More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people.
Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly.
With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to buy... But it's still not possible here.
More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people. But, when you think of them, you're thinking way too small. You need to think in terms of, like, literally doubling the number of apartments available, and they may then be in reach of normal people once more.
You also need to get yourself together and reverse that trend where your transit system has carried fewer people more slowly for more money since the eighties. (The bus-rapid-transit corridors are a good start, as they're much more transiting for much less money than new subways, but you're still thinking too small, and need to 10x your ambitions.)
These are bad faith arguments and therefore you are either debating in bad faith, or a dupe. San Francisco's gross water demand has been falling consistently for the last 50 years. Not per-capita. Gross. In 1998 the demand was 82 million gallons per day and in 2019 it was 63 million, with a population 17% greater. The more people you pile into a city, the less demand there is, because grossly wasteful activities like washing cars and watering grass get squeezed out. The east bay's EBMUD service area has experienced the same trend: total water demand has plummeted since mid-century and now stands at its lowest point in history, despite the exploding population.
Please make your points without personal swipes. Your comment would be fine without the first sentence—it's quite interesting. There was no need to spoil it with a personal attack.
Not only is that very unnecessary strong language, but I find the types of squabbles around water rather unproductive. Sure, (referring to your other comment) one can see that efficient toilets have been productive in doing what they are supposed to do, but that also totally dismisses things like the fact that sewage systems designed/engineered in the past were created for specific flow rates that things like high efficiency toilets and faucets and generally low water usage have caused problems with.
It also oddly erroneously equates water usage with some sort of negative thing in and of itself, akin to saying that rain is wasting water. It is not the use of water that is the problem, ignoring the rather minimal cost of things like moving the water, which is overwhelmingly a fixed, not variable cost. The real and only consequential problem is the contamination and pollution of water through things like significant quantities of soaps/surfactants, as well as almost unremovable harmful chemicals like birth control and other pharmaceuticals, preservatives from vehicle tires, and carcinogenic PFOA/PFOS that are now said to essentially be in EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE PLANET.
I can assure you that pumping a million gallons of water out of a well and letting it seep back into the ground is not nearly as destructive and damaging as the emission of various hormones into the municipal water system by women simply going to the bathroom.
In other words, if I were to use essentially nothing but moderate levels of natural surfactants, e.g., animal/plant fat produced soaps and did not take or use products created with "chemicals"; I could use tens of thousands of gallons of water per day and it would make no difference to the water cycle or availability. However, I could also use the amount and number of different destructive, polluting, toxic products that the average self-righteous person uses and I could pollute millions upon millions of gallons of water EVERY SINGLE DAY, all, while feeling self-righteous about my low water usage, while tossing new technology and plastic products produced by pumping tons of chemicals into Asian rivers.
A lot of these things are about perspective. You would ask that you take a step back and reexamine whether you are actually rational and using the scientific method that requires the questioning and reexamination of all assumptions and facts, or if you are being militant and extreme, aka an activist.
You seem to be speaking about a theoretical water system, or one that relies on an aquifer that can be considered infinitely capacious, and which recharges from its own wastewater, but that's not the situation in which the SFPUC finds itself. It has one source and it relies on rain and snow falling in one single particular place. Therefore SFPUC has to treat its supply as limited in a way that an aquifer system that's effectively a closed loop doesn't need to worry about. SF's wastewater does not recharge its water supply in any predictable way.
You're going to need to present some evidence for this, I think. I don't even know what an "inferior toilet" is. I've pooped in a lot of SF toilets and can assure you that they've all gotten the job done satisfactorily.
I've lived in California my whole life, and I have to agree with the sentiment that our water fixtures are not what they used to be 40 years ago. For example, the shower head we wanted to get is illegal in California, because the flow is too high. When we bought a new toilet we had to get the low flow toilet, which definitely clogs more than the old ones did.
What I don't agree with is that this bad. These are minor inconveniences. Sometimes I have to use the plunger, and the shower is less relaxing. Not a big deal. I'd rather that than water rationing.
Early in the pandemic I bought a bidet, not wanting to compete with the demand for toilet paper. Since then there has been a huge decrease in frequency of plunger use in the house. Once you get used to it it generally seems like a big increase in quality of life.
How can you say that when the evidence is drastically against you? Even in this thread it was pointed out that gross water usage is down for decades across the state and especially in the cities.
This is clearly positive given that just a few years ago we were on the brink of water rationing, even with these measures in place.
TL;DR: Toilets clog more with lower GPF. Showers clean less effectively - you only need to go to a country with no "eco" pressure or flow rate limitations to notice this yourself. Washing machines and dishwashers perform poorly with low flow rate and no TSP.
Basically any appliance that people complain about and have a bad time with is only that way because of environmental regulations.
> I don't even know what an "inferior toilet" is
That's because you're used to using garbage and you've never experienced anything better.
Toilets are probably the least acute example, since they have mostly gotten them almost back up to their former reliability. Cleaning appliances, like showers and dishwashers, are the most acute.
> That's because you're used to using garbage and you've never experienced anything better.
I grew up in Pennsylvania for the first 21 years of my life, moved to SF for seven, and have lived in Chicago for 3. I've traveled pretty extensively. I can assure you I know how toilets, showers, sinks, washing machines, and dishwashers work. As someone with a breadth of life experience and full control of my faculties, I cannot say I've experienced any of the issues you describe. Do not make assumptions about my life experience.
If _anything_ the worst issue I've experienced in some parts of SF is low water pressure, which has nothing to do with fixtures or appliances and everything to do with infrastructure.
I'll tell you who won't pay for it: existing homeowners, because they rely on new buildings' property taxes for anything to work. And in SF, they rely on payroll taxes from high income earners.
And in SF, the "dig once" policy means that anytime something substantial is done, nearly everything is redone, which is why Van Ness has been under construction for sooooo long: utilities.
The property wealth in SF appreciates at absolutely massive rates, but they rely on poorer new entrants to fund everything. And that old property wealth is the same political power that stops the city from a accommodating new people, restricting entry to ever more wealthy new entrants.
Here's the thing: maintenance of existing infrastructure that serves existing residents is almost entirely paid for by astronomical "impact fees" paid by new developments. In the East Bay, 85% of EBMUD's maintenance (not capital!) budget is funded from impact fees. These can be really high. Any new dwelling in the East Bay pays a minimum of $26000 for water capacity and a minimum of $4100 for wastewater capacity. It's a big pyramid scheme and the existing residents better get a clue and permit some new construction, or the public utility districts are going to have to change their strategy and get all that money from annual assessments on existing properties.
So it delivers 97% of the product to the user. Seems pretty good. What is your standard? According to the EPA the typical water system loses 16% to leaks, that means SFPUC is well above the typical system performance.
Modern construction is amazing and better than you would think at avoiding ripping up roads, but yeah, that's gonna have to happen too.
Who pays for it? This is infrastructure 101 stuff. You want the people who use it to pay for it, so you finance it and have the new tenants pay for it.
You need to do this anyway, current infrastructure does not last forever. Electric lines, gas lines, optic cables, sewage systems, everything has a lifespan and at the end of the lifespan you either exchange it or risk cascading failures. At that moment, adding capacity for new construction is not a huge extra cost, especially if the density is high enough.
BTW, utility tunnel is a thing, and places like SF can probably afford some, to prevent disruptions to the surface.
I think the implication is that you also enhance the infrastructure to support these apartments. Note that the population of SF increases by about 20% during the workday due to commuters.
Aren’t the sewers in SF literally over a century old?
An entire city's entire sewer system isn't all built in one year. Real life isn't Sim City.
There is constant maintenance and replacement. You don't have to be an urban planner to know this, you just have to look at the construction going on in your own neighborhood.
Some of them are from 1875 to be precise. I know because a section of Mission St collapsed when I was there. The causus belli was a decrepit sewage tunnel from the 1870s.
> More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people
What? No! Rent control is among other something that can lower the rent for normal people. I know SF has rent control, but currently it only applies as long as you don’t move.
Missed economics class? It's basic supply and demand. Rent control doesn't do anything to make housing affordable for people trying to get an apartment in the city, all it does is make it near impossible to find an affordable unit (because people who are under rent control are unwilling to move), and push up the price of non controlled units.
Rent control as implemented can only make housing just-as-expensive, and rent control cannot make housing affordable for normal people.
Put a plain 2BR in the Mission at, idk, $1500 a month (which Google tells me is a bit over the US median), and you'll have to hold a lottery to figure out which of the ten thousand families trying to get it, actually get it.
Maybe you don't always have a lottery, maybe the big winners are people who were in the right place at the right time as an accident of history. Either way these people are anything but normal. The normal people are the tens of thousands who can't get an apartment at that price. In the end it fails for the same reason that you can't "solve" poverty by running a state lottery and seeing a "normal" person win.
And even if we don't have a problem with this as inherently inequitable, it's just ... such tiny, tiny, small-scale thinking.
I’m not thinking small. I wonder if a confluence of several efforts would come together and make a real impact. E.g. make it illegal to charge more then x for an apartment evaluated at y. Make it illegal to raise the rent more the x over inflation (also between tenants). Make it illegal buy housing with the intention to sell for profit. County could buy housing with set rent to drive down the market rate. Make it illegal to own a house that stays empty more then x months.
EDIT: I know it might seem unfair if you are a landlord or in the housing speculative market. But heck, you’ve had your chance to play a fair game, and seriously screwed us over. You’ve proven your self unworthy as a player in a fair market to a point that you shouldn’t be allowed to play it.
No this won't work. As I said just let the government provide housing for a reasonable price directly. Private landlords can still make money by undercutting the government but they can't charge more because getting your housing from the government will always be cheaper.
Rent control increases market rates for rent by constricting available supply.
It can decrease your rent if you never move, but that decreases the liquidity of the market, and traps you in a crappy small apartment for longer than you’d live in it otherwise.
The freakonomics podcast had a decent episode about this. They frequently host liberal economic ideas as well, so don't assume the opinions come from some landowner backed think tank.
California requires winning a plebiscite to build public housing. This is not optional.
When it does manage to build public housing, SF spends approximately a million dollars a unit to do so. That's purely to get a habitable unit. It includes none of the maintenance costs, which will increase over time, or the social services required to make public housing work as intended.
With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does.
Incidentally, the Supes only actually get to control about $3.5bn of that. So now we're reduced to 3,500 units a year... in a city where population growth averages 11,000 people a year. And we still haven't talked about social services, maintenance, or how allocation of what will never be enough public housing units will work.
I think these numbers lay clear that public housing is unlikely to solve SF's housing woes. Don't hesitate to ask if anything is unclear!
>With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does.
You are skipping over the part where the government can change the relevant laws that make public housing expensive. Public housing also doesn't have to be built by the government directly so if private construction firms can do it cheaper the government can let them build the housing.
I believe that that's such a good idea that SF already agrees with you, has for years, and put it into practice long ago. The people who labor on public housing construction projects in SF are rarely city employees directly and generally employees of construction companies.
The items that make this expensive have to do with the standards that must be met, zoning and approval processes, and so on. These are things that a private construction firm, under contract with SF, does not find easier or cheaper.
Personally, I like the idea of SF maybe getting in the way of housing construction a bit less. But I also understand that voters seem to like the system as it is. Plus, only some of these laws are readily changed by SF - the plebiscite for public housing law is a state prop from the 70s. Many of the other requirements are also propositions at either state or local levels.
As you say, it's completely true that the government can change the relevant laws. It's just perhaps more subtle than that, as there are multiple levels of government involved and some of the relevant laws are quite challenging to change.
I'm honestly not sure what effective policy kneecapped by developers you're talking about. Can you help me understand? I don't think any of the things I mentioned were set up or advanced by developers to kneecap effective policies, but I'd love to learn more!
If anything, I would naively expect most of the relevant policies here to be things property developers would be quite strongly against. Perhaps you can enlighten me with critical factors I've overlooked?
The hospital administrators insisted. He made what was clearly a mistake in letting them use his name after giving $70 million to the hospital his wife did her residency at.
Benioff Hospital would be unaffected, but only because it's in no way run by SF.
Public housing only makes rents go down on market-based properties when it can offer serious competition to those market-based properties, which means lots of new public housing. (Something that I fully support, and something that is actively being worked on by some groups in California, just not any of the supposed "tenant" groups that never support new housing.)
Even in Red Vienna or Singapore, there are still market-rate housing! And the only way they keep the market rate housing low is by having enough housing. Singapore, in particluar, is really good at building tons of public housing. And their policies would horrify all the preservationist fake-progressives in SF, because they just build build build, and do it at heights greater than three stories. And Vienna's public housing would similarly horrify the fake progressives in SF that stop all new housing.
Public housing is great, but if you're looking to see it happen in SF, look to the Mods, not the Progs.
To paraphrase, poorly, the story of Color of Law by Richard Rothstein:
The housing projects in the US were implemented in extremely racist ways: segregation, then don't maintain the public housing at all. Public housing for white people in the 1930s was great, then with the red scare, the government decided that subsidizing home ownership would prevent the spread of socialism in the US. It was quite effective, but access to cheap home loans and cheap new developments was racially segregated: only new developments that would be largely white would get the FHA-subsidizided home loans. This is the well-documented "red lining."
This led to the economic segregation where the housing projects were only for Black people, were in areas without access to good schools or jobs. It's no wonder the housing projects failed, because they were largely doomed to failure.
I support rent control fully, but it does nothing to lower rents. It keeps them the same, at best. It's a way to protect current tenants, which is good, and we should support, as an "ownership-lite" model of residency.
But it's only one, very small, tool in the arsenal to make cities work for the people. It must be accompanied by robust protections to new people as well. The flaw with rent control in isolation is that it assumes that people never move, are never born, and never die, and that cities never change. In order for rent control to be a useful tenant protection, it must be accompanied by robust rebuilding when more people need to live in the city.
I’m not talking about rent control as it is currently done in San Francisco. We need more. Like you say, rent control should also apply when a new tenant moves in. A landlord should not be allowed to raise the rent arbitrarily when a new tenant moves in.
Also rent control should not be the only measure. The county should also buy up housing and rent for cheaper to drive the market rate down, price gauging should be illegal (for everyone, not just foreign investors). etc.
>The county should also buy up housing and rent for cheaper to drive the market rate down
Almost, buying up housing is fine if the government changes zoning and upzones existing properties. It is better to go one tiny step further and make the government guarantee housing for a fixed price because then it is truly forced to fix the problem.
Once you have done this important step the government has many options. It can either fix the demand side or the supply side.
The supply side is easy to fix by changing zoning laws to encourage taller residential buildings and then by actually building them.
The demand side can be fixed by changing the tax law so that commercial property is no longer the only source of property tax income. This lead to an imbalance of commercial vs residential property which then lead to lots of workers without housing which then lead to a race for apartments driving up prices.
You're still missing the most important component for affordability: more housing. Not simply conversion of existing market-sold housing to price controlled, but more.
Lets say that everything gets converted to rent-controlled in an area. A child becomes 18, graduates from high school, and wants to stay close to their family to maintain their emotional connections. If everything is rent-controlled, but not enough housing is built, they have to be on some sort of waitlist or lottery to stay in the area. This will push out so many people.
The only solution is to make enough housing for the people that want to live in an area. Without that, we are rationing it by price, by lottery, or by waitlist, and all of those will destroy the emotional connections that both you and I want to maintain.
If you want the government to implement an upper bound for housing prices then you must introduce a housing guarantee at a fixed price. The government will be forced to build housing directly and if it cannot do so it can just change the relevant law that prevents it from doing so and then build the housing or reform the law so that there is no imbalance in regards to commercial and residential property which creates an endless supply of jobs but not enough housing for the new workers.
Rent control ultimately increases the cost of housing by suppressing supply. Price controls don't work.
And how is rent control supposed to follow tenants? They just show up to a unit costing $3,000/mo and say "my rent control rate is $800/mo, so you need to rent to me at that price." No sane developer would ever build in SF if that is the case, thus exacerbating point #1.
This is absolutely false. Every three years, by law, NYC does a housing and vacancy survey of tens of thousands of apartments (the most recent survey was in 2017). The raw data is here[0], and selected findings are here[1]. You can see in in the selected findings that the vacancy rate in NYC in 2017 was 3.63%, which is INCREDIBLY low. A "healthy" vacancy rate is closer to 7% or 8%[2].
I'm no expert, just a virtual tourist via YouTube.
According to (1) average Tokyo apartment size is 20 square meters or a little over 400 square feet vs 700 square feet in San Francisco as found from a quick Google search.
Considering some Japanese rent and live in Cyber cafe cubes that are even smaller I'm not sure how fair a comparison really is between the two. Japan in particular seems to have small appliances geared towards smaller footprint apartments.
Joking aside, the lifestyle is also different. Tokyo and HK where I live are known for tiny apartments, but they're also cities where residents spend far less time at home, offering cheap options for eating out, many places to hang out outside home, reliable transit, and extreme safety from crime at all times of the day. I'm far more comfortable in a tiny HK flat than I would be in the same size in SF. Thankfully I have the luxury of a decent sized space in both now.
Sadly you are correct about Japanese vs American sizing. But beyond that hanging clothes to dry vs having a dryer, inbuilt grills on stoves, rice cookers, dishwashers being rarer, etc all add up to more efficient use of space.
> More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people.
Pre-covid, I knew engineers making $100k+ living with four roommates in a somewhat run-down apartment. Sure, $100k isn't that much, but it's enough that they should be living somewhere nicer without the roommates. People who should be in high-end apartments are living in low-end apartments, displacing "normal" people who would normally live there. If you build only mid-high-end apartments, the priced will come down to the point that the average tech worker can afford them, and they'll move out of their four roommate situation. That will free up inventory at the lower end, and prices will drop.
This really is just supply and demand. It does funny things at times (see the backward bending supply curve of labor), but until there's a surplus of housing, this isn't one of them.
>>true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly.
Why would they do that? Not to mention that NY is kinda big for developers to band together to manipulate this. My guess is that developers try to sell/rent units as fast as they can....and faster than the other guy.
How about mixed-cost buildings? Some higher-cost "luxury" units whose price/rent subsidizes the lower cost "essential" units, where firemen, teachers, local people can live.
More broadly, if housing is so expensive people with full time jobs can't easily afford it, build more housing. Subsidizing it for certain groups is NIMBY-enabling tokenism.
Land value tax would be simpler. Tax everything based on the unimproved value of the land. Unoccupied homes and apartments become money-losers, and owners are forced to sell them to people who would rent them out or occupy them, or else it becomes a money-losing enterprise. No need to figure out what's occupied or unoccupied, and no loopholes. Just tax the externality and let the market figure out the rest.
Vancouver does this, and it reveals that vacant homes are not the problem. There's a small additional revenue stream, and some college students get to rent our mansions for cheap, but it's simply not enough homes to have much of an impact.
The vacancy/spec tax spiked the amount of rentals hitting the market the year it came into effect, adding 8000-11000 that year depending on if you factor in new builds.
You're only gonna get that big impact one time, but it goes to show that the tax was worth doing.
Doesn't solve the problem by itself, but the tax will help.
The amount of units that suddenly appeared showed that there was a small percent of units "leaking" from every new build that never hit the market.
Really hard to do. Not because it’s a bad idea but because it’s hard to identify a vacant apartment. One example using utility bills as proof of residence can be gamed by paying people to go turn on the lights for a while. How can you tell that the property is actually empty?
You mean add additional taxes? Presumably they are already taxed.
Does SF have homestead property tax exemptions? Where I live property taxes are quite high, unless the property is owner occupied. The second homes and rentals subsidized the taxes of those who live here.
SF, like all of California, has the worst possible property tax scheme. They passed "homestead" protections but did it for all property tax, not just homesteads.
Any property tax, from vacant lot to strip mall to vacation home to industrial plant, can not rise above 2% per year. Meanwhile property values rise 5%-10% per year. The only way for property to get reassessed at market value is to build on it or sell it.
This subsidizes speculation. If you own a vacant lot since 1970, and pay an effective tax rate of 0.05%, and building on it raises your taxes to 1%, you're taking a huge risk by deciding to enter the market now. Similarly, that super old 6-unit apartment building from 1930 has a ridiculously low tax basis; upgrading to 20 units hugely increases taxes.
If the problem is developers making a bunch of apartments and releasing them slowly, wouldn't such a tax just mean they'd switch to a strategy of making them slowly to get the same effect?
Literally nobody has ever done this. Large apartment builders have banks breathing down their necks. They try to lease up as fast as they can, which generally takes about a year to get to 90% because there's a lot of friction in getting people to move.
The governor of my state ripped toilets out of one of his mansions to make it "unlivable" for tax reasons. No doubt the developers could stall finishing units if they had to.
This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values.
Presumably, the building company would be the owners for all the empty apartments which would make it easy to find and tax. It would be more difficult to detect someone buying a home/apartment as an "investment".
> This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values.
At what point do they become apartments though? When the Certificate of Occupancy is issued? "No problem; those units aren't finished yet. [They need a smoke alarm to be legal units and somehow we haven't found the time to get around to it yet.]" Or whatever the threshold is between "this is a vacant lot" and "this is a taxable unoccupied unit", you're just providing incentive to stay on one side of that line if there is a glut of builders using this strategy.
IDK, probably have to do some research into how much time it takes to finish a unit to say when the clock starts ticking.
For example, obviously a smoke alarm is something that takes 15 minutes to install, so that wouldn't be when you start the clock.
You might be able to base it on when any single unit is sold in the block. That is "You sell 1 apartment, you've got a year to sell to rest or you are going to start seeing vacancy taxes".
Same in Indiana. But the proposed idea was to tax more heavily all unoccupied properties, not merely "all properties other than one's primary residence."
Berlin has such laws since 2014 and it is working poorly. Turns out that it is hard to get an overview of empty apartments. City government has to rely on other tenants reporting empty apartments.
You know, it's been a while since I left Potrero Hill, but I think that I heard the feds had taken over the public housing projects on the south side (you know, back where OJ Simpson grew up) because they were basically uninhabitable. What's the status on that?
But you know, that's last generation projects. What's the status on today's "affordable housing" projects? Oh, you say it costs $750,000 in construction costs alone for an "affordable" 2BR apartment? Oh dear me, that's rather ridiculously steep, isn't it...
Singapore relies heavily on cheap foreign construction workers. In order for that model to be applied in SF would require opening the Mexican border to allow for cheap immigrant workers to come to SF. That’s not going to fly for many reasons.
I always thought that most of the construction workers in SF are illegal immigrants from Mexico and have been for the last 30 years or more.
I always thought that there were about 8 million illegal immigrants in California, then 9/11 happened, but even after 9/11 the number never dipped below 1 or 2 million -- and if it got that low, it was only for a few years.
Also, I thought that when the numbers have gone down, from 8 million to 4 million, say, it is more because of an increase in economic opportunity in Mexico than it is because of an increase in the effectiveness of US border control.
And I thought that even with all his talk, Trump didn't improve US border control significantly.
But I don't have any direct motive to stay informed on this issue. E.g., I don't hire cheap workers. So it is possible I am misinformed.
That article puts the price of a new 5-room apartment in 2010 at $448,700 Singapore dollars (USD $337,000 at today's exchange rate). That's about 50% of the NYT's cited 2BR=USD$750k that doesn't even include the price of the land.
San Francisco as a political entity has neither the will nor the project management capacity to build anything at reasonable prices.
More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people.
Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly.
With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to buy... But it's still not possible here.