7 ms·

San Francisco supervisors opposing bill to increase housing density

76 points by Reedx 7y ago

mc32 7y ago
Freaking supes. They treat SF like their little political science experiment and nothing of note ever gets done. Just let them build. Do something about the car break-ins and package thefts. You know, govern the damn city.
- tehlike 7y ago
  It's interesting to have all these startups improving efficiency and all, but then have a government doing exact opposite.
  - jgalt212 7y ago
    because the supervisors are just acting in the short term best interest of property owners. limit supply and prices will go up. they're all on the take.
    - codyb 7y ago
      Aren’t those the people that make up their communities?
      - jgalt212 7y ago
        true, but in cities, as opposed to burbs. most residents/voters are renters not lessors/owners.
      - unlinked_dll 7y ago
        What percentage of single family homes in SF are owned by single families, and what percentage of single families own a single home? Because if the answer isn’t 100% to both those questions, then “property owners” are not strictly the community’s constituents.
      - mntmoss 7y ago
        The money going into SF is big enough these days(just look at the city budget, it's a multiple of similarly large cities elsewhere in the US) that the government has fallen into a default of over-regulating everything and then carving out shortcuts and excemptions, and this isn't a new trend, even - SF has always been expensive but the pay-to-play system really started picking up steam with Willie Brown's mayorship back in the 90's, amid the original dot-com boom. When a city is "hot" and the working population is very transient, which is the case with SF's new tech workforce, nobody is really being a watchdog. The existing property owners will drift along, yelling about anything that might concievably affect their property values, and they get thrown bones to stay complacent since they're the most consistent voters. But they don't pay rent, and the majority of the workers still expect to be here as a career stepping stone and then move on to somewhere that doesn't suck, and so they put up with the rent and don't put down roots. People staying long-term under rent control hang onto their position for as long as they can. There's a lot of kicking cans down roads going on, hence the system trundles on.
    - irq11 7y ago
      This is such a sophomoric take on a complicated issue. Speaking as a long-time renter who is now a property owner, I almost never think about things in terms of “limiting supply”, and as far as I can tell, my neighbors don’t either. They do care a lot about things that you’d expect a non-cartoon-villian to care about: neighborhood quality, schools, access to daylight, preservation of views, congestion, etc. While I’m sure there are idiots out there who think like economist robots, generally, characterizing the other side of a debate as one-dimensional doesn’t do anyone any good.
      - tehlike 7y ago
        You are right. I own a property, and I wouldn't probably like crowding in my neighborhood. But despite the fact that I don't like it, I would vote in favor of denser zoning.
      - Gibbon1 7y ago
        I keep coming back to parts of San Francisco are already over 60,000 people per square mile. People talk about more housing and talk zero about infrastructure. Want to pack more people in? Where the fuck are the subways?
        tehlike 7y ago
        People do not talk about zoning without infrastructure. it is implied.
        Gibbon1 7y ago
        Not my experience. The people that blame the city for enforcing existing zoning are the same that would get the vapors if you suggested the city raise taxes to run more buses and build subways.
        irq11 7y ago
        Exactly. I’ve been saying for years that the key to greater density in SF is transit. Trying to force developers to build high density housing is pushing on a string; make the place desirable for commuters, and density will follow the demand. HN’s average level of discourse on housing policy tends not to be particularly intelligent. Mostly folks who read the first chapter of their econ 101 textbook, then got bored.
    - tehlike 7y ago
      Allow denser zoning, then land value increases much more!
  - noobermin 7y ago
    No love for Nimbyish supervisors but "startups improving efficiency" isn't a counterweight nor a good example to contrast with.
    - hodgesrm 7y ago
      Actually it is. I've always felt that many 19th century local governments in the US were run like start-ups with a grand vision of creating a better society for their citizens. If you look at the efforts to build transportation, support business, promote local education, and the like it's hard not to see the parallels. Edited: clarification
- xiphias2 7y ago
  ,,Just let them build.'' Would you also advise a company to destroy its profit center?
  - mc32 7y ago
    Thing is they’re like that guy or gal who is waiting for the “perfect one”. That one is never gonna come. It’s been like this decades. Get something!
    - drdeadringer 7y ago
      In the Bay Area city I live in, there was an empty building on "main street" which remained that way for about 13 years. Every few years a potential new business would file for permission. Nope, no, "not a good fit", "too many of your idea already here", and more endless excuses kept the building empty. Finally, about 1.5 years ago, a business was finally granted permission to move in. About 6 months later, a second business [a refugee from San Jose] moved in upstairs. Both businesses resemble other businesses already on "main street". I'd like to know more about the previous 13 years of "we don't want your tax money, we'd rather a big gaping hole and an empty building but thanks".
      - eschaton 7y ago
        Lvl Up and AFK aren’t all that similar to businesses already in Campbell though. The empty bank building was a real eyesore though, especially with its prominence on that end of Campbell Ave. And now that it’s filled, a couple more of the empty storefronts near it look like they won’t be for long either.
- api 7y ago
  You are asking a cartel to vote to increase supply and decrease prices. That's not what cartels do.
  - OceanSunfish 7y ago
    The term "cartel" is interesting here, if the power structure is indeed the voting population of San Francisco being predominantly homeowners, then as those homeowners are the suppliers of the housing market, it is a cartel in form.
    - khuey 7y ago
      San Francisco has its own unique issues but local government in pretty much any upscale suburb in America is effectively a homeowner cartel.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  I know this will never happen, and I'm sure is not a popular opinion, but San Francisco needs a Bloomberg/Giuliani (pre-nutcase) style Republican to come in and clean house. Sometimes that is needed, and sometimes the opposite is needed; otherwise you get run away situations like deep red and deep blue areas that progress backwards.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Hope springs eternal but we’d have to change the city charter so we’d have city-wide elections. It doesn’t matter what stripe, but yeah we need someone with determination to come in and clean house like after the Koch era. People are so fed up neighbors in the west part of the city are wondering out loud if it’s possible to secede from the city while remaining in the county cuz they just want a government which takes care of the hoi polloi. The police don’t even want to bother with robberies unless it involved a weapon because the DA won’t take the cases and the perps are instead given citations...
paulsutter 7y ago
Really the problem is San Francisco voters. How many tech people actually vote?
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  ...and how many are home owners or landlords?
- dannyr 7y ago
  Tech population is mixed of US citizens and immigrant workers. But yeah, I would say that even American tech workers do not reliably vote. You just accept the situation and pay since you make good salary. If you can't afford it, move somewhere else.
boulos 7y ago
Sigh, this kind of thinking is some sort of variant of broken-window syndrome: > But Board President Norman Yee said San Francisco should be exempted altogether from Wiener’s proposal. > He said that SB 50 “does not take into account the nuances and intended impacts that comes up upzoning entire neighborhoods” and he noted that there are large developments planned in the district he represents. > "We’re actually building our share of housing,” Yee said. “Maybe we could better. But we certainly are probably doing better than most places in California. We have motivated communities that want to plan. We should be exempt from SB 50.” It's definitely true that San Francisco is building more housing than the other counties in the Bay Area, and that they should also do better. But that isn't a license to ignore the need for more housing directly in San Francisco. If anything, it's almost a non sequitor to the basic challenge facing any major city: how do you have enough housing within a reasonable commute of the jobs in your city? Just earlier today [1] the mayor decried the lack of housing in the city that our public transit employees can afford. Over 250k people were already commuting in back in 2013 [2]. For a city of under 1M people where job growth has outstripped housing growth, that seems like a fairly high "deficit". [1] https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/fixing-muni-ecb536aea50e https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/fixing-muni-ecb536aea50e [2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2013/cb13-r22.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2013/cb13-r22...
- mc32 7y ago
  The supes are a ridiculous hypocritical bunch. They hem and haw about building in the city, but they’re okay with bullying a neighboring community[1] in a different county into building (they threatened Brisbane, down the road, an independent jurisdiction in another county!!) [1]https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/04/san-francisco-supervisors-bully-brisbane-with-annexation-threat/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/04/san-francisco-supervi...
  - boulos 7y ago
    A friend points out that Yee is Supervisor for District 7 [1], which is essentially entirely zoned as 40-X [2] (40 foot height limit) and mostly RH-1 and RH-2 [3] (single-family homes and two-unit residential respectively). As the N-Judah line runs through it, the SB 50 bill would immediately cause entire swaths of his District to be upzoned fairly dramatically. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Yee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Yee [2] https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2018-08/Zoning%20Height%20and%20Bulk%20Districts.pdf https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2018-08... [3] https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02/zoning_use_districts.pdf https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02...
pcwalton 7y ago
To understand this, you need to realize that San Francisco politics is a perpetual no-holds-barred fight between two factions within the local Democratic Party: the "Moderates" and the "Progressives" (although the Progs also contain some members of other parties, like the Greens and the DSA). The Progs hate the Mods with a burning passion and are constantly trying to undercut them. Generally, Moderates tend to win city-wide races, while Progressives tend to win district supervisor races. Right now, the mayor's office and all state-level seats--including Scott Wiener, who authored the bill in question--are occupied by Mods, while the Progs have a veto-proof supermajority on the Board of Supervisors. The Progressives tend to lean more NIMBY than their Moderate counterparts, and some of this opposition is certainly the result of that. (Gordon Mar, the president of the Board, is probably the biggest NIMBY of all the supervisors at the moment, possibly excepting Aaron Peskin.) But most of this opposition is purely tribal: the Progs on the board just want to snipe at Scott Wiener. Progs are not categorically opposed to housing: as others have pointed out, when Brisbane was waffling on approving market-rate housing just to the south of San Francisco, Jane Kim, a Progressive, threatened to annex the city! Most of this anti-SB-50 resolution is properly understood as San Francisco tribalism more than any sort of policy grievance. SB 50 doesn't even have much if any of an effect on a lot of the districts these supervisors represent, either because they're exempted as "sensitive communities" (e.g. much of the district I live in, D10) or because the districts are already upzoned (e.g. the Mission).
- thebradbain 7y ago
  That instance of Jane Kim threatening to annex Brisbane came off more as “everyone ELSE should build more housing so we don’t have to” than anything else to me, personally. They’re not wrong that other cities also need to build more housing, too, but SF equally needs to. They’re the city, not the suburb.
  - caycep 7y ago
    Forgive my municipal ignorance but how does one city "annex" another? It's not like they have an army to do it with? Are there legal maneuverings to accomplish this?
StuffedParrot 7y ago
SB-50 is the market-rate bill, but is just one of many movements to increase density.
jdkee 7y ago
This is criminal.
c3534l 7y ago
So just business as usual in San Francisco, then.

76 points by Reedx 7y ago

mc32 7y ago

Freaking supes. They treat SF like their little political science experiment and nothing of note ever gets done. Just let them build. Do something about the car break-ins and package thefts. You know, govern the damn city.

tehlike 7y ago
It's interesting to have all these startups improving efficiency and all, but then have a government doing exact opposite.
- jgalt212 7y ago
  because the supervisors are just acting in the short term best interest of property owners. limit supply and prices will go up. they're all on the take.
  - codyb 7y ago
    Aren’t those the people that make up their communities?
    - jgalt212 7y ago
      true, but in cities, as opposed to burbs. most residents/voters are renters not lessors/owners.
    - unlinked_dll 7y ago
      What percentage of single family homes in SF are owned by single families, and what percentage of single families own a single home? Because if the answer isn’t 100% to both those questions, then “property owners” are not strictly the community’s constituents.
    - mntmoss 7y ago
      The money going into SF is big enough these days(just look at the city budget, it's a multiple of similarly large cities elsewhere in the US) that the government has fallen into a default of over-regulating everything and then carving out shortcuts and excemptions, and this isn't a new trend, even - SF has always been expensive but the pay-to-play system really started picking up steam with Willie Brown's mayorship back in the 90's, amid the original dot-com boom. When a city is "hot" and the working population is very transient, which is the case with SF's new tech workforce, nobody is really being a watchdog. The existing property owners will drift along, yelling about anything that might concievably affect their property values, and they get thrown bones to stay complacent since they're the most consistent voters. But they don't pay rent, and the majority of the workers still expect to be here as a career stepping stone and then move on to somewhere that doesn't suck, and so they put up with the rent and don't put down roots. People staying long-term under rent control hang onto their position for as long as they can. There's a lot of kicking cans down roads going on, hence the system trundles on.
  - irq11 7y ago
    This is such a sophomoric take on a complicated issue. Speaking as a long-time renter who is now a property owner, I almost never think about things in terms of “limiting supply”, and as far as I can tell, my neighbors don’t either. They do care a lot about things that you’d expect a non-cartoon-villian to care about: neighborhood quality, schools, access to daylight, preservation of views, congestion, etc. While I’m sure there are idiots out there who think like economist robots, generally, characterizing the other side of a debate as one-dimensional doesn’t do anyone any good.
    - tehlike 7y ago
      You are right. I own a property, and I wouldn't probably like crowding in my neighborhood. But despite the fact that I don't like it, I would vote in favor of denser zoning.
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      I keep coming back to parts of San Francisco are already over 60,000 people per square mile. People talk about more housing and talk zero about infrastructure. Want to pack more people in? Where the fuck are the subways?
      - tehlike 7y ago
        People do not talk about zoning without infrastructure. it is implied.
        Gibbon1 7y ago
        Not my experience. The people that blame the city for enforcing existing zoning are the same that would get the vapors if you suggested the city raise taxes to run more buses and build subways.
        irq11 7y ago
        Exactly. I’ve been saying for years that the key to greater density in SF is transit. Trying to force developers to build high density housing is pushing on a string; make the place desirable for commuters, and density will follow the demand. HN’s average level of discourse on housing policy tends not to be particularly intelligent. Mostly folks who read the first chapter of their econ 101 textbook, then got bored.
  - tehlike 7y ago
    Allow denser zoning, then land value increases much more!
- noobermin 7y ago
  No love for Nimbyish supervisors but "startups improving efficiency" isn't a counterweight nor a good example to contrast with.
  - hodgesrm 7y ago
    Actually it is. I've always felt that many 19th century local governments in the US were run like start-ups with a grand vision of creating a better society for their citizens. If you look at the efforts to build transportation, support business, promote local education, and the like it's hard not to see the parallels. Edited: clarification
xiphias2 7y ago
,,Just let them build.'' Would you also advise a company to destroy its profit center?
- mc32 7y ago
  Thing is they’re like that guy or gal who is waiting for the “perfect one”. That one is never gonna come. It’s been like this decades. Get something!
  - drdeadringer 7y ago
    In the Bay Area city I live in, there was an empty building on "main street" which remained that way for about 13 years. Every few years a potential new business would file for permission. Nope, no, "not a good fit", "too many of your idea already here", and more endless excuses kept the building empty. Finally, about 1.5 years ago, a business was finally granted permission to move in. About 6 months later, a second business [a refugee from San Jose] moved in upstairs. Both businesses resemble other businesses already on "main street". I'd like to know more about the previous 13 years of "we don't want your tax money, we'd rather a big gaping hole and an empty building but thanks".
    - eschaton 7y ago
      Lvl Up and AFK aren’t all that similar to businesses already in Campbell though. The empty bank building was a real eyesore though, especially with its prominence on that end of Campbell Ave. And now that it’s filled, a couple more of the empty storefronts near it look like they won’t be for long either.
api 7y ago
You are asking a cartel to vote to increase supply and decrease prices. That's not what cartels do.
- OceanSunfish 7y ago
  The term "cartel" is interesting here, if the power structure is indeed the voting population of San Francisco being predominantly homeowners, then as those homeowners are the suppliers of the housing market, it is a cartel in form.
  - khuey 7y ago
    San Francisco has its own unique issues but local government in pretty much any upscale suburb in America is effectively a homeowner cartel.
partiallypro 7y ago
I know this will never happen, and I'm sure is not a popular opinion, but San Francisco needs a Bloomberg/Giuliani (pre-nutcase) style Republican to come in and clean house. Sometimes that is needed, and sometimes the opposite is needed; otherwise you get run away situations like deep red and deep blue areas that progress backwards.
- mc32 7y ago
  Hope springs eternal but we’d have to change the city charter so we’d have city-wide elections. It doesn’t matter what stripe, but yeah we need someone with determination to come in and clean house like after the Koch era. People are so fed up neighbors in the west part of the city are wondering out loud if it’s possible to secede from the city while remaining in the county cuz they just want a government which takes care of the hoi polloi. The police don’t even want to bother with robberies unless it involved a weapon because the DA won’t take the cases and the perps are instead given citations...

paulsutter 7y ago

Really the problem is San Francisco voters. How many tech people actually vote?

pmoriarty 7y ago
...and how many are home owners or landlords?
dannyr 7y ago
Tech population is mixed of US citizens and immigrant workers. But yeah, I would say that even American tech workers do not reliably vote. You just accept the situation and pay since you make good salary. If you can't afford it, move somewhere else.

boulos 7y ago

Sigh, this kind of thinking is some sort of variant of broken-window syndrome: > But Board President Norman Yee said San Francisco should be exempted altogether from Wiener’s proposal. > He said that SB 50 “does not take into account the nuances and intended impacts that comes up upzoning entire neighborhoods” and he noted that there are large developments planned in the district he represents. > "We’re actually building our share of housing,” Yee said. “Maybe we could better. But we certainly are probably doing better than most places in California. We have motivated communities that want to plan. We should be exempt from SB 50.” It's definitely true that San Francisco is building more housing than the other counties in the Bay Area, and that they should also do better. But that isn't a license to ignore the need for more housing directly in San Francisco. If anything, it's almost a non sequitor to the basic challenge facing any major city: how do you have enough housing within a reasonable commute of the jobs in your city? Just earlier today [1] the mayor decried the lack of housing in the city that our public transit employees can afford. Over 250k people were already commuting in back in 2013 [2]. For a city of under 1M people where job growth has outstripped housing growth, that seems like a fairly high "deficit". [1] https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/fixing-muni-ecb536aea50e https://medium.com/@LondonBreed/fixing-muni-ecb536aea50e [2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2013/cb13-r22.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2013/cb13-r22...

mc32 7y ago
The supes are a ridiculous hypocritical bunch. They hem and haw about building in the city, but they’re okay with bullying a neighboring community[1] in a different county into building (they threatened Brisbane, down the road, an independent jurisdiction in another county!!) [1]https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/04/san-francisco-supervisors-bully-brisbane-with-annexation-threat/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/04/san-francisco-supervi...
- boulos 7y ago
  A friend points out that Yee is Supervisor for District 7 [1], which is essentially entirely zoned as 40-X [2] (40 foot height limit) and mostly RH-1 and RH-2 [3] (single-family homes and two-unit residential respectively). As the N-Judah line runs through it, the SB 50 bill would immediately cause entire swaths of his District to be upzoned fairly dramatically. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Yee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Yee [2] https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2018-08/Zoning%20Height%20and%20Bulk%20Districts.pdf https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2018-08... [3] https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02/zoning_use_districts.pdf https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02...

pcwalton 7y ago

To understand this, you need to realize that San Francisco politics is a perpetual no-holds-barred fight between two factions within the local Democratic Party: the "Moderates" and the "Progressives" (although the Progs also contain some members of other parties, like the Greens and the DSA). The Progs hate the Mods with a burning passion and are constantly trying to undercut them. Generally, Moderates tend to win city-wide races, while Progressives tend to win district supervisor races. Right now, the mayor's office and all state-level seats--including Scott Wiener, who authored the bill in question--are occupied by Mods, while the Progs have a veto-proof supermajority on the Board of Supervisors. The Progressives tend to lean more NIMBY than their Moderate counterparts, and some of this opposition is certainly the result of that. (Gordon Mar, the president of the Board, is probably the biggest NIMBY of all the supervisors at the moment, possibly excepting Aaron Peskin.) But most of this opposition is purely tribal: the Progs on the board just want to snipe at Scott Wiener. Progs are not categorically opposed to housing: as others have pointed out, when Brisbane was waffling on approving market-rate housing just to the south of San Francisco, Jane Kim, a Progressive, threatened to annex the city! Most of this anti-SB-50 resolution is properly understood as San Francisco tribalism more than any sort of policy grievance. SB 50 doesn't even have much if any of an effect on a lot of the districts these supervisors represent, either because they're exempted as "sensitive communities" (e.g. much of the district I live in, D10) or because the districts are already upzoned (e.g. the Mission).

thebradbain 7y ago
That instance of Jane Kim threatening to annex Brisbane came off more as “everyone ELSE should build more housing so we don’t have to” than anything else to me, personally. They’re not wrong that other cities also need to build more housing, too, but SF equally needs to. They’re the city, not the suburb.
- caycep 7y ago
  Forgive my municipal ignorance but how does one city "annex" another? It's not like they have an army to do it with? Are there legal maneuverings to accomplish this?

StuffedParrot 7y ago

SB-50 is the market-rate bill, but is just one of many movements to increase density.

jdkee 7y ago

This is criminal.

c3534l 7y ago

So just business as usual in San Francisco, then.