4 Years Trying to Get Approval to Turn SF Laundromat into Apartment Building
reason.com
reason.com
Whether deliberate or not, it’s sick to the core - as an example, in Bath in the UK, I’ve had a several year battle to simply carry out like-for-like repairs on a subterranean vault on my property - it’s going to collapse soon, and it’s directly under a major road - but even using 200 year old techniques with no external disruption they keep denying it. At this point I’m just going to let the arterial road through the city disappear into a hole.
Meanwhile, a neighbouring property owned by a large multinational landlord got planning permission to build an external lift on a Georgian property, and the same landlord recently won an application to evict 600 people (owners) from perfectly serviceable housing to build fewer, more expensive houses.
Big corps don't fear regulations, they fear competition. Big corps (I have read elsewhere) /want/ more regulations, because it raises the barrier of entry for the little guys to compete with them. They can afford a tightly-regulated world but little guys cannot.
Google this: Corporations love regulations. Lots of examples.
"The NYT's Scott James recounts the insane red-tape endured by Juliet Pries, an entrepreneur who decided to open an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco's Cole Valley. She had to pay rent on an empty storefront for over two years while the necessary permits were processed, and tens of thousands of dollars in fees (including the cost of producing a detailed map of nearby businesses, which the city itself seemed not to have)."
https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of-getting-...
I grew up and live in Indianapolis. It's only happened a handful of times, but while visiting San Francisco someone would say, "I'm sorry," after hearing that I live in a "flyover state." Of course, these folks weren't from San Francisco either. (I think I've only met one or two actual natives of San Francisco.) This has also happened in New York City.
I don't mean to tarnish the people of San Francisco, though, because I love visiting SF and the people there are the nicest I've ever met, anywhere.
I also understand that people want to preserve what good they have going on there, though, but I often wonder if this is because they're thinking about the greater good; or, some other self-satisfying motive.
Of course, if you go by CSA, DC's CSA will become larger than Chicago's in the next few years, if it hasn't already.
Within the democratic society, there is no fix for this problem.
Basically, back to Soviet Union.
European cities try to fix it in a half-Commie way: try to keep as many apartment buildings in public property and lease them subsidized, with rental contracts dating from early post-WWII days and passed as inheritance. Same thing: keep the place to incumbents - only with no ability to cash out.
Got any data about it?
From my experience in London prices just keep on going up and up (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-house-price-index-hpi-...) despite adding more and more (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/london-hous...) apart from more recently, but that is due to brexit - for years and years prior to brexit the prices just kept on going up despite new blocks of apartments being built everywhere they could find an old petrol station or pub or old school or house-with-unusually-large-garden they could knock down and replace with a block of 30-40 apartments.
There may obviously wider economic factors going in to this - i.e. construction because prices are going up, but I suspect SF will be very similar in this regard.
No shit it won't. We need vastly more housing. But you're just being defeatist if your attitude is to give up if you are unable to construct enough to get prices to drop. You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The problem is, where do you build? Sounds like in this article there is a prime spot that is redeveloping a brownfield site - fine.
But eventually you start running out of space. Eventually you need to build elsewhere - you cant simply just keep on piling more and more and more and density into a city. There is already a trend in London of literally piling on more density by adding additional floors to existing apartment buildings (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashse...). How many times can you build on-top of an existing building? Eventually the amount of land runs out, especially in a tiny little mini-city like SF.
I think it is when density gets "too high" that the NIMBY problems start to kick in - e.g. in my area in inner-outer-London on-street parking space is already super-competitive and local services like doctors and the tube are already super-busy, yet then we got a proposed development of adding 6000 (six thousand!) 2-and-3 bed apartments with zero parking spaces allocated, and absolutely zero money or effort going into improving the local infrastructure - no new schools, no new doctors, no new libraries, no new bus stops/routes, no new improvements to tube stations. You cant just add 12,000-18,000 new people into a local area and expect no one to own a car or need to go to the doctors etc etc. It is this kind of density-overload that understandably gets people pissed off.
In the UK, the effort needs to go beyond just building more and more and more AND MORE apartments in London, but to also include persuading employers to not be in London and investing in decent infrastructure elsewhere where there is space. I suspect it is the same for SF and a lot of employers in the valley. The employers say they are there because the talent is there, and the talent say they are there because the employees are there. Someone needs to make the first move.
Regarding your last paragraph, you basically just said this: https://i.redditmedia.com/ym0Xv9Jc_nVYFEsL6G5LPN07oziNzrU2ZF...
There is no doubt that as more people move to a city, services have to scale up with them. San Francisco does have ample room to build more buildings. The article at the top demonstrates this. Cities can never be 'full'. No one in San Francisco is complaining that they can't get an appointment at a doctor's office. You are pulling that out of your behind. Under that logic, no cities would exist at all because they never would have been able to develop from detached single-story buildings. The fact that we do have some cities with at least medium sized buildings clearly demonstrate that your concerns about change are unfounded.
Growing pains are inevitable and necessary.