California requires winning a plebiscite to build public housing. This is not optional.
When it does manage to build public housing, SF spends approximately a million dollars a unit to do so. That's purely to get a habitable unit. It includes none of the maintenance costs, which will increase over time, or the social services required to make public housing work as intended.
With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does.
Incidentally, the Supes only actually get to control about $3.5bn of that. So now we're reduced to 3,500 units a year... in a city where population growth averages 11,000 people a year. And we still haven't talked about social services, maintenance, or how allocation of what will never be enough public housing units will work.
I think these numbers lay clear that public housing is unlikely to solve SF's housing woes. Don't hesitate to ask if anything is unclear!
>With that in mind, giving literally 100% of San Francisco's budget to building public housing could produce 12,000 units. That would mean shutting down Zuckerberg General Hospital, street cleaning, street repaving, SFO, schools, and anything else SF does.
You are skipping over the part where the government can change the relevant laws that make public housing expensive. Public housing also doesn't have to be built by the government directly so if private construction firms can do it cheaper the government can let them build the housing.
I believe that that's such a good idea that SF already agrees with you, has for years, and put it into practice long ago. The people who labor on public housing construction projects in SF are rarely city employees directly and generally employees of construction companies.
The items that make this expensive have to do with the standards that must be met, zoning and approval processes, and so on. These are things that a private construction firm, under contract with SF, does not find easier or cheaper.
Personally, I like the idea of SF maybe getting in the way of housing construction a bit less. But I also understand that voters seem to like the system as it is. Plus, only some of these laws are readily changed by SF - the plebiscite for public housing law is a state prop from the 70s. Many of the other requirements are also propositions at either state or local levels.
As you say, it's completely true that the government can change the relevant laws. It's just perhaps more subtle than that, as there are multiple levels of government involved and some of the relevant laws are quite challenging to change.
I'm honestly not sure what effective policy kneecapped by developers you're talking about. Can you help me understand? I don't think any of the things I mentioned were set up or advanced by developers to kneecap effective policies, but I'd love to learn more!
If anything, I would naively expect most of the relevant policies here to be things property developers would be quite strongly against. Perhaps you can enlighten me with critical factors I've overlooked?
The hospital administrators insisted. He made what was clearly a mistake in letting them use his name after giving $70 million to the hospital his wife did her residency at.
Benioff Hospital would be unaffected, but only because it's in no way run by SF.
Public housing only makes rents go down on market-based properties when it can offer serious competition to those market-based properties, which means lots of new public housing. (Something that I fully support, and something that is actively being worked on by some groups in California, just not any of the supposed "tenant" groups that never support new housing.)
Even in Red Vienna or Singapore, there are still market-rate housing! And the only way they keep the market rate housing low is by having enough housing. Singapore, in particluar, is really good at building tons of public housing. And their policies would horrify all the preservationist fake-progressives in SF, because they just build build build, and do it at heights greater than three stories. And Vienna's public housing would similarly horrify the fake progressives in SF that stop all new housing.
Public housing is great, but if you're looking to see it happen in SF, look to the Mods, not the Progs.
To paraphrase, poorly, the story of Color of Law by Richard Rothstein:
The housing projects in the US were implemented in extremely racist ways: segregation, then don't maintain the public housing at all. Public housing for white people in the 1930s was great, then with the red scare, the government decided that subsidizing home ownership would prevent the spread of socialism in the US. It was quite effective, but access to cheap home loans and cheap new developments was racially segregated: only new developments that would be largely white would get the FHA-subsidizided home loans. This is the well-documented "red lining."
This led to the economic segregation where the housing projects were only for Black people, were in areas without access to good schools or jobs. It's no wonder the housing projects failed, because they were largely doomed to failure.
