Biggest question I had when I first arrived in bay area. Gov. Regulation are the reason why it is a bit harder to have taller buildings, tech companies have lot of money to go for more land grab is the main reason.
If you are building a building with X floor area the city government requires you to have f(x) area as open land. If you want to build a very tall building it will have to look like the Saruman's Tower. This regulation is part of the reason why Sunnyvale or Mountain View do not look like SF. It is also the reason why property prices are so expensive. The good part however is that it means less crime, better neighbourhoods and overall good quality of life.
I'm pretty sure that SF restricting building height is a major reason for high real-estate prices that people complain about pricing them out of their homes.
Why is SF (I assume you mean local government?) anti-height? Are there downsides to building upwards (environmental? taxation?) or is it just a refusal to allow the landscape to change?
The land is very expensive, shouldn't that be good enough of a reason to build high rises? It works in NYC and most of Europe, the only reason there are few high rises in SF is because of the government that prefers artificial scarcity.
It's even worse in the suburbs. Everything is incredibly sprawled out. Every major city I've been to has apartment towers. It's just a more economical way to use land. Given how much demand for housing there is, there are obviously regulations in place keeping anything very tall from being built. The bay area doesn't want to grow.
A little bit off topic, but related to the rents in SF: I've been to San Francisco and the first impression to me is that as a city with large population, why there's so little high-rise buildings? Is there any law which limits the buildings' height?
I don't understand why cities around SF are not building high rise buildings. If there is no space to expand, you should build high rise building which can accommodate more people. I understand there are zoning laws which prevent from building taller buildings, but if you see the landscape in south-bay they are all single story houses. The land could be utilized in a better way and build bigger housing complexes with multi-story buildings. I don't understand why city administrations are not taking this step and rather pushing the rent & house prices which is forcing people to spend 50% of their salary on housing.
This does not follow. Regulating what types of building can be built does not inherently limit the total volume of buildings that can be built. Barcelona and Paris are mostly under ten stories and house a very large population with considerable efficiency. Currently most buildings in San Francisco are one or two stories tall. The real problem with regulations is much more difficult to characterize. How much money and expertise does it take to negotiate building regulations? How much time does it take or might it take? The article calls out limits to how much residential or office space can be built over a specified time as particularly damaging. Many developers highlight the ability for NIMBYs to draw out environmental hearings until projects get stressed and fail.
Towers might be helpful in some cases, but are absolutely not needed. Indeed, research into the Bay Area suggests that the entire area functions as a unit. Because of the distribution of the population this means that the long hindered expansion of suburban downtowns is more relevant and critical to regional housing demand than what is going on in urban cores. Suburban cores do not need big towers, just the usual expansion. Large developments brought about by economic forces tend to be boxy and incrementally larger than existing buildings. Tall towers get built to house egos, not families or business operations.
Zoning laws and building heights restrictions and other regulations are to blame. Basically, it's hard to provide enough inventory when doing so in a way that would help (build more buildings and higher ones that can receive more people) is illegal. Why do such regulations exist? Several reasons:
* nepotism, current owners want to keep the inventory low so the price of their property and demand remain high
* nepotism, because owners are afraid tall building will make their city less appealing and lower the price of their property.
* silly zoning laws, because many believe central planning is actually a good thing despite the ridiculous amount of evidence that it doesn't work.
* simple inertia, bad laws and regulations are created all the time but almost never repealed.
I'm probably missing a few other reasons I'm sure others will point them out.
Also something worth saying, owners love to say that adding taller buildings and more buildings and people would kill the spirit of the city. But preventing new buildings has a effect of super high prices that makes it impossible to live in the city, in the end only billionaires can buy homes as investment and don't even live there while the few other building are rented to a few lucky high salary people which creates tension with the rest of the population. So you get a city full of empty houses, super rich people, high salary folks and regular people who are getting kicked out. Real people start living outside the city and its spirit is gone anyway.
There are always ways to build the tall buildings safely- they're just more expensive. These buildings aren't unsafe because there's no choice, they're unsafe because the builders wanted to save money and the building code was too loose to stop them.
Japan is a highly volitile region, tectonically speaking, yet they've managed to build lots of tall buildings safely. How? By having some of the strictest building codes in the world, yet allowing development within those rules.
Meanwhile, outside of SF itself, the Bay area refuses to build any real density that's desperately needed, using earthquakes as (one of many) excuses for NIMBYism and entrenched interests of landlords.
The reason we don't have mass high rise construction everywhere in high cost of living cities is due to goverment regulations. In Seattle you cannot build above four stories for much of the city. San Francisco has similarly restrictive measures. The problem is usually incumbent property owners want to preserve the "character" of their neighborhood and protect their investment.
I don't understand why we can't build up? I wish building regulations for cities were the opposite from what they are right now and only permit buildings over a certain height (20+ stories as a starting point?) so that we aren't wasting space. In SF I often times hear earthquakes as the reason (not fully buying that because there are many tall buildings in earthquake areas including SF). It probably all comes down to NIMBYs.
Interestingly San Jose has had some controversy over the opposite issue. The city has a bit of an inferiority complex about not being perceived as a "real city" despite having ~1m people, so has been trying to encourage more high-rise development and fewer sprawling office parks. The goal seems to be to turn itself into a globally known tech hub, rather than being perceived as just the southern suburbs of San Francisco. Part of the city (the North San Jose redevelopment area) is targeted as a new high-rise central business district adjacent to the BART extension, and part of that redevelopment plan included minimum height guidelines, in which new developments were supposed to be at least 14 stories tall. There was considerable pushback from developers, though, because they wanted to build office parks rather than 14-story buildings, so the guideline has since been waived.
SF has additional earthquake protection laws that kick for buildings taller than 8 or 9 stories iirc. I think they're expensive to do, because a lot of buildings stop at that height.
There are height limitations in most of Silicon Valley (except maybe downtown San Jose?) -- I think the limit here in Sunnyvale, for example, is eight stories -- but earthquakes are not the reason for them. People just want to preserve the suburban character of the area. How that can be done when a lot more people want to live here is not clear to me.
Space is not a limiting factor. You will never run out of land, if zoning laws are such that you can build as high as you want.
Also, tall buildings don't make an area undesireable to live. Just go check out the Financial District sometime. Lots of people would love to be able to live there.
We just need more areas in san francisco that are like the financial district.
It's fairly common European cities to be anti-height in the city center for reasons that seem somewhat similar to SF's, though seems less common elsewhere. Some of it is a reaction (sometimes overreaction) to tall modernist housing blocks which nobody really liked. That and other things led to a preference for "human-scale" 5-7-story mid-rises. Another factor is a desire for light to be able to hit streets and parks in the "common areas" in the city center. A common compromise is to have a mid-rise historical center, but high-rises a bit outside of it, connected to good transit, e.g. central Paris banned skyscrapers after the Tour Montparnasse was so badly received, but there are skyscrapers a short distance away in the "new downtown" area of La Défense. An SF version of that might be to keep central SF mid-rise, but allow high-rise towers near the BART/Caltrain stations in Oakland, Daly City, and Burlingame.
The Bay Area's problem is that nobody wants the high-rises: putting them in the center or putting them near transit a bit outside the center would both work, but everyone, except to some extent Oakland, is anti-development, so they go nowhere. Heck, Palo Alto won't even allow mid-rise apartments near the Palo Alto Caltrain, so you actually have people "reverse commuting" from SF down to Stanford, because as crazy as living in SF is, trying to live in downtown Palo Alto is even crazier. A few livable, urbanized downtowns on the peninsula might siphon off some of the demand in SF, not solving the problem, but at least reducing it.
Other problems that seem like they exacerbate SF's problems: 1) poor intracity transit, e.g. lack of an east-west subway, concentrates demand in a handful of eastern districts; and 2) large areas of the city are not even mid-rise, but full of two-story houses (partly historical, partly anti-development, partly related to #1).
Many places (especially in Silicon valley) restrict the height of buildings, and the number of apartments, etc. When you can't build up, you have to build out.
- Extra tall buildings generate significant extra tax revenue to the city that could easily be used for acquisition and maintenance of public spaces.
- Zoning laws that limit square footage result in artificially inflated property values. How much lower would housing cost if developers could build as tall as safety and market demand supports?
If you are building a building with X floor area the city government requires you to have f(x) area as open land. If you want to build a very tall building it will have to look like the Saruman's Tower. This regulation is part of the reason why Sunnyvale or Mountain View do not look like SF. It is also the reason why property prices are so expensive. The good part however is that it means less crime, better neighbourhoods and overall good quality of life.
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