San Francisco Blows Housing Deadline, Prompting Standoff with State Regulators
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
The state level regulation is made to force these dysfunctional city halls to get their ducks in a row or face builders remedy.
50 years on, it's clear zoning regulations being determined at the municipal level is toxic, because regulation gets captured to enrich existing land owners at the expense of everyone else.
[edit] If the government wants to control rents and define what a neighborhood looks like it should buy the land and build itself; then rent it out using policies it likes, or sell it as “affordable housing.” Works great in Singapore.
Otherwise private land shouldn’t be subject to this silly overbearing approach to “rent control” and shadows and color schemes and building heights. If a neighbor doesn’t like what you’re doing on your own land they should buy your land or stop whining. Plenty of remote places they can buy a tract and decide what’s what.
Isn't this what you should do? Zoning isn't an act of god, it is the choice of democratic elected majorities. You don't need to live in the mission or pacific heights. You can build a better SF where land is cheap and there is no zoning.
San Francisco is 65%-70% renters, they have a large majority to make change if they want.
If the city feels differently they should buy the land and develop it themselves. Not have their cake and eat it too; where I own the land and I can’t do what I want with it.
Honestly if SF was declared a UNESCO world heritage site it would probably have fewer restrictions.
Behavioral restrictions are things like "no more than 80db noise from hours of x to Y" or "no smells which can be detected n kilometers away" with significant fines for violation.
In an industrial area, you release the requirements. You can put your residence in an industrial area, but you don't get to complain about noise and stink afterward.
In a residential area, you tighten the requirements. You can put your business in a residential area, but you have to comply with better restrictions. A dentist or computer worker can easily meet the restrictions while industrial would be highly unlikely to pass.
If zoning doesn't prevent the heaviest of heavy industry from setting up shop right next to preschool then it's pretty clear that the only reason we have it is to boost the assets of entrenched property owners
Could you dump toxic waste there if you want? Could you store tons of ammonium nitrate on it? Could you farm chickens? Hold nightly raves?
Furthermore, the municipality's authority to govern is derived from the democratically-elected California state government. So this appears to be a democracy of Californians telling San Francisco that they can't maintain local zoning authority if it's going to keep making it too expensive for other Californians to move there.
Now perhaps you could take the position that California voters shouldn't be allowed to tell San Francisco what to do, based on the principle that only the residents of an area should have final authority over how their land is used, regardless of what their surrounding neighbours vote... but I'm sure you'd see the irony.
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/california-city-planne...
Check out California City. Turns out that building in a place where nobody wants to live, leads to a place where nobody lives.
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/18/1200196497/locals-push-back-a...
Now, granted, this won’t solve the problem of housing in San Francisco and other areas with rich job markets but extremely expensive housing. Having to commute three hours away is still a problem. But for those who are willing or able to leave the Bay Area, why aren’t developers generally only building car-dependent suburbs instead of walkable towns and cities?
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/18/1200196497/locals-push-back-a...
And in fact, California has passed some laws putting restrictions in place on where you can have parking minimums
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/10/12/california-law-...
Well, it's California, so one part of the answer is probably water rights. In fact you can buy a lot of lovely looking property in coastal California for surprisingly low prices with just one tiny detail missing from the paperwork.
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/california-city-planne...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/california-city-unbuilt-...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/mountain-house-c...
Heh. Where young people postpone marriage and continue to stay with their parents because of how long it takes to get a HDB flat?
How many Singaporeans are in that position as compared to America or god forbid Canada?
Remember that 80% of Singaporeans live in HDB flats, and they have the infrastructure and experience to throw up some more towers fast.
The argument re hdb is probably still valid but it had more currency 10 or 20 years ago. Today, sg looks more and more like the rest of the developed world cities that refuse to build enough housing to meet demand. It's probably even more frustrating in that if there is any government that could do it if they wanted to, it would be the sg govt.
So it worked until they decided to stop doing it. And this is an argument against doing it? :)
> The government needs to constrain supply to keep the voter base happy at the expense of younger folks.
They literally do not.
> A private builder wouldn't find itself in a similar situation.
That's literally how it works right now in America, and Canada and the UK. The government constrains development in major metros to appease landowners. 83% of the Bay Area is zoned single-family, a zoning scheme developed with the explicit intent of keeping housing unaffordable for people of color in Berkeley in 1916 and copied throughout the US. That's exactly the situation private builders find themselves in. [1]
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...
This statistic includes the young people living with their parents. So, not exactly a refutation of my point.
Young couples in the rest of the world typically rent for a few years before before they buy their own place. The tax treatment in Singapore makes this very unattractive.
As opposed to USA where marriage rates are the lowest they’ve ever been? (still higher than all other OECD countries except Turkey)
Singapora is amazing to visit but you would never catch me living there. It truly is Disney-like. Between the slave class that comes out at 22:30 and the fact that the country doesn’t exist without China shipping future landfill material around the world it’s just its own thing.
I look forward to going back, but it’s not a place that works anywhere except right there and for it’s reasons.
Correct me if I misunderstand, and for clarification to other responders, but I believe this is referring to the class of foreign laborers (most visible as young men working hard manual labor and women working domestic labor) which Singapore employs on a temporary, long-term basis from less prosperous countries.
All of Asia shuts down at 2200 or so; except Borneo oddly. But in Singapore it was crazy just how many people with pressure washers there were, in an every night routine deep cleaning.
I don't think there is anything sinister about one of the most developed economies and cities being a city that doesn't sleep.
Nobody is asking San Francisco alone to do anything.
And yet, here we are discussing an article about San Francisco while completely ignoring the regional picture. San Francisco has an overall population density of ~17,000 people/sq mi, Brisbane 1,600. Atherton? Under 1,500. So, yes, focusing on San Francisco as HN seems wont to do is utterly ridiculous.
Here’s a recent one (their mayor is as bad as the NIMBY SF BoS):
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/11/21/high-rise-dev...
For those keeping score at home: San Francisco has a population density of over 17,000 people per square mile. Woodside? 460. For all of its corruption and inaction San Francisco's already done far more than the surrounding communities.
Brooklyn has 38,000 people per square mile. Queens is 22,000 people per square mile. Manhattan is 73,000 people per square mile. Hoboken is 48,000 people per square mile.
SF is not dense. SF should be the Manhattan of the Bay Area and instead it's got the density of like East LA.
The problem when people pull this stat is that we should really be comparing the density of the Bay Area to other major metros - not just SF. SF is a tiny little postage stamp. It's much more comparable to one of the NY Boroughs. It's just that SF city/county is gerrymandered out of the other peninsula counties.
When we do the logical and look at the SF-SJ-OAK MSA it has a population density of 700/sqmi, as compared to New York City at 29,302/sqmi. It's comparable to Augusta, GA, or Norman, OK.
If we compare at the densest are in the SF-SJ-OAK MSA, San Francisco at 17,000/sqmi - to New York City's Manhattan at 73,000/sqmi - the picture looks awfully different.
SF is woefully underdeveloped, and the MSA is devastatingly underdeveloped.
Also, San Francisco is a city, Woodside isn't.
I thought the urbanist argument is to build densely in the cities, so that would mean in SF, not in Woodside.
Tung Chung East, part of a new development on the northern edge of Lantau Island in Hong Kong, is reclaiming ~130 ha and building ~62000 units, housing ~184k people.
> The TCNTE was originally planned with 49 400 housing units with public / private housing split of 63:37. To meet keen housing demand and optimise infrastructural investments, we have recently reviewed the technical feasibility of intensifying the development density of TCNTE housing sites. With the spare infrastructural capacity so identified and revision of the public housing flat design, we are able to increase the overall housing yield from 49 400 units to 62 100 units for estimated total population of 184 000 subject to subsequent planning approvals to be obtained. The increase of 12 700 units will all be public housing with the resultant public/private housing split adjusted to 72:28. In terms of commercial facilities, the TCNTE will provide about 877 000 square metres (m2) floorspace generating some 40 000 jobs.
https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr20-21/english/fc/pwsc/papers/p20-...
build up, not out!
You can’t access public housing unless married or over 35.
The rules keep being changed because Singaporeans see housing as a lottery - and it is. Land a new HDB in a prime location and you can sell it at market rates 5 years later. A cool $500,000 in your pocket.
Oh, and everything is a 99-year lease, so after paying $1M for a resale HDB you get to give it back to the government and walk away with zero.
Don’t get me wrong, it worked great at rapidly housing a large population in a country with limited space. But it’s far from an optimized or sustainable system.
But the government has come out and said “those will be the rare exceptions”.
There were some 40 year lease homes that expired recently and the government took them over and tore them down with no compensation to the owners.
Try moving to Singapore and see how that works out for you. Until you or your spouse are a citizen (and the other a permanent resident), and then wait some time.
I’m not sure how a city in the USA could give away apartments (or sell them at subsidized pricing) without some sort of residency restriction, and even if the federal government was funding it, you couldn’t just let everyone live in the most popular cities, someone will need to live in a flat in Gary Indiana for example.
Singapore can do this because they can restrict it to citizens and PRs married to citizens, migrant workers don’t need to be considered.
Some places also implement a quasi-residential requirement by making the wait list open only/preferentially to people referred by a local service provider.
As a result it's hard to get these to pencil out. I wouldn't be surprised if cities subject to builders remedy end up with less housing vs. those that wrote compliant plans.
Too afraid to fully make something public, so we end up with a half baked public/private hybrid that is disastrous.
I think healthcare should be fully public or fully private. What we have now is a joke and leads to massively bloated healthcare costs.
Exact same with education. Thanks to government loans and subsidies tuition costs have exploded. Either make it public or private.
The public/private hybrid takes taxpayer money and enriches the private corporations offering near-monopoly services of poor quality.
Why?
The only country I can think of that is fully public is Canada. And even then, there is a small amount of private.
Every other country has a mix of public and private.
Why do you feel that making healthcare public only is the solution? What are you basing that one?
What America has is uniquely nightmarish, and not at all similar to other countries.
Not true! Having the public option be the "overwhelming default" is not the norm among developed countries. Neither is there being a public option at all!
Nor is anything else the norm, so great is the variety of approaches. What is true is that the Canadian/British approach of completely or almost completely free at delivery is not the norm.
The US's approach post-Obamacare is closest to the DACH countries, with a variety of nonprofit and profit plans. The US differs in a) having Medicare as the normal public option for the elderly (and having it be completely government run[1]), and b) not making getting a plan mandatory, while the DACH norm is for the government to pick one for you and send you the bill if you don't choose one first.
[1] Although I suppose Medicare Advantage is similar to the nonprofit plans available through the German GKV
This regulated market isn’t very “private” - and it’s not very capitalist either. Outcomes are ok, but as always could be better, which is at least as much cultural as how it’s all funded.
All companies offer completely exchangeable plans and are only allowed to take age, municipality and desired copay into account when calculating your premium. Every resident of Switzerland is also obligated to have this basic health insurance (if you don’t, the government just picks a random insurance for you and signs you up retroactively).
I would say it’s a great system…but Swiss health care costs are also among the highest in the world (and rising steeply), so it’s not a silver bullet.
To be fair, this particular system is probably not to blame for the high costs, but it also didn’t prevent them (though it leads to a bit of innovation around e.g. telemedicine, which is great).
But relative to GDP Swiss healthcare spending is lower than in Germany or France. Adjusted by PPP they aren’t even that much higher in absolute terms than in most other richer European countries. Of course there are some outliers like Denmark but if we consider income levels and outcomes healthcare in Switzerland seems relatively “cheap”.
But, sure, healthcare is a mix of labor and materials like most things, and the labor cost should scale loosely with local GDP per capita, but to the extent tradeable the materials cost shouldn't and should follow the law of one price, so Switzerland, with almost twice Germany's per capita GDP (and more than twice France’s) should have lower healthcare costs as a share of GDP, all other things being equal, because for the same mix of goods and services, the per-GDP materials costs is naturally lower.
They'd have to be doing something really wrong [0] for that not to be the case.
[0] like the U.S. is
Let’s suppose they are eliminated completely. You save 15% at most from not paying insurers, and let’s say doctors’ offices spend 10% on all the paperwork dealing with insurance.
However, government employees have to do some of the same jobs as the insurance company employees, such as identifying overcharges/fraudulent charges, etc. Add 10% back for that work (5% on government side, 5% on provider side since it should be less paperwork since it’s only 1 entity they are dealing with).
So all in, that is 15% savings, in an ideal case. With 90% medical loss ratios, it is 10% savings (more likely).
Relative to GDP the Switzerland spends less than Germany or France. Relatively to average net monthly salary healthcare is cheaper by about 30-40% or so compared to Germany.
…higher levels of AIC correspond to higher price levels for hospitals
as richer countries have generally higher price levels than poorer ones.
The correlation is, however, not perfect: as an example, the hospital
price level in Switzerland is twice the level observed in Germany, for
comparable consumption levels.
Edit:
I found it relatively difficult to make an apples to apples comparison as much of the details seem to only be available in French. However, nothing I saw put the Swiss rate of savings at 19%.
FT put the German rate at around 10% for 2018, and a source citing the BFS put the Swiss rate at over 12% for the same year (with a peak of 18.7% in 2020). So no, I don't buy that per-capita consumption is an inaccurate method here. Swiss health care is expensive even if you adjust for the overall wealth of the nation.
Also looking at PPP disposable income per capita and PPP healthcare spending the gap is much narrower (Germany still has lower costs but only by ~10% or so).
IMHO using per capita consumption seems a bit disingenuous because household savings rate in Switzerland is considerably higher than in Germany (19.3% vs 11.1%). So yeah while it’s accurate that the Swiss spend more on healthcare relative to the other goods and services they consume that largely makes sense because almost all healthcare services have to be ‘produced’ locally and can’t be imported.
Even with social transfers nominal disposable income is about 50% higher in Switzerland. So of course the Swiss will spend a smaller share of their income than the Germans to maintain comparable levels consumption just because a lot of the goods they buy cost more or less the same. The Swiss could consume more and save as little as the Germans and if they did so that would somehow decrease relative healthcare costs according to that report. That seems somewhat flawed?
Look at places like Singapore or some of the scandinavian countries where they have pretty effectively used the private sector to discipline the public sector and vice versa, as it seems to have way better outcomes and is certainly far less time consuming and painful for the individual going through the system. I especially like the Scandinavian countries that give the public sector 90 days to get something done before the patient has the right to use the private system at government cost, maybe Sweden? That's a great system that stops the utter bullshit of months to years of waiting for treatments that probably won't save your life but will make your life a hell of a lot better like joint replacements.
Both the USA and Canada should be held up as examples of how not to do health care and all eyes should be elsewhere for better ideas.
Germany, while it has historically been a mixture of public and private insurances (mostly due to state servants, clergy and entrepreneurs not being allowed in the public system [2]), has about 90% of its population covered by the public insurance [3] and there's regular discussions on getting rid of private insurances entirely - about once every year or two.
[1] https://conversion-uplift.co.uk/brexit/the-boris-johnson-bre...
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krankenversicherung_in_Deutsch...
We help get people elected, get them support to pass better laws, and sue the cities when they don't comply with the laws to compel them to do so.
We've spearheaded the action on "RHNA / Housing Element" [2] which helps push CA cities to do better, or like you said, allow the "Builder's Remedy" to bypass a lot of their stalling tactics.
I'd recommend anyone who cares to check out the sites below, come to a meeting, or donate to the cause. We even have a "Sue SF" fund if you want to help sue the bastards that make our rent too damn high and push people into poverty and homelessness.
will it be rent control with new rent price baseline? Where people from demolished apartments will be living until new apartment will be built?..
It would be a new baseline, but at a rent that would be calculated to be affordable to the tenant’s income: “The developer agrees to provide … right of first refusal … at an affordable rent” https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm.... For low-income tenants, this would most likely be even lower than the rent controlled rent. For very-low income tenants who do not qualify for any other program (other programs such as Inclusionary Housing typically have narrow income bands as a % of AMI), they would have a home almost for free. For higher-income renters, they could see a rent increase.
> Where people from demolished apartments will be living until new apartment will be built?
SB 330 requires “Relocation benefits” according to §7260, but I think San Francisco’s local relocation payments are already higher (currently $7,540/tenant, up to $22,618/unit, plus $5,027 per elderly/disabled tenant https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/579%20Multilingua...)
If I had a rent controlled SF apartment, why would I ever want to give it up? That’s like winning the lottery. I can see where these people are coming from.
This is due to another Byzantine quirk of SF zoning where the neighborhood is zoned 40X (~40ft or 4 stories) but if you try to build a 4 story building you have to notify all your neighbors and they get the chance to demand discretionary review, forcing your project to go before the planning commission for a vote. People also pull this crap for simple additions to existing houses.
At any rate the state is demanding reduced setbacks, elimination of neighbor notification and DR, etc. This would apply to other normal projects too, turning a lot more stuff into "by-right" approval: if you meet the set standards you can get a rubber stamp at the permit desk and no one can block you.
I wish new builds weren’t so bland and ugly, but that’s by far the lesser of the evils at this point.
I hope the crazy tall outer sunset tower gets built so it’s a kick in the pants to cut the red tape and at least allow mid rise without any of the BS that even a single family home construction is face with at present.
Actually if anything, single family houses should be banned in the core city including parts of the sunset and Richmond.
It still turns into a huge benefit that no one would want to give up, you have winners (who have rent control apartments) who don’t want to give them up to allow for more density.
Realistically if you applied rent control over the entire bay area any concerns regarding its ability to disadvantage building is moot at that point. The true limiting factor is probably a combination of zoning as well as onerous permitting and review processes. People in rent control units do get developed upon, they often readily accept buy out offers for example that are a rounding error for multimilliondollar apartment development projects. I believe redevelopment or renovation would count as just cause to evict but ianal.
It’s not the city’s job to make good things illegal because they are too good to pencil out.
But by “economic illiteracy”, I was referring to tenant groups’ reasons for opposing unsubsidized housing. Excuses such as that San Francisco had increased vacancies during the pandemic and thus not need any more housing. Or that San Francisco already met its RHNA housing quota for 2014-2022 (which was way too low since it was calculated based on outdated population growth trends rather than rents). Or denial that housing construction has any affect on rent. These are not fringe positions; these are the canon of the self-proclaimed “progressive” faction in San Francisco (see Supervisor Peskin’s statements in https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6412806... and https://twitter.com/_fruchtose/status/1729280621313511602 and basically any article on 48hills.org). The set of policies they support are basically to reduce for-profit apartment development by increasing neighbor veto points, ask for increased funding for favored nonprofits, increase tenant protections, and watch as rents rise.
Who pays? (Current or future residents? Over what timeframe?)
How much new infrastructure is required for a 50 story tower like this proposal? https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/tower-housing-ocean-b...
Might make sense for the state to provide funds, since many city budgets are struggling. SF has a projected $780 million two-year deficit, last I heard.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/sf-hou...
If that spiral is left unchecked it seems you get some kind of gerontocratic failure mode of democracy.
I'm pretty uninformed on this subject, so pardon my ignorance with this question, but what's the "morality" difference between renting land and owning it? Because in the US, even when you nominally "own" land, you still have to pay taxes on it, otherwise it can get seized by the government. And even when you do pay your taxes, the government can always seize it and reimburse you through eminent domain. It seems pretty similar to renting to me, except by a different name. How is that so dramatically different from renting where one is moral and the other immoral?
As far as why private land ownership is immoral I think it's quite obvious when you think about why we have property rights. Other than the security aspects which are retained with land value tax the main purpose is to encourage people to create things, without property rights there's less incentive to engage in the economy. Through that lens private ownership of land is absurd. Land is not created, the idea that someone can become entitled to its rents is counterintuitive to the entire point of property ownership. The profits from an asset that wasn't created by anyone should go to everyone.
We can go in less philosophical directions too, land value tax has zero deadweight loss and heavily penalizes speculation. LVT encourages efficient land use which raises our GDP and is likely to help everyone in the economy as land is a very decentralized asset.
Still, I firmly believe that a democracy works better when there is local control. San Francisco is already the most densely populated city in California, with three times the density of LA. If it is the wish of the people of SF to go slow on development, is that really unreasonable?
How would you define and enforce this? People who don't live in a particular city are everyone in the country except those who already live there. That's a lot of people.
Would you have a registry of people who want to live somewhere so they can then vote there? How do you enforce that people on that list are serious about it? Or maybe I sign up as a wannabe resident of somewhere just to mess with their elections for the lulz?
Perhaps not. But other Californians shouldn't be subsidizing it.
Maybe the compromise is that a city can halt builder's remedies indefinitely. But that revokes their claim to state funds. (About $900mm a year, or 15% of San Francisco's regular revenues [1].)
[1] https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2022-06/FY22-23%20and%20F...
Anyway, fair is fair. San Francisco has to densify because the law is making all the cities around them densify too. This is a compromise because nobody wants to be the center of growth but everyone understands that the state is worse off with no growth. This is where the dream of local control is shattered on the rocks of game theory. And while I'm not familiar with the details of this particular kerfuffle, the story in San Francisco for at least a decade has been that politicians say they are in favor of growth, but they also want the developers to fix the homeless problem, save the whales and make your hair grow back, so nothing gets done.
https://la.streetsblog.org/2015/03/03/l-a-vs-s-f-how-does-tr...
It’s the millionaire Preston/Peskin “saviors” that oppose development.
I agree with this sentiment, as long as it's equally applied in an even more local fashion: If it is the wish of the people of a neighborhood, a street, or indeed a singular plot of land, to go fast on development, is that any less reasonable than less local control, such as by the city?
The problem is when you have large negative global effects that emerge from so-called "local" decisions. A nationwide housing crisis leading to human suffering and political extremism. It's bad for everyone, it's especially bad for the poorest in our society, and it's not local as much as landowners like to tell themselves it is.
Local governance is ideal for decisions that are actually local. Like organizing communal rubbish pick-up.
LA is practically synonymous with disastrous low-density sprawl, so "three times the density of LA" is kind of a "three times zero is zero" statement. Huge parts of San Francisco look like this: [0], it's obscene and absolutely is unreasonable.
[0]: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/3/9/21171492/housing-affordabilit...
If left to locals, no one will do it. It like a person always going for immediate gratification and wondering why they are unhealthy. Decisions need made on broader timelines and scales than local control allows for.