[rurp]

It's all talking points on both sides. "Build more housing" being the one true solution has become a religious tenant in a lot of wonkish circles. I see it repeated uncritically every single time this topic comes up on HN and similar spaces.

The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.

The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.

Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.

[inigyou]

Isn't SF infamously a SFH zone that makes no sense? If you razed the whole city and rebuilt it like Manhattan, you wouldn't have 25% more inhabitants, you'd have 25000% more. And if you improve public transit (I heard BART is some that's pretty good by American standards but not by European standards?) you can drastically widen the area that feels like the core city (just take a look at Berlin which I'm familiar with) giving maybe another 1000% multiplicative increase.

Every time I'm in Berlin I love the public transit system there. I think that's because they have a relatively dense network of lines through the city center, and the trains run every 4-5 minutes which means you don't have to check the timetable before going to the station, you can just show up. I haven't visited London or NYC though. I know some cities with more modern train signaling have trains every 1-2 minutes so there is basically always a train at every metro station.

[rsynnott]

> And if you improve public transit (I heard BART is some that's pretty good by American standards but not by European standards?)

BART is ~fine; there's just not very much of it. Only two lines go through San Francisco (both of which are essentially one line while _in_ San Francisco), plus there's one line worth of Caltrain (which is kinda low frequency; 3-4 an hour per direction peak time), and _that's about it_.

[cal_dent]

every single city you mentioned there also has significant housing issues. So as per the original comment, the actual solution is more complicated than the debate typically tends to acknowledged.

Densifying homes will help, don't get me wrong, but its far from the silver bullet HNs lads like to claim. Now, not densifying jobs and employment centres as much as modern society as done on the other hand....well, now we may be on to something with legs

[inigyou]

Oh. "A 2 million percent increase might not be enough, so we should do zero percent"

[cal_dent]

Awww cute

[pibaker]

> You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso

Well, yeah, a human can only run so fast, but San Francisco is not even trying to run — it's barely crawling. Go to the sunset district, or Bayview, or any neighborhood in the western or southern half of the city and you will see nothing but rows after rows of single family homes — and yes, the car is a part of the family. Replace it with something like new york's west village and you will more than double its density.

> There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at

Yeah, just tell everyone to move to somewhere in the rust belt where the only job opening is in public sector health care that may or may not get cut by the current administration, that will help.

[ieatcandlewax]

I don't understand how people can see San Francisco and think "I wish this entire skyline was all 20 story apartment buildings so that rootless cosmopolitans can have marginally cheaper rent". If you want to live like that, new york is a great place and there is no need to sacrifice a beautiful and historic (by american standards) city for it.

This is all on the backdrop that the only reason people are complaining about this is because they want to pay Midwest prices for rent to go work at Amazon and make 250k.

These companies didn't build the city themselves, and they'll be gone as soon as you turn it into seoul with a higher corporate tax.

[slibhb]

It doesn't have to be 20 story apartment buildings. Start with duplexes, fourplexes, or townhomes -- none of which have to be ugly. It simply makes no sense to zone these densely populated urban areas for detached, single-family houses.

[scoofy]

What the hell are you talking about? I live in SF. Like half the city is literally single family homes. You could trivially double or triple the population of the city by just legalizing the cute, three-story Victorians they have in the Haight city wide.

People live here and would like to build a life for themselves instead of living with roommates into their 40s and 50s.

[ieatcandlewax]

I'm guessing you live in the northern half if your using cute and Haight in the same sentence. Esp when Inner Sunset has effectively the same architecture.

You could feasibly quadruple the population if you wanted to, I guess my question is to why? It wouldn't decrease rent appreciably, and you would have to move out to daly city to raise your family in something other than an apartment.

You could do all this building and ruin the atmosphere of the lower half of the city just for Amazon, Salesforce and whatever other software companies are still downtown to move to some desert and have the rents drop back down to normal ranges.

[scoofy]

>You could feasibly quadruple the population if you wanted to, I guess my question is to why? It wouldn't decrease rent appreciably

You live in a fantasy world if you don't think increasing the housing supply by 4x will do anything to prices. Austin is a near-perfect natural experiment... not that you likely care about good-faith discussion with a month old throwaway account.

[rsynnott]

> rootless cosmopolitans

???

I hadn't realised _Stalin_ had a HN account.

[ieatcandlewax]

My bad, I thought it was just an apt way of describing modern tech workers, didn't know it was an antisemitic slur.

I love Isreal and pledge my allegiance to the Zionist cause.

[disgruntledphd2]

Or Theresa May, perhaps?

[rainsford]

It might be unsatisfyingly simplistic, but if prices are high in an area because a lot of people want to live there, building more housing seems like a fundamentally better approach than demanding everyone who wants to live in San Francisco instead accept living in Mississippi. Even if prices stabilize back to where they were before, it would still be a net win that more people than before get to live in a desirable place for the same cost. I'm genuinely not "sneering" at Mississippi here. But if you want to live in San Francisco, Mississippi is probably not going to be a reasonable substitute and maybe making it easier for you to live in San Francisco is a reasonable policy goal.

But history and lots of examples suggests prices are unlikely to remain the same if you build more supply, which makes sense from an economics perspective. There aren't an unlimited number of people wanting to live in a particular area at a given price point, otherwise they would likely have driven the price higher in the first place. Induced demand is a problem for highways because the cost of driving that particular route at a particular time is essentially zero, which his not really true of moving to a different area.

[lovich]

Do you think if you built a million houses for every person that the price would go down?

I’m using hyperbole here specifically because I’ve met nimbys who confidently state that the price would not go down in that situation.

Assuming your answer would be yes, then part of the yimby/abundance crowds argument is that this needs to be done everywhere or at least at a state level. Yea if only a single city does it they may never be able to out produce their demand, but that’s more of a prisoners dilemma issue between cities than a problem with building more housing leading to lower prices.

[maxerickson]

Do you think yimby's hate transit and encouraging revitalisation?

They are going to support both for the same reason that they are yimby's...