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.
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.
Knowing a few NIMBYs among older generations, I suspect that the real objection to densification isn't actually property values, it's character of the neighborhood. Having the single-family home you raised your children in torn down for a luxury highrise feels like a tragedy whether you get $1M or $3M for it. That's why so many senior citizens don't sell at any price - they'll take out reverse mortgages and fritter away their retirement savings so that they can stay in the home that is familiar to them, even if they could just sell it for a few million and retire someplace cheaper with a higher quality of life.
On one hand, you have sentimental value. On the other hand, you have a crushing housing crisis that is causing incalculable financial strain on millions of people. I wonder which of these we should consider more important.
Do you have a source on that? Tokyo is famously known for having largely flat housing prices over the last 20 years[1]. In fact, in Japan, most houses are considered depreciating assets [2].
I’m not sure we have enough information to conclude that property values will never fall with increased density.
It could also be that property values never went up to begin with in Tokyo, and remained at market equilibriumm, I.e. prices there reflect simply the cost to produce the unit, plus some profit margin. Things never got out of hand in Tokyo like they have in SF and NYC (though the latter, to a much lesser extent).
The value of most commodities stays flat once it reaches that equilibrium (eg. most food, clothing).
The argument that housing prices in SF would fall with increased density seems to be another way of making the claim that SF housing is currently experiencing “surge pricing”, so to speak.
I never said, and don't believe, that housing prices would fall if the city were up zoned (per square foot). I think that prices per unit will fall if you make more units available.
Only if you sell. Otherwise, if you are truly successful with up zoning for affordable housing, not only will the market rate of houses fall but land to build on won't be scarce anymore either.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to on the one hand supply large amounts of affordable housing and on the other to not negatively affect those benefiting from the lack of it.
But ultimately it isn't me you have to convince, but those who would risk their property values. If you do that, then you have a solution to the situation.
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.
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.
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.
We would expect parcel prices to increase with upzoing - land becomes more valuable if more people are permitted to enjoy using it. That's the behavior that encourages developers to make multi-family housing.
Not everybody wants to get rich. Some people, especially the old, just want to stay in a familiar place. If you change that place, it is no longer familiar. Older people often struggle with change. People with memory problems can often get by for much longer if nothing much changes. If you make changes all around them, they might need to go into a nursing home and then struggle every day in the unfamiliar situation.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
They're talking about a circle of multi-family homes, surrounded by single-family homes, and steadily expanding the size of the circle of multi-family homes so density increases. But it's ok because the outer circle of single-family homes becomes accessible to public transport from taxes. But as the circle of multi-family homes keeps increasing... eventually you develop the last single-family homes and hit the ocean and there's no more single-family homes.
No. He's saying the opposite. That whole blocks won't convert en masse. That individual properties within the new zones will convert to multi-tenant, and that will drive an overall density increase and more taxes, benefiting all units in the area, even the SFHs that didn't convert.
If you currently own a SFH, it's entirely up to you whether the house stays that way or not. You can remain as-is, and enjoy the transit benefits that accrue from the deeper tax base.
I know one. She is geographically in the center of San Francisco. When I visit, I simply park in front of her house. There is plenty of space on the street, free of course. Her street is quiet. It would be reasonable to stand in the street playing catch.
Adding multi-tenant houses to her area would ruin it. Her street would become noisy, polluted, too crowded for parking, and too busy to play catch.
There is already transit around (two different MUNI lines and two different bus routes) within walking distance. That works for the able-bodied and less-vulnerable people, which she is not. Adding more transit is no benefit to her; she can't safely use the existing transit.
Property value doesn't matter to her. If she sold, where would she go? You might suggest a cheaper area, but why her instead of the other people? She has contributed to her community and wishes to continue attending her neighborhood church. She knows her way around; her mind is old and might adjust badly to new surroundings.
> 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.
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.
All of those places are desirable and do have pent up demand though. If I could cheaply buy a house in SF, Seattle, or Boulder... you bet I would!!! But I can't, so I rent as cheaply as possible in SF.
> 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.
Well, absent zoning laws, you'd build tall buildings. And you'd build more floors until the marginal cost of adding the Nth floor is just under the marginal selling price of the floor.
> And you'd build more floors until the marginal cost of adding the Nth floor is just under the marginal selling price of the floor.
No, you'd stop much earlier or it wouldn't be worth it.
> (so it always will be an issue)
Sorry, I can't follow you there. What would be the issue? Even the marginal cost of building the Nth floor at which you'd stop would be much lower than current market prices for a similar amount of residential space. So building enough of it would drive prices down.
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.
It’s not just the quality of the schools, it’s the lottery system. You have no idea where your kid is going to go to school, and there’s not a lot of control over it. While I understand the intent of making all the schools equivalent, in practice you don’t know if your kid is stuck in a school on the other side of the city or not. It’s super confusing.
We’ve been considering moving, but the lottery system keeping us from moving to SF. There’s other problems with the city too, but that’s the most serious one for us right now.
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.
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.
There's nothing wrong with not letting The Market optimize every square meter of real-estate you care about. Not to mention the selective application of what The Market entails - aren't zoning rights just as real as property rights, that The Market respects? Why not allow The Market to respond to high property prices by redirecting development elsewhere?
> aren't zoning rights just as real as property rights, that The Market respects?
No. "zoning rights" are not rights, they are rules applying to property that people own _and are subject to change_ much more fluidly than the ownership itself.
As I understand, by buying property, people get a vote on if the zoning should change, much like buying shares in a company gives you a vote on its decisions. So why are zoning rights, or rules, not part of the Market?
And the ability to do so is granted by the state. Thus efforts like SB 50 or Oregon's HB 2001 to take away some of the right to exclude different types of housing.
Only if it changes. I think the point is that if people are buying under current zoning, the market has already spoken. As such it becomes weird when people want the market to handle things, but not if they don't like what the market is saying.
Quite frankly, saying “The Market™ has spoken,” is a bullshit answer. The Market™ is merely the outcome of the rules we’ve setup. We decided as a society to establish certain regulations. People intentionally shaped it. To then turn around and act like this is some sort of natural occurrence and that the outcome is now somehow sacrosanct, is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. If we picked different rules, a different outcome would have happened. And if the outcome isn’t what we want, then we can change the rules, and a get a different outcome.
That's a fine point but would you please stop arguing aggressively in the flamewar style on HN? I feel like we've had to ask you this a lot. It isn't necessary to vent toxic fumes when making your substantive points: it makes your comments and this forum worse, and it isn't fair to your fellow HN users who restrain themselves from doing the same. You may not owe better to The Market, but you do owe better to the community you're part of here.
I don't disagree. I think the point "deogeo" was trying to make was that YIMBY often say that zoning should be removed so the market can take care of housing. But in effect the market already says that it doesn't value affordable housing. We might not like that, and want to change zoning, but that is still intervening in the market and should be recognized as such. But then you would also have to recognize other ways of intervening in the market as legitimate, like rent control. Which is something people usually don't want to do.
Well, yeah, I mean if you don't care about your fellow human beings or the environment, the current policies are working great.
Homeless people, moms and dads driving 2 hour commutes, people who would benefit from a more tolerant climate unable to live there, people unable to take good jobs... the human cost of people's NIMBYism is real, and it is staggering.
It amazes me that alternative solutions are never mentioned:
1) (short term) Make remote work much widely accepted, especially for software roles.
2) (long term) Build offices/centers (e.g.) jobs outside of Bay Area and CA. This is much more scalable and beneficial for the country than having one or two super concentrated centers. Why not have 20?
Teachers, nurses, janitors, waiters and so on can't work remotely.
Splitting things up that naturally group together likely has some costs. VC's might not want to invest in a startup in, say, Tulsa, OK. I've read that some are changing their minds, and it'll happen some, but clusters do happen for a reason, and fighting that may create some problems.
I've had a lot of similar thoughts. If VCs here want to tell their startups they have to be here, that's one thing, but I don't see why some of the tech mega-corps don't open more offices with a few hundred positions in places across the country. A few MBA-types I've talked to told me that just won't work but they didn't offer much of an explanation beyond some mumblings about looking for "only the best talent".
zoning rights are not as real as property rights, in fact they are the opposite. Zoning rights are your ability to limit what the actual owners of a property can do.
Which... might make some sense when we're talking about maybe not having that oil refinery next to a school.
But when we're talking about a 4-plex next to some single family homes because you don't want less wealthy people near you? That's a perversion of the idea in my opinion.
Yes, but Marin doesn't have the same number of jobs as SF and as out-of-whack jobs to housing ratio. Rent control was introduced a few years after the article and created a new haves-vs-have-nots divide of people protected by rent control vs. new entrants who have to pay vastly higher rates, i.e are subsidizing the former.
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.
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.
The entire peninsula is built on 1970s garden apartments without an update in 30 years. We need a solution to NIMBYism in the bay so badly - just making it more exclusive can't be the answer.
The Historic District in Tremé is causing a lot of problems where the predominantly black locals who don’t have the cash flow to keep the property up to code are being driven out by speculators who report every little historic ordinance violation to the city and then swoop in with a lowball offer after they have been served notice.
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.
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.
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.
I would say the breaking point has already been reached. There are heaps of better places to live with a vastly lower costs. All we need to do is convince the VCs to fund startups in these places and we can all forget about SF.
The problem is very few of them are better enough to be an advantage. Almost all of them have similar problem just at lesser scales, which means they can't handle much of a change. The things with place like SFBA and NYC is that as bad as they are you know what you get.
How about all that green space on both sides of 280 - we don't need that any more. We should also relocate all those graves in Colma being kept there by selfish NIMBY families.
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.
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, ..."
Also located on a major fault line with alternating drought & monsoon seasons and a propensity for wildfires. It's paradise, but temporary paradise.
The gold rush is deeply embedded in the Bay Area psyche. This is not a place to grow old; this is a place to seize the day and make the most of your youth. So much about the region is both wonderful and terribly fragile over time.
Yes, and it's also reinforced by the Bay Area's geography and climate.
The history of the Bay Area has been one of successive migrations, each of which comes seeking wealth & fortune and each of which is ultimately displaced by the next as it taps out the economic boom that started it. It started with the gold rush (1848-1855). Just as that was winding down, the railroads (1863-1890) took off, leading to widespread immigration first of white Americans fleeing the Civil War and devastation there and then of Chinese and other Asians. The 1890s and 1900s were a rough couple decades for San Francisco, between endemic corruption, a bubonic plague outbreak, and the 1906 earthquake and fire, but from 1910-1930 you had a large migration of poor white farmers ("Okies") fleeing economic consolidation and environmental destruction in the plains. From 1930-1945 you had the huge U.S. military buildup and a large migration of largely black workers; SF was both an important port and shipbuilding center. After the war Fred Terman made sure that Stanford and associated companies got a large share of the Cold War DARPA dollars; this funded HP, Shockley, Fairchild, Varian, Lockheed, Hendy Ironworks (now Northrop Grumman), Moffett Field, and most of the first-gen Silicon Valley companies. This branched off into consumer semiconductor & electronics manufacturing in the 60s & 70s, with Intel, National Semiconductor, TI, Seagate, Apple, etc. While this was going on, you had the countercultural revolution up in SF. Then you had the PC revolution in the 80s, then the dot-com boom in the 90s, and then the Internet, mobile, and sharing-economy booms of the 2000s & 2010s. Now you have a significant blockchain & AI presence up in SF. All of these are fueled by a mass migration of young people from more disadvantaged areas of U.S. like the Midwest & South, as well as a large influx of Chinese & Indian immigrants.
It's always been a place where people come from far away to capitalize on the zeitgeist, and if you're not capitalizing on the zeitgeist (or supplying shovels to those who are), you're marginalized. When the zeitgeist turns, everybody who made their money in the previous iteration looks to invest in the next one. If you call the next one wrong, you fade away into obscurity.
> The gold rush is deeply embedded in the Bay Area psyche.
I think that's true for a demographic - the San Francisco 24-35 demographic (especially those in the tech sphere of influence), but I don't think it's generally true across the bay area. People who tend to think like this tend to be transplants that do not know very many people over 40, they don't know anybody from, say, Redwood City, Hayward, or Albany or even the Sunset district. I say this as a transplant under the age of 40, but the majority of my coworkers are much older despite most of them also being transplants.
I'd argue that it was true of them when they were in the 24-35 demographic.
My in-laws have been here 35 years. They are old-school now: they own a home, they oppose further development or upzoning, they worked as a mechanical engineer in defense and a biologist in biotech. Nevertheless, when they were in their late 20s, they were recent immigrants from another country.
Their neighbor is close to 90. She's even more removed from today's gold rush: she was a secretary & later HR manager at one of the early electronics companies. IIRC, she came here as a child in the 30s, one of the dust bowl & depression migrants.
I'm reminded of a line from last week's Game of Thrones episode:
The South Bay is probably closer to a "perfect climate" than SF itself which, after all, inspired the Mark Twain quote "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." That said, the overall Bay area climate doubtless contributes to the desire of many to live there to a degree that probably wouldn't exist if the equivalent job market were in Minneapolis.
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.
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.
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.
I know many people from various cities around Europe that would quite happily jump ship to an American city if given the opportunity (at least, prior to number 45). I think it's more of a 'the grass is always greener' situation.
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.
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.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] thread2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10070103
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.
* https://yimbyaction.org/
* https://cayimby.org/
* https://sd11.senate.ca.gov/
* https://sd09.senate.ca.gov/
They need all the help they can get against monied NIMBY interests.
Do you have a source on that? Tokyo is famously known for having largely flat housing prices over the last 20 years[1]. In fact, in Japan, most houses are considered depreciating assets [2].
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/la...
[2] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-dispo...
It could also be that property values never went up to begin with in Tokyo, and remained at market equilibriumm, I.e. prices there reflect simply the cost to produce the unit, plus some profit margin. Things never got out of hand in Tokyo like they have in SF and NYC (though the latter, to a much lesser extent).
The value of most commodities stays flat once it reaches that equilibrium (eg. most food, clothing).
The argument that housing prices in SF would fall with increased density seems to be another way of making the claim that SF housing is currently experiencing “surge pricing”, so to speak.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to on the one hand supply large amounts of affordable housing and on the other to not negatively affect those benefiting from the lack of it.
But ultimately it isn't me you have to convince, but those who would risk their property values. If you do that, then you have a solution to the situation.
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.
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...
* “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.
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.
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.
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.
More tax revenue means more money available to fund more lines from SFHs that currently exist elsewhere.
So you would lose single-family-homes.
If you currently own a SFH, it's entirely up to you whether the house stays that way or not. You can remain as-is, and enjoy the transit benefits that accrue from the deeper tax base.
I know one. She is geographically in the center of San Francisco. When I visit, I simply park in front of her house. There is plenty of space on the street, free of course. Her street is quiet. It would be reasonable to stand in the street playing catch.
Adding multi-tenant houses to her area would ruin it. Her street would become noisy, polluted, too crowded for parking, and too busy to play catch.
There is already transit around (two different MUNI lines and two different bus routes) within walking distance. That works for the able-bodied and less-vulnerable people, which she is not. Adding more transit is no benefit to her; she can't safely use the existing transit.
Property value doesn't matter to her. If she sold, where would she go? You might suggest a cheaper area, but why her instead of the other people? She has contributed to her community and wishes to continue attending her neighborhood church. She knows her way around; her mind is old and might adjust badly to new surroundings.
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.
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.
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.
(so it always will be an issue)
No, you'd stop much earlier or it wouldn't be worth it.
> (so it always will be an issue)
Sorry, I can't follow you there. What would be the issue? Even the marginal cost of building the Nth floor at which you'd stop would be much lower than current market prices for a similar amount of residential space. So building enough of it would drive prices down.
We’ve been considering moving, but the lottery system keeping us from moving to SF. There’s other problems with the city too, but that’s the most serious one for us right now.
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.
No. "zoning rights" are not rights, they are rules applying to property that people own _and are subject to change_ much more fluidly than the ownership itself.
The former is much, much larger. The latter is more like 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who's for dinner.
And never, never forget that a lot of zoning and land use regulation was basically created to replace outright racist policies like redlining.
Homeless people, moms and dads driving 2 hour commutes, people who would benefit from a more tolerant climate unable to live there, people unable to take good jobs... the human cost of people's NIMBYism is real, and it is staggering.
The environmental cost is pretty big too: https://www.redfin.com/blog/why-dense-housing-is-green/
Not to them, it's not.
1) (short term) Make remote work much widely accepted, especially for software roles.
2) (long term) Build offices/centers (e.g.) jobs outside of Bay Area and CA. This is much more scalable and beneficial for the country than having one or two super concentrated centers. Why not have 20?
Teachers, nurses, janitors, waiters and so on can't work remotely.
Splitting things up that naturally group together likely has some costs. VC's might not want to invest in a startup in, say, Tulsa, OK. I've read that some are changing their minds, and it'll happen some, but clusters do happen for a reason, and fighting that may create some problems.
But when we're talking about a 4-plex next to some single family homes because you don't want less wealthy people near you? That's a perversion of the idea in my opinion.
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.
> 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.
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.
edit: forgot bart
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.
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.
And you need to make sure there's a big talent pool there, and good universities.
A few places are close to that, but it's not so easy to replicate.
This book talks about it some: https://amzn.to/2XAU3f0
And most of the places that are close have rampant NIMBYism problems of their own.
To NIMBYers: The "character" of your neighborhood is more important than cheaper housing for everyone--disproportionately helping lower income people?
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.
"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, ..."
The gold rush is deeply embedded in the Bay Area psyche. This is not a place to grow old; this is a place to seize the day and make the most of your youth. So much about the region is both wonderful and terribly fragile over time.
The history of the Bay Area has been one of successive migrations, each of which comes seeking wealth & fortune and each of which is ultimately displaced by the next as it taps out the economic boom that started it. It started with the gold rush (1848-1855). Just as that was winding down, the railroads (1863-1890) took off, leading to widespread immigration first of white Americans fleeing the Civil War and devastation there and then of Chinese and other Asians. The 1890s and 1900s were a rough couple decades for San Francisco, between endemic corruption, a bubonic plague outbreak, and the 1906 earthquake and fire, but from 1910-1930 you had a large migration of poor white farmers ("Okies") fleeing economic consolidation and environmental destruction in the plains. From 1930-1945 you had the huge U.S. military buildup and a large migration of largely black workers; SF was both an important port and shipbuilding center. After the war Fred Terman made sure that Stanford and associated companies got a large share of the Cold War DARPA dollars; this funded HP, Shockley, Fairchild, Varian, Lockheed, Hendy Ironworks (now Northrop Grumman), Moffett Field, and most of the first-gen Silicon Valley companies. This branched off into consumer semiconductor & electronics manufacturing in the 60s & 70s, with Intel, National Semiconductor, TI, Seagate, Apple, etc. While this was going on, you had the countercultural revolution up in SF. Then you had the PC revolution in the 80s, then the dot-com boom in the 90s, and then the Internet, mobile, and sharing-economy booms of the 2000s & 2010s. Now you have a significant blockchain & AI presence up in SF. All of these are fueled by a mass migration of young people from more disadvantaged areas of U.S. like the Midwest & South, as well as a large influx of Chinese & Indian immigrants.
It's always been a place where people come from far away to capitalize on the zeitgeist, and if you're not capitalizing on the zeitgeist (or supplying shovels to those who are), you're marginalized. When the zeitgeist turns, everybody who made their money in the previous iteration looks to invest in the next one. If you call the next one wrong, you fade away into obscurity.
I think that's true for a demographic - the San Francisco 24-35 demographic (especially those in the tech sphere of influence), but I don't think it's generally true across the bay area. People who tend to think like this tend to be transplants that do not know very many people over 40, they don't know anybody from, say, Redwood City, Hayward, or Albany or even the Sunset district. I say this as a transplant under the age of 40, but the majority of my coworkers are much older despite most of them also being transplants.
My in-laws have been here 35 years. They are old-school now: they own a home, they oppose further development or upzoning, they worked as a mechanical engineer in defense and a biologist in biotech. Nevertheless, when they were in their late 20s, they were recent immigrants from another country.
Their neighbor is close to 90. She's even more removed from today's gold rush: she was a secretary & later HR manager at one of the early electronics companies. IIRC, she came here as a child in the 30s, one of the dust bowl & depression migrants.
I'm reminded of a line from last week's Game of Thrones episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwOOeJxrhL4#t=95
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.
What Tokyo has that the Bay Area lacks is excellent public transit, and a willingness to build at high density.
If only the Bay Area cities would amalgamate and solve housing and public transit as a unified force....
https://www.kqed.org/news/11735556/map-where-do-kids-live-in...
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.
I agree with this.
But this
> Yes, America may have a fixation on children needing yards and minivans
means that fixing those problems won't make this any likelier
> 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