Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco apartments | Hacker News Reader

Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco apartments

experimental-geography.blogspot.com

200 pointsspenrose151 comments

> It will be very hard. If the (first) model is correct, it would take a 53% increase in the housing supply (200,000 new units),

Doesn't seem that hard in a city full of three-story housing.

I'm thinking the same thing. Is it physical limitations of building (such as earthquake proofing) that makes it difficult? Or is it the suffocating amount of bureaucratic red tape imposed by short-sighted interest groups?

Red tape. All red tape. See top comment.

Definitely red tape.

I'm doing an expansion on my house in SF. 1 year in already, and at least another year to go before we get permits, if we even wind up getting them.

It will probably cost over $10,000 just in planning review / permitting costs when it's all done. That does not include the added time architectural costs of changing the plans as demanded by the various planning departments.

By way of comparison, out here on the East Coast, I went by my county office on a Friday, talked over what I wanted to do with the clerk, sketched out a basic plan on a blank sheet of paper, paid $75 in fees, taped the permit to my front window and started work on an expansion the next day.

Yes, SF's process is incredibly broken. It's not just that they are too expensive and time consuming (which they are!), it's also that the rules are arbitrary, and there are multiple departments, which often have the exact opposite requirements.

Additionally, any approval can be appealed by neighbors for any reason, at very little cost, but then the person applying for the permit will then have to spend thousands more, and potentially years more, to fight the appeal.

The uncertainty and lack of clear rules is actually worse than the cost (which is ridiculous).

I find it hard to imagine a more dysfunctional planning process.

> Is it physical limitations of building (such as earthquake proofing) that makes it difficult?

Can't be worse than in Japan. They manage to build plenty. So, definitely red tape.

Yup if Tokyo can build safely skyscrapers on landfills (look at the Ariake area in the Tokyo bay -- an area that is friendly for young families btw), then there is no structural reason why SF can't.

Here's an interesting comparison. New York City's population density is 56% higher than San Francisco's, and the average height of a building in New York City is only 6.8 stories (in spite of skyscrapers pushing up the mean).

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

http://www.sunilmishra.in/2012/07/05/average-building-height...

Do you happen to know how many units the largest residential building in NYC has? It would be interesting to know the minimum number of buildings needed to cover the 200k unit deficit.

[edit]

Thanks for all the replies!

So it looks like we are talking about a minimum of hundreds of buildings to be torn-down and rebuilt taller. That seems unlikely to happen in SF proper.

Interesting idea. It looks like the largest in terms of number of units built in 2014-2015 in NYC was 815 units, so you would need 246 of them to get to 200000+ units.

http://therealdeal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/NYC-Condo-...

That 815 units was a proposal, not something that's actually been built. It appears the company intending to build it has since cut the proposed size to 646 units, and that's big even for NYC - the biggest on that list that's actually being constructed is 246 units and the sizes drop rapidly from there. So you'd be looking at a thousand or so NYC-sized buildings, in an area probably considerably less suited to them than NYC. (Oh, and the estimates I can find claim that apartments in that building are selling for about $2,000 per square foot. I think that's expensive even compared to SF prices. What's more, anyone who complains that SF housing development is too slow needs to realise that 246-unit building is part of a construction project originally proposed in the late 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_South )

I dunno, but the Rincon towers in SF have something like 300 units each, so you are talking about several hundred Rincon-sized buildings or a few thousand 50-100 unit buildings.

"A West 57th Street project by developer TF Cornerstone will be New York City’s largest apartment building when completed, with 1,189 units, according to city records."

http://therealdeal.com/2013/11/12/tf-cornerstones-606-west-5...

3333 Broadway has 1200. It's technically five buildings, although they are all connected, so I don't know how they decide that.

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

It's also a monster of a building. I kind of get the NIMBY vibe if it's about that, it's just too big, sucks up all the energy.

There are a few like that this (Galaxy Towers in Guttenberg). They're all old, though, they don't build new stuff like that.

423 Park Avenue is the tallest [1]. 412 637 square feet, containing 104 apartments.

I have no idea what fraction of the floor area is apartments, but if it was all of it, they would average 3968 square feet, which seems huge. If everyone got the same modest but comfortable 820 square feet i have, there could be 503 apartments. At that rate, you'd need about 400 towers to make 200 000 apartments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

A pretty high fraction of each floor is apartments, the problem is that the apartments are huge. I'm pretty sure the penthouses actually span two floors. The lower floors probably have 2 or 3 units per floor.

More moderate apartment buildings would have had several units per floor, but that building was built to be the most prestigious in the city.

I don't know about New York. I lived in a two-tower complex in Chicago, 45-stories with over 1,000 apartments total.

But you don't need tons of high-rises. Having everything be free-standing buildings is the larger problem. Blocks of mid-rises is what drives density in places like Paris: https://agingmodernism.wordpress.com/category/sarcelles.

Not one building, but the Stuyvesant Town complex in Manhattan has 30,000+ residents and it sits on 80 acres with 89 buildings, and lots of green space, basketball courts, etc. It's a very livable place.

> New York City's population density is 56% higher than San Francisco's

And even New York City is not really that dense:

    San Francisco: 18 000 people per mi2
    New York City: 27 000
    Barcelona:     41 000
    Paris:         55 000

Only Manhattan (72 000 per mi2) is dense.

New York City is vast. Brooklyn alone is 40% larger than San Francisco.

If you're talking about outlying areas, the rest of the bay area is amazingly not dense given how expensive housing is.

You can't really compare a single municipality to several that collectively equal it's size. The latter case has a whole lot of more localized and conflicting political interests that serve to hold back the area as a whole.

I know they're different politically - I'm comparing the results, which are terrible.

Note New York City has less of these issues because over the centuries it gained control of its neighboring areas from other counties, something San Francisco never did.

But given how fervently anti-development San Francisco itself also is, would it even have helped?

San Francisco looks positively pro-development compared to places like Palo Alto. At least they allow townhomes, not requiring detached houses with large lots. If more of the Peninsula were even near SF levels of density, the housing issues would be a lot less severe.

Or look at Hong Kong and Singapore.

That's twice you've said that, care to elaborate?

Hong Kong 6,544/km2 17,024/sq mi

Singapore: 7,697/km2 19,910/sq mi

Hong Kong is 75% rural montane forests. The city density is closer to 80000/mi^2.

An unsurprising choice, since for a century residents were surrounded by a much poorer, much more dangerous country, and the ocean, in all directions. The only place you can go in Hong Kong to escape are its parks.

Singapore is reasonably dense as a whole for around 5 million people.

If you look at the high numbers for Barcelona, Hamburg or Paris, that's only the urban core. Singapore, of course, also has a denser core.

(And what scythe said about Hong Kong.)

Those numbers are the population densities for the whole countries. I wasn't able to find densities for the urban areas of Hong Kong or Singapore.

Btw, Monaco is at 48 462 people per mi2.

New York City's mayor has pledged to build (and preserve) that many units of affordable housing alone over the next 10 years [1]. About 80,000 of those will be new construction [2].

The broader picture is more vigorous. Developers applied to build 60% as much (over 50,000 units) in 2015 alone [3].

This is a political problem San Francisco has dug itself into.

[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/site/housing/index.page

[2] http://gothamist.com/2016/05/16/depends_on_what_affordable_m...

[3] https://www.buildingcongress.com/outlook/

You could just let Google build 300 of these https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superjednostka#/media/File:Kat... on closest possible lots.

https://www.google.pl/maps/place/Superjednostka,+aleja+Korfa...

Googleplex to scale: https://www.google.pl/maps/place/Googleplex/@37.42302,-122.0...

Building straight into the sky is easy. You'd be amazed at how earthquake-proof skyscrapers are with modern technology.

You want a challenge? Build in a city where you're required to post notice any time you cut down a tree on your own property.

i acknowledge that city ordinances can be a huge headache, but consider that trees serve more than just aesthetic purpose. They provide shade, filter particulate matter, and increase air quality for a much larger area than just 'your own property'.

This is especially important in the urban core of cities where greenery can be scarce, and mature trees even more so.

If you are worried about the environment there are far more effective approaches we could use, like increasing density to reduce transport emissions.

Yeah, but apparently building out public transport pits you against the petroleum industry (which has held sway in the US over a century).

This isn't an either-or, it's a case where special interests have shot down the more efficient approaches, so we're left with what we have.

Consider that you can just girdle the tree to kill it, and then the city will then force you to take it down.

Ok, give everyone a tax break determined by the number of trees on their property.

But then you lose control, and that's a lot more valuable than money.

This is a perfect example of a positive externality.

We tend to try to make the producers of negative externalities pay for the problems they create for the rest of us, but we rarely pay the producers of positive externalities for the benefits we all get from them.

It's interesting that cities never put their money where their mouths are. If we really valued trees, we, the non-tree owners, would pay people based on the size and benefits of their trees.

The right way to do it is not by restricting cutting down trees, but by encouraging planting more. I bet a $100/year property tax deduction per tree would have the city absolutely packed full of every kind of tree you can imagine.

Old, large trees are not easily replaced. A 100 year tree is not the same as 3 or 4 trees that were just planted.

"Building straight into the sky is easy."

Except, it isn't. Construction costs of taller buildings scale non-linearly with every additional story [1]. Building skyscrapers costs upwards of $300 per square foot, whereas single-family homes cost a fifth or a sixth of that. It's so much cheaper to build low-rises, in fact, that virtually no developers will take on a high-rise project unless the property is so expensive that it can command luxury prices. This is more-or-less true for mid-rise projects as well, though at a lower price point (~$200 per square foot).

The conversation about planning and NIMBYs is misguided. As the article concludes, the city is out of land. Any new construction requires buying and knocking down something else, and the choices are all various flavors of "expensive" or "inconvenient".

For example, east of Divisadero, the density of SF is actually pretty high:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7907112,-122.424097,3a,75y,4...

But west of Divisadero, there are huge sections of the city that look like a suburb:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7468355,-122.4598049,3a,75y,...

...the problem is, everyone wants to rebuild the dense parts to be skyscrapers (which is very expensive), and transit access to the suburban parts is quite bad. Developers won't build even medium-density projects in western parts of the city, because there's no demand, because there's no transit. Instead, they build higher density in the Mission and SOMA. These buildings will always be expensive, "luxury" units, because at $300+/sq.ft. construction costs the economics don't pencil out otherwise.

[1] https://westnorth.com/2014/03/18/between-rocks-and-a-tall-pl...

Why is $300/ ft2 construction costs a problem when condos are going for $1k / ft2? Even selling condos for $600 / ft2 would be a major improvement.

data: http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/m... then click the wavy graph next to "explore this area" sales price / sqft

A quick distinction, you have to build all of a skyscraper but you only get to sell part of it as condos. There are hallways, janitors' closets, fire stairways, etc etc.

Yes, this exactly. If you can get 70% efficiency in a skyscraper you're doing phenomenally well. Also, the cost of land isn't included in the $300/sq.ft. number (though that becomes a proportionately smaller concern for taller buildings, for obvious reasons), nor the costs of financing, insurance, maintenance, etc.

But more to the point, these numbers set only the lower bound on what a unit will sell for. These numbers don't predict the final market price of new construction, but they tell you when a project can be justified.

Hmm, [1] suggests 25% overhead for 30-40 stories.

Maintenance is largely irrelevant to the sales price, assuming the HOA/condo association fees aren't wildly out of line with others. Also, these should scale linearly or sub-linearly I'd think.

I still don't see an answer to why $300/ft2 (or hell, $500/ft2) construction costs are a problem when condos sell for $1k +- 50 ft2 in the north east chunk of sf. Even $500/0.70 = $714 / salable ft2. Which should make selling prices near $1k a damn attractive proposition.

The cost of land goes as

   (land cost / ft2) / ((1/0.7) x (stories - 1))

so even $5k/ft2 of land cost comes out to $103 per salable ft2 on a 35 story building.

[1] https://westnorth.com/2015/04/27/high-rises-land-efficient-b...

Replying to self: denominator on land costs should have factor .7 not (1/.7) so $210. Embarrassed.

> Instead, they build class I-III in the Mission and SOMA. These buildings will always be "luxury" units, because at $300+/sq.ft. construction costs the economics don't pencil out otherwise.

In the long run, that isn't true. A skyscraper has a useful life well in excess of 50 years. If you look at places like Chicago, you'll see that luxury high-rises get renovated 20-30 years in to become mid-range places.

Of course, that requires the foresight to have permitted enough high-rise construction yesterday.

"In the long run, that isn't true. A skyscraper has a useful life well in excess of 50 years. If you look at places like Chicago, you'll see that luxury high-rises get renovated 20-30 years in to become mid-range places."

It really depends. They just gutted 101 Van Ness (a pre-existing 1960s-era skyscraper) and turned it into housing. It's all luxury -- the cheapest units are upwards of $3000 a month for a tiny studio. When developers renovate a building, they ask for what the market can bear, not for their cost of redevelopment.

All you can really do is assume that long-term, more housing is good, and less housing is bad. That's fine, but it doesn't change the fact that new construction doesn't help anyone but wealthy people in SF, today.

"In the long run, we're all dead."

> That's fine, but it doesn't change the fact that new construction doesn't help anyone but wealthy people in SF, today.

If you build more luxury housing it lowers the price of luxury housing so that a marginally less rich person can move to that tier.

That marginal move reduces the demand on the next lower tier of housing which should reduce the price at that level.

And so on, and so on...

This was addressed by the source article. It happens a bit, but it isn't magic: one of the author's models found that for every 1% increase in housing, rents dropped by 1.7%.

Lowering rents enough to make SF affordable for poor people requires construction on a scale that isn't just impractical -- it's economically impossible. No developer would choose to build into such a market with fixed construction costs at hundreds of dollars per square foot.

Indeed construction costs are far too high! Significant zoning changes are needed to make SF more affordable for large swaths of the economic spectrum. And even then, unfortunately, it will take time. Buildings don't go up overnight. The problems that SF is experiencing today are due to decades of mistakes.

The costs he is citing are fixed. They don't have anything to do with zoning or past decisions by San Francisco.

Just like hermit crabs when a slightly bigger shell is available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dnocPQXDQ#t=1m33s

Ha! Yes!

Love that analogy!

Can you promise that

Happens all the time. http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/

Thanks, that was a very interesting read!

Thanks for reading. If you liked that, you might also like

http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/G2009-Hidden_Taxabl...

Only in the same sense that you can promise that an apple released from your hand will fall to the earth and not hover in mid-air.

Oh, come now...if it were that certain, the article wouldn't have gone out of its way to explore the question. There's actually no guarantee at all that the markets for high-end and low-end goods are linked.

The price of Lamborghinis doesn't have much to do with the price of Kias.

What a strange analogy. There's no scarcity to Kias at all; the car is built to command a particular price point. There's a huge surplus of drivable cars. That's not the case with SF real estate, even a little bit.

The metaphor is fine. You're making my argument: there's no inherent reason that the prices of luxury products should influence the prices of commodity products. In fact, barring exceptional circumstances (i.e. shortages) they usually don't. It isn't safe to assume that "construction" will lower rents for everyone. Even here.

Despite conventional wisdom and lots of hand-waving justifications, there's actually very little evidence that building more luxury units impacts low-end housing prices on anything but the long term. Even the author of this piece is falling back to long-term averages to make his argument, and the results are...tepid. A 2% reduction in aggregate, long-term rents for every 1% of new housing built is not a screaming endorsement for indiscriminate construction.

If you have data that shows otherwise, feel free to cite it.

There are a fixed number of residential slots in the SF real estate market. There is undersupply at every level of the market. If a slot is labeled "luxury", lower-income people will not move in there. But the converse isn't true: higher-income people will take "low-income" slots (see: the Mission) if that's all that's available.

No part of this market in any way resembles the market for Lamborghinis and Kias.

Yeah, I understand what you're saying: there's a shortage of housing, and there's not a shortage of economy cars. But that's not a rebuttal to the argument I'm making.

The question is whether or not new luxury housing makes rents cheaper for poor folks, today. Even here, in the epicenter of a housing crisis, there's not a lot of evidence that it does. But there's evidence that preferentially building low-income housing does make a difference.

This isn't a controversial or irrational or counter-intuitive argument: there are a lot of great reasons that a rich person might choose to live in a cheaper apartment. It isn't a given that rich people will self-segregate to luxury buildings because "luxury". So at the end of the day, you're back to aggregate supply vs. aggregate demand. And if that's the case, why not build for low-income people instead?

Is there a coherent argument you can make that doesn't depend on upper-income people shunning lower-income neighborhoods in San Francisco? Because the evidence strongly suggests that they don't: that when luxury housing is unavailable, upper-income people in the Bay Area move on to claim lower-income housing.

(I lived in Bayview for a bit, and I was hardly the only tech person I knew who lived there.)

"Is there a coherent argument you can make that doesn't depend on upper-income people shunning lower-income neighborhoods in San Francisco? Because the evidence strongly suggests that they don't"

I'm not claiming that they do. I'm arguing the opposite: if you build only luxury, it doesn't help poor people much, because most people will try to get the cheapest, nicest housing they can find. Building luxury units helps only to the extent that building anything here helps -- and if we believe the OP, it doesn't help very much at all.

Basically, this: you lived in Bayview, so you know who lives there. Knocking down every existing low-density home in Bayview and replacing it with market-rate housing would displace a huge number of poor folks. It probably also helps lower aggregate rents for everyone in SF by $40 a month or whatever, but that's thin gruel to the people who were there before.

This is the fundamental dilemma facing all construction in San Francisco.

Since I didn't advocate bulldozing Bayview for luxury condos, I'm not sure where to go from here. It seems like you've conceded my central point.

Only in the sense that I disagree completely and shown that you're wrong. ;-)

There's no guarantee that building luxury housing lowers prices, which is what you were implying. You have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

If you don't build luxury housing for wealthy people, they just bid up the existing housing stock.

Look up filtering down. As houses age, they become less luxurious.

See http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/

> In the long run, that isn't true. A skyscraper has a useful life well in excess of 50 years. If you look at places like Chicago

...they aren't like San Francisco. In addition to construction costs, I wonder what the effect of periodic major earthquakes is on maintenance costs of large buildings. And, particularly, the relative costs of larger vs. smaller buildings.

Doesn't seem to be dissuading high-rise construction much in LA.

It requires something more than foresight - it also requires that the demand for mid-range apartments now matches up with the demand for luxury high-rise apartments several decades ago, and there's simply no reason why this should be so. (Oh, and as timr points out, it also requires that the buildings can't more profitably be refurbished into luxury apartments. Basically, it needs to be grotty enough that the wealthy don't want to live there, but not so derelict that it gets demolished.)

To no one in particular, from TFA, w/r/t "luxury" housing:

"Surprisingly, given the anxiety over "luxury" apartments vs regular, non-luxurious ones, there does not appear to be any segmentation in the rental market in any year, even by unit size. In every year with more than a handful of listings, the total pool of prices is a smooth curve (except for the occasional taboo price: landlords were strangely reluctant to offer apartments for exactly $105), approximately lognormally distributed. The 95th percentile apartment always rents for about 2.2 times the price of the median apartment, and the 5th percentile apartment for about 1/2.2 of the price of the median apartment, but see below about variability in this. "

An hour north of SF, my single family home cost me $216 sq. ft. Prices in SF are significantly higher. Trulia makes it look to be ~ $700-$1000 sq. ft.

I don't mean to belittle your choice as I assume you're happy with it. But please understand that, for a lot of people, living an hour north of SF is too far for their taste. Even to the point of being worth the extra money.

I think you lost track of the thread at some point. I supplied housing prices at my location to counter the parent's assertion that skyscrapers were too costly as supported by "Building skyscrapers costs upwards of $300 per square foot, whereas single-family homes cost a fifth or a sixth of that." I was not trying to suggest that people move an hour away for cheaper housing, but that even an hour away, a skyscraper at those prices isn't necessarily a bad deal, making it much more feasible in SF.

The big price jump is where you have to switch over from wood construction to steel. Once you're high enough that you need a steel structure you may as well build it as tall as you can to get as much use out of the land as possible.

It might be 'easy' and 'earthquake-proof', but it sure isn't cheap.

No, it's not. But SF's prices could easily make the investment worthwhile.

Build in a city where you're required to post notice any time you cut down a tree on your own property.

That's because you're talking about one of the most beautiful cities in the world (despite the attempts of some people to decry otherwise) and, as expressed through the will of its electorate, intends to stay that way. It's also a city that's keenly aware of ecosystem dynamics and environmental issues generally, and the effect of removing that removing certain kinds of trees (for example, trees of significant age, size, and/or foliage) -- particularly if they're close to the street -- can have on the neighborhood well beyond the tiny confines of your own property.

If you want to live in a city that couldn't begin to give a flying F* about trees, or anything else green, for most of its history -- and has the corresponding development footprint and visual character to show for it -- try moving to San Jose.

The west side of the city (the Sunset and the Richmond) has little to recommend in terms of "visual character". It's also poorly connected to the rest of the city and has very poor walkability, save for the N corridor. They could just tear it all up and build mid-rises, if only they had better connections to stimulate demand.

Every city has its underbellies and backsides -- most of them for more unappealing and unsalvageable than SF's. Meanwhile, very few large cities in North America (and I've been to basically all of them) have much to compare with in terms of architecture, character (up until the current boom, anyway) and charm.

And in terms of the stunning beauty of its geographic surroundings -- precisely none of them.

On balance there's basically no contest.

They have enough demand. Zoning (and Nimbys) are bad.

So true, San Jose, and the greater Silicon Valley have a huge problem with this. The ongoing fight over Coyote Valley is the flashpoint of the moment but mostly because it's the only open space left.

SF has far fewer trees than other cities. I agree that the city needs more trees but the city should plant them on sidewalks and other open spaces.

http://www.deeproot.com/blog/blog-entries/tree-cover-how-doe...

HA! San Fransisco is a dirty, 2 fisted drinking town, full-stop. It is not 'one of the most beautiful cities in the world'. Try Hamburg or Vienna. It is a port of call for those looking to escape polite society, be they gays, Chicanos, drunk miners, Russian trappers, whores, Burners, or whatever else isn't talked about on 5th Ave. Do not delude yourself into thinking San Fransisco's people care about anything but the prices of their vices. That is what makes SF great, it just wants to get sloppy drunk. Do whatever else you want.

San Francisco's wooden victorian are very beautiful, it also has a lot of "western American port city" architecture in tact, as you say. Many of us find that beautiful compared to old European cities that have their own very different histories. "The most beautiful city in the world" is most definitely an exaggeration, but it definitely has its own charm.

"One of the most" is what I said, not "the most."

Sure. I was just stating that the exaggerated point would have been...an exaggeration, not that this is the point you made. Sorry for the confusion.

IMO, San Francisco is an ugly city. It's got that smattering of high rises in a mostly low rise city that just screams slums in most of the world. I mean there is a reason most photos are of a bridge not the buildings.

I accept everyone has different aesthetics. But, the city just screams fake to me without any of the organic charm an old city or the brutal asthetic of say NY.

PS: I guess you can call it unique...

Not just bridges, I mean, SF has stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_ladies#/media/File:Pai...

Linking into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_ladies:

> "Painted ladies" is a term in American architecture used for Victorian and Edwardian houses and buildings painted in three or more colors that embellish or enhance their architectural details. The term was first used for San Francisco Victorian houses by writers Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen in their 1978 book Painted Ladies - San Francisco's Resplendent Victorians.[1]

Such housing is virtually everywhere in SF if you bother walking out of the urban core. I used to lose myself for hours just wandering around SF neighborhoods.

I really wonder if you really know what slums really are. I live in Beijing, a high rise city by any definition, which has slums galore (though not the ones found in India). Even the tall buildings are dingy, lack character. I also lived in Lausanne for a couple of years...supposedly a nice city, but it definitely had its share of grit and urban fake-ness. Especially high rise social housing (say in Renens), which, while not bad, definitely had a feeling of sluminess to them.

That's a nice, romantic point view of the world to have.

But the reality of the city's history and demographics is far more staid. And the people living there just want jobs, affordable housing, and better public transportation just like anywhere else. And streets that don't flood during storms, and air they can breathe.

SF is not the world. The POV is of SF city only.

SF also does actually sit right on top of a fault line, so it is not a staid place by any stretch of the mind. It was just over 100 years ago the entire place burnt to the ground and was rebuilt by greedy logger barons (Cowell, Lick, etc.). It is a matter of time before another bad quake happens again, though maybe to Market as badly the next time. I agree they want the amenities, but SF is a port and it needs its vices, despite all calls to the contrary. People that need the amenities move to Napa or Dublin. Also, SF has never had real problems with flooding like St. Louis does (see: the hills) or the bad air like on Mexico City or LA (see: the bay fog rolling in).

I've no idea what drives the romanticism when you can smell the streets even in the rain. Then again, the French are like that and their streets are covered in doggy land-mines like SF's are.

The Embarcadero, the Ferry Building, Sunset, SOMA and the hipster spots, Haight-Ashbury with the old Victorian houses, with the Redwoods nearby... SF is a great place, at least to visit, and while it has what you describe, it is not what you describe.

Sounds like my kind of town

It is very charming once you get past the slurs. Folk are nice, if stabby and strung-out.

My level of depression while walking outside significantly reduced once I moved away from San Jose.

San Jose has a beauty reminiscent of Houston, Texas or Melbourne, Australia.

What do you find similar between Melbourne and Houston?

SF, a city so keenly aware of environmental issues that we built a dam in a national park to get some water.

I'm talking about the SF of 2016, not 1923.

It is worth mentioning that building into the sky is expensive. Easy sure. But expensive. Each floor is more expensive than the one below it.

I'm not sure what the premium is though. Anyone know? What's the added cost for an apartment building as you go up?

Seattle has a lot of 2+4 construction. Where it's 2 floor concrete and 4 floors wood. I believe the limit used to be 2+2 but they raised it. Cheaper construction costs but also cheaper quality. These plastic and cardboard buildings won't be standing in 100 years that's for sure. Or so I'm told.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. This article talks about housing in Japan depreciating rapidly: http://www.archdaily.com/450212/why-japan-is-crazy-about-hou..., a contrast to the U.S., where to some extent, properties gain in value. (Mostly the land value, but to a certain extent the structures as well).

I think it's reasonable that a 2+4 building built today last 20-30 years, is depreciated, and then torn down for an even more dense structure at that time. Over 30 years, building heights and technologies should be such that a more productive use of the space can be made.

In light of that, it doesn't make sense to spend extra for a “100-year-building.” Not everything needs to be a historic structure. We should recognize that some buildings should be [relatively] transient.

It's a plausible strategy as long as it's part of the plan. If you're in an environment that that makes construction difficult then cheap may not be the best choice.

Seattle still has too many taxes and fees for my liking. I appreciate the desire for below market rate units and and low income housing fees. But it's completely ass backwards. Taxes are disincentives. Don't disincentivize the thing you want more of!

Developers are slapped with extra fees if they want to build above a certain height. Complete opposite of what's correct. There should be a fee for not building high enough!

Le sigh.

Fellow Seattlite here... Do you have details on those building restrictions? I'm trying to come up to speed, but the complications of building in the city are more than I was bargaining for...

Context for non-locals: Seattle is on track to become SF with about 100k new residents each year and an already large housing shortage. The city is struggling to combat it, with regulations designed to force new construction to include affordable units, rather than letting existing inventory move down market with age. If they're taxing dense construction on top of it, I'm inclined to make a few calls to learn more...

Nah, it's only the land that appreciates. Buildings don't appreciate in value. (Unless it's some fancy one-of-a-kind work of art.)

It's a common tax dodge to try and make it look like the building appreciates in value.

See http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/G2009-Hidden_Taxabl...

Wood and concrete are perfectly valid for low rise construction. It isn't exactly "cheap" but reasonable. In fact, wood is much better than concrete in handling earth quakes.

If it wasn't for earth quakes, you can get up to about 30 or so floors with concrete, which is the standard in China (a bit overbuilt on wall/floor thickness, but quality is less than the states). Anything higher, you should go with steel, and anyways, I'm guessing steel is standard for high rise construction in earth quake prone areas, right? The biggest problem with steel is that the skills needed to work it are much greater, so you can't just through surplus farmer labor at it (which is why China doesn't use it very often).

Interesting corollary: the upper floors sell for far more than lower floors. My understanding is that often upper floor tenants will subsidize the lower floor tenants - the lower floors exist in order for the upper floors to be high.

Boosting housing by building vertically is virtually unlimited.

The trickier part is supplying the added people with water, electricity, gas, food, and other supplies without augmenting infrastructure (which is failing left and right as it is) and convincing them to never travel out of or into the city using its already-at-capacity freeways and rail.

Impact fees can help solve this @ 40+k per apartment it adds up fast. However, rent controls + property tax limits are the real issue.

Would available living spaces in downtown areas reduce congestion in some way? I could see it going both ways.

For the last part, having mixed-zone development is essential.

Put housing above supermarkets! Offices inside apartment complexes! Make it easy for people to walk around.

I think that people don't need convincing not to use their cars... it's more that the space needs to be built in a way to where cars are not necessary.

Like Tokyo?

Or for a more American example. Denver has been doing a good job with their new construction over the last few years. While I haven't looked into actual codes, the majority of new buildings I've seen have work/live offices or full-on commercial zoning on floor 1 and dense luxury apartments on 2~20;

Denver is also investing quite heavily into public transit, specifically they've been working on a fairly impressive light-rail system. [1]

At the end of the day, it's simple density that allows me to live inside the city and bike 15 minutes to work. City life isn't perfect for everyone but it does offer some great benefits if we go dense.

[1] http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/se_68

It's a sad commentary on the state of public transit in the USA that a system which (using its most optimistic projections) hopes to achieve a 21% farebox return by 2021[0] is "fairly impressive"... or, if you count capital expenditures (like the private sector has to), less than 5% (meaning 95% subsidized). But that's a hell of a lot better than VTA here in Silicon Valley.

[0] http://www.rtd-denver.com/documents/financialreports/strateg...

Sure, that's the ideal and gradually becoming more common. (Heck, the Two Worlds development in Mountain View -- ground-level retail with residences above -- dates to the 1980s.)

But again, the trick is figuring out a way to force people to only take jobs within their building and/or move to the building where their job is (and move both when either changes). It just doesn't work that way in the Real World.

but empirically it works in many other cities in the Real World. Something something Europe Japan.

I stated this but if you ask most people whether they'd want their office to be moved close to their house, I imagine most people would want their office to be close by. And people are willing to pay a premium for this.

Even if they don't take jobs in their building, at the very least this will cause other people in nearby residential zones to be closer to other jobs. Of course people will still use cars (and traffic will probably suck! But that's what you get for driving). But you'll reduce how much people need to drive.

Infrastructure for dense cities is doable (and cheaper per-capita). Just do whatever other dense cities do. Look at Singapore for inspiration.

Obligatory reminder: If you care about housing in the Bay Area, register to vote now. Scott Wiener is a housing and transportation advocate running for State Senate in this election.

http://registertovote.ca.gov/

Show up to Planning Commission and Board of Supervisor meetings. Participate in public comment. We all talk about how NIMBYs rule SF, it's because they show up in full force at these gatherings.

the SF Planning Commission holds their public meetings on Thursdays at Noon. They don't want people to come

More the unemployed and retired.

The retired. Most boomers have most of their savings in real estate.

I'm not sure if it's too late but consider registering as a Democrat so you can vote on the DCCC appointments since the DCCC endorsements have a fair amount of sway in elections. See: http://www.sfyimby.org/slate/

Though feel free to vote as you wish.

Out of curiosity, is there a way for a non-citizen to vote?

I see the logic of requiring you to be a citizen, but it does nevertheless feel a little unfair -- I live here too, and I pay my taxes like everyone else.

Apparently it depends on the state (within the United States). For California, it appears that Citizenship is required. Some states seem to have substantially lower requirements.

Scott Wiener seems to be a big part of the problem in terms of increasing the regulatory burden on new development. Have I missed something in his actual record that indicates he is removing restrictions on new housing development?

Wiener is really good on housing, much better than the Peskin group of Supes. Read his post when he came out against the Mission Moratorium to get a sense of his housing views:

http://www.scottwiener.com/more_affordable_housing_not_a_hou...

Alternatively, read his post on Medium titled, "Yes, Supply & Demand Apply to Housing, Even in San Francisco":

https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/yes-supply-demand-apply-to-...

> These trends are exactly why the supply-and-demand deniers pose such a significant challenge to actually fixing our housing problem. As we work hard to try to produce new housing — through market-produced housing, below-market-rate housing, new types of housing such as co-housing and micro-units, and more flexibility toward in-law units — we have a vocal and influential set of advocates pronouncing that we shouldn’t even bother to build market-produced housing, since, according to them, doing so won’t lower housing costs and may even raise housing costs. This argument, to the extent it succeeds, not only reduces the amount of housing produced in San Francisco but actually slows the production of below-market-rate housing, since market-produced housing, through our inclusionary housing program, is the most significant source of new affordable units coming online.

As I said, these essays propose and defend additional restrictions on building new housing. His restrictions are slightly less sinister than moratoriums, and come in the form of affordable housing requirements. He is still adding regulatory burden to the legal code, just slightly less burden than some of his peers have proposed.

I'd also like to point out that Wiener strongly advocated solar panel and beautification requirements for new construction. Requiring solar panels on homes is a great way to pat yourself on the back, but not a great way to generate electricity. Let's build solar power plants, not require every new apartment to cover it's roof in panels regardless of the economic sensibility of doing so.

It's politics. You can't survive here politically proposing as-of-right building permits and across the board upzoning. But you can move the needle in the right direction.

Gentrification step 13: vote out the pre-existing population's preferred politicians and install new "free market" policies (since the "free market" works in favor of the people with the money the new policies will benefit the richer new comers).

Building is the one variable of the three he cites that is reasonable to encourage IMO. But the pre-existing population here has demonstrated a clear disdain for building. So who is really to blame then for the inflation and displacement and thereby the gentrification?

What's wrong with gentrification?

Answering a question, why the decline in rents 1950-1960? Far as I know during WWII the population of the city swelled due to war time industry. After the war people moved to newly created suburbs in Santa Clara and the Peninsula.

I'm unsure but I think my grandparents moved to SF during the 1939-1940 WWII preseason. And by the late forties had moved away.

He mentioned he didn't have good data for housing advertisements during that time frame, so one possibility is that during the boom lots of people started advertising rooms for rent instead of entire houses or apartments.

People were leaving!

In 1950 the population of SF peaked (at the time) at 775,000, by 1960 it was down to 740,000, then by 1980 down to 678,000 (13% drop over 30 years!).

Hard to believe it living in SF today.

Reminds me of "Will the last person leaving SEATTLE -- Turn out the lights" in 1971, http://www.historylink.org/db_images/req094.JPG, during a Boeing bust in Seattle. How times have changed.

Herb Caens books on San Francisco are good read. Some reference here. A lot of the issues facing the city haven't changed as much as people think.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/place/article/Problems-He...

It's not hard to believe at all. White flight to suburbs after the war is a pretty well known phenomenon that happened in every major city in the US.

SF should work on rezoning some hub areas higher density, and build (lots of) unit blocks. For comparison, I live in a suburb that has had the zoning rules changed to allow for transit-oriented development. Houses are being moved out and being replaced by 5 story apartment blocks. I live in one of those, a 3 minute walk from a busway station.

There will probably be 50000 units built in my the city in the near future. However, Brisbane, Australia has twice the population of SF, and a possibly irrational building boom happening though:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-27/brisbane-to-see-50,000...

New housing doesn't even need to be right in San Francisco. Anywhere along the Peninsula, even Oakland would be good enough, as long as it's close enough to public transportation.

To a lot of people though, it does. And public transit is already stretched thin with a lot of problems. A second Transbay Tube is being discussed so you're not looking at anything soon.

Using a logarithmic scale seems kinda silly. It really detracts from my innate visual ability to understand the topic.

Inflation is exponential. It removes all the contrast in the the historical data, and trends are more difficult to spot if a linear scale is used on exponential data.

Supply and demand.

Demand is higher than supply.

Everyone in SF knows that and actually seems to not want to increase the supply.

Strike that, they want the property tax revenue but only from huge, high-brow luxury apartment build-outs. The City has no problem letting the supply at the high end of the market increase.

By stopping any growth in the supply of nominally affordable rentals, the City leadership is pushing people of limited means outside of the city.

Let's see then if the City's limitations to increasing Supply makes sense:

1) low-income people -- like it or not, the vast majority of crime is committed by this group -- are pushed out of the city. That reduces crime. Check, makes sense from the City leadership perspective.

2) Rent control fools the city's renters into voting for more of the same. Landlords cannot profit; take affordable units off the market. Again, the low income types are pushed out of the city. Check. (see #1)

3) Also, by putting these mom-and-pop landlords out of business, rent control eliminates a COMPETITOR for the Luxury Apartment developers -- if there are no low-cost apartments to rent, people have no choice but to pay up or get out. Rent control also pushes up rents at the low end as those units go offline/out of business/converted to condos/etc., leaving fewer units available for low income folks.

The City is acting in its own best interest to:

- limit supply growth of apartments - put mom and pop landlords with affordable units offline - thus eliminating affordable units and the low socio-economic status people who create most of the crime problems from the city

And all that pushes up rents to benefit high-property-tax-paying Luxury apartment developers.

The City needs as much property tax revenue as they can get.

"How do we attract luxury apartment developers to boost the City's property tax haul?

- eliminate the low-priced competitors -- and even get the voters to approve it -- by imposing rent control

- reduce crime so Luxury apartment developers will feel they can attract high-dollar customers

- reduce/eliminate the creation of new affordable housing

SF wants property tax revenue. If you understand the above, you know everything.

It's not like the City leaders are going to announce their strategy to voters. Too many low-income/moderate-income renters here in SF.

But you can see the effects: - high rents due to the gradual elimination of mom-and-pop low rent units (they go out of business or convert to condos) - no more low-end Supply allowed to be created - rent control is here to stay (at least until all the low-priced apartments are gone)

Url changed from https://medium.com/@andersem/a-guy-just-transcribed-30-years..., which points to this.

Yeah. Keeping it classy with a tiny grey link at the bottom of the Medium article.

I really dislike this trend of "oh we totally credit our sources here is a tiny link at the bottom of the article, never mind that it isn't underlined like all the rest of our links and it is in the same color and font as the word 'Advertisement' just below."

The source should be clearly defined and easily accessible, especially with these just-rewriting-the-source articles. (Glaring at you, Gizmodo and TechCrunch.)

Agreed in general, but the Medium author seems genuinely enthusiastic about the OP, so it was probably just an oversight. (Edit: and the phrase where he introduces the source article does link to it.)

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