5 ms·

I wish the zoning permitted them to do more than five stories.

TulliusCicero 2y ago
Even if it did, it's not clear how many developers would take that up. Part of why the 5-over-1 is attractive is because you get a decent amount of housing (and some retail) for fairly cheap. Going taller usually means a more expensive type of building. Having been to a lot of big European cities, buildings of roughly this size of ~6 stories or so seem to typically be the norm, and they get plenty of density out of it just by having a lot of them. Much taller buildings usually aren't all that common. Hell, even in Tokyo, while there's a lot of high rises, the average building definitely isn't a high rise, it's probably still six stories or less. That said, much higher density in some areas (e.g. downtown, or right next to subway stations) definitely makes a lot of sense.
- creer 2y ago
  The retail in "5+1 (retail)" is mostly a planning checkbox. In many locations it may no sense at all and is quickly taken over by (1) the leasing office), (2) the construction office, (3) a startup, (4) empty hopeful vacant space.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Have they only fairly recently started going up in your area? There's a chicken-and-egg problem with these; on the one hand, the retail space is only useful in a relatively dense area, on the other hand, these are generally an essential part of densifying an area. In Dublin, we had a building boom which came to a crashing halt in 2008 or so with the financial crisis, and then resumed by about 2016. In the interim, street-level retail space in new apartment blocks on the advancing edge often lay empty, which kind of makes sense, because the density wasn't there yet. As building resumed, and areas filled up, so did the retail space.
    - creer 2y ago
      That's fair - for a newly densifying area. In San Francisco SOMA, this is not a "newly densifying area". It is still densifying (converted from automotive workshops, entertainment and light manufacturing prevalence 30 years ago) but there has been plenty of people living there for many years now. And there are supermarkets and other Costco that did take advantage of that mix of still available largish, newish spaces and local population. But no, for SOMA and San Francisco in general, the issue is more likely that "street level retail" was a checkbox you better meet in your permit application. It's largely aspirational. There are some thriving stores in the area (cafés, furniture, specialty retail, supermarkets, private schools, etc). And there is also several times that in apparently empty street level spaces. Many of them are not always empty: they get leased for "cool office space" - but it's kind of the same from the street: frosted or painted glass front at best. The more noticeable spaces are stores that were there for years and finally gave up and closed (indeed café, hardware store, art galleries, furniture, schools, home goods, bakery - that should be at least surviving if population density was the only issue.) Just because street level retail is aspirational to the city planners of San Francisco, will not be enough to make it happen.
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        Ah, so I've actually wandered around there (my employer used to have an office there). Now, I was last there in 2020, and maybe things have changed, but when I was there it was a case of "apartment block, derelict-looking warehouse, unexpected parking lot, office block..." - that is it's fairly early in the cycle. You need a good bit of density for a lot of this ground-level retail to make sense; outside _exceptional_ cases no-one is going to _travel_ to visit your pharmacy or greengrocer or antique shop or cafe or whatever. As the gaps fill in you'd expect this to work better. (It was also to my mind a slightly weird example of this sort of "convert obsolete light industry into housing and offices" phenomenon, in that it seemed to be super-patchy. I've no idea if anyone has looked into it, but my suspicion is that people are more likely to walk around the local area and use the retail facilities if it feels like a local area, rather than islands in a sea of old warehouses.)
        2y ago
- hbossy 2y ago
  Parking space is the most important limiting factor around here. Making more than 4-5 stories on typical city plot requires adding a second level to underground garage, which skyrockets the building costs. Creating an underground level is few times more expensive than normal one and cost rises exponentially for each story. Cities typically require 0.5 - 1.5 parking spaces per apartment, so you have to make them and convince customers to pay extra or else you loose money holding lots of unused space that require constant maintenance. For the same reason Honk-Kong-style micro apartments are unheard of in Europe.
pc86 2y ago
"The zoning" is different everywhere, there are plenty of places that allow more than 5 total stories and/or more than 4 residential stories above commercial.
margalabargala 2y ago
This is less of a zoning issue and more of a structural one. Traditional stick buildings can't really be built higher than 5 stories. This is changing as glulam gets more popular but most 5 over 1s are not built with glulam for now.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  it is mostly fire code and other such things. five stories is about the maximum amount of traditional (not-CLT) wood construction tolerated by fire code. also, six and above stories is where you start needing more elevators as a practical matter, which cuts the amount of leasable space on lower floors. if you look at skyscraper designs one of the most complicated things is elevator layout design, because you need enough capacity so that people don't wait unreasonably long for elevators, but you also don't want to waste so much space on elevator shafts.
hoppyhoppy2 2y ago
More stories would require more-costly construction techniques than the inexpensive wood construction discussed in the article.
tichiian 2y ago
While zoning in Germany almost universally sets the limit at the height of the local church (yes, really...), the actual reasons are building codes. Even cities that permit arbitrary height (famously Frankfurt am Main) still don't have that many high buildings: Because somewhere around the 5 to 7 story line, you run into really expensive requirements around additional rescue staircases with overpressure ventilation, roof access, rescue balconies and stuff like that.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > Even cities that permit arbitrary height (famously Frankfurt am Main) They do? I believe I've heard from a friend who lives there that the fire department recently shortened a few planned buildings because they could not guarantee reaching higher than $X meters. (Said $X is over 100, but less than they initially wanted to build.) I don't have any hard sources tho.
  - tichiian 2y ago
    Not sure where the actual limit is or if they changed it, I also don't have any hard sources, just heresay that there is "no limit". But there are 20 buildings over 150m, and 6 over 200m, so it probably is or was quite a bit above 100m. And if it is due to the usual fire brigade ladder height problem, that would be at most 68m currently: https://www.magirusgroup.com/de/en/products/turntable-ladders/m68l/ https://www.magirusgroup.com/de/en/products/turntable-ladder... (around here in a smaller town, a company got a 50m building permit when they paid for the new fire truck with a sufficiently long ladder).

Even if it did, it's not clear how many developers would take that up. Part of why the 5-over-1 is attractive is because you get a decent amount of housing (and some retail) for fairly cheap. Going taller usually means a more expensive type of building. Having been to a lot of big European cities, buildings of roughly this size of ~6 stories or so seem to typically be the norm, and they get plenty of density out of it just by having a lot of them. Much taller buildings usually aren't all that common. Hell, even in Tokyo, while there's a lot of high rises, the average building definitely isn't a high rise, it's probably still six stories or less. That said, much higher density in some areas (e.g. downtown, or right next to subway stations) definitely makes a lot of sense.

creer 2y ago
The retail in "5+1 (retail)" is mostly a planning checkbox. In many locations it may no sense at all and is quickly taken over by (1) the leasing office), (2) the construction office, (3) a startup, (4) empty hopeful vacant space.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Have they only fairly recently started going up in your area? There's a chicken-and-egg problem with these; on the one hand, the retail space is only useful in a relatively dense area, on the other hand, these are generally an essential part of densifying an area. In Dublin, we had a building boom which came to a crashing halt in 2008 or so with the financial crisis, and then resumed by about 2016. In the interim, street-level retail space in new apartment blocks on the advancing edge often lay empty, which kind of makes sense, because the density wasn't there yet. As building resumed, and areas filled up, so did the retail space.
  - creer 2y ago
    That's fair - for a newly densifying area. In San Francisco SOMA, this is not a "newly densifying area". It is still densifying (converted from automotive workshops, entertainment and light manufacturing prevalence 30 years ago) but there has been plenty of people living there for many years now. And there are supermarkets and other Costco that did take advantage of that mix of still available largish, newish spaces and local population. But no, for SOMA and San Francisco in general, the issue is more likely that "street level retail" was a checkbox you better meet in your permit application. It's largely aspirational. There are some thriving stores in the area (cafés, furniture, specialty retail, supermarkets, private schools, etc). And there is also several times that in apparently empty street level spaces. Many of them are not always empty: they get leased for "cool office space" - but it's kind of the same from the street: frosted or painted glass front at best. The more noticeable spaces are stores that were there for years and finally gave up and closed (indeed café, hardware store, art galleries, furniture, schools, home goods, bakery - that should be at least surviving if population density was the only issue.) Just because street level retail is aspirational to the city planners of San Francisco, will not be enough to make it happen.
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Ah, so I've actually wandered around there (my employer used to have an office there). Now, I was last there in 2020, and maybe things have changed, but when I was there it was a case of "apartment block, derelict-looking warehouse, unexpected parking lot, office block..." - that is it's fairly early in the cycle. You need a good bit of density for a lot of this ground-level retail to make sense; outside _exceptional_ cases no-one is going to _travel_ to visit your pharmacy or greengrocer or antique shop or cafe or whatever. As the gaps fill in you'd expect this to work better. (It was also to my mind a slightly weird example of this sort of "convert obsolete light industry into housing and offices" phenomenon, in that it seemed to be super-patchy. I've no idea if anyone has looked into it, but my suspicion is that people are more likely to walk around the local area and use the retail facilities if it feels like a local area, rather than islands in a sea of old warehouses.)
      - 2y ago
hbossy 2y ago
Parking space is the most important limiting factor around here. Making more than 4-5 stories on typical city plot requires adding a second level to underground garage, which skyrockets the building costs. Creating an underground level is few times more expensive than normal one and cost rises exponentially for each story. Cities typically require 0.5 - 1.5 parking spaces per apartment, so you have to make them and convince customers to pay extra or else you loose money holding lots of unused space that require constant maintenance. For the same reason Honk-Kong-style micro apartments are unheard of in Europe.

pc86 2y ago

"The zoning" is different everywhere, there are plenty of places that allow more than 5 total stories and/or more than 4 residential stories above commercial.

margalabargala 2y ago

This is less of a zoning issue and more of a structural one. Traditional stick buildings can't really be built higher than 5 stories. This is changing as glulam gets more popular but most 5 over 1s are not built with glulam for now.

bobthepanda 2y ago
it is mostly fire code and other such things. five stories is about the maximum amount of traditional (not-CLT) wood construction tolerated by fire code. also, six and above stories is where you start needing more elevators as a practical matter, which cuts the amount of leasable space on lower floors. if you look at skyscraper designs one of the most complicated things is elevator layout design, because you need enough capacity so that people don't wait unreasonably long for elevators, but you also don't want to waste so much space on elevator shafts.

hoppyhoppy2 2y ago

More stories would require more-costly construction techniques than the inexpensive wood construction discussed in the article.

tichiian 2y ago

While zoning in Germany almost universally sets the limit at the height of the local church (yes, really...), the actual reasons are building codes. Even cities that permit arbitrary height (famously Frankfurt am Main) still don't have that many high buildings: Because somewhere around the 5 to 7 story line, you run into really expensive requirements around additional rescue staircases with overpressure ventilation, roof access, rescue balconies and stuff like that.

nottorp 2y ago
> Even cities that permit arbitrary height (famously Frankfurt am Main) They do? I believe I've heard from a friend who lives there that the fire department recently shortened a few planned buildings because they could not guarantee reaching higher than $X meters. (Said $X is over 100, but less than they initially wanted to build.) I don't have any hard sources tho.
- tichiian 2y ago
  Not sure where the actual limit is or if they changed it, I also don't have any hard sources, just heresay that there is "no limit". But there are 20 buildings over 150m, and 6 over 200m, so it probably is or was quite a bit above 100m. And if it is due to the usual fire brigade ladder height problem, that would be at most 68m currently: https://www.magirusgroup.com/de/en/products/turntable-ladders/m68l/ https://www.magirusgroup.com/de/en/products/turntable-ladder... (around here in a smaller town, a company got a 50m building permit when they paid for the new fire truck with a sufficiently long ladder).