[sudo-discuss] new occuption in SF: #gezigardens

[Sonja Trauss]

I know, it's so outrageous. This line, "The notion of smart growth — also
referred to as urban infill — has been around for years, embraced by a
certain type of environmentalist, particularly those concerned with
protecting open space."

Yeah, the type of environmentalist that is an environmentalist - what is
this supposed to mean!

Also I guess (I hope) these progressives don't realize that in opposing
development in Bayview, they are contributing to keeping blacks overall
poorer than whites.

Putting renters aside for a minute, let's consider similarly situated black
and white homeowners, in similar income black and white neighborhoods. If
these neighborhoods are in a city that is growing in wealth and population
(like san francisco) both homeowners should be able to look forward to
their house values increasing, right? NO. House values at first only
increase in the white neighborhoods, because the new residents, moving to
SF from all over the world, avoid living in black neighborhoods. Here's a
citation and a quotation, but this isn't the kind of knowledge we need
experts to discover for us. Examine your own mind, you use black population
level as a proxy for neighborhood safety. You probably believe that it is a
good proxy, that you can judge the thing you can't immediately see (how
likely are you to be mugged) by judging a thing you can see (black people
around?).
We find that the percentage of a neighborhood’s black
population,particularly the percentage young black men, is significantly
associated with perceptions of the severity of the neighborhood’s crime
problem. This relationship persists under controls for official
neighborhood crime rates.
http://www.princeton.edu/~pager/ajs_quillian&pager.pdf-
The effect of this is that homeowners in black neighborhoods (many of them
black) can't expect to benefit from the overall increase in wealth of their
city in the same way white homeowners can. That is, until, the rent in
white neighborhoods has become so egregiously high that white people,
having already filled up the industrial neighborhoods (they'd rather live
next to machines than live next to black people!) are finally land starved
enough to consider living in, buying land in, spending money in, black
neighborhoods. Our composite black homeowner starts to get excited. "Yay, I
can finally (1) borrow a large sum of money against my now appreciated
house (2) rent my house at a high price to the new white people moving in,
retire and move somewhere beautiful in the country or (3) sell my house at
a higher price than ever to these white developers." BUT WAIT, black
homeowner, here we have some helpful progressives, looking to protect you
from your good fortune. Screaming that you can't be allowed to be
"displaced." Nevermind that once you own your house, nothing can MAKE you
move, and if you sell or move to rent it, that is because you would rather
have the money you get from those activities than stay in your house!

Lets return to renters. The bottom of page four of this hysterical article
says: "Let's remember: Building more housing, even a lot more housing,
won't necessarily bring down prices. The report makes clear that the job
growth, and population boom that accompanies it, will fuel plenty of demand
for all those new units."
Right - housing prices have to do with the relative supply of housing. If
the amount of housing expands at the same rate the population expands, the
price of housing will not go up or down. But if the population increases
and the supply of housing doesn't, then prices will go up! This article is
advocating for no new housing to be built - what if we do continue to see
more population! Things will be worse than they are now. It will certainly
be a much worse scenario if SF has more jobs, more people, but the same amt
of housing.
Finally, there is the projection, by developers, of how much they are going
to be charging for the new units. People look at the new housing and see
that the plan is for it to be high priced. They don't realize that if the
supply of housing increases as fast or faster than the population
increases, that the introduction of new housing at the high price point
will cause some of the currently expensive housing to drop in price
(because people like new things, generally, better than they like old
things.) The mid level renter will see the options available at his price
point expand. If there is enough housing growth, the supply of the lowest
price housing could expand also. If there is way too much housing growth,
the renting population of SF might just win the housing market lottery -
see developers go bankrupt and be forced to sell their newly built condos
for a fraction of the planned price, or be forced to keep them and rent
them out to anyone who will take them.

Could building new housing cause people who wouldn't have lived here move
here? Can it be the sole cause of population growth? yeah, there are more
people that want to live in SF than do live in SF, for a little while the
increase in housing will be taken up by the people in the surrounding areas
that have been wishing they lived in SF but couldn't (this is the opposite
of the displacement problem, btw) It seems mean spirited to oppose new
housing to keep those people out. If you consider the SF community to be
not just the people that live there, but also the people that used to live
there but were already pushed out, plus the people that never even got the
chance to be pushed out, than you're an agent of displacement when you keep
new housing from being built.

Damn that's a long email.
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