Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

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The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy. I see people making that claim all the time, and it's madness, guys. Even if literally every density-increasing project was rubber-stamped with zero money or time cost, how many housing units do you think that this city could possibly have added in the last fifteen years?

Unless you're proposing eminent-domaining people out of their houses to be handed over to for-profit developers (and man, that's a mess, and it's still super-expensive), you aren't going to be replacing too many blocks of two-storey homes with high rises, and you're also quickly going to saturate the ability of local developers to build out giant skyscraper projects -- like, how much slack do you think that there possibly was in the construction industry?

And as soon as we step away from literally insane levels of accommodation to a pattern of in-fill development and recognize that, rightly or wrongly, in-fill development is not wildly popular and you can't just strong-arm an entire city into an unpopular policy, the realistic amount of new development that you could get in SF is, you know, maybe twice as much development as we actually did get.

Which might've shaved 5% off the rents or so.

In a system where it's easy to build new housing, you don't need eminent domain. The developer simply buys two-storey homes for much more than they're worth as houses.

You also don't need to limit yourself to the existing local developers with political connections. Construction workers from all over the world could move here, just like software people do.

It's not easy to buy up entire blocks of houses. You get hold-outs, either people who understand that they're in a position to block a potentially lucrative deal and get a big payout, or just people who have a sentimental attachment to their homes or whatever.

The idea that there's a lot of elasticity to the construction trade is also naïve. Construction workers from "all over the world" can't move here -- we have an immigration process, and it's not one that's favorable to construction workers. We are also in an area that is itself not very conducive to living on a construction worker's salary.

And also, who are these developers who are so eager to build high-rise housing in a market that is stipulated to have affordable rents? It's a big capital investment to build a modern skyscraper, especially if there's a construction crunch, especially if you have to do things like buy out large areas without the benefit of government coercion, especially if there are similar projects going up across the city to compete with you. Housing is not typically a highly profitable use of real estate to begin with, and San Francisco is also a city that is not very landlord friendly.

This dream of in-fill development being a simple cure-all to San Francisco's housing ills like most "one simple trick to fix all your problems" -- click bait, not a real solution.

None of this is to say that SF shouldn't have in-fill (it should), or that SF shouldn't reduce barriers to development (it should). But be realistic. Unless you rewrite everything about SF back 50 years, it's not going to dramatically change everything about this city overnight.

> Construction workers from "all over the world" can't move here -- we have an immigration process, and it's not one that's favorable to construction workers.

Process, shmawsess.

Look what actually happened during the real estate bubble years: a large number of laborers just simply came to California from foreign countries to build houses and condos.

A large number of these workers went to California when they felt like it and left when the bubble burst. The government was scarcely able to impose anything resembling a "process."

> it's not going to dramatically change everything about this city overnight.

Your post I responded to talked about 15 years, not overnight. I absolutely think SF could have been transformed with a different policy if starting in 2001.

Even without any immigrants, there are an enormous amount of construction workers among our 300 million US citizens.

The idea that it's so incredibly hard to build a lot of housing over 15 years is disproven by the many successful big cities that actually do it.

> This dream of in-fill development being a simple cure-all to San Francisco's housing ills

Again, nobody is talking about a simple cure-all in three easy $19.95 payments.

I don't think it's crazy. There's already over 60,000 units in the development pipeline: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/a-record-62000-un...

This timeline is measured in decades, but imagine if San Francisco was easier to get permits to build?

Large swaths of the city are built under their _currently allowed_ zoned height (there was a map that went around, I wish I could find it). Add a few stories to some existing buildings, build on empty/underutilized lots, reduce parking requirements, legalize in-law units, add in the affordable housing bonus program...you'd be talking about tens of thousands of units.

I do agree there is a strong argument that this wouldn't be enough (Bay Area-wide coordination is necessary), but it would slow the rate of increase. For example, after an apartment building boom, Seattle rents are now decreasing: http://cityobservatory.org/in-some-cities-the-housing-constr...

NYC adds more capacity in a year than SF adds in a decade.

You don't need eminent domain to build high rises. Developers can easily make very compelling offers to those currently in small houses to get them to move.

Well, NYC is also 10x bigger than SF.

This article http://newyorkyimby.com/2015/01/the-yimby-report-2014-adds-a... suggests that in 2014, NYC added 44.8k units and in 2013 it added 22.9k units -- call it an average of 34k units.

This article http://sf.curbed.com/2015/7/16/9939720/sf-is-set-to-add-more... suggests that SF is adding about 3.6k units per year right now.

And NYC is 10x the population of SF. So. Sounds like they're expanding at around the same rate. (NYC is only 6.2x the land area of SF).

The mayors office or some development chief said it would take 100K units to make a dent. That was late 2014 I think.

We all know those would be luxury units, but it would add 20K below-market, so there's that.

As always, I stand ready to let them bring a bulldozer to their favorite Mission block as long as I can bring one to Palo Alto and Atherton.

For some reason, people just see that as a cray-cray demand...

>The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy.

this meme has reached seattle as well.

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