Let's Get Organized and Fix Housing Affordability in San Francisco
blog.zactownsend.com
blog.zactownsend.com
As the article states, there's a large majority of the population in favor of relatively sensible rational policies. And where two sides disagree, there's a large majority in favor of sensible compromise. Only the most hardcore partisans and ideologues are intransigent. And yet only the most hardcore partisans and ideologues vote in primaries. In today's gerrymandered and politically segregated world, primaries are the only elections that matter in many places. Solution: everyone should vote in primaries.
TLDR: Vote in primaries or the crazies win.
1. Upzone SOMA district to 12 stories.
2. Remove requirement that buildings over 50yrs old in SOMA need to pass the historic building committee.
But aren't these suggestions a bit like in the late 90s when you would just add more beefy servers to a really slow web site? Even if these ideas would add the required 100,000 units to the market, how do you deal with the politics of making these two changes happen?
The housing shortage / underbuilding crisis is actually a wicked problem. Before throwing solutions onto the wall, we should understand its beastly nature better.
SF has a complicated review process that basically lets neighbors hold up permit approval indefinitely with appeals. Whether good or bad, it's there. Shadow laws are also in place and would need to be changed.
Changing a low to mid density neighborhood into a high density 12 story building neighborhood means a lot more than just removing height limits. Sufficient parks and retail/commercial space need to exist to ensure good quality of life, no one wants to live in a neighborhood full of condos & apartments and little else.
Likewise, there needs to be sufficient transit, SF Muni is already bursting at the seams, add a high density neighborhood without adding transit, and no one will be able to get out of the neighborhood.
Building high density housing is important but it's a lot harder than just removing a height limit.
One recent and significant gain in the fight is the notion that the city must measure the economic impact of underbuilding:
Wait until a few of the big overvalued startups tank (looking at you, Twitter) and the bubble will be over.
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/04/15/san-francisco-housing-prices-d...
I bet it would be a lot cheaper than building more houses too!
You don't solve a supply problem by adding taxes. If anything, that will reduce the supply even more.
Raising the cost to landlords in an sellers market like SF is just going to drive up rents - and Landlords will certainly be able to pass through their higher costs even to rent controlled tenants.
If you stick a massive tax on that, that deters that kind of behavior, and forces them to either rent out the property, or sell to someone who will either live in it or rent it out. This will increase the housing supply, which would then decrease the cost of housing overall by providing more supply and more competition. This wouldn't be a tax that people would actually pay, unless they're stupid; they would take steps to avoid paying the tax altogether.
Taxes don't make stuff more expensive: they deter behavior. The simple rule is: if you want less of something, tax it. Now, this isn't always true, but to an extent it usually is, especially for consumption. (It's not really true of income taxes usually; everyone usually wants more income, and needs some amount of income, so a tax on that income doesn't discourage that, unless the tax is so high or so wacky that it discourages working for additional income.) Here, we want people to stop leaving properties unoccupied, so we slap a giant tax on that so they'll stop doing it.
Honestly in my building near harvard square this hasn't seemed to prevent those from moving out from renting (rents have gone a little nuts here too). Its a decent idea, as it incentives people to sell when they move. We have had some people cashing out, because values are high.
"The City of Cambridge offers a residential exemption to property that serves as a property owner’s principal residence. To be eligible for FY17, the owner must own and occupy their property as their principal residence on January 1, 2016 shown on 2015 Massachusetts Income Tax."
https://medium.com/@TomPJacobs/what-housing-crisis-3c0568a5d...
A lot of quality of life problems will crop up as density rises. With that realization, calls for a "grand unified growth plan" and the corresponding environmental impact studies will surface. And that will take ... t .. i .. m ... e ...
The whole movement hits a wall.
Here's a radical idea: build tall buildings. Tokyo sits on a fault. They manage to build tall buildings.
/s
I live in the 2nd hottest neighborhood in the city. You can rent an apartment within 4 blocks of me, tomorrow, for $800 a month, and you'd have many choices. If you were willing to live further out or in a less prestigious neighborhood you could trade up on size, too.
[+] Tokyo is very much not monolithically tall buildings. I live in a 45 story highrise; less than 25 meters away there exists single-family housing and 3 story apartments. The average density is pretty high, though -- here in Meguro it is about 2.5x SF's citywide (50k people per square mile vs 20k).
SF would need to invest tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in transit in order to make Tokyo style densities work. Just digging out the sides of Embarcadero station to allow two-sided boarding for BART is projected to cost a billion dollars.
corollary of your position - don't approve density increase where you live if you don't like density :)
Under the current political system, it takes just a handful of the "comfortably settled" to lever potential quality of life problems and create a giant obstruction to pro-growth policies.
This is how it goes in other parts of California too.
The nature of cities is that they are constantly changing, and the sooner we can teach people this, the better.
If employers stop coming to SF because of the lack of affordable housing, then maybe the community will change their minds. Or maybe that's exactly what they wanted.
"No, how it's supposed to work is that every region must remain open to growth at all costs and from all sources, especially outside sources. And if there's a policy such as a zoning policy or a density goal that stands in the way of outsiders entering a region to settle there and grow the economy, then that policy is discriminatory and ought to be removed. This applies just as much to San Francisco as it does to Arizona. Blah blah blah."
But seriously now, where do we draw this line? I have no idea anymore. The debate has gone in every direction and twisted itself into so many knots I have no idea when a local government should have control over this and when it shouldn't.
The argument that many residents have against urbanization of SF by removing building height limits is that an urbanized SF is no longer "SF". Skyscrapers built on pilings down to bedrock are almost certainly more safer in an earthquake than most of the old low rise housing in SF, so earthquake safety is not the reason SF isn't full of high rises.
I would point out that article showing that the poor live longer in places like SF and NY. For others, access to a more productive, dynamic place to work carries a lot of benefits, and excluding them definitely hurts.
Do you mean this one:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/11/where...
Where the map shows that areas up and down the California Coast (not just SF) show longer life for the poor?
However, I'm not sure that longer life correlates strongly with "quality of life" (as someone who watched a loved one undergo long slow decline and live about a year longer than he wanted to).
A homeless person that barely manages to eke out a living on the streets of SF may not be happier than a homeless person in Detroit that largely lives in shelters in Detroit, even if the SF homeless person lives longer.
If you don't like expensive housing or problems that arise due to expensive housing, don't living in expensive places. There are plenty of less expensive places.
Note: I agree with density == good(in general) but you're using the same argument that the nimbys are using in SF.
San Francisco density: 7,100/km^2
Per wikipedia.
Actually, as long as you allow mixed-use areas, density works out pretty well. What doesn't work is one huge skyscraper all by itself. Vastly preferable is larger areas of lower buildings, which can be anywhere from 2-3 stories, to 5-6, or higher as needs be.
Source: I spent most of the past 15 year in Europe and greatly enjoyed it.
Also: San Francisco is already kind of dense - it's not exactly rural suburbia.
http://www.7x7.com/arts-culture/dark-history-san-franciscos-...
But from the commentariat of HN, you'd think that SF had the density of Dallas or something. Just pointing out that it's already pretty dense.
Density and better public transportation kind of go hand in hand. One before the other probably doesn't work very well.
I really wish it would just slide off into the ocean at this point.
It's also a huge issue for anyone working for a startup in that area, especially for those who are no longer young and single and thus require a bit more in terms of their housing.
The main reason you moved there in the 90s is 1) because it was pretty and pleasant, and the culture was eccentric and liberal, and 2) because Willie Brown was unbelievably friendly to rezoning everything to accommodate you at the expense of the diverse people who used to be able to afford to live there. Now, astonishingly, the wealthy libertarian line is that the problem is that they won't let you continue doing it until the place looks like a giant housing project. SROs that can be slotted in by crane are hailed as a technological innovation.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-S-F-s-live-work-de...
"Manhattanization" is definitely a good word for it, because Manhattan is a cultural wasteland where no one interesting can afford to live, where the wealthy moved in the 80s because it was filled with interesting people.