowed to build.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ah, I see you are a fan of the Kowloon Walled City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

[Schiendelman]

There's a great book called "City of Darkness" about it - a lot of what we believe about it was a campaign funded by the Hong Kong government to turn public opinion about it negative because they wanted the land back from China.

Most of the reason there were any problems there at all was that there was no legal jurisdiction over it, there are still buildings in Hong Kong that have nearly that density with none of the legal issues.

[apparent]

Should people also be allowed to move into neighborhoods that are zoned as suburban (not so much in SF as in nearby areas), and have them remain that way?

I get the libertarian impulse to let people do what they want with their property, but it seems like part of that freedom should be the right to move into areas where there are zoning restrictions.

[Schiendelman]

Zoning should always have been unconstitutional, and the court case enabling it proved that.

The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around it with single family zoning. Ever wondered why it isn't called "house" zoning? Because it was segregation.

The appellate court in the case threw out zoning, because it was so obvious that it was about race. The Supreme Court overturned it by ignoring the entire appellate court decision and defining a building itself (apartments) as a nuisance, instead of making the petitioners regulate actual behaviors. Because the behaviors weren't the problem, it was the black people they didn't want.

Sorry - this riles me up. :)

You should absolutely not be able to have a say over how much housing your neighbor builds. Sure, if they make noise, or bad smells, or bright lights, THAT you should be able to regulate. But the outcomes of having a say over how much housing your neighbor can build is the strongest root of a whole host of issues - from CO2 to obesity to high commute times and traffic to municipal budget bloat. It causes sprawl. Increasingly, parts of the left and right are starting to realize we need to overturn it.

[scoofy]

Yes, but not forever!!!

Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born.

We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right, to expand their housing by 2x the median building unit within a half mile radius, by units, sqft, and height.

Suburban neighborhoods then slowly turn into duplexes over one generation, then row houses over another, then finally start building up after a third generation. Predictable, fair, and sustainable.

[pixl97]

When all areas have zoning restrictions you've reversed the problem again removing peoples freedom.

[HDThoreaun]

No, you have no right to force your neighbors to behave exactly as you want.

[seanmcdirmid]

We can’t let everyone choose to live in the same place. There has to be some mechanism, hopefully market-based but it could also be a residency system, that ensures people spread out and live in different places. Even if you could get SF to support a billion people in living space, I’m sure infrastructure and resources like water would cut things off before it got to that many people.

[Schiendelman]

There absolutely does not have to be in mechanism to spread people out. It is cheaper to provide infrastructure to people who are much closer together than it is to provide the same infrastructure to people who are spread farther out.

There's been a website for the last 20 years called Strong Towns that talks about this a lot if you're interested in learning more.

[seanmcdirmid]

Building up isn’t cheaper at some point. Around 30 stories is the economic limit right now when you consider fire safety, with anything higher reserved for splurges.

Having lived this in China, the economics get wonky in dense cities. I’ve never seen the built up area with lots of 30 stories being cheaper than 4 story blocks. And that is in the most zone-agnostic build happy country on earth.

[gogobio]

So go buy land and build a house, just CHOOSE to spend your money and buy land. What's so hard about that? Ah yes we conveniently forget in our youthfulness that we are not original and if thousands of software leeches choose to relocate en masse they will sky rocket the costs on just about everything - simple supply and demand.

[Schiendelman]

The point here is that the existing owner of a house is often happy to build an apartment building, and almost always not allowed to.

[floor2]

As soon as FAANG starts hiring people in Utah, Arkansas and Minnesota for the same roles at the same wages as they hire in the Bay, then people will move. As soon as VCs start funding founders in Boise, Kansas City and Chattanooga, then people will move.

Until then, maybe we work to improve the places where most of us are required to live by our jobs. (And yes, in parallel we can work to reduce the employer-mandated dependence on those areas).

[apparent]

Agree, but I think you mean NYC of the West, not East.

[bombcar]

Of course I meant ... East Asia ... it's not that I'm tired enough that I forgot what coast SF is on ...

[scoofy]

>Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country

This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are.

The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely.

We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.

[robocat]

> housing has been turned into a zero sum game

Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for.

And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum).

Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...

[scoofy]

>Not really. Land has always been zero-sum

What? Yes, but you misunderstand.

When you (intentionally) make expanding the housing supply illegal or practically impossible, then you've turned housing into a zero-sum game.

[tqi]

It's frustrating to see the NYT frame this as an AI vs everyone else story, pitting incumbent renters against newcomers, while landlords literally extract rent.

[everdrive]

>There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism

What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

[mbgerring]

> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution:

Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters.

Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!

[Sohcahtoa82]

> Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth

I don't think this is true at all.

Birthrates are already declining. All you have to do is give proper sex ed and easy access to birth control and populations will shrink on their own. You don't even have to begin propaganda around overpopulation, though we may need to tone down the "WE NEED MORE BABIES" propaganda that the right is currently projecting.

The fact is, there are a lot of people (18-29% of non-parent adults in the USA, depending on your source) that don't want children. Give them the tools to make sure accidents don't happen (IMO, vasectomies would be more popular if there weren't so many myths surrounding them), and birthrates will decline naturally.

[mbgerring]

Neither the global birthrate, nor the U.S. population, are currently declining. The U.S. population may decline this year following the Trump administration’s massive increase in violent, capricious removal of immigrants regardless of legal status or criminal record.

Birthrates naturally declining is probably a good thing, but it happens too slowly to make a dent in housing prices without additional interventions.

[robocat]

> dent in house prices

Already dented in Italy and Japan:

https://impatria.com/en/magazine/1-euro-houses-italy-foreign...

https://www.akiyajapan.com/japan/cheap-houses

We're propping up house prices in New Zealand by adding 50% immigrants (I think is fantastic - we're now at 30% population born overseas). Stop-gap solution but it is working at present.

[saulpw]

> or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth

People are quite naturally controlling their own quantity of offspring, to the dismay of our leaders who insist on perpetual growth. If we limit immigration (not my preferred approach, but here we are), then the population will naturally start to fall, as is happening in other places.

[pixl97]

I mean, ya, it kind of works. Your economy will go to shit for the most part.

[everdrive]

>Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives

I'm really sad to see this response. President deported a large number of illegal immigrants -- to the extent that he was called the "deporter in chief" -- and he did not employ an army of fascist goons. The insane polarization of the last few years has shrunken the scope of people's imaginations, and I'm sure that people think their only choices are "open borders" vs. "barely-trained fascist thugs."

[everdrive]

Sorry, that should be "President Obama"

[Legend2440]

The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump:

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...

[mbgerring]

That’s correct, and to my point above, driving immigration down to this degree required a level of violence and cruelty so extreme that even the people who voted for it now disapprove of it. And that’s before the profound economic consequences really hit.

[DiscourseFan]

I think its also quite apparent that building new housing is a whole lot cheaper than killing and forcibly removing people, its just that it also destroys the value of an asset that the majority of families still hold. I mean its very basic of course: capitalism has a tendency to destroy the family unit, home ownership is a means of maintaining the family unit, and force against the destruction of the family requires violence, which is overall unproductive and wasteful. But anything that is unproductive is also freely determined, which is where the vulgarity of fascism lies, in its conflation of freedom with "letting off steam," so-to-speak.

[joinjune]

Short term you might be right. Long term we have seen that western "education" results in declines in birthrates. Demographics are destiny.

[KylerAce]

Birthrates go down in the east too whenever incomes increase (and sometimes without income increasing)

[xnx]

""education""?

[lokar]

I bring it up with some people.

To do this you need to either accept:

- the area becomes an enclave for the wealthy with a high unhoused population, where most youth have to move away. People say they don't want this, I’m not sure they are being honest.

- the government regulates internal migration. You need a permit to move from the Midwest to California.

[jerlam]

> the area becomes an enclave for the wealthy with a high unhoused population, where most youth have to move away.

Yeah, that's already happened. SF is the US city with the least amount of children, where schools have to close due to declining enrollment.

[lokar]

Yep. And on some level, if that’s what these people want, fine. I disagree, but I don’t live there. I do live in CA, and I’m happy the state is pushing back, and this is not a purely local issue.

What really bothers me is the dishonesty. If this is what you want, then own it. Argue for it. Don’t pretend to care about other people.

[Makeitmakesense]

People don't bring it up because it requires doing things most understand to not be options. 1 - how would you stop people from moving to SF if they choose 2 - it stops dynamism for the city. You are here because you were already here is the only requisite.

The prices going up is the market creating the incentive for less people to not move to SF and old guard to stay. You already have that. You are not going to bring down prices while limiting people without legislation that goes into dangerous territory of limiting who can live in one of Americas most dynamic cities.

[mitthrowaway2]

Presently high housing prices are causing this; a lot more people would be living in SF today if there was more supply, which is equivalent to the high prices having kicked people out.

Do you have any policies in mind that could reduce the population without pricing people out? Maybe a Hukou system, or a right-to-reside lottery?

[bwhiting2356]

If you prefer to live in a low density exurb, you have many options for affordable housing, there's just a lack of good paying jobs and services in those areas.

[rsynnott]

... What would the mechanism to achieve fewer people be? The Logan's Run approach?

Governments have mechanisms to make there be more housing, if they want to use them. Only extremely scary governments have mechanisms to make there be _fewer people_.

(Also it doesn't really work; cities which do depopulate tend not to do well, as the depopulation tends to be biased towards the working-age population.)

[gogobio]

You're right about one thing - housing being expensive is a choice, it's a choice of those who have moved to SF and despite it making no sense for their financial situation just "trying to make things happen" there to stay there. These are the people who drive property costs up. It's not about "just building more", that's literally never the answer. Building more is solving just for one factor and when you build more - guess what's gonna happen? More density, even higher costs of living because guess what - more people moving means more demand on local services, shops, transit, so higher costs. On top of it - folks who buy these newly built properties aren't going to be making minimum wage at a local coffee and avocado toast shop - they're business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, etc. Your cost of living will keep rising with every new property built and every new transplant.

The real answer is taxes, taxing the shit out of these rich transplants and the corporations. You're in California I can't believe you lot aren't more progressive about jacking up the taxes on the rich to pave the way for a healthy society for the rest. But given that every single tech nerd that moves to SF sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or a not-yet-founder - good luck with that, I genuinely do not see even the younger crowd being pro taxing the rich in a city full of tech leeches.