4 ms·
Fortunately, there's an easy workaround for the ever-increasing land rents, which should work even in places like the SF Bay Area: you can just have a group of
by crzwdjk 11y ago
Fortunately, there's an easy workaround for the ever-increasing land rents, which should work even in places like the SF Bay Area: you can just have a group of people pool their resources to pay for a given plot of land, usually in the form of an "apartment building". Unfortunately, those are illegal in almost all of the Bay Area, and in SF itself, even in the few places where you can build a new one, the process takes forever and costs a lot of money. As a result, housing becomes a rare and collectible good, and people have to either crowd into the existing units, pay a lot of money, or have punishingly long commutes.
- dawnbreez 11y ago>apartment buildings are illegal Well, I guess they don't want tall buildings falling over due to a quake...
- xlm1717 11y agoThey should get Japanese engineers to come in and build the apartment buildings then. Tokyo is still standing.
- vorotato 11y agohas nothing to do with that, has everything to do with maintaining the "look and feel" of SF.
- crzwdjk 11y agoThis is equally the case in most other US cities, most especially the expensive ones, but even including the likes of Chicago. It's kind of baffling: a four bedroom house with one kitchen and four roommates is perfectly fine per the zoning code, but that same house split into two apartments with two people living in each one would only be allowed in a relatively small fraction of the city (generally a smaller fraction than _actually has_ such buildings, btw). It's almost like the zoning bureaucrats think stoves are some kind of evil that needs to be strictly limited.