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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
This is especially important in the urban core of cities where greenery can be scarce, and mature trees even more so.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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...
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).
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...
data: http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/m... then click the wavy graph next to "explore this area" sales price / sqft
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.
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))
[1] https://westnorth.com/2015/04/27/high-rises-land-efficient-b...
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.
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."
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...
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.
Love that analogy!
http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/G2009-Hidden_Taxabl...
The price of Lamborghinis doesn't have much to do with the price of Kias.
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.
No part of this market in any way resembles the market for Lamborghinis and Kias.
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?
(I lived in Bayview for a bit, and I was hardly the only tech person I knew who lived there.)
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.
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.
Look up filtering down. As houses age, they become less luxurious.
See http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/
...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.
"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. "
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.
And in terms of the stunning beauty of its geographic surroundings -- precisely none of them.
On balance there's basically no contest.
http://www.deeproot.com/blog/blog-entries/tree-cover-how-doe...
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...
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.
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 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.
San Jose has a beauty reminiscent of Houston, Texas or Melbourne, Australia.