The San Franscisco Area still isn't building enough houses

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Bay Area cities and counties built 83 percent of the homes needed to meet population and job growth over the last seven years, exacerbating the region's affordability crunch and lengthening many residents' commute times, according to a study by a business-oriented think tank.

While cities from Hercules to San Jose approved more than their "fair share" of housing between 1999 and 2005, other municipalities such as Larkspur and Redwood City issued permits for only a fraction of the total condos and single-family homes prescribed by a regional group of governments, said authors of the Bay Area Housing Profile.

In 2004, the last time the report card was issued, the pace of building was 87 percent of the need -- a grade of B+ compared with the current B.

"The (housing) deficit keeps piling up every year and is contributing to housing prices that never seem to subside in the Bay Area," said Andrew Michael, vice president of sustainable development at the Bay Area Council, which released the report.

Those sky-high housing prices -- a typical single-family home runs $671,000 -- ripple through the region in the form of worsening traffic, increasing air pollution and additional segregation of high- and low-income households.

The study assigned grades ranging from A+ to F to each of the area's 110 cities and counties after studying the number of housing permits issued from 1999 and 2005 and comparing those figures with the state-mandated housing obligations set by the Association of Bay Area Governments, or ABAG. It said 184,076 new homes were approved in the past seven years -- 38,629 short of the total necessary.

Through the report, the council hopes to encourage municipalities to better plan for growth and transportation, accelerate building and reform state environmental laws they say quash many developments.

"Voters, employers, governments realize expensive housing is a real issue here," said Alastair Mactaggart, president of Emerald Fund, a residential developer in San Francisco. "The problem is, people don't want to solve the problem right next door. It's a NIMBY (not in my backyard) problem."

Some places just don't like people who aren't rich or don't already own a house.