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Re:Proposition C by manfredo on Saturday October 20, 2018 @01:31PM (#18264348)
Height restrictions are a big one, as is reducing the ability for neighborhoods to reject housing construction. Plenty of groups, like Calle 24, use this in an extortionary manner and block housing unless the developer makes donations to the group or its affiliates.
Re:Proposition C by SllX on Saturday October 20, 2018 @02:30PM (#18264689)
You and I would probably agree right off the bat on reducing the ability for neighborhoods to reduce housing construction.

However, I have to ask you about height restrictions. There's height restrictions because not everyone wants to live next to a skyscraper, which is well, debatable. I can debate both sides of that.

There's also height restrictions because the bedrock of San Francisco is not uniform across the city. In many areas of the city, I don't think you even can build skyscrapers and expect them to remain stable, as we are seeing with the Millennium Tower and the incomplete dome on the Salesforce Tower.

I could consider reducing height restrictions, certainly, but I don't think you can eliminate them completely.

Re:Proposition C by manfredo on Saturday October 20, 2018 @04:06PM (#18265147)
I think rent control a is a big reason why this attitude exists. A large segment of rents (~70% of them) live in rent controlled units, and thus have no direct incentive to lower rents. In practice, most people probably wouldn't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars extra per month for a better view. But in SF, residents are shielded from that sort of tradeoff by rent control, and the costs of obstructing development are passed off to other people. If residents actually felt the impact of rising rents, the discussion around development would be a very different story.

In cities without rent control, like Seattle, development happens a lot quicker. Over the course of half a decade (2010-2015 IIRC) Seattle added more than twice the number of housing units as SF. Rent control's perverse system of incentives leads cities like SF to shoot themselves in the foot.