> There is no such law. This is a myth propagated by political
> propaganda.
You cannot really believe this statement. Of course there is a "law" of
supply and demand, which works much like the "law" of evolution. If
more people want something than exists of that something, people _will_
complete for it, one way or another. "Price" is the way we measure that
competition. I will grant, however, that "rule" might be a better word
than "law." Like evolution, supply and demand is not a universal truth,
but a trend, driven by the way our natural environment works. Through
great effort, it is possible to temporarily shove aside or subvert that
natural trend, but, as is stated in the laws of thermal dynamics, effort
is hard and eventually you get tired. It is much better to make your
civilization work with natural trends, than to try and stop them in
their tracks.
> I.e. those who own the economy get the lion's
> share of the proceeds. There is no inherent relationship between
> income based on ownership and work.
There is, unfortunately, a great deal of truth to this. But, a lot of
those people did earn their high incomes. I have argued that the
enduring "problem" of democracy is the presence of inheritance, and the
enduring "question" is how to limit the influence of inherited wealth
whilst still letting people benefit from the hard work that, ultimately,
makes a civilization live. (However, "hard work" can be running a
company or writing a book, just as much as building a solar water heater
or digging a ditch). No civilization has solved that issue, and it is
no accident that, historically, republics tend to last about two-hundred
years before being taken over by an arostocracy -- which, pretty
clearly, is what is happening here and now. However, letting the
government take people's property -- defined broadly, not just as land
-- will only simplifies the complex structure of an economy, making it
easier for this consolidation to take place. General rule: complex
societies tend to be more free, and safer for the individual, than
simple ones, for the simple reason that they are harder for any one
individual or group to control. If there is one thing you can say about
the American economy, it is complex.
The reason no one has been able to solve this problem is because nobody
really understands how civilization, culture, and economy all work,
either individually or together. That is why attempts engineer
civiliations aned cultures and economies almost always end in tragedy.
Once again, when you don't understand something, it is almost always
better to work _with_ the natural system, rather than against it. Which
is why market- and trade-based civilizations, with their complex and
unguided flows of information and goods, "guided" by the unplanned
desires of individuals, are almost always more free for the greater
number than planned economies that try to directly control who gets to
live in desirable locations like San Francisco.
I do accept a role for government, even a large role, but mainly as
referee, trying to limit excesses and keep the game within a relatively
fair set of rules. This is a balance that I think the United States has
got fairly right for an amazingly long time; balancing the benefit to
the group as a whole against the maximum possible individual freedom.
Where I disagree with the Republicans is that, I believe, there must be
a floor to the game. People who, for whatever reason, cannot succeed or
even break even, should not starve. But this floor does not extend to
an equal right to every benefit of society. If you extend all benefits
equally, there are not incentives, the work needed to run a civilization
will not get done, and that civilization will die.
> 3. Policies that deny the ability of people to continue to live where
> they do so now and want to continue to live therefore seriously
> diminishes their self-determination.
I do not disagree with this. However, I do disagree with you on the
solution to that problem. I say, Problem: people are being driven out
because the price of housing is too high, because a lot of people want
to live here, many of whom are wealthier than the current residents.
Solution: build lots of new housing, to take at least some of the
intensity out of the competition, and to gain the other benefits that (I
believe) you get from a denser city. But also recognize that if the
city is to have a future, there also has to be room for the new
information industries and their employees to live here. There does
have to be some turn-over -- like any organism, without change, San
Francisco will die. It is a physical and practical impossibility to
give everyone what they want. Your solution seems to be to try to
freeze the city's "frontier" (where there is room for additional growth)
into some sort of golden age of "rust belt" industry that, given a
choice, very few people would really like to live in. (After all, who
really wants to stand at a oroduction line assembling solar hot water
heater? Yes, the transition is hard on today's assembly line workers,
but their children will be a lot happier if these kinds of jobs are
automated out of existance and the new generation educated to do
something more constructive.)
> >But they do have the freedom to try to do so. The Constitution does not
> >guarantee success, nor should it. It only guarantees the right to try.
>
> The right to "try" is a nonentity. If Joe loses his arm to an industrial
> accident, he can still "try" to move it.
> Rights without corresponding powers are meaningless.
Nonesense, because that doesn't take the real world environment into
account. Everyone has a "right" to try to drive a car, but not everyone
has a right to succeed in driving a car. If you are blind, you cannot
drive, and have no right to attempt to since you will hurt others. The
society as a whole has a moral responsibility to try to ameliorate these
kinds of "natural" limitations on your rights, but nothing in the real
universe can remove all limits on your rights. (For an extreme example,
you your world view, I should have a right to live on Mars, no matter
what it costs the society to put me there. Since I do in fact wish to
visit that place, perhaps you would like to help me exercise that
right!)
> You mean "compete" in the capitalist labor market to see who can
> get the most income and let those with the most income buy whatever
> they can. What if this diminishes the rights of the majority?
But that is what guarantees the rights of the majority. Your only right
in the real world is to work try to obtain what you desire. No one,
anywhere, has a right to have what they desire handed to them. In that
case, if you have a limited resource that everyone cannot have (like
living in San Francisco), you are distributing that resource through
some sort of executive force, rather than through free competition
amongst individuals. I would far rather have a one-in-one-thousand
chance of earning something I desire through my own efforts, than to
have to try to obtain it by some (almost certainly corrupt) executive
procedure.
> Building such housing won't solve the problem you have described.
> You don't know if the amount that would be created by the current
> market forces will be such as to facilitate affordable rents for
> those currently living here. I see no reason to think it will.
Of course I don't know how many houses are needed to house all of the
people who might or might not want to live in San Francisco by the time
those houses are or are not built. Nobody can know all of that. That
is why these decisions are almost never successfully made by an
executive decision. That is the reason for a market. If someone builds
too many houses, the price will come down, they will lose money and stop
building houses. If they don't build enough, the price will go up, they
will lose money because they didn't have enough "product", and somebody
else will build houses and make money. The builder, ideally, only makes
money when he build the number of houses that people will buy, and,
spread over a large number of builders, the number of houses will stay
in rough balance with the number of people who want to buy them.
Now, I recognize that it cannot be that simple, and that you do need to
provide for those who cannot afford any house at any price. But, it is
far better to work with that "natural" system, than against it. Let the
majority of the housing be build, at no cost to the city, by "the
market," and the city only needs to provide the difference. In your
system, the city has to provide most or all of the housing, with no
defined source of money to pay for it.
> What you're pointing out is the inequity created by Prop. 13. That's
> just a reason to get rid of Prop. 13.
Ah, ha! Unless my poor old eyes deceive me, here is something we agree
on! Proposition-13 has been an unmitigated disaster for this State.
Not least because it has shifted taxation from rich older land owners to
young people who are just starting out, enforcing economic
stratification. Yes, Tom, I have argued that it benefits both the city
and the majority of the population for large numbers of people own a
home in San Francisco; I have not said that, if you can afford to do
that, you should not pay your fair share of the taxes!
> Like the Sunset or Bayview? This is also partly related to zoning.
> You have to make sure that large tracts of land aren't zoned into
> a kind of land use monoculture. That can happen even with high density.
> Take a drive along Wilshire Blvd. in L.A. east from Westwood village.
> Massive luxury highrises for blocks. And not a single store. It's
> as autocentric as suburbia, in effect. To buy a beer or a bag
> of Peet's coffee, the residents will have to jump into their beamers or
> Mercedes' and drive somewhere.
I would suggest applying to developers of housing blocks something
similar to downtowns requirement that all towers have ground floor
retail. By ensuring that there is a surplus of commercial real estate,
you keep the cost down, which benefits the type of mom-and-pop stores
that make San Francisco unique in medium-sized American cities. That
law was the best thing this city ever did for itself. (Okay, second
best, the best was limiting freeways.)
> It isn't clear that the current structural steel
> technology used in building highrises will actually survive the sorts
> of earthquakes that can occur here. This was one of the more discouraging
> results of the Northridge earthquake in 1994 in L.A. They discovered
> that literally *hundreds* of new structural steel buildings in L.A.
> had serious cracks in their structural steel frames, contrary to
> expectations.
Yes, they had cracks, but so far, I don't believe that any modern steel
"bridge construction" tower has ever collapsed in any earth quake.
Clearly, they are safer than any other kind of building currently being
constructed. (One thing that concerns me, though, is that I see a lot
more cement structure in the newer towers, replacing steel. I hope they
know what they are doing.)
> Clearly, people with working class incomes, equal to or below
> the median, are the largest group whose protection is the function
> of rent control.
I disagree with this. Everyone I know who rents, no matter what their
income level, is benefiting from Rent Control. The net effect of Rent
Control for everyone is that it discourages moving. This decreases
turnover in the apartment stock, which means that there are fewer
apartments available for newcomers or for people who, for some reason,
have to move. Since there are fewer apartments, there is more
competition for the few remaining, and so the price goes up. Rent
Control is probably the single biggest contributor to the outlandish
market price of San Francisco rents.
> I'm suggesting that there would be
> something like a housing commission that would be only responsible
> for monitoring needs for increased housing and move to acquire land
What land? There is very little land available for new housing.
Therefore, new housing generally must be very dense, or it won't amount
to much.
> and provide financing
With what money? I don't mean to be facetious, here, but you are
proposing a major change from the way things are done now. It is your
responsibility to provide specifics. How much money? Where will it
come from? How do you get homeowners and businesses to pay it rather
than move to Pleasanton or Oakland?
> There could be
> a waiting list for the vouchers. It could be "first come, first
> served." Or there could be a lottery, as is used now for coop and
> condo conversions.
I've tried to avoid saying this in this conversation, but I can't help
it here. This sounds like exactly the kind of thinking that created
ugly, dispirited housing in Russia (or Counsel Housing in England, or
equily dispirited "projects" here). Sure it was "fair," unless you were
sufficiently equal not to have to pay the bribes that let you move up in
line, but nobody, of any income level, wanted to live there. And, note,
even in Russia was a price on housing, and the competition was every bit
as fierce as in San Francisco, or more so. But you, as an individual,
had far less chance of winning on your own efforts, and you won a whole
lot less. I don't think we want housing vouchers, especially with a
waiting list.
> Why? Why can't the "unconnected poor" sign up at a housing office
> to participate in a housing lottery as easily as those with higher
> incomes?
Because people with higher incomes will always find some way to corrupt
the system and use their higher incomes to get what they want. Look at
every country that has tried this. It is not possible to keep people
from competing for what they want, so it is far better to try and
referee the competition, keeping it above board and honest. Hiding it
by pretending it doesn't exist solves nothing.
> Why should artists have this privilege anymore than, say, janitors?
> If janitors are necessary to production, housing must be provided
> for them.
Okay, I'll buy this. But, since it is not practically or financially
possible to subsidise housing for everyone, the more you try to do the
less effective you will be.
> This has a lot to do with why the auto has
> become so dominant in most American cities.
Actually, the auto is one of the best arguments _for_ a free market.
The automobile culture came about when the government, for basically
military reasons, destroyed the free market for transportation by
building the freeway system at no cost to the end users. The auto mess
is a perfect example of why this is not a good idea, in spite of the
fact that the freeway system is one of the very few historical examples
of a vast, planned economy that actually worked, as measured by its own
goals.
> I wasn't proposing such a ban. My position is a lot more nuanced than that.
> I'm proposing *some* increase in density, *some* housing in the rustbelt
> under certain conditions. Why do we have to turn S.F. into Manhattan?
> You haven't explained that. Nor will it guarantee low rents. Take a look
> at Manhattan's rents if you don't believe me.
You don't have to make San Francisco into Manhattan, but if you don't,
you guarantee that there will be a shortage of housing and that rents
will remain high. And, yes, building even a lot more housing will not
guarantee that there will not be even more demand, so maybe we want to
make the choice to keep the density where it is. [However, I have
argued against that for other reasons.] But not building the housing
guarantees that prices (for rent or voutchers or however the houses are
priced) will remain high. This is where you are refusing to make a
choice. I didn't say it would be an easy one; the ones that matter
never are.
> It doesn't take money away from Muni if each has some dedicated
> funding stream, which I think they both should have.
This statement is rediculous. A "dedicated funding stream" does not
give the city any more money, it just directs the money it has to a
specific goal. The city's income, for the most part, is pretty fixed.
Where do you propose this extra money come from?
> It's well known that the rate of growth in
> labor productivity in the last decade has dropped down to a rate
> that is slower than anything seen since the Civil War. This has
> happened in a period when 80% of all capital spending has been
> on computerization.
That's because you are only counting non-computer labor, when ever more
labor is computer-related. I think that that is a good thing!
> I think that's a myth. Most "independent contractors" are not independent,
Well, everyone is part of society and dependent on other parts of that
larger organization.
> nor are they a particularly significant segment of the total economy.
Yet, but increasing all the time.
_________________________
Donald F. Robertson
San Francisco
donaldrf@hooked.net
Donald's Space Exploration page:
http://www.hooked.net/~donaldrf/index.html
The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually
we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of
inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to
reclaim a little more land. -- Thomas Huxley.