<story><title>Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness</title><url>https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/house-speaker-rain-homeless-film-reviews/housing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dionidium</author><text>Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can&amp;#x27;t figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that&amp;#x27;s really on you. What a gift! Any city would be lucky to have that &amp;quot;problem.&amp;quot; You have to &lt;i&gt;actively&lt;/i&gt; work to make that a negative (by, say, refusing to allow almost any new housing for literally decades).&lt;p&gt;The consequences of that decision are fairly obvious and straightforward and they&amp;#x27;ve by now been explained to everybody 50 times, but this is the path these cities choose anyway! It&amp;#x27;s their choice and it&amp;#x27;s what they keep choosing.&lt;p&gt;Cities like San Francisco have said clearly, firmly, and repeatedly: &amp;quot;we would rather suffer a housing crisis than allow the city to change too rapidly.&amp;quot; At this point what else can you say in response?</text></item><item><author>jlmorton</author><text>Imagine you&amp;#x27;re a municipality like San Francisco. You control all of the zoning regulations, and many of the permitting requirements. You have a AA+ credit rating, and even in today&amp;#x27;s higher rate environment, you can borrow billions of dollars at 6%.&lt;p&gt;You already own oodles of land. You can build to whatever height you want within reason, because you control the zoning, and you even control many of the ordinances that allow citizens to block development (though certainly not all, like CEQA and NEPA). So you have lots of lands to build on, and what you build is largely in your control.&lt;p&gt;Construction costs in San Francisco are sky-high, at $440 sq ft. But people will happily pay you $40&amp;#x2F;sq foot per year for housing, probably for 75 years.&lt;p&gt;How is this not the easiest decision in the world?&lt;p&gt;Create a housing development agency, become a permanent developer, and landlord. Never stop building. Put proper incentives in place, so that employees at the agency can partake in the profits, incentivizing them to be efficient. Never stop doing this.&lt;p&gt;You might not be great at this at first, but fifty years later you will be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danjac</author><text>Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There&amp;#x27;s nothing magic about SF&amp;#x27;s geography that makes it a tech hub. It&amp;#x27;s not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It&amp;#x27;s based on work that can literally be done anywhere.&lt;p&gt;Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison&amp;#x27;s lawyers back East, so maybe the tech industry needs to get out of SF, start a new hub somewhere else, and leave the city to the NIMBYs.</text></comment>
<story><title>Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness</title><url>https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/house-speaker-rain-homeless-film-reviews/housing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dionidium</author><text>Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can&amp;#x27;t figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that&amp;#x27;s really on you. What a gift! Any city would be lucky to have that &amp;quot;problem.&amp;quot; You have to &lt;i&gt;actively&lt;/i&gt; work to make that a negative (by, say, refusing to allow almost any new housing for literally decades).&lt;p&gt;The consequences of that decision are fairly obvious and straightforward and they&amp;#x27;ve by now been explained to everybody 50 times, but this is the path these cities choose anyway! It&amp;#x27;s their choice and it&amp;#x27;s what they keep choosing.&lt;p&gt;Cities like San Francisco have said clearly, firmly, and repeatedly: &amp;quot;we would rather suffer a housing crisis than allow the city to change too rapidly.&amp;quot; At this point what else can you say in response?</text></item><item><author>jlmorton</author><text>Imagine you&amp;#x27;re a municipality like San Francisco. You control all of the zoning regulations, and many of the permitting requirements. You have a AA+ credit rating, and even in today&amp;#x27;s higher rate environment, you can borrow billions of dollars at 6%.&lt;p&gt;You already own oodles of land. You can build to whatever height you want within reason, because you control the zoning, and you even control many of the ordinances that allow citizens to block development (though certainly not all, like CEQA and NEPA). So you have lots of lands to build on, and what you build is largely in your control.&lt;p&gt;Construction costs in San Francisco are sky-high, at $440 sq ft. But people will happily pay you $40&amp;#x2F;sq foot per year for housing, probably for 75 years.&lt;p&gt;How is this not the easiest decision in the world?&lt;p&gt;Create a housing development agency, become a permanent developer, and landlord. Never stop building. Put proper incentives in place, so that employees at the agency can partake in the profits, incentivizing them to be efficient. Never stop doing this.&lt;p&gt;You might not be great at this at first, but fifty years later you will be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>luckylion</author><text>Especially for a city that is explicitly progressive, why the &amp;quot;all rapid change is bad, it must take decades or centuries, otherwise it&amp;#x27;s not natural&amp;quot; approach?&lt;p&gt;Germany&amp;#x27;s large cities have similar issues where they don&amp;#x27;t want to start building new districts because it&amp;#x27;d be artificial and not naturally grown building by building. And it&amp;#x27;s better to have rents double every 10 years, apparently.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t get the &amp;quot;why&amp;quot;, but the approach is fairly explicit -- and politicians get reelected while following it, so I guess it&amp;#x27;s what &amp;quot;the people&amp;quot; want.</text></comment>