A sizable number of Americans live with 3-4 people in a singlewide.
All this regulation does is allow something to be built. I can’t see why that would be controversial. What should have been controversial is disallowing it in the first place.
There is probably no greater way that society and government screw poor people than by local licensing and zoning regulations.
What is screwing most people is the distorted real estate market. It gives very large financial incentives for people never to move again, and those incentives accumulate over time.
The housing policy of “let’s put people in smaller and smaller boxes” is bad on multiple levels. First, as I’ve noted, it doesn’t fix the cause of the lousy housing market.
Second, if tiny apartments are viewed as attractive options for affordable housing because so many rental units have been taken out of the market, it is strictly a temporary solution to a generational problem. As young singles grow into couples, perhaps with children, they can’t continue to live in tiny apartments. Larger apartments are going to be in short supply, and thus available ones will be more expensive. The cost of buying houses will continue to be high because the rental market for larger apartments will be artificially high. So, we will continue to see the same thing in housing in rent controlled cities as we see for the classes in the US generally: the middle class is going to get screwed coming and going.
Third, tiny apartments are bad for consumption. You can’t buy and store a lot of shit in a tiny apartment. Now, we’re only looking at a couple hundred units right now, but I think in general that people should be able to live in a place where they can own a desktop computer, more than 5 changes of clothes, and some assorted other consumer goods.
Sure, you say, people are free not to live in tiny apartments. But if the main solution to a sucky rental market is to create dwellings that are barely the size of two storage units put together, and that’s the main source of affordable housing… people in that area are screwed.
The alternative to ultra-small apartments is not nice spacious ones. It is what students, young professionals, low-wage workers and assorted cheapskates already do- sharing apartments and inhabiting “creative living spaces”. I’m a young professional in a high rent zone, and I’ve lived behind the curtain the living room, in a modified dining room, two-to-a-studio, in basements, etc., often with complete strangers as housemates. My co-worker, for example, lives in a two-bedroom apartment in a nice building. Two friends share a room, another has the other room, someone has curtained off the dining room and uses that as a bedroom, and she sleeps in a large walk-in closet. They are all reasonably paid professionals in their late 20s, and this arrangement really is the most reasonable one available to them.
Compared to the crowded make-do living situations that brokesters usually live in, the privacy of a “prison cell apartment” is a paradise. A private bathroom, nobody leaving dishes in the sink, no need to live with strangers I met on Craig’s List and a much better chance of a healthy love life (not to mention no pressure to move in with my SO ASAP to save on rent? SIgn me up!
San Francisco will always going to be 231 square miles of prime real estate, and with or without rent control, housing will always be expensive. There will always be students, young people, commuters and low-wage workers who will be interested in rock-bottom rent. Before prison-cell apartments, there were boarding houses. That’s the part of the market we’ve really lost out on.
I’m not saying rents in San Francisco will be cheap. I’m saying without rent control, they would be cheaper. Even Paul Krugman agrees that rent control is a terrible policy. And his conclusion? “So now you know why economists are useless: when they actually do understand something, people don’t want to hear about it.”
My dorm room in grad school was 79 square feet. 220 isn’t that small.
Okay, but even if rent was somewhat cheaper in San Francisco, it would still be more expensive than other nearby cities. Unless San Francisco runs out of students, artists, commuters, interns, young folks and service workers, there will always be a demographic that is interested in living in the city proper for as little rent as possible. Those “prison cell” apartments will still be highly sought after.
Rent control may affect the eventual price point, but in San Francisco’s case, it’s not going to affect the fact that affordable housing will always be at a lesser standard- be it size, condition, or location- than other nearby cities. The working stiff who can afford a one-bedroom in Oakland will probably never be able to afford a one-bedroom in San Francisco. There will always be a large number of people who want to live in San Francisco who cannot afford a traditional living arrangement.
Small studios are a better alternative than the current practice of ad-hoc boarding houses, where groups of strangers camp out in spaces designed for couples or small families. The market has spoken, and some people want no-frills housing in a good location.
An absurdist, broken market has spoken. Again, it is impossible to build enough tiny studios to replace the tens of thousands of apartments that have been taken off the market.
Step one is to fix the market and add back those tens of thousands of apartments that are suitable for families, middle class, and group homes before building dorm rooms for grown men and women.
The more fundamental question here is, why won’t people acknowledge that the market for housing is broken, and band-aids are not sufficient? Most of the people who live in San Francisco will readily acknowledge that the market for health care is a disaster and there must be fundamental change. The conservative proposal for stripped-down health plans that are cheap and cover almost nothing is laughed at in those circles – and I agree with them. But when it comes to the broken system of rent control, they propose the housing equivalent of a stripped-down cheap health plan rather than acknowledge the fundamental problem. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people do not see adding tens of thousands of existing apartments to the housing pool at unregulated prices as being a much better win for those who need housing, as compared to building handfuls of tiny apartments over the next couple years. This should be a no-brainer.
Here’s an artists rendering. It looks pretty livable for a young single person. No idea if the actual apartments will resemble this conception.
Only 47 square miles of it can be prime real estate: the rest of it is water.
My first apartment was 12 x 15 including, yes, kitchen and bath as well as the single room (kitchen was an alcove, bath was entered through the closet). Tiny, yes, but I loved it and it was an important step along my road to adulthood/independence. Lived there 18 months. It was great for that time in my life.
I am very mildly offended you compared such a space to a prison cell. Want to know one HUGE difference between that and a cell? If it’s an apartment you can leave at any time. It was a secure place to retreat to for sleep, a meal, and a safe place to keep my stuff. Nothing prevented me from leaving it when I chose to experience city life, visit friends, and so forth. It felt liberating, not confining.
It’s not for everyone, but for some folks they’d rather spend money on things other than a large living space. For other folks, a tiny but safe and secure apartment is far superior than well-meaning codes requiring larger units beyond their means, requiring them to take on roommates who may or may not be trustworthy, or live in unsavory locations.
I’m a poor Bay Area student, and I have no problem acknowledging this. The observation that pretty much all economists of all political stripes seem to agree that rent control is a misguided, destructive idea is convincing enough to me.
I hope your SO likes doing it standing up.
Why haven’t you called Geico?!
The OP is making some incorrect assumptions. For one thing, San Francisco does not have “very strong rent control laws”. Strong rent control was banned by state law in the 90s. What SF has is properly termed rent stabilization, although people do call it rent control in casual conversation. It’s pretty mild.
SF is a very small city in terms of land area. The lack of housing is not caused by regulating rents. It’s caused by a lack of land, combined with other regulations (like zoning) that aren’t going away anytime soon. Additionally, San Francisco’s housing issues predate its adoption of rent stabilization.
I really don’t see what the problem is here. Just speaking as a resident of the Bay Area who has done plenty of apartment hunting in the past, in my opinion there are not nearly enough small studios available. They are pretty hard to come by. If this increases the supply, all the better. They really should not have been disallowing small dwellings in the first place.
Only if the kid or grandkid lived with you in the apartment for 2 years before you left the apartment. You can’t actually inherit a rent controlled (or stabilized) apartment in New York.
Are you really thinking there are tens of thousands of single people living large in bag-ass SF apartments because of rent control? I spent most of my life in the Bay Area and I’ve never met one person like that. More often it’s just a working stiff that can afford a one bedroom instead of a studio. I don’t know how you’d fit a family into a one bedroom and call that an improvement. Besides where would the working stiff go if they lost their apartment under your plan? Should they all move to Fremont or Daly City? How does that fix anything?
Where did you get this tens of thousands number anyway? Have you ever even been to San Francisco or do you know anyone who rents an apartment there?
Are you a real estate attorney or do you remember that case from Property Law? 
moejoe: I grew up in Berkeley. If you read the links in the OP you’ll find the sources of virtually all the info in the OP, including the estimate that 10,000 to 25,000 rental units are kept off the market due to rent control. I have known people who have benefitted greatly from rent control, and in one of my links is an interview with a woman who, because of rent control, rents two bedroom apartments for $1,000.
The reason you probably don’t know people wih great cheap apartments is that people have increasing economic incentives never to move from a cheap, nice apartment, so it will never enter the market. That’s the whole problem.
As far as what people do when they can no longer afford the place they live: they will have to move. “But rents are going up so fast in California!” you say. Do you know why? Declining stock as vacant apartments are converted to condos or taken off the market, which increases demand and prices for available units, which also drives up the cost of buying property, which further reduces fluidity in the market, starting the vicious cycle over again. The futility of rent control is almost as uncontroversial among economists as climate change is among scientists.
Eliminating rent control will increase the housing supply, stabilizing prices, and increasing fluidity in the market. Right now, a minority of renters are making life worse for everyone.
Any other questions?
I remember that case from when my husband wanted to hold on to his mother’s rent-controlled apartment , and when I looked into the regulations and found out that one of us would have to live in that three-room hovel with her for 2 years before she died, I said “hell, no”. But it’s also here