And it's not just limited to SF. You can go out to Tracy or Fairfield where there's miles and miles of space in every direction and yet, you still see the houses piled on top of each other with less than 5 feet in between each house, all because the greedy government and it's citizens won't allocate more space for residential areas. It's just crazy. Somehow, these democratically controlled areas just feel that everything (traffic, fishes, insects, a river, etc) is more important than basic human needs (shelter). They need to start putting basic human needs first, above all the other petty stuff.
No. SF has ample space horizontally and more importantly vertically for housing. The problem is the construction of housing has been hindered dramatically by bureaucrats.
You do realize just how tiny SF really is, don't you? It is only ~49 square miles. Take out land that is parks, schools, public services, roads, parking lots, retail, offices, not suitable for building, etc. - doesn't leave lots of land available for housing.
The housing problem in the bay area has nothing to do with space. There's plenty of space in most places, or at least enough room for greater density. Even as far out as Fairfield, you can see miles and miles of empty space, and yet all the stupid little houses are bunched up into a tiny little lot, surrounded by nothing but land.
The problem, as you said, is land use policy and regulations. All these rent control rules drive up the cost of building more housing, further constraining supply, causing even greater rent control... It's a downward spiral of epic proportions.
The true root of the problem is a lack of basic economic education. I've been viewing my voter election material, and there are countless politicians who freely admit that they've been "preserving open spaces", "preventing new construction and building" and even bragging about it! This tells you something about the general public: they don't understand (or believe in) the first thing about supply and demand. They just don't understand that more regulation leads to less supply, which leads to even higher housing prices.
The bay area has more than enough space too. It spreads over 100 kilometers south of San Francisco. It covers more than the surface area of NYC in total. The real issue is that the bay area refuses to grow. The population is only about 5 millions IIRC. The density is really low.
IMO, in order to accomodate more people, and deal with the insane rents, the bay area needs to start growing vertically. Every other urban area I've been to has towers, apartment complexes. Here everything is flat. Most apartment buildings are only two floors high, rarely more than three.
I won't get into the politics of all of this, but politics are the real problem. Many of the suburbanites around here want their suburbs to remain suburbs. The law of offer and demand should mean that apartment towers are getting built and rents go down as competition increase, but the regulations in place prevent this. Many swanky new condos are being built, but these are still flat buildings, not making efficient use of the available space.
That's literally not true. Human density can go far beyond what SF has. In fact, you could fit a lot more people in SF with only part of the city getting higher density.
The idea that each city should "do it's part" has no basis in sane urban planing. We know the current distribution of density isn't useful and this more or less just makes it permanent.
It is not a conspiracy or an inevitable consequence of growth. It is not because of the concentration of wealth (also a problem!). It is because there is not enough housing.
There are many kinds of restrictions, some you probably agree with. Most of the restrictions are popular with liberals, conservatives, Democrats, and Republicans.
Restrictions like:
* must build parking per housing unit
* zoning restrictions to limit density
* long approval processes for construction
* many blocks to construction approval even after complying with all the restrictions
This is a bipartisan problem, it's really a culture problem. It's understandable, even on the micro scale. When you move into a place (and are done renovating it), you'd prefer that the neighborhood never change and that no one does any construction in it. There's a little tinge of atavistic fear of strangers too, even though people are moving in and out of neighborhoods all the time.
In 1960, San Francisco population was 740,000. 50 years later in 2010 it's 808,235. The east bay and peninsula have been as reticent about housing.
Despite wanting to live in SF and ending up in San Mateo once they get there they don't want anyone to build anything - no more density. Despite wanting to live in the mission/noe valley/haight and ending up in the less dense sunset once people get there they vote against more housing.
The solution is more housing. Transit oriented development (denser zoning and no parking requirements near transit), allowing people to convert illegal inlaws to legal apartments, converting garages into apartments, and allowing people to add stories to their homes are all possible good moves. Maybe there are some of those you don't like, but each one we don't do is less housing and higher costs.
And when you do vote for more housing you are getting:
* cheaper housing
* less climate change
* less pollution
* less homelessness (because homes)
* less inequality (housing costs are a regressive expense)
* a more prosperous city (you personally will have more money)
* a more interesting city (you personally will have more interesting restaurants and things to do)
You think that cute 4 story victorian in Noe looks cool? Maybe make it legal to build it anywhere in the city or bay area. The whole sunset and richmond are filed with 1 story single family homes. Even pretty dense mission/noe/haight have lots of individually low density properties. Regionally why not let people build 4 story houses with apartment flats anywhere along caltrain or bart?
Yes, the problem is an entirely artificial, political lack of supply.
I mean, at a certain point, you get so dense that only building way, way up (skyscrapers) works to add new housing, and those are expensive. But SF is a long ways from there.
The majority of SF is two story suburbs (and as the song goes, they are made out of ticky-tacky). Height wise, it is underbuilt, and that's why SF has such a low population density despite every piece of land being covered in these rickety little bungalows. The bungalow owners fight tooth and nail against denser multistory construction because they realize that the housing crunch is the only possible way that their shacks can have such high prices.
We all need shelter - I cannot argue with that. However, we all don’t need shelter in the Bay Area. There is a great sense of entitlement in thinking that anyone should be able to move to any city they so choose and live comfortably. Pick a different city to find opportunity if you can’t afford to move to San Francisco. Space is at a premium, it’s no secret. I’m not against development in general, but in the case where you buy a piece of property in an area on the premise that there are 5 other homes in the area, and then artificially, as you say, 3 homes replace what used to be 1 home for a total of 7 homes, I wouldn’t be happy, and neither would you.
It's not that it's too small an area yet, it's that higher density building is being hamstrung, which prevents housing from meeting demand. If I recall correctly, for every new housing unit that's been created over the last (I think 10) years, 9 jobs were added. It's incredibly low density for such a high priced area, with many tiny, single story ranch-style houses, but a sizable contingent of very noisy residents fight tooth and nail against increasing the density.
In San Mateo, for example, there's a law on the books that prevents any new buildings above 55 feet, as well as any building with a floor area greater than 3x the land it sits in, which condemns the area to an average density of 3 stories or less, even in downtown, where there are some existing 150 foot+ buildings. That law is sunsetting in 2020, but there are already citizen groups agitating vigorously to get a renewal on the ballot, even as the current council was elected on a platform of more building. This would tie the hands of the council and prevent them from doing what they were elected to do.
The problem in SF is not that property developers don’t want to build high density housing. It’s local government and NIMBY-ism actively blocking and restricting it.
Right - just build more housing. Forget about failing utilities, packed roads, overwhelmed social services, crowded schools! Just build more skyscrapers and move half of the country to SF so that we can all drown in shit together.
This oversimplification that we just need to build more houses is amusing. SF is a tiny city, stuffing more people here won’t resolve many of the problems that already make life here difficult. And no, it won’t lower rent by much: SF doesn’t exist in a vacuum, more people will move here and will keep rent as high as before.
The government is what tells where and what things can be built. As, as long as that's the case, then gov is almost 100% responsible for this mess. Sure, the geography of SF is limiting.
Look at cities that let people build where there is need to build, they don't have the kind of housing problems SF does.
SF is wealth deprived (wealth is not money, wealth is your ability to Shelter/food/water/necessities etc). It has so much money and yet, 100K income isn't near enough for a family to live there. The homeless rate is nearly 2%! The bottom 20% is at risk of being homeless. The other 70% can barely afford to make rent.
Compare this to Houston, a city that allows things to be built when it needs to be built. Homeless rate is just 0.2%. The bottom 20% is able to afford to live there and so is everyone else. Look people, there's nothing about hot weather that makes it easier to build buildings. It's the attitude of the people. People in SF need to seriously learn something about supply and demand, and the nature housing.
And, let's keep in mind, Houstons yearly growth rate is much faster than SF, it has added over x4 more people to its city per year than SF! and still is able to handle all that, whilst creating a ton of jobs in the process.
The Bay Area is unaffordable because most cities haven't allowed anywhere near enough housing to be built by land owners over the last five decades: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/.
Return building rights to land owners and the problem will be solved. The insane thing is the way coalitions of existing owners conspire to reduce supply and thus increase the values of their assets, and the rest of us just go, "Oh, okay, that's cool, that you're conspiring to embeggar the rest of us."
Interesting. Most of SF residents I know still live in small houses or low-rise buildings, so there is a lot of potential for more living space (if current situation worsens in that way it is)
Some areas have geographic or legal limits to constructions (maximum building hight, water, etc). There is simply no way to build more building without first demolishing existing buildings, which is costly.
But not as costly as sticking to the status quo - if you account for opportunity costs.
Most people want to live close to work, and work tends to be close to the centre. A house that is an hour commute away will not influence the price in the immediate vicinity.
that's not true at all. Look at commuter suburbs and exurbs that get developed.
If space was infinite, it would be Econ 101, but given that space is not, elected officials need to protect the voting population from inflation, through whatever means possible.
Space is not the issue - space utilization absolutely is and zoning laws produce suboptimal space utilization. There should be a lot more residental sky scrapers in the bay area than there currently are. If San Fran adopted the zoning of say Dallas, things would be different and probably more affordable.
Very true about this being a regional problem. San Francisco is doing a poor job building more housing but the suburbs are actually far worse, such as mountain view allowing more office space to be built but no new housing.
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