5 ms·

I don't understand why cities around SF are not building high rise buildings. If there is no space to expand, you should build high rise building which can acco

by rajeshp1986 9y ago

I don't understand why cities around SF are not building high rise buildings. If there is no space to expand, you should build high rise building which can accommodate more people. I understand there are zoning laws which prevent from building taller buildings, but if you see the landscape in south-bay they are all single story houses. The land could be utilized in a better way and build bigger housing complexes with multi-story buildings. I don't understand why city administrations are not taking this step and rather pushing the rent & house prices which is forcing people to spend 50% of their salary on housing.

__jal 9y ago
Go sit in on a meeting in Mountain View or Cupertino. Existing home owners don't want it and the elected admins don't want it. They are happy to foist the problem off on, well, just about anywhere else. They want wealthy folks in detached single-family homes, and the fact that they host companies that employ more people than can live there means constant upward pressure on home prices and the tax base. In other words, it is an externality just like pollution that the producers don't want to internalize.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  South San Jose are building condos and apartments (maybe 4 stories tall, skyscrapers only in the "Everything's up-to-date in Kansas City" sort of way). Still, this density of housing is only going to put more pressure on the already strained highways that take people north to the jobs. Next year the article will read, "California's Commuting Crisis Reaches a 'Breaking Point'."
  - sbov 9y ago
    All of those, plus a mini mall for good measure, on land that used to be a large source of tech jobs for the surrounding area. How many mini malls does a suburb really need? I have a friend-of-a-friend who used to work for a big company decommissioning these old campuses. He claimed they always pushed heavily for commercial because there are fewer lawsuits related to groundwater contamination and such.
    - ac29 9y ago
      > How many mini malls does a suburb really need? A lot of people live in the Bay Area. The 9 county area has 7.68 million people [0], enough that it would be the 102nd (of 234) most populus country in the world if it were its own country [1]. Countries with similar populations include Switzerland, Israel, and Hong Kong (all relatively small and dense). Anecdotally, I dont see much vacancy in commercial/retail real estate (mini malls or otherwise) in the Bay Area, and with nearly 8 million people living here, there is an obvious need for quite a bit of commercial space. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...
      - sbov 9y ago
        I'm well aware of the population of the bay area. I speak to South San Jose because I was born and lived there for close to 25 years, basically around the corner from the former Cottle IBM plant. I still visit because my parents live in the same house. And from my anecdotal experience when visiting, the older mini malls surrounding it have less foot traffic. Which makes sense, because everyone wants to go to the new shiny places. And it's not like these places were overly crowded in the first place.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Not to mention that the "no new development" position simultaneously has vast amounts of money behind it and can present itself as left wing, even radical. Plus also sound "ecological" (except for the gas spent on two hour commutes but hey look at my "green" lawn). Anarchists in SF don't protest mountain view homeowners, don't demand opening the door to high rises on Potrero Hill but rather block buses taking tech workers to work - morons. Confusion reigns!
rebootthesystem 9y ago
Cities don't build anything. People, investors, entrepreneurs build. What cities do is prevent them from building. I've been researching buying some land to put up affordable housing. I can buy the land. The permits and regulations? Almost impossible to deal with. Every single contractor I've spoken to has advised has echoed my findings.
dsjenson 9y ago
Who do you mean by "you", when you say "you should"? Do you mean you as in YOU? Or everyone else? Of course people who can't afford housing want cheaper housing. But people who have housing don't want high-rise buildings in their neighborhoods and that's understandable. The solution is not to build more housing. The solution is to create work in other places, too. Why should all companies be in SF? Force companies to move to states with plenty of space.
- int_handler 9y ago
  Or other parts of California with plenty of space such as the Central Valley. Unfortunately, similar to how homeowners don't want high-rise buildings in their neighborhood, companies do not want to build additional campuses or allow remote work.
- xxpor 9y ago
  The solution is for people to stop telling other people what they can do with their land.
  - davidw 9y ago
    Yeah - however, politically, it'd be expedient to come up with some kind of 'replacement' for zoning that still allays the (mostly ridiculous) fears that someone is going to buy the house next door and put in a nuclear waste disposal facility in its place.
iheart2code 9y ago
It's a bit further South than most people want to live, but San Jose is currently doing this.
peterjlee 9y ago
My guess is that voters who actually care about city level politics or influential people in the city are already home owners. For home owners, building more housing means a decrease in their home value so they have no incentive to push more housing.
- Zach_the_Lizard 9y ago
  This is why regional or even national planning could work better; the larger region has less incentive to do this. Seems to work well in other countries
PeterisP 9y ago
Zoning laws aren't handed out by God on stone tablets. If current zoning laws prohibit the apartment buildings the cities need, the cities can and should change the zoning laws.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Democracy makes that difficult.
- davidw 9y ago
  But the people who want to change them can't afford to live there: https://shift.newco.co/letter-of-resignation-from-the-palo-alto-planning-and-transportation-commission-f7b6facd94f5 https://shift.newco.co/letter-of-resignation-from-the-palo-a... Best bet is probably statewide initiatives such as those proposed by Scott Weiner. https://twitter.com/scott_wiener https://twitter.com/scott_wiener
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Cities don't need things. People need things. The relevant question is, Which people are the city? Is it the business people who own businesses there? Yes. Is it the people who live there? Yes, them too. Is it the people who don't live there, but want to move there? No, it's not. That's the problem.
- dcd0101 9y ago
  Seems like those laws come from people that already live there, and it seems kinda reasonable for a community to have those opinions and make their own ordinances. The part I don't understand is why most of the sector doesn't just leave.
hindsightbias 9y ago
They'd rather bus the neu-techs and dump them on SF. Didn't the good folks of Palo Alto vote out the council members that voted for a 60-unit retiree building? They can bring a bulldozer to Dolores when I can take one to Stanford.
brudgers 9y ago
High rise housing projects take many years. Just assembling a suitable parcel in a good location from multiple small parcels under separate ownership requires cunning and misdirection and often a couple of decades. Real estate is slow. Apple has its new spaceship in Cupertino. Apple paid $300 million for HP's 100 acre former campus in 2010. Apple's adjacent parcel was acquired in 2006. Even without regarding how long it probably took to close the first parcel, that's more than a decade ago. For a straight up office building with no need for sales and marketing. And office buildings are what Cupertino wants on its tax rolls. Suppose that 100 acres went to housing instead. At $3million per acre and 30 units gross per acre, there's $100,000 per unit in land cost. At a low end 4:1 improvement to land cost ratio, the construction of each unit runs out to $400,000 and the unit cost is $500,000. Throw in 20% for carrying costs and 20% for developer profit and units hit the market at $720,000. Sure a person can play with the numbers and get them lower or higher. But even at 30 dwelling units per acre, that's only an addition of only 3000 units over ten years to the overall Bay Area market. And it took more than $1 billion in capital and a decade worth of work. If it were easy, it would have happened.

__jal 9y ago

Go sit in on a meeting in Mountain View or Cupertino. Existing home owners don't want it and the elected admins don't want it. They are happy to foist the problem off on, well, just about anywhere else. They want wealthy folks in detached single-family homes, and the fact that they host companies that employ more people than can live there means constant upward pressure on home prices and the tax base. In other words, it is an externality just like pollution that the producers don't want to internalize.

JKCalhoun 9y ago
South San Jose are building condos and apartments (maybe 4 stories tall, skyscrapers only in the "Everything's up-to-date in Kansas City" sort of way). Still, this density of housing is only going to put more pressure on the already strained highways that take people north to the jobs. Next year the article will read, "California's Commuting Crisis Reaches a 'Breaking Point'."
- sbov 9y ago
  All of those, plus a mini mall for good measure, on land that used to be a large source of tech jobs for the surrounding area. How many mini malls does a suburb really need? I have a friend-of-a-friend who used to work for a big company decommissioning these old campuses. He claimed they always pushed heavily for commercial because there are fewer lawsuits related to groundwater contamination and such.
  - ac29 9y ago
    > How many mini malls does a suburb really need? A lot of people live in the Bay Area. The 9 county area has 7.68 million people [0], enough that it would be the 102nd (of 234) most populus country in the world if it were its own country [1]. Countries with similar populations include Switzerland, Israel, and Hong Kong (all relatively small and dense). Anecdotally, I dont see much vacancy in commercial/retail real estate (mini malls or otherwise) in the Bay Area, and with nearly 8 million people living here, there is an obvious need for quite a bit of commercial space. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...
    - sbov 9y ago
      I'm well aware of the population of the bay area. I speak to South San Jose because I was born and lived there for close to 25 years, basically around the corner from the former Cottle IBM plant. I still visit because my parents live in the same house. And from my anecdotal experience when visiting, the older mini malls surrounding it have less foot traffic. Which makes sense, because everyone wants to go to the new shiny places. And it's not like these places were overly crowded in the first place.
joe_the_user 9y ago
Not to mention that the "no new development" position simultaneously has vast amounts of money behind it and can present itself as left wing, even radical. Plus also sound "ecological" (except for the gas spent on two hour commutes but hey look at my "green" lawn). Anarchists in SF don't protest mountain view homeowners, don't demand opening the door to high rises on Potrero Hill but rather block buses taking tech workers to work - morons. Confusion reigns!

rebootthesystem 9y ago

Cities don't build anything. People, investors, entrepreneurs build. What cities do is prevent them from building. I've been researching buying some land to put up affordable housing. I can buy the land. The permits and regulations? Almost impossible to deal with. Every single contractor I've spoken to has advised has echoed my findings.

dsjenson 9y ago

Who do you mean by "you", when you say "you should"? Do you mean you as in YOU? Or everyone else? Of course people who can't afford housing want cheaper housing. But people who have housing don't want high-rise buildings in their neighborhoods and that's understandable. The solution is not to build more housing. The solution is to create work in other places, too. Why should all companies be in SF? Force companies to move to states with plenty of space.

int_handler 9y ago
Or other parts of California with plenty of space such as the Central Valley. Unfortunately, similar to how homeowners don't want high-rise buildings in their neighborhood, companies do not want to build additional campuses or allow remote work.
xxpor 9y ago
The solution is for people to stop telling other people what they can do with their land.
- davidw 9y ago
  Yeah - however, politically, it'd be expedient to come up with some kind of 'replacement' for zoning that still allays the (mostly ridiculous) fears that someone is going to buy the house next door and put in a nuclear waste disposal facility in its place.

iheart2code 9y ago

It's a bit further South than most people want to live, but San Jose is currently doing this.

peterjlee 9y ago

My guess is that voters who actually care about city level politics or influential people in the city are already home owners. For home owners, building more housing means a decrease in their home value so they have no incentive to push more housing.

Zach_the_Lizard 9y ago
This is why regional or even national planning could work better; the larger region has less incentive to do this. Seems to work well in other countries

PeterisP 9y ago

Zoning laws aren't handed out by God on stone tablets. If current zoning laws prohibit the apartment buildings the cities need, the cities can and should change the zoning laws.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Democracy makes that difficult.
davidw 9y ago
But the people who want to change them can't afford to live there: https://shift.newco.co/letter-of-resignation-from-the-palo-alto-planning-and-transportation-commission-f7b6facd94f5 https://shift.newco.co/letter-of-resignation-from-the-palo-a... Best bet is probably statewide initiatives such as those proposed by Scott Weiner. https://twitter.com/scott_wiener https://twitter.com/scott_wiener
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Cities don't need things. People need things. The relevant question is, Which people are the city? Is it the business people who own businesses there? Yes. Is it the people who live there? Yes, them too. Is it the people who don't live there, but want to move there? No, it's not. That's the problem.
dcd0101 9y ago
Seems like those laws come from people that already live there, and it seems kinda reasonable for a community to have those opinions and make their own ordinances. The part I don't understand is why most of the sector doesn't just leave.

hindsightbias 9y ago

They'd rather bus the neu-techs and dump them on SF. Didn't the good folks of Palo Alto vote out the council members that voted for a 60-unit retiree building? They can bring a bulldozer to Dolores when I can take one to Stanford.

brudgers 9y ago

High rise housing projects take many years. Just assembling a suitable parcel in a good location from multiple small parcels under separate ownership requires cunning and misdirection and often a couple of decades. Real estate is slow. Apple has its new spaceship in Cupertino. Apple paid $300 million for HP's 100 acre former campus in 2010. Apple's adjacent parcel was acquired in 2006. Even without regarding how long it probably took to close the first parcel, that's more than a decade ago. For a straight up office building with no need for sales and marketing. And office buildings are what Cupertino wants on its tax rolls. Suppose that 100 acres went to housing instead. At $3million per acre and 30 units gross per acre, there's $100,000 per unit in land cost. At a low end 4:1 improvement to land cost ratio, the construction of each unit runs out to $400,000 and the unit cost is $500,000. Throw in 20% for carrying costs and 20% for developer profit and units hit the market at $720,000. Sure a person can play with the numbers and get them lower or higher. But even at 30 dwelling units per acre, that's only an addition of only 3000 units over ten years to the overall Bay Area market. And it took more than $1 billion in capital and a decade worth of work. If it were easy, it would have happened.