San Francisco's zoning makes it illegal to build apartments in 73.5% of the city

https://sfzoning.deapthoughts.com/

by oftenwrong • 8 years ago

364 431 8 years ago

sfzoning.deapthoughts.com

throwaway57523• 8 years ago

Where does San Francisco get its water supply and how secure is in the present/project climate?

Aloha2• 8 years ago

Hetch Hetchy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy

TulliusCicero• 8 years ago

Is that really relevant to a housing discussion? California has water issues, but they're largely caused by agriculture, not residents.

throwaway57523• 8 years ago

Yes, you shouldn't zone/permit for residential construction unless roads, utilities, and education systems can accommodate the increased load. I really didn't know the answer, and appreciate Aloha's response.

edit: I left unsaid that my understanding is that a lot of CA water is snowcap melt, and that there is some degree of uncertainty about how the changing climate will impact that.

ebikelaw2• 8 years ago

When San Francisco builds a desk for an office worker and no corresponding house, that person moves to Tracy where household water consumption is roughly triple what it is in San Francisco. Given that San Francisco enjoys a reliable water supply, you should be asking where everywhere else gets their water.

the_economist• 8 years ago

San Francisco's water comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy.

California has plenty of water for the humans. Whether we have enough for the current scale of industrial farming into the future is uncertain.

stevenwoo• 8 years ago

San Francisco's supply of water from Hetchy Hetch is probably more guaranteed than the rest of the Bay Area, the SF Water company has large resources in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Almeda counties earmarked for SF that might appear to uninitiated as large spaces ripe for development - it's not and probably never will be.

matchbok2• 8 years ago

Senate Bill 827 would have helped a lot of this. Unfortunately it was killed by "affordable" housing advocates and other NIMBYs.

hsljekskfh• 8 years ago

i agree with the dsa and chapo style socialists on everything except this issue. the “affordable housing” thing drives me absolutely crazy. pass laws that enforce affordable housing if you can, but the zoning thing is the biggest issue.

their argument is always aesthetic as well. “nice homes are replaced with big brutalist nightmares.” the guy on the street would much prefer to live in a modernist building.

debt• 8 years ago

I think that was the moment I finally understood the insanity of California politics. Anti-development, pro-housing groups actively lobbied against a housing bill.

Aloha2• 8 years ago

Rent Seeking by incumbents is a huge issue with land use.

I'd love to see a map like this of the whole Bay Area, or the Seattle area.

ttul2• 8 years ago

Speaking as your neighbour to the north, Vancouver has a similarly horrible NIMBY zoning problem.

https://imgur.com/a/CftAdv5

All the grey areas are single-family only zoning. Just eye-balling it, I'd say 80% of the land is for low density use only, despite Vancouver having some of the world's most expensive real estate relative to incomes and rents.

This situation is perpetuated by successive city governments who owe their existence to wealthy single family home owners. Oddly, those same single family home owners would become rich if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development. I have never understood this paradox.

artursapek2• 8 years ago

Quality of life in a single-family home neighborhood is higher than in a dense-housing neighborhood.

sf_rob• 8 years ago

Not for those who can't afford to live in an area with artificially constrained supply and instead will have to commute from the exurbs.

cpursley2• 8 years ago

According to what metrics?

hrktb2• 8 years ago

As for everything it depends.

If you want fiber internet, a number of local shops, medical facilities, “third places”, communal pools, libraries, schools at walkable distance, that’s not how you get them.

saosebastiao10• 8 years ago

No it isn't.

_jal• 8 years ago

Even granting the premise for argument, this says nothing about the tradeoffs involved in zoning some of the highest-demand real estate in the world as singe-family.

Not to mention that many, many people (including me) disagree with that notion, and the US is hardly wanting for 'burbclaves, if you like that sort of thing. Dense urban housing, on the other hand, is a relative rarity.

eldavido4• 8 years ago

I've been thinking about this a lot as someone who recently bought into a condo building.

I think SFR neighborhoods do tend to be better on average, than renter-dominated ones. Alameda (city next to Oakland) is instructive. Walk across the bridge from Oakland to Alameda, it's like you're stepping into a different world: the streets are cleaner, people drive with more civility, it really is noticeably nicer.

Condos are a bit of a wildcard. They can be better in theory but most probably aren't. As someone on my HOA board, I put a lot of time into making sure my condo is a good place to live. (328 units, 1000+ residents). Just yesterday, we invited Monkeybrains over for a chat about getting fiber in the building. We'll do it soon.

I think it's just that the challenges are different. In a SFR neighborhood, you get a lot of very invested people, which is good but also can be bad (NIMBY). Apartments people don't care as much. Condos have "ownership" but also governance problems; they can be the best when run well, but horrible when they aren't, which seems depressingly common

BurningFrog4• 8 years ago

This reminds me that SF's actual neighbor to the north, Marin County, is mostly real unbuilt wilderness.

This is all such an epic waste.

tarr112• 8 years ago

"Real unbuilt wilderness" has some value to many of us. [0] [1]

[0] https://www.nps.gov/muwo/index.htm

[1] https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=471

nerdponx• 8 years ago

To be fair, there is something to be said for increasing urban density while preserving unbuilt wilderness close at hand (and yes, you can still preserve "local character" in select historical neighborhoods via lottery).

ISL• 8 years ago

Wilderness is the opposite of waste.

azinman2• 8 years ago

You have to balance short term housing with the desirability of the location in the first place. I would not call it epic waste, I’d call it a nice contrast to the density of the city and a place for those who don’t want density can go live.

mikeryan4• 8 years ago

This is true, a better solution (for everyone) then high rises might be better access through (or around?) the city to the east and north bays. Getting into, or especially through SF from Marin is a nightmare.

butterfi6• 8 years ago

Oh yes, lets turn one of the last Bay Area counties that isn't urban sprawl into another vast wasteland of concrete and strip malls. Redwoods are overrated. Wetlands are just swampy land that need an In-n-Out. Mt.Tam would be so much nicer if it had some restaurants and gift shops.

CydeWeys• 8 years ago

Suburban sprawl is one of the main problems that we are facing. Building more sprawl isn't a solution to anything, it just makes the problem worse, while also decimating precious wilderness areas in the bargain.

How would people living north of the Golden Gate commute to their jobs in SF? The only option is driving across the bridge, which already has horrendous traffic during commuting hours. That doesn't work as a solution. Building denser housing in San Francisco itself, close enough to workplaces or transit that people don't need to drive to work, is the real solution.

stcredzero2• 8 years ago

This reminds me that SF's actual neighbor to the north, Marin County, is mostly real unbuilt wilderness.

Imagining a Sci-fi scenario. Elon Musk has Tesla develop an autonomous hovercraft ferry, which only requires ramps into the water to be built to allow operations. Access to and from Marin becomes several times easier, causing its population and development to rapidly increase.

maire• 8 years ago

There is a difference between urban sprawl and wilderness. Wilderness is good, urban sprawl is bad.

We should focus on high density housing around transit hubs and then build more transit hubs. We should focus on livability of the high density housing.

There was a measure on the ballot in the south bay where a major builder wanted to rezone an area for more housing. That part was good since it was not zoned for open space but rather industrial. But then they wanted to remove all ordinances for livability. That was wrong and the measure was correctly defeated.

Part of the problem is with the planning department, part was with NIMBYs, but part is with the builders. There are only a few builders who are capable of high density housing and they want to play hard ball.

ransom1538• 8 years ago

I was looking at apartments in Marin.

Me: "Man I wish BART went up here."

Marin landlord: "Nope. We don't want those people here."

sandworm1012• 8 years ago

Not sure I would trust that image. It has West Vancouver on the wrong side of the Lionsgate bridge.

Vancouver has many layered issues. I'm no fan of building more apartments only to have them sit empty 90+% of the time. Much/most of Vancouver's current multi-unit capacity is underused either as second homes or as investment vehicles. Building more will make current owners rich, but I say we shouldn't do than until we are better-utilizing current stock.

The percentage of single-family homes that are either empty or under some form of construction amazes me. I walk through neighborhoods I grew up in that are now practically empty but for carpenter's pickup trucks. These are no longer residential neighborhoods. They are industrial zones where workers commute in to 'mine' real estate.

pascalxus2• 8 years ago

Sure ideally they would all be filled with renters. but building more buildings 90% empty isn't such a bad deal: the owners pay all the same property taxes without any burden on the local system for schools, traffic, etc. In fact, i'd say it's a great deal.

reaperducer8• 8 years ago

You're right about empty units in high density properties. It's a problem in a lot of cities (London is another).

I've heard some cities thinking about imposing a supplemental tax on unoccupied housing. It would help a lot, not just in skyscrapers but also in low-density areas where slumlords let their houses rot waiting for the land values to rise.

But unfortunately, the same people who would get hit by this tax are the most solid part of the tax base. Real estate taxes are a huge part of many cities revenue. Increasing them is never popular.

calyth2018• 8 years ago

Probably a typical case of "Got mine, fuck you".

It's like some of the comment seen for the Ontario election. I got my dental insurance through my work, so fuck the other guys, I don't want to pay more taxes.

thatsamonad• 8 years ago

I’ve heard this referred to as “drawbridge thinking” in cases where someone moves to an area, makes sure they have access to whatever they want, and then essentially pulls up the “drawbridge” and says, “No new outsiders allowed! It’s too crowded here!”. I feel like this is essentially what has happened in the Bay Area/SV. Though I live in Portland and it’s just as bad.

It’s such bullshit.

nindalf• 8 years ago

Mildly disagree. If a NIMBY houseowner (along with everyone else in the area) agrees to change the zoning laws and allow high density housing, that only benefits the houseowners who sell their land and move on. Everyone else could _possibly_ see their house value drop because of increased supply and sprawl.

But it's a slightly worse deal for these homeowners because a potential developer could tell them "hey, why don't you sell to us while prices are high? Once we're done building, prices will fall"

I'm not defending what these homeowners are doing, but I disagreed with the notion that they're not behaving rationally. IMO, they are.

Chathamization• 8 years ago

I mean, everyone does that at some point. Just about no one would want to see their neighborhood turn into Hong Kong's Walled City, even if that meant squeezing in a few people. Different individuals naturally have different red lines - some might not want to see a historic single-family house neighborhood demolished to make apartment buildings. Others might be OK with that, but not want to see their neighborhood park destroyed to make a big box store. Others might be OK with that, but might not want to see the schoolyard where their kids play cut to a fraction of its size to make room for more development.

There seems to be a general lack of empathy when these issues are discussed - if the people who live there find think something is important but I personally don't care about it, then the people who live there are just selfish NIMBY types.

kindatrue7• 8 years ago

There's also people who severely disconnected from reality because they're homeowners/retired.

Like this former Mayor of a Silicon Valley city who opposes building housing because it will never drop prices down to the rent he used to pay... in 1978.

https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/998998249833984000

ghosterrific• 8 years ago

It cannot be compared.

The dental plan at work is factored into your compensation.

Stealing more money from taxpayers to pay for others is not a solution.

Your comment is a non-sequitor.

DamnYuppie• 8 years ago

I find it odd that people are so upset that others are looking out for their own quality of life and financial investments. They are under no obligation to make things better for others yet worse for themselves. Very few humans would actively engage in similar behavior if the roles were reversed.

lainga• 8 years ago

if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development.

But that would require giving a damn about the local situation. A large segment of single-family-home owners in Vancouver - foreign and local - see the house and plot as an abstract asset, not something you can live in, let alone part of the strange thing they're calling a "neighbourhood". There are 4 empty houses on my street in the West Side alone. Telling the owners they can profit from rezoning probably sounds like telling them they can make more money if they fold their bond certificates into paper cranes. </rant>

tyu1002• 8 years ago

Vancouver has done nothing but massively build new housing, one of the most prolific metros in North America. There were just lots of greenfield and brownfield areas to build on first, rather than up-zoning existing residential areas. (Olympic Village, now NE False Creek). The transit and other systems can barely handle the existing density as it is.

It doesn't matter how much you upzone SFH areas when you have tens of thousands of new people coming to your metro every year, it will never be enough.

iandanforth• 8 years ago

If you could add some sourced numbers to this comment it would be helpful. You might be right or wrong but I can't tell from this comment alone.

stale20025• 8 years ago

If 10s of thousands of people are moving to an area, there is easily a way to build enough housing.

All you have to do is build more than 10s of thousands of apartments.

This really isn't that hard. Just pick a small 1 square mile area in a singular section of your city and say "THIS is the high density zone. Anyone can build any amount of 20-30 story buildings."

And then you simply keep zone laws the same in all the other "low" density areas.

Everyone wins. The new people who are moving to a city get their apartments, and the suburban people can keep their yards.

24gttghh2• 8 years ago

You're telling me none of those big houses (viewed in satellite and street view) are even Duplexes‽

Sharlin• 8 years ago

The US has some ridiculously huge single-family houses. Five to ten times bigger than what's the norm here (Northern Europe).

patja4• 8 years ago

"Oddly, those same single family home owners would become rich if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development. I have never understood this paradox."

They are already rich by virtue of the property they own, so you would have to revise this to be "would become even more rich", which is more illuminating. These folks are already well above the "food, housing, basic needs" level of Maslow's hierarchy and are working towards self-fulfillment, part of which (to them) relies on preserving their current experience in their current home and neighborhood as it is (like living in a museum, as another commenter labeled it). They bought it for what it is, and that's what they want to preserve. It isn't about the money, it is about the experience they want to preserve. Or put in monetary terms, the market may value their home at $2m, but they put a personal value of maybe $3m or $5m on it in order to compensate for the cost of moving (people who have put down these kind of roots hate moving) AND finding an acceptable substitute or upgrade from what they currently have.

LanceH• 8 years ago

Going in on land development is a great way for the amateur to go broke.

Flimm• 8 years ago

The paradox you talk about is well-known. Property owners often don't sell their property even when it seems advantageous to do so, both for them and for the economy in general.

This reminds me of an episode of EconTalk, interviewing the author of the book Radical Markets, which includes new and radical ideas for how an economy could be run. One of the ideas is to allow anyone to buy a property at its set value at any time (giving a reasonable notice period, I presume). The property owner is the one who sets the value of the property. To stop property owners from gaming the system and pricing the property too high, all property owners would be required to pay a tax periodically on the value of their property. (Of course, the lower the price set, the more likely it is that the property will get bought, so the property owner can't set the price too low either.) The goal of this idea is to allow land to be used the most efficiently, the way the market is supposed to work for most goods. Of course, this idea has a lot of obvious drawbacks, but I thought it was an interesting thought to discuss.

- Podcast episode: http://www.econtalk.org/glen-weyl-on-radical-markets/

- Article from website of the book: http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/property-is-monopoly/

rcpt2• 8 years ago

Oddly, those same single family home owners would become rich if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development. I have never understood this paradox.

Because there's no insurance for drops in property values and most home owners have the vast majority of their wealth tied up in a single asset they are rationally terrified of any change which might increase the variance of property values, even if it means a higher expected value.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/00-04.PDF is a good read

dfxm122• 8 years ago

most home owners have the vast majority of their wealth tied up in a single asset

Is this a problem, and is it feasible to fix it?

hodgesrm• 8 years ago

Oddly, those same single family home owners would become rich if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development.

It's not just zoning though.

There is also California's infamous Proposition 13 and other market distorting tax breaks. Prop 13 limited real estate tax increases to 2% annually, which is far less than the property appreciation rate for San Francisco in recent times. If you sell out and want to move to another single-family home in the region you may have substantially higher taxes. See the following article for a discussion of prop 13 effects, tweaks on prop 13, as well as other tax breaks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-15/tax-cuts-...

No matter how you cut it the incentives are politically hard to unwind.

pessimizer3• 8 years ago

Oddly, those same single family home owners would become rich if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development. I have never understood this paradox.

It's because you assume their motive is greed, and then try to interpret the reality of the situation to justify your original assumption. Assigning greed as a motive is a result of a simple projection "They have something I want, they won't let me have it, I am a good person, therefore they are greedy."

If you think their motives might be to continue living in their homes, to not have their neighborhoods packed with traffic or the sun blotted out by hideous condo boxes, their problems with large multi-unit developments built without regard to adequate parking might make complete sense.

smokinn• 8 years ago

Seattle also has a growing affordability problem and is in the same zoning situation as SF or Vancouver.

Here's the official zoning map showing the absolute domination of single-family zones: http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Research/gis/webplots/smallzonema...

And an article with commentary on how much of Seattle is zoned for single-family home only: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-seatt...

Something needs to give.

kazinator6• 8 years ago

Vancouver having some of the world's most expensive real estate relative to incomes and rents.

That is fueled mostly by unbridled foreign investment.

Oddly, those same single family home owners would become rich if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development. I have never understood this paradox.

Could that be because they actually live there; it's their home? They aren't foreign speculators sitting on empty property, only thinking about how to make a profit.

munk-a• 8 years ago

As a Vancouverite I'll object to that analysis, there is indeed a large influx of foreign money into the city but that is only truly damaging for the vacated property squatters which are a relatively small proportion. Anti-density regulation is hurting the city much more and driving folks out to sunny New West where the mayor is much more progressive about supporting affordable housing by allowing density to expand in a targeted manner.

Downtown Vancouver Nimby'ing is so bad that public transit has been stymied to the point where neither of our major universities has a dedicated metro option to reach them and the city has a total of 3 1/2 different transit lines that leave most of the metro area without coverage.

https://www.translink.ca/-/media/Slider-Zoom-Tool-Images/tnc...

graeme• 8 years ago

How did you get that zoning map? Does anyone have one for Montreal?

cheeseomlit• 8 years ago

It's easy to understand, many people don't want to live in overpopulated urbanized environments. They want a nice piece of land with room to breath, they want to preserve the natural beauty of their surroundings, they want a nice place to raise their kids. I'm equally perplexed at people who want urban sprawl to spread indefinitely

fivre• 8 years ago

Many people do like living in densely-populated, urbanized environments. The SF metro area isn't Wyoming and pretending that it is won't make it become Wyoming.

nerfhammer3• 8 years ago

those same single family home owners would become rich if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development. I have never understood this paradox.

There isn't unlimited demand. Just a few large apartment buildings could soak up most of the demand and then prices would go down across the board.

So essentially, you want to ban your neighbors from being able to sell for upzoning but not you. But your neighbors won't let you do that either, so everyone agrees to ban everything.

ClassAndBurn• 8 years ago

San Francisco is only 7 miles square and nearly a 1/3 is the Sunset and the Richmond which is almost entirely 2 story max, single family homes. Measure K which limited most of the big construction to South of Market pushed everything into an already packed downtown. Not everyone wants, or can afford, a condo on the 30th floor.

I also hadn't realized how much of the city is green space. Kind of amazing that has been preserved.

ebikelaw2• 8 years ago

The green space is amazing but we didn't build the housing so everyone can enjoy it. All the blocks within walking distance of Golden Gate Park should be upzoned to five stories. The rest of the city should have, at a minimum, blanket approval for duplexes and other small multifamily dwellings. Statutory requirements for single-family detached housing is an abomination.

mikeryan4• 8 years ago

(San francisco is 7 miles across, about 46 square miles)

nwatson• 8 years ago

(7 miles square == 49 square miles)

Jamerson2• 8 years ago

Good. You can't always fix housing demand with increase in supply. The streets and sidewalks and parking don't increase when the buildings get taller. After living in NYC for 11 years, I can tell you that just adding housing makes the real city: which is everything at street level worse.

I know that many people that want to increase housing in SF just want to commute to their tech jobs, but that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland: too many people in a single area can't form a cohesive community. The people who already live in SF understand this, I think.

Edit: Some specifics:

The things that fall apart when density is too high. Here's an article about how density is making the subway worse than ever: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/28/nyregion/subw...

Schools overcrowded: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20170921/riverdale/overcrow...

Traffic congestion: https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/18/16903152/nyc-traffic-congest...

Trash infrastructure overwhelmed: https://citylimits.org/2015/04/20/new-report-nyc-trash-is-wo...

mikert5671• 8 years ago

I love NYC

matchbok2• 8 years ago

There are two ways to fix a supply/demand curve. Increase supply or decrease demand.

Obviously increasing density would require more transit options and infrastructure. Not parking.

Last time I checked, NYC was still one of the most diverse and vibrant places in the world.

frgtpsswrdlame4• 8 years ago

We could also decrease demand.

bdhe• 8 years ago

You make a lot of strong assertions that don't seem obvious to me whatsoever.

but that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland: too many people in a single area can't form a cohesive community

Can you elaborate what you mean by 'hellish wasteland'? What specific aspects of NYC (or even Manhattan) do you find to be a hellish wasteland?

And how do you define 'too many people in a single area'?

untog• 8 years ago

that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland

As someone living in NYC: hahah, what?

jtmcmc2• 8 years ago

NYC has been extremely dense before practically anyone on this forum was alive.

Eric_WVGG3• 8 years ago

Why would you want streets and parking increased? Here's an idea: put the roads on diets, eliminate not-really-free (publicly subsidized) parking, and add density to the moon.

That's what makes NYC an enthralling network of neighborhoods and communities.

sgt• 8 years ago

Someone who lived in NYC just said "that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland"

Since you say it's an enthralling network of neighborhoods and communities, can I ask whether you actually live in NYC?

I've been to big cities like NYC and others, and it definitely gets too crowded for me. There's clearly a desire on HN to densify, but why is that the case? Is the goal of humanity to increase demand in any particular city? Is the goal to put as many people into SF's existing area as possible?

ww5207• 8 years ago

Hear hear. People want NYC style living should just move to NYC. SF character is what makes SF unique and people want to destroy that.

stale20025• 8 years ago

Lol, NYC doesn't have enough housing either. Have you seen their rent prices?

It would be wonderful if there was an actual city out there where everyone decided "hey, let's drive rent prices in the freaking ground by actually allowing high density building EVERYWHERE".

cm2187• 8 years ago

What some people call heaven (a nice small friendly residential neighborhood where everyone knows each others) others call hell (a small community where everyone watches each others, and that enforces a conformist lifestyle). Some people love the anonymity of NYC.

pascalxus2• 8 years ago

people wouldn't need so much darn parking if they could live near work. This idea that people must buy housing 50 miles a way and commute over 3 hours a day must end: it's terrible for the environment and terrible for people's lives, not to mention very expensive.

Sure, adding a little more supply only helps a little. But you gotta start somewhere. It's like trying to reverse CO2 polution, it takes time, but it's worth it and in the long term it is reversable. We need to keep adding more and more and more supply for the next 40 years until it gets back to a normal level. We owe this to future generations for screwing things up so terribly.

frgtpsswrdlame4• 8 years ago

Seems like the best fix is to make a new city.

bazooka_penguin• 8 years ago

Or move to Oakland?

justinzollars• 8 years ago

East Bay is just as bad - low density with a lot of building restrictions.

clarkmoody• 8 years ago

If it had the same government, you'd get the same problems.

frgtpsswrdlame4• 8 years ago

Only if you believe that zoning is the problem. Otherwise a big 10,000 acre plot turned into a little stoplight town but with some good employers would expand, people could define they way they want to live, maybe high density housing, maybe low density, maybe both. Maybe walkability, maybe drivability, maybe both. And so on and so on, evolving and growing organically. Upzoning is government-mandated redistribution and not even particularly good redistribution. Go somewhere else and we avoid the problem entirely.

ProAm• 8 years ago

Right? None of these people consider moving as a viable option. Hugely employable people seeking better quality of life and more affordable way of living choose the toughest path possible.

jccalhoun• 8 years ago

I'm kind of surprised that we haven't seen someone like google try to build a company town in another state where they just buy up tons of land, build nice homes/apartments for employees, and move their headquarters there.

rsynnott6• 8 years ago

In general, this probably isn't an option for the likes of Google, because you won't get the best employees this way. The best people will want to live somewhere where, if their employer lays people off or they just want to switch jobs, they can do so without having to uproot their life and move.

There's a reason that places like Silicon Valley tend to emerge in the first place.

kindatrue7• 8 years ago

It's surprising how "Owning a home is the most important investment you can make" collides with "Why isn't housing affordable?"

Here's what parents are telling their kids: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/999364778907914245

refurb4• 8 years ago

If housing wasn't viewed as the middle class investment, housing prices would be much lower.

ww5207• 8 years ago

I'm going to throw out an unpopular opinion. I think it's great that 73.5% of the city is low rise. 26.5% of the city having apartments is already more than plenty. 100% apartments would destroy SF. People fighting to get to live in SF because of its character. Destroying that you won't have San Francisco.

greglindahl3• 8 years ago

I don't think anyone was advocating 100% apartments.

Qworg• 8 years ago

The character is what brought them there? Not jobs?

Also, which SF are you proposing to maintain? The 1850's version? Early '90's? Whenever you decided to move there?

The only constant is change and renewal - you can't live in a museum.

arethuza3• 8 years ago

I lived in the centre of Edinburgh in the UNESCO World Heritage Area for 30 years and that is pretty close to living in a museum and I was pretty happy with the experience

https://ewh.org.uk/

SCAQTony2• 8 years ago

Why not? Rich people do. Bill Gates lives in a 66,000 square foot "house" with collectibles in it. Larry Ellison on a 23-acre estate.

Why does the everyone below them have to be forced into cell block apartments?

flatline• 8 years ago

There are jobs all across the country. The total cost of living in SF is the highest in the US right now, so it can't be the pay that's attractive - if you're making $250k/year and paying $1mm for a starter home, you could almost certainly do better living elsewhere at a lower salary.

Jobs could still be a component, but I would say it's the character of the jobs, and the character of the area, that draws people.

butterfi6• 8 years ago

SF is a city that is constantly changing itself, for good or bad. Been in SF for over 40 years now and still can't believe how much has changed in that time.

reaperducer8• 8 years ago

The character is what brought them there? Not jobs?

Very often, yes. Especially in the 1960's. Thousands of people moved to San Francisco in the 60's just for its character.

Itinerant tech workers may not understand that. But once the tech bubble moves on to the next hot location, the locals who love the city and loved it before Google and Facebook will still be there.

hindsightbias• 8 years ago

All metropolitan zoning decisions should be made based off of short-term trends? Were you around for dotcom?

Character and cost played a part in the early post dotcom techwave. They didn't start coming here for the jobs. They came here because they already had a job in the valley (with >70% low-density housing) and it was cheaper and hipper to live in SF. They slept on my couch for weeks while apt hunting. Then that wave required busing. Then some employers decided to move/expand in the city because workers wanted to be where it has hip.

I'd be happy to bring a bulldozer to Valencia or Dolores. Problem is, a few thousand early-adopter otherwise glibertarian techies will be the first to jump in front of it.

And for some reason, it's those baddies in the zoning department who refuse to adapt to the latest fad. To think of all the strip malls we could have had. Or that freeway running thru Hayes, the Panhandle and GG.

https://hoodline.com/2015/03/panhandle-freeway-revolt

sushid4• 8 years ago

Can you add a disclaimer as to whether you own a housing unit in the Bay Area or not?

deadmetheny2• 8 years ago

What is HN's obsession with disclaimers? People are free to have their opinions for whatever reason they want and aren't beholden to explain why.

ww5207• 8 years ago

Does it make a difference? You are entirely free to dismiss my opinion. By the same token, does not owning a house in SF automatically lower the validity of one's opinion on demanding denser housing?

rukittenme• 8 years ago

I'm sure people felt the same way about NYC in 1890. But had we preserved the "character" of 1890's NYC we wouldn't have the supremely better 2018 NYC.

You're so worried about "losing" something that you're forgoing the creation of something new and better.

magduf3• 8 years ago

To be fair, to get to the "supremely better 2018 NYC", you had to go through the truly horrible NYC of the 70s and 80s....

reaperducer8• 8 years ago

NYC works hard to preserve its 1930's architecture, and the character of some neighborhoods.

NYC has zoning, too.

ufo• 8 years ago

I think more people fight to live there because o jobs and other people who live in SF more than because of low-rise housing.

Bekwnn• 8 years ago

73% being low-rise doesn't make the other 26% apartment buildings.

There are so few actual apartment buildings here that half the buildings that look like apartment buildings are hotels.

mikeryan4• 8 years ago

73% isn't low rise either, about a third of that 73% (30% of total) are parks and open spaces.

woah• 8 years ago

Do you own a house in SF?

ww5207• 8 years ago

No. I've lived there before.

adrice727• 8 years ago

How are you defining character? Is it only the look of the neighborhoods, or is it the people that live in those neighborhoods?

daveFNbuck• 8 years ago

If there aren't enough apartments, the character is going to change with the demographics as people need to have more and more money to live there.

MaupitiBlue• 8 years ago

Agreed.

If you can’t find somewhere you can afford to live, go somewhere else.

We are a nation of immigrants. Our ancestors relocated from every corner of the planet, yet we incessantly whine about having to move to Modesto.

butterfi6• 8 years ago

Have you been to Modesto? It could be worse I suppose, but it's not exactly what I would call a stretch goal.

jtmcmc2• 8 years ago

The character of the city isn't defined by the amount of single family homes it has. Also character of a city changes over time.

Karrot_Kream3• 8 years ago

Then maybe SF should have only allowed commerical zoning if it had the residential capacity to handle, instead of being greedy and trying to make jobs without housing.

conanbatt4• 8 years ago

more than plenty.

By whose measure? If it is more than plenty then you dont need to put any rules limiting it, it already satisfies the demand.

100% apartments would destroy SF. People fighting to get to live in SF because of its character. Destroying that you won't have San Francisco.

San francisco has been destroyed many times over. Its not the gold-digging town it used to be in the quaint 1800's, or the low-cost, cheap city it was in the 1930s, etc etc. If san francisco doubles its population it will be another city: it is inevitable and it is good. This is not SF's first iteration and wont be its last.

reaperducer8• 8 years ago

it is inevitable

A thousand towns and cities in Europe would disagree.

and it is good

Your opinion. Fortunately, not the opinion of the majority of voters in San Francisco.

closeparen3• 8 years ago

They sure did. But why should the rest of us be sympathetic to the aesthetic taste of people who own $1.5 million assets? This concession is not free. It comes at the expense of others’ access to community, jobs, and shelter.

bytematic3• 8 years ago

This can be done differently. In Madison, WI you cannot build above the capital building, but there is still lots of apartments.

saosebastiao10• 8 years ago

That's obviously not an unpopular opinion. How do you think it got that way?

The problem is that as people are slowly priced out of the city, out of the region, and out of state by these asinine policies, digging in the heels is only going to make the backlash worse. The fact that we are talking about it at all shows that we are in the early stages of a massive reform in housing policy. If you wait until the median family is living in poverty because they're paying 60% of their income to housing, the reform is going to be far more severe and undesirable (to you, at least) than you can even imagine.

namlem2• 8 years ago

SF's "character" is long dead for everyone but the extremely wealthy. Why should we preserve something that only exists to benefit the elite at the detriment of everybody else?

jblow• 8 years ago

The character of San Francisco is currently homeless people everywhere, and poop and needles all over the sidewalks.

rb808• 8 years ago

Lol I have a friend in SF who complains about high house prices and wants increased development. When I said he should move to NYC he said its too big and crowded and he doesn't want to live with a family in an apt. Didn't even blink.

magduf3• 8 years ago

Is he perhaps seeking a middle ground, where he wants more development of spacious luxury condos? I wouldn't want to live in a crappy little (and usually old) apartment either, but I do like new luxury-ish condos. Theoretically, it should be cheaper to buy such a condo than a single-family home in a location where land value is very high.

Apartments really suck for a lot of reasons: the rent goes way up every single year, forcing you to move out every year or two, because the management companies seek to maximize profit by screwing over existing renters, thinking they won't want to move. They're typically very poorly built, because they're not owned by the residents, so they're noisy. They're usually very pet-unfriendly. I could go on and on. Condos are almost always much nicer to live in, even though from the outside they look much the same. They do have their issues (crappy management at many of them, but at least in theory the mgmt is answerable to the owners and can be voted out), but there's big advantages to living in a condo over a single-family home in my experience: not needing to worry about landscaping, exterior maintenance, etc., various amenities (gym, etc.), and just convenience in general.

I don't live in SF (I live in DC), but it seems to me that what SF really needs is a lot more high-rise condos like what we have here in DC. And DC isn't nearly as "crowded" as NYC.

jrockway3• 8 years ago

I think you're painting apartments with a very broad brush. My rent in NYC has increased by a total of $125 a month over the 6 years I've lived in the same apartment. The building was built in something like 1839, and it's quite solid by today's standards. There are no noise issues to speak of.

Only thing I really want is central AC, a modern innovation that New York has not seemed to have heard of.

ilikehurdles• 8 years ago

"Luxury apartments" are usually a bit cheaper than any well-maintained condo from a century ago in my city. Cement/stone construction, thick, sound-isolating walls, coupled with foundations and architecture that has proven to survive vs yet another Amli/RealEstateChainBuilder company that puts up a tinderbox townhouse complex and charges a $100k premium for $5k in amenities.

ivankirigin• 8 years ago

LIRR is far better than Caltrain. It's easy enough to afford a house and commute to Manhattan

timr2• 8 years ago

Absolutely. The secret of NYC density is transit. Nerds invariably think that you can force people to act against their own interests; they call this "NIMBYism", but it's just rational economic behavior.

You don't make a neighborhood dense by changing zoning. You make a neighborhood dense by building decent transit, and letting economics occur. The zoning changes will take care of themselves.

jameslk• 8 years ago

This is a similar sentiment I've heard from several other renters who live in San Francisco. They often cite the appeal of the city keeping its "feel" and fear they will have to deal with more transportation issues. As a one-year resident in San Francisco, I can appreciate the desire to keep the city the way it is. I feel like this opinion is often overlooked by those who cheer for more housing development.

gascan2• 8 years ago

It could be as my father always said decades ago of BART- support was high, but ridership was low- because everyone was thinking:

other people will ride BART, which will reduce traffic for me so I can drive

In other words your friend wants development so other people will live in apartments, so he can then afford to live in a nice ranch.

(I do hear BART has better ridership now)

danans3• 8 years ago

other people will ride BART, which will reduce traffic for me so I can drive (I do hear BART has better ridership now)

Not just better ... It's literally bursting at it's 1970s-designed seams.

The culture around driving vs rapid transit access has changed dramatically in the Bay Area since that time. In those days, people who couldn't afford to drive (very poor) used mass transit, which is why people of means preferred to drive. Today, people pay for the privelege of _not_ having to drive to the workplace.

There's a lot of evidence that housing near good non-car transit is in higher demand than equivalent non-transit accessible housing.

For proof you need look no further than the price/sqft for housing within a few blocks of BART stations vs farther away:

"A condominium located within a half mile of BART is worth 15 percent more than one located more than five miles from BART, all else being equal" [1]

Admittedly that's a study by BART themselves, but you can see the same pattern around the price of housing near tech company shuttle stops, which has in turn attracted the ire of anti-gentrification advocates.

1. https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2014-08%20BART...

Shivetya• 8 years ago

Actually BART is continuing its downward trend as has most mass transit in the US [1]. Ridership was down in 41 out of 50 cities just from last year. Even with increases in service areas many transit authorities did not see a good return on investment. A common method has been to reduce bus service to try to bolster rail only to end up losing the revenue from the bus riders. Many transit authorities have tens of billions in deferred maintenance that is catching up to them. NYC has notorious problems with both expansion and maintaining its current system with pension debt fast becoming the big bogey man.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/With-BART-riders...

rsynnott6• 8 years ago

There's a middle-ground between detached houses and apartment blocks, though. For whatever reason, the US seems very low on terraced houses in particular. Much denser than detached houses, but not apartments.

euyyn• 8 years ago

Kinda funny to mention that in the context of San Francisco :) https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x808580a524767fb...

mrfusion2• 8 years ago

At this point wouldn’t it be profitable to buy an old cruise ship and park it offshore and sell living space? Give folks a high speed ferry running back and forth.

kindatrue7• 8 years ago

Voters (property owners and landlords) would instantly pressure the city to ban it for being blight.

The resistance to adding more housing is amazingly strong. Can't stop the gravy train!

mrfusion2• 8 years ago

They can’t stop it in international waters.

kilroy123• 8 years ago

That's what I've wondered. Maybe the solution is to build land out in the ocean like Dubai has done. It would cost billions, but building enough housing to meet demand will already cost billions.

I don't know, building a mile high building in the ocean doesn't sound so crazy anymore for San Fran.

Like this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Tokyos-mile-high-sky...

nradov5• 8 years ago

The Reber Plan called for filling in San Francisco Bay, and it was seriously considered. In retrospect it was obviously a terrible idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan

nradov5• 8 years ago

Cruise ships require a huge amount of maintenance just to keep them from falling apart, including occasional dry dock service where everyone has to get off for months. Sewage can't be discharged until you're very far offshore. Resupply at sea is challenging. High speed ferries can't run during rough conditions (which are common in the open Pacific Ocean).

samstave• 8 years ago

when you talk about high density housing, the only people who then own land are billion dollar investment funds with robotic inhuman desire to maximize per square foot profit because fuck you thats why.

sure, we need more housing - but it also perpetuates another set of problem factors by having such.

as far as building and ciy planning, id look at singapore and other high density asian ities for lessons. heck, we cant even have good quality transportation. if you think bart and muni are good services, then you havent been to places like singapore, hong kong, tokyo or beijing.

singapore digs down for every floor it puts up.

sf will never solve true density problems. period.

Wohlf• 8 years ago

Real estate is not limited to land, plenty of people own property in large cities with condos and coops. Even if the building is owned by a business homeowners in multi-family buildings have the same protections as those in single-family.

tovkal• 8 years ago

SF is in a similar situation as Barcelona, kind of. SF is 121.4 km2 while BCN is 101.9 km². SF is sea-locked on three sides while BCN is sea-locked on one side and on the other has mountains. As per the map, SF is mainly single-family housing while BCN is mostly multi-family housing (average is 12 homes per building). Population (in 2016) is 870k vs 1.6m.

If all those low density areas in SF were converted to high density, SF could grow a lot and housing issues could be plaited temporally (years?) but after a while it be the same thing, where there's more demand than supply.

Personally, I think having single-family housing inside a city is a waste of space but a city full of 30 story buildings usually is not very pretty. I like the Eixample, were streets are wide and buildings just the right size so there is plenty of sunlight, airflow and all that. Obviously if I were an owner of a single-family home in SF I would be against of converting my quiet, low-density neighborhood into all high-rise.

Tricky problem to solve.

tyu1002• 8 years ago

Yes, the nicest neighbourhoods in the world, in my opinion, are medium density, with a mix of mid-rise density that allows sunlight in while still getting a critical mass of people for services and transit, with some SFH that is nice for families and gets lots of green space in the neighbourhood.

reaperducer8• 8 years ago

Very tricky. Tourism is still a very big industry in San Francisco. One of the reasons people go there is to see the charming old houses and nice old neighborhoods.

While we think SF would look great if it were like in the Star Trek movies, that would pretty much destroy a large part of what makes San Francisco San Francisco.

namesbc• 8 years ago

Think about that for a moment.

People come to SF to visit the attractions at the high density parts e.g fisherman's wharf, union square, chinatown, ghirardelli square, coit tower, etc.

Look at a standard tourist map of SF: https://www.sftodo.com/sanfrancisco/wp-content/uploads/2018/...

No one comes to SF to visit the vast tracts of suburbia in the sunset: https://goo.gl/maps/p91HMQTcXBQ2

jdavis703• 8 years ago

There's a high density apartment right next to the famous Painted Ladies, and tourists still come: https://d2v9y0dukr6mq2.cloudfront.net/video/thumbnail/NYb7kU.... Most people aren't for bulldozing landmarks and genuine historical areas, but rather building on mundane areas like old laundromats: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/2/14/17012606/laundromat-2918-mis....

rsynnott6• 8 years ago

One of the reasons people go there is to see the charming old houses and nice old neighborhoods

The vast bulk of SF is probably not of any particular interest, though. Most European cities will have areas of historical interest where buildings are protected, sometimes incredibly strictly (here's a 250 year old 8000sqft house which would require 1.5million renovation to make it habitable, due to strict controls on acceptable renovation methods: https://www.independent.ie/life/home-garden/homes/georgian-p...). But that doesn't mean that you can't densify anywhere. Areas of historical importance are normally a small fraction of a city.

xenadu02• 8 years ago

charming old houses and nice old neighborhoods.

No one comes to outer Richmond, Sunset, or Parkside for the "charming old houses". It's mostly single-family sprawl.

The funny part is there are 6-10 story apartment buildings in Sunset that are illegal to build under current code. Doesn't seem to be "ruining" the neighborhood.

srinivasan• 8 years ago

I think this tourist map[1] brilliantly depicts what parts most tourists actually stick to, by shrinking the western parts of the city on the map.

There are very few tourists in the vast majority of the Richmond and Sunset, except near the water and Golden Gate Park (around the museums). Also, there are very few tourists south of Bernal Heights Park.

[1] http://baycityguide.com/media/San-Francisco-Map.pdf

riazrizvi• 8 years ago

I live on the Peninsula in the Bay Area, SF's suburbs. Recently there has been a huge uptick in apartment building, mostly because Caltrain is building apartments on their land. I rent so I like there is some downward pressure on property prices. However one problem with these apartments blocks is that they make them cheap and they look lame. Nothing like the nice apartments in Italy or France. It's too bad. There should be some big tax break for good architecture.

thatfrenchguy• 8 years ago

This. Why do every single new condo building in the bay has to be ugly ?

tomatotomato37• 8 years ago

There should be some big tax break for good architecture

As much as I would love it if modern builders tried making things look nice again, in practice I think this would just result in glass cube copypasta and beige foam

nickstefan123• 8 years ago

The problem with "just build more" is that eventually you run out of space the same as now, only you get to do it with a worse quality of light / space / light / traffic / noise / etc. I wish more cities fought to maintain true pristine open space.

There is no housing crises. There is a concentration of jobs problem and a wealth inequality problem. The internet's winner-take-all nature has created a world where one office in one city can do what used to require more sprinkled out offices of different businesses. Couple that with too many rich people, who will always have more money to park in desirable places than we have time to out build, and you get people priced out of the "one place" they can get a job.

It's not housing. It's the structure of our economy. If you don't believe me, notice how every city in America right now talks about its "housing crisis". It's wealth inequality and job monopolies.

nickstefan123• 8 years ago

People are going to accuse me of "got mine", but I have none! What I'm saying is to consider that wanting cheaper housing today is throwing away a lot of natural beauty, vistas, and life, forever, just for a short term easement of housing pressure.

saosebastiao10• 8 years ago

Building cities is exactly how you preserve natural beauty and vistas. Maybe you prefer we convert Mt Tamalpais to a SFH subdivision, but I would much prefer we house millions of people in a few sqm of land than millions of sqm of land. San Francisco at Paris densities could house 2.5M people. We could eliminate an entire Silicon Valley's worth of housing development if we would just allow density where there is demand for it.

jknz2• 8 years ago

The problem with "just build more" is that eventually you run out of space the same as now

This argument misses the point. In the process of building more, you have made a lot of people richer/happier/commuting less, because now they can live within the city walls. Making a lot of people richer/happier/commuting less should be done everywhere where it's possible to do so.

The problem with "just build more" is that eventually you run out of space the same as now, only you get to do it with a worse quality of light / space / light / traffic / noise / etc.

By admitting that you will eventually run out of space again, you acknowledge that demand will always keep increasing until saturation even if you build more, _because people are even more interested in denser city lives and its work/leisure/community opportunities than they are interested in suburban-type light/space/traffic/noise_. If people were interested at all in suburban-type light/space/traffic/noise, dense cities would not be in such high demand.

nickstefan123• 8 years ago

My argument would be that the demand is created by where the jobs are. What has changed "recently" is that jobs are being more concentrated post invention of the internet. The internet has removed the need for regional companies and so what we have now are super max companies located in "one place".

kousatsu• 8 years ago

That assumes that building more creates more diversity among the services or that the people living there are the McDonald's kind of non-picky persons that accepts whatever is being served.

People move to dense areas in belief that a dense city has more to offer in terms of jobs, but end up moving to country-side in their mid 40s despite commuting due to realizing what truly is quality in life.

stevehawk• 8 years ago

Oh, so it's still expensive to live in a city that refuses to build more housing? And here I thought that had changed since the last weekly article on the same subject. ;-)

Karrot_Kream3• 8 years ago

Maintaining its culture is one thing, but it's irresponsible that SF has continued to allow commerical zoning and jobs to increase without upzoning for housing accordingly. It places strain on cities around SF and causes the transportation infrastructure to be unnecessarily stressed.

SF is trying to pull a Palo Alto where they reap the benefits of having many jobs, but push the cost of housing to neighboring cities. It's irresponsible.

zjaffee2• 8 years ago

This 100%. We need federal legislation around zoning and job growth, as has been seen with the bay area, it leads to wealthy people moving to cheaper areas and causing property values to artificially rise there.

SF are by under no obligation to grow, where the vast majority of times when they grow, they aren't doing so due to interest from residents, but from the interests of businesses.

The only areas in the US that I've seen that truly want this sort of growth are ones in the sunbelt regions, and especially Texas. While these areas don't often have the same urban feel that NIMBY cities have, I'm sure part of that comes from the fact that theres less that's worthy of being preserved.

macinjosh3• 8 years ago

This 100%. We need federal legislation around zoning and job growth, as has been seen with the bay area, it leads to wealthy people moving to cheaper areas and causing property values to artificially rise there.

Yeah, more government meddling in the housing and jobs market will solve the problem! /s

The dichotomy you present of it being the interests of residents vs. the interests of business is false. I am sure many businesses want to build more housing for residents but the government prohibits it with zoning laws. If more companies were allowed to build new housing in and around the city it would be to the detriment of the landlords and businesses benefitting from the currently sky high rents as there would be more openings for residents and prices would be driven down accordingly.

electricslpnsld2• 8 years ago

Maintaining its culture

The thing is, by not building housing and allowing rents to skyrocket, San Francisco has pushed out most of its culture. The steady exodus of artists and musicians has by and large gutted the Bay Area's culture.

kyleblarson• 8 years ago

Eugene Wei summed it up well on Twitter: There should be an SF Fortnite mod that replaces the shrinking storm circles with encroaching zoning restrictions. Eventually no one can build any structures and all players are homeless and running around trying to avoid stepping in poop while getting in a long line for brunch.

tranchms• 8 years ago

The problem isn’t even San Francisco. It’s the entire Bay Area. In 1 hour in any direction you have exorbitant rent/ housing.

Building codes make it next to impossible anywhere in the bay to affordably build.

I live in Belmont, and my gf lives on Van Ness downtown.

They need to create more housing pretty much ANYWHERE in the bay. And somewhere close to the major business areas.

When I moved here years ago to work at a startup, the cheapest housing I could find was $800 sharing a house with 10 roommates. Having 4-8 roommates it’s not uncommon.

Who is making money off this scheme?

And on an unrelated note, downtown San Francisco has turned into a writhing cess pool of filth. Homelessness, unstable/ crazy people. Rampant drug use and needles everywhere. Tents lining the streets. Prostitution. Human excrement all over the sidewalks.

The only way to avoid it is stay in your bubble and pretend is doesn’t exist.

incadenza• 8 years ago

Have you or your gf been there for a while? Is the homelessness worse than before? I lived there about six years ago so I’m curious.

nradov5• 8 years ago

Based on my subjective observations, homelessness definitely seems to have gotten worse in the South Bay Area in the past few years. If you go biking or walking along the various creek trails and railroad tracks you'll see more encampments. Some of them are fairly well hidden but if you stop and look you'll see the signs.

By the way, this is one of the reasons why it's tough to get people out of their cars and commuting by bike. Many people don't feel safe cycling through those areas.

alonmower• 8 years ago

I've been here for 8, my (totally anecdotal) observation is that a lot of the homelessness + drug use has moved up market from the mid market/tenderloin area towards duboce triangle and the castro making it more noticeable/visible. I wouldn't be surprised if the absolute numbers increased too but it seems like a lot of the development/companies that moved into the mid market area may have led to an increase in police enforcement that has led to a dispersion.

kindatrue7• 8 years ago

Who is making money off this scheme?

The outside of SF, the Bay Area is composed of two groups of people: -People who rent -People who vote in every election/attend city council meetings at 7pm/attend city planning meetings at noon on week days

bradlys• 8 years ago

Property owners are making out quite well.

My landlord inherited their house decades ago. They rent it out and make some good cash off of it. They could sell it for $1.8m. Either way, they're doing just fine.

Other landlords I've had owned apartment complexes for decades or inherited them and they too are making out really well because their property taxes are so low.

GLjEI4YbnGD27LB• 8 years ago

Everyone who owns a house near san fransisco has the price of their property, and thus their money, reduced by more houses being built near san fransisco. They get more money by reducing the supply of houses, thus all the house owners, usually more rich and people who already live in an area, are against more houses being built.

gaius• 8 years ago

It’s weird how NIMBY is a pejorative

“Other people should sacrifice their wellbeing for me me me”

gbear605• 8 years ago

It's because NIMBY is equivalent to defection in an iterated prisoner's dilemma[1]. By being NIMBY, you'll be a bit better off today, but because someone else is NIMBY, you'll be a lot worse off tomorrow. YIMBY makes everyone better in the long term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

evilolive• 8 years ago

the same nimby who voted no Bart in the peninsula in the late 60's because it would: bring "unsavory" ppl from the east bay "to my snowflake walled community"

you can see the result of that now: diesel caltrain unadequate for ppl to commute with, and crowded freeways

imperialdrive• 8 years ago

Agreed. Why should the city and its residents stretch thin... businesses and newcomers will simply wise up and spread out. Living and working here has become like a high on drugs, and people are doing whatever it takes to get their next hit.

I'd love to see what an intelligent generation does to build up neighboring cities rather than complain about one that would do just fine without them.

emaginniss• 8 years ago

It's a pejorative because it is a short-hand for a longer statement: "Yes, of course, we need ${X}, but not in my back yard."

danepowell• 8 years ago

Honest question, is it truly possible to build yourself out of a housing crisis? Or is housing like roads, where an increased supply just leads to even more demand?

In other words, traffic exists not because of a lack of roads per se, but because people are willing to accept a given level of traffic when deciding whether to drive somewhere. In an area as beautiful and in demand as SF, will people essentially keep on immigrating until it's unattractive enough that they stop, regardless of supply?

Edit: thanks everyone for the thoughtful replies and for pointing out some of my potentially flawed assumptions. It's refreshing to have civilized exchanges of opinion on the internet every once in a while :)

inputcoffee2• 8 years ago

Great question.

In theory, jobs put an upper limit on housing usage. People almost always follow jobs.

There are many beautiful cities in the world but only SF is near Silicon Valley.

You can find cheap housing in nice areas if they don’t depend on jobs (college towns, retirement communities).

People will present counter examples at the margins of course, but generally the relationship holds.

gascan2• 8 years ago

But, also in theory, cost of living drives competitive salary, which in turn drives whether a company can afford to hire employees in a particular city.

So if you build more housing, cost of living goes down, which attracts more companies to the city who were priced out of the labor pool before, which increases jobs in the city, which attracts people and increases housing usage...

lewis500• 8 years ago

Regarding roads, it's not true that building roads can't alleviate traffic congestion---although there are special cases where building roads makes travel times. It depends on the network.

In general though we should expect building roads to reduce travel time. The fact that driving increases following road-building is evidence of this: why would driving increase if travel times between all origins and destinations stayed the same? Validated models of travel demand all depend on travel time, not the existence of roadspace. Just because driving increases upon building new roads does not mean it does so to the extent that travel times are unchanged.

For the record, I do not support building many more roads. They have become very expensive to build and maintain, the maintenance backlog in some places is severe, and in a thick network like many US cities have they do little good. In some cases the pollution they create is severe and disproportionately impacts poor people. But I still feel compelled to nitpick this common misunderstanding about induced demand.

namlem2• 8 years ago

Yes, Tokyo did it. Rent for a 1 bedroom apartment is like $1000/mo. It's a huge thriving mega city with affordable housing thanks to zoning that's managed by the national government.

TangoTrotFox• 8 years ago

I'd consider why housing prices are high. The reason is of course pretty simple - there's high demand at current prices driving prices even higher. Why is there high demand? Supply is certainly a part of the equation here, but in this case it's secondary to the primary reason. That being that the economy is in a crazy boom phase and there are lots of jobs paying disproportionately more than the rest of the nation.

So what about Japan? I think the big way they 'solved' this problem was by going through a 30 year recession. I don't think realize how extreme Japan's decline has been. In 1995 Japan was still a tech behemoth that many thought was on track to become the world's leading economy. They had a skyrocketing GDP that was $5.5 trillion at the time, compared to the US' $7.7 trillion. Today Japan's GDP is $4.9 trillion, the US' is $20.4 trillion. They've had an ongoing problem with deflation that's more recently been met with extreme measures including very heavy handed quantitative easing.

If the US economy just suddenly collapsed and stayed that way for decades, you'd also start to see the real cost of living stagnate or even decline, especially in areas that were being driven up previously by a sky-high economy.

darksaints• 8 years ago

Yes it is possible.

http://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-w...

As far as the roads situation, a lot of people confuse that phenomenon with induced demand, which is likely incorrect (and very hard to prove, even if it is correct). The much more likely scenarios is that because roads are underpriced (we don't make people pay their full costs for use), there will always be unmet demand. If people were paying $8-15/gallon for gas (approximately what the unsubsidized cost would be), it would be much easier to build a new road and actualize the intended effect of reducing congestion, because you wouldn't be trying to catch up to pent up subsidized demand.

smileysteve• 8 years ago

Induced demand is no longer true when there is capacity such that there is no demand based on negative externalities.

Ie: Traffic isn't bad at 4am; building/opening more roads at 4am likely won't cause more traffic/time/etc to happen at 4am.

abalone6• 8 years ago

Roads are literally the classic example of induced demand. The price is the opportunity cost of using them. You build more, you lower that cost, more people decide to start driving. Not that hard to understand. Perhaps a fair proxy for tech professionals who’d love to move to SF if only the price came down a bit — But way higher than what working class folks can afford.

That article is not immune from criticism. The first example it gives is Houston which it directly notes solved affordability through “sprawl”. It is totally invalid in an SF context where we live on the tip of a peninsula.

The second example is Tokyo. It is true that Tokyo is more liberal on building codes, but there are many other differences that go unmentioned. For example a massive, generation-defining pop of a real estate asset bubble and resulting 30 year recession. That that goes unmentioned smacks of cherry picking.

A more successful example is Vienna where the government was heavily involved in housing.

hunter232• 8 years ago

In the Bay Areas case I would put a definite yes. Specifically our city actually has a very normal amount of growth (there are many cities with higher amounts of growth that don't have enormous growth in housing prices). We absolutely have enough space for all the demand and induced demand if we raise restrictions of height and density to small European city levels (think Porto or Vienna not NYC or London). As much as we think there's a lot of jobs and growth in SF, it's actually not that high an amount.

Also I think you might have the reasoning for why people come here off. I think most people come for jobs. As an engineer the main reason I live in Bay Area is for the jobs, not for the beauty. There are plenty of more affordable beautiful cities, they just lack technology jobs.

dsfyu404ed6• 8 years ago

Roads (or any other high volume transit system) are like bandwidth. Peak demand times such as rush hour (for roads) or every windows machine updating at once (for bandwidth) will always use everything you've got, degrade the service and people will forgo trips (bad for quality of life) or not do their work because they can't access some cloud service well enough (bad for productivity). You don't add more roads or bandwidth with the expectation that service will not degrade but to reduce the length of time during which it's degraded.

(Yes I know that MS does P2P updated and WSUS is a thing but this is just meant to be an example)

The usage pattern for housing is totally different because everyone needs to use it and demand is basically constant per person over time.

paxy• 8 years ago

I think so. It is much harder to not to live in a city or move out than to decide not to drive. If a region's economy is good then housing demand is just going to go up indefinitely.

raldi• 8 years ago

"Seattle-area rents drop significantly for first time this decade as new apartments sit empty": https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

"New York City apartment market swoons on glut of new luxury construction" https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-york-city-apartment-ma...

27182818284• 8 years ago

If you're looking to move to the Bay area, you should also look at moving to the like Lincoln, NE or Omaha, NE or Kansas City. A lot more so if you have a family. I know that sounds strange, but....

The Midwest is cheap. Albeit harder than the past, it is still possible and common in the Midwest to live a middle-class-ish lifestyle on a single income. A two bedroom apartment can be less than $500 a month. I have friends with $830/month mortgage payments on their house.

The Internet is solid in the Midwest too, unless you're actually out on a farm. In the cities you can get Gigabit up/down for $90 a month. Most places don't have Google Fiber, but other fiber companies have sprung up. The majority of my tech friends have fiber in to their walls for Internet.

It is very much a culture of YIMBY right now too. Driverless shuttles? Yeah sure. New apartment building? Yeah sure. New tech startups? Yeah sure.

Lastly, (this is a hot topic issue so I am reluctant to put it in, but it is something that comes up from my friends on the west coast) the states are red states, but the cities are blue. As an example, Omaha is blue enough that it split the electoral vote of Nebraska to Obama in the past. (NE is a state that can split its electoral vote rather than winner-takes-all.) Yes it is true that if you start driving out in to the country you will see "Trump" painted on to barns and such, but in the cities you don't.

wumpus• 8 years ago

I live in the Bay Area because of the dense concentration of smart people and ease of joining/starting startups. There's more to tech than fast Internet.

aquova• 8 years ago

Believe it or not there are smart people outside of the Bay area, even out in the Midwest. Over the last few years there’s been a big increase in startups out here the last few years, partially driven by the high cost of living in the traditional tech regions.

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

Big, gigantic tornadoes. I live in florida and we can see our big nasty storms coming for weeks. The "alley" doesn't come with that feature.

hunter232• 8 years ago

The midwest is an underrated area of the US but unfortunately the lack of diversity makes it hard for me to live there. It's a hard area for certain cultures to live in.

edit: not sure why I'm downvoted as my wife lived in the midwest and it was hard for her to practice her culture. She has fond memories of the area but knows how unpractical it was for her parents. Her family had to make a monthly 1.5 hour drive into Chicago to find Indian groceries, she got picked incessantly for being the only Indian kid in school, and her parents couldn't eat out because there so few options with vegetarian food. It's just hard living in a place where so few people have a similar skin tone, religion, or culture as you which is why most Indians move out of the midwest. People make fun of the racism of the South, but I grew up in a diverse metro in the South and didn't have to deal with any of this since about 25% of my school was Asian. Obviously, Chicago and some of the other large metros are ok. I'm just pointing out that in all these threads there is this argument to "move somewhere else" but there are huge regions of the country many have to rule out because they are ethnic minorities.

codeafin• 8 years ago

It is true, I live in one of those cities (Omaha) at a tech startup, it's been tiring these last 4 years sitting next to people who openly talk and try to 'educate' peers about how immigrants kill people, vaccines cause cancer, and climate change is made up from dodgy scientist readings.

Education could be a lot better here.

NotQuantum2• 8 years ago

As someone from Kansas, absolutely an issue. It's probably 90% white, there's no culture in Kansas City, just a bunch of hipsters with clear framed glasses. When I interned for Garmin a few years back, they had intern events to hype us up about living in Kansas City.

It's essentially a cultural wasteland, and tech jobs are few and far between. The startup scene there is a joke too, they suck up new college grads too stupid to realize they can work elsewhere and pay them below market.

blang• 8 years ago

One way to decrease fear of the others is proximity and familiarity, eventually you stop being others.

Huge disclaimer: This is probably easy for me to say, as I am about as "all american" looking as they come

refurb4• 8 years ago

unfortunately the lack of diversity makes it hard for me to live there

You don't think non-whites live in Detroit/Chicago?

I'd argue SF isn't that diverse, especially some neighborhoods. It's mostly rich whites and asians. African Americans got chased out long ago or forced into Bayview.

bduerst• 8 years ago

This is more true than most people realize. I grew up in the midwest in a predominantly white area. We had an Indian classmate, and people called him the "black kid". I wish I was joking.

kitsunesoba2• 8 years ago

As some one who grew up in semi-rural Appalachia, part of the reason I live in SF today is due to how badly I don’t fit in culturally in places like the Midwest. Being surrounded by those with differing opinions doesn’t bother me too much, so that’s not a problem, but the culture in these areas tends to be quite hostile to anybody going against the grain and that’s not something I care to deal with.

On a slightly different note, having lived in places where the ocean is easily visible for almost a decade now I now find thoroughly landlocked places kinda depressing in a way that I can’t explain. I don’t even visit beaches all that often but there’s something uplifting about being able to look at an ocean filled vista.

ironjunkie• 8 years ago

Regarding diversity of thoughts (which is to me way more important than visible diversity):

What you really mean, is that the Bay area got the "good diversity" (rich democrats), while Kansas City got the "wrong diversity" (poor white republicans).

I think those two places are similar in that regards. They are both polarized, and are both not that diverse in term of actual ideas.

Now if you want visible diversity (whatever that means), sure the bay Area got more people from a different origin but they usually all think in exactly the same way.

Source: I lived 2 years in St Louis and 4 years in the bay area.

Edit: Forgot that I would be downvoted, since it seems to be politically incorrect to say that visible diversity (what everyone is focusing on) is different than thought diversity.

dionidium• 8 years ago

It is very much a culture of YIMBY right now too. Driverless shuttles? Yeah sure. New apartment building? Yeah sure. New tech startups? Yeah sure.

Nodded in affirmation to everything but this. NIMBYism is everywhere. In my hometown of St. Louis, people oppose everything for the same two lame reasons every time: traffic and parking. They oppose buildings in busy areas, in blighted areas, in single-family areas, in business districts, in areas that have been contracting for five decades -- everywhere.

And the mantra is always, "but what about traffic and parking?"

saosebastiao10• 8 years ago

The midwest is underrated, but even though they have the right mentality there are still major barriers to this idea:

1) People almost universally live close to where they grew up. Trying to get someone whose family lives in California to move to the Midwest is inherently harder than getting a Midwesterner living in SV to move back.

2) Jobs don't just shift, and they definitely don't do it quickly. There are a multitude of reasons why it is rational for companies to pay more to live in a more expensive area. What company would move across the country in order to pay more reasonable wages if it meant they lost nearly all connection to suppliers or customers or industry associations or academic/research relationships?

3) For many people, it isn't okay to just pack up and leave if you don't like it. Don't like slavery? Move north! I know that is an extreme example of the mentality, but we are still talking about the wealth and prosperity of an entire generation being swept away by the greed of another generation. Why shouldn't we fight back?

almost_usual4• 8 years ago

I feel like people view California sometimes as an entirely blue state which is absolutely false. If you go anywhere outside of a metropolitan area you are in Red country. Go to South Lake Tahoe and tell me you don't see Trump signs.

Rural is rural, I went to a local bar West of Sacramento and felt like I was in my home town in nowhere Illinois.

dsfyu404ed6• 8 years ago

Blue CA makes all the decisions that affect the state. It's a blue state.

_5meq• 8 years ago

Depends on what you want.

I've lived in the Midwest my entire life, from a tiny town of 2,000 people to Chicago Illinois. I'm moving out to Portland in less than a month.

I REALLY dislike the Midwest due to it's lack of natural beauty, epidemic of poor civil engineering and city design, and hostile climate.

If you're looking to move to the Bay area, you should also look at moving to the like Lincoln, NE or Omaha, NE or Kansas City. A lot more so if you have a family. I know that sounds strange, but....

Comparing the job market of Lincoln, Omaha, or KC to the Bay Area is very flawed. The tech-hubs are a real thing, and there are advantages to working in an office that make remote work undesirable. ( More likely to be promoted, having a social life, etc. )

Even in cities like Portland, you look around at the jobs being offered and see MOSTLY lame fintech and insurance company jobs. Additionally, you are away from the critical mass of highly educated and motivated developers. Even here in Chicago, you meet a LOT of the b-team.

The Midwest is cheap. Albeit harder than the past, it is still possible and common in the Midwest to live a middle-class-ish lifestyle on a single income. A two bedroom apartment can be less than $500 a month.

While it's true that you can get a large house for cheaper, what are you going to do while you are in these cities? They, full stop, lack the cultural and natural vibrancy of the Bay Area. Extremely homogeneous, poorly designed cities full of insurance salesmen and hicks.

Brutal cold winters and sweltering, buggy summers. Not that you would want to go outside anyway, since most of these Midwestern cities have declined to invest in walkable infrastructure and instead more resemble disconnected buildings joined by huge highways. You will drive everywhere and none of it will be interesting or beautiful. ( To be fair, I hear Columbus has some nice infrastructure )

Not that you would have anywhere to drive to. The nature sucks. You can drive out of town and see some beautiful... corn fields. And flat land. Filled with bugs. Nobody has bothered to forge hiking trails because there's nothing to see.

I have friends with $830/month mortgage payments on their house.

The most expensive house is the one you can't sell. And housing is not an automatically good investment like many people believe.

I know from experience, a lot of my friends who bought cheap houses regret it now that they are interested in selling and NOBODY'S BUYING.

The Internet is solid in the Midwest too...

True. You can do the job. If you don't mind working remote / find a good job in the Midwest, it is 100% viable to live there.

Lastly, (this is a hot topic issue so I am reluctant to put it in, but it is something that comes up from my friends on the west coast) the states are red states, but the cities are blue.

Yes. This means every time you decide you want to get away from the city, you are greeted by a bunch of Trump-supporting, confederate flag waving yokels who cut the sleeves off of their shirts. Also this means that when those people want to get away from the country, guess where they go? Your city, where you have to interact with them.

abalone6• 8 years ago

I have to say I loved growing up in midwestern nature. It's not a touristy sight-seeing nature like we have in the SFBA but there is just so much of it and you are surrounded by it and it's yours to play with. So.. as you said, it depends on what you want.

abalone6• 8 years ago

These are all very good points. I recently visited the midwestern city near where I grew up and was AMAZED, as a longtime SF resident, at the spacious cafes in gorgeous brick and timber buildings that would cost millions on open in SF. At the craft bars where liquor licensing was no problem. At the super cheap houses you could drive to in 10 minutes where the biggest cost was probably renovation. And seemingly more young, progressive-ish people out and about in the city than I remember. Diversity definitely an issue but pretty LGBT friendly and solidly blue state politics.

But... This all overlooks the major draw to SF which is work. It's the center of our industry. With all that can be said about remote work, it's harder to find the right gig that way. And there is a lot to be said for the more diverse, cosmopolitan culture here.

stlava• 8 years ago

There was an NPR clip a month or so ago that likened homeowners to a cartel.

saosebastiao10• 8 years ago

It isn't a simile. If they are colluding to reduce supply and increase prices, they actually fit within the dictionary definition of a cartel.

scottlegrand22• 8 years ago

SB827 would have overturned zoning near transit hubs. It was shot down by a coalition of NIMBYs and Bernie-progressives accusing it of not being good enough despite acknowledging the existence of the problem. The upshot for me was making a donation to Scott Weiner's warchest - we need more new ideas and original thinking to get out of this mess.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/californias-transit-d...

java_script• 8 years ago

Seems like a total misrepresentation of what the critics to the left said about it, and like you're trying to pull a "both sides do it" / "the truth is in the middle" act without substance.

For example the Los Angeles DSA argues that SB827 would not have even lowered rents [0] and would have worsened housing for poor families. You can disagree with that, but that is absolutely not the same as it "not being good enough".

0: https://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827

scottlegrand22• 8 years ago

So that's the problem. No plan is going to be perfect. Better remains the enemy of good enough and I think this would have been a really good start. Note that the rebuttal posted here demands the repeal of Costa Hawkins. Doing so would strip all homeowners of the right to evict renters from their own home. Please tell me how that helps any homeowner whatsoever. Or if you don't care about homeowners (in which case why should they care about renters?), please tell me why California would be a better place by doing that to every single homeowner in the state?

I personally think you need to build bridges not tear them down and there's a lot we can agree on when it comes to California infrastructure

But if you're going to veto everything that's imperfect, IMO you're just perpetuating and exacerbating the existing situation. I suspect SB827 will be back next year because the hyperbole (from the left BTW not both sides in this case) about Scott Wiener being a closet Republican was absurd and it took an insane degree of cherry picking of his voting record to make that case.

I read that ~54% of homeowners vote as opposed to ~28% of renters. I think the proposition to repeal Costa Hawkins is really going to bring out the vote here and the numbers are not on the side of renters. I note also that the cost of California Home Ownership is just not all that high once you get out of the major cities. I had to give a talk at UC Merced a couple months back and I was really tempted to immediately move there and buy a mcmansion for the price of a single room condo in SF.

Finally, this could have been a wonderful opportunity to put an additional proposition out there that we could all agree on. Too bad we're so busy fighting with each other while the other side of the political fence slowly assimilates power.

masonic2• 8 years ago

  It was shot down by a coalition of NIMBYs

No, it was poisoned by the committee chair, a Democrat.

sagarm• 8 years ago

The NIMBY / YIMBY divide is orthogonal to Democrat / Republican. Republicans are of no consequence in California, anyway.

CodeSheikh2• 8 years ago

Stop selling real estate to foreign investors and we might be able to solve one piece of the puzzle. NYC/SF has same issues. Greedy American based real estate investments companies are corroding the system for rest of us.

ahoy• 8 years ago

If it wasn't going to foreign investors wouldn't it be going to oil millionaires from texas?

CodeSheikh2• 8 years ago

Still USA citizens, not ideal either.

davidw• 8 years ago

Get involved: https://yimbyaction.org/ - there are YIMBY groups springing up all over the place, as well as groups like Strong Towns https://www.strongtowns.org/

This isn't an easy fix, but it's possible, and, hearteningly in this divisive day and age, something that people from all political points of view can find a reason to support.

jagger27• 8 years ago

Will SF reach a point where homeowners decide to build downwards (like they do in London) to gain living space? Is it feasible given the geography?

spike021• 8 years ago

Not sure if that's even possible. From what I can recall of SF history, much of downtown isn't really stable ground (see the Millennium Tower as an example, with the ground underneath shifting and the foundation not being built to consider that issue). Also, I believe there are ships buried underneath the ground in SF from the 1800's.

macinjosh3• 8 years ago

Here is an instance of government getting in the way of the free market. The reason SF's housing market is so messed up is because of government meddling in the market. That's not to say the government shouldn't regulate anything and that all zoning laws are bad, but it is clear in this situation it is not helping. IMHO the answer here is less government, not more.

siavosh• 8 years ago

I've been really confused at why cities are becoming exponentially more important rather than less despite better and better remote-working tools and the general de-industrialization of America (reducing the benefits of agglomeration economics). I find the economic claim that a firm being close to other firms being a significant productivity advantage unconvicing. My current theory is after 2008, the suburbs pretty much went belly up. So young people had less money and no desire to get stuck with a dangerous mortgage like their parents. With no desire to own a house or even a car and an emphasis on experiences, people started moving to the cities and the companies followed them there which created a positive feedback loop. So the jobs followed the people, not the other way around. My sense is that there just aren't that many good jobs even in the cities since there isn't any real advantage any more outside some old industrial sectors of being geographically close to others. It's primarily a cultural phenomena not an economic one of the growth of cities. So at what point is the cultural gain no longer rationale and trend flows back to the suburbs?

gweinberg• 8 years ago

For some people the glass is always 3/4 empty. I would say zoning allows building on 26.6%.

imh• 8 years ago

I can't think of a way to write this that doesn't come across as a little facetious, but I swear this is an honest question. Would the YIMBYs here be happy replacing the parks in SF (especially Golden Gate Park) with high density housing? It would be a huge and likely effective trade of city character for affordability.

abalone6• 8 years ago

We need more density. Serious question: do you guys think market rate development will push down prices enough to make SF affordable to the working class (service industry, teachers, etc.)? Or do we need subsidized / below market rate housing?

This is an issue that affects all of us. Commuting in 1+ hours for low wage jobs is not a viable growth model. Already small businesses in SF are having a very hard time hiring. Unless Elon Musk builds us some tunnels, we need local housing for the working class just to function as a city that’s desirable to live in.

My thought on market rate: it will certainly make it more affordable for folks like us (upper 5 - lower 6 figure incomes). But there is a long queue of white collar professionals particularly in tech that would like to move into the city. All that demand needs to be soaked up before the market rate becomes “affordable” for the working class — which means dirt cheap for professionals. How many tech professionals would decide to move here if SF was dirt cheap? That’s a lot of induced demand to satiate.

So that’s where the real debate is here when it comes to upzoning the west side. Do you open it up to maximum market rate, or do you negotiate with developers for maximum BMR units? I feel the “nimby vs yimby” dichotomy here tends to cloud that issue.

dragonwriter2• 8 years ago

Serious question: do you think guys think market rate development will push down prices enough to make SF affordable to the working class (service industry, teachers, etc.)? Or do we need subsidized / below market rate housing?

Just a thought, but maybe no to both questions.

You need working class people to be able to work in SF, but is it necessary (with adequate transit) that they live there?

abalone6• 8 years ago

(with adequate transit)

Well, do we have adequate transit?

I saw some maps that visualized where you could get from affordable neighboods on public transit within an hour in several major metros. Can’t find it now but it was striking. Even in NYC you could go from affordable parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx to most of Manhattan. But in the Bay Area... it was tiny areas around BART stops only. Most of SF was cut off. That’s why businesses are having such a hard time hiring.

I tried to address this when I noted that either Musk needs to build tunnels or we need local working class housing.

josh2600• 8 years ago

FWIW, I would totally live in Berkeley if my commute to the dogpatch could be shortened. Right now, there's no obvious mass transit way to get to my office in SF in less than 80 minutes (assuming every connection is hit perfectly). With an Uber, it's highly variable (between 40 minutes and 90 minutes depending upon the day).

San Francisco's zoning makes it illegal to build apartments in 73.5% of the city

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