In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plentiful affordable housing without decoupling this idea. Houses are a poor financial investment once you remove all the incentives involved like mortgage tax credits, fixed mortgage rates, and obstructive zoning rules. Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.

What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution:

Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters.

Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...

I don't think this is true at all.

Birthrates are already declining. All you have to do is give proper sex ed and easy access to birth control and populations will shrink on their own. You don't even have to begin propaganda around overpopulation, though we may need to tone down the "WE NEED MORE BABIES" propaganda that the right is currently projecting.

The fact is, there are a lot of people (18-29% of non-parent adults in the USA, depending on your source) that don't want children. Give them the tools to make sure accidents don't happen (IMO, vasectomies would be more popular if there weren't so many myths surrounding them), and birthrates will decline naturally.

Birthrates naturally declining is probably a good thing, but it happens too slowly to make a dent in housing prices without additional interventions.

Already dented in Italy and Japan:

https://impatria.com/en/magazine/1-euro-houses-italy-foreign...

https://www.akiyajapan.com/japan/cheap-houses

We're propping up house prices in New Zealand by adding 50% immigrants (I think is fantastic - we're now at 30% population born overseas). Stop-gap solution but it is working at present.

People are quite naturally controlling their own quantity of offspring, to the dismay of our leaders who insist on perpetual growth. If we limit immigration (not my preferred approach, but here we are), then the population will naturally start to fall, as is happening in other places.

I'm really sad to see this response. President deported a large number of illegal immigrants -- to the extent that he was called the "deporter in chief" -- and he did not employ an army of fascist goons. The insane polarization of the last few years has shrunken the scope of people's imaginations, and I'm sure that people think their only choices are "open borders" vs. "barely-trained fascist thugs."

Do you have any policies in mind that could reduce the population without pricing people out? Maybe a Hukou system, or a right-to-reside lottery?

To do this you need to either accept:

- the area becomes an enclave for the wealthy with a high unhoused population, where most youth have to move away. People say they don't want this, I’m not sure they are being honest.

- the government regulates internal migration. You need a permit to move from the Midwest to California.

Yeah, that's already happened. SF is the US city with the least amount of children, where schools have to close due to declining enrollment.

What really bothers me is the dishonesty. If this is what you want, then own it. Argue for it. Don’t pretend to care about other people.

The prices going up is the market creating the incentive for less people to not move to SF and old guard to stay. You already have that. You are not going to bring down prices while limiting people without legislation that goes into dangerous territory of limiting who can live in one of Americas most dynamic cities.

Governments have mechanisms to make there be more housing, if they want to use them. Only extremely scary governments have mechanisms to make there be _fewer people_.

(Also it doesn't really work; cities which do depopulate tend not to do well, as the depopulation tends to be biased towards the working-age population.)

To me it feels much more like just a significant cadre who resist any change, of any kind, for any reason, who can ignore the personal side effects because of Prop 13 and because their family bought a house in the 80s and they don't give a shit about anyone else who wants or has to live in the city.

They get this anyway, it's just unrealized capital gains.

Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.

This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are.

The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely.

We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.

Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for.

And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum).

Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...

Until then, maybe we work to improve the places where most of us are required to live by our jobs. (And yes, in parallel we can work to reduce the employer-mandated dependence on those areas).

I get the libertarian impulse to let people do what they want with their property, but it seems like part of that freedom should be the right to move into areas where there are zoning restrictions.

Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born.

We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right, to expand their housing by 2x the median building unit within a half mile radius, by units, sqft, and height.

Suburban neighborhoods then slowly turn into duplexes over one generation, then row houses over another, then finally start building up after a third generation. Predictable, fair, and sustainable.

It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.

The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.

The problem is that the most in demand areas get new buildings at 4-6 stories, and then you get locked up - the airspace above them becomes unavailable for 50-100 years, when there was market demand for some taller buildings from the beginning. It's the same "push down and spread out" that causes sprawl, just more localized.

People respond to incentives.

Yes, that’s the point. The policy only really changes things when prices become extreme, and the cost per unit of housing becomes completely detached from the cost of building that same unit.

This is trivially happening in much of San Francisco and New York City.

This is not sustainable. The good news is that, due to demographic shifts, we might have a glut of housing in 20 years.

These urban housing crises in every major western country have nothing to do with population growth and everything to do with population concentration.

We should expect this problem to accelerate during periods of population decline, because there will be even stronger economic incentives to move into concentrated population centers.

The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around it with single family zoning. Ever wondered why it isn't called "house" zoning? Because it was segregation.

The appellate court in the case threw out zoning, because it was so obvious that it was about race. The Supreme Court overturned it by ignoring the entire appellate court decision and defining a building itself (apartments) as a nuisance, instead of making the petitioners regulate actual behaviors. Because the behaviors weren't the problem, it was the black people they didn't want.

Sorry - this riles me up. :)

You should absolutely not be able to have a say over how much housing your neighbor builds. Sure, if they make noise, or bad smells, or bright lights, THAT you should be able to regulate. But the outcomes of having a say over how much housing your neighbor can build is the strongest root of a whole host of issues - from CO2 to obesity to high commute times and traffic to municipal budget bloat. It causes sprawl. Increasingly, parts of the left and right are starting to realize we need to overturn it.

I have heard of laws that prevent the construction of structures that shade other properties (skyscrapers) or block views of the ocean. If those are apparently legal, why not a law that says you can't build a big apartment complex that would greatly increase traffic, for example?

Higher courts are allowed to overturn lower courts. That's kind of the whole point of the hierarchy.

But regardless, that case was from 100 years ago. Are you saying that the reason people enact zoning laws now is the same? I love living in a suburb and would be equally displeased whether my neighborhood turned into apt complexes, regardless of the complexion of the residents.

I'm unclear how this applies to zoning rules voted on by the people who live in an area. There is not an intermediary "zoning regulator" who is capturing anyone. Similarly, there is not a constituency that is being "captured" inappropriately. It is literally just a group of people deciding how they want to live.

If this is regulatory capture, then so is having laws against automatic weapons and speeding.

I don't know why you think that the only reason someone might want their suburban neighborhood to stay suburban is the color of their neighbors' skin; perhaps that says more about you than anything else.

If you're open to some books about this, or study work, I'd be happy to cite. Are you open to changing your mind?

Similarly, a policy is not a racist policy if it disproportionately affects people of one race or another. If that were the case, any policy that increased the share of taxes paid by the poor, or the rich, would be racist (against black people or Indian people). But I believe that any change in tax rates is not intrinsically racist, which is what an outcome/correlation-based definition would require.

You're free to share links, but TBH I think we're speaking different languages here. You've also not answered my point about regulatory capture, which you seem to define in a novel way.

If you have any relevant documents, feel free to share. The one you shared does not seem to back your definition of racist/racism, let alone provide reasoning for why your preferred definition is superior to the one I use.

For the record, I find mine to be more apt because I find it useful to distinguish between policies that have disparate impact by race/age/wealth/sex/etc., rather than lumping such policies in with those that seek to discriminate against people based on their race/age/wealth/sex/etc. If we call all of those policies "racist" or "sexist" or whatever-ist, then we have to come up a new term like "intentionally racist" to describe the subset of policies where intent is present.

I generally prefer not to have to make up new terms if we have words that already (for many people) have that meaning. But hey, some people just love doing the euphemism treadmill and its equivalents, as here.

I assure you, I am very well-versed on the legal issues regarding disparate impact, race, and sex. I went into this conversation looking to understand what your perspective and motivations are, but little has been provided. I know when to cut my losses though, so I wish you good day.

Zoning has other reasons than racism.

Oversimplifying things down to single causes is an error of thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

This conflation is a coping mechanism by home owners, especially the ones in SF (which the entire city from SF to San Jose) is sitting on a fault line.

The main problem is that building is being blocked by several other homeowners who are petrified of the value of their homes falling. No wonder young people are beginning to look to this policy in China [0] - "Houses are for living, not for speculation".

> Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.

In 2026, it is really a bad investment in the AI age and especially in HCOL areas like SF, given the layoffs and the jobs being off-shored. If you were part of the people who leveraged their RSUs to buy, well that is also a bad idea to do in 2026.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

Fancy mansions have always been overpriced. For property prices to grow faster than inflation, the pyramid needed to grow its bottom. Supply restrictionism was the ticket. Eventually, every shack was priced mansion-like. This required extracting ever larger fractions of the incomes of renters. Some renters wisened up and bought homes (when they still could). Changing sides, they beefed up the scheme's political backing.

No one cares if mansions are expensive, but basic housing should be extremely cheap. This sounds like a handout but isn't. It's what an unadulterated market would provide. It's what the pre-1970 market used to provide.

That's not to say that markets should be left alone. It's to say that the way this particular market was "regulated" was fundamentally corrupt. We could call it negative regulation.

And it's a really, really shitty one. My house has roughly doubled in value since I bought it, but in practice that's useless to me. I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. If anything it reduces my mobility by making it harder to move, since I really need to coordinate the sale of my current home with buying the new one to help absorb that $500k or whatever price tag.

My if house prices dropped by 50% or more drops my net worth on paper, but it doesn't actually change anything. I still have a place to live + my savings, investments, etc.

HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.

Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?

(Also, of course, depending on timescale, doubling may not be that impressive. If you'd put your money in a broad index fund about five years ago, it would also have doubled.)

Eh? If you're moving to a _larger_ house (I assume that's what you're talking about here) the last thing you want is house price growth; that would increase the cost delta between the smaller and larger house.

Well, you can move.

I went from the Bay Area to Omaha, Nebraska without going homeless. I retired though, so there's that. (But my wife was able to work from home with the move.)

(Next stop: perhaps a double-wide trailer in Eloy, Arizona.)

The real answer is taxes, taxing the shit out of these rich transplants and the corporations. You're in California I can't believe you lot aren't more progressive about jacking up the taxes on the rich to pave the way for a healthy society for the rest. But given that every single tech nerd that moves to SF sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or a not-yet-founder - good luck with that, I genuinely do not see even the younger crowd being pro taxing the rich in a city full of tech leeches.