> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)
People keep saying this, but it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics. The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live. That's such a huge stretch, especially in those areas you mentioned, with median home prices over a million dollars, with rental prices to match.
SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019. That is here the problem to solve: make housing for 5190 people. For reference, the largest shelter in SF --MSC-- houses 340 people. So you "just" need to build the largest shelter again -- 15 times. Basically, take 4-6 city blocks and dedicate them entirely to housing, is what this amounts to.
Trickle down economics is a Republican justification for cutting taxes for the rich. Building new homes under Prop 13 increases the taxes paid by rich people.
Between 2015 and 2019 SF built 19,000 new homes and added 60,000 new jobs. In what world does that not drive up prices? This obsession with developer profits is convenient rhetoric to justify a hunger games like housing market.
Even SRO rooms were going for $1,200 pre-pandemic. This is how struggling people become homeless. Houston doesn't have less homeless because Texas has a better safety net. It's because housing is cheaper.
Here's a simple fact: we need to have enough homes for everyone that works here, retired in place, and that's growing up here. We do not have that right now. Luckily building large residential buildings is something humanity has known how to do for the last 100 years. We "just" need the political will to do it.
"Trickle-down economics" is not a well-defined term.
If all you're doing is giving money to Zuckerberg so he can buy more yachts and mansions, that money is not going to end up in the hands of regular people, and now he's bidding against them for scarce real estate.
If you give tax cuts to small business owners so they have more money to expand their businesses and make it easier to go into competition with incumbents so that consumers have more choices and competition drives down consume prices, that money is going to end up in the pockets of regular people.
> SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019.
In areas with a massive housing shortage, alleviating it would require building a massive amount of housing. So... build a massive amount of housing. There is no law against it, once you get rid of the law against it.
> The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live
Its obviously not true. Its a working theory - the more housing available, the lower the cost - is true. But SF has such a high demand you can probably double housing in SF and demand would not satiate. That said, seattle has built tons of housing, and stalled some of the exploding costs of housing.
There is probably no good solution to SF's issue - its so out of hand and so expensive that even if you doubled the city you wouldn't solve the issue. Like you said - 6 blocks just to homeless shelters is a lot (doable, but a lot). Especially for a city so geographically constrained.
It's the ratio of homes to jobs. "How many homes does SF need?" is hard because it's a moving target as the city permits new office construction.
I ballparked the housing gap a while back by comparing the ratio of employment/residents with 30 years ago and came up with ~80,000 missing homes. That's in a city of 400,000 homes right now.
An imperfect measure for sure, but I think affordability is achievable if we stop prohibiting the solutions.
> And just like building bigger highways induces demand so will building more shelters in SF.
"Induced demand" is a fallacy. The demand isn't induced, it was there the whole time and being suppressed by high prices (or, in case of highways, congestion). If there is very high demand, the amount of supply needed to satisfy it is equally high, but that is by no means the same as being infinite and impossible to do.
There are also ways to satisfy the demand for "highways" other than building more highways. Like building more housing closer to where jobs are so people don't have to drive such long distances.
Often these alternatives are better, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes your problem is actually that your highway doesn't have enough lanes. This isn't a question you can answer in the general case without looking at the specifics.
> Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US
Because that's where a lot of the homeless are because they can't afford the price of housing there. There are literally people in San Francisco who are homeless despite having a full-time job.
Also, it's not "housing for the homeless," it's just housing. Build enough and the price comes down. Then people can afford it instead of being homeless. There is obviously also a benefit to be had for the person who isn't homeless but is spending 60% of their income on an apartment the size of a parking space.
Induced demand for housing is a fallacy. There's only a very very small range of living space that people want.
Induced demand for highways definitely is not a fallacy. People can go from needing zero highway miles a day, up to 60-90 highway miles a day, depending on where they live. This sort of range is an order of magnitude higher than what could potentially be induced by having access to, say, cheaper construction methods.
In fact, for housing, the opposite seems to occur. When there are more people in an area, people tend to take up less individual space. It's only when people live far away from anything that they seems to expand to 1000+ square feet/person.
You’ve got cause and effect backwards. More people in an area take up less space because it’s more expensive and vice versa when living far away.
And of course you can induce demand with housing. If suddenly you could find $1,000/month 1 bed apartments in SF how many people you think would move there?
You're conflating pent up demand with induced demand. People want housing in SF because they work here. The jobs are the cause. In other words, office construction in a hot economy creates demand for housing.
It is a fallacy. The demand is there either way. It's just a regular supply and demand curve, where there is more demand at a lower price (and "price" includes the time cost of sitting in traffic congestion).
The heart of the fallacy is the assumption that the demand is infinite and it's impossible to ever satisfy it. It's not. It's just non-linear.
> And we’re not building housing here we’re building shelters.
Shelters are housing. But also, why aren't we building housing? Build a lot more housing and fewer people will be homeless or need "shelters" because housing will cost less.
People keep saying this, but it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics. The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live. That's such a huge stretch, especially in those areas you mentioned, with median home prices over a million dollars, with rental prices to match.
SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019. That is here the problem to solve: make housing for 5190 people. For reference, the largest shelter in SF --MSC-- houses 340 people. So you "just" need to build the largest shelter again -- 15 times. Basically, take 4-6 city blocks and dedicate them entirely to housing, is what this amounts to.
https://svdp-sf.org/what-we-do/msc-shelter/