Housing prices would seem to disagree with you given that waving a magic wand to create 10s or 100s of thousands of housing units in SF (and transit, etc. infrastructure to support them) isn't going to happen in less than decades even if the residents wanted it. Obviously, the technology exists to remake SF into a much denser city. But that's a different city.
This is a hodgepodge of several different arguments. You should pick one and flesh it out.
Do you mean to say:
1. That it's impossible to add 10,000 new housing units per year? That seems pretty unlikely.
2. If SF added 10,000 new housing units per year, housing prices wouldn't decline? Why not?
3. The politics of SF rule out the construction of 10,000 additional housing units per year? I agree, but think that needs to change; that's my whole argument.
4. That both politics and logistics would enable SF to add 10,000 additional new housing units per year, but that shouldn't happen because it would change the character of the city? That's an intellectually coherent argument, but one that I think a lot of people don't find compelling; I think if you're coming from a place of "save San Francisco's status as a postcard city", you should be up-front about that, rather than pretending that your argument is that fixing SF housing is somehow impossible.
At this point, #2 almost certainly won't help, but merely draw population from parasitical cities where jobs far exceed housing (mountain view, palo alto, menlo park, etc.) In this way, housing activists in SF are right to fight private buses: they enable companies located on the peninsula to dump their housing problem on SF.
I also think this is part of the reason people in SF (rationally, in a purely self-interested sense) oppose building: the amount of increased housing on offer won't help them. So they bear the costs of living in a construction zone with zero benefits.
Building 200k homes over the next 5 years would help, but no-one is in any way contemplating that. And even beyond the housing fight itself, the infrastructure here can't handle it.
Totally agree with your comments about the Bay Area screwing over people with Prop 13. I'm just amazed at how much better quality of life you get on the east coast vs the Bay Area- way more bang for the buck and also easier commutes and better public transit.
My friends who live in NYC metro area all have gorgeous estately 4bedroom 5 bathroom houses for between 500-700k in nice little commuter towns close to NYC like Rye and Stanford with simple commutes to NYC on the trains.
Whereas we make more than they do we are stuck scraping together 1.4 million for an ugly crack shack in redwood city. Seriously my wife and I looked at this piece of crap last weekend:
Not only was it a mold filled fucking dump, it was located in the hood with no public transit nearby. meanwhile my friends who work in NYC are able to get something gorgeous like this for way less $$ and can walk to downtown and a train station:
or even if you want to get more expensive, this is still cheaper than the Redwood City dump, you get two stories, a deck and giant yard and you are right next to MetroNorth:
Multiplying the growth of new housing units in SF by some low integer multiple won't decrease the cost of housing in SF? Can you go into more detail about the logic there?
The infrastructure in San Francisco (you mean, I assume, the roads and the public transit system) are abysmal, but they've been that way for a long time. It's possible that the Muni has actually improved since the second dot-com boom; when I lived there, it was a joke.
Cities up and down the peninsula -- MV, PA, etc -- have far more jobs than housing supply and that ratio continues to grow. viz MV approving 3+ million square feet of office space for linkedin, palantir, and google -- and then maybe, possibly, potentially authorizing up to 5k homes. Maybe. It's being discussed. So whenever SF builds housing, some goes to people from SF, and a lot of it goes to people previously renting in very supply constrained markets on the peninsula. Because of the foreign-to-sf buyers, and because new condos are generally of higher quality than much of sf's existing housing stock, and because these new buildings are cheaper than available houses on the peninsula, building more increases demand by bringing in such exogenous buyers.
Much of the increase in supply is in condos costing $1.2k +/ft2, ie more than $1mm, which exacerbates the above effects. They also don't help for people who can't afford to spend the roughly $5.5k or so that a $1mm property costs (after $200k downpayment, inclusive of tax and hoa fees.)
If you want to bring down house prices in sf, you have to build enough to satisfy pent-up demand from the peninsula, and outrun continued population movement from the whole US into SF. Or force the peninsula to build housing.
5k or 10k homes isn't going to to outrun demand, particularly after years of building virtually no housing in sf.
The "foreign to SF buyers" (most people who have lived in SF in the past 30 years were probably at some point "foreign to SF") are buying up leases whether SF makes more of them or not. How does increasing the supply of leases do anything but lower prices?
As I wrote: by drawing new buyers from the peninsula via two obvious mechanisms: increased availability, and increased quality/dollar. Where current residents came from is irrelevant to my argument. I don't understand where you get this faith that small amounts of construction magically decrease prices. Even micro-econ supply/demand curves don't say that, because of the aforementioned exogenous purchasers.
1.) Clearly not. Given the political will, it's technically possible (modulo earthquake safety) to make SF arbitrarily dense.
2.) Unclear. It's fairly well-established that building more roads leads to more traffic, for example. So building more housing--up to a point, of course--may just lead to that much greater a population.
3/4.) Politics (i.e. the preference of voters) do seem to rule out a mass increase in housing units and associated infrastructure. I don't have any opinion on what SF should or shouldn't do. I don't live there, don't particularly want to live there, and think the character of SF is a matter primarily for the existing residents.
I wasn't suggesting that I had four different rebuttals to your comment. I was saying that I didn't understand your comment because it seemed to hop from one argument to another, sometimes within the same sentence.
(3) and (4) aren't the same argument.
Argument (3) concedes that increasing housing supply in SF is a good thing, but that it can't happen because of political obstinacy. If you believe this, you're on the same page as I am, and we don't have much to debate.
Argument (4) suggests instead that increasing the housing supply of SF is a bad thing, because it's more important to retain the character of San Francisco than it is to accommodate people who want to live there.
There may be some argument (5) that I missed as well.
We remain in a place where I still don't understand your objection to my argument that San Francisco should resolve its housing problems by drastically increasing the supply of housing units.
Where we differ and where I was probably unclear is that I'm not arguing either for more housing or against more housing. I don't think that there is generally a good state or a bad state that exists independently of the desires of the voters of SF. So I don't think increased housing supply in SF will likely happen to any great degree because of "political obstinacy" but I don't have an opinion on whether that's a positive thing or a negative one. If I wanted to move there, I'd probably think it was a bad thing but would also acknowledge, it's not really my call.
Put another way, I don't consider growth to be a universal positive. I would certainly tend to vote against zoning changes that created more development in my semi-rural town.
