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.
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.