Comment by zachware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zachware | Hacker News Reader

I've developed several multifamily projects including my current focus, a 72-unit apartment development.

Proposals like these, while admirable, usually miss the mark and have little to no impact on housing availability because they fail to accept that housing development isn't just about zoning.

Impact fees, planning regs (traffic, parking, etc), planning delays, NIMBY fights, labor costs...these are all inputs into the question of whether a multifamily development makes economic sense for a developer.

There is a formula under which you can build market-rate and/or affordable housing (sometimes the same) and when that formula checks out, you see lots of development.

All of that has to work out to a cost per door and that cost has to be recouped in rents that pay for opex and debt. The fourplex in the article would cost $562,500/door. A very basic calc of the necessary rents would be $4,950.

California, particularly San Francisco, has pressures at every step of that formula. So if the Bay Area wants more housing, it has to be willing to look at the problem holistically.

  - What role do planning review delays play in increasing the costs and perceived risk of acquiring a parcel and going through the process?
  - What % of potential building sites are classified as historical properties?
  - What are the parking, traffic impact and roadway requirements that multifamily traffic counts will have to mitigate/build for?
  - What power do unions have to dictate building programs?
  - Who can object to proposals?

I'm not suggesting that everything has to be Texas-style free markets, but to solve the problem one has to be willing to admit that it may require something a bit more comprehensive that simply changing zoning.

Currently about 3/4 of the land area of San Francisco is zoned to only allow single-family houses or duplexes. All of the pale yellow areas in https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02... (RH-1 and RH-2 zones).

Most of that area is not classified as historical, and a lot of it is filled with relatively cheaply constructed and not particularly beautiful buildings (property values have increased a lot in the past few decades). The residential streets in most of that area are way wider than currently necessary and there is a lot of free or cheap street parking everywhere, but some arterial roads are a bottleneck during commute hours and public transit is inadequate. The zoning is basically “sleepy low-density beach town” rather than “cosmopolitan city”.

Changing the zoning of most of those areas to the purple (NCT) or medium orange (RM, RC, RTO) types is not the only change needed, and it won’t make a difference overnight, but it would eventually allow something like doubling the population of the city without requiring anything taller or larger than 4–10-unit low-rise buildings. It would probably also force the city to make a bunch of public transit upgrades, as the whole western half of the city is currently pretty isolated from the more connected eastern half.

The zoning isn't everything, but it's definitely one of the things that has to change. If everywhere in California had Sacramento's ministerial housing ordinance (60-90 day approvals, everything as of right), AND zoning reform, AND major reduction in impact fees, you'd start to make a dent in the problem.

Rezoning is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Sure, single-family zoning is a necessary but not sufficient development for housing reform. Can't have density with it, but doesn't mean there isn't a laundry list of other things wrong with housing in the bay

Why not free markets though? Why is this concept so dirty?

The idea housing is so expensive is just ridiculous. There should theoretically be no arbitrage between renting and owning. The market is so distorted though that the idea is a joke.

If there is something that free markets would do a very good job at solving it is this problem. If we don't believe in that at least we are really in trouble.

The really sad thing is this is just crushing poor people with rents. No one would be helped more by free markets in real estate than poor people.

Hopefully this is exactly what you're asking for. one of a series of changes.

The bigger the change in a single effort, the faster it often dies. This one is already fairly large and what happens to rent will be important in the short term but also the long term where you could build enough to keep things stable or growing slower.

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