San Francisco is one of CA’s most conservative cities when it comes to housing
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
And the issue is rents of all types.
I walked by an old favorite restaurant of mine which now has a for lease sign in the window.
It seems the rents in SF act as a filter only allowing longevity for certain types of restaurants:
- ones that use cheap terrible ingredients and production habits with high prices
- megacorp food franchises
Both underpay employees.
It feels like gone are the days of a person passionate about some culinary niche or ensuring their workers get a livable wage following through on that passion and filling the city with new and interesting food options.
The story of the restaurant I mentioned earlier already endured the rents of 5-10 years ago by starting as a tiny place, like a coat locker at a hotel, that sat 6 but churned out quality food and soon become as known for their excellent food as their infamous waits.
They were able, in a few years, to upgrade to a bigger space but now they’re gone.
I’m doubtful even their original success story could happen in the same city now.
[1] Without evidence that outdoor spread is a meaningful risk at all, I’ll add
SF is like a foodie Frankenstein. Lots of options from around the world, none of them crafted perfectly.
No, that's Tokyo.
San Francisco is okay because of its access to high end seafood but no where near its costs based on a multitude of criteria if you've been (let alone cooked) outside the US, but its far from mediocre as many are portraying it here.
Granted, I think guys like Patterson in SF were doing interesting work aesthetically, but as a chef/cook I'm more inclined to say the East bay had more exciting and appealing stuff going on culinary speaking before COVID than SF has had in the last decade. People were taking more risks, then just banking on selling the same offerings year after year.
Just because a place is fully booked and selling mediocre entries and upselling bottles of wine to yuppies and silicon valley's mid-tier earners pretending to be nouveau riche doesn't mean its exciting to someone who actually has an eye for these things professionally speaking.
Also, most chefs will tell you Michelin guide stars, especially those that earned them before the mid 80s, are the equivalent of gloried yelp ratings for how front of house made them feel that day. It's well known that the people that visit the restaurants for reviews do not have a background in culinary arts, beyond writing articles or going on TV, despite being well paid 'food critics.'
Very few have ever worked a service in their life, and even less have any idea of what is involved in pairing and matching flavours in a balanced way, what most see is: nice decour + professional staff + pretty plate of food + some exclusivity = Star.
In fact, for the last part of the decade many of chefs/cooks sought to create a different platform (Repsol's Sun guide had actual chefs on staff) to advertise their restaurant but this is mainly just marketing, and COVID really messed things up so may be entirely irrelevant soon, and to be honest I'd like to see a US based one with actual chefs (mix of active and retired with multiple unannounced visits) to gauge things that food critics can easily overlook. Most French cooking is sauce based because it tended to use mediocre cuts of meat in France, these were words straight from Paul Bocuse, the Godfather of modern French cuisine and would be well understood by most cooks, even those like myself that find French cuisine entirely blase.
So much of the reputation it gets is clearly an over emphasis on its French roots in France, rather than taking a local understanding of seasonal offerings to match the local palette, which in the US is very meat/protein based. So, while a Bouillabaisse has no place in a place like landlocked Idaho, but a place offering it could do really well amongst the locals and thus should be judged on its own merit, rather than what someone who just came back from weekending in Marseilles has to say on the matter.
Personally speaking, I've eaten enough oysters, and blue fin tuna from all over the World for a lifetime by the time I was in my 30s, so these places don't impress me much anymore as my pallet has grown weary from small variations of high end/expensive proteins and its predictable executions; so, to me a place like Pho 79 in N. Orange County that got a James Beard award (I had no idea until I got there) despite having ABYSMAL front of house service but literately the best broth and ox tail I've ever had was really pleasant.
To me it was well deserved as they even had the little chairs outside, like in Vietnam, in the Winter when I went last year. It was charming, and the cramped small parking lot and long line gave me pause as I knew it had all the hallmarks of what walking into a well kept secret amongst many locals looked like.
Upon what evidence do you base this assertion? My feeling is that closing indoor dining may have been a good idea, but closing outdoor dining and telling people they couldn't meet their friends (distanced) in public likely just caused people to have unsafe indoor gatherings in their homes, which is worse.
I of course have no hard evidence for this either, but outdoor dining was open for months before the holiday surge without a significant uptick in case rates. That would imply that the surge was driven by the holidays, with people traveling when they shouldn't, and hosting people outside their household for holiday dinners. Neither of those things has anything to do with outdoor dining.
But Newsom had to be seen to be "doing something", so here we are.
> But it should have come with a complete shut down of rent obligations as well.
I'm sympathetic to this idea, but landlords need to eat, too.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bi...
Also, ya know, covid shut downs.
They will be relegated to food trucks. Although this sounds like an issue with expensive cities in general.
edit: And it also comes into conflict with political progressives for essentially not being progressive enough, since it allows for new housing to be built that some people are still priced out of. So I think the angle that they're trying to hand-wave zoning deregulation as being "good" by using the word "progressive" is doubly misguided.
Removing zoning is a (classical) liberal move.
In particular “residential” zoning was because Chinese were known for running businesses like laundries out of their homes.
However, the left wing boomers currently running cities came up in the 60s when opposing construction like freeways and urban renewal was the activist thing to do, since they intentionally placed the freeways to tear down black neighborhoods.
Well, like I said, upzoning is still not super popular with progressives as in American progressives, because of the leftist crossover and social justice angle there. But I still think it’s correct to describe it as progressive in the context of contemporary urbanism.
We just have to accept that these terms are overloaded and make sure we agree on what we’re talking about. “Conservative” has the exact same problem—there’s what the encyclopedia says it is, and what American conservatives say it is, and what American conservatives actually do (not such big fans of small government after all, I think).
The conservative movement never really had much to say about housing policy as far as I can tell. Classical liberals on the other hand, have been consistently anti-regulation.
Why doesn’t it make sense? Political progressives and older land-owning (relative) conservatives have different reasons for opposing upzoning, but they clearly do agree in their opposition to it.
Beyond that, I specifically called out that these terms are overloaded and I’m trying to be relatively explicit about what I mean when I use them. I’m not interested in arguing for positions I never took, e.g. that “the conservative movement never really had much to say about housing policy”. I’m not talking about any movement—I’m talking about people who are, fundamentally, conservative. They may be granola-chomping, Smartwool-and-Birkenstock-wearing, Prius-driving, ex-hippie boomers who’ve never voted GOP in their lives, but if they own land and oppose upzoning because they don’t want their single family home neighborhoods to change, then they are, in a sense (to be clear, the same sense I’ve been talking about this whole time), conservative.
I am simply using these words because they mean what they mean, and not trying to make some broader “encoded” point about politics or whatever else. If you choose to ignore the intended meaning of my comments (which I have more or less spelled out for you at this point, no contextual awareness required), that’s not my problem, and I’m not going to follow you down that rabbit hole.
edit: If there is one political point I am sort of getting at, it’s probably the hypocrisy of older self-identified “liberals” who oppose densification/upzoning. Viewed through either a classical liberal or a left-liberal lens, using regulation to block affordable housing is not good, yet a lot of these people support it because they’re the beneficiaries of the status quo. And that, in a sense, is the attitude at the core of practical conservatism.
Of course, this assumes that we're talking about the usual political definitions of "conservative" vs "liberal", which more or less correspond to "right" and "left". If we're talking about "conservative" meaning "wants to status quo", then it gets really useless because the alternative is "wants to keep changing things", which isn't a political archetype that exists in reality.
Prohibiting development was originally a progressive position because redevelopment policies were being used to displace poor and brown communities. Now people want to keep those prohibitions in place because they function as a way to keep neighborhoods exclusive and generally keep things the way they are. So defending them has become a conservative position.
> the alternative is "wants to keep changing things", which isn't a political archetype that exists in reality.
Progressive is about progress and "wants to keep changing" is the whole point. From voting rights to civil rights to economic opportunity, being progressive means demanding change. The American republic is 245 years old and still has a long way to go to live up to its ideals.
This is quite amusing to watch. This kind of deregulation is now sold on the hand-wavey idea that it solves housing affordability (with incredibly limited evidence), and the unspoken premise is that government is too incompetent and the invisible hand of the free market is uniquely qualified to solve the problem.
"Rent control doesn't fully solve the problem, so just let the market solve it instead!" is about as libertarian a position as one could possibly espouse, yet it's got a shiny coat of paint as the "YIMBY" movement. Now, if you push back with a suggestion that some combination of government initiated interventions might be more effective than just letting capital do whatever the hell it wants, you're just a conservative NIMBY who wants to keep the poors away out of their own self interest.
Generally “conservative” means maintaining the status quo. You could see how “progressive” might be the opposite if that. It’s interesting when you apply the older “liberal” label which would mean generally permissive. Obviously that label makes no sense whatsoever when describing San Francisco. In this case it sounds like they are describing entrenched interests as conservative because they want to conserve the current state of affairs. They are opposed to progress. Therefore the people opposite them must be progressive.
There are practical steps we can take, today, to incentivize building more housing, such as:
Eliminating parking minimums: use the building's space for people, not cars.
Tax land on its ability to house. It should be a tax advantage to build houses over building a surface parking lot.
Build and maintain low rise, distributed public housing. Ensure operational costs are covered, not just capital costs. Low rises are easier to maintain than big projects.
Rent control -- I know this is polarizing, but I believe housing shouldn't be a constant upward pricing until you reach the limits of what the market will bear. People need live somewhere, and if we continue to turn the screws on rent, they'll have less to spend elsewhere.
There are other things we could do today too, like strengthen tenants unions, improve tenant protection laws, enact right of first refusal laws that require landlords to sell to the current tenants first, and more.
I know folks might disagree with me, and that's ok. I'd ask that you bring some good faith discussion rather than just downvoting and moving on.
(In case it is relevant, I am a home owner in a hot real estate market.)
When a city/county/region allows new office construction there's an obligation to allow new residential construction to house all those new workers. San Francisco and other bay area municipalities have spent the last 30 years avoiding that responsibility.
Yes, this means some policies will be working at cross purposes, but different people in our society will be impacted differently by those policies. (E.g. there are some folks for whom rent control means being able to live in their community at all). So it might be best to not try to chart the most efficient course from the outside, and instead accept some inefficiencies if it means making positive moves now.
How do you keep people in their homes?
How do you get everyone into a home?
Tearing down existing housing to redevelop into high rise apartments similarly only solves one of the two
I'm happy to discuss more, in depth, but just dismissing the idea out of hand with "you might as well jump off a building" doesn't raise any substantive objections to further a discussion.
Rent control for instance causes a decrease in the supply of housing. People in Stockholm are on 12 year waiting lists for apartments because rent control has reduced the amount of housing available. Simply telling people it's not a commodity will not make it cease to function like one.
SF rent control currently allows landlords to raise rent by 5-10% per year (depending on how large the yearly cost-of-living increase is), and can also raise rent somewhat for capital improvements[0]. To offset the above change, maybe we could bump that a little bit... but honestly 10% a year seems like a lot already; if you look at the other side of the equation, most renters are probably not getting a 10% raise each year, and a lot probably aren't even getting 5%. Does a landlord's costs really increase by 5-10% a year? I'd be surprised if so.
We also need a vacancy tax. Landlords should not be allowed to keep units vacant when doing so makes more financial sense than leasing it.
[0] Because I had to look it up myself: https://sftu.org/rent-control/
Here's from the last 10 years in SF:
https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20All...
Effective Period Amount of Increase
March 1, 2020 – February 28, 2021 1.8%
March 1, 2019 – February 29, 2020 2.6%
March 1, 2018 – February 28, 2019 1.6%
March 1, 2017 – February 28, 2018 2.2%
March 1, 2016 – February 28, 2017 1.6%
March 1, 2015 – February 29, 2016 1.9%
March 1, 2014 – February 28, 2015 1.0%
March 1, 2013 – February 28, 2014 1.9%
March 1, 2012 – February 28, 2013 1.9%
March 1, 2011 – February 29, 2012 0.5%
March 1, 2010 – February 28, 2011 0.1%Edit: The tech workers that I knew very much so cared about not allowing high density housing to keep their house prices inflated.
That's not really problem. The people needing toilets aren't particularly worried about using one. The root of the problem is sending a message that it won't be enforced, so people literally have no reason not to do it.
Amazingly enough, I think last year or the year before, SF announced they wouldn't enforce "quality of life" crimes, which include outside urination and defecation. Naturally this will be noticed by those doing it, and eventually it allows people outside to gather in large groups because they don't have to worry about how to relieve themselves.
Finding a toilet isn't impossible, but it does require holding yourself until you do find one. For people with no home, this is extra work, but we should all agree is extra work they should be forced to do, instead of treating them like animals with no agency of their own, and pretending somehow the problem doesn't include their decisions and the authorities' incentives.
I think if someone has a 'constant and grinding' exposure to homelessness, like they work near 5th and Market, it can actually have an aggravating affect emotionally.
Expensive housing however, is probably not a root cause of homelessness, because there is absolutely cheap housing all over California and the West coast.
We can argue about 'cost' but I don't think anyone would say that homeless people have some kind of 'right' to live in SF.
If we could feasibly provide more effective housing and services but it happened to be in Modesto or Sacramento than that would be perfectly reasonable.
First - SF was not 'tech' until the mid 2000's.
Some people - yes. But no HQs.
The Silicon Vally was where it was at.
Also - up until the 1990's at least, the Valley was just a burb, mostly affordable, not outrageous except in some little spots.
In the 2000's it started to get weird and 2010+ is when it got 'bad bad' and SF became a true hub.
In the 1990's regular folk could buy homes, Engineers could buy normal homes on normal terms. Large swaths of SF ware garbage.
It doesn't have trouble meeting basic needs despite of the wealth, but because of it.
Henry George observed this fact (that as cities get wealthier, poverty also increases) way back in the late 1800s, and in SF, funnily enough. This is what his book Progress and Poverty [0] covers, and the title is a reference to this phenomenon.
The TL;DR is that as locations get better and progress, much of this wealth gets captured by landowners, because they have an ownership over a monopoly; the supply of land is fixed. This leads to higher land prices and rents, which makes it harder for those on the margins, leading to more poverty. [1]
This problem is worse in SF (and CA as a whole), because Prop 13 restricts how much property tax can be collected, which is the primary way the community as a whole can reclaim the wealth extracted by landowners.
Blaming tech workers for the problems of Silicon Valley seems a little misplaced, given that most longterm homeowners in the Bay Area not tech workers, and they (longterm homeowners) are the ones who benefit the most from Prop 13, and ever increasing housing costs.
The problem in the Bay Area are the landed gentry.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty
[1]: A good snippet from the Wikipedia article:
> George saw how technological and social advances (including education and public services) increased the value of land (natural resources, urban locations, etc.) and, thus, the amount of wealth that can be demanded by the owners of land from those who need the use of land. In other words: the better the public services, the higher the rent is (as more people value that land). The tendency of speculators to increase the price of land faster than wealth can be produced to pay has the result of lowering the amount of wealth left over for labor to claim in wages, and finally leads to the collapse of enterprises at the margin, with a ripple effect that becomes a serious business depression entailing widespread unemployment, foreclosures, etc.
Also, the game Monopoly was invented to demonstrate his philosophy, and it’s why it’s not fun with the default rules. It’s supposed to make you feel bad.
Link to the original game:
I think development should be guided by a regional plan.
At this point, we know that suburban development is reaching it's end of and many people want to live in dense, culturally diverse cities. The problem is that developers, left to themselves, only build super-high units and the sum-total of those won't meet needs. The solution requiring high density in development. Essentially, impose "vancouverism".
Most SF home owners are conservatives at heart who just happen to vote Democrat in national elections.
On average, America has very affordable housing.
The only 'crisis' is that there are a lot of people that want to life in SF. But that's not really a 'crisis'.
If the residents of an area do not want to turn their city into Hong Kong or Vancouver with 100's of high rises stacked back to back, it's absolutely reasonable for them to do that.
Unlike Hong Kong, California is massive and there's plenty of space.
There's vast land available for fairly dense development around Morgan Hill, Santa Rosa, Sacramento - and that's where people can go if they want to live nearby.
If the jobs in SF don't pay enough for people to live there, then definitely demand more pay, don't take the jobs or leave. The area is nice, but not that nice.
Companies should use the opportunity to spread out a little bit.
This is actually illegal under California law, but is rarely enforced because it requires someone (eg. the state government) to actually sue exclusionary communities in state court to get an enforcement action against them to allow more housing to be built.
Because the state government hasn't been doing this, some organizations have been stepping up - https://www.yimbylaw.org
The people claiming it’s fine or the problem is just “too many vacant units” are going to have to try to explain to the state why their RHNA number should be zero and they’re going to fail.
> If the residents of an area do not want to turn their city into Hong Kong or Vancouver with 100's of high rises stacked back to back, it's absolutely reasonable for them to do that.
Have you seen Paris? Mostly 6-story buildings. Meanwhile SF is mostly single family houses worth over a million dollars each. That’s not the natural order of things! You can do better.
Sprawl and empty land development is not doing better, it means less wildlife, more emissions and more risk of fires.
It's exceedingly arrogant to tell residents of community what the 'natural order of things' should be in their community.
The 'natural order of things' in SF is whatever the residents want it to be.
Also note, the people who need to buy these houses aren’t immigrants, they’re the homeowners’ children. The population of California is decreasing because the younger natives are leaving. Similarly, homeless people here are mostly natives, not shipped in for the good weather.
They're 'extortionists' for wanting to live in their own homes?
Nobody 'needs' to live in SF, and nobody has a right to live there either.
People from outside SF have really no say in the matter.
Oh man, how can you be so naive to not know. 50 houses + 51 residents means prices rise until of them leaves. There is no amount of money you can pay to solve this if you don't build enough housing.
There cannot be more people in SF today than SF can already house.
So there cannot be '51' already for '50' homes (by your 1:1 analogy).
If Google wants more workers, they can open up more offices elsewhere, even somewhat nearby. Like Morgan Hill.
If you get a 52nd, you put them in the garage.
Also imagine the URMs in SOMA, Chinatown, and Tenderloin to be leveled.
At that point the city will need to rebuild for a large homeless population rapidly. High density earthquake resistant architecture will be the natural transition.
You'd think, but after the 1906 earthquake, building codes were actually relaxed because it was taking too long to rebuild the city after it was destroyed, and residents and city government were getting impatient. Would history repeat itself if/when this happens again? Probably?
The US has plenty of the latter (and, in fact, just elected one President). I believe that there's a difference between 'Leftists' and 'Liberals' in the Democrat side of US politics, where the Leftists argue for social democracy and the Liberals argue for unity and a return to civility, coupled with a moderately regulated market economy.
Some additional reading on the topic: https://theconversation.com/the-difference-between-left-and-...
Building dense housing in cities with crises of housing affordability and homelessness does not impede on said liberties, in fact we could reasonably proclaim that laws forcing an oligopoly of land and home owners does infringe on the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, by making the human right to housing unattainable by significant percentages of the population. Therefore, we should consider the elimination of that regulation because it inevitably serves to restrict the supply of housing, policies such as zoning, inequitable taxation on land ownership, and selective rent freezing. These regulations are at odds with the liberties our government serves to guarantee.
A simple and fair solution to the housing crisis is to make the housing markets fair, by treating all renters and homeowners the same, and by restricting their behavior only to the most minimal degree that is necessary to protect their life and liberty. Policies that engender the enrichment of the ownership class and the perpetual underclass at the expense of all others, squeeze the middle class into one or the other category, and mostly to the inferior one.
There's inherent unfairness between the renter and owner; letting the owner kick the renter to the curb on the drop of a hat isn't going to make things better