There has to be an incentive for real estate developers.

There's a project at my former company that will redevelop a part of downtown SF. There was a massive back and forth and iterations that had to be done because the numbers guy at the real estate development company wanted to cut out all residential since commercial would be more profitable.

Those are the people you have to incentivize to make it work.

What SF probably needs is not huge projects downtown, but more incremental growth further out. In Europe, in a city that size, you'd see a lot more 4/5/6 story development, rather than the huge skyscrapers downtown and then 1/2/3 story in a lot of residential areas.

I agree. Same in LA. I was merely pointing out things I heard directly from people working with a major real estate developer there. I know from the design side that there was a major fight to try and get in some sort of affordable residential vs what the developer was hearing from their number crunchers.

Yeah, stuff in SF is complex. Could be that, yeah, if they decided to add some residential, they got more NIMBY pushback, or some kind of requirement to add N% 'affordable' that made it pencil out as less profitable.

It's possible but honestly I don't think that's a factor only that commercial real estate in downtown SF is going to get them more bang for their buck right now. Their timeline is looking 5-10 years out so they have their shit together (as well as experience) to deal with SF stuff.