I remember when I lived there everyone was so against the “manhattanization” of the city, so it was a big uproar every time a new building went in. I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable
A collective delusion that we can have our cake and eat it too.
In my early 20s I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable. Got a lot of proposals that essentially boiled down to “control who can live here, kick out everyone that doesn’t fit and cap the city’s population”. Don’t ask me how, I never got a straight answer whenever I pointed out the problems. People can express what they want, they can’t usually tell you how they would obtain it.
Complainer: 'Homelessness is a mental health problem, they shouldn't be arrested for sleeping and shitting on the sidewalk.'
Me: 'Please go ahead and convince that homeless person to go to a Doctor's office, after you set up the appointment, and then follow up to make sure they take their medicine every day.'
Complainer: 'Well, that is the job of a social worker, not me'
Me: 'Are you going to go hire the social worker and let them know that they need to do this?'
Complainer: 'That is the government's job, not mine'
Answer: 'So you are going to vote for someone who says they will fix this, and that is about all you are going to do?'
> Homelessness is a mental health problem, they shouldn't be arrested for sleeping and shitting on the sidewalk.
Yes.
> Well, that is the job of a social worker, not me
Yes.
> That is the government's job, not mine
Yes.
>> So you are going to vote for someone who says they will fix this, and that is about all you are going to do?
Yes I will. I pay my taxes, it's not my fault the government wastes my money on the military and law enforcement. When there are candidates that pledge to fix this I donate to them and vote for them.
No argument from me re: government failing. There are so many failures regarding housing and other issues up and down the bay area. It has got to the point where I question whether the rich culture that does exist is worth the quality of life trade.
You don't see the connection from homelessness to housing affordability and the connection from housing affordability to the illegality of building affordable housing?
>In my early 20s I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable. Got a lot of proposals that essentially boiled down to “control who can live here, kick out everyone that doesn’t fit and cap the city’s population”.
At some point you have to ask yourself what problem is supposed to be solved if people come up with ideas like that. I mean, the reason why affordable housing is a problem is precisely because lack of it kicks out people, controls who can live there and caps the city's population.
So basically you have a person that wants the symptoms of unaffordable housing but also the virtue signalling that they "solved" the problem. Considering the entire state of California is following the path of San Francisco this is not an answer.
The reason why people come up with nonsensical things like "induced demand" is because the entire housing market of California is under a prisoners dilemma. Staying silent is building housing. Betraying the other is not building and coming up with random ideas to sweep the problem under the rug. Everyone is betraying each other so any specific city who ends up building will face the brunt of the population growth. Every city has to build for this to work and that means statewide reforms in California.
> At some point you have to ask yourself what problem is supposed to be solved if people come up with ideas like that.
You’re giving my friends too much credit. They just don’t like outsiders.
Most people, surprisingly, don’t take an engineering mindset to solving everything, nor do they want to, and even get offended if you do it too much. This past time of mine among many other things taught me that lesson the hard way.
Another collective delusion is the overpopulation we are experiencing. And it's accelerating.
8 billion people now.
Global population was 1.6 bil 100 years ago. Let that sink in.
It is a massive problem because due to advertising and media every one of this 8 billion wants to live like a first world middle class person.
It is not sustainable.
5 days ago, not sure how I missed this one before.
So a few points on this:
1. Depends how you define overpopulation. Can we still feed all of us? Yes. Do we? No, because while we can easily grow enough food, 50% more than our current population at least, people still starve, just not due to lack of food in the world. I think when we get to the point that we’re seeing a mass die-off of humans because of resource exhaustion, you can start calling us overpopulated. This is not to discount the possibility that we may become overpopulated, but I don’t think we know where that threshold actually is yet.
2. That said, population does tend to level off once the people of a country are well off enough, and so some countries are facing population contractions. Even within countries which are technically growing, subsets of their populations have leveled off and part of the difference is being made up in immigration. We may never actually reach overpopulation if that trend continues.
3. This is the part I hate when discussing population concerns. Let’s throw away my arguments above that we are probably not overpopulated, and suppose you are right. Then what? Genocide? Eugenics? Voluntary societal suicide either directly or by mass scale vasectomy? Just do nothing until something gives?
Acceptance of the idea that there are too many people leads you down to a much more uncomfortable conversation.
Also: all of this is off-topic. San Francisco could support plenty more people. Both California and the United States grow enough food to be net exporters, and California specializes in cash crops. Doing so would require upzoning. Upzoning would lead to neighborhood change, and that’s really the thing San Franciscans are fighting against. Every single time the Earth’s population vs carrying capacity is brought up in the context of San Francisco’s seeming inability to build more homes, it is a distraction.
We could, but we make it as difficult and expensive as we can to keep people out because San Franciscans taken as a whole don’t like outsiders and don’t like change. We’re not the only populace or locality that doesn’t like these things, but we are some of the whiniest and most hypocritical.
The main problem with "control who can live here" is that you would generally like children born in the place to be on the shortlist, but this would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Cities and states can't privilege natives over migrants.
Rent control and the heritability of Prop 13 are the best California can do to prioritize incumbents. They do work somewhat, but the next generation of natives is still as screwed as prospective migrants re: forming their own households in the place, at least while their parents are still alive.
Cities and states can't privilege natives over migrants.
This is causing huge problems in Utah right now. Great if you have a house (or condo/etc) you don't want, bad if you have a house you like because you might get taxed out of it, terrible if you want a house. Every house and condo has dozens of unconditional cash offers on day one.
Good, as it should be. The idea that you should get priority to live somewhere just because you were born there runs totally counter to America's founding principles. Building more housing to house more people and create more opportunity is the only morally conscionable way forward
A cohort with birthright priority access to the most desirable, productive places is a kind of nobility. Hereditary privileges around land are an Old World European thing. In the American ideal the identity of your parents does not determine where you can live or what kind of life you can have.
Obviously we don’t always live up to that ideal. But this would be a big step in the wrong direction.
"Everyone who grew up here and works an Xth-percentile job can still afford to live here, plus we have room for more" is a lot better than "GTFO natives, I've got more money than you." America (after the obvious colonial invasion) was also founded on principles of democracy and republicanism, where representation and self-determination belong to locals, not outsiders.
It's really bad for a community and a country when there is massive forced migration due to price pressure.
When new graduates are detached from their support networks, they have to pay more for things and services they could have shared with their family/friends/community. When new couples are detached from their support networks, they and their kids suffer from higher costs and reduced mentorship from extended family.
When there is a constant flux in and out, like I saw while I was living in SF, nobody has any commitment to the area, and nobody has lived there long enough to know what "normal" is.
When people who invest their entire lives into a community are forced out of it, and/or their kids are displaced by lucky rich in-migrants, you amplify people's natural defensiveness and, whatever points you may have had, they will oppose you on everything. Those communities are desirable places to live because of the years of time invested by those who came before, and they deserve not to be forced out by people with no prior stake.
When every avenue for just starting a life, let alone advancing it, is closed off to people, especially because of outsiders trouncing in with no appreciation for the history of a place, you have all the ingredients for revolt and revolution.
----
In places where there is ample land (like my native Utah), but supply targeted at natural growth can't keep up with in-migration and investor speculation, I would favor policies that significantly bias toward natives. Keeping churn low, but not zero, is absolutely essential for the health of communities.
- Favoring live-in owners over landlords, but still allowing for some renting
- Very strongly favoring live-in first-home owners over investors through tax, HOA, and zoning policy
- Breaking up the very large parcels currently owned by and being developed for billionaires -- hating on single-family housing is a scapegoat for this real issue
I agree it is a tragedy when people are forced out of a place, we only disagree on whether to fix it through abundance or through exclusion. Exclusion might work out for beautifully for insiders if it could be pulled off. To have affordability and small-town aesthetics at the same time. But it can't be pulled off. Americans do not get to treat each other as "outsiders" in this way. At least not institutionally. You can't stop someone from selling or renting me a home just because I'm not from here in particular. State borders are open. That's an important part of what America is.
Mass internal migrations, like those that built the West in the first place, are an important part of American history. It is an incredible arrogance towards history to assert that now every town is the right size and everyone is in the right place, no more growth or movement.
It would be convenient if this were a financial problem, but it's a geometry problem. People are moving into boomtowns to actually live and work, they take up space, and if you don't add new space on the dimensions you have (e.g. vertical axis), the only possible result is to squeeze out others.
Every family on a quarter acre was not a sustainable plan anyway, I'm not sure how much of a "shame" it really is that the economics are crying out for more compact, walkable communities.
San Francisco would like housing to remain scarce but be allocated to its favorite people, who are quite distinct from those with the highest ability to pay. This part is best achieved by an immigration policy. But that’s not allowed, so they’re stuck with imperfect substitutes. We can protect our favorite people from displacement, but it’s harder to make homes that change hands flow to them vs. tech workers.
I'm sorry I don't follow this point. Who exactly are these "favorite people" exactly, and how does California expect these "favorite people" to, overlaps notwithstanding, compete with those with the highest ability to pay all while being able to keep the state budget in tact?
The influx of relatively privileged, relatively boring tech workers is seen as destroying the city's unique value as a haven for counterculture, artists, activists, LGBTQ, etc. A common complaint is that "mainstream" people want to move here because those things make the city special, but in doing so they cause a regression to the mean.
Who gets to decide who is kicked out? at some point there will be a bunch of people born in the city who want to buy a house but can't but of the cap. You have to consider (and policies like this don't) what happens even if no one moves into the city. In that scenario the population will still rise, until it hits the cap, at which point people have to leave.
At that point where do they go? Presumably other cities will be allowed such caps so they can't move to those either.
Then there are historical population control tools like redlining, and racist applications of eminent domain used to remove "undesirable" (a euphemism for black) neighborhoods.
By placing a cap on population you ensure that the victims of that discrimination never have the opportunity to return to the places they used to live - and as an added bonus you get to claim that your policy isn't racist because it has no stated racial bias.
Say your rental lease is up, and the only place you can find to rent is Colma. Now you've left SF are you ever allowed to return. What if someone else moved into SF while you were away thus taking your position under the cap? Honestly if anything this possibly right here could easily cause rental and housing prices to go up even more.
Then there's SF's claim to be an open and welcoming multicultural city - you can't claim that well disallowing new residents, and so new cultures, from entering.
The only real way to reduce hoisin cost is to build more housing. Where and what type you build are the only actual questions that you need to answer.
> what happens even if no one moves into the city. In that scenario the population will still rise, until it hits the cap, at which point people have to leave.
Only, there are still racially restrictive covenants on many properties to this day. Yes, in San Francisco. Thankfully, they're unenforceable, but the evidence is writ large on the legal system. And no, they didn't forbid white people from living anywhere -- if you've got reams of evidence to contradict that, show it.
The Bay Area (the area this article is about) was heavily redlined, and almost all (maybe actually all?) uses of eminent domain for 580 and the MacArthur maze in the Bay Area were in predominantly black neighborhoods.
Not the OP, but the ones that come immediately to mind is that a) capping the population will reduce the market and therefore increase prices and b) if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich [0] one way or another, making the market even more competitive.
[0] Unless the place is not actually worth striving to live in, but in that case you probably don't have a rent price problem.
Shelter is one of the few goods which a society necessarily needs. The alternatives (being homeless) are unacceptable. People give up food, electricity and healthcare before they give up shelter.
It's fine at a micro scale (oceanfront is expensive, but a few blocks away is affordable), but causes incredible problems at a macro scale as the bay area demonstrates (people not able to live within 50+ miles of their support networks). It is VERY hard to uproot an entire life and move to an area where cost of living is lower, especially when you are poor. People in poverty form informal local support networks (neighbors watching kids, friends that can loan you $5 to top up your phone), making it that much harder to move to a lower cost area.
How are you going to keep people out of the city without raising prices? Also how is that fair to people who didn't have the privilege of being born in a nice city?
> I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable.
It is easy, there is no absolutely no desire to keep housing "affordable" by anyone that owns property in SF.
This is a problem through the US. Property owners vote and do things that are in their favor while renters and people that are trying to enter the market scream it is too expensive.
There are plenty of property owners who want housing to remain dirt cheap so that the kind of people who need dirt cheap housing stick around and the kind of people who don't need dirt cheap housing don't show up and bring their zoning and their bylaws and their opinions with them.
Current renters are part of the problem too: they lobby for rent control. The people who are really fucked are people who want to move to a city and rent or buy.
You can do both. Manhattanization is perhaps bad, but low-mid rise, Brooklynization or Barcelonazation or even Missionization of more of the city would help vastly. The highest population density parts of SF are Mission and Haight and similar midrise mixed use areas, they're significantly denser (50-100% more) than Richmond and Sunset.
Imagine fitting an extra 100K people without adding any buildings higher than 3 stories.
Manhattan is hardly affordable. Development alone is hardly an answer for affordability. Most development projects in the US are designed to increase growth and demand, not to decrease price. Increased growth and demand actively work against affordability, so if your development is contributing to increased demand as much as it is to supply, it's not helping.
It's like how building wider freeways doesn't solve traffic. Demand is not independent of what has been built.
Induced demand is predicated on the consumer not having to internalize the costs, which is the case for the poster child of induced demand--non-toll, public freeways.
The problem in the Bay Area isn't induced demand, almost by definition. Rather, the demand already exists, and that's precisely why costs keep skyrocketing despite very low supply growth. The only way out of the situation other than by increasing supply is to cut demand to live there by, e.g., bombing tech headquarters and unleashing roving bands of human culling robots so that people would have less motivation to move here.
An example of actual induced demand in the Bay Area might be homeless housing in San Francisco. Since circa 2005 SF has built enough units of homeless housing to house every homeless person enumerated in the circa 2005 homeless census. But the number of homeless on the street has stayed the same--which is to say, the total number of homeless has approximately doubled since that time, w/ half now living in city-built housing. Arguably this suggests that there may be something like a set carrying capacity of unsheltered homeless in the city, and no matter how many units of housing you provide, you'll always have that number of homeless on the streets.[1] Though, this is obviously just a conjecture. People argue vociferously about the origins and motivations of the homeless in SF. I certainly won't claim to have any concrete answers. But at least such a conjectured phenomenon would be consonant w/ the theory of induced demand.
[1] To be clear, the induced demand in this scenario is demand for the free housing units, not spots on the sidewalk.
> Rather, the demand already exists, and that's precisely why costs keep skyrocketing despite very low supply growth.
If the costs are skyrocketing doesn't that mean demand has been going up, not that it already existed at these levels?
How many more tech offices are in SF now than fifteen years ago? Has the city's commercial growth policies been considering in sync with their residential growth policies? Or have they let the one fan the flames of the other? They should've preemptively bombed the tech headquarters, to tweak your suggestion. ;)
But my money says that even if they had unleashed a bunch more residential construction fifteen years ago, it would've only been accompanied by even more business and commercial growth. Coastal hub cities have a fundamental demand aspect with how cheap cross-country (or even global) travel is these days - there is a lot of built-in appeal that's going to attract people there, even if only for second homes or investment housing, etc, and keep a lot of pressure on the price floor.
I'm sure demand has also been going up, though I don't know how to disentangle that from inflationary effects--same number of people wanting to live here, but w/ access to more wealth.
In any event, it only drives home the point that the relationship between demand, supply, and price isn't something you can just will away, like an alternate universe Jane Jacobs applying Marxist economics.
AFAIU, San Francisco has built more market and non-market housing than any other city in the Bay Area, despite being geographically quite small. Unfortunately, that's a relatively low bar in the context of the Bay Area considering so many cities just refuse to up-zone anything, or approve projects in up-zoned areas.
I disagree here as I've seen numerous examples of autonomous robots blocking sidewalks and crossings such that people with disabilities are unable to pass. Also who gets to win the contract? Are they using locally made small batch robots? If not, why not?
Have we consider the use of organic cullers instead?
You're talking about "induced demand". Induced demand is not so high for housing. I might decide to drive 15 minutes to get a hotdog from Costco is the traffic isn't too awful. I probably won't buy an extra house just because it looks like a better deal than before. It does exist to some extent, but it's nowhere near as big a deal as for roads (at least in the short-medium term), at least I think that's the currently thinking on it - https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper25811.ht...
It's not induced demand through increased housing stock, it's city development that becomes a cycle of residential/commercial/business development (or all-in-one mixed development), all of which have feedback loops into each other.
Simply going for growth-at-all-costs gets you a more crowded but still expensive city. That may be better for the people running the cities and their budgets, but it's not clear to me it's better for anyone else than having things spread out to more places across the state or country.
I think it's been tried and what you get is Tokyo. I wouldn't say dystopian but it's also one of the most expensive cities in the world. Apparently the average apartment is about $2000/month.
That's the average price for a two bedroom apartment. You can easily find much cheaper options, the average one room apartment in Adachi ward is nearly a quarter of that.
Edit: Just for comparison, the average two bedroom in San Francisco is $3500, and that's down $1000 from last year
Tokyo is very big. If the only apartments you can find are that expensive then you either want to live in a certain ward or you aren't looking hard enough.
I listened to everything that people told me they miss about San Francisco
and they are absolutely correct that this gentrifying transplant (aka anybody that signs a new lease, shrug) would find San Francisco unappealing
I mean I find it unappealing now too, but would have found it more so unappealing
Every single currently desirable neighborhood was an undesirable neighborhood within the last 30 years. "But the culture and the artists are gone" yeah, so is a gigantic abandoned highway through Hayes Valley replaced by ice cream shops eeeeeverywhere. There isn't a coherent consensus, just angst.
Sort of but the other US cities aren’t longing for a worse iteration of the city while simultaneously blaming the last decade or two on a 100-year long pricing trend but acting like its recent
There was a period after forced integration/busing, and the advent of suburbs where housing in cities was very much not a sure thing upward trend like it is now.
If you go to a lot of cities in between coasts the revitalization of downtown areas is most definitely a "last decade or two" trend.
I'd argue it's more "keep housing affordable without reducing the value of my home".
I recall seeing some article in which people were arguing that a council relaxing zoning laws to make more/cheaper housing possible was a "government taking" as it would reduce the value of their homes. Unfortunately I don't recall where/when so I can't guarantee it's not my mind merging unrelated stories.
It's quite selfish because there is a savings glut. Lots of reasons why people cut consumption but those savings have to go somewhere and this leads to low interest rates which then fuel the housing market. If the housing market crashes but the savings glut doesn't disappear then the housing market will recover within a year. If you did the obvious thing, namely building more housing then some of that money would have a place to go instead of just driving up the prices of existing houses.
This is "de-manhattanization" - as buildings reach end of life they will have to be replaced by more suburban forms, in 100 years San Francisco will have turned into Palo Alto.
Because building up isn't actually any cheaper. As the building gets taller, the construction costs go up per sq foot, not down, and so does ongoing maintenance.
I mean, you build a building as tall as necessary to maximize the total return of selling or renting. Saying that it costs more per sq ft to build each additional story is kind of missing the point.
That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery, in addition to all sorts of perverse incentives/disincentives for landlords and tenants alike, rather than a place where the people who are most willing/able to pay to live there are the ones that do. Rent control is one of the worst solutions to any problem.
> That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery
That's how property ownership works, after all. Extending the same benefits to renters has a lot of obvious appeal even if it does nothing to fix overall price increase trends.
No it's not. If I walk into SF with 2 million dollars, there are more than a few people who would give up their 1 million dollar house for that amount of money. My desire and means to live there would just have to exceed their own.
If someone is in a rent-controlled situation, they were simply lucky to get there first, and there is no mechanism in place for anybody else to rotate into that position.
Yeah, property _ownership_ not property renting. They work differently for a reason. When housing prices rise, owners are incentivized to sell. When rents rise on rent controlled buildings, renters are incentived to stay put, even if they don't need the space. This incentivizes building owners to not maintain the buildings since they know renters won't leave anyway.
There's tons of ways to make housing affordable without resorting to policies that have been rejected almost unanimously by economists.
I'll give you a direct answer that no one wants to say, but disclosure, I no longer live in SF due to work. I also don't own land or have a financial incentive to have high prices.
TLDR: I would rather have SF as it is now (because i like it now and dislike change) than an affordable SF. "Manhattanization" is worse than the attempt of keeping it affordable.
I would rather (to a limit) have an expensive SF than an SF that has more people in it. The manhattanization is not likely to drive down prices significantly. I read a article (cant find source) that said there would need to be ~4x the number of rental units in the city before prices fell meaningfully due to supply/demand. Even if the actual number isn't true, demand is so high that i don't believe any achievable increase in housing would help at any meaningful way.
If you accept the premise that prices won't go down (this is an assumption of course), you need to consider if more people would be better. Of course more people can enjoy it, and that is good, but here is why i think it will make the city a worse city:
SF is great in many ways. There are so many parks, all so close together so its very fun and walkable. So many restaurants and shops all so close. Walking SF is a joy compared to many cities, where most of SF is great for walking while some cities only have a few neighborhoods that are great for walking. This is my opinion on SF, not all agree.
The "manhattanization" of SF would destroy some of that by changing the "street view" details of the city. Sure, its just more people and likely no fewer "things", but bigger facades that change less "per foot" are more boring - bigger buildings tend to have fewer doors and things per foot of sidewalk frontage. Not universally true, but often true. Also, SF has some great historic architecture, and that would get lost as new building destroy the existing "feel" of a neighborhood. Some neighborhoods this would be good, but some are great how they are, and new buildings should improve not deteriorate the beauty of the city.
Sure, i agree. Not everything needs to be saved, but some things should be. We have museums full of modern art, and museums with 4k year old Egyptian stuff. Often the same museum.
I think i may have overstate the "save the old". Its not just about age, although we should save nice things that are old. Its primarily that "big" buildings (new or old) tend to be less human-scale than smaller ones (new or old).
I hear you. I get where people are coming from in a general sense. On the other hand, it strikes me as a kind of provincialism. I feel like the same argument could have been made in 1930s San Francisco: “ok everybody, time to hit the pause button, I like it here now!” But on the other hand people should have a say in what their cities are like and how they develop.
If you want a city for enjoyment then realize that this is something only the rich can afford. The poor don't have enough money to afford an increasing level of luxury.
Ok, but this requires governments to build competitive cities where the less well off can thrive. The way California is going is that literally every city is thinking the exact same thing you just said. There is nowhere to go.
How is it remotely hard to understand that someone doesn't want their neighbhourhood and greater neighbourhood plowed into the ground and replaced with skyscrapers?
They can disagree about it sure, but it should't be remotely hard to 'understand'.
America is a very large places, there are tons of places for people to build out and build up if that's a primary issue.
The most vertical city in the US - NYC - is one of the least affordable.
In fact - the 'most dense' places tend to be the least affordable, paradoxically.
So even in the event affordability becomes a primary concern, even then the answers may not be more obvious.
More than likely getting different companies to move to adjacent areas might be a more suitable problem to the affordability crisis.
Surely Morgan Hill, Pleasanton, Fremont or Santa Rosa could equally opt to 'build up'.
Yes, San Francisco is a perfect city, it shouldn't change because it was already perfect in 2020 and by keeping it that way it will stay perfect in 2120. Anything you do will only make it worse.
This is true in many, many places: as zoning, safety, access, and environmental rules evolve most older buildings become not buildable under current rules.
Our national housing stock is FULL of places with narrow winding stairs, lead paint, full flow toilets and shower heads, untempered glass, single pane windows, uninsulated walls or ceilings, ungrounded outlets, undersized plumbing, sketchy chimneys, springy floors, etc.
I'm surprised the number isn't closer to 80-90%, especially with the recent energy efficiency rules.
This article specifically addresses buildings that are only illegal because of zoning. They aren’t including buildings that are unsafe due to building regulations like firecodes, ADA, etc.
Yeah, but let's be clear though: the problem is bad zoning, not zoning itself. The fact that SF prohibits apartments in 76% of the city, according to the article (which, I'm assuming, excludes places like Golden Gate Park) is an abomination in itself. Literally just allow more apartment buildings, let buildings get built higher, and make a couple other tweaks for higher density housing, and zoning becomes a non-problem.
After that, all you have to deal with are the NIMBYs. Le sigh.
Zoning originally was driven by legitimate fears of tuberculosis and other diseases, and it emerged as an extension of building and safety codes which had developed in response to innumerable deadly tragedies.
Though, some of the more famous court cases that later secured broad zoning powers evinced mixed motivations clearly implicating class tensions.
I once took a Land Use seminar in law school. My professor, as well as numerous authors on the subject, always seemed incredulous and even cynical about professed concerns w/ tuberculosis and similar health concerns. But over the years since I've lost count the number of times I've come across non-legal historical writing directly or indirectly reflecting fears about tuberculosis, the prevalence of miasma theory, etc, so I no longer second guess the earnestness of those early regulations and court cases.
The powerful will always coopt laws and institutions to their advantage. That's almost the definition of power--the capability to do that. It's unavoidable. That dynamic doesn't by itself negate, post hoc, the original legitimacy of those laws and institutions. Of course, earnestness alone doesn't justify them at inception, either.
I'm literally saying it doesn't matter how they came into place. Zoning per se is irrelevant. It's inflexible and out of date zoning that's the problem. You don't have to go full on Houston and eliminate all zoning to solve this particular aspect of the problem.
The renters suffering aren’t actual current renters so much as the would-be renters who can’t actually become renters in the City because there are no units available for them to rent.
> How can someone say with a straight face that it's unjust people who don't live in a jurisdiction have no say in how it's run?
AFAICT, no one said it was unjust that nonresidents don’t vote in city elections. It was raised as a reason the policy was unlikely to be changed at the city level, because the people adversely effected aren’t voters in the city.
What collapse? In all but the most deplorable areas houses will have multiple offers within days of listing, starting even before any marketing effort. In many cases we're talking cash over the asking price. This isn't coming mainly/only from the tech sector. The number of people with FAANG salaries simply isn't sufficient to support the large number of multi-million dollar homes here. A lot of it is absentee (foreign) investors (for example, just under 20% of purchases in San Mateo as recently as 2019).
At best we might see a slight cooling in the rise in already absurd prices for property out here.
I've been reading about the "imminent" collapse of the SF housing bubble for essentially my entire adult life. Even the actual housing bubble implosion in '07 barely put a dent in it.
Current median home price in SF is $1.3M. 60% of that is $780k. You can definitely buy for that in Albany, Richmond, or El Cerrito. The nice neighborhoods in Richmond are basically in the south part of the city, anyway, which cuts down the distance. Unless you're talking about 30 minutes out in hardcore rush hour traffic, these cities will definitely fit the bill.
Daly City fits, since $1M is 77% of $1.3M -- not that I'd particularly like living in Daly City, but it is 23% less than buying in SF.
San Mateo median price is the same as SF, so, obviously, you don't look there for home bargains.
Seriously, just troll Redfin or Realtor.com sometime.
Edit: my bad re: 60%. I should be looking at $520k homes. There are definitely places in worthwhile neighborhoods in that range in Richmond. I've seen them. But, if you revise that number down to 40%, a lot of stuff opens up. So, 20-40% is a better range than 20-60%.
A more extreme example: 1/5 of all housing stock in China are vacant concrete boxes, and people are still complaining about apartment prices reaching to the sky.
Imagine cities both 20 times the size of SF, and being one fifth vacant.
To be fair, housing in China is used as a savings vehicle. They have few, if any, social safety nets available to them, and don't trust the stock market.
Housing in the US doesn't have nearly the same speculative force behind it.
Vacant != on the market. I know a few people living in china, all of whom own more apartments than they can use (in the same neighborhoods no less, so it's not even vacation homes).
They do it because it's the best way to invest their savings, so new apartments are usually spoken for before they're even built and often unoccupied until they're sold again.
Is it legal for private citizens to rent out vacant housing units in China? If so, that doesn't surprise me very much. Every landlord has more housing units than they can use.
Yes it's legal but the people I've talked to don't do it. There's a stigma of renting over buying so the rent/home value ratio is way off compared to the US. Renting out the homes wouldn't really net much profit overall and they don't want to deal with being a landlord anyway, so they let the apartments sit empty.
It won't collapse (over the long term [0]) because the underlying reason is a savings glut. There are dozens of factors that contribute to the savings glut and I don't see any signs of them going away for the next 15 years. Of those dozen factors at least one third would have to go away all at once for there to be a sustained housing crash.
[0] The 2008 recovery happened within 3 quarters...
What bubble? People will never leave San Francisco en masse. The "exodus" during the pandemic will be the greatest outflow of people from the city for the next decade.
San Francisco can build more housing to accommodate a higher population or let its poorest citizens get priced out. Either way people will not stop coming.
You zone for what you want to build, not what is there already. The later wouldn't make any sense.
The arguments generally given are to show that we're preventing building for density, pointing out NIMBYism, etc, but even if we were doing the polar opposite, the same would be true:
If you have a town that's all single family, and zoning rules pass that any and all buildings MUST be 3+ stories, then all the existing houses wouldn't be allowed under current zoning laws. The fact that they're not allowed under current zoning rules is irrelevant. The question is only if the new zoning rules are good for what you want to see or not.
Even if you allowed skyscrapers, most existing houses and buildings would be illegal because of code. The map on this particular page mentions it only looks at zoning, so it's still very valid.
But my point is saying "X amount of homes would be illegal to build" is completely pointless and just meant to rile people up. OF COURSE most buildings are illegal to build today. We don't build like we use to for a variety of reasons. Even if you forget about building code, there's also rules around minimum amount of affordable units that older buildings didn't need to follow. Zoning is a specific one and yes, it's often problematic and regressive. Let's focus on that.
The building code and fire code thing is not true. Building codes are actually very flexible. There are plenty of ways to build a building to look exactly like almost any old building and fully comply with all codes.
Look like old buildings? Sure. But actually be the same? No. Hell, the building I live in is less than 12 years old and the electric panel is no longer to code, the HVAC condensate line is no longer to code, the damn stairs are no longer to code, the freagin dryer vent is no longer to code. They were all to code when they were built.
Same is true of used cars, aircraft, boats and any number of regulated products. Change any tiny reg and all the previous stock "could not be built today". It doesn't mean much. Buildings last decades, centuries, far longer than any zoning board decision.
Aircraft are a different case than the others above. Aircraft are built to a type certificate and once it's issued so long as that type certificate is not revoked, airplanes can (in fact, must) be built today in conformance with that type certificate. Modifications to that type certificate are permitted, but they do not require full conformance with current regulations.
My 1997 airplane was built on a type certificate first issued in 1956 (under CAR-3 regulations) and amended to include my model in 1969. Many regulations changed between 1969 and 1997. Beechcraft could build one today under that type certificate, even though they couldn't get that exact type certificate newly issued today (CAR-3 has been replaced by Part 23 requirements).
Yes but the new aircraft would have to have things like modern electronics, not the pure original spec. The wings could be unchanged but the radio set would be to current standards, incorporating things like adsb transponders that didn't exist in the 50s.
The only avionics change since 1930s that would be required is radio with modern channel spacing, unless you want to fly in controlled airspace, then a transponder would be added (which would incorporate ads-b functionality, whether by integrated or add-on GPS)
Our national housing stock is FULL of places with narrow winding stairs, lead paint, full flow toilets and shower heads, untempered glass, single pane windows, uninsulated walls or ceilings, ungrounded outlets, undersized plumbing, sketchy chimneys, springy floors, etc.
My house from 1890 scored 10 for 10 on your list. I addressed about half of them over the decades, but the other half are just, "It's ok, we'd do it better if we did it over." The additions and any bits "touched" have to meet current code, but the old parts are allowed to be what they are.
I don't feel it detracts from my living experience at all. (I did take care of the "this can kill you" part of the list as well as most of the single pane windows and uninsulated areas.)
A couple of the code mandated changes are definitely negatives, as are a couple of "slightly off" construction problems which required space wasting and slightly dangerous constructs in the house instead of just accepting that the wall at the bottom of the stairs is 2 inches closer than code allows.
One of the first things I do when moving into a new place is remove all the flow restrictors on the faucets and shower heads. And I replace at least some of the LED bulbs with beautiful, soft, full-spectrum incandescent bulbs. Two quick fixes to improve your quality of life.
I can totally understand the flow thing--less flow means longer, more annoying shower.
I've found that the soft white LED bulbs are a tolerable replacement for full spectrum incandescent. I stick with LED because I'm lazy and I don't have to change them as frequently.
However, when the LED bulbs DO go out they do the flickering thing which is maddening. I'd prefer incandescent's total failure to produce light over the flickering fail mode any day of the week.
Some LED bulbs are pretty ok. But man do they have way more failure/annoyance modes. I've got can lights in most of my house, and it's much nicer if you match a room up for color temperature, but also start latency, and dimmer compatibility. With incandescent as long as the wattage was the same/close and the color type was the same, you could mix and match different manufacturers; now if one bulb goes out, I might have to replace the whole room if I don't have any like for like spares, the model may have been updated so I can't get a new bulb like the old one.
Reading *Golden Gates* by Conor Dougherty right now! If anyone is deciding on a book to read about the history of housing policies, then I recommend it to anyone in California over *The Color of Law* (which is also a great book).
Does a great job of painting how decades of decision making led to this point despite decades of warnings.
Seconded. Well researched goodie. He spoke with a wide variety of sources to get his data right. From essentially homeless to Eli Broad - the B in KB Homes.
I'd be shocked if this wasn't true in just about every city proper (not suburbs).
For fun one time, some friends and I checked the modern basic lot requirements against our homes, and every single one of us failed some check.
Almost everyone had issues with setback, some were footprint to lotsize ratios, and one minimum lot size.
The city just found a massive plot of undeveloped land (hugedefunct corporate campus is being developed) and we're all kinda curious how different those homes are going to look, being the first major development of new homes in the city in quite some time.
It's amazing how much we let city governments get away with zoning restrictions. Almost universally city governments will say they're "pro affordable housing", yet they will never budge an inch and give away some of their zoning power.
The market produces market rate housing. Developers prefer to develop higher priced housing because the effort to develop a housing project is mostly independent of the number of units and the market segment for which they are built...a few low cost units is about the same effort and risk as a lot of high priced units.
Actually, it's probably harder to build low cost units because bankers prefer a higher upside and psychologically tend to identify more with wealth than poverty...I mean people usually don't go into banking to alleviate poverty, misery, and suffering...although I have known bankers and they were all pretty decent people. It's just that their day to day work was serving wealth.
People in office and writing legislation also tend to be home-owners and landlords.
I recently became a home-owner, and while I live in a place that is undeniably in a housing crisis, I don't want 'them' to make drastic changes to housing policy now that I have most of my net worth tied into a home. From a clinically logical perspective, I fully support drastic changes that would make building more and denser housing MUCH easier. Just -ya know- not so close to my back yard.
There's a lot of reasons for zoning, not all of them are bad, even if most are. Preventing building a duplex around single family homes? Probably doesn't have fantastic reasons behind it.
Preventing building a 50 stories skyscraper in the middle though? Obviously not gonna happen, but if it did, can the infrastructure, the sewers, the streets take it? Is it just going to make thousands of people miserable, can the schools take it? Obviously this is a silly extreme case, but there's plenty of borderline situations that aren't super cut and dry.
Having SOME zoning in certain areas makes sense. Of course the ones discussed in this case aren't for these reasons, and they're probably bad. There's still a lot of subtleties to that problem space.
It always baffled me how people make expensiveness mandatory by law so nobody can get a home without at least some decades of mortgage. Some times I envy primitive people who would just build a hut when and where they need from what they find around and no authorities would come after them and say "you must buy a landed spaceship to live in and spend the rest of your life paying for it".
Since 65-70% of SF residents are renters from what I can gather, how/why exactly do these laws keep passing that restrict housing and increase home prices and rent?
They touch on this sort of indirectly, but homeowners aren't the only objectors. Often NIMBYs don't like development because they don't want to live next to a tall apartment building with lower income people, for example.
Remember that the people that create and enforce these rules are the same people in charge of all the other rules
that govern San Franciscans' lives. Look carefully and you'll see the same designs in transportation, education , policing, etc. It doesn't stop at housing.
I don't think this is true for the reasons listed, though. It isn't like they are illegal because they have old pipes or something. The interactive shows they are illegal because they are duplexes or apartments where now they only allow you to build single family homes.
I suppose you could go to smaller cities/towns and say that it would also be illegal to build apartments there - but the types of houses in suburban towns built 50 years are still very legal today.
Yeah, that's why the title is kind of meaningless here. If you did the opposite (make it illegal to build single families in an area with only single families, to promote density), you'd end up with the exact same issue.
A title like "Zoning laws explicitly forbid increasing density" or something would be more interesting/accurate. Saying "X% of houses would be illegal OMGZ!", while true, is not particularly productive as it implies its bad, but the a solution using zoning to increase density could have the exact same headline.
The map also explicitly lists "number of homes that would be illegal", presumably for that reason. If you make it illegal to build anything smaller than a duplex, on a lot that currently contains a single family home, the "number of illegal homes" on that lot is still zero.
I'm aware of very limited cases in which there is minimum density zoning on lots. It is just that given a vacant lot within a demand area developers are going to naturally build the highest density legally allowed.
I'm fairly certain you could buy an apartment building in Manhattan, demolish it, and build a picket-fence house there. It was just lose you tens or hundreds of millions of dollars so no one has done it.
From what I can tell the way that interactive was constructed it would also highlight a lot if it fell into the category you mentioned but I can't find any where this is the case. It is a one-side problem and to pretend like it is two-sided is a bit detached from reality.
> These buildings aren't illegal to build because of safety reasons or any construction deficiencies - they are only illegal due to regulations called zoning laws that San Francisco passed to restrict the density of housing in certain areas, originally to keep poor minorities out of white neighborhoods.
You're going to need some sort of evidence to back that up. Most of the restrictions are around keeping current homeowner's values artificially inflated.
"White communities are more likely to have strict land use regulations (and whites are more likely to support those regulations).[25][26] Strict land use regulations are an important driver of housing segregation along racial lines in the United States.[25]"
>> blacks moving into a neighborhood would decrease property values.
I'm not from U.S but why would black people decrease property values? Isn't this really about poor people (that in the U.S are more likely to be black) decrease property values?
I'm reading this claim every day across so many subjects now—that the goal was racist in origin. Not knowing anything about SF myself, I am however tempted to ask if __classism__ is the better culprit. Classism can masquerade as racism (as in this example), creating the same outcomes, but it requires a different antidote to treat.
That's nonsense. Houston absolutely has the same problems and many many buildings and home that exist in Houston would also be illegal to build today under city ordinances. The reason Houston doesn't have the same degree of housing shortage is Houston has over 668 square miles of land (1779 square miles for Harris county) vs 40 for San Francisco.
Is it a problem? Or is it awesome that they were able to raise the bar for newly constructed residences?
I've lived in newer homes over the last couple of decades. It's awesome to have smoke detectors in every room, grounded outlets, GFCI outlets, well-insulated windows and exterior walls, firewalls, plenum-rated cables, safe and easy-to-maintain plumbing.
The market would've only demanded a subset of these improvements. And the least expensive builders would've just built residences without them.
This isn't talking about lacking safety features that make the properties "illegal" to build -- they are referring to the minimum parking requirements, minimum lot setbacks, maximum height limits and other zoning restrictions that effectively legalized single family homes at the expense of all other varieties of housing. None of those things are connected to safety, only to NIMBYish ideals.
Also, because land is scarce and people need a place to live, houses will sell, regardless of their regulatory condition.
Also, newer homes are amazing in terms of heath retention and isolation. Having lived in buildings from before the war with either none of very little isolation.or even worse, i once lived in a home with a split in the wall thanks to a WW2 bmobin raid. The crack was not an issue in regards to the structural integrity, but it made isolation mood.
No one is saying housing and building regulation is always bad; those are good!
It's just regulation promoting low density is bad.
Libertarians love this example to troll the statist left that the state can't be trusted to control things wisely, but I'm just happy to hope undoing these things can be bipartisan, because the real estate lobby is so strong it's needed.
This is why zoning is dumb. How do most cities zone? They draw borders around what is already there and make it a zone based on what is there. The first effect is to freeze those areas how they already are.
The places that are not built up get borders around them too. Those places are zoned for a particular use based on the wild ass guess of some elected officials. Since those elected officials cannot see the future, those wild ass guesses are often wrong.
Around the turn of the century, I worked for the city of St. Petersburg (FL). More than sixty percent of the single family housing was non-conforming to base flood elevation requirements. Much of what wasn't in the flood plane was non-conforming to zoning because people built on the high ground first.
And then there was Isla del Sol. Dredged from Boca Ciega Bay, it destroyed the incredibly productive fishery and is the reason the ACoE became involved in reviewing projects for environmental impact.
i would assume so.
Atleast in my experience (in a northern european country with many 120> old houses) almost no houses are strictly "up to modern standards" in terms of building regulations. Usually it is something minor or energy inefficient. Using single pane windows for instance.
Most dangerous regulations are taken quite seriously however, Electrics are usually old(80's and later) but not ancient(pre-ww2 - reconstruction).
Water and gas supply is usually in good order because of the strict laws regarding those regulations.
80% of Toronto basement units are illegal as well. Gov looks away because housing supply more pressing. Sometimes I envy Japan, enough disasters like earth quakes and hurricanes for urban resets. Urban environments are just like forests, sometimes you need a controlled burn to rebalance ecosystem. Entrenched bad forestry and urban policies lead to bad environments. Sometimes you just need an act of god to shake things up.
"These days, many people who don't have explicitly racist motivations support zoning laws because they like the status quo, even though the status quo bans the construction of affordable housing in most of the city."
I don't think status quo is the only reason. Property values near more dense development are likely to suffer.
Moving to 1200sqft minimum lot size seems reasonable but 500sqft lot is tight, with little if any outdoor space. Plus 500sqft would not be friendly to older people or people with bad knees because of stairs.
Other people want to live in affordable housing in proximity to transit and parks -- so your preferences and theirs are in strict conflict. If you want space and outdoors, feel free to buy a place with those features. Making it illegal to build anything but your preference is insane.
Your argument boils down to righteous dignity. You presume that it's below another person's dignity to live in, gasp, 500sqft. This is obviously nonsense. I've lived in less. It is important to understand that scaling down square footage is the simplest path to creating market-rate, sustainable, affordable housing
