A new YIMBY activist group is starting to gain meaningful traction in San Francisco. They were recently featured in the New York Times and they have managed to secure the financial backing of people like Jeremy Stoppelman – co-founder and CEO of Yelp.
(All excerpts in this post were taken from the NY Times.)
The group is called SF BARF, which stands for SF Bay Area Renters’ Federation. The group, however, supports new development of all kinds. So I think the name is more driven by the fact that the founder, Sonja Trauss, wanted the acronym to be BARF. It speaks to their shit disturbing approach:
“Her group consists of a 500-person mailing list and a few dozen hard-core members — most of them young professionals who work in the technology industry — who speak out at government meetings and protest against the protesters who fight new development. While only two years old, Ms. Trauss’s Renters’ Federation has blazed onto the political scene with youth and bombast and by employing guerrilla tactics that others are too polite to try. In January, for instance, she hired a lawyer to go around suing suburbs for not building enough.”
The impetus for all of this, of course, is San Francisco’s lack of affordability and severe housing shortage. Housing supply is decades behind the city’s population and job growth.
Most people are directing the blame at the tech community for bidding up housing. But there’s clearly growing recognition that housing supply matters.
As a real estate developer, my industry obviously benefits from fewer barriers to building. So let’s get that out there:
“Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich.”
But let’s also be clear that I don’t believe we should be developing roughshod over our cities. New development should respond to what’s already there and give back.
At the same time, housing supply matters a great deal. A big part of the reason that cities like San Francisco, New York and Vancouver are so expensive is that they’re naturally supply-constrained markets. Geographically, they are either peninsulas or islands.
When you overlay tight land use restrictions, fierce community opposition and/or foreign investment on top of this geography, it should come as no surprise to anyone that demand is outstripping supply.
New supply won’t solve every problem, but I do agree that it is an important part of the solution.
Seeing how we’ve started looking at data from last year, I thought it would be interesting to look at global home prices as of Q4 2015. Here’s a chart from Knight Frank, which they refer to as their Global House Price Index:
We already know that many successful cities are struggling with housing affordability. But what you may not know is that a similar phenomenon is happening in many ski towns. Supply is constrained and demand is high.
Here is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article:
Local officials and housing experts say it is a symptom of widening economic inequality, one that is especially sharply felt in tiny resort towns hemmed in by beautiful but undevelopable public land. While the wealthiest can afford $5 million ski homes and $120-a-day lift tickets, others work two jobs and sleep in shifts to get by.
“It’s so much worse today than it’s ever been,” said Sara Flitner, the mayor of Jackson, Wyo., where the median single-family home price rose 24 percent last year to $1.2 million, according to the Jackson Hole Report.
It’s for reasons like this that some ski towns have strict criteria around who is an eligible resident. For example, Banff, Alberta does this to ensure, “that housing remains available for those whose primary objective is to live and work in the community.”
In small landlocked ski towns – where it’s difficult or almost impossible to increase supply – there are only so many options.
A new YIMBY activist group is starting to gain meaningful traction in San Francisco. They were recently featured in the New York Times and they have managed to secure the financial backing of people like Jeremy Stoppelman – co-founder and CEO of Yelp.
(All excerpts in this post were taken from the NY Times.)
The group is called SF BARF, which stands for SF Bay Area Renters’ Federation. The group, however, supports new development of all kinds. So I think the name is more driven by the fact that the founder, Sonja Trauss, wanted the acronym to be BARF. It speaks to their shit disturbing approach:
“Her group consists of a 500-person mailing list and a few dozen hard-core members — most of them young professionals who work in the technology industry — who speak out at government meetings and protest against the protesters who fight new development. While only two years old, Ms. Trauss’s Renters’ Federation has blazed onto the political scene with youth and bombast and by employing guerrilla tactics that others are too polite to try. In January, for instance, she hired a lawyer to go around suing suburbs for not building enough.”
The impetus for all of this, of course, is San Francisco’s lack of affordability and severe housing shortage. Housing supply is decades behind the city’s population and job growth.
Most people are directing the blame at the tech community for bidding up housing. But there’s clearly growing recognition that housing supply matters.
As a real estate developer, my industry obviously benefits from fewer barriers to building. So let’s get that out there:
“Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich.”
But let’s also be clear that I don’t believe we should be developing roughshod over our cities. New development should respond to what’s already there and give back.
At the same time, housing supply matters a great deal. A big part of the reason that cities like San Francisco, New York and Vancouver are so expensive is that they’re naturally supply-constrained markets. Geographically, they are either peninsulas or islands.
When you overlay tight land use restrictions, fierce community opposition and/or foreign investment on top of this geography, it should come as no surprise to anyone that demand is outstripping supply.
New supply won’t solve every problem, but I do agree that it is an important part of the solution.
Seeing how we’ve started looking at data from last year, I thought it would be interesting to look at global home prices as of Q4 2015. Here’s a chart from Knight Frank, which they refer to as their Global House Price Index:
We already know that many successful cities are struggling with housing affordability. But what you may not know is that a similar phenomenon is happening in many ski towns. Supply is constrained and demand is high.
Here is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article:
Local officials and housing experts say it is a symptom of widening economic inequality, one that is especially sharply felt in tiny resort towns hemmed in by beautiful but undevelopable public land. While the wealthiest can afford $5 million ski homes and $120-a-day lift tickets, others work two jobs and sleep in shifts to get by.
“It’s so much worse today than it’s ever been,” said Sara Flitner, the mayor of Jackson, Wyo., where the median single-family home price rose 24 percent last year to $1.2 million, according to the Jackson Hole Report.
It’s for reasons like this that some ski towns have strict criteria around who is an eligible resident. For example, Banff, Alberta does this to ensure, “that housing remains available for those whose primary objective is to live and work in the community.”
In small landlocked ski towns – where it’s difficult or almost impossible to increase supply – there are only so many options.
At the top of the list is Turkey, with an 18.4% increase from Q4 2014 to Q4 2015. (Supposedly this is because it has recently become easier for foreigners to buy property in the country.) Canada is 13th with a 6.2% increase (during this same time period) and the United States is 17th at 5.4%.
This is obviously a high level analysis. There are lots of regional and local variations within each country. For instance in Canada right now, Calgary is a very different place than, say, Vancouver or Toronto.
Nonetheless, it’s still valuable to see the relative performance of each country and see what their (Knight Frank’s) prediction is for 2016:
“Our outlook for 2016 is muted. We expect the index’s overall rate of growth to be weaker in 2016 than 2015. The global economy is experiencing a potentially dangerous cocktail of low oil prices, a strong [US] dollar and a continued slowdown in China.”
It’s also interesting to see how the countries rank in terms of affordability:
Once again, Canada ranks as being one of the least affordable countries in terms of home prices.
At the top of the list is Turkey, with an 18.4% increase from Q4 2014 to Q4 2015. (Supposedly this is because it has recently become easier for foreigners to buy property in the country.) Canada is 13th with a 6.2% increase (during this same time period) and the United States is 17th at 5.4%.
This is obviously a high level analysis. There are lots of regional and local variations within each country. For instance in Canada right now, Calgary is a very different place than, say, Vancouver or Toronto.
Nonetheless, it’s still valuable to see the relative performance of each country and see what their (Knight Frank’s) prediction is for 2016:
“Our outlook for 2016 is muted. We expect the index’s overall rate of growth to be weaker in 2016 than 2015. The global economy is experiencing a potentially dangerous cocktail of low oil prices, a strong [US] dollar and a continued slowdown in China.”
It’s also interesting to see how the countries rank in terms of affordability:
Once again, Canada ranks as being one of the least affordable countries in terms of home prices.
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