How San Francisco’s Progressive Politics Led to Its Housing Affordability Crisis - CityLab
I remember the time when my friends and I could take 6 month or year long working vacations from Alaska to San Francisco and be able to afford reasonable housing working entry level jobs. It hasn’t been that way since the early ’80s though.
When more people want to live in a city, it drives up the cost of housing—unless a commensurate amount of places to live are added. By the early 1990s it was clear that San Francisco had a fateful choice to make: Reverse course on its development attitudes, or watch America’s rekindled desire for city life overwhelm the openness and diversity that had made the city so special.
When San Francisco should have been building at least 5,000 new housing units a year to deal with the growing demand to live here, it instead averaged only about 1,500 a year over the course of several decades. In a world where we have the ability to control the supply of housing locally, but people still have the freedom to move where they want, all of this has played out in predictable ways.
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