photo credit: Thomas Hawk – cc
It is time for fundamental reform of SF’s insane restrictions on residential building. Whenever I tweet about need for more housing supply in San Francisco, people respond that new high-end housing won’t help lower-income people. That is exactly backwards. New high-end housing supply will redirect demand that is currently causing prices of existing housing to rise.
If you want existing SF housing prices to stop rising or fall, you should logically cheer for as much new high-end building as possible. And of course, any/all building restrictions that are holding back BOTH high-end and low-end housing construction should be reformed ASAP.
The root cause of SF’s housing problem is the basic rule of supply and demand. Time to end the madness, including restrictions and price controls. The most effective way to protest SF’s housing problems is to exert pressure on the SF Board of Supervisors. They are the key. “Our approach to housing in San Francisco is very dysfunctional,” said Scott Wiener, a SF supervisor who is a proponent of new housing. “…The system is intentionally designed to make it as difficult as possible to build new housing.”
Source:
Andreessen’s tweets on the SF housing problem: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
Responses:
@pmarca Says 
I do not agree with what you are stating here. I am a native San Franciscian. That means that I have lived here for 62 years. I also have worked on the housing in this city for some time now. The problem is not as you have stated here. The biggest problem that I see is “greed”. The more money that can be made the more can be charged. I was so close to homeless that it was not okay. I had never had this problem before. It was very bad. I spoke at a hearing of the Board of Supervisors and they did not even know what to tell me. I was working in a law firm, paying my taxes, born and raised here. How can you say that not developing more without taking care of this situation is the problem. Every thing that you are seeing are the other points that are out due to the lack of dealing with the greed and hight rents that we have here. If you have never been at this point you can not evaluate the situation. Review the articles that written on this and you will gain a better perspective of what is really going on.
Paulette Otten