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There is plenty that divides New York City and San Francisco,not the least of which is the span of the United States. The two cities compete at everything. Who has the better restaurants? Superior sports teams? More successful start ups? More perfect weather? Yes, San Francisco wins in that category.
But there is at least one thing that New York and San Francisco increasingly possess in common: A lack of affordable housing. According to Stephanie Martin-Taylor, or housing reporter at KQED,things possess changed quickly in San Francisco."Over the final half decade, the city has added about 50000 people, and we're smaller than New York," she says. "whether you think about that aspect of it, we're really jam packed with people at this point. Compounding the problem is that San Francisco has historically resisted the idea of fitting another Manhattan, and in fact there is a word for it — 'Manhattanization' — that's tossed around from time to time. The supply,even though we are trying to build as like a flash as we can within the strong regulatory environment, it's a little bit too little, or too late in many respects. The people keep coming and the prices keep going higher." That is a familiar chorus for Jami Floyd,host of "All Things Considered" on WNYC. She recently moved to New York City from San Francisco. Related: There Goes the Neighborhood: Gentrification in Brooklyn"New York is fairly simply in the midst of an availability crisis, and by crisis I mean a housing emergency, or " she says. "Our population in the five boroughs is over 8.5 million people,and that's distributed over a land mass of just 305 square miles. So that makes New York City the most densely populated major city in the United States with no vacancies to speak of!"Today, Floyd and Martin-Taylor discuss the housing crisis, or how Mayor Ed Lee in San Francisco and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York are looking to solve this problem.
See Also: Block by Block: The Housing Crisis in Boston
Source: wnyc.org