The housing crisis #1: Honesty and stupidity

Curbed

A few days after I praised Paul Krugman for his honesty on the housing crisis, he's stupid  on the subject:

Houston’s sprawl gave the city terrible traffic and an outsized pollution footprint even before the hurricane. When the rains came, the vast paved-over area meant that rising waters had nowhere to go.

So is Houston’s disaster a lesson in the importance of urban land-use regulation, of not letting developers build whatever they want, wherever they want? Yes, but.

To understand that “but,” consider the different kind of disaster taking place in San Francisco. Where Houston has long been famous for its virtual absence of regulations on building, greater San Francisco is famous for its NIMBYism — that is, the power of “not in my backyard” sentiment to prevent new housing construction. The Bay Area economy has boomed in recent years, mainly thanks to Silicon Valley; but very few new housing units have been added.

If San Francisco is so "famous for its NIMBYism," why doesn't Krugman---and others who make that claim---cite some city organizations and individuals leading that movement? 

Note too that Krugman abruptly shifts his argument above and below from San Francisco to "the Bay Area economy," as if they were the same thing (Only New York City is already more densely populated than SF):

More Krugman:

The result has been soaring rents and home prices. The median monthly rent on a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is more than $3,000, the highest in the nation and roughly triple the rent in Houston; the median price of a single-family home is more than $800,000. And while geography — the constraint imposed by water and mountains — is often offered as an excuse for the Bay Area’s failure to build more housing, there’s no good reason it couldn’t build up. San Francisco housing is now quite a lot more expensive than New York housing, so why not have more tall buildings?

The reality is that San Francisco is in the middle of a housing boom, as explained in Curbed, the real estate blog, back in 2013: "Construction cranes are popping up like weeds across the city, and these days folks are used to new buildings rising up in just a matter of months. The current construction boom is one for the record books..." 

And in this Examiner op-ed last year (San Francisco’s most massive housing construction era since urban renewal):

San Francisco is currently experiencing its highest level of housing production since the 1960s’ Urban Renewal. According to the City Planning Department’s Housing Inventory, almost 3,500 units were built in the year 2014, and we can estimate another 3,500 homes were completed in 2015. The last time we reached such levels of production was between 1963 and 1965, during the heady and controversial days when entire neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for new construction.

Thousands more units are currently midconstruction, or have been approved and are simply waiting for developers to start construction. According to the City Planning Department’s “Pipeline” data as of October 2015, there are almost 9,000 units of housing in various stages of construction and another 4,300 fully approved homes that have yet to begin construction. (This does not include the 23,000 units approved in the huge Hunters Point Shipyard, Treasure Island and Park Merced projects, which will be built in the coming years).

The real issue is discussed by Calvin Welch: Can We Build Our Way to Housing Affordability in San Francisco? 

See also Smart growth in San Francisco?