5 ms·

Is it simply the case of the majority of SF voters, who somehow locked in real estate years ago, not wanting to increase supply of housing in order to maximize

Is it simply the case of the majority of SF voters, who somehow locked in real estate years ago, not wanting to increase supply of housing in order to maximize their own wealth? Could one argue that this is democracy working as intended, even if you don't think it's "fair" to certain demographics?

ronsor 3y ago
Their wealth will minimize when nobody wants to live there anymore. Homes are only as valuable as there people willing to buy them.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
  It's true, but what's the political solution to this short of ignoring what your demos wants? Where do you draw the line as far as overriding what the votes are telling you? It's one thing when there's an autocratic central planner thinking 100 years into the future (with all of the dangers or a wise benevolent dictator), and another when society moves one electoral cycle at a time.
wnc3141 3y ago
I would hope their maximization includes other benefits of living in a community such as presence of arts, local restaurants, school teachers and first responders without commute induced burnout etc.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
  It doesn't seem that things have gotten bad enough that those services are no longer available and real-estate owners are impacted by it. Yes, teachers have to commute from out of town, but this doesn't affect the local residents just yet, from what I can tell, the educators are there when you need them, maybe thanks to higher-paying private schools. The restaurant scene is still strong, prices are through the roof as always and people can afford it just fine. First responder salaries are pretty good as well, although there are plenty of vacancies: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/san-francisco/?page=9&s=-other https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/san-francisco/?pa... I don't see how the current status quo will change anytime soon given that the residents don't feel that impacted besides the inconvenience of not being able to shop on Market St anymore. Most of the fancy neighborhood owners (Pac Heights, Russian Hill, Noe, Duboce, North Beach, etc) are still isolated from the urban decay and don't have to worry about finding a place to live. They can let things get worse in other parts of town for a while longer.
  - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
    [dead]
adam_arthur 3y ago
The irony is that increasing population density leads to much greater wealth gains for property owners than stifling development. When neighborhoods get upzoned for higher density, the value of the land rises far beyond what a SFH would command. e.g. now can build an apartment complex on what used to be a SFH. How much would a developer pay for a regularly sized SFH plot in the middle of Manhattan if it were zoned for high rise development? The reason Bay Area real estate appreciated so much was primarily due to the concentration of high paying jobs, not the lack of building. But now the lack of building is likely to lead to other areas/remote work displacing the centralization of jobs.
BashiBazouk 3y ago
I doubt it. I owned a house in SF. For me it was looking at the city. I grew up in the bay area and have been going to SF since the 70's. San Francisco is a beautiful city. Architecturally fantastic. In the 60's, 70's and 80's there were waves of mass fast building of apartment units and much of it is really, really ugly. I would not like to see San Francisco go in another ugly direction just so people can say they have an SF address. Further, I just felt the city could not take a boom in population. Public transportation, road usage already felt maxed out. There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work. You could call me highly skeptical on that front, especially the Bay Area where a car is just so useful even if public transportation is used to get to work. Another thing is looking at single cities rather than the entire metro areas. San Jose is first and San Francisco second. Where would Manhattan and Brooklyn be on the list if Queens and the Bronx were not there to bring the numbers down? Workers need affordable housing but I'm not convinced they need to be in specific arbitrary lined off areas rather than in the greater metro area with reasonable commute time to work...
- tdeck 3y ago
  > There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work. And yet as a software professional making a six figure income in SF, I had so many colleagues and friends who didn't own a car. There are very few places in the US where that would be true, and all of them are cities with transit policies you'd probably describe in the same terms.
- syntheweave 3y ago
  Right, that's the older generation speaking circuitously about what the Bay Area can do with land use and conveniently landing on the status quo being best-of-all-possible-worlds. The fact is, the city changes anyway. More and more newcomers in the past two decades ended up with roommates because of rent. E-bikes changed the game with getting over the hills and a lot of families are using them now, pulling kids and groceries despite the lack of infrastructure. Lots of people opt to get things delivered instead of driving down the peninsula to Colma. On the roads themselves, the self-driving taxis are all over the city every day - and mostly they do work, even if "Cruise gets stuck" is a meme; if they expand to achieve the current market share of Uber and Lyft at the projected cost metrics, SF's auto fleet will be majority centralized and professionally-operated. Meanwhile the fastest expanding public transit in the Bay is the ferry system, which in its current incarnation is largely a product of the '89 quake jumpstarting ridership, and now serves as a link to some relatively distant locales. What the whole Bay Area government did - not just SF - is spend a generation kicking cans down roads and letting real estate prices run up, and the time is ripe for a transformation that leverages all the new stuff. Right now everything, big and small, good and bad, gets challenged by CEQA and affordable unit requirements. It's an excuse for graft to run through City Hall. But the entire west side of the city has ample room to grow. It is not particularly beautiful as it is - it's just row housing. The transit and traffic problem is just geometry, doing more in less space. The way in which the city streets are currently designed is "every street is a stroad" - garage curb cuts are everywhere, every inch is available for parking, everything on the grid is a thru street. Many of the garages are not used as garages, they are used as rentals. Most of the delays are from intersections along major corridors, not access to destinations. So in practice, the city is subsidizing a lot of street space as a parking lot, which exacerbates the need for cars and car infra. All you have to do to make the kind of transformation Paris has made and go heavier into bike use is to carve out the block into a cul-de-sac with bollards - a stronger version of what's already been experimented with in "Slow Streets" and "Neighborways" since 2020. You don't get a fight over parking and lane space, but the fast thru traffic goes away and it becomes dead easy to set up a few consecutive blocks like that to create bicycle corridors, while reducing delay along the fast corridor by eliminating conflict points. There's plenty more, but that's basically where I see things going. A lot of changes will be precipitated by self-driving taxis because adoption of those removes the "owner's rights" element of why constituents vote to keep the streets exactly as-is.
thephyber 3y ago
Renters get the same weight of vote as landlords (assuming they both are adult citizens and live in the same jurisdiction). The ballot vote is not what stops developments most of the time (although in affluent suburbs like Cupertino, it frequently does). The “heckler’s veto” of planning boards and the CEQA are what give the few people who severely want to restrict new development an asymmetric power. This doesn’t happen at the ballot box. That’s not to say that there aren’t problematic measures. CA Prop 13 (1979) was passed by referendum, but SF Rent Control (1979) was passed by SF Board of Supervisors, so both democracy and republic governments both contributed to the current issues.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
  Re: your first paragraph, my hunch is that: 1. renters are less invested in the local politics given their more flexible and transient nature, therefore they care and vote less than people who have assets and multi-decade skin in the game 2. voters aged 45+ are less likely to be renters, given lowered likelihood of moving with age, and the higher likelihood of having locked in cheap real estate decades earlier. Those voters also tend to vote more 3. therefore renters are far less represented in elections Entirely possible the above is wrong, there might be data showing otherwise.
  - thephyber 3y ago
    I would agree with your points. But my point was that renters and landlords get the same number of votes each, even if they use them at different rates. Playing the long game is difficult and benefits people who aren’t starving or trying to hustle just to make rent this month.

ronsor 3y ago

Their wealth will minimize when nobody wants to live there anymore. Homes are only as valuable as there people willing to buy them.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
It's true, but what's the political solution to this short of ignoring what your demos wants? Where do you draw the line as far as overriding what the votes are telling you? It's one thing when there's an autocratic central planner thinking 100 years into the future (with all of the dangers or a wise benevolent dictator), and another when society moves one electoral cycle at a time.

wnc3141 3y ago

I would hope their maximization includes other benefits of living in a community such as presence of arts, local restaurants, school teachers and first responders without commute induced burnout etc.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
It doesn't seem that things have gotten bad enough that those services are no longer available and real-estate owners are impacted by it. Yes, teachers have to commute from out of town, but this doesn't affect the local residents just yet, from what I can tell, the educators are there when you need them, maybe thanks to higher-paying private schools. The restaurant scene is still strong, prices are through the roof as always and people can afford it just fine. First responder salaries are pretty good as well, although there are plenty of vacancies: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/san-francisco/?page=9&s=-other https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/san-francisco/?pa... I don't see how the current status quo will change anytime soon given that the residents don't feel that impacted besides the inconvenience of not being able to shop on Market St anymore. Most of the fancy neighborhood owners (Pac Heights, Russian Hill, Noe, Duboce, North Beach, etc) are still isolated from the urban decay and don't have to worry about finding a place to live. They can let things get worse in other parts of town for a while longer.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  [dead]

adam_arthur 3y ago

The irony is that increasing population density leads to much greater wealth gains for property owners than stifling development. When neighborhoods get upzoned for higher density, the value of the land rises far beyond what a SFH would command. e.g. now can build an apartment complex on what used to be a SFH. How much would a developer pay for a regularly sized SFH plot in the middle of Manhattan if it were zoned for high rise development? The reason Bay Area real estate appreciated so much was primarily due to the concentration of high paying jobs, not the lack of building. But now the lack of building is likely to lead to other areas/remote work displacing the centralization of jobs.

BashiBazouk 3y ago

I doubt it. I owned a house in SF. For me it was looking at the city. I grew up in the bay area and have been going to SF since the 70's. San Francisco is a beautiful city. Architecturally fantastic. In the 60's, 70's and 80's there were waves of mass fast building of apartment units and much of it is really, really ugly. I would not like to see San Francisco go in another ugly direction just so people can say they have an SF address. Further, I just felt the city could not take a boom in population. Public transportation, road usage already felt maxed out. There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work. You could call me highly skeptical on that front, especially the Bay Area where a car is just so useful even if public transportation is used to get to work. Another thing is looking at single cities rather than the entire metro areas. San Jose is first and San Francisco second. Where would Manhattan and Brooklyn be on the list if Queens and the Bronx were not there to bring the numbers down? Workers need affordable housing but I'm not convinced they need to be in specific arbitrary lined off areas rather than in the greater metro area with reasonable commute time to work...

tdeck 3y ago
> There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work. And yet as a software professional making a six figure income in SF, I had so many colleagues and friends who didn't own a car. There are very few places in the US where that would be true, and all of them are cities with transit policies you'd probably describe in the same terms.
syntheweave 3y ago
Right, that's the older generation speaking circuitously about what the Bay Area can do with land use and conveniently landing on the status quo being best-of-all-possible-worlds. The fact is, the city changes anyway. More and more newcomers in the past two decades ended up with roommates because of rent. E-bikes changed the game with getting over the hills and a lot of families are using them now, pulling kids and groceries despite the lack of infrastructure. Lots of people opt to get things delivered instead of driving down the peninsula to Colma. On the roads themselves, the self-driving taxis are all over the city every day - and mostly they do work, even if "Cruise gets stuck" is a meme; if they expand to achieve the current market share of Uber and Lyft at the projected cost metrics, SF's auto fleet will be majority centralized and professionally-operated. Meanwhile the fastest expanding public transit in the Bay is the ferry system, which in its current incarnation is largely a product of the '89 quake jumpstarting ridership, and now serves as a link to some relatively distant locales. What the whole Bay Area government did - not just SF - is spend a generation kicking cans down roads and letting real estate prices run up, and the time is ripe for a transformation that leverages all the new stuff. Right now everything, big and small, good and bad, gets challenged by CEQA and affordable unit requirements. It's an excuse for graft to run through City Hall. But the entire west side of the city has ample room to grow. It is not particularly beautiful as it is - it's just row housing. The transit and traffic problem is just geometry, doing more in less space. The way in which the city streets are currently designed is "every street is a stroad" - garage curb cuts are everywhere, every inch is available for parking, everything on the grid is a thru street. Many of the garages are not used as garages, they are used as rentals. Most of the delays are from intersections along major corridors, not access to destinations. So in practice, the city is subsidizing a lot of street space as a parking lot, which exacerbates the need for cars and car infra. All you have to do to make the kind of transformation Paris has made and go heavier into bike use is to carve out the block into a cul-de-sac with bollards - a stronger version of what's already been experimented with in "Slow Streets" and "Neighborways" since 2020. You don't get a fight over parking and lane space, but the fast thru traffic goes away and it becomes dead easy to set up a few consecutive blocks like that to create bicycle corridors, while reducing delay along the fast corridor by eliminating conflict points. There's plenty more, but that's basically where I see things going. A lot of changes will be precipitated by self-driving taxis because adoption of those removes the "owner's rights" element of why constituents vote to keep the streets exactly as-is.

thephyber 3y ago

Renters get the same weight of vote as landlords (assuming they both are adult citizens and live in the same jurisdiction). The ballot vote is not what stops developments most of the time (although in affluent suburbs like Cupertino, it frequently does). The “heckler’s veto” of planning boards and the CEQA are what give the few people who severely want to restrict new development an asymmetric power. This doesn’t happen at the ballot box. That’s not to say that there aren’t problematic measures. CA Prop 13 (1979) was passed by referendum, but SF Rent Control (1979) was passed by SF Board of Supervisors, so both democracy and republic governments both contributed to the current issues.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
Re: your first paragraph, my hunch is that: 1. renters are less invested in the local politics given their more flexible and transient nature, therefore they care and vote less than people who have assets and multi-decade skin in the game 2. voters aged 45+ are less likely to be renters, given lowered likelihood of moving with age, and the higher likelihood of having locked in cheap real estate decades earlier. Those voters also tend to vote more 3. therefore renters are far less represented in elections Entirely possible the above is wrong, there might be data showing otherwise.
- thephyber 3y ago
  I would agree with your points. But my point was that renters and landlords get the same number of votes each, even if they use them at different rates. Playing the long game is difficult and benefits people who aren’t starving or trying to hustle just to make rent this month.