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Seriously that was 11 years ago. Yes, a lot of things changed in 11 years.

by guyzero 10y ago

mcguire 10y ago
That's my point. 11 years may seem like a long time to you, but it's really not. I've seen quite a few people here wanting high-rise residential buildings in San Francisco to alleviate the high rents there. A skyscraper is at least 40 floors, according to wikipedia and one rule of thumb I've seen puts the construction time for them at 1 month per floor, from ground breaking to completion. That's about 4 years in construction, plus design and planning time, plus site acquisition. That's five, six years (more?), total, even in the most positive political atmosphere. Someone who wanted to alleviate SF's high rents today, assuming you could do that by building high-rise apartment buildings, would had to have started at the height of the construction bust. That would be, I think, before San Francisco proper's tech boom, i.e. before there was a problem evident. And if you started building one today,... Once upon a time, Intel planned to build a 10 story office building in downtown Austin. They stopped, with nothing but the structure of the building up, in 2001. The incomplete building was demolished in 2007.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Yep. The government and people of San Francisco and Silicon Valley could wake up tomorrow, all with the simultaneous revelation that OMG we need to build a massive amount of new housing and all the associated transportation and other infrastructure needed to support it. And you might start seeing the initial fruits in a decade. Meanwhile, in the real world, if attitudes and policies were to start shifting, 15 to 20 years is probably a more realistic planning horizon.
- guyzero 10y ago
  In 2008 I moved out of Toronto and when I went back a few years later there were dozens of new high- and mid-rise buildings that had been built downtown. Telus Tower was built from 2007 to 2009, 32 stories. 120 Bremner is 30 stories, same time period. Cityplace has about two dozen high-rise residential towers that were all built in 2-3 years and are 30+ stories tall. It does not take 4 years to construct a highrise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto

Seriously that was 11 years ago. Yes, a lot of things changed in 11 years.

by guyzero 10y ago

Seriously that was 11 years ago. Yes, a lot of things changed in 11 years.

That's my point. 11 years may seem like a long time to you, but it's really not. I've seen quite a few people here wanting high-rise residential buildings in San Francisco to alleviate the high rents there. A skyscraper is at least 40 floors, according to wikipedia and one rule of thumb I've seen puts the construction time for them at 1 month per floor, from ground breaking to completion. That's about 4 years in construction, plus design and planning time, plus site acquisition. That's five, six years (more?), total, even in the most positive political atmosphere. Someone who wanted to alleviate SF's high rents today, assuming you could do that by building high-rise apartment buildings, would had to have started at the height of the construction bust. That would be, I think, before San Francisco proper's tech boom, i.e. before there was a problem evident. And if you started building one today,... Once upon a time, Intel planned to build a 10 story office building in downtown Austin. They stopped, with nothing but the structure of the building up, in 2001. The incomplete building was demolished in 2007.

ghaff 10y ago
Yep. The government and people of San Francisco and Silicon Valley could wake up tomorrow, all with the simultaneous revelation that OMG we need to build a massive amount of new housing and all the associated transportation and other infrastructure needed to support it. And you might start seeing the initial fruits in a decade. Meanwhile, in the real world, if attitudes and policies were to start shifting, 15 to 20 years is probably a more realistic planning horizon.
guyzero 10y ago
In 2008 I moved out of Toronto and when I went back a few years later there were dozens of new high- and mid-rise buildings that had been built downtown. Telus Tower was built from 2007 to 2009, 32 stories. 120 Bremner is 30 stories, same time period. Cityplace has about two dozen high-rise residential towers that were all built in 2-3 years and are 30+ stories tall. It does not take 4 years to construct a highrise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto