San Francisco Bay Area: A beautiful house, near tech jobs, within most people's reach. If three people lived here, they'd each get their own room and bathroom for $1,330/month per person. An average entry-level office job pays over $50k/year, so you don't need to be a high-earner to enjoy a freshly renovated home.

🎯🎯🎯

Ironically, the areas for tourists have gotten worse since the 90s.

Most areas are safer than they were in the 90s.

"I don't care about your quality of life as long as I can imagine that luxury apartments will magically bring down my rent!"

Glass shoeboxes, no parking, hours of traffic to get everywhere...what's not to love!!!

Nothing slipped; my point is I don't give a crap about property values. I care about my community, family, and quality of life.

True, but we can use the same logic to justify building anything harmful next to your home. A huge construction project would only be slightly less harmful, especially since SF gives away a percentage of the units to drug tourists.

You missed the point: we can use the same argument to justify building a chemical plant next to your home. And therefore, the logic is invalid.

San Francisco: This is why people don't have any confidence in our ability to govern a larger population. We are miserably failing to govern the people who are already here! We can't enforce the most basic laws! Once we keep the city safe and clean at a population of 800k, we might be ready to grow it to 1 million.

Panda is correct: "White flight" had nothing to do with racism. It was just people fleeing violence. Nobody cared about the race of the people committing the violence; they just wanted to get away from it to avoid being harmed. And once things became less violent, normal people returned, and once again, didn't care about the race of people living in the place they were returning to.

I'd be happy for my real estate holdings to fall by 50 percent if it means more parking, less traffic, and a goal to keep SF's population around 800k (the sweet spot). And if we end the sanctuary city nonsense, we could probably free up 40k units of housing without increasing the population.

Why do you think they downzoned? Or do you think they did it for no reason?

Same tired logic and arguments in every city.

Of course, in any competitive environment, the winners get whatever is considered the best. So if the winners prefer the city, they'll live in the city. If the winners prefer the suburbs, they'll live in the suburbs. And it makes sense: in a functional society, you want to incentivize people to create the most value by rewarding them with the best stuff. Otherwise, much less good stuff gets produced! Which makes everyone poor.

San Francisco YIMBY logic: "We're not building a chemical plant in YOUR backyard. It's on the land next door, which you don't own, so STFU and grant us the right to harm your family!" "Don't like chemical plants? Move to the suburbs, communist!"

Yes, costs a lot to build vertical, so those won’t be cheap either.

Sounds like a great plan to destroy quality of life.

It’s simply what they want; same as what they did to LA and Maui.

If you wanted cheap market rate housing, you’d start with cheap land. It’s weird to claim to want something cheap and then insist on building it on the most expensive dirt. Makes no sense at all.