[surrealize]

Grrrr. Existing SF residents are facing an influx of newcomers, who are pushing out (pricing out) some existing residents. And somehow, it never occurs to them to just make room for more people, so that existing residents don't get pushed out.

SF has plenty of opportunities to build upward, but as long as SF insists on being anti-development and anti-height, the housing supply problem is going to continue.

[jseliger]

>SF has plenty of opportunities to build upward, but as long as SF insists on being anti-development and anti-height, the housing supply problem is going to continue.

Bingo. This: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... is good further reading if you're interested in the issue.

I think we've now gotten to such an absurd place in coastal city building markets that more people are interested in learning about the fundamental forces at work. Matt Yglesias, who wrote the linked article above, is fond of pointing out that we can use complex, advanced technologies like elevators and steel to greatly ameliorate housing affordability problems.

[charonn0]

How are current residents being priced out? If they rent, then rent increases are limited by law and no-fault evictions are nearly impossible to get honestly. If they own, the no one can force them to move short of the city invoking eminent domain.

[tomsaffell]

I agree with your sentiment, but just for completeness, there are a few ways existing residents get 'priced out':

1) the 'assessed value' of owned property (used to calculate property tax) can be raised ~2% per year[a], so over a decade a home owner's property tax may increase ~22%

2) Not all of SF has rent control. Any building constructed after 1979 does not. [b]

3) Not all renters are savvy enough to not get kicked out by greedy landlords, despite the laws protecting them. Apparently landlords often use 'renovations' as a way to do that. Just last week I overheard a conversation in Trader Joes about someone who had fallen pray to that [c]

TLDR: money is like water - it will find its way through the cracks to the place it wants to be (the pockets of those with capital).

a: http://www.sftreasurer.org/index.aspx?page=66 b: http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html c: time travel to TJ's on 8th, ~8.30am last Sunday.

[ryguytilidie]

"then rent increases are limited by law"

In certain cases, yes, but personally I lived in SOMA in an apartment for 2 years and my rent was going to go from 2k to 3k because Google had asked the building if they could rent some of the units. So I mean, maybe it was illegal and I don't know about it, but I can certainly say I don't live in San Francisco anymore because I was priced out by new incoming tech employees.

[redthrowaway]

I'm assuming you made a thinko there; as written your comment says you were forced to move because living got too inexpensive.

[ryguytilidie]

haha good call, thanks for noticing.

[surrealize]

One of the examples in the article is a couple who have lived in san francisco for a long time, and feel the need to move to a bigger place because they now have kids. But they keep getting outbid on houses.

[unreal37]

Its only true if you never move. Or if you were renting but now are ready to buy.

[gwern]

Property taxes being set on increasing market values of properties?

[gnosis]

From what I understand, efforts in other cities to build upwards to house poor people have been a failure.

That strategy results in large populations where poverty is highly concentrated. This leads to those areas becoming breeding grounds for crime and hopelessness. Over and over again in the US, large scale projects have exhibited this pattern of failure.

That's not to say that building affordable housing shouldn't be a priority. Indeed it should. But it might make more sense to build lots of small scale housing, with a focus on building viable community spaces rather than large scale ghettoes.

Also, rent control should be more widespread, instead of relentlessly fought against. This way, the housing that's created will have a chance to remain affordable, instead of constantly being at risk of gentrification.

[surrealize]

> From what I understand, efforts in other cities to build upwards to house poor people have been a failure.

You could always build upward to house the rich people instead. I'm sure a lot of the incoming startup-types are young and would be happy to live in a high-rise (The correlation between youth and high-rise-living coming, in my experience, from the fact that people with kids often want more space. But that's not a hard-and-fast rule, obviously.).

> But it might make more sense to build lots of small scale housing, with a focus on building viable community spaces rather large scale ghettoes.

I'm not sure if SF has the land space to build lots of small-scale housing. I totally agree about building nice community spaces, though, and I think high-rise building is compatible with that (e.g., Manhattan's pocket parks).

[gnosis]

"You could always build upward to house the rich people instead. I'm sure a lot of the incoming startup-types are young and would be happy to live in a high-rise"

You have to remember that San Francisco is a prime earthquake zone. I'm not sure how many rich people would want to live in what is essentially a death trap if a major earthquake (which is supposedly long overdue) were to strike California.

Also, gentrification tends to happen when wealthier people decide to move in to "hip", "happening" areas with "character". In other words, areas that the poor artists and the blue-collar melting pot have managed to just lift out of being a hellhole, through their hard effort. That's when the yuppie and hipster colonization begins. Witness the fate of the Greenwich Village and Williamsburg in NYC, and what's described in the original article in respect to SF.

So, I'm not sure how attractive high rises built for the rich would be to the rich themselves, as they'd be cultureless islands. No, they much prefer to take over brownstones and victorians that poor artists have fixed up, in an area full of "character".

[w1ntermute]

> You have to remember that San Francisco is a prime earthquake zone. I'm not sure how many rich people would want to live in what is essentially a death trap if a major earthquake (which is supposedly long overdue) were to strike California.

Have you seen what Tokyo looks like?

http://i.imgur.com/a4GQL.jpg

Don't give me that bullshit.

[disbelief]

Actually, that photo is a little misleading. Sure, there are some tall buildings in Tokyo, but for a city that size the number of skyscraper class buildings is actually quite low. Tokyo is more an endless sprawl of lowrises and single family dwellings.

[w1ntermute]

It doesn't matter if the percentage of skyscrapers is low, the point is that a large number of them has been built in absolute terms while strictly complying with earthquake regulations. That is, it is entirely possible to safely build skyscrapers in an earthquake zone.

There are a variety of other reasons for Tokyo's urban sprawl, not least the presence of what is the world's most comprehensive public transportation system.

[probablycorey]

In earthquakes Taller buildings are safer than smaller buildings http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/25/opinion/op-little25

Also, go to the the hip neighborhoods in NYC (LES Williamsburg), notice the tall buildings being built. Units in these buildings are being bought for large amounts of money.

I think

[surrealize]

> So, I'm not sure how attractive high rises built for the rich would be to the rich themselves

There are four units for sale at the (42-story) Infinity now, and the cheapest one has an asking price over $1.2 million. In my book, that's for rich people. If you consider a $1.2 million condo a middle-class dwelling, you may have lived in San Francisco for too long.

[mahyarm]

Tell that to downtown Vancouver, BC:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=vancouver%2Cbc

[jlgreco]

Isn't building earthquake safe highrises pretty much a solved problem? When I think "ring of fire", I don't think "flats".

[caycep]

rut roh, all those new highrises in downtown LA....

[greggman]

The op said nothing of poor people.

There are plenty of cities in the world that have built up without becoming ghettos. Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York to name a few. High rise housing != ghetto

[gnosis]

The gentrification that's happening in SF and that's described in the original article is happening because the rich are pushing out the original residents -- who were indeed poor.

From the article:

  Again and again, you hear of teachers, nurses, firefighters, police
  officers, artists, hotel and restaurant workers, and others with no
  stake in the new digital gold rush being squeezed out of the city.

  ...

  Bernal Heights in those years was a glorious urban mix of deeply
  rooted blue-collar families, underground artists, radical activists,
  and lesbian settlers

In general, the people described above would be considered poor.

As for high rise apartments not necessarily being ghettoes. That's obviously true. High priced apartment complexes and skyscrapers housing businesses are what constitute much of the "building up" in the cities you mention. It's only when building up is combined with low-cost housing that problems begin. But building up isn't the problem per se, but rather it's the high concentration of poverty that such projects encourage.

[greggman]

It seems like your missing the point. The reason there is no affordable housing is because the city doesn't allow building up so SF is stuck with only existing housing. As it gets more desirable those prices will continue to rise. There's only really a few possible paths forward

1) leave it as is. Prices continue to climb

2) allow building up. Prices come down as supply meets demand

3) some how make sf less desirable lowering demand

[citricsquid]

Why is SF (I assume you mean local government?) anti-height? Are there downsides to building upwards (environmental? taxation?) or is it just a refusal to allow the landscape to change?

[_delirium]

It's fairly common European cities to be anti-height in the city center for reasons that seem somewhat similar to SF's, though seems less common elsewhere. Some of it is a reaction (sometimes overreaction) to tall modernist housing blocks which nobody really liked. That and other things led to a preference for "human-scale" 5-7-story mid-rises. Another factor is a desire for light to be able to hit streets and parks in the "common areas" in the city center. A common compromise is to have a mid-rise historical center, but high-rises a bit outside of it, connected to good transit, e.g. central Paris banned skyscrapers after the Tour Montparnasse was so badly received, but there are skyscrapers a short distance away in the "new downtown" area of La Défense. An SF version of that might be to keep central SF mid-rise, but allow high-rise towers near the BART/Caltrain stations in Oakland, Daly City, and Burlingame.

The Bay Area's problem is that nobody wants the high-rises: putting them in the center or putting them near transit a bit outside the center would both work, but everyone, except to some extent Oakland, is anti-development, so they go nowhere. Heck, Palo Alto won't even allow mid-rise apartments near the Palo Alto Caltrain, so you actually have people "reverse commuting" from SF down to Stanford, because as crazy as living in SF is, trying to live in downtown Palo Alto is even crazier. A few livable, urbanized downtowns on the peninsula might siphon off some of the demand in SF, not solving the problem, but at least reducing it.

Other problems that seem like they exacerbate SF's problems: 1) poor intracity transit, e.g. lack of an east-west subway, concentrates demand in a handful of eastern districts; and 2) large areas of the city are not even mid-rise, but full of two-story houses (partly historical, partly anti-development, partly related to #1).

[prostoalex]

http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-...

"f you look at San Francisco’s zoning map, you’ll see height and density restrictions everywhere. There are also citywide building caps — restrictions on the number of new buildings that can be started every year. And finally there are labyrinthine regulatory procedures. Here, for your amusement, is a flowchart put together by the San Francisco Planning Department that outlines the steps a developer needs to go through to obtain a building permit. Despite the department’s use of Comic Sans, this is not meant to be a joke."

[charonn0]

After a building boom in the 70s-80s the city passed anti-Manhattanization laws.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanization

[jstalin]

So the government passes laws to limit housing stock, then passes laws to artificially keep rent low, then people complain about prices going up and a lack of housing stock? Has anyone in SF read an Economics 101 textbook?

[mc32]

I'm sure they understand that, but they understand 'elections' and their constituencies even better.

Allowing building upwards would be seen as 'pandering' to 'special interests' by lots of locals --specially people who like to call themselves Xth-generation Franciscan.

SF is always about the short-term but made to look long-term so as to seem forward looking and progressive. The only thing SF is progressive about two things, sex, and some minority causes (both of which are good things but hardly encompassing of the term 'progressive'.)

[viscanti]

SoMa is the only neighborhood with any 20+ story residential buildings going up. It's hard to say why so many of the other neighborhoods are against building up. The geography of SF lends to some beautiful views from atop the hills. Residents living on those hills are unlikely to welcome tall buildings to crop up and block their view.

SoMa probably ends up being the big-city, tall building part of SF in the future. It would take a big mind-set change for many other neighborhoods to build up anytime soon.

[onetwothreefour]

There are some city blocks in the Financial District where you're perpetually in the dark and are essentially in a wind tunnel due to the tall buildings. It's creepy as hell. :)

I presume that's mostly the reason.