This article specifically addresses buildings that are only illegal because of zoning. They aren’t including buildings that are unsafe due to building regulations like firecodes, ADA, etc.
After that, all you have to deal with are the NIMBYs. Le sigh.
[1] - https://books.google.com/books?id=GiAa8pLrSTIC&lpg=PA45&lr&p...
20%? Maybe in a few pockets. 60%? Never seen it. Even the crummy parts of Daly City the homes are $1M now.
Daly City fits, since $1M is 77% of $1.3M -- not that I'd particularly like living in Daly City, but it is 23% less than buying in SF.
San Mateo median price is the same as SF, so, obviously, you don't look there for home bargains.
Seriously, just troll Redfin or Realtor.com sometime.
Edit: my bad re: 60%. I should be looking at $520k homes. There are definitely places in worthwhile neighborhoods in that range in Richmond. I've seen them. But, if you revise that number down to 40%, a lot of stuff opens up. So, 20-40% is a better range than 20-60%.
Imagine cities both 20 times the size of SF, and being one fifth vacant.
They do it because it's the best way to invest their savings, so new apartments are usually spoken for before they're even built and often unoccupied until they're sold again.
Housing in the US doesn't have nearly the same speculative force behind it.
Still, the fact stands as mindboggling as it is — China has few Californias of empty housing, and a ridiculous housing price runaway at the same time.
(Similarly, I wonder how many are off market because it’s so difficult to evict problem tenants.)
Edit: Actually 44% to be precise.
San Francisco can build more housing to accommodate a higher population or let its poorest citizens get priced out. Either way people will not stop coming.
At best we might see a slight cooling in the rise in already absurd prices for property out here.
[0] The 2008 recovery happened within 3 quarters...
How do you think zoning laws came into place?
Though, some of the more famous court cases that later secured broad zoning powers evinced mixed motivations clearly implicating class tensions.
I once took a Land Use seminar in law school. My professor, as well as numerous authors on the subject, always seemed incredulous and even cynical about professed concerns w/ tuberculosis and similar health concerns. But over the years since I've lost count the number of times I've come across non-legal historical writing directly or indirectly reflecting fears about tuberculosis, the prevalence of miasma theory, etc, so I no longer second guess the earnestness of those early regulations and court cases.
The powerful will always coopt laws and institutions to their advantage. That's almost the definition of power--the capability to do that. It's unavoidable. That dynamic doesn't by itself negate, post hoc, the original legitimacy of those laws and institutions. Of course, earnestness alone doesn't justify them at inception, either.
Those people have no voting rights in the City.
How can someone say with a straight face that it's unjust people who don't live in a jurisdiction have no say in how it's run?
AFAICT, no one said it was unjust that nonresidents don’t vote in city elections. It was raised as a reason the policy was unlikely to be changed at the city level, because the people adversely effected aren’t voters in the city.
The arguments generally given are to show that we're preventing building for density, pointing out NIMBYism, etc, but even if we were doing the polar opposite, the same would be true:
If you have a town that's all single family, and zoning rules pass that any and all buildings MUST be 3+ stories, then all the existing houses wouldn't be allowed under current zoning laws. The fact that they're not allowed under current zoning rules is irrelevant. The question is only if the new zoning rules are good for what you want to see or not.
In contrast, SFH-only zoning is exclusionary.
But my point is saying "X amount of homes would be illegal to build" is completely pointless and just meant to rile people up. OF COURSE most buildings are illegal to build today. We don't build like we use to for a variety of reasons. Even if you forget about building code, there's also rules around minimum amount of affordable units that older buildings didn't need to follow. Zoning is a specific one and yes, it's often problematic and regressive. Let's focus on that.
Where are we taking this conversation now? Yes, it would be impossible to use the same physical piece of lumber in two houses at the same time.