San Francisco has limited land, so there is a natural constraint on growth; in addition, there is a form of rent control and then there are lots of stipulations for building new units in the city. these things contribute to the low inventory, I think.
I wish they would allow more common sense building in the city. For example, in some areas, the shadows from new buildings may not be allowed to cast on neighborhood parks from 10am to 4pm, or so. This has killed a few projects. Then you have powerful neighborhood groups (like the ones along the embarcadero) who won't allow dense building because they would limit their view. I understand their position, but it's a selfish one. No one "owns" a view. More over, their buildings obstruct buildings behind them, but they would insist on having their own buildings be demolished to give others a view --nevermind that this could go on till very few houses were left.
The building requirements, in my layman's view, is that the requirements are onerous (compared to say San Jose) and make housing in SF an artificially limited/scarce resource which puts pressure on housing. The Peninsula is not much better. Neighbors always bring up traffic but then never approve BART to alleviate some of that traffic concern (or some other form of local mass transit (let's say spurs from the main Caltrain stations meandering to the local downtowns which host offices). My frustration is such that I wish someone like ABAG were given the power to overrule locals and allow them to do proper (integrated regional) planning and allow building up (vertically) to take the pressure off of housing in the Bay Area.
I agree with your sentiment about neighborhood groups using the law to protect their high property values, but you can, essentially, own a view. You can purchase the "air rights" above existing houses and buildings from their property owners if you wish to prevent them from building something taller and blocking your view. Trump World Tower in New York is an example of a building that did this.
If you can't convince the owners of such air rights to sell them to you at a rate you're willing to pay to guarantee the view, you don't deserve to prevent them by law from blocking your view (basically stripping them of their air rights without compensation).
If you were designing a new city from scratch, this makes sense. Much like in software, cities have "legacy systems" to deal with. In the case of homes in San Francisco, "air rights" had largely been priced into properties by way of historical architecture limitations (lack of elevators, then earthquake resilience).
What the zoning restrictions have done is serve as a mechanism to allocate air rights. Effectively, properties come with the air "in front of" them, not "above" them. This is reasonable, and consistent. I doubt anyone bought low-lying property in SF with the idea in replacing it with a skyscraper, but most people up on a hill definitely paid for the privilege. A shift in pricing of air rights would cause a dramatic market shift from the previously existing condition.
I see it less on aggregate as a limited land issue, and more of a topography issue. SF is inherently not going to have the character of an east coast city because the hills provide natural divisions in development. San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods, each with their own character, and it's probably most reasonable to look at development on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. Increasing the density in Pac Heights is never going to happen, but building a residential high-rise in the FiDi? Look at the Transbay Terminal project. http://www.sfredevelopment.org/index.aspx?page=54. All of that said, any time you're talking SF, there is the elephant in the room: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Next-big-quake-could-b...
In general, I don't actually see a limited supply as a bad thing. As long as office space and residential stay within the right balance, the mix should be sustainable. The goal should not be to make every city look like Manhattan. The suburb I grew up in effectively ran out of land, demand increased in the next town out, and it got built up. There is no real shortage of land in CA as a whole - It doesn't take much of a road trip from SF to find an area where cows outnumber people, and it's reasonable that groups of people are able to define the character of an area in which they live.
The slippery slope view argument doesn't really hold water, largely because much of the city was built a century ago, long before the current residents settled there. Zoning restrictions caused views to be priced into the value of the property. Current owners bought their properties largely with the view-restrictions intact. You buy something, you know what the view you have, you know what view you don't have, you know what restrictions there are on what you can do with your property, and it's priced accordingly. It's a reasonable system for all.
I do second your suggestion of better regional planning as a whole, though, mostly with regards to transportation, though the Bay Area is better than most in that regard.
> San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods, each with their own character, and it's probably most reasonable to look at development on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.
I think this is what SF locals like to invoke as a reason. I don't really think it bears out. Paris is full neighborhoods, but it's a dense city. Tokyo is dense with thousands of small neighborhoods. Taipei is dense with hundreds of small neighborhoods with their own character. all these cities realise they are urban and they need to accommodate growing populations. Basically, it's red-herring.
>...but building a residential high-rise in the FiDi? Look at the Transbay Terminal project
SoMa is the only place where it's somewhat less onerous to build. But the FinDis? Not quite, even if it was historically amenable to tall buildings. Last time a tower was attempted, it was rejected on the basis of "character" and casting shadows[1]. I really dislike the "character" argument. It's as if things were not meant to grow and change. It's as if they'd want the city to be a "living" museum. It's a romantic, but unnatural notion, to me. I want some progress, sure, manage it, so it does not end up like Mumbai, or something like that.
>any time you're talking SF, there is the elephant in the room...
Lots of cities live on fault lines. LA, Seattle, Tokyo, Taipei, MDF., etc. You need to build them to code. And, not only that, but we already have tall buildings, it's not as if this is Phoenix, so this is beside the point.
> Bay Area is better than most in that regard
I would disagree with that. The Bay Area has 6 million+ residents. It's one of the most poorly coordinated regions with such a large population.
W/re views. I realize that's how it is, but I think it should be more a public good. How does NYC, Tokyo, MDF, Paris and so on deal with this? Obviously it's not disallowing growth in those cities. As long as they don't build monstrosities like they do in Caracas, I think sensible blending is okay and if you lose some view, so be it and be happy you had something which wasn't actually yours. I mean, SF thinks of itself as "progressive" but then, something as vain as "view" is like a sacred cow. how does that make sense?
Tokyo has about the same density as San Francisco (6,000/km^2), though maintained over a significantly larger area. The main thing that's interesting about Tokyo is that it's medium-density but very large: http://marketurbanism.com/2012/06/28/tokyos-surprising-lack-...
> How does NYC, Tokyo, MDF, Paris and so on deal with this?
Paris has taken a split approach, where high-rises are banned in the city center, but a new high-rise-building space was set aside in the suburbs. When Tour Montparnasse [1] was built in 1972, it was so unpopular that further such buildings in the center were banned. New high-rise construction is therefore moved to a few km out of the city center, to La Défense and the suburbs. An analogy might be allowing high-rise construction in Oakland or Daly City, but not in SF proper. The mid-rise buildings are higher-density in Paris than SF, though, typically 5-8 stories throughout the city center.
With Tokyo I was referring to the 23 wards. To take the metro area and calculate the density would be like going down to Palo alto and up to San Rafael and expand the density to those areas. Yes, true, Paris is not not full of high rises, but as you mention, you don't typically have the 2 and 3-story low-rises and neither does Tokyo. Tokyo, quite interestingly for such a dense city, does not have many skyscrapers, tho it has many high rises. But anyway, I could have said HK or Singapore, both have land limits and are on quake zones and both have lots of highrises and also a few skyscrapers. The way those cities achieve their densities is not via lots of skyscrapers, but via lots and lots of mid-rises and highrises. From 8 to about 25 floors. Most in the 8-16 range, IIRC.
I wonder why there hasn't been much in the way of proposals (that I've seen) for moderate redevelopment to make SF more like Paris, versus more like NYC. Stuff like replacing a block of 2-story townhomes with a 6-8-story apartment building. Construction economics, maybe? Developers seem mainly keen on getting approval to put up 20+ story glass-and-steel condo towers with sweeping views.
Or else, cultural differences? In much of Europe, block-sized, mid-rise apartment buildings, often centered on courtyards, are seen as a very classic, nice sort of city-center construction, while high-rises are seen as a bit garish, either too much like an office building, or else too much like an ex-Soviet housing project. Americans seem to have the opposite association, of high-rises as modern and mid-rise apartment blocks as meh.
(Though on the ex-Soviet angle, I've read that as one explanation for why Berlin is one of the cheapest major cities in Europe: the East German government didn't have much patience for these bourgeois concerns about "historical character" and "neighborhoods", so just built rows of high-rise apartment blocks right in the city center. As a result, the city now has an unusually large housing stock.)
Good question. I'm not sure. Maybe it's economics, or maybe a combination of economics and zoning. The one area in SF which got the 'stamp of approval' for that vision, is the China Basin/Mission Bay area. Those tend to be 6 to 15 floor developments. I think that's a good direction. It's not super tall but also does not despoil land with awful low-rise ininspired developments with the collapse-prone first floors (the ones with 'garages' on the first floors).
On the economic side, I think cities prefer single family devs because they can levy more taxes (as they do it per acre, I think). I don't see why they don't tax by livable (inhabitable) space and land, that way they can compensate for the greater density in required services.
Anyway, I've begun reading Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"[1]. It provides interesting insight into the suburbanization of America (and other places, of course, but she looks at the American side of it) and its impact on quality of life and how it may be time to rethink the suburbanization and revitalize cities to make the inner cores actual livable places, not just places where people drive in for work. It's an old tome, but it's still very relevant today.
W:re Soviet style (and even section 8 in the US and Council Estates in the UK) the planners were kind of utilitarian and naive. They more or less saw them as solutions for housing people as if they were storing objects. Little in the way of allowances for human nature. The plans were a bit too abstract. For example, let's say they thought it'd be nice to have a community area. They'd afford a room somewhere in a building, but put little thought on where might be optimum or how people might use it and have equally easy access to it. So they might end up being dingy unused areas which might just get defaced or used by low level criminals.
I think the increase in rental prices is going to continue for quite awhile. My recent experience moving to SF and trying to find a place was incredible. I was just looking for sublets, but most people that I got to personally meet told me their email rate for a CL ad was 150-300 emails a day. I quickly learned that unless I was discovering the ad within 2 hours of posting there was no point to even replying.
I was only able to get an apartment after (1) enlisting my mother on the East Coast to spend all her spare time on CL forwarding me appropriate listings, (2) calling an ad's phone number 22 minutes after it was posted, (3) making sure I was the very first person that was personally screened, and (4) forcing a check for two months' rent into their hand unsolicited with the message that if they found anyone better I'd just stop payment. It's a rough market and it is still getting crazier. I think someone on a previous HN comment thread mentioned the city gained only 270 new housing units last year.
This tickles my funny bone. Of all the New York-isms to import to the west coast!
So now instead of signing away your firstborn for a studio at a stabby corner of the Mission, it's now your firstborn and 2 months rent for the privilege!
San Francisco is a nice enough place, but I fail to see the attraction: high taxes, fees for everything you do, a fascist city council, homeless people pretty much do whatever they want and people that love to berate you for not driving a Prius. The geography of San Fran is nice but it's like living in an Al Gore version of Animal Farm. Aside from the weather, Texas is a far more logical place to be. In Austin, $3500 per month would buy a palace compared to San Fran.
> "The Texas cities (Houston, Dallas) have some of the most pollution this side of NJ. They're like LA without the culture."
Much of the pollution in North Texas, (from traffic, cement and power production), is due to the influx of people from the surrounding states, the coasts and overseas by the looser regulations attracting businesses.
Eventually I will probably move elsewhere. The pollution and the allergy environment is wreaking my health. Traffic is a crazy mix of over aggressive yuppies, over careful illegals and commercial trucks. The water system is stressed and the deregulated power system is over priced and in decay to increase profits.
I live in SF and the other option I actively consider is Austin. Fairly accurate statement (but as the other comment said, Dallas and Houston are miserable). Honestly, the income and opportunity in SF is still larger, so I stay.
I also fail to see the attraction of SF. It's foggy, cold, filthy, crowded and expensive. Sure there's perks like great food and awesome beers on tap that are hard to find elsewhere. But is it really worth it?
Food and beer are the least important attractions. Those things are portable. (And SF is hardly a runaway leader in either category, even when the competition is confined to the USA.)
The main non-portable attraction is VCs and their money. People go where the money is.
The fact that SF is crowded is a feature. Your startup's recruitment pool and tech meetups and potential partners are all within a few dozen miles. If you change jobs, your commute doesn't change.
Given all that, I still don't think it's worth it, but obviously a lot of others disagree.
You're right that close proximity to VC and tech scene is important for many people. I wonder if this will change going forward?
If a VC wants to a fund my company is the physical proximity of my office and their office really a deal maker/breaker? One of us can just fly to meet the other if the meeting has to be in person. I've actually never dealt first-hand with VCs so perhaps they require frequent in-person interaction.
Minor note: are there really that many bars in the US with Pliny the Elder and Blind Pig on tap? If so where are they. I'd like to live close-by.
Yes, because when the VC invests in you, they'll also take 1-2 board seats, and will routinely have to meet with your team onsite over the next 18 months.
People have been predicting the all-virtual office for decades. To paraphrase an old joke: It's the organization of the future, and perhaps it always will be.
It is certainly possible to work remotely from your VC. But you are conceding an advantage to competing teams who are working next door to the VC, for whom the cost of an additional in-person demo is a couple of extra blocks of walking during lunch hour.
I dont think this article is comparing apples to apples. There are no single family homes to be had in most of manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. I'm living in pacific heights now and also live in lower manhattan. Manhattan is still a bit more expensive IMHO.
"Rent control protects tennants from higher prices.."
That's bullshit. What rent control does is distorts the market so you have people hanging onto apartments when they may not need them. As a result, it creates shortages. When some dude in Soho NYC is paying $600 for a nice two bedroom, and his next door neighbor is paying $4500, then there's a big problem with that system.
Absolutely correct. When prices go up, newer tentants end up subsidizing squatters who are paying below-market rates. If rent prices were variable then the market would be more liquid and the total supply would be higher, and thus new rentals would be lower.
I guess it's nice not having your landlord jack up your rent each year (and landlords can't price little grannies out of their homes). But you also get stuck in one apartment because the cost of moving keeps getting higher.
I just moved from SF to Manhattan. Apples to apples (insofar as it's possible), SF is more expensive.
Obviously I wasn't looking at single-family homes in Manhattan, but when it came to studios and 1BR apartments, the busy parts of SF (e.g., not the Sunset or Outer Richmond) are probably marginally more expensive than Manhattan.
If you want to get as close, lifestyle-wise, as possible, you're comparing Rincon Hill to Midtown, and Rincon Hill will be more expensive. Even if you expand the parameters out to the high-rises in western SOMA (towards crack-stab-town) SF will still edge out.
If you're comparing more residential-y areas, like, say, the Upper East Side to Hayes Valley or the Castro, SF will still win out, though you will probably get a tad more space in SF for your troubles.
It's hard to declare with great certainty who is the clear winner (or rather, loser), but SF is definitely neck and neck with Manhattan.
Or the whole Bay Area to NYC. This is comparing large tracts of semi-suburban areas (outer parts of Queens, Staten Island, etc.) to a <50 sq mile city. A closer comparison would have to include the Peninsula and East Bay at the very least, which are essentially SF's "boroughs".
The commute time by subway from Flushing, Queens to Lower Manhattan, for example, is about an hour. If you're willing to include that commute radius for NYC, the SF equivalent would also have a number of affordable places to live. For example, you can head 45-60 mins eastward on either the Dublin/Pleasanton or the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART lines. Or even closer, the going rate for a 2br single-family home in San Bruno (30 mins by Caltrain or BART) is around $2500.
I am not sure if there is any meaningful number of single-family homes in Manhattan. If you consider townhouses they are definitely more than $3500, even in Harlem.
San Francisco is now for all intents and purposes a boom town.
At one end of the spectrum it is awash with tech money from the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter. On the other you have pretty much everyone else.
I'm familiar with this coming from Perth, Western Australia. Australia is undergoing an unprecedented resources boom thanks to China's insatiable appetite for metals and petroleum products. This has affected different parts of the country differently. Perth, Brisbane and some region centers have ridden this wave for more than a decade.
On one side you have those who have owned property for this entire time who are sitting on huge windfalls (eg a house you could buy for $85,000 in 2001 cost $350,000 by 2005). Now you won't find a house cheaper than $250,000 in the Perth metropolitan area which stretches for 100 miles of coast and 50 miles inland (at peak; it's in between a triangle and a semicircle).
To view this is a positive is ultimately shortsighted. You see, it's incredibly difficult for new people entering the market. And I'm not just talking about purchasing. It flows on to renting. Those rents are inputs into all other costs and this all adds up to an inflation bomb just waiting to explode.
The "haves" in Australia are those associated with mining and construction (since mining demands a lot of infrastructure). The "have nots" are everyone else. The have nots are, at best, asset rich and cash poor.
At some point the economy simply ceases to function. Office space is incredibly expensive in Perth such that, for example, there are fewer and fewer software engineering jobs as companies relocate or centralize to Sydney and Melbourne (exacerbating a natural trend), which incidentally is one of the reasons I moved a couple of years ago.
Honestly I think it's cheaper for me to live in Manhattan than anywhere central in Perth now. Manhattan. Rents are more expensive here but not by much. Everything else is cheaper. I can walk into a large number of eateries and have appetizers for <$5 and entres for <$10, just as one data point. Utilities in Perth are super-expensive. I know people with $1500 electricity bills... for two months.
Now Perth isn't land-contrained like San Francisco (or Manhattan) for that matter but the socialist bent in SF is ultimately a problem.
Rent control is a huge problem in SF. This has been covered here previously. Some estimates run at 1 in 8 rentable units being left permanently vacant, arguably due to rent control.
The city's building restrictions mean new units simply aren't entering the market.
NYC has several things going for it here:
1. It did away with rent control in 1973. It provided a smooth landing with rent stabilization, which is now rapidly disappearing from Manhattan;
2. Manhattan has excellent transport links, probably the best in the country. The fact is if you work in Manhattan, you can live in the five boroughs, New Jersey, upstate New York, Long Island or even further afield without having to drive into the city.
Compare this to the woeful transport situation (in comparison) in the Bay area. Caltrain is barely serviceable and at best runs once or twice an hour.
3. New York allows new construction, at least in some areas. Financial district, Battery Park, Midtown West, etc;
4. The surrounding areas of NYC are more densely populated. Compare this to, say, Menlo Park, which reserves almost all land for single-family residences on large blocks and like much of the rest of the Valley, virtually prohibits high-rise construction.
This low density is ultimately shortsighted as it comes at the expensive of amenities and will at some point impact the ability for employers to stay in the area as the rising property prices make commercial activity increasingly untenable.
5. The geography doesn't help SF. Whereas New York, London and other densely populated urban centers can expand in multiple directions, SF is more constricted.
Facebook really wanted to stay in Palo Alto. Zoning restrictions made it difficult. They had split offices and eventually had to move. Twitter for some reason is sticking to SoMA but as the seedier areas gentrify and go up in cost, this is going to become increasingly difficult. At some point it's simply going to make more sense to relocate out of these kinds of areas.
What happens to SF when large numbers of jobs move out of the city?
The whole rent control and construction limits is going to have to end. The longer it goes on, the worse the correction will be (IMHO).
It sucks living in a beehive. I don't particularly want to share walls with random people unless I have to. There's no virtue in being crowded unless that's your thing. Suggesting that everyone should be crowded to fit some urban planner's idea of efficient is the real idiocy. The people making the rules don't live in 400sf apartments.
Efficiency isn't just a global "urban planner's" idea. It actually is a different type of life.
Increased density, for me, means that my commute is a 5-minute walk as opposed to an hour-long drive. There is a small grocer in the middle of the commute, where I can stop in and make a 2-minute effort to buy a fresh chicken breast and broccoli to cook for dinner.
Being able to live without owning a car is a plus. Owning a car is a pain in the ass, with regards to maintenance and expense. Between Zipcar and easy access to taxis, I have no problem getting from Point A to Point B, and I never have to get my oil changed or a tire fixed.
Having a yard can be a plus (beautiful, room for kids to play tag, etc.) or a minus (mowing the grass is either a chore or an expense).
It is disappointing, as another example, in that I can't call some friends, plug in some guitars and rock out.
Choosing a place to live is a series of tradeoffs. There's a reason why, even at the extreme high-end, there are still options. Given an 8-figure housing budget, one can still choose a farm with room for horses, a suburban mansion, or an urban penthouse. Growing up, I could drive a half hour and see all 3.
From a policy perspective, the US probably overly subsidizes suburban living, but there's no reason to declare one style of living as best for everybody.
There's a big difference between making your own choices and forcing other people to make your choices, which is what density restrictions do. Housing markets reflect the collective desires of people that live in an area, and SF housing markets are begging on their hands and knees for density. It's the urban planners that are standing in their way.
The most maddening thing for me about this issue is that removing density restrictions in inner cities actually makes it easier to live in a detached single-family unit with two cars, since more people living downtown means fewer people competing to use space and freeways out in the suburbs.
I don't think it's purely the urban planners, as if they've usurped power against residents' wishes. The desire of would-be new residents may be for density (which is what markets would reflect), but in much of the SF Bay Area, the desire of current residents is in the opposite direction, which is what their elected officials and planning boards therefore implement. So that's another kind of collective desire, but of a different collection. Places like Palo Alto, for example, retain rules requiring single-family homes with certain minimum lot sizes, because that's what Palo Alto residents want their city to be like.
You actually get that in the private sector as well, if a municipality doesn't set such rules. The neighborhood I grew up in in Houston had minimum lot sizes and restrictions on subdividing houses for rental, all implemented via contract law. When the subdivision was built, all buyers agreed to set up a homeowners' association and certain rules, which are now conditions attached to the deeds. In an alternate world where Palo Alto had been set up that way N years ago, with subdivision organizations and contract law mandating lot sizes, rather than municipal government setting them, the end effect seems like it would be largely the same, so it doesn't really seem like a government vs. market distinction (at least, unless you restrict freedom of contract enough to make this kind of private-sector zoning impossible).
These sorts of restrictions are all wildly inefficient. Buying property doesn't buy you the right to control how the composition of the area changes with time. If you've got 10 people in a neighborhood with single family homes, and 100 people who want to move into the neighborhood into high density apartments, why should the minority be able to override what the market demands?
But the market is what set up the restrictions in the first place, in Houston's case! They're just private-sector agreements in contract law that you agree not to do X/Y/Z to your property, in return for your neighbors agreeing to the same.
Is the argument that people shouldn't be able to agree to a contract saying, "I will not subdivide this land, and will only sell it to someone who agrees to the same condition"? I'm not entirely averse to that, but it seems like it's a more complex issue than just allowing whatever the market demands, because there's market demand for these restrictive covenants (people really do sometimes want reciprocal agreements with their neighbors about what each will do with their land), which would have to be prohibited by restricting what kinds of contracts people are allowed to sign.
Just because something is achieved contractually does not mean it doesn't undermine market mechanisms. Cartels are contractual but that still undermines the market.
There is a proposition in the law of property that restraints on the alienation of land are to be avoided whenever possible. restrictions on alienation reduce the fungibility of property and increase transaction costs, reducing efficiency. In some states, e.g. NY, there are limits on what sorts of restrictions on alienation courts will enforce when written into deeds.
If you don't like living in a high rise, don't live in a high rise. But don't force the market to build single family homes by zoning choice land areas as single family residential. The point of zoning is to keep industrial areas separated from residential areas. When you use it to prevent multi-family development, you're foisting some urban planner's idea of the character of the community on everyone else.
Zoning is a local government issue, not "some urban planner's" issue. If a community wants its own zoning to change, it can get its own zoning changed. What zoning prevents is someone from buying a piece of land in a community and foisting unwanted change onto it.
Edit:
As an addendum, I'm not referring to the "wrong kind" of people. I'm referring to too many people, or a facility with drastically different traffic patterns. Ignoring the "wrong kind" of people thing entirely, I could knock down a few suburban houses, and replace them with super-luxury furnished condo-townhowse-type things that would sell for the exact same as the surrounding neighborhood. This still would be a major change to the community, both in appearance and lifestyle.
There is a key asymmetry you're missing: people who already live in a community and people who want to live in a community are all stakeholders, but zoning boards are controlled by the former. People who want high-density housing in a neighborhood can't get on the board to change the zoning.
People who want to live in a community have their say in getting to pick the community in which they live. If you have already made the commitment to move (which comes at a pretty significant cost), you are in a much better position of being able to pick a place to live than if you were to make changes that impose on others a desire/need to move.
> People who want to live in a community have their say in getting to pick the community in which they live.
They don't have any power in the zoning boards. 100 people could want to buy and build high-density housing in Palo Alto, but 10 people who already own property there could defeat their intentions via the zoning board. There is no reason why the desires of the few should outweigh the demands of the market.
If you don't want to live around high rises, buy up the land around your house. You shouldn't get to achieve the same effect by preventing other land owners from developing their property as they see fit. The zoning laws that allow this sort of behavior just favor existing property owners over future property owners, and lead to globally non-sensical development choices.
But they have plenty of power in deciding which zoning board governs the land in which they plan to settle. The community regulations are part of choosing a community in which to reside. If they don't like the regulations that govern Palo Alto, they can suggest that Palo Alto change its regulations, and otherwise are perfectly free to settle in, well, anywhere but Palo Alto.
> If you don't want to live around high rises, buy up the land around your house
How does this scale? Here's a scenario: 100 people who don't want to live next to high rises but are perfectly fine living next to other single-family dwellings buy up 100 acres of land in LibertarianUtopiaLand and chop it up. They then sign a contract amongst themselves requiring community consent if any of them are going to drastically change their property, and require that any transfer of the land be accompanied by the same provision. Sounds quite familiar.
There's no national regulation saying that every community must use the same planning methods. It just so happens that there's a pretty good model for how the process works so implementing it requires less lawyers.
It is far worse than this. For the better part of the history of the world, basic arithmetic is 1 man and 1 woman produce > 2 kids. Those kids grow up and even if one of them is happy to live in their parents' home, the norm, hell, the EXPECTED norm in american society is that the adult children go out and make their own home. How are they supposed to do that when there are no homes available because all their neighbors sitting on the local board decided that you can't build any new homes? This kind of selfishness is infuriating and utterly indefensible. A system that allows such situations to occur is undemocratic and un-civil.
Single-family residences aren't "idiocy", or "bizarrely 1950s". Some people simply prefer to live that way. For instance, I cannot picture my father living in a downtown high-rise.
In the past 10 years, I've lived in a suburban single-family home, a college dorm, a suburban "new urbanism project" apartment, two urban neighborhood houses-that-were-converted-into-apartments, two urban neighborhood apartment buildings built as such, and a downtown high rise.
All of these places have had their pluses and minuses. Depending on what I'm doing at the time, I may prefer one to the other, and I'm happy they all exist (and most certainly, are allowed to exist).
I didn't say that single family residences were idiotic. I said zoning for single family residences is idiocy. It keeps the housing market from efficiently responding to demand and building what people want. Just zone residential and let people build what people want to live in.
If someone bought a couple adjacent houses in the neighborhood where I grew up, knocked them down, and built an 10-unit apartment building in it's place, it would have certainly rented, but it would have imposed unwanted change (traffic, appearance) in the community in which it sits.
I could see replacing "single family" with some sort of density restriction (people per acre?). What a home entails is not simply a dwelling + piece of land to its borders, but the community in which it belongs. Communities have generally decided that a predictable nature here is desirable, and thus have enacted zoning restrictions.
Communities use zoning restrictions as a way to purchase rights they don't want to pay for up front. The people who first move into a neighborhood could bargain for and purchase the air space around surrounding properties to ensure they continue to have a view. Instead, they achieve the same result without paying for those rights by implementing zoning requirements that have hight restrictions.
I largely agree, even though I don't like the decisions overall here (in my own opinion, the Peninsula could benefit from more high-density areas of housing, especially near Caltrain and BART stations). I think it's actually not even that far from what the market would produce without zoning, at least under some circumstances. If you abolished zoning today, then lots of things would change, but if the area had been initially developed without zoning, private-sector zoning workalikes would likely have taken its place.
If you look at Houston, the largest city with no zoning laws, the private sector has effectively re-implemented zoning via contract law in huge sections of the city, in the form of subdivisions where the initial developer set up a homeowner's association, empowered via deed restrictions, that implement similar rules about not only density, but even things like what color you can paint your windows. People clearly seem to like living in that kind of community-managed neighborhood. At least doing it via the actual government, rather than these weird quasi-governments, is more transparent and democratic.
> Zoning for singe-family residences is so bizarrely 1950's
I find that a ridiculous statement when dealing with a country with one of the lowest population densities in the developed world.
Perhaps it's not the best solution for the Bay Area, or perhaps it is (changing it would surely drastically change the character of the area), but that's a far cry from denouncing the very concept.
Country-wide population density is a shit metric for what we are talking about. If the US annexed Antarctica tomorrow population density would plummet but it would be almost entirely meaningless in the foreseeable future in the context of a discussion on zoning laws.
The point is that this turns into a discussion of zoning laws because of an obsession of increasing density in hotspots, despite the fact that you have vast areas of viable land that is cheap, with few zoning restrictions, and far more viable to built extensive infrastructure to/from/in.
High property prices is not all that much of a problem unless your goal is the highest population density possible, or for you personally if you're dead set on living there. Rather, it is a market mechanism that if left to work will push the population further out, and benefit people in a much larger region that way.
Zoning is a problem mostly seen from the outside: Of people not living there who don't like that the locals believe the character of their neighbourhoods is more important than opening up for higher population density.
As much as I can sympathize with the desire to live somewhere that is "taken" at a price suitable to you, that's never something you will be able to do without some restriction or other. And the reality is that for a lot of people, those places would be ruined forever if there was nothing holding back rampant development.
The population density is so low because the country is so damned big. China's pop density is 24th in the world. The US has a greater density than Sweeden.
> The population density is so low because the country is so damned big
Eh. Yes. That's the point. There's plenty of space. Somehow places with vastly higher population densities still manage just fine.
The problem is not lack of space, nor that zoning regulations prevents you from putting up highrises in someones backyard in Menlo Park, but the focus on concentrating more and more people in tiny little parts of it.
The more ridiculous part of it is that a lot of the reason why those specific locations are attractive to a lot of people is exactly the character that would be irreversibly altered if you were to massively increase the density.
> "The more ridiculous part of it is that a lot of the reason why those specific locations are attractive to a lot of people is exactly the character that would be irreversibly altered if you were to massively increase the density."
Ah yes, as evidence by the endless subdivisions with idyllic countryside names: "Brookfield Estates", "Pinstream Brook", "Riverside Meadows" and the such. I don't see any brooks, meadows, fields, or pines. I just see row after row of cookie-cutter houses connected by meandering asphalt.
The modern suburb has never made much sense to me. You've taken out all the benefits of urban life, and the benefits of the rural lifestyle and what remains is the worst of both worlds.
Note that I'm not some hyper-urbanist who wishes everyone would just live in towering steel contraptions. There is plenty of room for redefining suburbs into something that actually makes sense and is substantially less awful than the subdivisions we have now.
> Facebook really wanted to stay in Palo Alto. Zoning restrictions made it difficult. They had split offices and eventually had to move. Twitter for some reason is sticking to SoMA but as the seedier areas gentrify and go up in cost, this is going to become increasingly difficult. At some point it's simply going to make more sense to relocate out of these kinds of areas.
In most firms, the people who are in a position to make a decision about relocating are the few who are able to compete successfully for expensive real estate at the current location.
Fascinating to see that the exact same thing is happening in different places. The large cities in Norway experience exactly the same problem right now, mostly due to the booming oil industry.
Forecasts from the government statistics agency for the next three years of housing prices practically make it impossible for young professionals to buy a home, even with very high (100,000+ USD) salaries. I'm not the only one curious about how the situation will resolve.
It's not really comparable. Same mechanism, but still.
Commute an hour out of Oslo, Bergen or pretty much any other Norwegian city, and you're in the middle of nowhere, with plenty of options that are vastly cheaper than in most similar positions relative to SF or Silicon Valley.
Couple that with a far flatter salary curve, and it might be worse for those of us on the upper part, but for most people it's vastly easier to find decent sized places.
E.g. my brother lives in a two bedroom flat 30 minutes from the centre of Oslo which costs less than most studios where I live, in a suburb an hour from Central London.Bay Area is closer to London than Oslo in terms of availability of decent priced property.
Outside of the tiny city cores which are typically small enough to walk across, I think price increases for property in Norway are more affected by construction cost driven up by high salaries even on the low end of the salary scale.
>San Francisco is now for all intents and purposes a boom town.
Yes. This happens every decade or so. It comes and goes with the business cycle. Just like commodity prices won't always be way higher than everything else, people won't be investing in 'social media' at inflated P/E ratios forever, too.
(what I find interesting is that housing prices did not fall that much during the '01 crash, not for another what, 7-8 years.)
>This low density is ultimately shortsighted as it comes at the expensive of amenities and will at some point impact the ability for employers to stay in the area as the rising property prices make commercial activity increasingly untenable.
I think this is our real long-term problem, especially in the silicon valley, south of SF. (I mean, the problems with caltrain are an issue, too... but I think it's going to be easier to just run caltrain more often than it is going to be to build more high density housing.)
>The whole rent control and construction limits is going to have to end. The longer it goes on, the worse the correction will be (IMHO).
Personally? I think the boom will end before the lack of construction becomes that huge of a deal.
I mean, sustainable businesses that don't depend on investor dollars are not what's driving this boom; unless we generate several new google/ebay like profitable powerhouses, the crash is coming and it's going to be big. Even then, right now? everyone, including "i take no investment" bootstrapped companies like mine are getting a boost from the torrents of investor money flowing into the area. I am personally a little bit frightened for my long-term contracts.
If anything, the fact that we can't build a lot of new stuff is going to have a dampening effect; It's going to tend to dampen both the upswing, as it means there won't be a huge construction boom, and it's encouraging companies to spread out, and it will temper the inevitable downswing for similar reasons. There won't be as far to fall.
There is a /lot/ of talent in the area, and eh, yeah, a lot of them will leave when the investment money leaves, but there will still be plenty of us left. If "social" investor money leaves and pushes down the price of space and labour, it will be fertile ground for other industries that need Engineering talent. We will come back, we always do.
The "haves" in Australia are those associated with mining and construction (since mining demands a lot of infrastructure). The "have nots" are everyone else.
If it's mining, you can put the environment in the "have not" column as well. Mining is devastating on wildlife and the environment.
We got lucky. 1.5 years ago, we rented a house in SF for $2700, and the rent was frozen at $2700 for up to 3 years. A friend of ours moved into our neighborhood and is paying $3300/month for a comparable place.
I'm not sure what we're going to do once the lease is up in 1.5 years, hopefully the rent prices will stabilize. I know my friend in SOMA who bought his 2 br condo for $580k can now sell it for probably $800k, and charge at least $4k/month for it. It's absolutely crazy how much rents have gone up, it's as bad as during the dotcom boom, where my rent went up $500/month after the 1st year lease. (I moved out to a worse neighborhood instead of renewing the lease).
Let's not forget: AirBnB isn't helping either. No, not the AirBnB employees; but the loads of people renting out their spare rooms, when earlier they would have taken in a roommate. I just checked, and 2300 listings came up for San Francisco.
Plus, SF Tenants Union is very powerful. Once you are a renter, you can basically do anything and the landlord can't kick you out. Consider this example from today's paper: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Landlord-nightmare-in-... . As a result, some people are leery of renting.
In other words: while the demand has gone up, the supply seems to have come down.
Once you are a renter, you can basically do anything and the landlord can't kick you out.
People seem to think that this is entirely independent from the evil tech firm seducing naive owners into believing 40% utilization of a room non-regulated beats 90% utilization regulated.
This is nothing compared to Sydney. We were paying $4k AUD for a run down 3 bed apartment in Newtown. This has been the norm for quite some time, and is probably down to the fact that Sydney has 1% vacancy.
I've since moved to a town called Newcastle and pay $1700.
My friend and I always talk about how, given our salaries, we could have both bought houses by now if we weren't living in the Bay Area. A tempting idea is just to save as much as possible for a few years and then move someplace cheaper.
No they are lower. The 9 bay area counties have a lot of diversity from San Jose which is on the southeastern tip of the bay to Sausalito on the northern end. From rough patches in East Palo Alto to gated communities in Portola. Things that affect prices: schools, commute, amenities (near the woods, libraries, county services, etc), and micro-climate (farther south is a lot warmer than closer to the water).
Single family home rents vary a lot based on school districts.
If you don't have school age kids, you can get something in most parts of the bay for $3500, but the schools are very medicore (and probably terrible compared to most other parts of the east coast or midwest).
If you need good schools, bump your budget up to $4000-4500. You might find a deal somewhere, but it's rare.
When I first moved to the Menlo Park/Palo Alto area two years ago, rent on a decent two-bedroom apartment was around $1400-1700 per month. Currently (two years later roughly), it's $2350+ a month and still climbing.
In fairness, a lot of that has to do with Facebook moving into Menlo Park and the crazy demand for space in Palo Alto / proximity to Stanford University.
I'd move farther south, but there's too much urban sprawl which makes it inconvenient at best to get around unless you drive everywhere. Mountain View is going up too thanks to Google.
The last place of refuge is pretty much Sunnyvale and San Jose. But the rent there is still a few hundred higher per month at least than it was two years ago.
I just started renting a 3BR house in the tri-valley area just east of Oakland at $3100/mo. It's a more suburban area with good schools, though, which tends to raise the price for potential families.
I wish they would allow more common sense building in the city. For example, in some areas, the shadows from new buildings may not be allowed to cast on neighborhood parks from 10am to 4pm, or so. This has killed a few projects. Then you have powerful neighborhood groups (like the ones along the embarcadero) who won't allow dense building because they would limit their view. I understand their position, but it's a selfish one. No one "owns" a view. More over, their buildings obstruct buildings behind them, but they would insist on having their own buildings be demolished to give others a view --nevermind that this could go on till very few houses were left.
The building requirements, in my layman's view, is that the requirements are onerous (compared to say San Jose) and make housing in SF an artificially limited/scarce resource which puts pressure on housing. The Peninsula is not much better. Neighbors always bring up traffic but then never approve BART to alleviate some of that traffic concern (or some other form of local mass transit (let's say spurs from the main Caltrain stations meandering to the local downtowns which host offices). My frustration is such that I wish someone like ABAG were given the power to overrule locals and allow them to do proper (integrated regional) planning and allow building up (vertically) to take the pressure off of housing in the Bay Area.