And no matter what the “trickle-down” marketeers who want to build our way out of the problem say, the history is clear: Only when San Francisco has taken units out of the private market, or strictly controlled rents, has the city been able to protect affordability.
The new housing being built, rental or condos, will never come down much in price (until sea level rise puts the bottom floors under water), since they’re all by law exempt from rent control.
The only time in the post-War era that rents came down was in the 1950s and 1960s, when the model was suburban, and people left the city for (government subsidized) homes in the East and North Bay and the Peninsula. That era ended for good when the price of gas went above $1, in 1975, and since then the people who work in San Francisco have increasingly wanted to live here.
Now: During the 1980s, when the city approved vast new amounts of commercial office space, nobody at City Hall had any interest in encouraging housing. It was all about office buildings. (A lot of planners and city officials were still assuming that this would be first and foremost a workplace city, for people who lived somewhere else). Now it’s not just a place where people want to live and work – it’s a bedroom community for Silicon Valley.
For all the tech jobs, most San Franciscans don’t make the kind of salary it takes to rent or buy here. More than 80 percent of current residents can’t afford market-rate housing.
Regulating the housing market works. In fact, it’s the only thing that works.
