How San Francisco makes it insanely hard to build housing

Sounds to me like the perfect person to expose it for what it is.

Housing isn't in the bill of rights directly, but equal protection is.

Basically, SF housing comes down to a battle of:

- I have a right to defend my housing equity/wealth (currently winning and will continue to win legislatively because the money is here)

- I have a right to a house (the moral choice, but far and away the less-monied, and therefore zero chance of legislative redress)

It isn't just SF, this is fundamentally a generational war across the entire US, practically everywhere.

I think an obvious comparison is between Tillman's project and the (still abysmal) averages listed later in the article. I.e. Tillman's approach turned out to be slower (or a dead end) for his project; lots of projects are "faster" but still ridiculously bogged down relative to other cities.

> But eight years later and after countless community meetings, hearings, appeals, studies, a legal challenge and a court settlement—the site of the former laundromat at 2918 Mission St. still sits empty.

> That timeline is far from unusual in San Francisco, where it takes more than two years on average to permit housing projects—an unusually slow pace compared to peer cities, according to a draft study published last year.

So his approach was at least 3-4x slower than average.

> What avenue for reform in SF would be faster?

A legal challenge might be a pretty good way to achieve some reform! I also think criminal cases for corrupt city officials are appropriate. But the article isn't claiming to be about how slow it is to reform city government -- it's about how slow it is to build housing. But it picked a project to highlight which seems to have tried to do a little of both.

Huh? The article headline and the article are about the speed of housing approval, not about the speed of "avenues for reform in SF".

The reason he can take the issue to court like this is because the city's "process" is illegal.

That may be true but that's a different issue also. The original claim that SF's process is slow, not that it's illegal (even if it is illegal).

The argument that building housing is useless because it's often more expensive housing, is absolutely bonkers. It increases supply, it is positive for everyone, even those that can't afford it and it liberates a space for them that would have been taken by that high income person.

But I'm not sure you're right about developers wanting to just develop a few luxury condos and artificially restrict the number of units they build. It seems like that would only work if there was a near monopoly on who was allowed / able to build in SF.

They make money on building units; not building units is not really benefitting them.

Per the article, the per-unit costs of all the planning / permitting / construction / land / special interest earmarks make the per-door cost to be the $1 million quoted. That already puts that into "luxury condo" price range. It might be that the ROI might be better for the developers if they decide to spend an extra $100k on premium tile so it really is "luxury". It might be that selling them as non-luxury really isn't profitable. After all, if as a customer you're going to need to spend at least $1.05 million on the unit (break even for developer + 5%), wouldn't you rather get a $1.25 million luxury apartment for not that much more? (1mill + 100k tile + 14% profit). For the developer in my made up scenario, they're making 3x the profit, while you're "only" spending 20% more on the more desirable luxury version.

I'm sure if the permitting process were quicker / easier, the barrier to entry for developers of all sizes would be lower. The per-door cost would be lower, and you wouldn't need a massive war chest of cash to ride the 3-year permit process. This would also make the economics on non-luxury units make sense.

I mean…can you blame them? Who really wants to lose money?

>The solution is actual public housing on a large scale

Please, no. Public housing has been an abysmal and utter failure, let’s not repeat mistakes that we know don’t work.

In an ideal YIMBY world, the government would just give a clear checklist of what can be built (based on safety and environmental requirements) and as long as your project follows that, no one should be able to delay or oppose your building.

What we have instead is arbitrary impact studies that anyone can throw to a developer and snooze the project indefinitely.

https://yimbyaction.org/2021/solutions/

I googled their username, clicked through to github, clicked through to repositories, clicked through to personal page (first repository on list), clicked through to cv folder, clicked through to cv pdf, and there they have a phone number and email address.

All of this is publicly available but takes at least four clicks but most importantly, I am not sure whether it is the same person!

email: ramon.d.iglesias@gmail.com

We did that less and less in Germany and now we pay the price. Higher rents and less room to live in.

"""Gentrification""" being used unironically should be the only thing you need to know about how far Robinson's mental model of the housing market is from reality.

Preston: "…is that they’re market fundamentalists. And they believe that simply creating more housing for rich people will ultimately trickle down to people who aren’t rich—maybe in a decade, maybe 50 years."

YIMBYs are not libertarian market fundamentalists. We believe that the principal cause of the housing crisis is that there is a shortage of housing. Simply removing zoning restrictions would not fix the situation for poor people, but that's not what YIMBYs argue. They want a mix of zoning reform, expanded housing vouchers, and yes, public housing.

Let's suppose that we only expand housing vouchers. We have rules forbidding increasing the supply of housing, and a policy that subsidizes demand. What happens to price? It goes up. How many more people do we house? No one, because you can't subsidize your way out of a shortage, and you can't redistribute your way out of a shortage.

Let's suppose that we only build public housing. We still have rules forbidding increasing density. Unless "build public housing" means building public single family home lot sprawl, nothing will get built. _The same zoning restrictions that prevent new private housing also prevent new public housing._

Let's suppose that we only reform zoning. Now it's legal to build more housing, and people will spend money building taller buildings with far more units for more people to live in. Since apartment units are built for far less money per-unit than detached homes, this lowers the price floor that housing can be offered at, allowing housing to become cheaper if we build enough housing to put serious dents in the vacancy rate. We're still leaving out the poor, since housing does take time to filter.

Zoning is not the end-all be-all of policy tools for fixing the housing crisis. YIMBYs agree. But it is the first step, and the single biggest tool in our policy toolbox. Everything starts with supply, and the biggest constraint on supply is zoning. After that, you can clean up the remaining market failures (i.e. homelessness, rent-burdened low-income people) with housing vouchers and much smaller public housing projects than you would need without zoning reform.

Preston: "For all the talk in this city, even a city that’s more progressive on some issues, for all the talk when it comes down to who our economy caters to—not just in housing, but especially in housing—it caters to the wealthy."

Preston literally blocked a 400+ unit housing development _on a valet parking lot_. _He is_ the wealthy person being catered to by the establishment.

Preston: "I thought we could control the rents a bit and have some protections in place. Maybe this can work if we just make developers do a handful of affordable units when they build, and maybe we’ll get there somehow."

Developers don't build out of the kindness of their hearts, they do it for money. If they're forced to subsidize too many "affordable units" with market rate units, the development won't be profitable, so they don't build. If the rent they can collect is capped early, they don't build. Remember, in California, because of Proposition 13, there are enough property owners paying 40-year old property tax valuations that renting is frequently 5-8x cheaper than buying. Literally some properties that rent for $4k/month (@ $600/month property tax) sell at prices of $15k/month mortgage + $3.5k/month property tax. In order for new build rental housing to be competitive with old rental housing, you need to build a shit ton of it to get the per-unit costs down since you're already paying far higher property taxes than landlords who have owned the same property for 30-50 years. San Francisco simply is not zoned for the density of housing that would make a lot more construction financially feasible. Add on rent control and making 30-50% of units "affordable", and you make it even harder for new housing to be built.

Preston: "Well, I think the city and government has to be in the business of actually creating housing for people that is not for profit, right?"

Public housing is good. However, the city and government will be building housing at per-unit prices that would be financially infeasible for private developers and renting them below cost. Even at-cost, these units would be far more expensive than they need to be. You still haven't fixed the underlying cause that you've put so many artificial constraints in front of building housing that you've made it far more expensive than it needs to be. Making the government pay $900k to build a unit and renting it for $800/month and just throwing the entire state budget into doing this _could_ solve the problem, yes, but I think we're better off making new units cost less than $900k to build than we are throwing money that could be better spent on this.

Preston: "I think that’s certainly a factor here. We commissioned a report—and we’re expecting to announce it fairly soon—from the budget, legislative analysts looking at vacancies in San Francisco. And there are a ton of vacancies. A lot of newly constructed places like these luxury condos that sit particularly in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco just sit empty, and it’s exactly as you’re describing. You can see at night what’s lit up and what isn’t."

People don't have their lights on at night, therefore their units are empty/vacant? Does he leave all of his indoor lights on when he goes out at night? I certainly don't.

Preston's Board of Supervisors actually passed a vacancy tax on units. It excluded luxury properties (Single family homes) like his. Take that for what you will.

Robinson: "If you have an apartment building with 50 units occupied by working-class tenants, and it’s demolished, and they build something that has 100 units, but it’s 100 people from Palo Alto who come and move in, you have the aggregate number of total units increased—you say we’ve got more housing—but you’ve actually managed to displace more working-class people from the city in the process."

If they're rent-controlled, they can't force the tenants out. If it's not, those working-class tenants were forced out by rent increases or general cost of living costs long ago. More units are better, because the root of the housing crisis is the shortage.

Preston: "Right. It’s always the loopholes around rent control that are used to attack rent control. There’s just such a disconnect between working-class folks and the pundits on rent control, right? You go to all these economics departments, and you can find lots of professors who are going to tell you how rent controls are bad and distort the market. A few of them will give you some support. But generally, you go and talk to people who are living in rent-controlled apartments, or live in San Francisco, where there would be virtually no working-class left in San Francisco, were it not for rent control."

Rent control reduces supply and doesn't help newcomers. It is great for current tenants, though.

Imagine you're a woman who's in an abusive relationship, but you share a rent-controlled unit with your abuser. If leaving means your share of rent goes from $800/month to $2,500/month, how likely are you to leave your abusive husband/boyfriend?

Rent control does not help people who have only recently started renting. A rich software engineer who lives in a rent-controlled unit for 30 years is paying less than a student who just moved to the bay for school and has to fork over $2-3k/month for a room. Is that fair? Older, well-established dual income married couples in rent-controlled units who are in the later and highest-earning stage of their career pay far less than the 26 year old transplants who just want enough space for themselves and a kid. Is that fair?

We are all better off when the market rate is lower for everyone. Rent control reduces supply and forces landlords to raise rents in other units, forcing poorer, younger, possibly abused newcomers to subsidize the older, richer, and more well-established residents of an area. That is not a solution to the housing crisis. Just build more fucking units.

Preston: "Even the studies from the economics professors who attack rent control always have to acknowledge, in all those studies, how effective rent control is in stabilizing housing for seniors, disabled folks, and the most vulnerable folks, even as they attack it on theoretical grounds. They still acknowledge that it works to do what it’s supposed to do, which is to stabilize people in their homes."

Rent control is America First, but for local cities. This is the principal flaw of democracy; politicians have no incentive to represent people outside their district. This "America First"-style politicking, more specifically, is politicians putting their constituents' interests before the interests of non-constituents _to the detriment of everyone_. Rent control may be great for the few is benefits, but it makes the problem worse for everyone else.

Don't get me wrong; rent control is a great policy when enacted with some limitations. Rent should not be allowed to be hiked more than 10% per year; but it cannot be enacted without other measures to increase the supply of housing, else you create a two-tiered housing market: one for the rent-controlled, who are stuck in place but get fabulous rents, and one for newcomers who are stuck with the bill for all of your overly-generous rent control.

Current Affairs is run by Nathan Robinson, a "socialist" union-buster who fired every Current Affairs staff member that attempted to unionize. That should tell you what kind of socialist he is; a rich trust fund baby that is more concerned with the aesthetic of being a socialist than the real and actual material conditions that socialism is intended to improve.

Dean Preston is a millionaire homeowner "socialist" who blocked a Nordstrom valet parking lot from becoming 400+ homes (many of which would have been reserved for people with below the area's median income) because "it wasn't affordable enough", AKA not perfect. The status quo of zero new housing supply suits Dean's class interests just fine, as his property will appreciate far faster without it.

Now that I've finished with the ad hominem, onto the articles, tweets, and sources:

Removing zoning restrictions is effective in increasing housing construction: https://twitter.com/mnolangray/status/1559610823353307136?s=...

Building more housing, even market-rate housing, reduces aggregate rents and displacement: https://twitter.com/IDoTheThinking/status/155136150802978406...

Real world example: Auckland, New Zealand: https://twitter.com/UrbFuturistDem/status/154986439702730342...

Vacancies are directly correlated with rent prices.

See New York City: https://twitter.com/NYCComptroller/status/154686782637968589...

Vacancies rose during the pandemic as people left the city. Rent fell. Then people came back, reducing housing vacancies. Rent went back up, climbing to new record highs. Vacancy rates determine the price of rent. Building more housing increases the supply of housing, which increases vacancy rates, which in turn slows rent price growth or reduces rents entirely.

This is not a fringe political ideology, but one tacitly endorsed by President Barack Obama: https://twitter.com/cafedujord/status/1541601275212619777?s=...

Current zoning restrictions weren't set in stone from the founding of cities, but enacted in the 70s to prevent population growth after the Fair Housing Act was passed. It had the intent and effect of keeping out poorer residents, a good-enough proxy for people of color. https://twitter.com/mateosfo/status/1540060815490813952

Los Angeles used to be zoned for 10,000,000. New York City used to be zoned for 55,000,000. We can simply remove this outdated restrictions in every city and allow builders to create the housing we need. Imagine a New York City or Los Angeles where rents were $1,500/month, and far lower in the rest of the country. This is the future that the YIMBY movement is fighting for. All it takes is pre-empting local zoning restrictions, which the states of California, Oregon, and Minnesota have already begun to do. [This is how Tokyo's housing prices have grown no more than 10% since the year 2000](https://twitter.com/aaronAcarr/status/1539606088819085312?s=...): they set zoning laws at the federal level, and build far more housing than we do.

I will try to go over the main type of accusations and refute them as best I can. I previously created a deck for an internal presentation at my company that you can peruse for a broad overview of how I see the whole thing [0]. You can find charts and some sources there backing what follows.

Note that the movement is actually quite diverse and the exact opinions vary, but I will try to summarize in good faith what we stand for.

--- Accusation: A common argument would be that we are "market fundamentalist" and that we believe in "trickle down economics".

This accusation seems to be made so that the audience lumps us with Tea Party conservatives and George W Bush. I find it laughable. Yimby Action members are on average left-of-center. I would probably fall on the right-most side of the spectrum and still would be far from the Tea Parties and GWBs of the world.

In reality, we tend to look at the data and draw conclusions based on economic principles. The truth is that we have been under producing housing for decades now. It's a widespread issue in the West, but it is particularly acute in the Coastal US and other anglophone countries.

We know it is a supply issue because reliably rents are go up as rental vacancies go down and viceversa. Same holds for prices (though I think rents are a better metric, given that housing prices bolt in a layer of speculation). We know that supply is constrained because of ridiculous laws because you can see it in data as the one shown in this article, and because you see alternatives such as Tokyo where building is relatively unhampered, has been growing over the last decades and yet has kept stable housing costs.

--- Accusation: That we are astroturfing for developers and only care about developer's giveaway.

This is just an attempt to create a boogeyman and then connecting everything to it. They chose to make developers the boogeyman instead of landlords, unsurprisingly because most of those making the accusations are landlords themselves.

Every building that has ever existed had a developer (in the general sense) behind it, and profited in one way or another. That's why they built, because it made sense for them. We engage in transactions where one party makes a profit in exchange for generating something valuable for the other party. This is good. We don't want to give away money to developers, we want them to be able to perform their productive function in society.

Landlords are not necessarily bad either. Owning is not necessarily for everyone, so there must be a rental stock. Landlords manage that rental stock and there is value in that.

What is actually bad is having a fixed housing stock that continuously appreciates and extracts increasingly higher rents. We think this is our current situation, and the only way out of it is to make it easy to add more to the housing stock.

--- Accusation: We are against government all intervention in the housing market.

This accusation again is used to try to scare those that are currently hurt the most by the housing situation from joining our side. But it is far, far from truth.

We think that shelter being a basic necessity should be regulated to an extent. We believe there should be a proper system for how and under what conditions a landlord can evict a tenant.

We aren't against government investment in housing, be it via vouchers or by developing public housing. In fact, most of us would readily admit that even in the ideal world you will need some government effort to keep the poorest among us from falling into homelessness.

---

I hope this helps.

[0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1O1_oW0Ci2SJEIIhXzuzV...

I think this has left me with only more questions, and I might ask a few of them later when I have a moment, but I wanted to say I appreciate you taking the time to reply.

- a capricious and arbitrary permitting process

- multiple opportunities for groups to cause mischief, with some like Calle 24 barely disguising that they are shakedown rackets

- excessively restrictive zoning

It essentially boils down to this: there are haves (people who own their own homes like many SF supervisors and like to see them appreciate, and Boomers benefitting from rent control and paying a pittance) who have political power and new entrants who have none. The solution will not come from within, but from the State preempting local control, like Scott Wiener's heroic efforts in Sacramento like SB35. If a housing project is 50% affordable, it can skip most of the rigmarole, as occurred in Potrero Hill:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/How-one-S-F-housing-p...

More broadly, in my experience, Yimbys have mixed-to-negative opinion on inclusionary zoning since it is essentially a tax on new construction, though there are a non-trivial amount of Yimbys who think its a good way to produce subsidized housing.

I personally think we should not be taxing new projects implicitly or explicitly at all, and instead we should use property taxes (especially land value taxes) to subsidize housing either via vouchers or via publicly built housing.

The reality of the CA political system makes all of this very hard to achieve and we often find ourselves settling on taking small but achievable steps.

Even in SF, that's not really the group whose mind the movement is intending to change. That's the group whose dominant historical grip on the left they're determined to dislodge, because of its harmful effect on San Francisco's progressive program.

What part of that is hard for people to understand?

One of the person who testified in exchange for not being jailed was "Mr. 3%", a member of the office who approve (public) construction projects. He took 3% of the project total cost (in bribes) from the top 30 contractors in exchange for making sure their permits requests never got in these artificial rejection loops.

The bureaucracy, just like the old taxi industry, is about keeping smaller players out, not enforcing the codes.

True, but it's also true that even NIMBY's are nominally for more housing somewhere. Just not, y'know, wherever they live, hence the name.

How do people think these kinds of thoughts?

"Food is too expensive! We have to shut down these evil farmers! Farming just makes them rich!"

I mean this is on the same level of ideologically induced willful stupidity as "a woman can't get pregnant from rape."

The architect is right, you are wrong. There is simply no reason to have this much concrete for a residential solar addition.

For your information and to head off argument: I am a licensed civil engineer in California. The rules and procedures for little shit like a solar array foundation can be followed by almost anyone who can do simple arithmetic by using the CBC, you do not need a license to do it correctly. You need the licensed engineer’s stamp so that there is someone (insurance) to sue if things go wrong.

Did you even read my post? Here. Quoting:

"However, because I am not a Civil Engineer, I had to hire a firm to, effectively, duplicate my work. Physics is physics, right? That's OK. No problem."

Let me repeat that last part:

"That's OK. No problem."

> Your architect friend would be wrong on that...For point of comparison, the average concrete foundation is 200 lb/square foot, or about 480,000 for a 1-story 2,400 square foot house

You are grotesquely misinterpreting the link you provided. That's the weight per square foot of an entire house, including footings, slabs, tile roof, etc.

> Because self-styled architects are constantly messing up on the math and physics.

Very funny, considering the above.

I mean, just a little bit of critical thinking and math shows how crazy the 480,000 lb number is.

For easy math, a 2,500 sqf house is 50 x 50 feet. Assuming a density of 133 lbs/sqf for concrete:

That slab, at 4 inches thick, comes in at 110,833 lbs.

Now assume a full footing all the way around the slab. That means each footing is 50 feet x 1 foot wide and 28 inches below the slab. I'll ignore the intersection of the footings just to keep the math simple.

Each footing weighs 15,517 lbs. That's a total of 62,067 lbs for footings and 172,900 lbs so far for the house.

Depending on code and type of construction additional footings might be required on the interior of the slab-on-grade construction. I'll just round the 127,000 lbs to 200,000 lbs, again, for rough numbers.

The 480,000 lbs number you came-up with is absolutely ridiculous.

Like my wife (a doctor) likes to say: "Your Google search isn't equivalent to my medical degree."

Regarding what my friend said about my project. First of all, it was a figure of speech, not a precise calculation. "Dude, you could build <insert whatever makes you comfortable here> on that much concrete!". Yes, it was an absolutely ridiculous amount of concrete. It didn't stop at 64,000 lbs. There's a full-on 55 x 45 foot slab, 6 inches thick, with lots of rebar and other details. If we are going to go on raw concrete weight --which isn't the right metric-- it's about 230,000 lbs.

EDIT: For Architects/Civil Engineers who might be reading this. We live in an area that has been classified as a high fire risk zone (wrongly, in my opinion, but there's nothing I can do about it). This gives LA County license to go absolutely insane with some of their requirements. They turned what should have been a relatively simple ground-mount solar project into an absolute nightmare.

I think people with capital would love to develop housing in SF which would ease the housing problem in SF. In fact, people with capital really are the only people that may be able to solve the housing problem in SF. And the reason why they can't do this is the local government. How is this some sort of problem with capitalism?

I really wonder how much of the progressive drama results from these highly educated folks working in overwhelmingly white/Asian industries and living in places like SF or NYC where nearly all the Black or brown people they meet are working service jobs for them.

California's housing situation is incredibly bad, there are some other bad parts too, like the water/fire situation, but there are some huge advantages to the state as well.

https://sfpuc.org/learning/conserve-water/we-are-drought

Of course nobody forces me to live in SF. But if I leave someone will just take my place - this isn’t just a housing problem, it’s also a mismatch in where jobs are relative to where housing is. My desk will get reassigned to someone else who will likely also live in SF (because we can afford it, but the people with families making my food can’t).

The least we can do now is fix it forward and make sure it doesn’t get worse. Even for people like me and the hypothetical low wage worker with a family, the sooner we fix this the sooner we can reap the benefits.

The jobs go where the people are. If companies can't find people in SF because no one can afford to live there they'll move.

At some point though don't rents become high enough it's almost a 'luxury' to live there? What proportion of people paying say $15k/month in rent are in poverty?

If the tyranny of the majority decide they want SF to be an ultra-rich enclave I'm trying to imagine how that can even be stopped, regardless. There's no constitutional right to free-market housing. IMO the 51% of best situated home/property owners will always have the incentive to impose their tyranny on others, and if they flush out the 49% due to elevated cost and repeat this iteratively you end up with an ever-concentrated hyper-wealthy enclave. That kind of self-reinforcing loop appears to be what SF is getting locked into.