Steve Sailer writes: The city of San Francisco has become a notoriously unaffordable place to live. Two-bedroom apartments in San Francisco currently average $4,126 per month, up from $1,840 in 2009. To buy a three-bedroom home would run you $1,612,500.
With San Francisco being one of the epicenters of the environmental movement of the past half century, local homeowners are adept at using progressive verbiage for justifying keeping San Francisco in stasis. As a conservative, I rather admire the cleverness with which liberals have contrived to keep San Francisco physically looking much like it did in the past.
The situation has gotten so bad for young renters that San Francisco now even numbers among its myriad activist groups a pro-capitalist one—the Bay Area Renters Federation, or BARF—that proposes that developers be allowed to develop.
This is part of an increasing national push to allow more construction in already dense big cities. That’s probably a good idea, but it’s worth explaining in honest language what’s actually going on in San Francisco.
