> why should I not vote to block and prevent this growth?
Because all you can vote to block is the growth in housing - you can't block the influx of people. So then demand continues to rise while supply stagnates... and prices keep skyrocketing as a result. And that doesn't freeze the city into being exactly what it's like now - as more low-to-mid income people are priced out, the city WILL change in character and in culture. Discouraging high-density housing gives you higher prices AND a much less diverse city.
Either way you cut it, there's no way to freeze San Francisco like a time capsule. It's going to change, the question is how do we maximize how much of that change is for the better?
(Btw, I think wanting the city to stay exactly how it is currently is fundamentally a NIMBY / selfish attitude - 'I got here first, but no one should be allowed to come after me and change things any further').
The city of SF is half as dense as Brooklyn and there are a lot of empty lots here. There is a lot more room for development. The problem is that the current political situation makes it easy for people to block new housing.
As an example - there is a 600-acre empty lot near the Bayshore Caltrain station. The developer wants to build 4400 units. The city wants to build 0 units and build an office park instead. Which will get built? It's not clear - the 5 people voting on it will probably be swayed by how many people show up to the meetings and advocate one position or another. I showed up last Thursday and one city resident said we should not build housing there because an earthquake may cause the buildings to fall over.
>> Bay area voters have made their intentions abundantly clear, in numerous elections and voting: they don't want growth.
I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but I first moved to SF in 1998, and in my experience it's San Franciscans who moved to the city to work in tech who don't want to see growth. The people who moved there for the culture of art, music, and radical self expression saw the writing on the way pretty early, and have been advocating for affordable, high density housing for decades now.
> Why don’t residents want new housing? A mistaken belief that blocking new housing will preserve their city.
It isn't a mistaken belief. If you got in early and own property in a place like SF then rising prices are going to be adding money to your retirement account.
Any real solution (build, build, build!) to the housing market in a place like SF would destroy a lot of value for a lot of people. Most of those people are middle-class, and the money they've stuffed in their bricks is their single biggest investment.
Of course if it all comes crashing down they'll also lose, but right now that's looking a whole lot less likely than them being able to keep riding housing bubble gravy train.
> This is precisely the mistake San Francisco has made.
What is that mistake? Permitting new, nice housing?
If this is your opinion, I cannot agree with it.
Firstly, something like 10->20% of all new residential construction must either be set aside for "affordable housing", or enough money must be given to The City to construct those units on behalf of the developer. Secondly, San Francisco's mistake is to -through a variety of screwups- make it nearly impossible to build new, dense residential buildings in the city.
If a district is able to build enough housing to meet current and expected near-future demand, rents will usually remain stable. See footnotes 0 and 1 at [0] for some info on long-term trends in the area.
>Can you provide any examples where rapid growth has occurred in the Bay Area in the last 20 years?
Sorry I meant what the people outside the Bay Area want. It hasn't, but that seems to be because the residents are blocking it.
For me, it seems people who don't live in the Bay Area want the people in the Bay Area to build "affordable housing," which really means "subsidized housing," which is subsidized by the residents that live there. I mean call me crazy but the people who live there don't want more building and they certainly aren't going to pay higher taxes to subsidize housing for more residents that they don't want in the first place.
Since zoning and all that is controlled by the mayor and city council, the only people the mayor and city council are beholden to is the residents, not people who want to be residents. I don't think affordable housing has a snowball's chance in hell of happening there.
They could come to my city, they're building like crazy here, road capacity be damned. It's been bumper to bumper during rush hour like never before. They're building a 1.5x0.5 mile strip of packed condos on a 2 lane road right by my kid's school. Those condos are right across the street from an even larger tract of apartments. That will be fun.
>Given that planning and zoning boards making it illegal to build anything other than low density suburbs are elected officials, their actions are pretty good evidence of preferences...
... of the voting population, whose demographics unfortunately don’t match up with the population at large.
There’s also a vested self-interest for property owners to vote in such a way that preserves their property values. And what better way to do so than to restrict supply?
Big caveat: My opinion comes from large amounts of anecdata. But at the same time, it has often been noted (especially on HN, given its demographics) that San Francisco, where there is a huge demand for dense housing, is fraught with many barriers to actually build dense housing.
>The demand there is not infinite. It's not even close to infinite.
Neither is the supply of land.
The question is, can San Francisco build enough to satisfy this demand, without replacing so much of the existing housing stock that San Francisco doesn't look like San Francisco any more? I don't know. And maybe it's not important. Cities do evolve, after all.
But I do think the question needs to be asked, and debated.
> Resisting new development doesn't stop people from moving here, nor does it remove the need to build out new infrastructure.
Sure it does. People aren't living in tents (generally speaking). Population can't grow unless the housing supply does.
There might still be a growing demand for Bay Area housing, but without supply growth, the effect of that demand is to push prices up until current residents are forced to leave. NIMBY housing policy has a lot of shitty side effects, but it does succeed at the basic goal of maintaining low population density.
> And...it is not like you HAVE to live in SF, there are plenty of cities nearby
All of which have even more draconian zoning policies that permit only SFH (not even a 5+1). If SF had 10 times as much housing maybe we'd have 10 times as many people being productively employed in industries in the city instead of being forced to locate elsewhere. Maybe some of those people wouldn't HAVE to work in tech/finance to afford the city.
Your opposition to increased density benefits only yourself and existing landowners.
NIMBYs. Builders want to build, but the people who already own won't let them in most cases. I live in Cupertino. They want to build 2000 units next to my house. Most of neighbors are against it because it will "change the character of the neighborhood". That is true, it will. But I'll be the farmers who lived here in the 1960s said the same thing when all of our houses were built as the farmers sold their land.
The main difference this time is that the current residents can't get rich selling their land because the developers want to build up, not out.
CA tried to solve this with SB 827, which would force upzoning near transit. Sadly, it was poorly written and failed to pass, but it was a good idea. It would have forced pretty much all of San Francisco to allow building medium size buildings in place of existing single family homes. And a lot of the rest of the Bay Area too.
I love idiots screeching about big tech creating to much demand. Seriously? Too much demand is a bad thing? Hardly! How about reversing the crap zoning laws and NIMBY attitudes so supply can rise up to meet demand?
The SF housing crises was caused by a bunch of selfish people declaring through policy (zoning laws) that they have theirs and don't want where they are to change to accommodate others.
And this is supposed to be an enlightened leftist utopia? Talk is cheap until it can affect you personally is the real lesson of San Fransisco housing politics - playing out rather dramatically. Blaming landlords is laughable. San Fransisco has an embarrassment of jobs brought by the high tech companies in the bay area and instead of embracing them (by letting more housing be constructed) they resent them and blame everyone but the real root cause - severely restricted supply.
> i'm yet to see a high-rise development resulting in cheaper housing, at least in US. No that i'm against it - i like it, when it is done right, for different reasons though.
It definitely won't be one or 2 developments; there has to be a systematic increase in the housing stock. Which is why the latest California plan (which was shot down in committee) to increase the density around mass transit by default was so amazing.
SF is NYC in the making. I know SF folks don't want to change the character of the city but something has to give; its attracting way too many people and we still need affordable housing for middle class folks.
> Now of course, relaxing zoning is important and necessary, you can't have a city with single family housing. It's just not a sustainable solution.
Much of SF's voters see this as the greatest of heresies. The honest and earnest expectation is that SF can, should, and shall remain mostly detached single family homes forever. They vote accordingly, and often make common cause with the left-NIMBYs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has not produced a sustainable state of affairs.
> If San Franciscans don't want their city to be 'verticalized' that's perfectly fine.
No it's not. It's ridiculous. Cities are meant to change, to grow, to adapt to conditions over time.
By refusing to build enough housing to match its booming economy, the cities in the bay area are seriously hurting people. They're seriously hurting economic opportunity. That is not okay.
What people don't seem to understand is if you live in SF you probably have housing that's working for you.
Lots of people can't live in that city. Guess what? If they don't live there they can't vote there. I'm not sure why but even as people decry NIMBYism they seem to think there's some groundswell of support that's somehow suppressed.
At this point we should just make Fresno really desirable too or something.
> San Francisco has seen huge growth but constructed basically no new units.
This is why San Francisco doesn't work anymore and isn't equitable until the electorate decides to build new housing. We shouldn't downplay a move to cities like Austin, Charlotte, and Atlanta that have no qualms with building lots of housing and affordable housing.
Why have a non-trivial percent of funding go to rent seekers, anyway?
"If you need an example of how intense this is, over the summer, 71,421 people, or 8 percent of San Franciscans, decided that we should all vote on every single project over the existing height limits on the waterfront by passing a ballot initiative. It was funded primarily by a single wealthy couple that didn’t want to lose their views, and they put it through in one of the lowest turnout elections in city history."
What she doesn't say, really matters: that initiative was primarily about stopping a massive government handout to the multimillionaire owners of a professional basketball team, which would essentially give away a choice bit of public property in order to build an arena in a part of town where no arena should exist. The ballot initiative was put in place to make it much more difficult for that land-grab to go through.
This stuff isn't just about people being ridiculous NIMBYs. Honestly, I think it's more ridiculous to look at San Francisco and claim that the problem is that we aren't building enough, when you can walk up to just about any live/work space in SOMA (i.e. the new construction), and see that the tenant list is mostly startups. That's what happens when you let developers build whatever they want -- they build for the most lucrative allowed use of the land. And that usually isn't residential construction.
Is there NIMBYism in the bay area? Absolutely. But the biggest problem, by far, is that there's a massive technology bubble inflating everything from real estate to salaries in a very tiny slice of livable property. The price increases are being driven by greed and speculation as much as any sort of sustainable demand.
> If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause.
No, but you'd have all those people waiting on the sidelines jumping in immediately. Net result, housing is still expensive (sorta like the highway analogy, we still have tons of traffic after building these lanes).
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
> Forcing a town of <1,000 people to infill with huge apartment buildings doesn't fundamentally alter the overall housing problem, but it does impact the people that live and work in the community.
I'm not sure what does alter the housing problem if not housing. It seems your position is "don't come here...unless you're rich" because the rich don't affect the "character" of the town.
You don't want lots of people. But your only option is to make it hard for people to move in, which constrains the supply of housing relative to demand. Which, in turn, makes prices go up. Which, in turn, forces out your blue collar resident friends. You can't have it both ways.
What you're doing with one unit honestly doesn't make much of a dent in any problem unless you're adding an order of magnitude more units. If anything, you're locking in that space to higher-but-still-very-low density. It's much easier to bulldoze a mansion than evict multiple families.
Because all you can vote to block is the growth in housing - you can't block the influx of people. So then demand continues to rise while supply stagnates... and prices keep skyrocketing as a result. And that doesn't freeze the city into being exactly what it's like now - as more low-to-mid income people are priced out, the city WILL change in character and in culture. Discouraging high-density housing gives you higher prices AND a much less diverse city.
Either way you cut it, there's no way to freeze San Francisco like a time capsule. It's going to change, the question is how do we maximize how much of that change is for the better?
(Btw, I think wanting the city to stay exactly how it is currently is fundamentally a NIMBY / selfish attitude - 'I got here first, but no one should be allowed to come after me and change things any further').
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