Voting in primaries is the single most important thing anyone can do do improve the political situation not just in SF but in the country writ large.
As the article states, there's a large majority of the population in favor of relatively sensible rational policies. And where two sides disagree, there's a large majority in favor of sensible compromise. Only the most hardcore partisans and ideologues are intransigent. And yet only the most hardcore partisans and ideologues vote in primaries. In today's gerrymandered and politically segregated world, primaries are the only elections that matter in many places. Solution: everyone should vote in primaries.
This really isn't rocket science or difficult. Everyone thinks this is a hard-complex problem, it is not. This is a hard simple problem. (easy-hard; simple-complex)
1. Upzone SOMA district to 12 stories.
2. Remove requirement that buildings over 50yrs old in SOMA need to pass the historic building committee.
SF has a complicated review process that basically lets neighbors hold up permit approval indefinitely with appeals. Whether good or bad, it's there. Shadow laws are also in place and would need to be changed.
Changing a low to mid density neighborhood into a high density 12 story building neighborhood means a lot more than just removing height limits. Sufficient parks and retail/commercial space need to exist to ensure good quality of life, no one wants to live in a neighborhood full of condos & apartments and little else.
Likewise, there needs to be sufficient transit, SF Muni is already bursting at the seams, add a high density neighborhood without adding transit, and no one will be able to get out of the neighborhood.
Building high density housing is important but it's a lot harder than just removing a height limit.
Right. That's why the vote needs to be gotten out: If the rules are a problem, you need to change the rules. We live in a democracy, and there's a process for that. Get people on the council who want to change the rules and the rules will change.
Absolutely. If everyone voted, there would be far more incentive to please the most number of people, not just the most invested in the status quo, or some other ideological view.
It is true, we simply do need more units. And any way can seem like the way to go.
But aren't these suggestions a bit like in the late 90s when you would just add more beefy servers to a really slow web site? Even if these ideas would add the required 100,000 units to the market, how do you deal with the politics of making these two changes happen?
The housing shortage / underbuilding crisis is actually a wicked problem. Before throwing solutions onto the wall, we should understand its beastly nature better.
The difference is that servers don't self organize, they are static. People on the other hand make things happen. Relatively few small changes have outsized impacts because our current status quo is so optimized for the existing ruleset.
You wouldn't need to go that far to have a huge impact. High speed rail or hyper loop between SF and Tracy would open up the Central Valley and its vast expanses of open land.
Why not implement a massive property tax hike for non-owner occupied units - with exemptions for apartment complexes & other properties designed as rentals? Something along the lines of 15x the property tax for units not owner occupied for at least 2/3 of the year / ownership period (if less than a year).
We have that in Cambridge MA. Buts its the other way around, your assessed property value is lowered for tax purposes if you live there.
Honestly in my building near harvard square this hasn't seemed to prevent those from moving out from renting (rents have gone a little nuts here too). Its a decent idea, as it incentives people to sell when they move. We have had some people cashing out, because values are high.
"The City of Cambridge offers a residential exemption to property that serves as a property owner’s principal residence. To be eligible for FY17, the owner must own and occupy their property as their principal residence on January 1, 2016 shown on 2015 Massachusetts Income Tax."
In some cases, you can. One apparent problem in SanFran (and I've heard of it in NYC too) is unoccupied properties, which could be used for housing but aren't because their owners prefer to just sit on it and not use it at all (maybe it's a vacation residence or they're speculating its value will rise).
If you stick a massive tax on that, that deters that kind of behavior, and forces them to either rent out the property, or sell to someone who will either live in it or rent it out. This will increase the housing supply, which would then decrease the cost of housing overall by providing more supply and more competition. This wouldn't be a tax that people would actually pay, unless they're stupid; they would take steps to avoid paying the tax altogether.
Taxes don't make stuff more expensive: they deter behavior. The simple rule is: if you want less of something, tax it. Now, this isn't always true, but to an extent it usually is, especially for consumption. (It's not really true of income taxes usually; everyone usually wants more income, and needs some amount of income, so a tax on that income doesn't discourage that, unless the tax is so high or so wacky that it discourages working for additional income.) Here, we want people to stop leaving properties unoccupied, so we slap a giant tax on that so they'll stop doing it.
Yeah, I didn't get his logic, landlords don't pay property taxes, tenants do (though the tax benefit goes to the landlord).
Raising the cost to landlords in an sellers market like SF is just going to drive up rents - and Landlords will certainly be able to pass through their higher costs even to rent controlled tenants.
If the tax disincentivizes boomers from buying real estate at asinine prices and then seeking rents to pay the resulting mortgages as an alternative to the stock market, then that should make property cheaper as it reduces the demand.
No, you need to massively jack up taxes to increase supply, and it will work. But you don't jack up taxes on homes for rent, you jack them up on the homes that aren't for rent: houses which are just sitting unoccupied. The taxes will encourage the owners to either rent them out or simply sell them off to someone who will (or who will at least live there). That increases supply.
Here is an IDEA, shipping container housing, infinatley modular and to boot much cheaper, by almost half to 3 quarters the cost....i have been doing designs of these type of home for fun and you know what, i love them, not to mention the fact if i wanted i could pack em up and put them anywhere else, its not that we should seriously consider the change to the environment of San fran, for which i am sure there is merit in some cases, but why not make a ___location that can conform to your needs and then build how you want to build, live how you want to live, in a place that welcomes you... food for thought
Adding more low-density shipping container housing to SF doesn't seem like a solution to the housing problem. If people are happy living in a 200 sq ft shipping container, then it'd be much more space efficient to build more high rise micro-condo buildings.
Building more housing per se is only one of the problems.
A lot of quality of life problems will crop up as density rises. With that realization, calls for a "grand unified growth plan" and the corresponding environmental impact studies will surface. And that will take ... t .. i .. m ... e ...
Re. "quality of life problems", how about not being able to afford to live in SF? Does that qualify? If you don't like density or problems that arise due to density, don't live in dense places. There are plenty of less dense places.
Here's a radical idea: build tall buildings. Tokyo sits on a fault. They manage to build tall buildings.
Not being able to afford to live in SF is a problem for people who aren't already comfortably settled there.
Under the current political system, it takes just a handful of the "comfortably settled" to lever potential quality of life problems and create a giant obstruction to pro-growth policies.
This is how it goes in other parts of California too.
Isn't that how it's supposed to work? People that live in a community have the most weight in deciding policies for that community?
If employers stop coming to SF because of the lack of affordable housing, then maybe the community will change their minds. Or maybe that's exactly what they wanted.
If I were to base my answer to that on what I've been hearing over the last decade from discussions about immigration, free trade, globalization, etc I'd say something like
"No, how it's supposed to work is that every region must remain open to growth at all costs and from all sources, especially outside sources. And if there's a policy such as a zoning policy or a density goal that stands in the way of outsiders entering a region to settle there and grow the economy, then that policy is discriminatory and ought to be removed. This applies just as much to San Francisco as it does to Arizona. Blah blah blah."
But seriously now, where do we draw this line? I have no idea anymore. The debate has gone in every direction and twisted itself into so many knots I have no idea when a local government should have control over this and when it shouldn't.
Not being able to afford to live in SF is not a quality of life problem. If you can't afford it, don't live there. There are lots of places in the world that I can't afford to live in, but that doesn't really affect my quality of life.
The argument that many residents have against urbanization of SF by removing building height limits is that an urbanized SF is no longer "SF". Skyscrapers built on pilings down to bedrock are almost certainly more safer in an earthquake than most of the old low rise housing in SF, so earthquake safety is not the reason SF isn't full of high rises.
> Not being able to afford to live in SF is not a quality of life problem.
I would point out that article showing that the poor live longer in places like SF and NY. For others, access to a more productive, dynamic place to work carries a lot of benefits, and excluding them definitely hurts.
Where the map shows that areas up and down the California Coast (not just SF) show longer life for the poor?
However, I'm not sure that longer life correlates strongly with "quality of life" (as someone who watched a loved one undergo long slow decline and live about a year longer than he wanted to).
A homeless person that barely manages to eke out a living on the streets of SF may not be happier than a homeless person in Detroit that largely lives in shelters in Detroit, even if the SF homeless person lives longer.
> If you don't like density or problems that arise due to density, don't live in dense places. There are plenty of less dense places.
If you don't like expensive housing or problems that arise due to expensive housing, don't living in expensive places. There are plenty of less expensive places.
Note: I agree with density == good(in general) but you're using the same argument that the nimbys are using in SF.
Tall buildings [+] are why Tokyo is so affordable.
I live in the 2nd hottest neighborhood in the city. You can rent an apartment within 4 blocks of me, tomorrow, for $800 a month, and you'd have many choices. If you were willing to live further out or in a less prestigious neighborhood you could trade up on size, too.
[+] Tokyo is very much not monolithically tall buildings. I live in a 45 story highrise; less than 25 meters away there exists single-family housing and 3 story apartments. The average density is pretty high, though -- here in Meguro it is about 2.5x SF's citywide (50k people per square mile vs 20k).
Effective transit is what makes tall buildings in Tokyo work.
SF would need to invest tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in transit in order to make Tokyo style densities work. Just digging out the sides of Embarcadero station to allow two-sided boarding for BART is projected to cost a billion dollars.
If people who work in SF could also live in SF, wouldn't that reduce the demand for taking BART across the bay? Yes, that's oversimplifying things a bit, but the principle seems sound.
It's a chicken and the egg problem. If the population is denser, than public transport systems like light rail, become cheaper and more effective. If the amount of people within 1km (i.e. walkable distance) of a light rail system doubles, then people are closer to a train station and it's potential customer base has increased.
> A lot of quality of life problems will crop up as density rises.
Actually, as long as you allow mixed-use areas, density works out pretty well. What doesn't work is one huge skyscraper all by itself. Vastly preferable is larger areas of lower buildings, which can be anywhere from 2-3 stories, to 5-6, or higher as needs be.
Source: I spent most of the past 15 year in Europe and greatly enjoyed it.
Also: San Francisco is already kind of dense - it's not exactly rural suburbia.
My point is that it is denser than your average burb in the US already. People don't move to SF because they think they're going to have a single story ranch house with a big yard, so by increasing density, you're not radically changing things.
I think a large percentage of readers here live in the bay area, and there are lots of strong feelings about housing in SF and the Bay Area in general so these articles will keep coming.
It's undeniably a big issue in many parts of the US - especially the "booming" ones. Here in Oregon, we're getting tons of 'refugees' from California who, in turn, drive up prices here.
It's also a huge issue for anyone working for a startup in that area, especially for those who are no longer young and single and thus require a bit more in terms of their housing.
The main reason you moved there in the 90s is 1) because it was pretty and pleasant, and the culture was eccentric and liberal, and 2) because Willie Brown was unbelievably friendly to rezoning everything to accommodate you at the expense of the diverse people who used to be able to afford to live there. Now, astonishingly, the wealthy libertarian line is that the problem is that they won't let you continue doing it until the place looks like a giant housing project. SROs that can be slotted in by crane are hailed as a technological innovation.
"Manhattanization" is definitely a good word for it, because Manhattan is a cultural wasteland where no one interesting can afford to live, where the wealthy moved in the 80s because it was filled with interesting people.
As the article states, there's a large majority of the population in favor of relatively sensible rational policies. And where two sides disagree, there's a large majority in favor of sensible compromise. Only the most hardcore partisans and ideologues are intransigent. And yet only the most hardcore partisans and ideologues vote in primaries. In today's gerrymandered and politically segregated world, primaries are the only elections that matter in many places. Solution: everyone should vote in primaries.
TLDR: Vote in primaries or the crazies win.