San Francisco YIMBYs Want To Give Landlords The Ability to Rob You
They're just too stupid to know it, or too evil to care.
One of the largest lies ever uttered in San Francisco is that the city suffers from a housing shortage. There is no housing shortage. Despite this, San Francisco has a large, visibly homeless population, mostly concentrated in subdistricts of Downtown like SoMa and the Tenderloin — as well as more residential areas like the Mission District and Bayview. The number of people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco hovers between eight and ten thousand. While that is a lot, it’s not due to a housing crisis, it’s due to greed and a shocking lack of political will.
Do you know how many empty housing units currently exist within the City and County of San Francisco? The answer is estimated to be as high as sixty thousand. That means San Francisco has roughly six vacant housing units for every single individual living on the streets of America’s supposedly most progressive city.
Shocking, right?
So, if there isn’t a housing shortage in San Francisco, why are we always being told that there is one? And what is the purpose of this misinformation.
The simple answer is that the YIMBY movement is a collection of useful idiots who think the problem is as simple as supply falling behind demand, and real estate demons who exploit these poorly informed people to squeeze renters for every last dollar they have.
I would know, I used to be a YIMBY. I was one of the people who thought San Francisco simply suffered from a problem of supply not adequately meeting the demand of a growing pool of renters. It seemed simple enough, but the devil is in the details.
San Francisco is a city that is known for strong renter protections. But how strong are those renter protections? Turns out… not that strong.
The San Francisco Rent Ordinance also known as the Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Ordinance only adds rent control to units built before 1979. Any building constructed after that doesn’t fall within its guidelines. And even for tenants in building that are protected under the San Francisco Rent Ordinance, there are a number of loopholes like “owner move-ins” where a landlord can evict a tenant so a they or a relative can move in. Another technique that limits the effectiveness of rent control is conflicting legislation such as The Ellis Act. The Ellis Act allows landlords to “go out of business” and exit the rental market. They can then turn around and sell the building at current market value, which in San Francisco, is usually inflated from when the landlord first gained possession of the unit.
Another problem that YIMBYs fail to address is the commodification of housing by the investor class. Just because a housing unit is built doesn’t mean it’s going to house someone. Independently wealthy individuals, as well as large, Wall Street connected investment firms, are either directly buying up single family homes and multi-unit complexes or they’re investing in companies that do. This allows housing to essentially go from functioning as shelter into functioning as a portfolio asset. It never has to touch the rental market and can remain vacant for as long as the owner allows it to be.
To put this simply, this is exactly why we need an expansion of rent control that covers all housing units, regardless of when they were built. We also need expanded government investment in affordable housing.
“EXPANDED GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT IN AFFORDABLE HOUSING, BUT AAAAAABE, WHO’S GOING TO PAY FOR IT?!?!?!”
Well, considering 800 people hold more than half the nation’s wealth, you fucking figure it out, genius.
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Great essay and I agree with the message. But what is a YIMBY?