Government and the media lied to us about COVID, masks, vaccines and social distancing. They lied to us about the Russia hoax and lied about Hunters laptop. So, is it surprising they are lying to us about stack and pack housing being good for us? Of course they are lying.
“They warn that relaxing San Francisco’s oversight of housing construction will simply allow the real estate industry to run roughshod over the cityscape, raising new luxury high rises, demolishing old neighborhood landmarks and displacing longtime residents — all without meaningfully improving affordability.
Condon’s work, they say, bolsters their case that demand for new housing — either from new residents or from real estate speculators — will always outmatch supply.
Their opponents — many of whom organize around the slogan “yes, in my backyard” — see such arguments as a smokescreen. The true motivation of those in the anti-development camp, the YIMBYs say, is to keep newcomers out and housing values high for property owners.
After years of YIMBY advances, development critics are trying to push back against the tide by changing the narrative around housing. Hosting Condon’s talk was part of that larger effort.
New York is stack and pack—and has the highest cost of housing in the nation. What more evidence do you need?
Vancouver housing expert questioning consensus finds a following in SF
Keith Menconi, SF Examiner, 10/5/24 https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/why-a-vancouver-housing-expert-is-winning-over-some-in-sf/article_f1360c06-82a2-11ef-8c70-d70e8a6728c7.html
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Want to solve California’s affordability crisis? The popular answer these days is to allow developers to build more homes. Supporters say it’s an intuitive solution that follows the basic logic of supply and demand laid out in economics 101.
But as San Francisco city officials move forward with a controversial plan to allow much denser housing development across large swaths of The City, some residents who oppose that effort are embracing a heterodox housing researcher who argues that the mainstream housing consensus is simply wrong.
On a Saturday afternoon last month, a crowd of about 200 massed inside Noe Valley Ministry to hear the housing homily delivered by Patrick Condon, a professor of urban design at The University of British Columbia. Condon had come all the way from Vancouver to offer up a warning: “You’re in for a big disappointment.”
A former city planner, Condon has become a prominent voice in Vancouver’s own housing debate. He told the gathered crowd he has seen firsthand how increasing density doesn’t solve the problem of housing unaffordability. Despite a massive development boom in recent decades that has made Vancouver one of the densest cities in North America, housing prices there are among the highest on the continent.
“Unfortunately, it will take 30 years for you to realize that you were wrong,” he said.
Why have housing costs spiraled even as thousands of homes have been built? Condon argues the problem lies with upzoning, the process by which cities redraw their zoning maps to allow bigger structures and more homes to be built on parcels of land than they previously allowed.
Upzoning inflates land values by inviting speculative investment, he says. Real-estate investors pass on those increased land costs by jacking up rents and home prices, effectively undermining any affordability gains that might be gotten by increasing the number of available homes.
“Urban land absorbs the value of all our good works,” he told the audience at Noe Valley Ministry.
Condon’s views cut at the heart of the now dominant consensus on housing in California that to address its affordability crisis, the state needs to massively increase its housing stock, in large part through increased density. That consensus has led to the passage of dozens of new housing laws in recent years aimed at boosting construction and streamlining the approval of new developments.
But Condon’s views also run counter to the work of many leading housing researchers. They cite decades of studies that have drawn a link between restrictive rules for home builders and high housing costs.
“None of the empirical research on this topic supports Condon’s argument,” said UCLA urban planning Professor Paavo Monkkonen in a recent email exchange with The Examiner.
Even so, Condon is also not the lone dissenter in the field. Other housing experts, including widely cited academics, have also taken a more skeptical view of the housing market’s ability to deliver affordable housing.
In San Francisco, such arguments have been catching on.
The counter-narrative
Under state law, San Francisco is on the hook to build more than 80,000 new homes by 2031. The City plans to meet that mandate in large part by upzoning, turning areas with relatively low housing density into higher density zones. Some groups of progressive voters and neighborhood advocates have pointed to Condon’s work and warnings as they battle that plan.
His message has also found a receptive ear in Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who has made opposition to the upzoning plan a key theme of his mayoral campaign. Peskin attended Condon’s recent talk and participated in the question-and-answer session that followed. At one point, the supervisor decried “upzoning for upzoning’s sake.”
“I’m not interested in building 100,000 units if it’s not going to bring the price down to things that make a city a great city,” Peskin said at the talk.
It’s probably no surprise that Condon’s arguments have gotten a warm reception from some participants in San Francisco’s long-roiling housing war. Although advocates in favor of more development and density have had the upper hand in recent years, opposition to such changes — branded by some as NIMBYism, for “not in my backyard” — runs deep in The City. For decades, development critics have worked to block many new projects.
They warn that relaxing San Francisco’s oversight of housing construction will simply allow the real estate industry to run roughshod over the cityscape, raising new luxury high rises, demolishing old neighborhood landmarks and displacing longtime residents — all without meaningfully improving affordability.
Condon’s work, they say, bolsters their case that demand for new housing — either from new residents or from real estate speculators — will always outmatch supply.
Their opponents — many of whom organize around the slogan “yes, in my backyard” — see such arguments as a smokescreen. The true motivation of those in the anti-development camp, the YIMBYs say, is to keep newcomers out and housing values high for property owners.
After years of YIMBY advances, development critics are trying to push back against the tide by changing the narrative around housing. Hosting Condon’s talk was part of that larger effort.
The event was organized by Neighbors and Communities United, a progressive-aligned advocacy organization launched over the summer with backing from labor groups. Neighbors and Communities plans to hold many more such events, bringing in additional housing experts to make their case, said spokesman Eric Jaye.
“Developers and their allies at City Hall are asking voters to believe that building tens of thousands of units of luxury housing will make housing more affordable,” Jaye said. “People like Condon are looking at that and challenging the economics of that assertion.”
Responding to such criticism, YIMBY advocates argue it’s unfair to say they’re only pushing to build more luxury or market-rate housing. They have also campaigned for additional publicly-subsidized affordable housing and greater protections for renters, they say.
Condon’s case
Condon says he too once thought like the YIMBYs. He also believed that adding more density would help bring down Vancouver’s housing costs.
“A lot of people seem to think I’m against density, which has never been the case,” he told The Examiner in a recent interview.
But over the past two decades, as he has watched affordability worsen in the city despite the addition of increased density, he has grown “profoundly disappointed,” forcing him to rethink his assumptions, he said.
According to his figures, Vancouver has tripled its housing stock over the past 60 years. It upzoned neighborhoods, making way for a proliferation of duplexes and high-rise towers. All told, the city has had perhaps the fastest rate of housing growth over that period of any major city in the U.S. or Canada.
“So if there’s a case in North America where adding incredible numbers of new supply should have led to cheaper housing, it should have been Vancouver,” Condon said during his recent talk in The City. “But unfortunately, it’s not.”
Instead, over those same decades, Vancouver’s housing affordability has only gotten worse. By some accounts, in fact, it is now among the most unaffordable housing markets in the world.
