I for one "treat the people starting these little restaurants and cafes as your users" in SF and I can tell you, the permitting process is not the biggest problem.
It's costs.
Commercial rents have skyrocketed. Moreover, residential rents have skyrocketed to the point where few people in the service industry can afford to live in SF at market rates. Even if you can find a space, how are you going to staff it? Who's willing to commute in from Oakland (which is getting expensive too) for a low wage job with grueling hours?
Nopa, one of the most successful SF restaurants in the past 10 years, is posting job ads for cooks on their menus now.
This isn't because of a slow permit process. Nopa hasn't applied for a permit in years. It's a result of the macroeconomic effects of a tech boom. So while I'm very happy to see PG highlight macroeconomic factors that foster economic growth in cities, I see a missed opportunity to fully address their complex effects.
This is probably because this issue has been politicized here in SF, with the tech industry often lambasted for "destroying" the city (this comes from a lot of the people getting pushed out), so tech folks often get hyperdefensive and contort themselves trying to point fingers elsewhere. I think that's what's happened here with PG trying to blame the government's permitting process.
But clearly if we want to continue making SF an attractive startup hub, we need to help "little restaurants and cafes" continue to open and operate. And the elephant in the room there is quite simply the high rents and high cost of living for workers in the service industry, driven by a huge influx of wealthier residents competing for space. You want a startup hub, you need city policies that manage that growth.
Yep. San Francisco no longer has marginal spaces -- every conceivable inch of it has been claimed, developed, and/or bid into the stratosphere. And it has nothing to do with "NIMBYs" or lack of development. It's a tiny, tiny patch of land, all of the build-able portions of which have been speculated upon since the early 20th century. This is important, because while cafes and universities and whatnot are important, you need marginal spaces to be a creative hub. Creative people tend not to be wealthy. They need affordable, amenable places to live and work. And San Francisco doesn't fit the bill -- unless you have connections, power, fame or access to unlimited capital. Which is why SF is suffering right now.
The last time this city was on discount was probably the late 1980s, when SOMA was a wasteland and everyone wanted to live in the suburbs. And surprise surprise...along came the first dot-com boom. All of those (comparatively) cheap spaces where creative kids were having raves and making art became the birthplace of the modern web. Creativity happens in marginal spaces.
I was actually surprised that pg kept emphasizing the need for constraints on development in this essay ("The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about historic preservation. The tougher cities are about it, the better they seem to do.") The conventional wisdom around here is that we must refer to this kind of thinking as "NIMBYism", and condemn it as backwards-thinking. "Obviously," says the technorati, "we should be knocking those tiny old buildings down and replacing them with skyscrapers!"
But he's right. San Francisco was once a cheap, pleasant place to live, precisely because of those sorts of constraints, coupled with demographic trends. But it's at a different point in the development curve today. It isn't for scrappy, poor innovators anymore. It's for ambitious, get-rich-quick types who will tolerate paying $4,000 a month for an apartment to be part of the scene. And as soon as the scene moves somewhere else, those people will be gone, too.
When I walk around SF, I see a lot of underdeveloped spaces...abandoned buildings, abandoned gas stations, huge parking lots full of city trucks. Inexplicably, there's been a huge abandoned building on 18th and Mission (seemingly prime location) for I don't know how long. This article about it is from 2012[1].
So, yes, SF is a small space but it is far from being efficiently (or fully) developed and I think the SF Planning Department and other bureaucracies are partially to blame.
I think you're exaggerating when you say you see "a lot" of these spaces. There are some. And they're usually vacant for a reason that involves money. Or there's a more serious problem (like contamination).
For example, the reason that space at 18th and Mission was vacant is right there in the article you linked -- the landlord pushed out the previous tenant, and turning it into a grocery store required extensive renovation. It's not as if the space was sitting empty because nobody had a use for it:
"So when the 99-cent store closed — because of high rent, according to neighboring businesses — and the vacant building went on the market in May 2010, he seized the opportunity and bought it two months later."
But yeah, it would have been nice if the new owner allowed someone else use the space while waiting for his redevelopment plans to go through, instead of letting squatters turn it into a drug house.
I agree, there are waaaaaay too many parking lots in SF. If you covered every parking lot in the city with a 4 story multi-use building, what impact would that have?
Yeah, cities that are not in the active earthquake zone lovingly called The Ring of Fire. Remember, the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge cost 1 million per foot of road up to it.
Actually, much of the city isn't a city but a suburb. If you stand on Twin Peaks looking south, you will not see a single part denser than New Jersey. There is plenty of room above SF that is not used.
Yes, you're right. And that's one of the most ironic parts of the SF development debate: the folks who complain about "NIMBY opposition" the loudest are (usually) talking about already dense neighborhoods, like the Mission, when they should be thinking about the Outer Sunset or Laguna Honda.
That said, it doesn't change my point: to change the density of these places, you have to buy out a bunch of people who know exactly what their land is worth if it's zoned for higher density. Many of them are actually betting on that windfall. There is no equivalent in SF to the vast tracts of undeveloped land in, say, Texas.
That is an excellent point, however, part of the reason those areas are not as densely developed is that the transportation infrastructure sucks.
And how to fix it? It takes a long time and a lot of investment to improve public transport, but it's challenging when the need for it is driven by short-term boom-bust tech "bubble" cycles. Makes it harder for the city to invest when demand might go poof in a year.
PG was wrong to say that you cannot be too strict about historic preservation because it leads to the exact problem we have in SF right now -- there is no physical reason this city can't be more dense and remain beautiful (look at Paris for an example of how this might be possible), but there are many, many political reasons.
There are also economic reasons. Parisian density is only possible with a great underground transportation system. That's hugely expensive to build and takes decades. SF has traditionally been a boomtown economy with corresponding bust cycles, so it's harder to make those kinds of investments. They are happening (e.g. the Chinatown extension) but more conservatively.
Saigon where I'm back from is building a light rail to the center with twenty odd 30-40 story residential blocks along it. The whole thing is taking about 2 years to build.
That kind of thing is good for preserving historic buildings too - the blocks are all in nondescript areas 1-4 miles from the center.
I'm mainly just talking about the density -- many more people fit into less space than in San Francisco. And its both an option for us to build up, and build in -- we could close down some of our wider car-oriented streets and build walking/biking oriented roads.
I look at SF and I see the strangest thing. Many new buildings that are built at 4 stories max. A big innovation is to give a whole 2 story density bonus! Wow 2! I know of small towns of 250'000 that build buildings that are 20 stories regularly!
12 SFH homes on a block can be purchased for $30 million, have 400 unit buildings built on them and make far more than that selling it off. Then take the massive increase in property tax revenue and use it to fund an expanded rail system with right of way. But they can't do it effectively because of the law.
Build 250 of those 400 unit buildings and you will have filled the 100'000 unit backlog. 250. You can easily fit them all 0.5 miles from bart and muni tunnel stations. Everyone knows the solution, the planning department and SF NIMBYs don't want to happen, and they fight it hard.
250 high rises wont even make SF approach hong kong or manhattan levels. Not even 1000 of them. SF and it's people has it's head so far up it's ass it's comical.
Maybe we don't want to continue. Maybe the insane rents will cause closures of a lot of the places that make SF attractive to the tech workers, and slowly SF will become less of a destination for them, and they will start flocking to other places instead of to SF. And then maybe tech companies will have to open offices elsewhere and the situation will equalize itself that way. But then I'm not personally invested in SF staying a tech hub.
Would be nice. There are network effects, though, that make this less likely. If prices "succeed" in driving people out, prices will fall to the point that people come back in (as long as the network of money and jobs stays intact).
Maybe it shouldn't be such a low wage job, if [good?] talent is in short supply?
Just a thought.
I for one would be happy to pay higher prices, if it meant we could avoid the whole 20% restaurant subsidy (tips) song and dance. Charge me a fair price and I'll pay you a fair price. There's no need for the whole "And oh yeah, we don't pay our staff enough so you're a bad person if you don't pay extra".
SF restaurant prices have in fact already gone way up. ("The biggest factor: labor") [1]
It doesn't sound like you're actually offering to pay higher prices. You just want tipping built into the base price. There are restaurants experimenting with this, but it generally doesn't make them more money. [2]
You're talking about serving/wait staff, whose hours are significantly shorter and wages (including tips) are significantly higher than cooking staff, which is what the parent comment was actually talking about.
It's costs.
Commercial rents have skyrocketed. Moreover, residential rents have skyrocketed to the point where few people in the service industry can afford to live in SF at market rates. Even if you can find a space, how are you going to staff it? Who's willing to commute in from Oakland (which is getting expensive too) for a low wage job with grueling hours?
Nopa, one of the most successful SF restaurants in the past 10 years, is posting job ads for cooks on their menus now.
This isn't because of a slow permit process. Nopa hasn't applied for a permit in years. It's a result of the macroeconomic effects of a tech boom. So while I'm very happy to see PG highlight macroeconomic factors that foster economic growth in cities, I see a missed opportunity to fully address their complex effects.
This is probably because this issue has been politicized here in SF, with the tech industry often lambasted for "destroying" the city (this comes from a lot of the people getting pushed out), so tech folks often get hyperdefensive and contort themselves trying to point fingers elsewhere. I think that's what's happened here with PG trying to blame the government's permitting process.
But clearly if we want to continue making SF an attractive startup hub, we need to help "little restaurants and cafes" continue to open and operate. And the elephant in the room there is quite simply the high rents and high cost of living for workers in the service industry, driven by a huge influx of wealthier residents competing for space. You want a startup hub, you need city policies that manage that growth.