GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Blue City Only Issues Seven New Housing Permits In Two Months Despite Housing Crisis: Report.
The city of San Francisco has only issued seven new housing permits in the first two months of 2024, The San Francisco Standard reported Monday.
San Francisco committed to building 82,000 housing units by 2031 in a plan adopted in 2023, according to the outlet.
The number of approved new housing does not count a number of scenarios such as refurbishment and conversion projects, The San Francisco Standard reported. The city reportedly claimed it had permitted 341 new housing units in three months since the start of 2024. The outlet observed that under the current rate of approvals, it would take the city decades build 82,000 new housing units.
As Thomas Sowell has written, it’s “The Housing Price of Liberalism.”
In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.
Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.
Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.
What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.
As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.” San Francisco is a crumbling, endlessly multifaceted example of precisely that.