The problem in SF isn't that we couldn't build up more - we certainly could. It's that you generally have to tear something down to build something up,. I live in one of the less fashionable parts of SF that is zoned single family, though it is somewhat dense by American standards (small lots, no space between houses, though each house does have a small backyard). Most of the houses were built in the 1920s and are in my opinion architecturally interesting, though of course opinions will vary. I suppose we could allow people to buy up a block or a bunch of houses, tear them down, and replace them with 6 story (or higher) apartment buildings.
While there is a case to be made for allowing this, I think it's probably the weakest place to make your stand against the lack of new housing construction in the bay area. We have options other than tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.
While everyone may be saying Not In My Backyard, there are degrees of NIMBYism. Personally, I think that it's far more egregious for very low density areas like Mountain View or Menlo Park to ban new housing development, especially when these are the same cities that have green lighted office construction that will bring hundreds of thousands of new workers to the region.
The problem is that most of the inhabitable stuff in SF is being rented out at >$2500 per studio in those old Victorian homes, and it's not exactly easy to just evict everyone for a few years to build higher density housing. A lot of stuff is also under rent control, and since no new buildings are under RC (and all the new construction I've seen is explicitly luxury), tearing old things down to build means tearing down "affordable" (relatively) housing to build luxury junk.
It'd sure be nice to be able to clear a few blocks at a time and start over with fresh buildings, but it's more a matter of changing wheels on a bus while it's full of people driving down the street.
I am in favor of more density in San Francisco, but no matter how negatively we feel about nimbyism we must acknowledge that current blocks are tightly packed with single family homes or at best 2-3 unit buildings, and people live there. This creates an obstacle or delay if we think they should be demolished and replaced with denser housing.
So I’m for more building in the Bay Area and in SF. I’m for a denser SF, denser downtowns and business districts of the many Bay Area cities.
...But, you have s point. Some activists want to steamroll any and everyone. They want to go into residential neighborhoods and remake them into SoMa or Van Ness; they're often not saying, yes build in my SoMa, The Mission BkYd, no, they're saying, hey you over there with the yard, we wanna build over there! There are lots of areas prime for infill. You don’t have to go disturbing traditionally single-family-home neighborhoods and reshape them into your image.
San Francisco has limited land, so there is a natural constraint on growth; in addition, there is a form of rent control and then there are lots of stipulations for building new units in the city. these things contribute to the low inventory, I think.
I wish they would allow more common sense building in the city. For example, in some areas, the shadows from new buildings may not be allowed to cast on neighborhood parks from 10am to 4pm, or so. This has killed a few projects. Then you have powerful neighborhood groups (like the ones along the embarcadero) who won't allow dense building because they would limit their view. I understand their position, but it's a selfish one. No one "owns" a view. More over, their buildings obstruct buildings behind them, but they would insist on having their own buildings be demolished to give others a view --nevermind that this could go on till very few houses were left.
The building requirements, in my layman's view, is that the requirements are onerous (compared to say San Jose) and make housing in SF an artificially limited/scarce resource which puts pressure on housing. The Peninsula is not much better. Neighbors always bring up traffic but then never approve BART to alleviate some of that traffic concern (or some other form of local mass transit (let's say spurs from the main Caltrain stations meandering to the local downtowns which host offices). My frustration is such that I wish someone like ABAG were given the power to overrule locals and allow them to do proper (integrated regional) planning and allow building up (vertically) to take the pressure off of housing in the Bay Area.
Point to the place where I argue against allowing construction.
I'm making a more nuanced point: indiscriminate high-end construction doesn't help, and that's what you get in SF without the kind of planning that people in this debate like to call "NIMBYism".
I'd personally love it if someone were to build 1000 units of affordable housing. The thing is, nobody is gonna do that unless they're forced to do it -- in this town, it takes years of fighting to get a fraction of that number built (for example: NEMA phase II had 52 'affordable' units built, out of a total of 489. Those other 437 units have some of the highest rents in San Francisco.)
good points, but new construction in SF wouldnt be a good thing. New buildings stick out like sore thumbs in SF, as they arent made of wood. People want to live in the old, creaky wood buildings with the over the top bay windows. Not in plaster boxes, they can get that anywhere else in the bay area.
I don't think building more will help. There will always be a finite number of single-family homes in sought-after areas. Building on the outskirts of SF is not a substitute for prime locations
You're ignoring the consequences that come from building large amounts of new housing at once, I should preface this by saying I'm very much in favor of new housing just we need to be careful about it.
First you grow talent the same way it grew in the bay area, by letting people work on challenging software products decade over decade.
Second, population growth leads to strains on civic infrastructure which in the bay area is way under invested in. Additionally, there is a very limited amount of infil available to build new housing on, so it would require that other housing get torn down in order to build said new housing. In areas with small lots, this is harder to do because you need to buy up a bunch of surrounding properties to build a larger building.
This often contributes to increased displacement as developers are buying up properties, using laws such as the ellis act to evict and redevelop properties. Oddly enough, the restricted zoning which keeps prices high, also reduces the amount of redevelopment that happens which keeps land values lower and maintains rent control that would not be allowed for new buildings under costa hawkins.
Additionally, the political infeasibility of San Francisco should not be overlooked. This is a city with a long history of anti-capitalist activity and capitalists should recognize this fact and go to places that will be more accepting of their investments.
This point of view only makes sense if there is a strong limit on the number of homes that can be built. This is not the case. Both SF & NY can easily build many many more homes simply by building up. The fact that they, for the most part, aren't doing so is a much much much bigger problem than a few empty homes here and there (as a % it's still a very very small number).
You don't have to mandate construction of housing. You just have to get rid of the INSANE barriers to housing construction that exist today in places like SF and the wider Bay Area.
Well, redeveloping existing areas is of course not as simple as building on unused land. From my limited research using Google Streetview, Mission Street looks like a charming neighborhood with many buildings worth preserving.
What about south of San Francisco? Couldn't you build five story or higher apartment buildings there? Again, using Streetview, it looks like there are many newly built suburbs (or maybe they are just well-kept?) but almost all of them are single homes. Which isn't dense enough to solve the housing shortage. Also quite a number of golf courses and country clubs around. :)
SF caused new housing to be built there precisely because those areas are dangerous neighborhoods where few NIMBY neighbors protest housing. Even then housing still get blocked all the time.
It's not that hard. A huge financial incentive exists to convert a lot of the city's low density housing stock to higher density housing. SF is full of poorly built, ugly, non "historic" residential buildings that developers would gladly convert to taller, safer, prettier buildings that housed more people if they were allowed to. The city government just needs to have the will to loosen regulations and limit neighbors' effective veto on neighborhood improvements. The negative impacts of these developments could be remedied by impact fees, to go to expanding transit and other services that would be needed to accommodate more people in the neighborhoods. Again, the cost of housing is so high that developers would gladly pay astronomical impact fees if they were allowed to build. Historic buildings can be excluded from these rules, and developers can be required to adhere to certain architectural guidelines. Hell, they could mandate that all new development be in the "painted lady" victorian style, though I personally think that would be stupid.
I'm a huge proponent of new building and I fully support the Bay Area groups in favor of more housing (BARF, SFYimby, etc.) but the wrinkles and complexities of building new housing shouldn't just be hand-waved away. In a region as attractive as the SF Bay Area (or Boston / NYC / LA), there is a significant competent of induced demand that affects housing prices.
If they built a 50,000 unit skyscraper in Mountain View and priced the apartments at $1,000/month, how many people would move from other parts of the country to be in Mountain View? How many people have relocated out of the Bay Area due to housing costs that would move back if things became more affordable?
We should absolutely build more housing, especially around transit, but overselling the price impact isn't going to win many friends.
San Francisco is has extremely low population density across vast swaths of its territory for a city with such a high demand for housing. And, unlike other world cities, most of the buildings are not architectural masterpieces with historic value. They're cheaply built, ugly little boxes. The only things that will reduce this tension would be limiting the number of people allowed to move into the city (obviously not legal) or increasing the supply of housing. There isn't a lot of new land, but it would be easy to increase the density by a factor of 2-3x by giving developers incentive to raze lower density housing and replace it with larger buildings. The could be compelled to pay impact fees and fund neighborhood improvements to ensure that transit capacity, parking, public amenities, and street life are actually improved rather than degraded.
Unfortunately, the current regulatory climate in SF is 180 degrees opposed to this solution, with NIMBYism run rampant and any improvement or expansion of existing housing stock subject to a thicket of roadblocks and regulations.
I think the best argument for building more is to keep SF weird. A lot of people are sad SF has changed so radically; become less artsy. These same people argue against building up, in the misguided notion that it will destroy their lovely city. But imo what's destroying SF is not high rises but anyone on a sub $100k salary has to live somewhere else. It's becoming a mono culture. And at the end of the day bitching about all the tech people isn't going to solve the problem because you can't tell people where they can and can not live.
Yes, developers would love to build more housing. Various regulations make it difficult, or even impossible (depending on the area).
The funny thing is that the bay area as a whole isn't even that dense. Yeah it's a metro of 7 million, but it's fairly spread out. There's plenty of room for more housing without resorting to high rises everywhere, but we can't get mid-rise or even low-rise most places.
While there is a case to be made for allowing this, I think it's probably the weakest place to make your stand against the lack of new housing construction in the bay area. We have options other than tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.
While everyone may be saying Not In My Backyard, there are degrees of NIMBYism. Personally, I think that it's far more egregious for very low density areas like Mountain View or Menlo Park to ban new housing development, especially when these are the same cities that have green lighted office construction that will bring hundreds of thousands of new workers to the region.
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