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“San Francisco bans affordable housing”, this is an unrealistic conclusion. Lovely post after Vadim Graboys (Link to Twitter).
The post was titled “54% of San Francisco’s houses are located in buildings that will be illegally constructed today”, with interactive pictures of these houses.
Or, in other words, “In order to comply with today’s [zoning] According to the law, 130,748 houses must be destroyed and approximately 310,000 people must be expelled. “
The latter statistics are interesting, but they actually seriously underestimate the damage of San Francisco (and Palo Alto!) zoning laws. The current house is illegal, the only reason is that the house was built according to less restrictive zoning laws. In this way, more and more stringent zoning laws can be measured over time. It cannot measure the number of houses and apartments that have never been built.
Now, how does San Francisco implement a zero management system, and a city’s politicians can’t get up in the morning or sign a permit to build anything, without having to say “affordable housing” about 10 times, it is actually “prohibition of affordable housing” . housing? ”
If your goal is to make housing as expensive as possible, then the best approach is to require a lot of land for each house, because land in cities is very expensive. San Francisco does this in many ways, but I decided to focus on the following three ways:
Minimum land area: San Francisco stipulates that to build a house on it, you must own at least 2500 square feet (4000 square feet in some cases) of land. Since a decent single-family house can be built on a 500-square-foot plot, and a very good single-family house can be built on a 1200-square-foot plot, the minimum plot requirements greatly reduce what San can build The number of houses Francisco has increased the price of each house. Due to the small size of the plot, it would be illegal to build 65,974 houses today.
Density restrictions: San Francisco has clear density restrictions, ranging from a total ban on apartments (76% of the city) to a minimum lot size for each apartment (almost everywhere else). The only reason for these restrictions is to make housing more scarce and therefore more expensive. San Francisco uses many other ways to limit density, such as floor area ratio, frustration requirements, etc., but for simplicity, I only checked the minimum lot size of each apartment on this map. Due to population density restrictions, 69,499 houses will be illegal today.
Height restriction: When land becomes expensive, developers can still create cheap houses by building multiple apartments on the same piece of land. Each apartment only pays a small part of the cost of the land, which can make apartments much cheaper than single-family houses. The higher the apartment building, the less important the cost of the land, so San Francisco limits this savings by limiting the height of new buildings to 40 feet in most of the city. Due to height restrictions, it is illegal to build 9,066 houses today.
Whenever San Francisco creates new restrictions, existing houses will be demolished instead of demolished. This is the source of all these “houses to be built illegally today”.
This is why most areas of San Francisco have ancient housing reserves. Many houses were built cheaply in earlier periods and cannot meet current needs. If the house is a grandfather, you can “remodel” it within the existing scope, but you can never take it down and build something suitable for today’s reality.
Doodle boy asking
How do you say that San Francisco deliberately bans affordable housing? All its leaders are constantly talking about building more affordable housing!
And come to a conclusion
I’m sorry to spoil it to you, but the politicians lied.
I think that a more nuanced perspective can better explain behavior. Politicians like new government-built or government-controlled housing that is marked as “affordable” and rationed by politicians. They just don’t like “developers,” people who are in the house-building business building and selling houses without paying proper tribute to politicians. after that:
I noticed that there was a building last year and you claimed it was illegal. How is that possible?
Well-connected developers can apply for conditional use permits to exempt each project from zoning laws. The city does not need a consistent reason for granting or denying these permits, so this is an easy way for politicians to grant special offers to friendly developers.
I learned from a friend who knew a New York developer that in the process, we were discussing “affordable” units for the new apartment.
More importantly, politicians in democracies are sensitive to the demands of their supporters, even though such demands are not coherent. Talk to voters in San Francisco. They want “affordable” housing that is authorized by the government as a virtue signal, and a small museum for the poor, but they absolutely don’t want any such housing in their neighbors. Near my home, people with BLM/front yards without hatred signs also have no new development signs in their front yards and appeared at the city council meeting to make sure nothing was built.
A kind Separate post The document also mentions pictures of “illegal construction of apartment buildings in 76% of the San Francisco area.”
why? Graboys provides
These buildings… only because the “Zoneing law” passed by San Francisco is illegal to restrict housing density in certain areas, initially to keep poor ethnic minorities out.
…Since ethnic minorities are poorer than whites, and dense housing (such as apartments) is usually cheaper than single-family housing, the goal is to prohibit the construction of housing that ethnic minorities can afford.
Nowadays, many people who have no clear motives for racism support zoning laws because they like the status quo, even if the status quo prohibits the construction of affordable housing in most parts of the city…
…even if intention Zoning law is not racist, influences Has racist influence. The black population of San Francisco has fallen from 13% in the 1970s to 5.5% today. In contrast, from 2010 to 2015, Houston’s landless residents increased by 100,000 black residents, and black people now account for 23% of Houston’s population.
This is a bit superficial. Although I think it is useful to remind our progressive friends because they want to see the unpleasant racial experience of American institutions, perhaps they should consider the unpleasant past and unexpected consequences of the institutions they support, (next: union) I also think We should all retreat from the current “you are a racist” hunt.
It is also possible that more construction will be allowed in San Francisco, and today there will be no direct construction of “affordable” new homes. It will create affordable housing through the role of musical chairs: fancy new apartments and condos will be built for technicians at “reasonable prices” because they only cost $1 million instead of $3 million. They will free up existing housing stock, and then the money will be affordable for the middle-class people.
When the zoning method was introduced, they had countless motives. People who have bought a new house realize that the block, like the block they left, may fall into decline. Yes, they want to keep black people out, but they mainly want to keep poor people, Asians and low-income whites (angry people) out, etc. This basic desire was shrouded by unthinking racism at the time, but I think anti-black racism is the only motivation. Although this may be a rhetorical point of view, it is not a useful reading for history.
The irony is that today, laws that keep the poor out are keeping wealthy young technicians out and preventing the same area from becoming richer, thereby providing better services for businesses and taxation. Ironically, this is exactly what many people in San Francisco want now. They don’t want 300,000 new residents. Zoning laws are not only a tool to prevent gentrification, but also a tool to invade struggling low-income minorities. It is very convenient.
All of this may be unfounded. They may realize their wishes as HL Mencken said before, both good and hard.
Update:
“Well, you don’t want others to build a 100-story apartment next door to you, right?” No, I won’t. Of course, as usual, this is an extreme example. The community changes slowly. Even in Houston, no one built a 100-story apartment in the middle of a residential area.
But let us take it seriously. There are externalities. How do we deal with externalities? (Quiz question).
property. (Quiz answer). For example, as a transitional measure, each house can have a transferable right to impose current zoning restrictions on neighboring houses. Then, you can be sure that you can build an apartment building, but first you must purchase the right to do so from your neighbor. What should they do if they refuse? Then build it where others can sell the rights.
Perhaps even better, every homeowner can be granted the right to break the zoning laws on his property, but anyone, including neighboring houses, can purchase the right. Now, if you don’t want to walk an apartment down the street, you can spend your money on your lips instead of buying the whole house like you do now. According to Coase, it does not matter to whom the rights are assigned.
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