The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis

Asking why there isn't enough housing is like asking why water is wet. The answer is state/local government regulation. There's an old saying "your margin is my opportunity" and I suspect that the current crop of homes that are built have decent margins, but in a deregulated market an entrepreneur could come in offer more affordable housing options with lower margins. You can see this in vehicles. Nobody complains about the vehicle affordability problem because there are far fewer regulations in the transportation industry (don't get me wrong, there are regulations, but not a constraining as you see in the housing market). There's a vehicle at every price point. You got bikes, then ebikes, mopeds, scoters, motorcycles, sub compacts, compacts, full size, trucks, suvs, and all the way to crazy expensive sports cars. You don't see that in house because affordable housing is not a good business. It's impossible to offer options at the lower end of the market because of zoning laws, environmental impact regulations, a difficult permitting process, nimby's, and affordable housing politicians that are really big proponents of affordable housing except "they have question about this particular housing project." Here is a terrific video that everyone should watch that shows how insanely difficult it is to make affordable housing. A [this video] Sometimes what you need is less government regulation, not more. edited sentence "You don't see that in house it's not a good business." to You don

Profit is a function of materials, land, labor, margin, and very much regulatory cost. When town laws limit the height you can build, that means you have fewer units to distribute total costs across. Building 10 stories might be 70% the cost of 20 stories… so if you have double the units to spread things across, price per unit WILL be lower. Now extrapolate for things like 1. Minimum square footage 2. Parking requirements 3. "low income housing" units or other terms the local housing authority might put on top of any deal 4. Getting approval for the design (and the cycle of going back and forth to the drawing board) 5. Buying out surrounding rights holders like that old church you have to move across the street, or in SF's case the derelict gas station that is now a landmark if it means "preserving the character of the neighborhood" 6…etc Building is anything but easy or cheap: [this video] All this adds up. Public housing is important in the interim given its usually easier to get around existing regulations, but the government is one of the shittiest landlords around. The goal should be 100% private housing supply. Market based solutions will absolutely build homes for the homeless as long as the cost to build them do not exceed the value that whatever entity like the government or charity can pay. Markets deliver $8 Waffle House steak, and $60 Ruth's Chris steak. Cities/regulations only allow Ruth's Chris. You get luxury housing b/c it's too expensive to build anything else. Fo

> I read in the SF Chronicle that there’s permitted and approved projects that developers are not moving forward with, like around the new hospital off of Van Ness, due to the “tightening of capital markets” and “soaring construction costs.”[1] Not NIMBYs or government regulations. No doubt that construction costs exacerbate the problem. But there absolutely are people deliberately blocking housing construction. There was a proposition to outright block private housing construction in the Mission that got ~40% yes votes. For further examples, see the infamous case of the developer that wanted to replace a laundromat with an apartment building: [this video] > And then I dig a little deeper into the “it’s just supply and demand, dummy” narrative and find articles that document how luxury housing development actually is associated with a rise in rents for the working class.[2] Who would have thought macroeconomics is complicated? This is a fundamentally dishonest objection. New housing is "luxury" housing because the housing market is so expensive that even 1 bedroom apartments rent for $3-4K. Blocking "luxury housing" is blocking all housing, because the market is so expensive that even the smallest units are expensive enough to be considered luxury. Seriously, even 300 sq foot studios rent for 2.5K: [link] Of course "luxury housing" is correlated with rising rents. When rents rise, newly constructed units get more expensive too and get pushed into the "luxury" price bracket. This i

> SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. Pretty much. When I lived in SF I received fliers in the mail urging residents to oppose new apartment construction literally on the basis that it was too tall. If you want to see how difficult it is to build there, check out this story[1] of a laundromat owner who spent almost 5 years and $1.4 million attempting to convert to an apartment building. This is even though it was already zoned for housing, didn't have any units above it (wouldn't displace anyone) and eligible for streamlined approval since it was close to public transit. And yet... 1. [this video]

Is it the old people? It feels like it's the new, young people moving to the city that do this. When people do investigative reporting on the SF housing market, they find a bunch of people who have been spent 8 years trying to convert dilapidated buildings into an apartment complex, but have been getting blocked by environmental reports on what shadows the building will cast, or other bureaucratic nonsense. This is a famous video demonstrating that point; where even if you're rightfully zoned to do something, it can take years and years of fighting bureaucratic nonsense if you haven't bribed the right people [this video]