As long as we're using our imaginations, I'm genuinely curious how much NIMBYism would come into play when trying to retool downtown into primarily residential towers.
Historically it's been a huge issue in other neighborhoods, where current homeowners are loath to approve more housing since it would drag down their property values. But I have to imagine that SF's downtown has drastically fewer homeowners per-square-mile (at least compared to, say, Sunset or Pacific Heights or the Marina).
Yes SF's approval process is a hellscape of regulatory hurdles, but given the lack of homeowners in the area, I wonder if the approval process would go at least a smidge more smoothly?
Actually, who am I kidding- some other interest group would probably take their place.
It could but they would have to expand the public transport infrastructure. If you look at the "cheap" areas one of the many issues is that they have poor transportation links to the downtown area.
However expanding public transport in SF is almost a difficult an issue as building skyscrapers. See the central subway as an example of the other end of NIMBYism.
As an outsider, the solution to the SF housing issues seem pretty simple... Vote out the NIMBY politicians and replace them with people who will change zoning laws to allow for more building. I'd assume almost no one likes the current situation unless they are a landlord.
I think the current strategy of guiding ultra-high density residential developers towards the Central Waterfront (i.e. the Dogpatch and the flat but underutilized industrial parts north of the Bayview) makes more sense than trying to up zone existing Victorian neighborhoods. There aren't many NIMBYs there to block development and it will also give the entrance from the Peninsula up to SF a much better feel.
The challenge is that construction in general (not to mention the once in a millenium transformation of a former industrial zone to a people friendly multi-story residential zone along with supporting light rail/subway transportation) takes time and the media doesn't have the patience.
There will definitely be a lag time between a project as significant as Salesforce Tower being completed and the supporting residential tower being completed. Residential developers aren't going to start building until there is a sufficient guarantee that the office buildings are going to get completed and corresponding demand will be there. Unfortunately that lag does mean some interim pain with respect to apartment rental rates.
Here's a fun historical time-lapse of Downtown SF. A lot of the office buildings are actually relatively recent (post 90's-20's).
They could if the government and NIMBY neighbors would get out of the way.
And you know perfectly well they won't (decide tomorrow to repeal all zoning), so we're already in the territory of wishful thinking. And in any case far outside the realm of "could just do it."
SF's housing problems are entirely self-created
They are not. There are multiple factors involved.
The city has essentially the same housing stock as it did 20 years ago, but there wasn't, at that time, anything like the housing crisis like it has now. I'll leave it to you to guess what some of those intervening factors might be.
NIMBY is an inherently local problem, and from what I've heard, that is at the heart of SF's issues: "you can't build affordable housing here, that will lower my property values"; "you can't build a big apartment building here, that will destroy the quaint local character".
I'm not saying that's a problem unique to SF, but SF can solve it without fixing the political issues that affect the rest of the country.
The simple reason why this will never happen in SF is because property owners have both the means and incentive to restrict housing supply.
New York is rather different in that NIMBYism never had the formal tools to block development as effectively.
In order to convince homeowners to allow expansion, you would need to pay them off somehow. Perhaps a large tax on new developments that is redistributed out to nearby property owners?
EDIT: I suspect people don't like the implication that property owners should get even more, but fundamentally property owners are the ones that vote and go to city hall meetings because they have the most skin in the game. Political and economic power are already concentrated in their hands, so there is no workable solution without their consent.
Restrictions on building probably makes SF more sprawling, not less. Imagine if you allowed people to buy up a block in Sunset District and build 40 story apartment buildings. People wouldn't have to live in Livermoore anymore.
Will highrises and density bring rent down? I think it's been shown that the number of houses needed to actually do that is enormous. In practice, what's likely to happen is that the city will fill up with even more of the well-off. (That is to say, people working in tech.) In a decade rent might come back down, but by then all those groups will be long gone anyway.
Personally, I don't have any vested interest SF housing, as it's really not one of my favorite cities. But I keep thinking of what I would do if this was happening to a city I did actually love and live in, and I think in that situation I would be more sympathetic to the NIMBYs than the newcomers. I don't think there's any moral imperative for cities to keep growing.
That's an excellent point. I live in an R1 neighborhood, but a buddy of mine lives in a SFH in an R2. He would technically be allowed to convert his SFH into two 3bd/2ba apartments, he could sell one of them, and profit so much that he would cover his entire mortgage with lots left over. While he'd still face permit challenges, this has been done (legally, with all required permits) on his block. However, this remains a relatively rare situation in SF.
I gotta say, for a moment there, I was a tad bit jealous that he had this option.
Yeah, truth is, if large sections of SF were rezoned for multi story dwellings, property owners might very well benefit, since the value of their land could substantially increase. I'm not sure how this would all work out, but it certainly seems like a possibility.
This is why I think that SF's opposition to new development isn't really driven by property owners who wish to maximize the dollar value of their asset. I think it's rooted more in a very preservation minded populace (not always such a bad thing), a left-leaning hostility to "greedy" developers (not always unwarranted), and a deep suspicion of redevelopment projects that they worry will tear out the soul of a community and replace it with something corporate and soulless (plenty of that has happened). There's also a tendency to leave good enough alone (prop 13 insulates property owners from the tax burden of massively rising property values, and many people just aren't interested in more money once they're happy. If you live in a neighborhood you like just the way it is, and you can easily afford it, what do you care if you could make more money tearing down your house and building an apartment building? You're more interested in making sure that doesn't happen right next to you).
In short, San Franciscans will happily vote against their own economic interests (well, their own asset value maximization) in order to "preserve" what they like about where they live.
While we probably agree that the bay area needs more density, I'd be against tearing out the french quarter in New Orleans, even if that would lower the price of housing there. I personally think that the bay area actually can substantially increase density, both in SF and out, and vastly increase excellent light rail (preferably underground) without tearing down old and interesting neighborhoods, and that the city that would emerge would be a richer and more interesting one.
Truth is, I put "preserve" in quotations, because one of the best qualities of San Francisco has been lost. Interesting people, with a half formed idea that is too strange or misunderstood to be funded as a thing, used to be able to move to SF and give it life. That's largely gone, because it's nearly impossible to live in SF without working so hard to pay the rent that you have no time left for things that nobody understands well enough to pay for. You do have to ask yourself what you're preserving and what you're losing. Interestingly, I actually think this will influence tech as much as the arts. There are now career paths in tech that are lucrative and are available more in SF than anywhere else, but there's certainly a wild, misunderstood, and creative side of tech that nobody will fund because they just don't understand it yet, and that requires the freedom of time to tinker. SF may lose this just as surely as it loses interesting non-tech arts and culture.
In fairness, this has also happened in the vastly more dense and urban city of New York. I found this link about the galapagos art project moving to Detroit very interesting: "You can’t paint at night in your kitchen and hope to be a good artist. It doesn’t work that way… If the core competitiveness of the big apple is culture, but actually being an artist in New York City costs you a full time career in another industry, then the best and brightest – the ones our meritocracy would obviously miss the most - won’t allow their work to suffer just to be among our tall buildings."
Not sure this will work, but my guess is that Patty Smith was right when she said "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."
I'm all for building more density in SF, but finding a new city sounds like good advice.
Yeah, it’s unlikely that San Francisco’s current majority at the Board of Supervisors would opt in to this program. Both because they are hostile to housing in general and because they have a special aversion to condominiums (which they likely conflate with an unrelated displacement issue when existing apartments are converted to condos and the tenants are evicted).
To be fair, however, they did pass an ordinance that allows up to 6 units per lot and condo subdivision, but the catch is that the extra units are rent controlled, making them less appealing for unsophisticated buyers (https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/o0210-22.pdf).
Seems like it could work. Nonsense local policies to encourage "affordable" housing like inclusionary zoning have been huge failures. In big cities, we just need way more housing. Yet NIMBYs fight it at every step, esp in SF.
I feel like if you were to build a skyscraper full of condos and apartments in downtown SF, you could get massive rents from it. Especially if you were the only one doing it. The only problem would be if everyone was doing it. I guess nobody has the money to buy a building in downtown SF, and anybody that owns a building in downtown SF doesn't want to tear it down and lose the cashflow for a whole year or so.
Historically it's been a huge issue in other neighborhoods, where current homeowners are loath to approve more housing since it would drag down their property values. But I have to imagine that SF's downtown has drastically fewer homeowners per-square-mile (at least compared to, say, Sunset or Pacific Heights or the Marina).
Yes SF's approval process is a hellscape of regulatory hurdles, but given the lack of homeowners in the area, I wonder if the approval process would go at least a smidge more smoothly?
Actually, who am I kidding- some other interest group would probably take their place.
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