by scoofy | 2025-06-20 22:36:28+00:00
I appreciate the response.

Also in good faith. My entire point is that housing is an ecosystem. To say that "homelessness" is somehow independent of this housing ecosystem is to focus on the blemish, not the disease.

If we literally build enough houses to house the current homeless people and did nothing else, in a few years time we would have more homeless people to house.

>Somehow though the luxury homes that were promised are always built, but if anything fails to materialize it's the affordable housing that was promised--the very thing the high-end homes were supposed to finance.

I mean, this is an easy thing to say, but is a very complicated in actuality, and I go to the meetings in SF and I know exactly what is happening.

The "luxury homes", really, mostly just market-rate homes (if you want real luxury homes in San Francisco, go to Pacific Heights where you will bay $10M, not $1.5M), they are allowed to be built, and the vast majority of the do have deed restricted "affordable" homes attached, these are quickly distributed via lottery. However, one of the reason why these "luxury" homes are so expensive as that the costs of those deed restricted homes must be included in the market rate homes. This is just how it's done in CA.

The public housing in SF is constantly plagued by both funding problems and political problems. The funding problems are mainly that (1) for the reasons in Ezra Klein's Abundance, since they are public projects, the cost at least twice as much to build as private developments, and (2) the cities promising these homes have not secured funding when the promises are made, and finally (3) while financing is being secured, the spaces get put to alternative use that local residence value and then when it comes time to actually build the housing, it is not politically viable because they residents will lose the fun thing they have had since the project started.

I feel I don't need to explain point (1) because Ezra Klein literally just wrote a book about it.

Point (2) is just a regular part of politics, and in SF it's an insane political position, where the Progressive candidates both promise housing without securing financing and then blame Moderate politicians (especially at the state level) for not carving out state funding for SF specific projects. This is just good politics when you're looking for a villain, because you get to win both with the promises, and the broken promises. It's also the reason I kick and scream so much about how actual luxury housing is extremely effective at bringing in new revenues for public housing because even with insane laws like Prop 13 that are slowly starving our cities of tax revenue, building new, dense high cost housing dramatically increases revenues that can be used to develop public housing that can otherwise not be built. Talk is cheap, tying new property tax revenue to public housing development actually gets things done.

Point (3) refers to the iconic failure that is San Francisco's "Biergarten" housing site. The city delayed development of the housing site, and leased the land for alternative use, in this case, the Biergarten outdoor bar was started and became successful. Fifteen years later there is no housing and the bar is still there. Why? Because closing the bar to build housing, public or otherwise, is too politically unpopular now because while the housing is needed, it is effectively a net loss for existing residents. I specifically fought against a similar proposal for 730 Stanyan public housing project at neighborhood meetings where residents were kicking and screaming that we should put the land to "good use" while the development stalled, specifically because the site was promised for housing without any financing in place. Thankfully the proposals were rejected, and the public housing project will soon be open to the public.

I'm extremely passionate about housing policy. Housing should be approaching the cost of production of housing, like in Vienna. Instead, because we treat housing as a kind of piecemeal project where the whole goal is to solve some specific need, we miss the point entirely. We should be building as much housing as is practically possible, specifically to drive the cost of housing as close to the cost of production. We can have aesthetic concerns here, but folks who want low density should not be rent-seeking in major cities. That's exactly what suburban environments are there to serve. If we care about the welfare of our middle-class, lower-classes, and homeless, we need to prioritize every aspect of the housing ecosystem, and the means we must build luxury housing to fund public housing. We should be approving every single luxury housing project.

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Biergarten project background (from 2015!): https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing-crisis-pits-hayes-va...

Similar proposal from HANC for 730 Stanyan: https://www.hanc-sf.org/meetings/24-home/623-hanc-continues-...