It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned.
I used to live in NYC, a city that's had its own difficulties adding new housing, corruption in the permitting process, considering too many areas "historic." But the Bay Area is something completely different. It seems that everyone who already owns a single family home is strongly in favor of pulling up the ladder.
Perhaps too much money is riding on the existing "market value" of homes here. If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? Proposition 13 can't be helping, either.
It honestly didn't seem all that insane to me, because Boston is crazier in nearly every dimension. The peninsula at least has 3-lane boulevards with a reasonable road hierarchy and traffic light timings. Boston has cowpaths branching off in every direction, controlled by stop signs that can literally back up for miles. The peninsula has block after block of Eichlers on 1/4 acre lots. Boston has mid-rise row-houses on landfill in the Back Bay, quickly trailing off to historic old houses on 1.5 acre lots 10 minutes outside of the city. The peninsula refuses to let you put in an in-law unit or cut down a redwood tree without going through an extensive permitting process. The Boston area might refuse to let you put in new window panes if you live in a historic house (my computer teacher lived in one from the 1730s, and it still had all the original glass - which back then was hand made and tended to flow like putty - because it was considered a historic property and she couldn't modify it). The peninsula is due for a natural disaster in the next 30 years. In Boston, as my wife puts it, every winter is a natural disaster. BART has a problem with homeless dudes and property crime. The Red Line has a problem with trains losing the 3rd rail and running 20 minutes late. Caltrain electrification is stuck in limbo. The Big Dig has ceiling tiles that fall down and kill people.
Of course, the flip side of this is that Boston hasn't grown since 1950, and is around the same size as its 1910 population. San Francisco will probably meet a similar fate when the tech boom peters out.
https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/how-does-...
Housing prices in Boston aren't Bay bad or even close to it.
That sounds like a really easy problem to solve ...
"Yes, children - of course you may play baseball in my front yard ..."
It's actually quite the opposite. So-called soft story buildings are more dangerous in an earthquake and property owners are taking quite a while to bring them up to code. Californians just love their cars.
I don't see how that could be the case. The property value of a plot of land on which a 50, or even 5 story building can be built is much higher than the property value of a single-family home.
It's sorta like when labor unions go away. The company that hires non-unionized labor at half the price and double the productivity reaps an enormous windfall. So do the employees, who were presumably in other, less well-paying jobs. Everyone else who chooses not to play the new game ends up out of a job.
Or is this correct: As housing prices rise, it becomes cost effective to replace simplexes with duplexes, threeplexes, etc., causing the value of all simplexes to rise.
That's not completely accurate. Yes, demand might fall, but even so price and value will still rise regardless.
If you build a 50 unit complex next door, as long as some of those 50 units sell, then everyone elses 1/4th acre will become more valuable, even if no one ever actually buys them, because land value in the US has very little to do with buyers or demand, and is exclusively valued by whatever property transactions happen to occur nearby it.
land value in the US has very little to do with buyers or demand, and is exclusively valued by whatever property transactions happen to occur nearby it
Most residential properties here could have been snapped up in 2009 for about 60% of current costs... because demand was lower. (Probably several hundred percent in areas like Mission Bay.)
Land value in the US obviously has to do with buyers and demand.
So yes the price of land would go up, but the price of livable space would fall. And the cost of livable space is what we care about with regards to affordable housing.
Elaborate efforts have been made to adapt the contradictory parts, efforts that worked adequately for a while but which are now coming apart, leaving a situation with no way forward at all.
Do an image search for old timey SF and you'll see: the Sunset was sand dunes until about last Tuesday, etc. Dudes used to pan for gold out by Lake Merced.
Also, this was the weirdo town. Bohemia on the Bay. Serious folk didn't really come here to be serious and sane. The old line was, "All the crazy people move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to San Francisco." To which residents add, "And all the people too crazy for San Francisco move to Berkeley."
So yeah, you've got a young town full of nuts and flakes that no one really paid much attention to until the last ~50 years or so, whadda ya expect, eh?
Things are changing though. I was over in the Inner Sunset the other day and the beautiful people were there casting me in the shade because I look too close to homeless on the hipster/homeless spectrum.
My concern is the weakening of the commitment to keeping the wild areas of the Bay Area wild. SF is the largest city with the most wilderness around it in the world. Marin Headlands, Wildcat canyon et. al., nearly half of the peninsula is forest. I saw a coyote in someone's front yard on Junipero Serra the other day not three blocks from Stonestown Mall! In a neighborhood of single family homes, FWIW.
I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo. On the other hand, it sucks that I can't afford an apartment in my home town, let alone ever own a home, despite making programmer money. I can't imagine what it would be like if I didn't have tech skills. I'd probably be living in a tent under the freeway.
"I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo."
These two sentiments are in direct conflict though. Your options are to either build up or to build out. Building up will preserve the nearby wilderness; building out will see it turned into low density housing, roads, and terrible traffic congestion.
I know. Quoting Whitman, "I am large. I contain multitudes."
> Your options are to either build up or to build out.
Or, in a word, arcologies.
> Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated, ecologically low-impact human habitats.
> The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who believed that a completed arcology would provide space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities while minimizing individual human environmental impact. These structures have been largely hypothetical, as no arcology, even one envisioned by Soleri himself, has yet been built.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
If I had my druthers, I would roll up the low density stuff into arcologies and rehabilitate the old creeks that ran and still run to the bay. Use Permaculture (applied ecology) and passive design. IIRC the Australians were going to build a huge multi-acre combined solar chimney and greenhouse to generate electricity and grow food. &c.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney
We have all the solutions we need (often they are decades old) we just have to clue up and get crackin'.
And also the trend of people wanting to live in SF is a pretty recent phenomenon. The population of SF in 2000 was the same as it was in the 1950's. People were leaving SF in droves 40 years ago.
Cities can't just turn on a dime.
Other urban areas undergoing growth seem to have done much better by allowing more density. Unfortunately the California tax system incentivizes municipalities to build office space over housing. With the Bay Area's patchwork local organization and no metropolitan level layer of governance local municipalities instead play beggar-thy-neighbour as they promote only development that expands their tax base while the burdens of providing schools etc. falls to the municipality next door.
https://goo.gl/maps/7iW3oiqN3FcPhVXq6
Who owns it? Why is this still not housing or at least something? Who knows! There's a vacant boarded up mansion/victorian multiunit building on Grove as well that has been that way forever as well.
Also years ago there was a natural grocery store that closed on Divisadero. There was some controversy but the council decided to let it become a Core Power Yoga. That was almost a year ago. Zero progress has been made on building that studio, still an empty shop front.
http://www.sfweekly.com/news/with-corepower-divisadero-loses...
I don't have a strong opinion on that fight, but it's insane that these things take so long. I don't understand it, I've been meaning to go to a neighborhood meeting to ask, but I've been busy the rare nights they happen.
Seems there was once a school there: https://sf.curbed.com/2012/5/31/10366476/painted-ladies-have...
http://www.sfweekly.com/news/news-news/entropy-on-grove-stre... (2017) elaborates on why its been vacant, seems like the owner doesn't have the funds/desire to make it habitable. Also mentions how much red tape exists to develop in the neighborhood in the last couple paragraphs, maybe the owner doesn't feel like enduring that adventure.
The Peninsula is bland and awful. Plenty of affluent folks that just like to fuck with people (a.k.a. Atherton and the NIMBY's asinine fight against electrifying Caltrain). Plenty of folks (a.k.a. Brisbane) that like to pretend they're rich and only want to develop commercial property and leave the housing to SF.
But... the Bay Area is incredibly provincial. San Mateo county (most of the peninsula) is not San Francisco.
Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay.
Part if it is that there are chain retail bans in many neighborhoods, but the other part is where are you going to put the big stores? Cities in San Mateo county fight tooth and nail over the big box stores (see the Target in Colma directly across the highway from the Target in Daly City). Retail = tax revenue. Middle class jobs = less tax revenue. San Francisco can afford to levy payroll taxes and whatnot, but other cities don't have that prestige.
You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man.
You're starting to see more multi-unit housing in the Sunset, but again SF is not the peninsula. As bad as things are in San Francisco, things are far worse to the south. The garages are often two car sized and likely converted into illegal residential units.
Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces.
Curb cuts make walking in SF worse than it has to be, but try walking in the suburbs where there are sometimes no sidewalks, higher speed limits, and wider roads to cross on foot.
Compare with Hong Kong. Right off the Victoria Peak there are 40+ story apartment buildings. There's forest to one side of them, and more 40+ story buildings to the other side.
Incredible that people can be so willfully blind that they don't see how their own actions are contributing to the crisis. It's a real tragedy of the commons
Instead, on April 12, 1962 the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors opted out, citing high costs and concerns over shoppers leaving their county for stores in Downtown San Francisco.
Keep in mind that Silicon Valley did not exist yet. There was no support for BART in San Mateo County-grassroots or otherwise. Many Peninsula civic leaders were also against it–including JR Clinton owner of the San Mateo Times (predecessor of San Mateo Daily Journal). Also opposing BART was David Bohannon the developer of the Hillsdale Shopping Mall, Tom Casey of the San Mateo Co Development Associations. They, and the San Mateo Times, published Op-eds arguing that BART was not needed; instead more freeway lanes was the proposed solution to congestion woes.
The neighboring Santa Clara County's obsession with building and publicly financing the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol) didn't help either.
You can read more about it in BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System by Michael C. Healy.
the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol)
As for San Mateo county, Caltrain already served as an artery through it. San Mateo county residents would have been used as cash cows for SF to Western Alameda county, just like eastern Alameda County has been for five decades.
BART is a basket case of incompetence on its own. SF residents were largely willing to support an infill station at 30th and Mission, but BART stuck its thumbs up its ass and eventually built a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport (ripping up recent renovations to the street along the way).
San Mateo residents bought into BART in the 90s, but as they've learned public transit (BART especially) is a cost not profit center so the regional (SamTrans) service got gutted to fund BART (whose ridership numbers consistently lag predictions).
a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport
The empty trestles over Hegenberger were reminiscent of the "Freeway to Nowhere" (the 280/680/101 interchange in San Jose).
I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majority Southern Californian neighborhood all their life in the same homes they've always been in. Imagine ripping on them for trying to preserve their neighborhood and therefore their culture. And for what? To make it possible for more people to move in and potentially make things worse for the people already there? If it's a minority-majority neighborhood, making it possible for more whites to move in is gentrification. How do you argue for that?
I'm not saying I agree with any of this by the way, just playing devil's advocate.
Regardless, these people are not "natives" who got SF entirely in its current state from God, it was growing up, as prosperous cities do, and neighborhoods were changing. So why should it stop its development in 1976, why are people who moved in to SF back then entitled to this? If you ask me, this is becoming uncannily feudal.
But essentially this basically comes down to gentrification vs preserving culture. Do we value cities as money-making assembly lines where all the workers are replaceable or do we value cities as a living thing, with the culture(s) as their bloodline that makes those cities what they are and gives them their appeal? Do I want to keep my neighborhood as it is, for my children to grow up as I did, or should I just let anyone come and change it, for better or worse?
the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person
The problem is recognizing that appreciation without weathering the crushing taxes. Proposition 5 (portability of Jarvis Gann property tax bases) would have helped, but it was voted down.
Take a single person with $1 million in appreciation. $750K gets hit with (unindexed!) Federal capital gains, full CA income taxes with surtaxes "for the rich" (likewise unindexed), and you'd be starting over with respect to property tax basis (with a few exceptions in 9 counties).
You could eventually do a 1031, but you'd have to move somewhere in the meantime... probably out of state.
[1] https://www.sfcommunityhousingact.com/press/landmark-housing...
Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay.
In the Embarcadero there are actual motor inns, crappy hotels with one story raised 10 feet off the ground with parking spaces below them. Like a whole bunch of them. You don't even see those in abandoned small towns any more.
You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man.
Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces.
Yet the entire city is dominated by garages at street level. And two story buildings, and mile after mile of awful zero-architecture postwar commercial properties.
Yes the painted ladies are pretty, don't bulldoze them. Landmark Lombard street and some of the other charming blocks, Sure why not. But it's a global commercial city willing to build 50+ story office towers, and unwilling to do anything about the dozens of square miles of 1-2 story unredeemable residential surrounding them.
It's insane.