Political Relativity

Stuck in a strange warp of the space-time fabric, our supervisors can't stop tilting against a dot-com development monster that's dead and buried

A A A Comments By Matt Smith Wednesday, Jul 17 2002

...continued from page 2

As a result, our city suffers a housing shortage of between 25,000 and 70,000 units, depending on who does the math, which keeps apartment prices sky high. This shortage will persist if our city continues to ignore Planning Department problems, and instead conducts irrelevant historical debates.

For the first time in a decade, we really have the opportunity to address San Francisco's housing crisis. In today's real estate market, developers, investors, and landowners have no interest in developing commercial property, because of the glut of commercial space, and every interest in building housing, for which there is continuing demand.

Fred Harper

More About

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Weekly Newsletter: Our weekly feature stories, movie reviews, calendar picks and more - minus the newsprint and sent directly to your inbox.

If San Francisco were to permit, say, 5,000 extra apartments to be built each year, the landlords who are currently holding out for $2,000-per-month rents on their measly two-bedroom apartments might begin to yield. Just a few thousand more apartments might be enough to force demand, and prices, to slide. If that happened, real, present-day, low- and middle-income San Franciscans could once again afford to live here.

But to get to that point, we'll all have to start living, once again, in the present.

Check out this week's featured ad for News