6/29/2026 at 4:58:27 PM
Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas.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.
by TSiege
6/29/2026 at 5:02:02 PM
Even today the structure is a declining asset. It’s just that bad land use policy has forced land value up enough to overwhelm that.by lokar
6/29/2026 at 5:49:28 PM
If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so.Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.
by bombcar
6/29/2026 at 6:55:59 PM
This take is actively destructive. We need to let people CHOOSE to live WHERE they want to live - and let people who buy land CHOOSE to build housing for demand they perceive. That's it. That's the problem and the solution. It should be unconstitutional to limit housing production arbitrarily.by Schiendelman
6/29/2026 at 6:14:14 PM
As soon as FAANG starts hiring people in Utah, Arkansas and Minnesota for the same roles at the same wages as they hire in the Bay, then people will move. As soon as VCs start funding founders in Boise, Kansas City and Chattanooga, then people will move.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).
by floor2
6/29/2026 at 6:03:51 PM
>Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the countryThis 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.
by scoofy
6/29/2026 at 5:21:25 PM
>There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanismWhat 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.
by everdrive
6/29/2026 at 5:25:52 PM
> 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!
by mbgerring
6/29/2026 at 6:59:30 PM
>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 livesI'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."
by everdrive
6/29/2026 at 6:03:47 PM
> or you have to control pregnancy and childbirthPeople 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.
by saulpw
6/29/2026 at 5:50:59 PM
> 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 childbirthI 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.
by Sohcahtoa82
6/29/2026 at 6:18:28 PM
Neither the global birthrate, nor the U.S. population, are currently declining. The U.S. population may decline this year following the Trump administration’s massive increase in violent, capricious removal of immigrants regardless of legal status or criminal record.Birthrates naturally declining is probably a good thing, but it happens too slowly to make a dent in housing prices without additional interventions.
by mbgerring
6/29/2026 at 5:43:44 PM
The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump:https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...
by Legend2440
6/29/2026 at 5:46:18 PM
That’s correct, and to my point above, driving immigration down to this degree required a level of violence and cruelty so extreme that even the people who voted for it now disapprove of it. And that’s before the profound economic consequences really hit.by mbgerring
6/29/2026 at 6:04:23 PM
I think its also quite apparent that building new housing is a whole lot cheaper than killing and forcibly removing people, its just that it also destroys the value of an asset that the majority of families still hold. I mean its very basic of course: capitalism has a tendency to destroy the family unit, home ownership is a means of maintaining the family unit, and force against the destruction of the family requires violence, which is overall unproductive and wasteful. But anything that is unproductive is also freely determined, which is where the vulgarity of fascism lies, in its conflation of freedom with "letting off steam," so-to-speak.by DiscourseFan
6/29/2026 at 5:29:37 PM
Short term you might be right. Long term we have seen that western "education" results in declines in birthrates. Demographics are destiny.by joinjune
6/29/2026 at 5:37:09 PM
Birthrates go down in the east too whenever incomes increase (and sometimes without income increasing)by KylerAce
6/29/2026 at 5:27:43 PM
I bring it up with some people.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.
by lokar
6/29/2026 at 5:48:49 PM
> the area becomes an enclave for the wealthy with a high unhoused population, where most youth have to move away.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.
by jerlam
6/29/2026 at 5:35:43 PM
People don't bring it up because it requires doing things most understand to not be options. 1 - how would you stop people from moving to SF if they choose 2 - it stops dynamism for the city. You are here because you were already here is the only requisite.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.
by Makeitmakesense
6/29/2026 at 5:27:27 PM
Presently high housing prices are causing this; a lot more people would be living in SF today if there was more supply, which is equivalent to the high prices having kicked people out.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?
by mitthrowaway2
6/29/2026 at 5:31:30 PM
If you prefer to live in a low density exurb, you have many options for affordable housing, there's just a lack of good paying jobs and services in those areas.by bwhiting2356
6/29/2026 at 5:25:14 PM
SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.by crooked-v
6/29/2026 at 5:38:42 PM
Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.by orangecat
6/29/2026 at 6:06:01 PM
If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far.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.
by crooked-v
6/29/2026 at 6:44:07 PM
People have non financial interests.by pseudalopex
6/29/2026 at 6:16:48 PM
> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset.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...
by rvz
6/29/2026 at 5:06:43 PM
[flagged]by grttw11
6/29/2026 at 5:18:27 PM
> This is patently false.I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before:
1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values
2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome
This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area.
> Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home.
I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.
by jadenPete
6/29/2026 at 5:14:41 PM
Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.by duped