If building continues at the clip it has for the past 10 years, what do you think is going to happen to the SF real estate market? What I think will happen is that it will be owned almost entirely by wealthy people.
It's already owned entirely by wealthy people. That ship sailed a long time ago. Ripping down tenements and replacing them with luxury condos doesn't do anything to solve that problem.
If you ask me, the best we can do now is improve regional transit to make SF look more like Manhattan, and fight to hold on to whatever low-income property remains on the SF peninsula in the meantime.
You keep arguing against allowing construction because you don't see it as actually lowering housing prices. I don't think adding, say, 1000 units of affordable housing will lower housing prices in SF, but I don't see a reason to be politically opposed to such a proposal. Isn't the fact that it will ease the pressure on continue housing price increases reason enough to allow more development?
Point to the place where I argue against allowing construction.
I'm making a more nuanced point: indiscriminate high-end construction doesn't help, and that's what you get in SF without the kind of planning that people in this debate like to call "NIMBYism".
I'd personally love it if someone were to build 1000 units of affordable housing. The thing is, nobody is gonna do that unless they're forced to do it -- in this town, it takes years of fighting to get a fraction of that number built (for example: NEMA phase II had 52 'affordable' units built, out of a total of 489. Those other 437 units have some of the highest rents in San Francisco.)
So, if no one wants to do it, then where does this idea come from that it's a good idea? What's wrong with allowing the market to determine what kind of housing is going to be built? I'm skeptical about this whole Soviet Russia style concept where somehow the government ought to be involved in building a bunch of crappy, cheap, high-density apartment buildings.
I'm comfortable with the idea that the market will figure out the right amount of housing, and the right price for housing. I'm not saying that there should be no zoning laws, but within whatever zoning laws you have, why not allow it to be a free market? The forces of supply and demand do a good job shaping what supply is provided. Zoning itself may be a big part of the problem as well:
"The artificial upward pressure that zoning places on house prices—primarily by functioning as a supply constraint—also may undermine the market forces that would otherwise determine how much housing to build, where to build, and what type to build, leading to a mismatch between the types of housing that households want, what they can afford, and what is available to buy or rent" ( Jason Furman, Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers)
Perhaps we'd all be better off leaving much more of land use to the market as well.
Actually, if you could build 1000 units of really high end housing in place of, say, 100 units of average, low-density housing, it would still help, because it lessens the pressure on some of the existing housing.
