This has been something I have struggled to grapple with as someone who spends a lot of time in far left spaces as well as urban planning spaces. Hopefully you guys can correct me if I'm being a lib or even worse, a neolib.
On one hand one I love cities and one of the things I love is how dynamic they are. Each building and street tells a story about the city and the people that live there and how they have changed over time. I don't think we can stop that process from happening and since I believe cities to be our best chance to fight climate change they must change. We need more housing, more transit, and we need to invest in our cities to make them better places to live for everyone. I believe that means making it easier to build more housing. You might even call me a YIMBY. That means there is probably going to be a lot more a lot more 5 story buildings with a coffee shops on the first floor, bike lanes, and inevitably breweries, but what is the alternative? If we don't build those yuppie apartments then yuppies will just move into existing apartments which will accelerate displacement. If we don't invest in the most disinvested parts of the city we will just recreate places like the south side of Chicago or Detroit that essentially had no investment in generations and creates extreme segregation. That's not good for anyone.
Of course if I were dictator for a day I would just make all housing public but since I can't do that I think we have no option but to embrace the YIMBY strategy while simultaneously fighting for realistic housing reforms to protect current residents, like rent control, with the long term goal of decommodifing housing. I live in Minneapolis and I'm involved in a few Socialist/Left orgs and I can't believe there are people that were against the plan to get rid of single family zoning in Minneapolis because it was supposedly a handout to developers. Single family zoning is one of the most reactionary policies in America that entrenches a white petite bourgeoisie, and socialists are opposing eliminating it? People just seem to hate developers more than solving actual complex problems.
The real problem isn't gentrification, but capitalism. As long as housing and land, the things we all require to live, are commodities cities with opportunities will always be expensive because demand to be there will always outpace supply of land and housing. I just feel like so much of the gentrification discussion on the left is purely reactionary and doesn't have any actual solutions that could actually help people in our lifetime.
Am I just a lib?
That article only dates back to "the 2010s". I can't speak about SF during a massive silicon valley boom, but for the US on the whole production has outpaced population growth since the 1950s as have most major metro area. As well, SF still has 5 vacant units per person. So again, these units did not need to be built as the housing supply already existed.
The article is also slightly disingenuous as California (and most measures of housing) use metro areas to break down housing froth instead of just cities.
SF has added vastly more jobs than housing, something north of 6x. Each one of those jobs represents someone who would want to live in or near the city. The construction in the city has not kept pace with this.
Instead, the construction is pushed further and further out, destroying more and more of the beautiful California countryside, and requiring their residents to drive. All the while over 2/3rds of the city is comprised of single family homes that legally cannot even be developed by their owners into multi-family housing.
Any source?
I can get it for you on my computer in the morning. I don't have it bookmarked on my phone.
So I read over our conversation again and I think we were just talking past each other or I was just arguing like an idiot so I want to try to express myself a little better.
Lets take your original point of 3x-5x vacant homes to homeless in San Fransisco.
According to Google there are 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco which means which means 40,000 vacant housing units in the best case scenario and I will be even more generous and assume every vacant home was immediately livable. If we homed every homeless person we would have 32,000 vacant homes. San Francisco gained about 8,500 residents per year since 2010 according to Wikipedia numbers which means if we are assuming average US household size we would literally be full in a little over 9 years. This is assuming all 40,000 vacant homes are in livable condition which I bet is an extremely generous. What about people who want to move within the city? Comparing homeless numbers to vacant homes numbers only makes sense if people never move into a city or never move within a city. You need a certain number of vacant homes.
He mentioned that housing supply typically outpaces demand. So all the vacant houses wouldn't fill up in 9 years, because although 32k might fill up you'll have another 40k houses built in that time (assuming their stat is accurate).
So if you've got 5x more vacant houses than people in need of housing, and the rate of houses being built is higher than the rate of population increase, then theres no apparent reason why we need to increase housing development.
If at this rate of housing development, the problem of high rents still persists, then it implies that it's not just a problem of supply and demand. Rents won't necessarily decrease if we increase the supply of houses.
Sorry if you felt like I was talking past you. That was not my intention at all. I think @boboblaw largely covered what I would respond to this question, but I feel like it might be helpful to try and summarize my main points as it relates to this discussion as well as try and explain myself better.
I'm not saying we never need to build another housing unit in the United States ever again. I agree with the larger original point you are making, however, I just believe that you are slightly off on the aspect of housing following typical supply/demand methods. It is an incredibly common misconception as the ideology (:zizek:) is incredibly pervasive across both mainstream media and the public policy sphere. Most of my academic work for a degree I have was on housing policy in the United States and it hasn't been until probably the last 5-10 years that there has been anything actually testing that notion that the solution is just to build more.
As noted with the vacant units across the country (especially as housing units are gobbled up by larger companies who can write off certain lost expenses) there are more than enough units for each person. However, keeping some vacant until a higher price is met can be more profitable for companies to do than just selling/renting at the first available offer. This artificial scarcity coupled with the necessity of having a house to live enables ownership prices and rental prices (at least until COVID) increase continually.
It is reasonable to think that more development will just continue to create more vacant units. It doesn't seem like a problem we can build ourselves out of, BUT I do agree with you that single-family-zoning (and exclusionary zoning in general) should be done away with. In my opinion, though, the priority should be getting people into homes, stabilizing affordability of the units for everyone, and then development of density in urban areas. Not that they can't happen concurrently, just development shouldn't lead the solution.
I think we are talking past each other because I think we might actually agree with each other except maybe a few minor points. I'm still a little skeptical of the vacant home thing as a viable strategy but I think we agree that this is a complicated issue that requires multiple fronts.
We do mostly agree I have been trying to get that across somewhat. I just strongly disagree on development as a solution.
I think something like a vacancy taxes would be incredibly effective, because it creates a negative externality for companies which hold onto vacant units in hopes of higher rents. Creates ones for developers and holding companies for asking too high a price on housing they sell. Also, for people who own multiple homes it becomes more expensive.
Look forward to it