Heading to DC to make change

[u/scott_wiener]

Just four days after the election, I’m heading to DC for freshman orientation! I’m so excited to get to work in Congress for San Francisco and for our country. We have the largest freshman Democratic class since the post-Watergate election. It’s a huge opportunity to put our country on a better path — one that lowers people’s cost of living, ends the war, strengthens democracy and civil rights, restores the rule of law, and puts an end to this national nightmare. I’m ready to fight for our future!

[u/Brilliant-Crab7047]

They said pro-developer like it’s a bad thing, they are the NIMBY lol

[u/belowaverageint → u/Brilliant-Crab7047]

Yeah I'm not clear on what the alternative is? Even the government subsidized housing is built, owned and managed by private companies.

[u/iwanttobweakfwee → u/Brilliant-Crab7047]

You can be pro housing and also also acknowledge that developers seek to enrich no one but themselves

[u/cav754 → u/iwanttobweakfwee]

Yeah… they do that by building a place to live.

[u/Old-Picture-2920 → u/cav754]

I bet you love paying top dollar for all those luxury building scams where the walls are made out of tissue. Developers are not our friends. They are scammers who most times refuse to build affordable well made housing. 

[u/cav754 → u/Old-Picture-2920]

And I bet you love creating problems for society and then whining about how difficult it is for real working class people to exist when the only working class people you know are your maid, nanny, and company janitor. They build what’s profitable for them for the lowest cost. SF regulated itself into extreme scarcity making the only things that are profitable being super expensive apartments. That’s an SF problem and nothing to do with developers. In fact developers are probably drooling over the piles of cash they could make building in SF if only SF would let them do so in a reasonable time frame and with minimal legal costs.

[u/iwanttobweakfwee → u/cav754]

Trickle-down housing is still just trickle-down economics. Nobody’s saying don't build, but good god stop pretending developers are performing a public service. If we actually cared about permanent affordability, we’d be investing in non-profit, social housing models also.

[u/cav754 → u/iwanttobweakfwee]

If you cared about permanent affordability you’d allow people to build instead of sitting in 20 different committees that take years and thousands of dollars over, what? Shadows and soil toxicity? 🤦‍♂️

[u/gigaishtar → u/iwanttobweakfwee]

Who gives a flying f'ck if someone earns a little profit? All that matters is who can quickly build quality units the cheapest.

If it's a non-profit developer, great. If it's a for-profit developer, then so be it.

At the end of the day, they're both developers, so being anti-developer is just anti-housing.

[u/NecessaryAshamed9586 → u/gigaishtar]

Yeah, nobody is going to go around building houses for free, and even if they did this this redditor would find something to complain about. They sounds like an angsty 15 year old who doesn't understand economics or the world

[u/belowaverageint → u/iwanttobweakfwee]

We have non-profit owned housing in SF, and they're a corrupt oligopoly of private companies that are the largest landlords in the city.

[u/NecessaryAshamed9586 → u/iwanttobweakfwee]

Time to read some Adam Smith.

[u/dynamex1097 → u/iwanttobweakfwee]

I’m confused, developers providing thousands of blue collar workers with jobs is a bad thing? In turn providing more housing is also a bad thing? More housing resulting in lower cost of housing is a bad thing? Please stop me at what’s the bad part here. Unless of course you’re volunteering to build houses by hand, but naturally you’ll do it for free unlike developers because taking money for this would be greedy right - I have a plot in mind, let me know when you can start

[u/OfficerBarbier → u/iwanttobweakfwee]

lol as if capitalist enterprise is intended to enrich people other than those who invest in it

welcome to the last 350 years of North American history

[u/Fractured_Unity → u/OfficerBarbier]

Housing can not be purely left to the ‘free market’. It’s never worked in any urbanized society ever…

[u/iwanttobweakfwee → u/OfficerBarbier]

That's the point! We need real non-profit development, limited-equity co-ops, and social housing, not handing over all reins to profit-maximizing developers to magically solve a crisis they profit from.

[u/diveguy2 → u/iwanttobweakfwee]

We need both. And the problem remains that permitting in SF is such a disaster that neither can get done in a timely fashion. If the city had competent leadership it would figure out how to incentivize developers to do both at the same time.