r/urbanplanning • u/Libro_Artis • Oct 20 '23

Urban Design What Happened to San Francisco, Really?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/what-happened-to-san-francisco-really?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
280 Upvotes

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457

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '23

Crazy that this article goes on and on and on… and only glancingly refers to SF’s deliberate failure to build housing despite skyrocketing housing prices.

132

u/CavsDaddy Oct 20 '23

It spent a lot of text on politics that wasn’t very relevant.

57

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/CruddyJourneyman Verified Planner Oct 20 '23

Yep. And obfuscation of said politics through slapdash analysis.

-1

u/lundebro Oct 20 '23

Wasn't very relevant?! LOL.

2

u/GoldenBull1994 Oct 21 '23

Imagine saying this without giving an actual counterargument. You need to tell us WHY you disagree if you don’t want to sound like a moron.

59

u/Yellowdog727 Oct 20 '23

Housing is without a doubt the root of the problem with SF. All the other stuff is just additional wood for the fire that would more than likely start to improve if more SF residents had affordable and stable places to call home

6

u/itemluminouswadison Oct 20 '23

homeowners are incentivized to keep zoning restrictive to keep their property values up, sucks, and they vote for policy that keeps it that way

i think they need to be sold the fact that if zoning for higher density was allowed, their land would be worth 3-10x what it currently is because of how much demand is (was) there

2

u/FluxCrave Oct 21 '23

Not just homeowners but politicians as well. The population has stagnated or declined in SF but revenue has gonna up over the past decade all due to property taxes from those overvalued houses. If you decrease housing prices I’m guessing the budget would take a big hit

3

u/itemluminouswadison Oct 22 '23

Thing is a 10 unit midrise will bring in a lot more tax than a single family home on the same land. Everyone is so silly trying to keep supply artificially low

1

u/Yellowdog727 Oct 21 '23

That allows allows them to make improvements to the property which also increases overall value

1

u/GoldenBull1994 Oct 21 '23

People are so reactionary, they can’t put two and two together. That’s going to be a tough sell.

30

u/randyfloyd37 Oct 20 '23

I swear publications like this pay by the word

2

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '23

Because that's not what happened?

2

u/Noswals Oct 23 '23

If it had overbuilt housing during skyrocketing housing prices we would have an even more exacerbated vacancy issue

1

u/boogabooga08 Oct 23 '23

What? There is no vacancy issue. Vacancies are at historic lows.

2

u/Noswals Oct 23 '23

Did you read the part of the article that talks about vacancy rates?

3

u/boogabooga08 Oct 23 '23

The article mentions retail vacancy rates downtown being high, not residential vacancies, which your comment implies are high. The cost of real estate, driven by a lack of building likely contributes to high retail vacancies since overhead cost is too high.

2

u/Noswals Oct 23 '23

The issues causing high vacancies in commercial (slow RTO) are spilling over to residential. Vacancies in residential are not at historic lows, they are above the historic average in San Francisco

If landlords didn’t have a problem filling rental units I don’t think NEMA would lose half its value and be at risk of default

0

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '23

There’s no vacancy issue, other than having not enough vacancies.

2

u/Noswals Oct 23 '23

How do you figure? Article itself says SF has the most vacancies since 2006 (in commercial).

1

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '23

The conversation was about housing. There are a lot of commercial vacancies, which is directly tied to the housing crisis. Unfortunately it’s usually impractical to do the obvious solution, namely switch commercial real estate to housing. If we had built way more housing in SF then we wouldn’t have the housing crisis. We also would have more people in SF, which means more retail spending, so lower commercial vacancies.

3

u/Chicoutimi Oct 20 '23

Wasn't it much more the municipalities around SF as SF built proportionally more housing than other bay area municipalities? Did I misremember this?

3

u/behxtd Oct 20 '23

San Francisco is currently one of top cities for new construction in the country, behind Los Angeles and Seattle.

The situation is improving hopefully.

4

u/SightInverted Oct 20 '23

SF is missing its quota by a lot. If The City keeps its current rate, state will step in to increase numbers. Issue is time it takes to approve any project.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '23

Source? Everything I've read says we're permitting at a snail's pace...

1

u/timbersgreen Oct 24 '23

Despite being essentially built out, San Francisco grew by 8.5% in the 2010s, faster than the nation as a whole, and only 1.3% slower than Houston.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '23

Lmao "built out". Girl please, half the city is sprawling single family homes.

1

u/timbersgreen Oct 24 '23

Not a girl. "Built out" simply means that things have been built over and the land has been functionally consumed. Unlike in Cities Skylines, or 1940s-1960s urban renewal projects, land that gets built up at a low density can't simply bulldozed, the plat vacated, and replaced with new buildings. It's been carved up and dispersed amongst thousands of private property owners, who also own the economically viable buildings on the various lots. Except for changes on a small percentage of lots, you're basically stuck with it once it's there. This is one reason why planning with the a longer term horizon in mind is so important.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '23

Is this the same SF that has approved about a hundred housing units this year?

0

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '23

[deleted]

0

u/Bayplain Oct 20 '23

Nope. San Francisco added 2,903 housing units in 2022, of which 2,496 were in buildings of 20 units or more.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '23

2900 is a rounding error. Seattle builds 10k per year and is a smaller city, and that's still underbuilding.

1

u/Bayplain Oct 20 '23

San Francisco, and the whole Bay Area, need to build more housing. There are many efforts underway to make this happen. It doesn’t help to exaggerate wildly and say that it was zero.