San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

Hot Air has this one from National Review:

The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco recently hit $3690 per month, 30 percent greater than in New York City. Over the last decade, the Bay Area has added 722,000 jobs but built only 106,000 new homes. Proposition M, passed in the 1980s to avoid “Manhattanization,” limits the supply of office space. The city’s average Class A asking rent has risen 124 percent since 2010 to over $80 per square foot.

The legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs once remarked that new ideas come from old buildings, the types of places you can alter without permission because no one cares about them. This is one reason why so many garage startups and garage bands and artists spilling paint in discarded warehouse lofts have left their mark on the world. The true creative class can’t afford to rent expensive new studios.

But in San Francisco, the true creative class can’t afford to rent any space anymore.

The artists have fled. Sadie Valeri, an artist who has been painting and drawing in San Francisco for over 20 years, recently announced that she is closing her famed Potrero Hill atelier. “Our studio lease is ending,” she wrote in an email to her students last month. “And we have been informed that our rent will be increasing significantly to more than we can afford.”

There is no longer a San Francisco music scene, either. The house the Grateful Dead lived in at 710 Ashbury Street during their formative years in the 1960s is surrounded by Victorian townhouses that today sell for $3 million and more. A tourist review of the location puts it well: “Unless you knew who lived there, you wouldn’t know.”

When you limit the supply of something....