6 ms·

4 Years Trying to Get Approval to Turn SF Laundromat into Apartment Building

35 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

rendall 9y ago
This reminds me of another struggle in SF to get an ice-cream parlor approved. "The NYT's Scott James recounts the insane red-tape endured by Juliet Pries, an entrepreneur who decided to open an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco's Cole Valley. She had to pay rent on an empty storefront for over two years while the necessary permits were processed, and tens of thousands of dollars in fees (including the cost of producing a detailed map of nearby businesses, which the city itself seemed not to have)." https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of-getting-appr.html https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of-getting-...
yostrovs 9y ago
It's surprising that San Francisco isn't doing a laundry assessment evaluating whether anyone became dependent on the historic launderette.
anovikov 9y ago
Well, obviously people who already own apartments nearby don't want values of their own ones - mostly purchased on mortgage - to fall, because it could ruin their retirement. Within the democratic society, there is no fix for this problem.
- sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
  The other democratic societies who have solved this problem seem to belie your claim. The issue here is that the unit of democracy for this problem is too local.
  - anovikov 9y ago
    Simple fix: even MORE strict zoning and ban of private ownership on individual apartments. They all will be owner by the city itself and rented out. Basically, back to Soviet Union.
    - sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
      That is a bad idea. The Soviet Union was a shitty place to live, and its economic policies were disastrous. As I pointed out in the comment you're replying to, this problem has already been well-solved by simply expanding the locus of control for zoning so that the interests served by it are more global.
      - anovikov 9y ago
        That's what i meant. Sacking democracy and market economy to fix these things is an overkill and there is hardly a better way. European cities try to fix it in a half-Commie way: try to keep as many apartment buildings in public property and lease them subsidized, with rental contracts dating from early post-WWII days and passed as inheritance. Same thing: keep the place to incumbents - only with no ability to cash out.
- mattlondon 9y ago
  I'm not sure a few extra apartments in a city of thousands and thousands is going to reduce the value of anything nearby by any appreciable amount? Got any data about it? From my experience in London prices just keep on going up and up (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-hpi-for-january-2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-hpi-...) despite adding more and more (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/london-house-building-set-plummet-half-sales-dwindle/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/london-hous...) apart from more recently, but that is due to brexit - for years and years prior to brexit the prices just kept on going up despite new blocks of apartments being built everywhere they could find an old petrol station or pub or old school or house-with-unusually-large-garden they could knock down and replace with a block of 30-40 apartments. There may obviously wider economic factors going in to this - i.e. construction because prices are going up, but I suspect SF will be very similar in this regard.
  - Atheros 9y ago
    > I'm not sure a few extra apartments in a city of thousands and thousands is going to reduce the value of anything nearby by any appreciable amount? No shit it won't. We need vastly more housing. But you're just being defeatist if your attitude is to give up if you are unable to construct enough to get prices to drop. You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
    - mattlondon 9y ago
      My attitude is not to give up. Of course there needs to be more housing built. The problem is, where do you build? Sounds like in this article there is a prime spot that is redeveloping a brownfield site - fine. But eventually you start running out of space. Eventually you need to build elsewhere - you cant simply just keep on piling more and more and more and density into a city. There is already a trend in London of literally piling on more density by adding additional floors to existing apartment buildings (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashsection.theobserver1 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashse...). How many times can you build on-top of an existing building? Eventually the amount of land runs out, especially in a tiny little mini-city like SF. I think it is when density gets "too high" that the NIMBY problems start to kick in - e.g. in my area in inner-outer-London on-street parking space is already super-competitive and local services like doctors and the tube are already super-busy, yet then we got a proposed development of adding 6000 (six thousand!) 2-and-3 bed apartments with zero parking spaces allocated, and absolutely zero money or effort going into improving the local infrastructure - no new schools, no new doctors, no new libraries, no new bus stops/routes, no new improvements to tube stations. You cant just add 12,000-18,000 new people into a local area and expect no one to own a car or need to go to the doctors etc etc. It is this kind of density-overload that understandably gets people pissed off. In the UK, the effort needs to go beyond just building more and more and more AND MORE apartments in London, but to also include persuading employers to not be in London and investing in decent infrastructure elsewhere where there is space. I suspect it is the same for SF and a lot of employers in the valley. The employers say they are there because the talent is there, and the talent say they are there because the employees are there. Someone needs to make the first move.
- Atheros 9y ago
  A national land value tax would fix it. The tax could be phased in slowly so that property prices have time to adjust downward. When it costs NIMBYs money to NIMBY they'll eventually stop.
madaxe_again 9y ago
This is par for the course in trying to develop in many western cities, and it’s almost as though a system has been designed to exclude smaller developers in favour of vast multi-billion-dollar-portfolio landlords. Whether deliberate or not, it’s sick to the core - as an example, in Bath in the UK, I’ve had a several year battle to simply carry out like-for-like repairs on a subterranean vault on my property - it’s going to collapse soon, and it’s directly under a major road - but even using 200 year old techniques with no external disruption they keep denying it. At this point I’m just going to let the arterial road through the city disappear into a hole. Meanwhile, a neighbouring property owned by a large multinational landlord got planning permission to build an external lift on a Georgian property, and the same landlord recently won an application to evict 600 people (owners) from perfectly serviceable housing to build fewer, more expensive houses.
- sdoering 9y ago
  How can you evict owners? Are 600 people behind with their payments?
  - nine_k 9y ago
    Does UK have an analogue to the "eminent domain"?
    - roywiggins 9y ago
      It does. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order?wp...
MiscIdeaMaker99 9y ago
San Francisco certainly has its share of self-righteous, self-important, holier-than-thou types. I grew up and live in Indianapolis. It's only happened a handful of times, but while visiting San Francisco someone would say, "I'm sorry," after hearing that I live in a "flyover state." Of course, these folks weren't from San Francisco either. (I think I've only met one or two actual natives of San Francisco.) This has also happened in New York City. I don't mean to tarnish the people of San Francisco, though, because I love visiting SF and the people there are the nicest I've ever met, anywhere. I also understand that people want to preserve what good they have going on there, though, but I often wonder if this is because they're thinking about the greater good; or, some other self-satisfying motive.
- rayiner 9y ago
  The coasts are like that. Growing up in D.C., if you had told high-school me that Chicago was far larger than D.C. I would've been floored. Illinois is just a "flyover state" right?
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    Chicago is the major interior city of the US, and has been for well over a hundred years. I also grew up in the DC area, and I was never under any illusion that Chicago wasn't a small city (visiting Chicago every Christmas may have helped). Of course, if you go by CSA, DC's CSA will become larger than Chicago's in the next few years, if it hasn't already.
Cw67NTN8F 9y ago
I think I know what it is: he didn't specify the length and brand of the screws to be used in the inside door handles. Without them, it's impossible to issue a permit. How else can those leeches justify their jobs?
rebuilder 9y ago
This sounds so ridiculous I have a hard time believing the issue isn't being misrepresented. Does anyone have the other side on this?
- harryh 9y ago
  If you google for robert tillman san francisco, there are lots of news stories. While the reason article is certainly written with a certain viewpoint in mind the facts appear to be basically correct.
- closeparen 9y ago
  It’s axiomatically true to a broad and well-organized segment of the San Francisco polity that multifamily residential development is an unqualified evil: accelerations gentrification, ruins the aesthetics, worsens traffic, tightens the parking situation, etc. The reasons they give are sometimes absurd because the particular reasons to oppose a project don’t matter. It’s development - in particular, residential development in the Mission - therefore it must be stopped by any means necessary.
SlowBro 9y ago
Stories like these are why I am led to believe that more and more regulations actually hurt the little guy. Big corporations do not fear more regulations. They can afford the lobbyists to influence politicians to write loopholes, the consultants to jump through the right hoops, and the lawyers to get them off the hook. What can little startups do? Hope that they can raise millions in series A, I suppose. Big corps don't fear regulations, they fear competition. Big corps (I have read elsewhere) /want/ more regulations, because it raises the barrier of entry for the little guys to compete with them. They can afford a tightly-regulated world but little guys cannot. Google this: Corporations love regulations. Lots of examples.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  SF is notoriously anti-chain though, so even corporations can't seem to open or build new stores in SF. I'm sure many construction companies/apartment complex owners would love to build more in SF as well and can't do it either.

35 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

This reminds me of another struggle in SF to get an ice-cream parlor approved. "The NYT's Scott James recounts the insane red-tape endured by Juliet Pries, an entrepreneur who decided to open an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco's Cole Valley. She had to pay rent on an empty storefront for over two years while the necessary permits were processed, and tens of thousands of dollars in fees (including the cost of producing a detailed map of nearby businesses, which the city itself seemed not to have)." https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of-getting-appr.html https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of-getting-...

yostrovs 9y ago

It's surprising that San Francisco isn't doing a laundry assessment evaluating whether anyone became dependent on the historic launderette.

anovikov 9y ago

Well, obviously people who already own apartments nearby don't want values of their own ones - mostly purchased on mortgage - to fall, because it could ruin their retirement. Within the democratic society, there is no fix for this problem.

sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
The other democratic societies who have solved this problem seem to belie your claim. The issue here is that the unit of democracy for this problem is too local.
- anovikov 9y ago
  Simple fix: even MORE strict zoning and ban of private ownership on individual apartments. They all will be owner by the city itself and rented out. Basically, back to Soviet Union.
  - sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
    That is a bad idea. The Soviet Union was a shitty place to live, and its economic policies were disastrous. As I pointed out in the comment you're replying to, this problem has already been well-solved by simply expanding the locus of control for zoning so that the interests served by it are more global.
    - anovikov 9y ago
      That's what i meant. Sacking democracy and market economy to fix these things is an overkill and there is hardly a better way. European cities try to fix it in a half-Commie way: try to keep as many apartment buildings in public property and lease them subsidized, with rental contracts dating from early post-WWII days and passed as inheritance. Same thing: keep the place to incumbents - only with no ability to cash out.
mattlondon 9y ago
I'm not sure a few extra apartments in a city of thousands and thousands is going to reduce the value of anything nearby by any appreciable amount? Got any data about it? From my experience in London prices just keep on going up and up (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-hpi-for-january-2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-hpi-...) despite adding more and more (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/london-house-building-set-plummet-half-sales-dwindle/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/london-hous...) apart from more recently, but that is due to brexit - for years and years prior to brexit the prices just kept on going up despite new blocks of apartments being built everywhere they could find an old petrol station or pub or old school or house-with-unusually-large-garden they could knock down and replace with a block of 30-40 apartments. There may obviously wider economic factors going in to this - i.e. construction because prices are going up, but I suspect SF will be very similar in this regard.
- Atheros 9y ago
  > I'm not sure a few extra apartments in a city of thousands and thousands is going to reduce the value of anything nearby by any appreciable amount? No shit it won't. We need vastly more housing. But you're just being defeatist if your attitude is to give up if you are unable to construct enough to get prices to drop. You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
  - mattlondon 9y ago
    My attitude is not to give up. Of course there needs to be more housing built. The problem is, where do you build? Sounds like in this article there is a prime spot that is redeveloping a brownfield site - fine. But eventually you start running out of space. Eventually you need to build elsewhere - you cant simply just keep on piling more and more and more and density into a city. There is already a trend in London of literally piling on more density by adding additional floors to existing apartment buildings (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashsection.theobserver1 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashse...). How many times can you build on-top of an existing building? Eventually the amount of land runs out, especially in a tiny little mini-city like SF. I think it is when density gets "too high" that the NIMBY problems start to kick in - e.g. in my area in inner-outer-London on-street parking space is already super-competitive and local services like doctors and the tube are already super-busy, yet then we got a proposed development of adding 6000 (six thousand!) 2-and-3 bed apartments with zero parking spaces allocated, and absolutely zero money or effort going into improving the local infrastructure - no new schools, no new doctors, no new libraries, no new bus stops/routes, no new improvements to tube stations. You cant just add 12,000-18,000 new people into a local area and expect no one to own a car or need to go to the doctors etc etc. It is this kind of density-overload that understandably gets people pissed off. In the UK, the effort needs to go beyond just building more and more and more AND MORE apartments in London, but to also include persuading employers to not be in London and investing in decent infrastructure elsewhere where there is space. I suspect it is the same for SF and a lot of employers in the valley. The employers say they are there because the talent is there, and the talent say they are there because the employees are there. Someone needs to make the first move.
Atheros 9y ago
A national land value tax would fix it. The tax could be phased in slowly so that property prices have time to adjust downward. When it costs NIMBYs money to NIMBY they'll eventually stop.

madaxe_again 9y ago

This is par for the course in trying to develop in many western cities, and it’s almost as though a system has been designed to exclude smaller developers in favour of vast multi-billion-dollar-portfolio landlords. Whether deliberate or not, it’s sick to the core - as an example, in Bath in the UK, I’ve had a several year battle to simply carry out like-for-like repairs on a subterranean vault on my property - it’s going to collapse soon, and it’s directly under a major road - but even using 200 year old techniques with no external disruption they keep denying it. At this point I’m just going to let the arterial road through the city disappear into a hole. Meanwhile, a neighbouring property owned by a large multinational landlord got planning permission to build an external lift on a Georgian property, and the same landlord recently won an application to evict 600 people (owners) from perfectly serviceable housing to build fewer, more expensive houses.

sdoering 9y ago
How can you evict owners? Are 600 people behind with their payments?
- nine_k 9y ago
  Does UK have an analogue to the "eminent domain"?
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    It does. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order?wp...

MiscIdeaMaker99 9y ago

San Francisco certainly has its share of self-righteous, self-important, holier-than-thou types. I grew up and live in Indianapolis. It's only happened a handful of times, but while visiting San Francisco someone would say, "I'm sorry," after hearing that I live in a "flyover state." Of course, these folks weren't from San Francisco either. (I think I've only met one or two actual natives of San Francisco.) This has also happened in New York City. I don't mean to tarnish the people of San Francisco, though, because I love visiting SF and the people there are the nicest I've ever met, anywhere. I also understand that people want to preserve what good they have going on there, though, but I often wonder if this is because they're thinking about the greater good; or, some other self-satisfying motive.

rayiner 9y ago
The coasts are like that. Growing up in D.C., if you had told high-school me that Chicago was far larger than D.C. I would've been floored. Illinois is just a "flyover state" right?
- jcranmer 9y ago
  Chicago is the major interior city of the US, and has been for well over a hundred years. I also grew up in the DC area, and I was never under any illusion that Chicago wasn't a small city (visiting Chicago every Christmas may have helped). Of course, if you go by CSA, DC's CSA will become larger than Chicago's in the next few years, if it hasn't already.

Cw67NTN8F 9y ago

I think I know what it is: he didn't specify the length and brand of the screws to be used in the inside door handles. Without them, it's impossible to issue a permit. How else can those leeches justify their jobs?

rebuilder 9y ago

This sounds so ridiculous I have a hard time believing the issue isn't being misrepresented. Does anyone have the other side on this?

harryh 9y ago
If you google for robert tillman san francisco, there are lots of news stories. While the reason article is certainly written with a certain viewpoint in mind the facts appear to be basically correct.
closeparen 9y ago
It’s axiomatically true to a broad and well-organized segment of the San Francisco polity that multifamily residential development is an unqualified evil: accelerations gentrification, ruins the aesthetics, worsens traffic, tightens the parking situation, etc. The reasons they give are sometimes absurd because the particular reasons to oppose a project don’t matter. It’s development - in particular, residential development in the Mission - therefore it must be stopped by any means necessary.

SlowBro 9y ago

Stories like these are why I am led to believe that more and more regulations actually hurt the little guy. Big corporations do not fear more regulations. They can afford the lobbyists to influence politicians to write loopholes, the consultants to jump through the right hoops, and the lawyers to get them off the hook. What can little startups do? Hope that they can raise millions in series A, I suppose. Big corps don't fear regulations, they fear competition. Big corps (I have read elsewhere) /want/ more regulations, because it raises the barrier of entry for the little guys to compete with them. They can afford a tightly-regulated world but little guys cannot. Google this: Corporations love regulations. Lots of examples.

dawhizkid 9y ago
SF is notoriously anti-chain though, so even corporations can't seem to open or build new stores in SF. I'm sure many construction companies/apartment complex owners would love to build more in SF as well and can't do it either.