San Francisco is completely, utterly corrupt when it comes to housing. In 2011 there were a total of 418 new housing units built [1]. Really? One of the hottest areas with the highest demand in the entire country and only 418 new units were added in a full year? That's an absolute outrage.
This is why I'm hoping that Bloomberg's efforts to create a Silicon Alley are a success. Maybe SF will realize that it needs to appreciate the tech industry more when people start leaving for NYC. It would be great for tech to be based in a city where (a) it's not the biggest industry (so you don't get mental inbreeding), (b) there's proper public transportation that doesn't require hazmat cleanup because of people shitting and pissing all over it[0], (c) you don't have homeless people and drug addicts everywhere on the streets, and (d) you don't have rampant NIMBYism blocking the development of more efficient housing because they're afraid of "Manhattanization" destroying their "Bay view".
Oh yes, lets look to Bloomberg to show us how to run a city. Shitty rent controls, banning all sorts of things, cops stopping people in the streets for security checks. Brilliant.
Stop and frisk is a huge boon for making cities safer. Every major city does it.
Can you to cite a source for both of those claims? AFAIK, NYC is the only city that does stop and frisk, and it has been proven to be a program to 1) be heavily skewed towards frisking minorities, and 2) resulting in a 1.9% "success rate" in finding a weapon after having frisked the entire African American population once over in NYC (source: http://occupydesign.org/uncategorized/stop-frisk-infographic... )
It's also unconstitutional, but as long as you aren't the one being frisked, it's no problem, right?
5.4% of stops between 2004 and 2009 resulted in arrests. That's actually a really high number, contrary to the characterization of the article. That's tens of thousands of instances of actual wrongdoing being caught.
Stop and frisk does skew towards stopping minorities. That is not in and of itself necessarily problematic. Race, socioeconomic status, and crime are deeply correlated in the big cities. The unfortunate fact is that most crime in New York, Chicago, and LA are committed by blacks and hispanics, and in fact usually both the victims and the perpetrators are minorities. See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/nypd-report-details....
Stop and frisk is not unconstitutional. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._Ohio. Playing armchair Supreme Court Justice when it comes to the 4th amendment is fraught with peril, for the simple reason that the founders explicitly left it open to judicial interpretation by using the wiggle word "unreasonable."
Frisks are enabled by Terry for the exclusive purpose of detecting weapons that would endanger officers, and are confined to explorations of the outer layers of clothing (ie, to places where weapons can easily be both detected and accessed suddenly by an assailant).
But NYC is accused of going far past the Terry authorization; the NYPD has been sued for demanding that people turn out their pockets, and for arresting people for drug possession.
If you read the general orders for a large police department (I've read Chicago's, but not NYC's), they're clear on this point: you can't reach into someone's pockets without having either consent or an arrest.
Consider that "Stop & Frisk" may be marketed as a systematic application of Terry v Ohio, but might instead be emblematic of something broader.
(It's also worth remembering that NYPD statistics are controversial; look up "CompStat". I read some Chicago police blogs and get the sense that NYPD's statistic accountability is basically loathed outside of NYC --- which doesn't make the Chicago police right!)
Fairly low weapon-finding rates are about what I would expect, whether the program was working or not. Crime is disproportionately committed by a small fraction of the population. (Victimhood is also highly skewed, in case you were wondering.)
Has stop and frisk helped Oakland? The city is ranked 4th most dangerous in the US.
Maybe tighter gun control makes cities safer? It's supposed to be rare for a SF resident to successfully obtain a concealed carry permit, and a local ordinance requiring weapons at home to be locked up was upheld just a few days ago. (http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/crime-law/federal-judge-uphold...)
Having a police force larger than many standing armies is a huge boon for making cities safer. Stop and frisk probably doesn't have much to do with it.
I don't know about that. Russia and Singapore have roughly the same number of police (~750) per 100,000 inh. One is way safer than the other. (The US is middling with 233 per 100k.)
Also, as a city, Caracas comes to mind. A city with heavy police presence but intolerable crime statistics.
I think that every SF resident is entitled to their opinion on the topic. Do we know how many residents are for housing growth and how many are against it?
SF residents are entitled to their opinion on the topic, but their opinions must also be balanced against the rights of the landowners to develop their private property as they see fit. The point of zoning regulation is to allow a measure of urban planning to safeguard the health and safety of the city, not to allow existing landowners to freeze the city in its current state by restricting development on land they don't own.
It's funny given the economic argument, how we don't often hear about plans to start building in Pacific Heights, where many VCs and business leaders reside, given that it's a neighborhood with probably one of the lowest population densities in the city.
In case you haven't noticed sf is bounded by the Pacific Ocean. It can't just grow and it already has a very high housing density. The only area that can absorb new housing is china basin (3rd st) and that is being developed. The rest is already full.
Do we really want or feel that more people in sf is a good thing? Why not live down the peninsula or the east bay where there's an unlimited amount of space.
There is extremely high demand and artificially limited supply. Without corruption land and buildings would be purchased at fair market value and additional housing units would be built up in their place. As it stands the few real estate owners can continuously increase prices without further investment because corrupt politics prevents any new competition.
San Francisco has a love affair with beat-up 100 year old victorian houses and outrageously high prices. If I owned one of those houses I also wouldn't want to let any new real estate developers into my Cool Kids Club.
Excuse me, how is that a problem again? The same could be said of any exclusive area in the US. If you find San Francisco extremely expensive, then move elsewhere. Seriously.
It's certainly possible to grow SF up like NYC or HK. Both are bounded by water and yet manage to make more living quarters.
As for whether building up and having more people is a good thing that really depends on the people, the culture and the management of the city. Personally Tokyo an awesome place to live with all kinds of activity, culture, etc and it has a population density much higher than SF so it's certainly true that an SF that grows up could be a great place.
okyo an awesome place to live with all kinds of activity, culture, etc and it has a population density much higher than SF so it's certainly true that an SF that grows up could be a great place.
But Tokyo's average building height is lower than San Francisco's already. Tokyo did not grow "up."
Tokyo has double the density of SF by having much, much less parking and much narrower streets. Eighty-five percent of street miles -- or kilometers -- in Tokyo are single lane streets, not single lane each way or single with a parking lane but true single lane. Tokyo also has no truck with SF's absurd excess of easy, cheap, and free parking.
Building up harms quality of life. If you want more density, and you do, then you need to eliminate parking and turn it into housing.
> But Tokyo's average building height is lower than San Francisco's already. Tokyo did not grow "up."
This is very interesting. I did not actually know this. However, the city will never go for this. They make a ton of money through parking fees, citations etc to turn this city into a car free zone. Also, although SF has a large number of exceptions, most Americans have a love affair with cars.
Manhattan also has significantly less potential for destructive earthquakes than San Francisco, making it much easier to build tall buildings. It's not just a matter of being bordered by water. A big part of it has to do with no one wanting to rent or build a 20+ story building in San Francisco. That tends to limit population density.
Tokyo has far more earthquakes and far more tall buildings than SF. Besides SF has plenty of tall buildings even now. Is there something special about the existing tall buildings that would be different from new tall buildings? I guess I'm not quite following your point.
As far as I know none of the existing tall buildings are having trouble finding people to rent them
yes, there is sand and silt under parts of SF. new york is built on granite. the geologies are different. in sf you have to dig 15 stories for a basement. so its not just the seismic issues, but other factors of geology and geography: eg. you have the topo issues (hills). Then you have the SF summer/winds. Lastly, you have an existing stock of Victorian (actually, edwardian in most places) architecture that is worth keeping, for cultural reasons (/arguably).
Check out this interactive map of liquefaction risk. If you zoom into SF you can see that most of the skyscrapers are built in a high risk zone. Guess they figured it was ok.
Great link! But If you zoom in, you'll see the Marina, South of Market, and the edges in NB etc are "red" (the worst areas). This is exactly why the financial district (where the high-rises are) is located where it is (on Yellow to montgomery), and why SOMA was the "wrong side of the tracks". While they are/have been recently building high rises in the Red (embarcadero, etc), they have been digging 150 feet down (ie, 2x the normal height of an above-grouhnd building ~traditionally < 7 stories). to set the foundations. At least that's my understanding.
A ton of lower manhattan is built on fill so that doesn't seem to be a huge problem in building tall buildings. (Battery Park is totally fill, the Financial District is about half the size if you look at how big it was originally, so the rest is fill, etc)
The problem is fill in an earthquake, has risk of ~liquification. So its the combination of factors. NYC would have a major problem with a major tectonic event, for example. ~Nothing there is seismically zoned/engineered.
The problem isn't that you can't build 20+ story buildings in an earthquake zone or that people wouldn't want to live in them (see Japan, Taiwan, etc), but rather that nobody in San Francisco can get permits to build them.
> In case you haven't noticed sf is bounded by the Pacific Ocean. It can't just grow and it already has a very high housing density. The only area that can absorb new housing is china basin (3rd st) and that is being developed. The rest is already full.
No, it doesn't. I live in the Haight (which is a key cultural mecca of the city). While, there certainly are gorgeous Victorian era houses (The Painted Ladies), most of the buildings are look like cute, unstable, four - five floor buildings which were probably built in the fifties or the sixties (Or certainly look like it). IMO, this place could do with a few shiny high rises. I am convinced that it should be possible to design a place that doesn't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of a neighborhood whilst helping organic growth.
> Do we really want or feel that more people in sf is a good thing? Why not live down the peninsula or the east bay where there's an unlimited amount of space.
This is not going to solve the problem. I used to ponder about why Austin which has roughly the same size and population as SF is not as packed or doesn't have as shitty a public transport system. I think there is a reason for that: It is because San Francisco acts like a cultural magnet for the rest of the bay, which means that irrespective of who actually lives/works here in the city, the presence of unlimited amount of space or job opportunities in the rest of the bay is not going to depress demand. I know people living in South/East bay, who keep looking for places. All these requests are driving up our rents and that hasn't been affected by the space constraints outside the city.
Even as early as the turn of the 20th century, there was private development on every single acre that was privately owned in Manhattan. It still grew and continued to be developed. You don't have to worry...if people stop liking cities, they will move to the peninsula or the east bay.
I agree with nearly everything this article says, with one important caveat: this won't last.
The Great Nerd Influx of 2012 is just one of many boom/bust cycles that San Francisco has experienced, and it's far from the most robust -- there are a lot of good reasons to believe that this sudden surge in activity will fade in a few years as thousands of doomed startups hit the series-A wall. Rents have shot up dramatically in a year, but it's almost entirely a side-effect of the funding bubble. It's hard to fault government for reacting slowly to short-term phenomena.
I moved here at the tail end of the last funding boom, and watched rents fall after Sequoia sent out the "Good Times, RIP" slide deck. Think it can't happen again? It will. It doesn't make a lot of sense to run out and rip down the victorians to make room for market-rate condos simply because SOMA is a trendy place for startups at this particular moment.
The ability to build should not depend on whether a boom will last...even if we could trust people that predict that it won't. The entire US continues to benefit from an overly exuberant boom in fiber-optic cables in the late 90's. San Francisco would continue to benefit from the housing stock even if all the nerds packed up and moved to Oakland.
"The ability to build should not depend on whether a boom will last"
That's an assertion of fact, when it should be an argument. And it's not a particularly good argument.
There are a lot of valid reasons for the city to regulate construction: fire safety, traffic control, utility provisioning, transit, urban/community planning, affordable housing, diversity, and aesthetics (just to name a few off the top of my head). These concerns mean that the city gets to control building policy, and once they do that, how they control that policy is a question of degree.
Every city in the world regulates the number and type of construction permits that are issued. San Francisco may be conservative about issuing new permits, but nobody reasonable is arguing that they shouldn't be allowed to regulate construction at all. If the city regulators announced tomorrow that it was open-season for new construction in San Francisco, they'd be doing a disservice to everyone who lives here.
It was an argument. I don't know you could confuse it for anything else. And your counter to my argument was a straw man. I never questioned the idea that governments shouldn't be able to regulate...just that regulating growth on the prediction of a bust following a current boom is not only short sighted, but that the housing stock growth presents few burdens even in the presence of a bust.
"I never questioned the idea that governments shouldn't be able to regulate...just that regulating growth on the prediction of a bust following a current boom is not only short sighted, but that the housing stock growth presents few burdens even in the presence of a bust."
I think part of my original comment was confusing: the restrictions on building in San Francisco aren't new. I'm saying that it's probably not a great idea to lift those restrictions based on short-term trends. If the city were being reactionary and lowering the number of permits in response to this boom, I think that would be pretty stupid.
Think of San Francisco as a bowl, with it's limited real estate and finite density. All the money pours into the bowl and sloshes up the sides and overflows, resulting in very high housing costs.
The central valley is more of a sauce pan, when money is poured into it, it spreads out at a low price level.
San Francisco has lots of great qualities, but constantly telling ourselves that it is the greatest place in the world home to the greatest (or, in the author's words, the "smartest, most creative") people is tiresome. As South Park memorably put it, San Francisco has an abundance of "smug." The city has real problems, of which housing is only one.
The SF Weekly (an alternative newspaper here) has published several thought-provoking articles on the state of the city over the years. They are all titled, "The Worst Run Big City in the US."
San Francisco also has a civil grand jury that periodically issues reports on topics of citywide concern. These are generally ignored, even though they point out significant present and future problems (I'm thinking specifically of looming pension issues).
I wish there were a way to take a slice of Oakland or maybe San Jose (or conceivably, San Mateo), make it independent with great services (Palo Alto quality schools, UK quality police) and pro-growth policies.
Emeryville kind of does this, but isn't ideally positioned (Caltrain and/or BART, highways to Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Francisco).
Ideally also some special tax benefits (at least California, but maybe even federal) due to being "enterprise zones".
It would be politically unpopular to redevelop an entire area of Oakland or San Jose (i.e. moving out everything), and segregating services, but the net benefits would be worth it for even the remaining parts of the city and county.
I think some of the "eastern Alameda/Contra Costa county" areas work on this model, too -- there are a surprising number of corporate HQs for enterprise companies out there, and especially regional offices for non-bay-area companies. Higher density and less suburbia would make it more appealing to startups, though. I was surprised by just how nice Walnut Creek, Livermore, Pleasanton, etc. are.
Emeryville kind of does this, but isn't ideally positioned
Emeryville had great potential, I think the location is great, but as you mention, for getting to SF or SV the public transit sucks. And is alas pretty-unwalkable, even locally. If San Pablo had a Bart Stop (without the 1-3 mile walk to it), it would be much more interesting place, IMHO.
Emery-go-round made up (slightly) for the BART situation. Still not great, though, and it got a lot worse in the past year.
Also, the bordering areas of Berkeley and Oakland are sufficiently bad that I feel uncomfortable at night in some parts of Emeryville. I don't know how you could really set up a separate city without some kind of natural border like the water or hills.
yeah, i should caveat the location is great strategically, in the sense that it is well placed on the map and in (close to Sf/soma, Cal, the Water, 580, weather, etc). in terms human geography/sociology, it has some drawbacks that go beyond the transit issues.
Things are getting better... the top post on HN currently refers to 2011's 418 units, but this was following a huge economic downturn. Projects in the city take huge resources and require years of permitting and approvals, followed by years of construction. This isn't a 'flip-the-switch' type of problem like you can solve in the suburbs. This process could obviously be expedited, and I hope people work toward that, but things aren't as dire as they sound.
I really think that the current administration is much more pro-growth than previous ones have been. There are 370k housing units currently available in the city. The pipline report has some really good news as far as housing is concerned. (http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=1691)
* 48,000 new housing units approved (including Candlestick, Treasure Island, and Park Merced developments, but still a 13% increase in available units)
* 4,200 units currently under construction
* 9mm sq ft of new commercial real estate approved
I've read some of JWZ's blog posts about trying to get permits for the expansion of his club in San Francisco. I wouldn't hold my breath for this type of expansion to happen.
San Francisco needs to work on its public transportation infrastructure before it even starts thinking about becoming as densely packed as New York, Tokyo, etc.
There are a couple of things that really really bug me about this city:
1) The horrible state of the public transport system. Irrespective of the recent rains we have been having, the Muni system appears completely broken down. There are buses on the same route which appear at bizarre periodicities (A couple of buses every 5 minutes and then one bus after 50 minutes). The metro line (especially the N line) has way too many repairs going on. Also, there is a ridiculously large amount of cars on the road and way too few bike lanes. This is something the city should fix by a combination of exorbitant tolls, making parking expensive and taxes.
2) The homeless people situation. While I am sorry for their situation, the city's response to homeless people appears to be either switching from completely ignoring the problem to sending out a few town cars every couple hours in the nights so that they can chase homeless people from one block of a street to the other.
Its a great article. Unfortunately, the problem plagues Seattle too, which also has the potential to be a world city, but can't get over its incredible NIMBYism. You can't even remodel your kitchen without getting your neighborhood to vote on it.
I don't buy the taller buildings = more wealth, creativity and energy argument. New York and Tokyo are easy examples to refer to but they are in scale and history completely different. What about other cities that build high and are on a smaller or average size scale? Good examples? And you couldn't double SF's size by building higher easily anyway. City and county is 800,000 people now, doubling would bring it to population of Manhattan. That's lots of floors in lots of buildings. Tokyo is 13 million: 16x the size of SF. Not a relevant comparison.
> I don't buy the taller buildings = more wealth, creativity and energy argument.
If you haven't read The New Geography of Jobs, I highly recommend it. It gives an excellent explanation of why having a higher density of knowledge workers increases their per-capita productivity and creativity.
The Skyscraper Index is a concept put forward in January 1999[1] by Andrew Lawrence, research director at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein,[2] which showed that the world's tallest buildings have risen on the eve of economic downturns.[3] Business cycles and skyscraper construction correlate[4] in such a way that investment in skyscrapers peaks when cyclical growth is exhausted and the economy is ready for recession.[5] Mark Thornton's Skyscraper Index Model successfully sent a signal of the Late-2000s financial crisis at the beginning of August 2007.[6][7]
I was surprised that the risk of a large earthquake was not mentioned in the article. Having lived in SF for over a year and experienced two relatively minor 4.0 earthquakes, this is a real risk and one that suggests it doesn't make sense to pack the city with large, high rise buildings.
SF is also a city of extremes - it contains the richest people in the world and the poorest people. Something really need to be done about the large mentally ill population before SF can be considered a truly forward looking city.
It was mentioned. The author briefly stated it was not worth talking about since other earthquake-prone cities like Tokyo have built up despite this just fine.
San Francisco is tiny. It covers less than 50 square miles! Liberalized housing rules aren't going to offset that. This article is making an observation about the greater SF metro area and using it to drive an argument about SF proper; it's incoherent.
The author writes, "Victorian houses... are very pretty. They’re also very inefficient. Collectively, they take up a lot of space, but don’t house very many people... if developers were allowed to do it, they’d buy up small houses and apartments all over the city and replace them with highrises"
Funny, you don't often hear about plans to start building tower blocks in Pacific Heights, a neighborhood with probably one of the lowest population densities in the city. Surely, given the economic arguments, VCs and business leaders residing there wouldn't mind a bit of construction?
The author believes "Build more houses, lots and lots more, and you’ll finally start seeing rents go down" yet the evidence of rental prices in Manhattan, Tokyo and Hong Kong suggest otherwise. In fact, today in Hong Kong, a car parking spot costs double the average US house price! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-26/hong-kong-parking-c...
This battle over high-rises has been going on for decades, through every boom and bust, and this time is no different. The one constant is people falling in love with the pretty Victorian houses on tree lined streets. Amen to that!
Okay. Here is how I look at it. I am a smart, focussed, imaginative guy. I believe pretty strongly that if I lived in a city where I was in close proximity to a lot of other smart, talented people, I could make some great things happen. I have a lot of ideas that would require teams of such people to realise, any one of which could become an important business or non-profit venture. The Internet is great, and web-based collaboration and idea-realisation tools are certainly developing and making the world flatter, but proximity is still a very large catalyst to things happening. San Francisco happens to sound like one of the best cities for someone like me to move to. I happen to live very far from San Francisco, in another country. I am sure there are a lot of people like me around the world. The cost and difficulty and unknowns of the idea of moving to SF are pretty intimidating.
Now what would happen if all the people like me were able to easily move to San Francisco, and start meeting and talking and coming up with ideas and doing things together? If those big walls of distance, national borders, and evidently prohibitively expensive real estate were broken down? I imagine some very great things could happen. One thing this article pin-pointed is interesting: salaries at major SF tech companies are high because of the housing shortage. What might happen if you could concentrate the world's smartest people in one great city with affordable housing, so that the companies they might start could pay lower wages? Well you could definitely start companies a lot easier, and they could be profitable at lower levels, so it would encourage I think better and more diverse companies and internet services. I think San Francisco would also benefit hugely.
I think eventually a city like this has to come along eventually. If there is going to be a global village, there needs to be a global hub where the best and the brightest can meet and work together. Currently the world doesn't have such a place. It seems like SF has as good a shot as any of becoming that hub. Doing so would of course require some sacrifices, so the question for SF seems to be, do you want to go on being sorta great but holding off true greatness because you don't want to give up any of the things you like about the way you have things now, or are you willing to aim high?
The question for anyone else is, what can you do to make it much much easier for people from around the world to gather together in a single place? There are a lot of legislatory hurdles to be dissolved. Also anyone who made it their business to help people make the jump could do well I think.
Also, as an aside, nation-states and borders are so 20th century. Eventually the world will have no borders - a truly united world has to happen eventually. Removing borders should be a priority for everybody.
Major agreement. Urban housing is effectively a cartel, in that the owners spend a lot of time corrupting city councils and zoning boards to prevent new supply so the absentee mega-owners can charge exorbitant prices. It's rent-seeking (literally) parasitism at its worst.
The problem in SF is self-inflicted by the city with its double shot of rent control (which I benfit from) and its labyrinthine permit process coupled with the weight of neighborhood groups who oppose grand projects --their mindset reminds me of the stuff I hear out in the Peninsula, the suburbs.
In addition, the argument above is mostly about rental properties and discounts condominiums which are also very necessary to remediate the housing issue in SF.
If SF were more like Miami, then we would have seen many more developments coming in and driving prices down --for both housing and rent. But I think it's the home owners rather than absentee mega landlords and landladies who are being self-interested and who want to keep the prices inflated. These are the people who want to keep out the new housing developments. People want to maintain their property values.
Anyhow, I agree with the author. SF is a city which likes to pretend its progressive, but actually, in its heart, would like to remain the quaint 19th century Victorian relic city. It's only progressive in a partial social sense, but not in any larger sense.
If that's so, how come the city still has rent control? Not that I think rent control is a good idea, but property owners hate it and by your thesis they should be able to get it abolished because they have the city government in their pocket. In reality, it's usually residents and tenants who raise the largest objections to new developments, either on environmental, value-reduction, or affordability grounds.
SF rent control is profitable for landlords. It resets with each tenant. So, only if you overpay when you initially buy are you ever going to lose money b/c rent control. And if you do that, its a fault of the bid being off.
That assumes a high tenant turnover. From what I've seen, the opposite is true. I know people with downtown apartments that have had them since the 80s and only pay a couple of hundred bucks a month. It's difficult to evict someone; for example, if you buy a house that is rented and you want to move in yourself, you either need to wait most of a year or pay up $15,000 to the tenant, depending on their circumstances (if they have dependents who are old people or children in school, for example). If you buy property as an investment and want to evict the current tenants to charge a higher rent, you'd better a) have evidence they're breaking the lease and b) be prepared for a long appeals process.
Its not that its 'more profitable', it is that it 'is profitable' (enough). And, its not only profitbale enough, but it creates a lock-in (people wont move/give up their space) wich reduces turnover. The ideal position for a landlord is protiable tenants that don't turnover. That's why there is more inertia in the system than seems at first blush to be likely.
I don't know about San Francisco, but New York landlords who don't own rent-controlled apartments actually make a huge amount of money out of it.
Demand for housing is extremely inelastic, which means that a 1% supply destruction will have a much greater than 1% (possibly 10-50%) effect on prices. The result of supply destruction is that the class of suppliers benefits, although individual suppliers (who experience the destruction) don't. Of course, landlords who own a lot of RC properties are losing on those units, regardless of the aggregate benefit to the class of landlords.
The legacy, 1947-era, rent control in New York covers less than 1% of apartments, but it's responsible for at least a 50% increase in what people have to pay for at-market housing. That's how price inelasticity works.
[1] http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2012/05/san_franciscos_to...