While putting together links for my last post I stumbled on this video clip. There’s nothing special about the image of a wordy Power Point presentation. But it’s worth listening to what the City of San Francisco’s Chief Economist Ted Egan says about housing supply and demand in the city. His analysis is what was the hook for this story in the San Francisco Examiner.

When asked recently about his 2012 testimony, Egan said, “I think what I said was that building 100,000 units would have a comparable impact on prices to a down-payment subsidy that would cost several billion dollars just to cover the entire low-income — 50 to 80 percent of the area media income — population in The City. Whether such a level of construction would ‘really impact’ prices is a matter of opinion.”

That opinion seemed to be his in 2012: “In order to have an appreciative effect on diminishing housing prices in San Francisco,” he told the committee, The City would have to build 100,000 units.

The question for Seattle is will we learn from San Francisco and make building easier now, or will we listen to NIMBYs who want to stop building new housing now?