SF restaurants are suffocating

Re:SF restaurants are suffocating by avz on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:01AM (#18901194)

> 5. In order for the market rate price of housing to become affordable to cooks and servers, it would first become dirt cheap for tech workers making 2-4x their compensation. Therefore all of that worldwide demand for SF tech worker housing would need to be satiated before the market solves this problem.

Suppose you take a fraction S of city's residential surface area and build it up by H times average residential height. Housing volume increases by S * H. Most housing in SF is merely 2 stories high. Let's assume average is 3 stories. Now, pick 1% of city's residential area and build it up by adding 30 stories, say from 3 to 33. Note that 33 stories is actually smaller than a few existing tall residential structures in SF [1]. This would give relative increase in housing volume by S * H = 1% * 10 = 10% which given SF's population of >880k [2] amounts to >88k increase in housing capacity. This is more than the entire global workforce of Google [3].

It's a lot of construction work, of course, but it looks feasible. Many cities build a lot higher and on a wider area than the figures above.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Residential_skyscrape...

[2] 884,363 (2017), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

[3] 85,050 (Q1 2018), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Edit: formatting and correction

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Re:SF restaurants are suffocating by abalone on Monday January 14, 2019 @02:45AM (#18901379)

I mean I don’t want to sound too discouraging but this is the problem with “plausible sounding” armchair urbanism. 1% of the surface area of SF is over one hundred city blocks of 33 story residential skyscrapers. And as you note, that’s not even enough to house the global workforce of the current tech companies, many of whom would move to HQ if housing became cheap along with crap tons of others.

Well, sure, go ahead. The point is market rate construction alone will not solve the service industry housing problem. There needs to be affordable price-controlled housing to support a healthy local economy.

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Re:SF restaurants are suffocating by closeparen on Monday January 14, 2019 @01:40PM (#18905214)

>1% of the surface area of SF is over one hundred city blocks of 33 story residential skyscrapers.

You're writing that like it's ludicrous. Manhattan's ~2500 blocks are much more than 1% covered in high-density residential structures. So it's not even close to touching the examples we already have.

> market rate construction alone

I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up. Market rate construction alone is not a thing in San Francisco. The requirement is 18% BMR. If we zone for more capacity, it will be 18% BMR.

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