It’s rarely that easy or financially viable. Major changes to the building’s core systems are required.
Which, perhaps coincidentally, gets at what's been a major question in American cities for quite a while now: what are we going to do about how hard it's become to build affordable housing to help people escape rent feudalism?
We're talking about California in this particular case. That's a place where one of the organizing principles of politics for generations has been preventing new housing. If you want to enable people to escape from being serfs on rent farms, you'll need to grapple with that.
As I see it, there is not any lack of housing in Western society. There are a ton of unused or underutilized housing and a on the other side a ton of employed people who are denied access because of hyper inflation in real estate prices.
In the past the elder generation would pass on their real estate to their offspring when they were making families. Then there was a period in the 20th century with high wages, were people could buy property with their wages, so that tradition stopped. Today it is not realistic for a working person to buy property without the life long debt, and that is according to plan.
Living in San Francisco is not necessary. Live somewhere cheaper and stop complaining that desireable places to live are more expensive.
On top of that, what you save financially you frequently pay for in other ways. Communities and services that can be found in large cities simply don't exist in smaller and midwest areas.
I live in a small town because I could not afford the big city near by.
Life is full of compromises, not living in the most expensive city in the country shouldn’t be considered a hardship.
For many of us, the culture of smaller cities and increasingly even the laws of entire states represent an existential threat, or an existential threat to our loved ones. That is much more than a "hardship."
> Live somewhere cheaper and stop complaining
This is how you eradicate civil society, if working people are priced out of where they were born. But it happens, and it has happened historically. Millions left Europe for America. Millions will leave "cemetery cities" where young people cannot afford to live. I've seen such places and know how they are. The old people there hate the younger generation, even though most young people have moved out and the few teens there are itching to get the hell out as well.