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You’d need 5,000 units a year in San Francisco to keep rents steady. This is the goal SF’s mayor just set for the city, google “Ed Lee Medium” to find it. It i

You’d need 5,000 units a year in San Francisco to keep rents steady. This is the goal SF’s mayor just set for the city, google “Ed Lee Medium” to find it. It is definitely not an intractable problem given SF built 5,000 units in 2016. Upzoning, lowering impact fees, speeding housing approvals for things like ADU’s, making discretionary review tougher (it currently costs $700 to delay a project by three months), electing pro-housing candidates, having places like Brisbane choose apartments over another office park - all of these will help, it’s not intractable by any stretch.

jacobolus 9y ago
If we just slightly upzoned the whole western half of the city, and added public transit to go with it (even better if streets were narrowed a bit and street parking reduced), San Francisco could fit a whole heck of a lot more people without ever needing new buildings taller than 4 or 5 stories. San Francisco zoning through huge swaths of the city is restricted to single-family houses and scattered duplexes, with only a few mixed-use areas. It’s supposed to be a booming city, but more than half of it is zoned to be a sleepy beach town. (And a lot of the Bay Area is even worse.) Here’s the SF zoning map. All the pale yellow part is very low density; If it were up to me we would change half or more of that pale yellow area to some mix of darker yellow, orange, and purple. http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf
mamon 9y ago
5000 units, and you think that's a lot? Last year in Warsaw (which is smaller than SF) there were almost 20,000 new apartments built. You now see how much impact all those zoning laws have.
- pawelk 9y ago
  According to Wikipedia SF City and County has a population of 870k, Warsaw 1.8 million. The metro area 4.6M vs 3.1M respectively. So I'd say the same ballpark. That said 5000 units seems like nothing at these population sizes. I live near Wrocław (650k city population, 1.1M metro), there were 10.000 new units in 2016 and this year will be similar. And this number doesn't include private investments (people building a house for themselves), only housing built by developers and sold on the market.

jacobolus 9y ago

If we just slightly upzoned the whole western half of the city, and added public transit to go with it (even better if streets were narrowed a bit and street parking reduced), San Francisco could fit a whole heck of a lot more people without ever needing new buildings taller than 4 or 5 stories. San Francisco zoning through huge swaths of the city is restricted to single-family houses and scattered duplexes, with only a few mixed-use areas. It’s supposed to be a booming city, but more than half of it is zoned to be a sleepy beach town. (And a lot of the Bay Area is even worse.) Here’s the SF zoning map. All the pale yellow part is very low density; If it were up to me we would change half or more of that pale yellow area to some mix of darker yellow, orange, and purple. http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf

mamon 9y ago

5000 units, and you think that's a lot? Last year in Warsaw (which is smaller than SF) there were almost 20,000 new apartments built. You now see how much impact all those zoning laws have.

pawelk 9y ago
According to Wikipedia SF City and County has a population of 870k, Warsaw 1.8 million. The metro area 4.6M vs 3.1M respectively. So I'd say the same ballpark. That said 5000 units seems like nothing at these population sizes. I live near Wrocław (650k city population, 1.1M metro), there were 10.000 new units in 2016 and this year will be similar. And this number doesn't include private investments (people building a house for themselves), only housing built by developers and sold on the market.