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Comment by toodlebunions | Hacker News Reader

Can San Francisco just hurry up and build some more high rises already?

We don't need highrises. We could cut the cost of housing in half by increasing the supply by 30% (i.e., around 110,000 units), and we could do that by converting 6% of the city's single-family houses into six-story apartment buildings. The other 94% of the houses could stay the same, and no other plot of land would need to change. No buildings taller than six stories would be necessary.

Sources: http://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employmen... http://spothopping.com/sfhpn.html

The real trick is convincing the families in those 6% single-family homes to move.

You'd have an easier time rezoning old industrial areas into residential, like they did with Mission Bay.

> The real trick is convincing the families in those 6% single-family homes to move.

No way; that would be a piece of cake. The only reason it's not happening now is that zoning law forbids it. If that were changed, homeowners would be falling over themselves to sell their land to apartment developers; it would be a giant windfall for them. In fact, you'd have to charge a steep development fee to reduce that windfall to something modest in order to ensure that only 6% volunteer to do it.

Based on what I've seen, people will fight tooth and nail over any development whatsoever. This is true in any city.

Want to knock down a burned out building full of crack addicts? No way, pal, that's going to make the property taxes go up when house values aren't depressed!

Or people could just stop moving to SF already. Supply and demand works two ways, and it's not like the SF housing shortage is a secret.

But one of these is the market functioning correctly - people moving to places with good jobs. The other is the market being manipulated to serve the interests of a relatively small group of people - restricting housing supply.

No, the market is not functioning correctly. The SF housing situation is making it increasingly expensive to get workers in SF. In a functioning market this would cause businesses to set up elsewhere. This isn't happening, in part because funding is coming from a relatively small, tightly-connected group of SF-centric VCs.

So what do you suggest the companies do that already exist in the area when they need more employees? "Tough shit"? That likely won't work in a free market :)

Finding a place to live there absolutely sucks and I hope someone eventually makes progress towards fixing it but I'm not sure telling people to stop taking good jobs is going to fly.

Employ remote workers.

Open offices in other locations? Move to other locations? Allow remote work? The notion that companies just have to setup shop and maintain a primary presence in SF is ridiculous.

A couple Burj Khalifa clones should do.

Or would that just not work there?

On an active rift zone? That's ambitious.

Safely building giant skyscrapers in earthquake zones is a solved problem. Many of the tallest buildings in the world are in the most seismically-active parts of Asia, and have successfully demonstrated their resilience after being exposed to powerful earthquakes.

It's in no ones best interest to do that, sadly.

I disagree.

- It's in the best interest of the city because it brings more people there and they get more taxes (only X amount of people can live in the city if they're not building anything new).

- It's in the best interest of the existing / new businesses because they gain access to new talent pools and they can, eventually, spend less on them.

It's really only NOT in the best interest of the properly owners who want to milk people for as much money as possible. Honestly the government just seems really corrupt or downright stupid to me. They could make SF into an amazing city but right now it's a bit of an eye sore in many ways.

Cramming even more people into San Francisco will make the traffic bad enough that tech startups will finally start working on flying cars. ;)

No. I like the way SF is and I do not want to have even worse traffic here. If you don't like the prices, there are plenty of other cities to move to.

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