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Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.

While this system does pretty effectively maximize the percentage of new apartments that are set aside as below market housing for low income people in new buildings, it does so at TREMENDOUS cost to broad housing affordability. cayimby.org/blog/califor...

Because the rents that poor people can afford are too low to pay off the cost of building new homes for them, these requirements act as a stealth tax on new housing. Taxing new homes means that only the highest-end projects get built and each subsidized unit costs tenants $800,000 in excess rent.

Subsidized housing is a good thing and we should publicly fund it instead of relying on kludgy, counterproductive market mechanisms that trade broad middle class housing affordability for a handful of means-tested units.

Wishes are free. If anti-affordability voices put their shoulders to the wheel on making public funding a reality, I would have more faith in their prescriptions. Not seeing it though.

In any case, SF anti-affordability advocates got their wish: affordability mandates have been cut to 5% and eliminated completely for developments of fewer than 25 units. The result will be the Manhattanization of San Francisco.

Maybe not bad for the trust fund babies who can buy homes there, but it’s a loss to the greater community.

Do you think the status quo was working out great for working class people?

I see it’s improved, and I see that building to exclude hotel workers, nurses, and other working people does not serve the greater good. Is Jane Jacob’s a pariah in Urban Planning schools these days?