Tag: San Francisco

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free trade & free markets too much government

San Francisco Obstructionism

San Francisco, homeless, zoning, housing, regulations

Bob Tillman wants to build a 75-​unit apartment building in San Francisco.

He owns the property — a laundromat. He just wants to convert it. But although there are no good reasons why he shouldn’t, city officials and activists opposed to the property rights of developers have been blocking the project. Tillman has spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars just trying to get started.

His plight “encapsulates the political dysfunction that’s turning San Francisco … into an exclusive playground for the ultra-​wealthy,” says Reason magazine.

Because of the government’s general antagonism to development, and specific policies such as rent control, much less housing is getting built in the city than would have been possible in a fully free market.

The population is growing quickly, but housing isn’t keeping up. Which results in unnecessarily high rents and housing prices.

None of this is shocking if you understand basic economics. The greater the supply of a good, the cheaper the price tends to be — all other things being equal. That qualification is important. If the supply of oranges doubles but everybody suddenly starts an all-​orange-​juice diet, orange prices may remain the same or even rise — but less than the price would have risen without the greater supply.

Many factors, including monetary factors, can affect the price of a good. All I’m saying is that if you want the benefits of more housing, including rents that are lower than they would have been without the new housing, you must build houses and apartment complexes.

Stop something from being built and, unfortunately, it won’t be there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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San Francisco, homeless, zoning, housing, regulations
Photo by Mussi Katz

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall nannyism national politics & policies property rights responsibility too much government

Minimum Shock

minimum wage, closure, restaurant, business, prohibition, wages, pay, Berkeley, San Francisco

“Three restaurants vacated the Bay this week, with Berkeley’s Bistro Liaison getting the most attention,” the San Francisco edition of Eater informs us. “It’s a bittersweet exit for the owners, who plan to start new careers.”

The week in question was in February. But this was not an isolated event. Sixty-​four Bay-​area restaurants and fast food joints closed their doors this last winter.

That is a lot of closures.

Why?

Every eatery has a different story, but the entry December 17* provides a big clue: minimum wage hikes.

Citizens should hardly be surprised. They got what they asked for. The minimum wage went up to $13.00 per hour last July, and will go up another two bucks next year. And this was the result of a citizen initiative. “On November 4, 2014, San Francisco voters passed Proposition J, raising the minimum wage to $15.00 by 2018,” the City Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement tells us. 

And the thing about minimum wage laws is that they do not — either by magic or by law — directly raise any wages. They, by law and quite directly, prohibit wage contracts below the minimum established. 

Businesses then react, struggling to accommodate the newly imposed costs. Sometimes they keep all their employees and economize on other inputs, but often they must re-​arrange hours and workers and whole production schemes.

If hemmed in elsewhere, they just go out of business.

Just as one should expect, according to the law of supply and demand.**

Citizens might wish to reconsider. That is, initiate a measure to repeal a previously successful initiative … that gave us this unsuccessful policy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The entry reads thusly: “OAKLAND — alaMar Kitchen and Bar as you know it is shuttering on December 17, but will reopen in the new year with a fast casual format. The owner points to minimum wage raises and the cost of doing business in the Bay Area as the reasons cited for the closure/​change.”

** It is often said that businesses just “raise prices” and “pass along the costs” to consumers in general, but, for reasons of supply and demand, they cannot do this without decreasing sales and thus revenue.

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Categories
free trade & free markets

Help Airbnb Win in San Fran

Whenever companies invent radical new ways of making life easier, there’s a good chance someone will kvetch about how hazardous the new way is and/​or how rudely inconvenient for those wedded to old ways.

That’s true when it comes to smartphone apps that helps users buy rides outside the usual regulated-​taxi context (as I’ve discussed here and here). It’s also true in the case of Airbnb, whose app connects renters and home owners.

Airbnb and other companies are fighting to reform San Francisco’s restrictive housing laws, which have helped inflict one of the most hellish housing markets in the country. The Fair to Share San Francisco website says that the town’s housing laws are “outdated” — which understates the case, since the strictures weren’t valid to begin with. Regulators prohibit San Francisco residents from subletting their residences for fewer than thirty days.

This makes things tough for an app designed to broker short-​term rentals.

Airbnb has also been hassled in New York State, where it has been forced to turn over some data about its users to the attorney general as prelude to turning over even more data about users the AG decides may be breaking the law.

It is indeed unfair to outlaw you from peacefully using your own property as you wish. If you live in the San Francisco area, you can help change Fog City’s smoggy housing laws by signing a petition at the Fair to Share site.

Strike a blow for Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Original photo by Dave Alter, “Lombard Street San Francisco,” some rights reserved.

Categories
local leaders too much government

How to Be a Bad-​Law Killer

You have a golden opportunity to help kill some of the bad laws infesting San Francisco’s city code.

The news is being passed along by the indefatigable champions of liberty and property rights at the Institute for Justice. Wherever local governments have assaulted the right of citizens to use and dispose of their own property, IJ has fought and won legal battles on behalf of the victims. Now the Institute urges us to accept the invitation of City Supervisor Mark Farrell to help root out the city’s bad laws.

Farrell wants to “clear any unnecessary laws from San Francisco’s books and to tweak laws that need updating.”

IJ has already fingered some of the more egregious San Fran laws that need “tweaking.” For example, there’s Chapter 6 of housing code, which demands that “Private and public storage garages in apartment houses and hotels shall be used only for storage of automobiles.” Thus, residents like Kimberly Conley are breaking the law when they stow their bikes in their garages, and can be fined up to $500 per infraction.

There are onerous regulations on food trucks, onerous rent control laws, a “transient occupancy” tax on rentals by homeowners to travelers, onerous dog-​walking licenses. Just for starters. (“Don’t worry, there’s plenty of work for everyone,” IJ assures us.)

The San Francisco Code is presented at a website that seeks to demystify its legal jargon. Mark Farrell’s email address is mark.​Farrell@​sfgov.​org.

Happy hunting.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy too much government

Excise Excitement Exorcizes E‑Biz

Retail sales taxation became vogue among the states of the union during the Great Depression. When other revenue sources dried up, many states decided to nab potential taxpayers at each transaction.

We’re in a depression again, and numerous legislatures are looking to expand their retail sales tax base by targeting out-​of-​state Internet purchases.

California has made the biggest stink about this, and its fight with Amazon​.com has been in the headlines for some time. Though the issue has been put “on hold” for a year, the Assembly’s rapacity has produced at least one effect. It has driven many online businesses out of the state, and severely curtailed the online sales of many California brick-​and-​mortar concerns.

Take Shopobot, a new online business. One of this San Francisco company’s biggest revenue streams was Amazon. And Amazon dropped it like a hot rock.

So what did Shopobot do? It fled California for the cooler Seattle, Washington.

Why skip Oregon — which lacks a retail sales tax? My guess is that Oregon’s political environment struck the Shopobot folks as nearly as crazy as California’s, so heading further north made more sense, to sit beside Amazon itself, and across Lake Union from Adobe’s compound, er, “campus.”

The online sales tax question is widely perceived as a problem. The only solution, I guess, is to let Congress do its constitutional duty and “regulate interstate commerce.”

Amazon sure wants that.

But why am I not optimistic about a good solution?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Bleaching the Bay

In economics, it’s called an “unintended effect”; in pharmacology, a “side effect.” In plumbing, it’s one heckuva stink.

Yes, it’s time again for a perennial Common Sense subject: Government messing around in our toilets.

The push to “save water” gushed into a number of proposals over the years, the closest-​to-​consumer one being the many government edicts demanding that toilets use less water. 

Governments can make a regulation and process lawbreakers. But they can’t change the laws of liquid dynamics. Federal legislation for smaller-​reservoir toilets yielded a generation of poorly flushing toilets — demanding double flushing to get solids down. It took years for inventive engineers and entrepreneurs to redesign toilets so that they could actually do their job right.

But Congress’s intrusion into your bathroom wasn’t enough for busybodies in San Francisco. They had to go further, with low-​flow toilets that used even less water.

The consequence has now become pretty obvious: Too little water in the public sewage system, leading to slow-​moving masses of ugh, clogging pipes, and, well stench.

San Francisco has proved that “well-​intended” government regulation into our bathrooms quite literally stinks.

Frisco sewerage officials have stocked up on $14 million worth of bleach to “act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city’s water before it’s dumped into the bay.” Environmentalists are predictably and, well, understandably concerned. 

What begins as an environmental concern ends as an environmental disaster.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.