San Francisco is the municipal equivalent of raising tons of money to scale negative unit economics
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Replying to @Austen @AustenAllred
Public goods often have negative unit economics (at least in the short/medium term). If they had positive unit economics, the private sector would’ve provided it already.
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Replying to @kimmaicutler
I meant it as an analogy, not literally. It feels like things are fundamentally broken organizationally and we try to solve with money.
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Replying to @Austen @AustenAllred
Well, I dunno, when your whole country effectively uses homeownership as a social safety net in lieu of actually having a social safety net and therefore real estate is protected and enhanced as an asset class at literally every level of government and generally appreciates at
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Replying to @kimmaicutler @AustenAllred
5-7%/yr while wages have generally remained flat since the 1970s, you will just have a larger and larger share of people left out of this system over time and then you’ll also have to spend more money to re-house them via increasingly expensive rental subsidies, land acquisitions
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Sounds like a problem much larger than San Francisco
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Replying to @nbashaw @kimmaicutler
California and SF exacerbate it with housing policy among other things
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It’s a bigger problem than SF. Also we have a real estate developer (who actually does not have a great track record in business) running the country and so I don’t think the federal stuff is going to get solved soon.
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A big problem is that voters perceive homelessness as a municipal problem, but housing subsidies (for both upper middle class homeowners and Section 8) are controlled at the federal level. Every time the federal govt weakens the social safety net, voters blame cities for the
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the resulting consequences. If the federal govt’s tax plan effectively means 235K fewer affordable housing units, who do you think picks up the tab? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/business/economy/tax-housing.amp.html …
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