At the same time there's a huge shortage of residential space, where so many more people now work. Clearly mass conversion is necessary. I wonder if the city government can get out of the way of that.
And many developers would happily knock down an office building and rebuild an apartment complex, if only they could get past the red tape.
Why?
For one, the heights of those floors are 10 plus feet. You can easyliy hide the plumbing under the subfloor, and end up with 8 plus unit heights. I didn't know about the window requirement. That could be changed overnight. I would happily pay a few hundred less because of a lack of window.
Many old SF buildings used to be converted to residential apartments.
Now--it's more financially advantageous to demolish the building, and put up residential condos.
(Condos are not rent controlled.)
We need to get rid of the residential condo Rent Control exemption. Most people will never make enough to afford one, even you tech guys.
I worked on many luxury condo projects in SF. As union tradesman, we all knew we could never afford one. They are nice though.
If SF applied Rent Control to Condos, we might see more apartments being built?
(I don't want to get into a debate on Rent Control. It has helped out many dear friends over the years. SF only has so much land to build on before going farther into the bay.)
Windows are emergency fire escapes, which is a big part of why they are required. How much are you willing to pay to live in a literal deathtrap? How many dear friends struggling to afford to live in the city they love should live in deathtraps with poor fire safety? Has the Bay not learned its lesson about fire codes yet?
> If SF applied Rent Control to Condos, we might see more apartments being built?
Can you help me understand why you think extending rent control would increase construction? Maybe step me through the math of it? I genuinely and sincerely do not follow your logic.
To my mind, condos get built in SF because it's possible to come out in the black. Building rent controlled apartments and coming out in the black would seem to be impossible given how high costs are in SF. How would rent controlling condos change this?
Edit: Also, the fact that a non-operable window, or even a window too small for a person to fit through, will usually suffice to meet the bedroom/window requirement gives the lie to this "fire escape" idea.
Edit 2: Correcting myself here, for residences without automatic sprinkler systems, two means of egress (could be a window or doorway to the outside, could be a doorway to another part of house) is a requirement for a bedroom in the International Residential Code. There is a separate requirement for certain levels of light (natural or artificial) that can be satisfied by an inoperable/small window, which is what I was thinking about. In any case, all the commercial buildings in question would have automatic sprinkler systems, these fire escape requirements just wouldn't apply.
> Can you help me understand why you think extending rent control would increase construction?
If SF applied rent control to both condos and rental apartments, it might change the balance so that relatively more rental apartments would be build, and less condos. If the numbers now were 80 (condos) and 20 (rental apartments), the new numbers might be 40 and 40.
If this seems counterintuitive - and it did to me at first - consider that the money being spent to develop that housing has plenty of alternatives. Not all of which are SF housing. SF isn't guaranteed some level of privately-funded construction each year, after all. Trying to shift the mix runs the risk of adjusting the size of the mixture too, exactly as your suggested model does.
> Can you help me understand why you think extending rent control would increase construction? Maybe step me through the math of it?
If rent control just means a maximum rent, and not a maximum increase, it would make builders prioritize maximizing units per building. This means more, although smaller and cheaper, apartments.
Shrinking units is an great thought! That's such a plausible mechanism that SF has gone ahead and done the thing its politics centers on - making building that form of housing difficult too. Parking minimums, density restrictions, and so on all affect the wonderful idea that is micro-apartments. And attempts to cut costs with pre-fab units assembled off-site ran directly into political conflicts as well.
It's impossible to read about the politics of housing in SF without arriving at the understanding that SF just really doesn't want to allow any new housing.
I think it's perfectly fine for SF to say "we want a bunch of single occupancy housing, not high rises". Certainly, that's not great for everyone who wants to move there, but it's perfectly fine for a city to decide they don't want to grow anymore.
And putting minimum restrictions with regard to density and parking is a great idea. If you aren't going to invest in public transit, you need people to have parking spaces. If you want to live in uber-packed urban areas, you can move to NYC instead. There are a lot of options!
As you correctly say, people in rent controlled units have controlled housing cost increases year to year. They do not have controlled costs if they need to move. They do not have controlled costs for food or transportation or any other aspect of their cost of living.
To the extent that rent control drives up market rents as population increases, it definitely helps increase cost of living. To the extent that the politics around rent control help deter new housing supply it helps drive up the cost of living that way too. The effects of rent control on the market - and on the people blessed by rent control - are both well-understood.
San Francisco has made a series of policy choices that result in very high cost of living. There's nothing wrong these choices so long as people are willing to accept the results.
> We need to get rid of the residential condo Rent Control exemption. Most people will never make enough to afford one, even you tech guys.
That's a myth. The price is high because "some" people can afford it. By limiting the price using Rent Control, these "some" people become "lucky first renters" instead of the people who "got the most cash".
Well... in Berlin that was pretty much the case. They wanted rent control for the most expensive parts of Berlin. You know, the places where the richest Berlin residents live in...
Perhaps some should be converted to apartments with some low cost.
I think there is a broader question of how much office space the Bay Area as a whole has/will have empty.
Rather than extending rent control to condos, perhaps removing rent control from apartments would be another valid way to achieve the result of more apartment construction?
As you say, there’s only so much land.
Rent control tells landlords that they should make less of their money from renting out. Just because the government doesn't understand what it is saying doesn't mean it is unfair.
When you have options X,Y,Z and the government says stop X then you stop doing X. The fact that you still do Y and Z isn't a loophole, it's what the government told you to do.
Bonus, if leave the conference room intact, the company can optionally have meetings in person instead of Zoom!
[1] These are known as hacker houses, are completely illegal, and actually exist in San Francisco.
But the natural light is the biggest issue if you ask me. I would never buy an apartment without morning winter sun shining into every main living area. (North here in Australia)
although i guess floor plate size has grown... either way, convert the skinny buildings to residential and use the big floor plates for biotech/coworking/office space.
there's a lot of free square feet and it's easy to shuffle modern offices around.
Indeed, it works well in the way you describe.
SF has way too much commercial space for the amount of residential space it has.
As opposed to many others, I'm fine with residents deciding they don't want to change their city by allowing high density residential... however there's a simple price to pay: no high density commercial.
It is one of those fundamental things which should be mandated statewide, the ratios of commercial to residential should be within bounds for each municipality, and the abundance of some should drive prices crazy low and crazy high in some places so that these disparities tend to correct themselves.
Instead there are policies that seem exclusively tailored to only do the crazy high pricing part.
(and while we're at it, vacancy needs to be taxed to further drive the point home. if you won't lower your prices enough to get occupied, prepare to subsidize those who do)
Half the buildings with empty spaces in SF are likely tied up in CMBSs with terms that state that the value of the building is based on the value its renting units out at, and if they lower the rent they have to recollateralize the loan, but they can just apply missed rent from empty units to the end of the mortgage.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothird...
The free market is about to create the commercial real estate version of the housing crash.
If so it's another correction that is sorely needed. Hopefully this time people are allowed to lose the money they richly deserve to lose.
Rent control, fed policy, etc, lead to certain types of land development being favored.
The bay is chock full of 30k pop municipalities that point everywhere but to themselves and say “this is your problem”
I also suspect that insurance and other regulation for being a housing provider isn't something they are interested in.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-...