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How do you propose San Francisco adds 2 extra stories to most Victorians in the city? What would this process even look like? How do you get homeowners to do th

by acchow 5y ago

How do you propose San Francisco adds 2 extra stories to most Victorians in the city? What would this process even look like? How do you get homeowners to do this and who would pay for it? Where would we even get the engineering and construction expertise to do this? You would call an endeavor like this not building “that much”?

eloff 5y ago
It's called rezoning them and letting the market handle it. Land value explodes, owners sell, developers bulldoze and build apartments. You only have to do three things. Rezone, expedite permits, and encourage investment dollars to flow into development. Sadly most cities that have this problem are failing on all three counts.
- numbsafari 5y ago
  Which, more or less, is exactly how Paris became Paris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
graeme 5y ago
Rezone the area, allow houses to be bought and redeveloped into denser housing. Destroy or move the victorian houses, preserve any of especially notable significance. The payment and expertise is the easy part, if the law allows it. The hard part emotionally is allowing the city to change. But any growing city has destroyed much of what came before. Manhattan has been a city for hundreds of years, current buildings were not what was there before.
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
>How do you propose San Francisco adds 2 extra stories to most Victorians in the city? No problem. Tear them down and build a bunch of Soviet apartment blocks.
- CuriouslyC 5y ago
  I suppose it's either that or have streets and jails littered with homeless people
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
They don't need to do anything to most of the city just let people build skyscrapper the whole length of missionbay to the end of the dogpatch. Every empty warehouse could be a massive amount of high density.
throw0101a 5y ago
You raise the tax rate so that land has more value/return having multi-storey buildings than single-storey ones. Toronto (Canada) used to have a lot of flat parking lots, but they're basically all gone now. Gas stations downtown are getting hard to find (not that you have to drive far to kind one out of the "core"): * https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2020/11/last-gas-stations-toronto-downtown-core-condos/ https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2020/11/last-gas-... Edit: it should be noted that Toronto didn't actually raise rates. Land just got more "inherently" valuable/expensive, and even with one of, if not the lowest property tax rates in the province, you get a large resulting product when you do the multiplication.
- ericmay 5y ago
  Seems a little unfair to existing home owners though. This is how you get people voting down tax increases for any reason whatsoever. Frankly, I think as long as you change the zoning the market should work itself out. The issue is complicated, not just economically but morally and ethically too. Point Reyes isn't very dense for example. Should I be petitioning the government at Point Reyes Station to raise taxes so high that people have to give up their current homes so I can have a cheap condo to buy? I mean that's basically what we're asking to be done in San Francisco, it's just not covered in baggage. Another alternative is that if prices become too high then companies won't be able to attract workers to the area, or they'll be paying so much it's like well, fine then. Idk. I have a hard time with this because I don't view skyscrapers (or any building over around 3 or 4 stories) as good development, but I also don't like actual suburbs either. It's two ends of an extreme spectrum and both are bad/good for their own reasons. I also don't think you can really satisfy the demand for living in San Francisco either. The more you build the higher the prices will go. It's counter-intuitive but when developers go off and pay exuberant prices for these single-family homes, they'll have to make up for that somehow. So they'll build higher-priced units which will create higher rents. But the previous units aren't going to drop in price. If you're a landlord or property manager that's not good for business and it messes with your investment forecasting models. But unlike a typical supply/demand relationship that you may think of, what ends up happening is that this current price point is just filled by other workers who previously wouldn't have lived in San Francisco and they come in at that rent price. So what happens then is that the higher-rent people want higher wages to maintain their previous COL. More people move in, more developers build, etc. etc. And you can see this in Manhattan right? I think often people assume that the demand is stable. But it's not. It is just increasing and further supply does nothing to change that. People are willing to pay any price to live there, they just change how much they're making. I'm sure there are examples, but I can't recall a major city like San Francisco where rent prices have gone down over time as a result of building new developments. Maybe someone has a link or anecdote. I mean, prices in Manhattan haven't gone down have they? Maybe Chicago if people have actually been leaving the city. Idk. Tl:dr New units increase prices.

by acchow 5y ago

eloff 5y ago

It's called rezoning them and letting the market handle it. Land value explodes, owners sell, developers bulldoze and build apartments. You only have to do three things. Rezone, expedite permits, and encourage investment dollars to flow into development. Sadly most cities that have this problem are failing on all three counts.

numbsafari 5y ago
Which, more or less, is exactly how Paris became Paris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

graeme 5y ago

Rezone the area, allow houses to be bought and redeveloped into denser housing. Destroy or move the victorian houses, preserve any of especially notable significance. The payment and expertise is the easy part, if the law allows it. The hard part emotionally is allowing the city to change. But any growing city has destroyed much of what came before. Manhattan has been a city for hundreds of years, current buildings were not what was there before.

OneEyedRobot 5y ago

>How do you propose San Francisco adds 2 extra stories to most Victorians in the city? No problem. Tear them down and build a bunch of Soviet apartment blocks.

CuriouslyC 5y ago
I suppose it's either that or have streets and jails littered with homeless people

tick_tock_tick 5y ago

They don't need to do anything to most of the city just let people build skyscrapper the whole length of missionbay to the end of the dogpatch. Every empty warehouse could be a massive amount of high density.

throw0101a 5y ago

You raise the tax rate so that land has more value/return having multi-storey buildings than single-storey ones. Toronto (Canada) used to have a lot of flat parking lots, but they're basically all gone now. Gas stations downtown are getting hard to find (not that you have to drive far to kind one out of the "core"): * https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2020/11/last-gas-stations-toronto-downtown-core-condos/ https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2020/11/last-gas-... Edit: it should be noted that Toronto didn't actually raise rates. Land just got more "inherently" valuable/expensive, and even with one of, if not the lowest property tax rates in the province, you get a large resulting product when you do the multiplication.

ericmay 5y ago
Seems a little unfair to existing home owners though. This is how you get people voting down tax increases for any reason whatsoever. Frankly, I think as long as you change the zoning the market should work itself out. The issue is complicated, not just economically but morally and ethically too. Point Reyes isn't very dense for example. Should I be petitioning the government at Point Reyes Station to raise taxes so high that people have to give up their current homes so I can have a cheap condo to buy? I mean that's basically what we're asking to be done in San Francisco, it's just not covered in baggage. Another alternative is that if prices become too high then companies won't be able to attract workers to the area, or they'll be paying so much it's like well, fine then. Idk. I have a hard time with this because I don't view skyscrapers (or any building over around 3 or 4 stories) as good development, but I also don't like actual suburbs either. It's two ends of an extreme spectrum and both are bad/good for their own reasons. I also don't think you can really satisfy the demand for living in San Francisco either. The more you build the higher the prices will go. It's counter-intuitive but when developers go off and pay exuberant prices for these single-family homes, they'll have to make up for that somehow. So they'll build higher-priced units which will create higher rents. But the previous units aren't going to drop in price. If you're a landlord or property manager that's not good for business and it messes with your investment forecasting models. But unlike a typical supply/demand relationship that you may think of, what ends up happening is that this current price point is just filled by other workers who previously wouldn't have lived in San Francisco and they come in at that rent price. So what happens then is that the higher-rent people want higher wages to maintain their previous COL. More people move in, more developers build, etc. etc. And you can see this in Manhattan right? I think often people assume that the demand is stable. But it's not. It is just increasing and further supply does nothing to change that. People are willing to pay any price to live there, they just change how much they're making. I'm sure there are examples, but I can't recall a major city like San Francisco where rent prices have gone down over time as a result of building new developments. Maybe someone has a link or anecdote. I mean, prices in Manhattan haven't gone down have they? Maybe Chicago if people have actually been leaving the city. Idk. Tl:dr New units increase prices.