Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Maybeeee, except then you wind up with a service class of workers who can't live anywhere near the places that need servicing and they have no way to get there.

Unless you're going to bus them all in from afar, it doesn't work.  And why spend a long time on a bus to do a low-paying service job when you can just walk down the street 10 min and do the same low-playing job?  Why waste time on travel to service the rich who let the free market boot you out when you can service the average nearby?

Here in Phoenix, a 1-bdrm apartment in the ghetto is $1200/mo.  Plenty of new apartments being built, all around, and every single one of them are "luxury" apartments. 
Doesn't help the problem.
Scottsdale is pretty hoity-toity....where do you think their service workers live?  Not Scottsdale!  But it's not a peninsula with limited space, so all the service workers ride or drive in from the surrounding, poorer areas.
Hell, you could make the argument that Mesa is a 1,000,000 person service city.  Poor, run-down, but adjacent to nicer parts of town. 
Hooray free market!!!
Now the poor can have worse infrastructure and worse schools to maintain their role as service industry to the wealthy! 
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

So it's logical to value the...let's say safety....of the 1 person you know more highly than the thousands of strangers you don't?

Yeah.
Math iz hardr than I thot.

I’m of the opinion that if the free market were allowed to work we would not need “ affordable housing “.

Read an article years ago about housing in the Bay Area. Govt artificially restricts building ( excessive costs, unnecessary permits and red tape). Therefore very little construction gets done, and that that does is very $$$. Then they have laws about how much rent you can charge, and how often rent can increase so people just stay in the same housing for decades because they can’t afford to move. This limits the housing to other people who can afford it, who would otherwise be willing to pay the prices for new construction.

Yes, exactly.  And there has been study after study that supports the notion that until the gov't (and to be clear I was speaking more so about local and state gov't than the feds) allows a higher population density the problem will remain.  But nobody wants the sort of population density in their backyard, even in the slums. 

As an example of the kind of over-reach the gov't requires is that if you build a home in California out in the country you're supposed to supply a water supply for the fire dept.  I forget the quantity, but it's something like 3,000 or 5,000 gallons with dual pumps with their own power supply.  Just in case your house catches in fire, so the fire dept. can put it out.  Now I may be just a tad bit off, but shouldn't that decision be left up to the homeowner?  That is my house catches on fire, and I don't have a water supply for the FD, that welp it's my loss?  If we had this crap in TX nothing would ever get built.  Because we are still a lot of rural communities here. 

Okay, but without that, in the SF peninsula (or whatever it's actually called), there's not enough supply, even if it's genuine (not artificial).

With genuine high demand/low supply, you'd have the same number of people paying more for the same spaces and those who cannot afford it having to commute in, which is a whole other problem.

I agree that the government probably oversteps and has bad ideas and can be draconian about it. Of course.  But for the Bay Area specifically, the artificial limitation of supply is irrelevant, because the demand will far outpace supply there.

In 1928, the commission finally established height limits of 40 feet for parts of the city’s wealthiest enclaves—the Marina, Pacific Heights, and Presidio Heights. That same year, the San Francisco Planning Commission gained additional power through a charter amendment, which included provisions for hiring a city planning engineer, posting neighborhood-development notices, and crafting the first citywide general plan. But the commission’s increased power did not mean more protection for city’s disadvantaged residents.

(snip)


As the threat of litigation became a new constant, the San Francisco Planning Department slowly began to craft a new approach to development. The city’s 1971 Urban Design Plan was the first to codify the shift in values from the Modernist freeway-and-tower model toward a greater respect for San Francisco’s unique neighborhoods and their human-scale features. The plan focused on preserving and expanding existing neighborhood character, and was influenced by a coalition of environmentalists, affordable-housing advocates, and preservation groups who recognized the power of zoning to limit change, for better or worse. For example, its guidelines for building size suggested that new development should mirror the “height and character of existing development.” Notably, many of the plan’s proposals to increase livability, such as greening public spaces and improving street safety, mostly omitted the city’s densest, lower-income neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, Chinatown, and South of Market.

However, the plan also identified 11 areas for taller residential buildings, which local activists immediately fought as the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco. In the face of these criticisms, the department revised its plan after a series of public hearings, resulting in the removal of these high-rise zones.

But the largest legislative achievement of this emerging anti-growth coalition would be the Residential Rezoning of 1978, a project to implement stricter controls across all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. In addition to creating 40-foot building-height limits for most residential areas, the legislation included new setback rules (regulating how far a building could be from the public right-of-way), low-density requirements (limiting the number of housing units in a given building), and overall design guidelines aimed at preserving entire neighborhoods in amber. The decision to adopt these new limits included a lengthy EIR and public-hearing process, featuring speakers both for and against such exclusionary zoning. For example, several homeowners echoed the sentiments of Ms. Marie Potz, who said she was perfectly happy with her street’s height limit being lowered after someone had built “a huge three-story monstrosity.” Potz made the unfounded claim that there was no housing shortage and asserted that the city had overproduced apartments. “What we need,” she said, “is more single-family houses.”

In sharp contrast to these kinds of aesthetic complaints, many residents, homeowner associations, and community groups spoke forcefully against the rezoning and the inevitable rise in housing prices at a time when San Francisco was already short on affordable housing. Ed Lawson, representing the Richmond District Council, said the zoning was too restrictive and would harm low-income residents the most. Jerry Horowitz of the San Francisco Planners Network explained that the rising cost of housing was already changing the makeup of neighborhoods. “While well-prepared groups concerned with preserving the character of their neighborhoods have had their demands for lower densities heard, low-income residents have lacked the organization to speak up for their own housing needs,” he said.

(snip)

It’s clear that many San Franciscans were well aware this rezoning would lead the city toward a housing crisis. The planning commissioners, however, were not moved. Their testimony throughout the hearings made it clear they valued maintaining the city’s predominately suburban layout over affordability. In response to a homeowner who was unhappy that his property would be downzoned to allow fewer units, commissioner Sue Bierman gave a quintessential anti-growth response—countering that San Franciscans were concerned about parking, traffic, and sunlight reaching their backyards, embracing a shift toward zoning that would preserve “more comfortable neighborhoods.” Instead of listening to those folks worried about becoming homeless, the commissioners focused on the single-family homeowners worried about shadows on their yards and parking for their cars.

In the final minutes of the June 27, 1978, meeting, San Francisco’s planning commissioners prepared to approve the EIR, along with its damning final clause, which explained that the project would reduce the amount of housing that could legally be built in San Francisco. “As a result the cost of housing may increase, and that with increasing housing costs, some population groups may find it difficult to live in San Francisco. The proposed zoning will affect the low- and moderate-income households more than any other group and mitigation measures are proposed to help alleviate this impact.”

But commissioner Bierman said she was “troubled” by this statement, and commissioner Nakashima agreed, complaining that it wasn’t the solely the planning department’s fault if housing prices continued to rise. Commissioner Rosenblatt suggested removing the clause entirely—and that’s exactly what they did, erasing their acknowledgement of the plan’s disastrous effects from the document moments before approving it.

(snip)

San Francisco’s new zoning left most of the city restricted to buildings under 40 feet in height with no more than three residential units allowed. The legislation also gave implicit support to homeowners seeking to block construction of apartment buildings, even if they were allowed under existing zoning. Just as Kenneth T. Jackson explained in Crabgrass Frontier, yet again, “zoning was used by the people who already lived within the arbitrary boundaries of a community as a method of keeping everyone else out. Apartments, factories, and ‘blight,’ euphemisms for blacks and people of limited means, were rigidly excluded.”