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The solution is the same as every other time this comes up. Upzone the city. They tried this at the state level with SB827. That bill was flawed but the idea was good.
The city could fix this for itself if they could get the political will to do so. Follow the lead of Minneapolis, and make R1 zoning good for up to four units, instead of single family. That one change alone would make a huge difference.
People are afraid whole city blocks would be converted, but that wouldn't happen. Single family homes with good transit would slowly be sold to developers who would replace them with quads, bringing in increased taxes so that transit could be expanded, leading to more SFHs near transit, and so on.
It's just that the people who have SFHs don't want to ruin the "character" of their neighborhood.
Bingo. The people working on this include, but are not limited to:
They need all the help they can get against monied NIMBY interests.
I am curious - how old were the houses that were getting demolished in Minneapolis?
A lot of the houses that would be torn down SF are nearing 100 years old. That probably sounds comically young to people from Europe, but SF's neighborhoods are among the oldest west of the Mississippi.
You put "character" in quotes... but how far would you go with this? Would you support the right of a property owner to tear down an old building in the French Quarter of New Orleans and replace it with a modern steel and glass structure? How about an old building in the left bank of Paris?
The complicated thing about NIMBYism is that not all backyards are alike.
I say this with full acknowledgement that SF's housing policy has created a horrendous situation. But I actually do think it's possible to build substantially more density here, close to public transportation, without tearing down the older neighborhoods.
I've lived in San Francisco for 5 years now, and one thing I find ridiculous about this city is how ancient most of the residential buildings are. I'm currently living in an apartment that was built in the 60's, and have been to open houses of single family homes originally built in the 40's. Nowhere else I have ever lived would people be proud of that fact. In Atlanta and Vegas and Seattle I was able to find nice modern apartments to live in that weren't thin-walled, ancient plumbing, creaky floor wooden buildings well past their expiration date. But in San Francisco somehow people get offended when I suggest that an old building would be better torn down and rebuilt. (And yes there are some modern condos/apartments in SF but they are all in the range of $4000/m for a one bedroom and mostly clustered in the Dogpatch or SOMA which isn't a great area to actually live in my experience)
To answer the parent's question, I absolutely would support the right of a property owner to tear down an old building in the French Quarter of New Orleans and replace it with a modern steel and glass structure. Likewise with an old building in the left bank of Paris. I'd even like to incentivise that with tax breaks or whatever other levers are available.
Something that is sometimes missed in these debates is that the most egregious areas are not actually SF. I mean, NIMBYism is pretty bad there, but it's way worse in, say, Marin county, Palo Alto, and other locations that want to keep playing suburb make believe instead of acknowledging they're part of a large metro region and allowing the market to add housing.
I’m ok with building materials, architecture, and any range of requirements that a community wants to place on new structures to maintain a certain “look” to a neighborhood. Those can be factored easily into costs.
I’m not ok with a community preventing new development entirely, especially taller and denser development. Even worse is that red tape can delay a project for years if not permanently, making the cost of owning property for development (mortgage, taxes, size of eventual payoff) uncertain.
If you set clear rules, the market will adapt. When everything is banned or uncertain, developers are much less likely to take risks.
> I am curious - how old were the houses that were getting demolished in Minneapolis?
> A lot of the houses that would be torn down SF are nearing 100 years old. That probably sounds comically young to people from Europe, but SF's neighborhoods are among the oldest west of the Mississippi.
I grew up and currently live in south Minneapolis, my parents house was built in 1908, most of the neighbors houses were built from around then to the early 1920s. The place I'm currently in was built in 1914, so seems to be about the same age as the homes your describing in SF.
110 years ago when my house in Calgary was built, they were sold as kits by Sears. they're essentially the same cookie cutters that there are now.
The first people to get displaced by upzones are the ones who can't afford to continue to live there after a place gets redeveloped. I think this is really the key - you can "save" the castro, the painted ladies, and the billionaire estates in cow hollow, but you need to give people living in upzoned areas a 1-1 swap. The housing that gets built needs to be AFFORDABLE, and the people that would be displaced if they turned Excelsior into towers can't wait 10 years for rents to come down.
So here's an equitable solution that requires too much money/effort/organization/faith:
* Raise land taxes on the millionaires and billionaires in the mansions and areas that don't get upzoned - you can't have your cake and eat it too
* Everyone in the area of an upzone gets their rent frozen, and gets to move into a new "equivalent" apartment as new ones are built - in the same neighborhood. Rent is unfrozen when the median rent price lowers back to where their rent is now, or equal difference between median and theirs at freeze time.
* Govt pays market rate for the housing out of land taxes - city-wide rent control for up-zoned communities, in order to move into new places.
* Create a special economic zone in some of the upzoned communities - prioritize building and reducing regulations like sight-lines, and people in that community get first dibs at new housing (with their rent subsidies, or if buying a new place).
* Flurry of building occurs, eventually excess is made and maybe prices go down, but the buildings are less of a soulless shell for rich people, formed off the remains of the community that was once there, but filled with people who've lived there.
This is why I'm looking with anticipation at the plans to develop downtown San Jose. Nothing is "sacred" there, so you avoid all these discussions and get on with building.
It seems extremely unlikely that affordable housing will ever happen in the Bay Area, since that would essentially mean a crash of the housing market (maybe even by government intervention). This would of course be extremely unwelcome. As such any acceptable solution would have to be ineffective. And an ineffective solution have little chances of counteracting the inertia of current developments.
Property values don't usually go down when you increase density. Look at NYC or Tokyo or Paris. If anything it usually makes the land value go up, especially if a developer knows they can buy it and put four units in it's place.
Hard to say. SFH owners typically own the dirt beneath their house. A lot with the right to build a 3-story block of 3/2 flats might be worth considerably more than a lot with a single 3/2 SFH.
Would a crash of the housing market be unwelcome?
The people that lose in such a crash are property developers, landlords, and home-owners that planned to sell and buy in another region.
The people that benefit in such a crash include people who currently can't afford to live here, renters that currently can't afford to buy here, renters who currently have too many roommates, renters who can't afford to leave their rent-controlled unit, people who could buy a larger or nicer place, businesses where people spend the portion of their income which no longer goes to housing, businesses that can hire into the region more easily, and everyone who enjoys a community with a more diverse range of residents.
You take it as a given that a crash associated with actually affordable housing would be unwelcome. I think it should only be unwelcome to those who see the housing supply as an investment vehicle, rather than as housing. To those who just want to live here, or live here more comfortably, a crash might be very welcome indeed.
> The solution is the same as every other time this comes up. Upzone the city.
I'm all for increasing density in the Bay Area, but it is very easy to overstate as that "solving the problem". You will see more people being able to live and work in SF (which is overall good for society) and have more disposable income, but you won't by any means make SF an "affordable" city full of "children".
On the affordability side:
* There is enormous pent-up demand to live in SF. If you drop rents $100/month, a lot more people are now willing to live there. Even more if rents drop another $100/month.
* It's more expensive to build tall buildings (per sq foot of habitable space) than single family homes or townhomes.
* You end up with an equilibrium point that is cheaper, but by no means on par with Central Valley pricing.
On the children side:
In America, there's a very strong cultural attachment for children to grow up with a significant amount of space. Single-family homes and town homes work for most; condos and apartments do not (esp. when developers in SF build very few new condos/apartments with more than 2 bedrooms)
Additionally, having lived in both SF and the south bay with kids, very dense environments [1] are more annoying to raise kids in due to the difficulty of shuttling them from place to place. Combined with higher pricing per square foot and lack of a guarantee on using neighborhood schools, the needle quickly swings to choosing to live in suburbs once you have kids.
[1] As in more dense than SF residential neighborhoods, which are already quite dense by US standards.
For children, it doesn't help that SF public schools are terrible, and the demand for private schools is so high they can't keep up. That's why most people move out of the city when they have kids.
> There is enormous pent-up demand to live in SF
While that's true, you do need to be careful with that argument. You get people arguing that eeeeeveryone wants to live in San Francisco. And others arguing that everyone wants to live in Boulder, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, and even right here in Bend, Oregon (really!) because they're all convinced that their town is the bestest place on the planet.
> It's more expensive to build tall buildings (per sq foot of habitable space) than single family homes or townhomes.
This isn't really an issue when building costs are far below market prices for either of these. Obviously, supply would drive prices down despite higher building costs.
Why is this fundamentally considered bad? If the majority of residents in a given area want to keep the zoning as-is, why do you (or I) have any right to force them to change? I personally don't mind living in multi-story apartment buildings but I don't get the widespread notion that a city of mostly SFH = morally bad. And frankly, if increasing density actually helped property values wouldn't you expect a place like NYC to be more affordable?
> If the majority of residents in a given area want to keep the zoning as-is, why do you (or I) have any right to force them to change?
Because: (a) the "why should you be able to tell people what to do?" argument really runs the other way, as zoning is a way of telling property owners what they can and cannot do with their property; (b) rising home values cause renters to be forced out of their homes unnecessarily; (c) banning new housing in one city causes gentrification in other nearby cities (which is why for example East Palo Alto and Stockton came out in support of SB 50).
> And frankly, if increasing density actually helped property values wouldn't you expect a place like NYC to be more affordable?
Fortunately we have economists to study these things instead of drawing conclusions from single data points, and the economic consensus is that supply and demand does in fact apply to housing.
I don't get the widespread notion that a city of mostly SFH = morally bad
Forget morality. A city with a large demand for housing that refuses to allow higher density is inevitably going to end up only being affordable to the very wealthy, with others forced to move, or out on the streets, or clinging to rent-controlled units with hostile landlords. If that's what you want, then by all means continue the current policies.
And frankly, if increasing density actually helped property values wouldn't you expect a place like NYC to be more affordable?
Manhattan holds a lot more people than SF, and there are reasonable cheaper options such as Queens and New Jersey.
It's as morally wrong as eating meat or paying minimum wage or running your water while you brush your teeth. ie. it's not really all that bad in the grand scheme of things, but it's something that we know causes harm, generally to a vulnerable population, so we should want to do something about it.
Or the solution could be to do nothing. Do we all have to live in SF? If the people living there want to spend all their money on rent or mortgage interest it is fine by me.
Eventually, yeah, there's a breaking point and industry will abandon that area.
But in the meantime, excluding people from one of the most economically productive places on the planet is hugely detrimental for the 'marginal' people who end up not living and working there. The economy overall loses out a lot, too.
https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5901041/nimbys-are-costing-the...
Also: there's a climate change argument to all of this. Forcing people out of a region that actually claims to care about it into places like, say, Phoenix or Las Vegas or Dallas or other sprawly places entirely dependent on cars... is not a win for the environment.
> Single family homes with good transit would slowly be sold to developers who would replace them with quads, bringing in increased taxes so that transit could be expanded, leading to more SFHs near transit, and so on.
There's water around two-quarters of the city that means it is not possible to keep developing the extra layers of suburbia that you are describing.
I mean, it should be obvious that increasing the density of a city forever, cramming more and more people in, and developing more and more, is not sustainable however you try to do it.
He's talking about transit being expanded, not housing footprint.
More tax revenue means more money available to fund more lines from SFHs that currently exist elsewhere.
Why not? NYC is 50% more dense than SF. Clearly there's room to grow.
Or we could upzone Stanford and Palo Alto and no transit would be needed.
We could and should, but the article was about San Francisco. And let's face it, more people want to live in SF than PA or Stanford.
That one change alone would make a huge difference, yes. It would ruin neighborhoods. I know a person with a SFH in the geographic center of San Francisco. It's RH1 zoning. She would suffer greatly from "zoning good for up to four units".
Her street is peaceful. You could stand in it and play ball, not that she does. Free parking is plentiful. There are no loiterers or buses. Usually there are no pedestrians or moving cars. You'd take all that away from her.
She is surrounded by transit, not that it matters to her. She is too vulnerable to safely use it. There are two different MUNI lines and several different bus routes within a distance that many people would consider to be short. Transit expansion would be completely useless for her. I don't think she'd mind shutting down the transit.
She would be harmed if her environment were to change. Adjustment gets more difficult with age. Major change, like moving out of the area, might put an end to her independent living. It would also separate her from her community, particularly her church and some family.
+1
To NIMBYers: The "character" of your neighborhood is more important than cheaper housing for everyone--disproportionately helping lower income people?
> The solution is the same as every other time this comes up.
And this [1] study says it doesn't work.
> Freemark reaches two startling conclusions that should at least temper our enthusiasm about the potential of zoning reform to solve the housing crisis—conclusions that, interestingly enough, he has said he did not set out to find.
> First, he finds no effect from zoning changes on housing supply—that is, on the construction of newly permitted units over five years. (As he acknowledges, the process of adding supply is arduous and may take longer than five years to register.) Caveats and all, this is an important finding that is very much at odds with the conventional wisdom.
> Second, instead of falling prices, as the conventional wisdom predicts, the study finds the opposite. Housing prices rose on the parcels and in projects that were upzoned, notably those where building sizes increased.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/01/zoning-reform-house-cos...
The author, Yonah Freemark, wrote this article discussing the implications of his paper (https://urbanaffairsreview.com/2019/03/29/upzoning-chicago-i...). In short, he does not claim that upzoning “doesn’t work.” He says 5 years may have been too short a time to measure the changes in Chicago. He also highlights numerous possible reasons for the Chicago housing price increases that may differ from the California proposals (SB 827 last year, or SB 50 this year):
* “it targeted just areas around transit (rather than the city as a whole).” SB 827 and SB 50 are a much broader upzoning.
* “it was implemented in a city with relatively affordable housing (rather than very high rents, such as in San Francisco)”
* “they should take seriously the concerns of local residents who are worried that their housing costs will increase”. SB 50 exempts tenant-occupied housing and reserves a fraction of the units for low-income households.
I've heard this author speak about his paper, and he would be shocked and dismayed that you are mischaracterizing it to this degree. It's about a Chicago, a place which doesn't have a housing shortage that San Francisco has been working towards since the 80s.
San Francisco described in a 1930s era book about the Gold Rush:
"Despite the amazingly high cost of living and the extraordinary opportunities for frittering away money, everyone in early San Francisco was supremely confident that he would soon be able to return home with an incalculable amount of gold. Everything was conceived on a vast scale, and there was always plenty of cash available for any scheme that might be proposed, no matter how impossible or bizarre it seemed. No one hesitated to borrow money, ..."
Wow. This could still be said today. I wonder what it is about that city.
It’s beautiful in a perfect location with perfect climate. San Francisco will always be a desirable place to live.
This wsj article suggests that Tokyo, a much larger city, has been able to keep housing costs flat by building a much larger supply than most other city: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...
This could work in SF I think, as there's a lot of potential for up-zoning. On the other hand, the city is surrounded by water, so it doesn't leave a lot of space to expand.
Tokyo also has zoning that generally works on an "up to" basis, rather than prescribing narrow categories. For example, an area zoned for light retail can contain small businesses, but can also contain anything in one of the "lesser" zones, like small apartment buildings or single homes. It's a simple way to let the market build to demand for housing, as well as for upper-story residences or mixed-use business space to be extremely common.
There are vast tracts of vacant land in SF, and the whole western half of the penninsula is low-density housing.
What Tokyo has that the Bay Area lacks is excellent public transit, and a willingness to build at high density.
For the curious, 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13464747
SF will never be a place people will want to have children. Americans do not believe children can grow up in cities. They do not believe kids can take buses or trains. We're going to see the effect of this suffocating parenting style in a next generation that is dominated by fear and discomfort with unfamiliarity.
But SF has its own issues beyond those of many other American cities.
There are blocks and muni buses where many adults feel understandably uncomfortable with what they see during their normal commute. I see drug use and nudity and feces on the street almost daily. I've kicked needles while walking down SF sidewalks with some regularity. I'm not a parent, but in those conditions, I wouldn't want a kid I cared about to go around unchaperoned.
Yes, America may have a fixation on children needing yards and minivans, but SF could become a much more appealing place to raise kids if it we could better address factors like the cost of housing, or the opioid crisis.
Perhaps its American cities rather than American attitudes? I can't quite pinpoint why, but I would much sooner raise children in Paris than Los Angeles.
its mostly about school districts and housing costs. people don't want to rent forever and buying property in the city is generally prohibitive unless you're in the top sliver of income earners.
Of course, the Bay Area in general is comparable to other American metropolitan areas in terms of its number of children.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11735556/map-where-do-kids-live-in...
San Francisco: on the verge of pricing everybody out since 1850