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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (781280)	4/24/2014 1:41:20 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578931

Over the past 10 years, San Francisco's population has grown by 75,000 people. Over the same time period, our city produced 17,000 units of housing. You do the math: Over the next 25 years, San Francisco is projected to add another 150,000 residents. If we continue to produce housing at the same anemic rate, $3,000 rents will begin to look cheap. This disconnect - saying that we need more housing while arbitrarily finding reasons to kill or water down projects that provide that housing - is having profound effects on our city and its beautiful diversity, economic and otherwise. This is an argument that has been made extensively up and down the West Coast and has only minor validity. The most desirable part of the WC is the land west of the mts.......the Sierra Nevadas in CA, the Cascades in OR and WA state. Around the cities on the WC most of that land is gone. The most beautiful city on the WC and probably the country is SF. As I have pointed out previously, SF is water locked on three sides and built on hills. There is little if any vacant land. The amount of land for WC cities is mostly finite. And its the growing cost of the land that is making housing so expensive in the cities of the WC. So then, to counteract this 'problem'......the growing cost of land caused by scarcity........SF could build 20K units this year but long before the final unit is built, lenders would stop lending. Why? Because too many units are getting built and the market is glutted. Projects are going belly up. Rents will come back down..temporarily.....may even seem reasonable for a short while. But once the market is back in equilibrium.......you know what Rs love......supply and demand......construction will resume and prices will start going back up. Seattle, which has been building more units than SF each year even though its a smaller city, still suffers from the same problem. Seattle rents are skyrocketing even as the city builds thousands of units.......probably more than double what SF is building. SF and Seattle are urban success stories. Their industries are booming. Labor wages are high and land costs even higher. They are attractive cities with fairly benign climates.......SF more so than Seattle. Assuming they are not leveled by earthquakes, they always are going to be expensive compared to less fortunate cities.