Posted on 01/13/2008 3:11:57 PM PST by Lorianne
San Francisco median home prices continue hovering between $750,000 and $800,000 and as yet are relatively undamaged by the national housing market slowdown. So it comes as little surprise that private developers remain willing to brave The City’s daunting permit bureaucracy in hopes of constructing new high-end units. And in order to build, would-be developers are generally required by City Hall to include an assigned percentage of lower-income units priced at approximately $200,000 to $250,000.
But this trade-off leaves out of the equation something absolutely essential to San Francisco’s future economic and social well-being — badly needed additional middle-income residences for the working households that everyone agrees are being priced out of The City. Even worse, unintended consequences of San Francisco’s restrictive planning and building codes virtually guarantee that nothing new can be profitably built by private enterprise at prices affordable to midrange homebuyers.
Yet, what if it were possible to easily adapt the permit codes so that private developers actually wanted to build middle-income housing — because they could then do so at a fair profit and without any need for taxpayer subsidies? According to a new task force study by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, this could be accomplished by simply easing city regulations to enable lower-cost construction of new housing in neighborhoods where land prices permit.
SPUR, The City’s own urban development think-tank, found that the midrange housing market could be effectively served by offering an option of smaller but more efficient units with fewer amenities. Such units are now extremely difficult to bring to market because of unnecessary restrictions involving building density, common spaces, parking capacity and height limits on wood-frame construction.
SPUR makes six main code-change recommendations for lowering city housing construction costs:
A building’s size should be regulated only by outer dimensions, not by the number of units allowed within. This would encourage developing smaller but more efficient units in response to market demand.
Parking should no longer be required in every new building, which would lower each unit’s cost by at least $40,000.
Stop regulating the number of bedrooms in all units. A multiple bedroom requirement forces residents to take roommates approximately as often as it encourages families to stay in town.
Give developers more flexibility in fulfilling their below-market housing quotas with either moderate-income or middle-income units.
Start allowing a fifth floor to be included in wood-frame structures instead of the current four-floor limit. And allow more multistory buildings to offer street-level housing instead of retail or garages.
Allow more flexibility in how to provide sufficient common spaces, such as setting a total footage requirement that could be divided between a central courtyard, backyard buffer and roof gardens in a way that best suits the overall design.
All of these changes are comparatively minor and could easily be tested as pilot programs of limited duration. Yet in total they might significantly enhance housing opportunities for a vitally productive but too-often overlooked segment of the San Francisco community.
This is all appropriate.
Socialist economies have two kinds of housing, elite, and proletariat
What’s preposterous is that the liberals are the cause of these ridiculous prices. If no one can build, no surprise that existing homes go up in value and become unobtainable for the “little people”. Supply/demand.
I am surprised you can get a home that cheap in SF. We lived in San Marino in 1988-1990 and that would have been cheap for SF or SM even then. Prices must have dropped a lot since 1990.
The market could solve San Francisco's problems, but what the Board of Supervisors really wants is free housing for people who share their political values.
Only if you have political connections. For most people, $750K is starter home territory.
The good middle class folks like the nurses, firefighters, generally business and service etc all have to live far, far away and commute each day.
It is odd as an upper end person buying there as I really enjoy a community that is full of diversity in class, such as middle, high, and the lower. But homeless people, gang members, and the very wealthy make a horrid living environment. There is no one to role model the next step for these young poor kids in the end and the only out is the gang life or being on the dole as this is what is shown to them and more accessible then the big dollars and high education jobs. I don't even need to mention how this sort of environment is horrible for the upper income folks that live in these cities.
Whatever happened to money and Republicans going together anyway? Where are all these wealthy folks and their socialist policy making come from? They seem like a bunch of guilt ridden idiots that do not understand how the real world works. They need to grow opportunity not build trenches for these poor and homeless folks to live in, squander, and not make postive change. Us Republicans really need to infiltrate these city committees and make SERIOUS change!!
Liberals are and always have been elitists, no surprise here.
I live in the silicon valley, was raised here, and I went to school in Santa Barbara. I saw the parallels right off when I was there. Isla Vista, the small town adjacent to UCSB, is the most dense “city” west of the Mississipi. It’s all apartments. There are single family homes for millionaires and apartment dwelling for the middle class. It’s similar in the rest of the bay area, to some extent, but more pronounced in San Francisco.
Significantly, in San Francisco the thing that has taken off is TICs (Tennancy In Common).
Andy Sirkin is the shepherd of this movement.
http://www.andysirkin.com/HTMLArticle.cfm?Article=1
Basically a group of, say 10 people get together and buy a 10-unit apartment at about half the cost if it would have been Condos. Then they inhabit each individual unit as their own. The idea is spreading down to the higher density areas of Silicon Valley. So I would expect it to take off in Isla Vista and other dense pockets in Santa Barbara as well.
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