Yeah all apartment buildings have that built in a little as you noticed: different sized units for different prices. 

Also, just encourage construction of all housing no matter the final planned price point. Like all products, the new version is the most expensive. The best middle income housing is the past's luxury housing. 
The house I live in is 150 years old, my car is 23 years old, as it should be, I'm mid-low income. 
There are tons of high income people here and tons of new high income people coming all the time. They want to pay a lot for things! They can afford it and it makes them feel nice. As long as we build enough new, high end stuff to satiate that part of the market, we don't have to worry that our middle low income housing will be invaded. 
What if they accidentally build too much high priced housing? That would be great. That would be winning the lottery - they would cut prices on the extra units until they got tenants. That's what happened in Phila after the crash in 2008 and around here after the crash in the 90s. 

The other way to make new build less expensive is to make it cheaper to build. You're seeing a selection bias - if it costs $250/ sq ft to build, no new thing will be sold for less than that. If it costs $100/sq ft to build, then you will see projects that will sell for less. 

The part of the building costs that are under the control of regular citizens - maybe the fees and taxes the local municipality charges, and definitely the costs that are incurred by a long drawn out entitlement process. 

This is what is so ironic and sad about the WOSP opposition. The specific plan is a blanket EIR, so that builders can build more quickly (and therefore cheaply). The opposition, if successful, would make building take longer and be more expensive. So, selection bias, whatever gets built will be the more expensive.

On Saturday, May 17, 2014, Romy Snowyla <romy@snowyla.com> wrote:
Is there a way to encourage construction of middle class and low income housing? This is a tough question and has a lot do to with basic tax structure, social values & resources。

I lived in Berlin and there were plenty of high quality safe mixed income neighborhoods . The wealthy people usually lived on the top floors (light) .

By the train station there were a lot of nice low income homes mixed in with condos and centex middle income duplexes about a decade ago which was cool. 



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On May 17, 2014, at 10:20 AM, Gregg Horton <greggahorton@gmail.com> wrote:

Well hackerspaces along with pop-up shops, yoga studios, artisanal anything, third wave coffee shops and food trucks are some of the horsemen of the gentripocalypse

On May 17, 2014 10:13 AM, "Romy Snowyla" <romy@snowyla.com> wrote:
So I'm curious .. Once sudoroom moves out of it's current location what hot education tech start up moves in? I guess we are the frontline of the gentrification wave. 

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On May 17, 2014, at 9:30 AM, Sonja Trauss <sonja.trauss@gmail.com> wrote:

This is an Orwellian notion of anti-displacement. 

In the face of increased population these people seek to build nothing new. I really can't understand what they think is going to happen when the population goes up but the housing stock doesn't. 

Sf tried that! Look what's happening there! It sucks! 

This is the saddest thing to me because all efforts like this do, is make building more expensive and difficult. That means the only things that get built are at higher price points. Or, if they're slightly successful, whole projects are blocked, and they miss the opportunity to get capital to build something useful, instead of something stupid like a new calendaring app. 

On Friday, May 16, 2014, Romy Snowyla <romy@snowyla.com> wrote:

WOSP – City of Oakland’s Plan for Gentrification: A Target For Anti-Displacement Activity : Indybay

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Advertisement for Public Release of WOSP in Feb. 2014

March 29, 2014

Snapshot of the State and Capital in the Bay Area

If the Bay Area’s economy was compared to every other national economy in the world, it would be the 19th largest. The Bay has the highest GDP per capita in the entire United States, and even outpaces London and Singapore. It captures 40% of the entire flow of venture capital in the US (p11), which constitutes a higher amount of capital than that captured during the dot.com boom. While the Bay accounts for only 2.4% of the total jobs in the US, it has 12% of the computer & electronics manufacturing, 10.3% of software development, and 8.3% of internet related jobs (p13.) Seven of the top 10 social media companies are here – Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Linkedin, Zynga, and Yelp. In short, the Bay is home to one of the highest concentrations of capital in the world and mapping out the composition of capital is key for us to situate ourselves as we continue to engage in class combat. (Footnote #1)

The regional state is well aware of its place within the world economy. Over the past years, city politicians from the greater Bay Area have come together to generate a 30 year strategy about how to restructure the region’s housing, employment, and transportation structures. Plan Bay Area (PBA) was developed by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) to carry out the tasks of determining how the state can support and facilitate the accumulation of capital throughout the region. In order to grease the wheels of the local capitalist economy, the PBA aims to redevelop housing and transit throughout the Bay; New units are set to be built, new transportation “hubs” developed, and both of these projects are to be coordinated across single cities and the bay area as a whole.

PBA aims to align the various metropolitan areas of the Bay in their development of housing