Expensive Cities Lose Population
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
San Francisco and Boston found themselves among the cities losing the most people between April 2000 and July 2004. Boston, for example, shed more than 19,000 people, or 3.4 percent of its population. San Francisco lost 32,000, or 4.2 percent.
“People like to live in smaller places and a lot of it’s propelled by the sharp spike in housing costs in the inner and more attractive cities,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “People want to get as much housing as they can for their dollars.”
The median price for a single-family home in Gilbert is around $220,000, compared with more than $387,000 in Boston and $641,000 in San Francisco.
Peter Ragone, a spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, said the city recognizes the problem and has begun a number of affordable housing initiatives, such as redevelopment projects aimed at producing more moderately priced homes.
Four out of one hundred people left SF between 2000 and 2004.
San Francisco has tried all kinds of things to make housing cheaper including building “affordable housing” and more than 20 years of very tight rent control.
All they have done is make housing more expensive.
There are a huge number of people living in San Francisco who are playing far below market rates for rents. The city has strict laws against converting those units into condos.
If a huge percentage of your housing stock is locked up for decades at far below the market rate, any housing not covered by those restrictions will skyrocket in price. It’s basic supply and demand.
By taking so many units off the market by keeping them strictly rent controlled, San Francisco and other cities have limited the supply of housing where there is high demand. Their efforts to create affordable housing have produced the exact opposite.
Irrational premises create problems, they don’t solve them.
To solve problems it is necessary to stop believing in things that don’t exist, which is the basis for all irrational premises.
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