This is a problem all across the nation. Everyone wants a single family home, so this leads to two things: outrageously high costs of homes, or people moving out to the suburbs and thus worsening the rush hour traffic and smog issue.
The people that have owned for the past 30-50 years, are completely unwilling to give up on their single family homes, gardens, etc. They basically demand to live a nice and cushy suburban life, in the middle of a big city.
It then takes forever to build vertically, because for every projects that's proposed, there are hundreds, of not thousands of protests from neighbors that'll lose some sunlight, depreciation of property value, and what not - or they just don't like the modern architecture. So it can take YEARS to just get the first shovel in ground, because these projects go through so many rounds in city councils and what not.
That's how you end up with extremely partisan / one-sided city councils, consisting of established home/land owners, that will fight tooth and nail to impose draconian zoning laws, and general NIMBY-politics.
I think that expecting people to "give up their homes" is more than unreasonable. The reasonable compromise being that builders can build in more densely once the current owners sell it.
Kids move out of the house, parents retire at 65 and live to 85+. That's 20 years, a whole generation.
If the developer can get permission to build 3-5 story apartments on the lot
But if the whole block gets rezoned, then there's a race to the bottom.
The higher taxes could effectively force a land owner to sell their property.
Often part of what existing land owners are fighting for is preferential zoning which artificially keeps the "highest and best use of land" a low density detached house, which keeps land values relatively low.
Well, lady, if you wanted the view, you should have bought my lot.
In an existing city, the cost to purchase land and buildings that would need to demolished, rezoned, and rebuilt as a higher density area with accompanying infrastructure is astronomical and wouldn’t be possibly by anyone other than the federal government only because they can print money. And politically, that effort would be dead on arrival.
The biggest issue with residental construction today is approval process and the amount of land that can be utilized.
An unreliable approval process means increased investment risk which keeps away investors.
Setbacks and parking space requirements significantly impact the amount of usable living space per acre of land.
Both of the above can be addressed by local municipalities. High density dwellings are going up all around in the rest of the US.
Granted, ADA and other upgrades in quality of life are nowhere near the big problem of the cost of reducing lot and block sizes retroactively. The design for cities made for cars and for pedestrians are fundamentally opposed, and cannot coexist.
If I got rid of my oversized two-car garage, I could recover maybe 400 square feet. Without a driveway, another house of the same exact size could be placed on the same lot.
Cars are antithetical to density. Discouraging their use will greatly improve city density, while also having environmental benefits.
This happens all the time in NYC, though. Anywhere from a several-story small/medium apartment building to a large skyscraper.
I think the limiting factor is much more likely to be air rights and zoning than safety standards.
This should intrinsically make sense. Private developers don't have to build and there's other ways for them to invest their money.
Now if the developer was a public entity with a mandate that they had to build now that would be different.
> surely you wouldn’t “knock down”
I suppose that’s up to the owner. Though the question is about no longer making it illegal for owners to do so.
But folks who want to live in a single family home in the middle of san francisco can still do so. Just don’t sell the house.
The problem has solved itself already - the US is big and empty. There is little reason to stack people twenty stories high in a Zoom economy. So much talk here of policy changes, LVT etc etc...just freaking move!! That's a very trite response but it also is the best one. If anything, the pandemic has taken a wrecking ball to the entire thesis of New Urbanism and dense development...many Bay Area residents have already figured it out, don't be the last to get the memo.