Fourplexes allowed on every S.F. single-family lot? | Hacker News Reader

Fourplexes allowed on every S.F. single-family lot?

sfchronicle.com

22 pointsjseliger20 comments

Please build more housing in SF!

Most SF lots, at least on the east side are 25 or maybe 35 ft wide and 75 or 100+ ft deep. How do you fit a fourplex on that?

is this a trick question? one possible configuration is two stories, two in the front, two in the back, side entrances (for the back units at least). with reasonable height allowances, a lot that big could easily accommodate 20+ units.

A lot that big can accommodate 20+ units? No.

I’ve seen duplexes on lots that size but you’re looking at a 4 story building (2 floors + 2 floors). And even then it’s tight.

yes. such buildings literally blanket my neighborhood. lot (and block) sizes in the US are huge for urban development.

Please share an example. I'm curious now. I've never seen 20 units built on a 25 ft wide plot.

The standard NYC lot is 20x100 (some a little bigger, some a little smaller). The prewar walkup rowhouses that blanket the city fill the lot basically entirely, and can easily fit 20 units (one-bedrooms or studios) in dense/expensive areas. I lived in one up until recently -- 5 stories, 4 one-bedroom apartments per floor. The rowhouse schema is very flexible: in outer boroughs they can be single family, while in Manhattan they are endlessly subdivided. For examples of the type see:

https://urbanomnibus.net/2016/04/201604typecast-the-row-hous...

Oh I see. Typically a fourplex is four, multi-room homes in a single building. In San Francisco there are plenty of duplexes, two, single floor homes with a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. Maybe 900 sq ft. That fits on the typical lot and doesn’t require climbing 4 flights of stairs.

The buildings with more than 2 or 3 units tends to be on double or triple lots.

Sure I could see fitting 20 studios in a lot that size but SF needs a variety of housing. Housing for families, etc. Studios or even 1 beds won’t fit the need.

Everybody wants more housing in SF, but building up doesn't increase the grocery stores, the roads, the parking, the first floor retail, the room on the sidewalk.

Everything outside the home will become more crowded. You can always shove more people in. The smart question is what is the maximum pleasant capacity? Look at New York, it's unbearable.

Meanwhile there's plenty of other cities in America that would love to have your company and its employees.

Worth noting that this isn’t mandating more housing, it’s (proposing) removing an artificial constraint.

This constraint is the land use equivalent of taxi medallions: the chosen supply cap is arbitrary and it hasn’t evolved in decades.

And as with removing the arbitrary cap on taxi supply, not everyone is going to like this change. Taxi medallions were a great system for those who owned them. The externalities were borne by passengers and other potential drivers.

The taxi medallions might not be the example your looking for because passengers, other drivers, and residents also benefited from the positive externalities generated by limiting the number of cars circling around waiting for fares.

It’s not clear that the system generated a net negative externality at all, it could very well have been positive overall. Which if applied to SF property…

I very much agree with you that there are drawbacks to increasing density, but SF isn't exactly going to look like Tokyo just because you let people in the Sunset and Richmond Districts convert some single family homes into fourplexes.

Incremental population creates the ridership needed to add transit lines and improve the frequency of existing lines. Also the foot traffic to make more businesses viable within our glut of empty retail.

Meanwhile, Tokyo is somehow more livable than SF or New York.

If you define “livable” as 50% of the Tokyo population having less than 17 sq meters of living space per person. Not just college students…everybody. Different strokes, but still…

https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/how-much-living-sp...

Why New York is so unbearable that 8 million people bear it and millions more visit it. Clearly no one actually likes more housing or more stuff.

The same could be argued about Dhavari in Mumbai. Nobody is fleeing a place with an estimated 1M people in less than one square mile. People visit there too…films use it as a backdrop all the time. Must be quite glamorous. One out of every 8000 people on the planet live there.

Dhavaris bear it, so it is, by some definition, bearable.

It’s kind of a nonstarter for a discussion about livability to equate livability with a lot of folks living somewhere.

"No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

would the employees want to live in those cities?

There's no way I moving to some science denying town, city, or state for any sane amount of money, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

What about an economics-denying town?

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