I think it’s a bit disingenuous to compare Austin building rates to SF and NYC. Austin is far less built up then those other two cities so there’s still a lot of easy gains to be made. Turning two single family homes into a 3 story 10 unit apartment complex is relatively cheap, has a high profit potential and multiplies the housing stock by 5. The problem comes when you run out of cheap single family houses on large lots and have to start turning the town houses and three story apartments into high rises. That is significantly more capital intensive, requires way more permitting and inspections, as it should, and has less potential for gains in housing and profit.

This isn’t to fully excuse those cities as they could definitely be building more housing. Just saying their success isn’t only due to them getting the government out of the way and letting developers build. Building 9x more housing is easier when your 9x less dense already. San Diego has no excuse though.

Yes, if rail were so good all the families and normal people who value there lives could take it, meanwhile the interstate could go turn into no speed limit chaos where all the rich people with huge egos and small dicks can crash their Porsches into each other without killing an innocent person whose just trying to get to work.

I read it as homeless people, not actually a crime but people associate the two so much that an increase in one “must” mean an increase in the other.

Sweet, I’m sure this won’t be used by AIPAC to sue all the tech companies for causing October 7th somehow like unrwa and force them to shutdown or suppress all talk on Palestine. People hearing about a genocide happening might radicalize them, maybe we could get away with allowing discussion but better safe then sorry, to the banned words list it goes.

This isn’t going to end in the tech companies hiring a team of skilled moderators who understand the nuance between passion and radical intention trying to preserve a safe space for political discussion, that costs money. This is going to end up with a dictionary of banned and suppressed words.

Judge hasn’t ruled yet, this was just them saying the case has some merit and won’t be dismissed. This will go to trial, after which the judge will make their ruling.

It’s not about the actual level or rigor of education, just the perception. Unless the employer back in China studied in a German school they probably won’t know the difference and think it’s like any other western education. It’s more about name recognition and the ivy’s are “known” as the best and that sort of association probably boosts the perception of all U.S. schools. If anything students will want to go to the school with less rigor and that’s easier if an employers not going to know the difference.

Also English remains the lingua franca and the u.s. is china’s largest trading partner. There’s probably more demand for workers who can talk to and relate to English speaking clients then Germans. so if not the u.s. they’ll probably end up going to Britain , like the girl in the article, or Australia or Canada.

Thank you for your response and for being civil. I still think development should be a negotiation between the government and developers but your argument has pulled me more to the developers side. I still don’t trust them because fundamentally developers don’t care about housing affordability, the environment or neighborhood culture but people do and the only way for those voices to be heard is through the government. The government does have it’s excesses and those should be eliminated but to say that we should always side with the developers and let them decide everything will not end well.

The case for this is induced demand which contrary to what you said is a thing. The study that the other article references doesn’t deny induced demands existence, in fact it has a chart proving that more high income people migrated to the area then the control, it just says that this doesn’t counteract the downward pressure on rent the increase in supply caused. It does blunt the effect though, and raises the question can we increase the supply without inducing demand, maybe with policies that make it so only low to middle income people can rent there. The study is also just comparing building a market rate building vs no building, more relevant to prop c though would be a market rate building vs an affordable housing building.

The study is also an average of over 100 different cities and San Francisco is not an average city. The real estate market is uniquely speculative, SF is ranked 3rd world wide behind new York and London for real estate investment, no link but this is from “pictures of a gone city” p. 211, I’d also recommend his entire chapter on the housing crisis if you want a more in depth empirical explanation of the progressive take on the housing crisis. The city also has the one of the highest income and one of the highest inequality in the country. So there’s a lot more of those rich people moving in and a lot more investors buying property to sit on as shown by the high vacancy rate, that the author of the article mentions, probably not as much as they’re hypothetical, but enough to further blunt the impact the increase in supply a new building creates.

Yes any new building will probably reduce rent in the area but that doesn’t mean we should build any building. Certain buildings are going to bring down rents faster and land is limited. Affordable housing projects are competing for the same land/empty office space as luxury housing projects and if those affordable housing projects have no advantage from the government then luxury housing projects will win every time since they can outbid. Like the author said it’s a matter of efficiency, not simply whether something will go up or down.

All of this requires a balancing act between making sure housing is built and making sure it’s the best to suit the communities needs. Falling into a dichotomy and always siding with one or the other is what the author warns against, it’s not just nimby or yimby.

Also would like to hear more of your opinion on public housing. That is probably what the author and most progressives have an issue with yimbyism. You seem to be against it because government hasn’t been building but that’s mostly due to lack of support due to past sabotaged projects. If the yimby movement backed public housing and lended more support then that would help to solve the issue.

The police aren’t afraid of the populace, and any fear they may have or that may be inspired by increased gun ownership isn’t going to manifest itself in de-escalation and them using a lighter hand, they’re cops they know in the game of escalation they have the full force of the state behind them and will win.

Unless you have some other organization that is powerful and organized enough to contend with the state cops aren’t going to back down, and at that point we’re talking about a well regulated militia and not individual ownership.

Why does this prove it worked? Because they weren’t beaten or assaulted? Most protests , even BLM ones, don’t involve police brutality.

Nothing in your drafts? If you want to give a more condensed version that’s fine too, rarely get to talk about local politics on here with someone who actually lives here, as opposed to the people outside of the bay area who think it’s a hell hole covered in shit.

This is absolutely not true. Not anywhere close. SF is drastically behind on housing at all income levels. By tens if not hundreds of thousands of units.

Could you cite something in this, because for nearly the past decade SF has beat it’s market rate housing goals by over 50% . This seems to be going down recently due to the tech recession and people leaving the city though . Even looking on Zillow there’s a thousand results for apartments under $3,000. If you’re medium to high income, based on AMI, and want to live in this city, you can find a place. If there were truly a housing shortage at all income levels and that’s causing high rents then the shortage would be alleviated and rents would be going down with the slow exodus that’s been happening in the city post pandemic and during the tech layoffs, but they haven’t. That’s a big question I have for the market fundamentalists and developers, how does the population go down, the total supply go up and rents stay the same?

Speaking anecdotally I recently moved from one of the newer high rises in mission bay and I’d guess it was half full. They were either fully vacant or as I discovered with my next door neighbor only occasionally occupied during some weekends. The building management probably knew this as they started to encourage residents to Airbnb as they tried to keep or attract more of these pied e terre types of residents. Some of my friends also live in mission bay a few blocks away and they say there building is mostly empty as well.

Here’s an article on some of the flaws of the yimby movement, I hope it’ll give you a different perspective on how to solve the housing problems facing the city.

The rest of the propositions you mentioned were pretty liberal but the office space one was lead by the right. It allowed for fast tracking transforming office space from commercial to residential, which sounds good on paper, until you realize that fast track already existed for affordable housing. All the proposition did was fast track developers plans to turn the space into non-affordable housing, which San Francisco already has plenty of, and removes the incentives to build affordable housing out of that space.

You could argue that reducing the red tape for market rate housing would help increase the supply and therefore reduce the cost for everyone, but that’s a standard right wing pro-developer argument. The left would say that SF has been building tons of market rate housing for years with no decrease in rent and that the only way to make housing affordable is to build affordable housing. You can either build it through state funding and building, like the affordable housing proposition A does, or by incentiving developers to build it, because the base incentive of the market is to build the most expensive housing possible to maximize profits.

Lenin advocated for a mixed system of capitalism under state control as a country transitions to communism called the new economic policy . Stalin abandoned this and went with full centralized state control which had it’s own problems as any Ukrainian can tell you.

A lot of Marxists, and Marx himself, subscribe to to a two stage theory of development and revolution. First there would be a revolution against the feudal system in favor of a capitalist system led by the bourgeoisie. The capitalists and workers would then industrialize and develop the means of production to a point where most necessities are mostly automated. The capitalists would then fire the unnecessary workers and use unemployment as a threat to maximally exploit the remaining workers until they revolt and bring about a communist state where the new abundance made by industrialization is shared by all.

If you believe that communism can only be achieved under the conditions of abundance that industrialization creates then you have to have some way of developing. You can do it through centralized state run planning like Mao or Stalin, which had mixed results to say the least. Or you can do it by allowing capitalism on a tight leash with a powerful state so that once abundance is achieved you can easily disposses the capitalist class like modern day China and Vietnam.

Either way the process of development tends to be a very brutal affair for most of the workers. There’s an argument to be made to let capitalism take the blame for this brutality instead of associating it with socialism as it will sully the name. You can see this in that most people associate communism with the horrors and starvation of Stalin’s 5 year plans.