Friday, October 18, 2013

Nevius recycles "development wars" myth

"Construction cranes are popping up like weeds"

C.W. Nevius made a couple of phone calls to people who agree with him to come up with still another column on the completely imaginary opposition to building housing in San Francisco:
"Any suggestion of increased development is bound to start howls of protests from those still riding the no-growth hobbyhorse, but it is hard to imagine what they disagree with."
It's even harder to imagine who "they" are. Like his previous columns promoting this myth, neither Nevius---nor SPUR's Gabriel Metcalf and Planning Director Rahaim, the two he talked to---bother to name a single individual or organization that is now---or has in the past---started "howls of protests" about all the new construction in the city.

District 5 Diary is one of the few critics of this push to overdevelop San Francisco, but I doubt that Nevius is talking about me.

Would that "they" were protesting, since the dumb smart growth/transit corridors assumption of Rahaim's agency is allowing the approval of so many housing projects that it's hard for Curbed, the real estate blog, to keep track of them all.

The explicit  and dubious assumption behind this boom in construction is that building a lot more housing in San Francisco will reduce housing prices. 

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