I lived in San Francisco for five years in one of those Mission tenements where the toilet never flushed properly and half-inch gaps between window and sill let in freezing gusts of cold air during the winter (and sometimes in August). Five years isn’t a long time, but it was long enough for me to learn my way around development politics in San Francisco. When my boyfriend and I wanted to move in together, we started looking for one-bedrooms before we realised that, in the neighbourhoods that would work for both of our commutes, we were priced out. So we both crammed into my squalid, 300-square foot digs. Around the same time, a more-or-less permanent homeless encampment sprung up on the corner below, and one day I came home to find a man passed out next to our building with a needle sticking out of his arm and a pool of bile dribbled on the pavement beneath his chin (for the record, I was calling him an ambulance when he came to just long enough to tell me he was fine, before sinking back into a chemical coma).
So, although I no longer live there — we got married and moved to England last summer — I feel like San Francisco and I really got to know each other. When I read screeds about how young ‘tech people’ are ruining the city, and why it’s a mistake to build more housing for them, I have a dog in that fight. For five years, I lived in a hole stuffed with asbestos, lead paint and aerosolised pigeon shit because I couldn’t afford to move. My husband and I might still live in the Bay Area, closer to my family and a whole lot of friends, if we hadn’t decided that, short of changing careers from academia and the arts to something more lucrative, we couldn’t afford it.
Along comes Tim Redmond, a former editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the feisty left-wing weekly which preserved its vintage 1990s nose rings-and-tattoos worldview right up until it ran out of money and readers in 2014, to explain on his 48 Hills blog that 1) this is all the fault of Ed Lee, San Francisco’s perpetually baffled-looking mayor, and 2) that ‘when you’re in a hole, stop digging,’ by which Redmond means that the correct solution to a housing shortage is to stop building more housing.
Redmond believes that the debate over housing has taken San Francisco away from its foundational progressive idealism, asking what happened to taxing the rich and redistribution in the midst of all this rampant capitalism:
This is really interesting to me because, by any reasonable standard, Tim Redmond is rich. According to public records, Redmond owns a three-bedroom house on the west slope of Bernal Hill. Last sold in 1999 for $352,000, Trulia puts its market value at $1.4 million. If you own a $1.4 million-dollar house which has quadrupled in value since you bought it, I think it’s fair to say you are rich.
How much do you think Tim Redmond — he of progressive taxation and income redistribution — pays in property tax on this $1.4 million house?
Trulia supplied me with that number. It’s $5,669. Better stated, that’s 0.4% of the house’s market value.
It’s bizarre that Redmond can write nearly 2,000 words criticising housing advocates for failing to ‘understand the basic facts, which are not that complicated’ without seeing fit to mention how he benefits from Prop 13, the California law that holds down property tax regardless of actual market value. He calls for income redistribution and progressive taxation, yet overlooks a system that allows him to pay a negligible amount in tax on an asset which has quadrupled in value in under twenty years. This means less money for California to spend on schools, state parks, and, yes, affordable housing. And it means that Redmond directly benefits from San Francisco’s high-and-ever-rising property values, because so long as supply is restricted the value of his house will continue to increase with only the tiniest of corresponding increases in his tax liability.
Not only does Redmond fail to mention that the housing crisis has benefited him personally, he tries to explain market forces in moral terms by blaming ‘landlord greed’ for rising rents:
Right, so when a shortage causes prices to rise, the culprit is greed. Presumably, when Redmond or his eventual heirs sell this $1.4 million house, they will be sure to ask only a ‘fair’ price — say, for example, a x4 multiple of median household income in San Francisco (about $300,000) rather than the actual market value of $1.4 million. Because that would be greedy. And speculative.
Take another look at the first sentence of the block quote above: ‘We have a crisis because more people are moving here than there is housing.’
This is obvious, so you might have to read it twice before you see how it’s also shockingly stupid. There will always be more people moving to San Francisco than housing exists because the population continues to grow. With the exception of Detroit, this is pretty much a constant problem for cities. California is projected to grow from 38.8 million people to between 50 and 60 million by 2050. Where are those 10–20 million people supposed to live?
I have a feeling what Rich Person Tim Redmond would say to that: ‘Anywhere but ‘Frisco, which is by the way the densest city west of the Mississippi. Too many people here already.’
But that’s wrong. San Francisco is only moderately dense, but it has better infrastructure to support further growth than sprawling cities like Sacramento and Fresno. There’s already an extensive bus network, a subway, BART, plus rail and ferries that connect San Francisco to the rest of the Bay Area. So those 10–20 million people — or some of them, anyway — should come live in the Bay Area, because that is where we can add population while reducing carbon emissions and that is where the best jobs will be.
Seriously, which is better — pouring concrete over farm fields to build a new megacity the size of Los Angeles in the Central Valley, or making the Bay Area denser and taller to support growth with San Francisco at its centre?
But no, says Tim Redmond, because running the buses will cost too much:
It’s a strange argument that increasing density — in other words, building more housing around pre-existing bus and subway lines — is something existing residents should complain about having to pay for. More density means more people riding transit and more taxpayers supporting the city budget. Yes, the city might have to hire more drivers and invest in new buses which aren’t 30 years old and covered in graffiti and vomit. But it’s about time they did that anyhow. Meanwhile, if you don’t invest in trains, buses and subways the alternative is more people driving which isn’t a smart longterm plan in a place as congested (and polluted) as the Bay Area.
This is another one of those bizarre San Francisco things which is so interesting to me. Redmond is the author of a book called (amusingly) Not in Our Backyard about the development of environmentalism in the United States. He would probably tell you he hates sprawl and wants more people to get out of their cars. Yet when it comes to making political choices — actions, not words — his instincts are conservative. He insists that his city should be preserved without change, he gives no importance to the interests and needs of the young, he evidently prefers cars over buses and subways, he sees the arrival of more people in San Francisco as a ‘crisis,’ and instead of looking at ways to make cities more sustainable he complains about having to hire more bus drivers. His left-wing views are frozen in amber from the 1980s and 1990s. In nearly every way, Redmond does a good job of representing a class of older, belatedly rather well-off Baby Boomers who see themselves as standing up for all that is good in the world (the environment, preservation, organic produce, neighbourhoods, driving a Subaru) but who are primarily engaged in self-justification.
The key to Redmond’s argument is a straw man: the claim that housing advocates, including developers and groups like the San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation (SFBARF for fun), believe that building lots of market-rate (‘luxury’) housing will by itself solve San Francisco’s housing problem:
I don’t know who Redmond thinks is making the argument he outlines above. I have never argued that, and I’m sure leading voices on the pro-housing side also acknowledge that unfettered market-rate construction, by itself, will not deliver affordability — though it will slow rent increases and decrease pressure on existing housing which might become a target for gentrification.
If you want a genuinely affordable city, you need a vast increase in purpose-built housing for low- and middle-income families, paid for by government and therefore subsidised (at least to start with) by the rest of us. Progress on building more social housing has been minimal because no one in politics thinks big when they can get by thinking small. So, instead of building a meaningful quantity of social housing (and it would have to be a lot, perhaps changing parts of the skyline more than Not in Our Backyard Tim Redmond would be comfortable with), we have an interminable development process which is supposed to provide for affordable housing in every project but often doesn’t, which maximises opportunities for cranky old people to block projects for petty reasons, which allows interest groups and their political backers to extort money from developers in the form of ‘community benefits’ and campaign contributions, and thereby makes it even more expensive to build in San Francisco and further exacerbates the shortage.
The truth is that for some San Franciscans this state of affairs works fairly well. Older homeowners like Tim Redmond have seen the value of their houses quadruple or more while paying an absurdly low rate of property tax; landlords make a killing; developers with the savvy to navigate a murky system make money hand over fist; tenants protected by San Francisco’s generous rent control code are shielded from sudden rent increases (they can’t afford to move, but they can stay put); politicians and pressure groups have leverage to extract concessions and money for pet causes; and for the lawyers and lobbyists who attach themselves to City Hall like barnacles, a more complex system is more profitable.
It’s just the rest of us who lose.
