I agree with this but am always skeptical of the YIMBY side of things. At least as I understand it, YIMBYism is advocating for deregulated real estate development markets? So maybe my understanding of it is skewed, but I can't really see real estate developers making cheap housing a priority in an expensive neighborhood when they could profit from building more expensive housing. Especially now that housing can be bought as an investment and held but not used. I just think "market based solutions" aren't going to fix homelessness. Good ole fashioned public housing might though, real public housing, not projects owned by private corporations and subsidized by tax dollars.
This letter isn't really talking about YIMBYism so I'm probably just assuming any anti-NIMBY writing is pro-YIMBY which is probably inaccurate. I do see a lot of YIMBYism on HN so perhaps someone can set me straight on it.
I believe in the theory that building "luxury" housing for high income workers frees up rental space for those with lower incomes.
This is anecdotal but personally I know a lot of millennials who place a lot of weight on living downtown (I'm one of them). A few years ago -- prior to the completion of a variety of luxury apartments, these folks were renting out rooms in homes, or staying in more moderately priced apartments.
Once more rooms opened up that a had a gym, a nice rooftop area, close access to Whole Foods, and other amenities, they moved. I even know of a very wealthy couple that lived in a relatively poor neighborhood while they waited for their condo complex to finish completion so that they could move in. This couple could easily pay the monthly rent with half of one persons paycheck.
I think Boston showed that building luxury housing didn't lead to gentrification growth but instead concentrated it to the new housing. Granted it is one data point essentially but it makes some sense - that would take up higher end demand although some gentrification resulted from "all they could afford" and then growing successful.
In San Francisco public housing projects are funded from fees on new development. In 2016, voters approved Prop C which increased the affordable housing requirements to 30% of the total units for a new project. A combination of factors -- rising construction costs, high land value, big fees (such as Prop C), onerous approval process, etc has led to the number of new construction permits being applied for dropping significantly.
That decrease has led to the city only getting funding for about 240 units of affordable housing in 2018 - 2019, whereas from 2014 - 2016 the city produced 500 units of public housing per year. [https://www.spur.org/news/2018-11-08/how-has-san-francisco-r...]
This is a long way of saying that the market affects everything. Even if we decide to build public housing that housing is not immune from market effects like expensive land and big construction costs. If it's more difficult, and therefore more expensive, to build market rate housing then it's more difficult and more expensive to build public housing.
For example, in the Mission no new affordable housing has been built in, according to Supervisor Ronen, close to 10 years. There are 7 projects in the pipeline, but none have broken ground [https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/24/17276152/affordable-housing-...].
Long approval processes and constantly increasing construction costs are partly to blame.
City planning requires proportions, but cities keep building more office space without building the residential space for those workers to live in. For example, San Francisco has added over 170,000 new jobs since 2010 and has a stretch goal to build 5000 homes each year. It just doesn't add up.
So what am I to do? I'm the white tech worker living in a building with predominantly lower income families. If developers were allowed to build more condos I'd probably be living in one of them.
Also, consider what "luxury" means in this context. They're expensive because they're expensive to build and superficially nicer than older things. Once there's enough of them and some newer ones down the street they won't be "luxury" any more.
> advocating for deregulated real estate development markets
Not blindly deregulating, though. The YIMBY coalition near me includes a lot of socialists. It's entirely possible to build the needed housing without displacing vulnerable communities.
There was an article (I believe on Noahpinion?) a while ago about how they don’t need to build cheap housing, if they built enough expensive housing to soak up all the tech workers, the price of everything else would drop enough that poor people would have plenty of places to live.
I don’t know if that would work, but it’s a theory...
It really isn’t. It comes down to the fact that if you’re a high-paid tech worker you can outbid basically anyone else for your rent. If an area doesn’t build housing for tech workers and other such high-paid young people, you force them into the existing apartments, forcing out anyone who was living there previously.
It’s less “trickle down economics” and more “build housing for me or I will outbid you for your own apartment”.
Price is determined by both the characteristics of the unit and the characteristics of the market. This is why units that are not at all luxurious by national standards can rent for $3500 in San Francisco, and why luxury high-rise apartments can rent for $1800 in Chicago.
It’s true that developers target the top of the market. The point is that, when they do it at scale, supply/demand balance brings the top of the market a lot lower. Possibly even lower than the bottom of the market in SF today. And they will do it at scale, unlike public housing.
The market has successfully provided nearly every home that exists in every affordable market today.
You’re probably right that it won’t solve homelessness, because many homeless people would not be able to hold a job and pay rent at any price level.
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"
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. Fortunately even new luxury stock is good, as it frees up formerly luxury housing stock and stabilizes pricing for less-nice housing elsewhere.
Been witnessing this a lot in my city. Developers talking a big game about deregulation and additional supply being the only way to drive prices down, then building only "luxury" condos that are snapped up by speculators and prices everyone else out.
Shifting the supply curve is the only way to drive the price down if the demand curve cannot be shifted. If prices are not falling, that simply means the supply curve hasn't shifted far enough yet, hence more supply is needed.
Edit: At the heart of the issue is whether or not society believes if the place someone lives should be distributed via supply and demand. Historically, the overarching theme has been might makes right, either via brute force or some proxy such as money, with a few localized instances of seniority or luck dictating the right, such as with rent controls and housing lotteries.
another way to look at this is that the number of people who need housing is higher than (far to the right of) the current market clearing price point (where the supply and demand curves currently cross).
building more at the high end shifts the whole supply curve down, not just the portion at the high end (this is because markets are defined by the interchangeability of the goods therein--i.e., fungibility). however, the rate of building is far too low to even meet the rising demand, much less to supply housing to everyone, so prices continue to rise.
the demand curve, which moves independent of the supply curve, has shifted up with the flood of high-salary developers into the market, so the new equilibrium price is still high and far to the left of the number of people needing housing.
all of those people between the market clearing price point and total needing housing are homeless (not all are on the streets however).
to get to the point where we can house everyone, we can shift the demand curve up with higher wages (for the bottom 80%). the supply curve shifts up (prices are higher) with high rents (e.g., land prices), zoning/other regulations, and nimbyism. we need to improve all of these things to supply enough housing for everyone.
You might want to look into how things have played out in Seattle, where there was a recent housing construction boom. The tl;dr is that prices have come down significantly.
They also never went as high as San Francisco where construction was more restricted. How the amount of residential construction compares to the amount of office construction also matters.
I grew up in Rainier Valley and Beacon Hill. Your tl;dr omits an important point: the city sold development rights to gentrify the area. Poor residents were relocated to outlying areas such as Skyway, which is significantly underdeveloped in term of infrastructure and social services. The housing projects were replaced by "mixed-income" neighborhoods; where a small portion of the homes were reserved for low-income residents and the remainder were sold at market value. The area, once diverse and full of immigrant/refugee communities, is now whiter, richer, and the NIMBY attitude is growing. Prices have come down a little recently, but enough to counter this displacement.
This letter isn't really talking about YIMBYism so I'm probably just assuming any anti-NIMBY writing is pro-YIMBY which is probably inaccurate. I do see a lot of YIMBYism on HN so perhaps someone can set me straight on it.