Don’t build affordable housing; build expensive housing—that’s what San Franciscans want. Build 300,000 expensive units in areas where upper-middle-class citizens like to live: the Marina, Pacific Heights, Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, Twin Peaks, Noe Valley, and the Sunset and Richmond districts.
Build 10-story apartment buildings on Geary Boulevard from Union Square to Ocean Beach, with rapid transit. Build 10-story condos along Fulton and Lincoln from Arguello to 48t h Avenue; rename those streets Golden Gate Park North, Golden Gate Park South.
Add Judah and Taraval (with rapid transit), and Van Ness Avenue, possibly Lombard Street from Van Ness to the Presidio. New apartments at Mission Bay are not where San Franciscans want to live. Such apartments are pieds-à-terre (secondary residences) and short-term housing for employees at Google, Salesforce, and UCSF Medical.
The building trades will be ecstatic. Not only because they would have work, but because, once again, they would be employed using their skills to produce a beautiful product.
As it is now, to build affordable housing, the city seeks ways to lower construction costs by replacing architecture with featureless tiny windows cut into pre-fabricated siding, inexpensive kitchens and baths, small untrimmed rooms, and synthetic floors.
Then the city looks to subsidize construction by increasing property taxes, business taxes, and consumption taxes and cutting city services.
Look what developers of affordable housing have produced—Bridge Housing, for example. Compared to San Francisco’s iconic Victorians, they’re ugly housing projects.
Example: the prime vacant lot at the corner of Fell and Stanyan streets. It sold to the highest bidder. To compensate for overpaying and for the difficulty in obtaining building permits in San Francisco (more protracted than obtaining a permit in Egypt or India), the developer built five poorly designed inexpensive eyesores. In relation to the beautiful 1920s housing next to that property along the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, it’s a crime against the city.
What about rent control? Rent control exists because of supply control. With 300,000 new units, supply would match demand and the price would fall.
But rent control is irrelevant. It’s a symptom of the deeper problem: supply control. Tenants benefit in the short run with below-market rents (although they’re trapped in their apartments, which, after 20 years, they hate but can’t afford to leave). Landlords benefit in the long run. First, tenants eventually leave; second, when demand far exceeds supply (the very reason for rent control), the price of housing increases more than the landlord’s total loss of rent. Investment tip: purchase real estate in rent-controlled cities. The rate of return is higher than for any other long-term investment.
A downside to rent control is that it encourages cities to control property even further—redistribute from landlord to tenant—by telling tenants to stay in place until age 55, because San Francisco rent control forbids the eviction of seniors for any reason, except nonpayment of rent. With tenants protected for life, neither landlords nor their families (parents or children) can occupy those units. With modern health care, with 55 no longer considered a senior citizen, owners may never get their property back.
Senior citizen tenants 55 and older now no longer need to save for retirement; they virtually own their apartments. They can just place their savings in U.S. Treasuries earning 5 percent interest per annum. Coupled with their Social Security stipend, their next 40 years are fully paid for. (Sly tenants will rent their apartments to subtenants at two to three times what they’re paying. Illegal, but San Francisco tenant attorneys are good at showing tenants how to do it.)
What would Ayn Rand or Thomas Jefferson say about this? There’s not one word in rent control law that acknowledges an American’s inalienable right to property, that government has no right to confiscate private property without paying for it. Eminent Domain, 5th Amendment. Why do progressives believe expediency outweighs principle, that the United States has “progressed” from the 5th Amendment?
Example: forbid a single mother with three children, no income, and nowhere to go, from being evicted, and the owner of that house—an 80-year-old woman who also raised three children without a husband yet saved every penny in order that she not be without a home when she retired, who counts on the rent from her investment to pay the cost of her retirement home—will herself be evicted.
There is an expression in law: hard cases make bad law.
