On line discussion of SF's housing woes

Participate in a discussion of San Francisco's land-based housing troubles. The discussion will be moderated.

Our backdrop:

When Tim Redmond quotes Karen Chapple in order to school SPUR it's a flop.

Here's the quote from Chapple's essay diagnosing SF downtown's paucity of foot traffic:

"Big landlords and developers hate [restrictive zoning]; they want to maximize every dollar they can get for every inch of land."

Chapple, by the way, is an eminent professor of urban planning, while Tim Redmond is publisher and editor of 48 Hills. SPUR is a well-intentioned urban think tank.

The "flop" observed four paragraphs above is simply this. Everyone of us should be striving to maximize the advantage of every inch of land, but when land is conceded to be conventionally privatable, gone is any practical argument for socially maximizing the use of land.

Animals and plant species flourish precisely because they are striving to optimize their use of habitat . . .but with this natural law proviso: there is no monopoly of habitat by any organic being. San Francisco, however, breeches this natural law by permitting individuals and associations of individuals to monopolize habitat without organically co-existing with other humans. In other words, land owners are not in a reciprocal organic relationship with society. They own land, demand created value from others as a condition for use of location, but offer nothing in exchange that they themselves have created. That non-reciprocal relationship is the origin of all housing debacles.