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> Just because something is permitted doesn't mean it happens. It's very hard to find a vacant lot or tear down at a price that would work First you make thing

> Just because something is permitted doesn't mean it happens. It's very hard to find a vacant lot or tear down at a price that would work First you make things legal then you streamline them. > You would need to find a developer willing to take a risk on a minuscule profit and an architect who enjoys brain damage," he said. "They are complicated little projects. It's the absolute opposite of economy of scale." Once you’ve gotten the streamlining part right, new actors can come in to make this cheaper. Those developers just want to keep the code complex so that only 100 unit projects are viable so that huge firms are the only ones who can execute projects.

BurningFrog 5y ago
> Those developers just want to keep the code complex so that only 100 unit projects are viable so that huge firms are the only ones who can execute projects. Strong disagreement. The best thing for developers would be minimal zoning, Houston style. As the Bay Area built to expand from 7M people to, say, 20M in a decade, enormous fortunes and livelihoods would be made from all that construction work.
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  You wouldn’t have to go all the way to Houston style zoning. SF’s regulations are so onerous that going just half way would help massively.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Houston still has also sorts of housing covenant and other thing. Texas is still a low density mess, too. We do need to get rid of stupid zoning, but also cannot rely on a housing market to do the right thing. We need to force a shift to anti-car rather than pro-car development (and it really is a dichotomy, with the midpoint being a highly unstable equilibrium). The fact that they are talking about 4-plexes shows they really don't get the scale of density that is needed. Everything should be 5 stories minimum. Maybe some shorter Victorians can be grandfathered in, but the Sunset and western half more broadly needs to be almost entirely redeveloped.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - l1tany11 5y ago
      The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's the reality of redeveloping a single family residence one at a time. If you could do it city block by city block there would be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest. The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble that much land to make such projects actually happen. No one wants to move, no one wants change. The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer". They set the table when they built it, and to undo all of that is going to be crazy expensive and difficult. Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible. Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse. A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous. And the Miami disaster just goes to show that not only can your HOA affect your sanity, but also your life safety.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        I think you are accurately describing a current political reality, but this is deeply disappointing and not a response that will go behind virtue signalling ("zoning is racist") to actually solving the problem, or even right a wrong: ("there is so much cheap housing the non-white proportion of SF/Berekley/etc. goes up.") > The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's the reality of redeveloping a single family residence one at a time. I wish they could at least talk about 2 lots at a time! > If you could do it city block by city block there would be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest. Amen. > The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble that much land to make such projects actually happen. If only we could do just one, and then for the next one give people units and free moving in the prior one. That can become a virtuous cycle. > No one wants to move, no one wants change. Very true, but for all those perks and a nice cache out people can be persuaded. We would need some eminent domain for the stragglers, however. > The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer". Just gotta talk about how Better is getting $5M, a condo, and the elevator she will need anyways as she gets older. > Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible. They aren't! Spineless compromises as described in https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-trains-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-train... (pork for both sides!) is spineless politics that will diffuse outrage now, but at the cost mutually-undermining investment that just makes people disrespect government more later. > Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse. :( > A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous. The irony is suburbia is full of annoying HOAs. Just like the fact that without more broad economic growth homeowners will have a hard time paying off their mortgage in their lifetimes means that it is a lot closer to paying rent than they would like to think.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Developers as a whole, sure. The handful of developers who are working in the current environment? No. You see this with every regulated industry. The people who pissed away a ton of time and money to get into the club don't want the club to fall apart.
- irrational 5y ago
  Why would the Bay Area grow so much in the next decade? Now that remote working is becoming more normal, and considering the cost of living in the Bay Area, why would that many people want to move there? There are plenty of other places with comparable natural beauty, vibrant communities, cultural resources, etc.
  - voidfunc 5y ago
    Start naming those other places and we will tell you why they are not viable or comparable. If there are so many it should be easy.
    - smohare 5y ago
      I bet those other places are 115 Fahrenheit right now.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        And/or the people already in them are trying to keep them secret lest they gain all the problems people are fleeing from in the first place.
      - wavefunction 5y ago
        If those places can suddenly hit 115F then so can the Bay Area. I am not saying it is likely but who would have said it is likely that Portland would hit 115.
        TaylorAlexander 5y ago
        It’s true in general. What really surprised me though was the recent/current heat wave across all of the west coast - it has been foggy and cool the entire time in the Bay Area. I hope that holds even as the climate changes, though I don’t know if it will.
    - Der_Einzige 5y ago
      Uhh, Portland or Seattle? They're political similar, economically as similar as you'll get (silicon forest in Hillsboro and Seattle's whole tech scene rivals SF), and geographically similar in terms of climate to parts of the bay area.
- Matticus_Rex 5y ago
  You're confusing the incentives of all developers and people who might become developers collectively with the incentives of entrenched large players already existing in the market. It's like in many industries; the interests of the group as a whole push towards deregulation, while the interests of the biggest, politically well-connected firms is to increase regulation that will be harder for competitors to deal with and will allow them to get or maintain a stranglehold over the market.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    People in general lack the imagination to grow the pie too. Getting / keeping a big slice allows you lord it over others, and do so immediately. A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and powerful actually like growth.
    - lr4444lr 5y ago
      Do you know why you're getting down voted? Because this "insight" flies in the face of reality: economic growth (despite arguably unfair distribution of it) has defined the last 150+ years of the most powerful nations on earth, aside from a few blips during a war period or brief speculative asset collapse. The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        Sure, they like it when numbers in account books get bigger, but Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out? Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit? If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.
      - epistasis 5y ago
- jnwatson 5y ago
  Reducing red tape would help a lot, but Houston has geography on its side. Looking at a map of Beltway 8 superimposed over the SF Bay [1], it is easy to visualize why land is cheap. That's not even the outer loop for Houston. SF and adjacent cities need to both reduce the approval process and encourage higher density. 1. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/as-if-you-needed-it-further-proof-that-houston-is-so-much-bigger-than-most-cities/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/as-if-you-needed...
- secabeen 5y ago
  Minimal zoning would be a bit much, but I think Japanese-style highest-allowed use zoning with few single-family home zones would be good.
- nugget 5y ago
  The people I know who live in the Bay Area don’t particularly want it to expand. Part of the value of living there is its relative exclusivity.
  - grandmczeb 5y ago
    The people who value the “exclusivity” of the Bay Area tend to be a very narrow demographic. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a particular representative group.
    - epistasis 5y ago
      I agree that it is a narrow group, but unfortunately it is a very powerful narrow group that controls local politics and has enacted these exclusionary policies. The Calvin Welch school of thought in SF is a prime example.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    The people who currently live in neighborhoods full of $5M single-family houses may value “exclusivity”, but I have met plenty of young people with ordinary jobs sleeping in bunk beds, 4 adults to a 2-bedroom house and still paying most of their paychecks to rent, who would much prefer to be living in separate 1–2 bedroom flats instead, with more little shops in their neighborhood and better transit.
    - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
      Sure but they could move almost literally anywhere else. If someone said you could live in one of the most desirable places in the entire world on an 'ordinary' job but you had to share a room (which TBH could just be your significant other anyway) that would seem like a great deal right?
      - watwut 5y ago
        No, living with partner is not the same as living with roomate and 3 flatmates. The two are actually massively different.
- handmodel 5y ago
  I disagree. Developers who are entrenched enjoy the fact it is hard to get a permit. Then, the specialty becomes navigating the system (which the surviving developers are de facto good at). It is hard for the best developers from other cities, who may be amazing at cheap/efficient/quality construction to challenge the incumbents in SF. It is like saying that government contractors who build websites want the bid system to be simpler. In some ways they do, since on paper they would save a lot of money if they could get rid of their dozen employees who specialize in navigating it. At the same time, most government website contractors probably are not the best web developers - jsut the best at navigating the system.
  - wernercd 5y ago
    You disagree but it sounds like you make the same points. The post you reply too says "we need minimal zoning". You say "its hard to work because of too many restrictions". Am I reading it wrong, but you disagree but seem to agree on the main points: Government needs to get out of the way to allow progress.
    - frumper 5y ago
      He’s saying entrenched developers like the restrictions because they can navigate them better than newcomers. With a lot of red tape it’s easier to make the most money if you’re good at dealing with red tape instead of being the best developer.
      - wernercd 5y ago
        I understand that: He's saying the same thing as the previous guy. More red tape = bad. Just for different reasons.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    >Developers who are entrenched enjoy the fact it is hard to get a permit. Imagine how much a developer with Coastal Commission expertise could charge. That's probably a specialty in itself.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  The best thing would be to ban AirBNB and rental housing. Those two artificially restrict the supply of housing to an absurd extent and drive up the costs of everyone else’s housing. I’m not alone in this - several cities have already banned AirBNB.
  - someguydave 5y ago
    lol how do you figure that rental housing restricts total supply?
    - jimbob45 5y ago
      It inflates the prices of desirable areas because there is less housing available to purchase, especially for the currently renting tenants who ostensibly wish to someday become homeowners.
- cheriot 5y ago
  There are developers that specialize in building and "developers" that specialize in buying land, getting the approvals, and selling it off to someone that actually builds it.
georgeplusplus 5y ago
So we totally flip the rules and it will all work out once the new rules are in place because people will begin to optimize to the new rules. Sounds like a lot how people think the free market is supposed to work.
austincheney 5y ago
How do you streamline real estate availability? Blow up mountains or expand into the ocean?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 5y ago
  A legal framework that enables the land you do have to be less like Atlanta and more like Paris.
- flurben 5y ago
  Eliminate minimum requirements on parking and restrictions on height. Make demolitions easier. Eliminate the neighbors ability to stop any project that they don't like. Reduce the number of permits required, reduce the permit fees, reduce the time it takes to issue a permit. In the case of San Francisco, they also need a centralized, online planning/permits database. They are still doing things on paper, and they've got a backlog of thousands of permits. It can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to navigate the permitting process.

BurningFrog 5y ago

> Those developers just want to keep the code complex so that only 100 unit projects are viable so that huge firms are the only ones who can execute projects. Strong disagreement. The best thing for developers would be minimal zoning, Houston style. As the Bay Area built to expand from 7M people to, say, 20M in a decade, enormous fortunes and livelihoods would be made from all that construction work.

compiler-guy 5y ago
You wouldn’t have to go all the way to Houston style zoning. SF’s regulations are so onerous that going just half way would help massively.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Houston still has also sorts of housing covenant and other thing. Texas is still a low density mess, too. We do need to get rid of stupid zoning, but also cannot rely on a housing market to do the right thing. We need to force a shift to anti-car rather than pro-car development (and it really is a dichotomy, with the midpoint being a highly unstable equilibrium). The fact that they are talking about 4-plexes shows they really don't get the scale of density that is needed. Everything should be 5 stories minimum. Maybe some shorter Victorians can be grandfathered in, but the Sunset and western half more broadly needs to be almost entirely redeveloped.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - l1tany11 5y ago
    The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's the reality of redeveloping a single family residence one at a time. If you could do it city block by city block there would be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest. The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble that much land to make such projects actually happen. No one wants to move, no one wants change. The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer". They set the table when they built it, and to undo all of that is going to be crazy expensive and difficult. Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible. Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse. A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous. And the Miami disaster just goes to show that not only can your HOA affect your sanity, but also your life safety.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      I think you are accurately describing a current political reality, but this is deeply disappointing and not a response that will go behind virtue signalling ("zoning is racist") to actually solving the problem, or even right a wrong: ("there is so much cheap housing the non-white proportion of SF/Berekley/etc. goes up.") > The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's the reality of redeveloping a single family residence one at a time. I wish they could at least talk about 2 lots at a time! > If you could do it city block by city block there would be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest. Amen. > The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble that much land to make such projects actually happen. If only we could do just one, and then for the next one give people units and free moving in the prior one. That can become a virtuous cycle. > No one wants to move, no one wants change. Very true, but for all those perks and a nice cache out people can be persuaded. We would need some eminent domain for the stragglers, however. > The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer". Just gotta talk about how Better is getting $5M, a condo, and the elevator she will need anyways as she gets older. > Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible. They aren't! Spineless compromises as described in https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-trains-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-train... (pork for both sides!) is spineless politics that will diffuse outrage now, but at the cost mutually-undermining investment that just makes people disrespect government more later. > Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse. :( > A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous. The irony is suburbia is full of annoying HOAs. Just like the fact that without more broad economic growth homeowners will have a hard time paying off their mortgage in their lifetimes means that it is a lot closer to paying rent than they would like to think.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Developers as a whole, sure. The handful of developers who are working in the current environment? No. You see this with every regulated industry. The people who pissed away a ton of time and money to get into the club don't want the club to fall apart.
irrational 5y ago
Why would the Bay Area grow so much in the next decade? Now that remote working is becoming more normal, and considering the cost of living in the Bay Area, why would that many people want to move there? There are plenty of other places with comparable natural beauty, vibrant communities, cultural resources, etc.
- voidfunc 5y ago
  Start naming those other places and we will tell you why they are not viable or comparable. If there are so many it should be easy.
  - smohare 5y ago
    I bet those other places are 115 Fahrenheit right now.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      And/or the people already in them are trying to keep them secret lest they gain all the problems people are fleeing from in the first place.
    - wavefunction 5y ago
      If those places can suddenly hit 115F then so can the Bay Area. I am not saying it is likely but who would have said it is likely that Portland would hit 115.
      - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
        It’s true in general. What really surprised me though was the recent/current heat wave across all of the west coast - it has been foggy and cool the entire time in the Bay Area. I hope that holds even as the climate changes, though I don’t know if it will.
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Uhh, Portland or Seattle? They're political similar, economically as similar as you'll get (silicon forest in Hillsboro and Seattle's whole tech scene rivals SF), and geographically similar in terms of climate to parts of the bay area.
Matticus_Rex 5y ago
You're confusing the incentives of all developers and people who might become developers collectively with the incentives of entrenched large players already existing in the market. It's like in many industries; the interests of the group as a whole push towards deregulation, while the interests of the biggest, politically well-connected firms is to increase regulation that will be harder for competitors to deal with and will allow them to get or maintain a stranglehold over the market.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  People in general lack the imagination to grow the pie too. Getting / keeping a big slice allows you lord it over others, and do so immediately. A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and powerful actually like growth.
  - lr4444lr 5y ago
    Do you know why you're getting down voted? Because this "insight" flies in the face of reality: economic growth (despite arguably unfair distribution of it) has defined the last 150+ years of the most powerful nations on earth, aside from a few blips during a war period or brief speculative asset collapse. The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      Sure, they like it when numbers in account books get bigger, but Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out? Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit? If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.
    - epistasis 5y ago
jnwatson 5y ago
Reducing red tape would help a lot, but Houston has geography on its side. Looking at a map of Beltway 8 superimposed over the SF Bay [1], it is easy to visualize why land is cheap. That's not even the outer loop for Houston. SF and adjacent cities need to both reduce the approval process and encourage higher density. 1. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/as-if-you-needed-it-further-proof-that-houston-is-so-much-bigger-than-most-cities/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/as-if-you-needed...
secabeen 5y ago
Minimal zoning would be a bit much, but I think Japanese-style highest-allowed use zoning with few single-family home zones would be good.
nugget 5y ago
The people I know who live in the Bay Area don’t particularly want it to expand. Part of the value of living there is its relative exclusivity.
- grandmczeb 5y ago
  The people who value the “exclusivity” of the Bay Area tend to be a very narrow demographic. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a particular representative group.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    I agree that it is a narrow group, but unfortunately it is a very powerful narrow group that controls local politics and has enacted these exclusionary policies. The Calvin Welch school of thought in SF is a prime example.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  The people who currently live in neighborhoods full of $5M single-family houses may value “exclusivity”, but I have met plenty of young people with ordinary jobs sleeping in bunk beds, 4 adults to a 2-bedroom house and still paying most of their paychecks to rent, who would much prefer to be living in separate 1–2 bedroom flats instead, with more little shops in their neighborhood and better transit.
  - KingMachiavelli 5y ago
    Sure but they could move almost literally anywhere else. If someone said you could live in one of the most desirable places in the entire world on an 'ordinary' job but you had to share a room (which TBH could just be your significant other anyway) that would seem like a great deal right?
    - watwut 5y ago
      No, living with partner is not the same as living with roomate and 3 flatmates. The two are actually massively different.
handmodel 5y ago
I disagree. Developers who are entrenched enjoy the fact it is hard to get a permit. Then, the specialty becomes navigating the system (which the surviving developers are de facto good at). It is hard for the best developers from other cities, who may be amazing at cheap/efficient/quality construction to challenge the incumbents in SF. It is like saying that government contractors who build websites want the bid system to be simpler. In some ways they do, since on paper they would save a lot of money if they could get rid of their dozen employees who specialize in navigating it. At the same time, most government website contractors probably are not the best web developers - jsut the best at navigating the system.
- wernercd 5y ago
  You disagree but it sounds like you make the same points. The post you reply too says "we need minimal zoning". You say "its hard to work because of too many restrictions". Am I reading it wrong, but you disagree but seem to agree on the main points: Government needs to get out of the way to allow progress.
  - frumper 5y ago
    He’s saying entrenched developers like the restrictions because they can navigate them better than newcomers. With a lot of red tape it’s easier to make the most money if you’re good at dealing with red tape instead of being the best developer.
    - wernercd 5y ago
      I understand that: He's saying the same thing as the previous guy. More red tape = bad. Just for different reasons.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  >Developers who are entrenched enjoy the fact it is hard to get a permit. Imagine how much a developer with Coastal Commission expertise could charge. That's probably a specialty in itself.
jimbob45 5y ago
The best thing would be to ban AirBNB and rental housing. Those two artificially restrict the supply of housing to an absurd extent and drive up the costs of everyone else’s housing. I’m not alone in this - several cities have already banned AirBNB.
- someguydave 5y ago
  lol how do you figure that rental housing restricts total supply?
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    It inflates the prices of desirable areas because there is less housing available to purchase, especially for the currently renting tenants who ostensibly wish to someday become homeowners.
cheriot 5y ago
There are developers that specialize in building and "developers" that specialize in buying land, getting the approvals, and selling it off to someone that actually builds it.

georgeplusplus 5y ago

So we totally flip the rules and it will all work out once the new rules are in place because people will begin to optimize to the new rules. Sounds like a lot how people think the free market is supposed to work.

austincheney 5y ago

How do you streamline real estate availability? Blow up mountains or expand into the ocean?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
closeparen 5y ago
A legal framework that enables the land you do have to be less like Atlanta and more like Paris.
flurben 5y ago
Eliminate minimum requirements on parking and restrictions on height. Make demolitions easier. Eliminate the neighbors ability to stop any project that they don't like. Reduce the number of permits required, reduce the permit fees, reduce the time it takes to issue a permit. In the case of San Francisco, they also need a centralized, online planning/permits database. They are still doing things on paper, and they've got a backlog of thousands of permits. It can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to navigate the permitting process.