The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis
Why Hacker News recommends it
It is HN's go-to concrete example of how local regulation and NIMBYism block new housing in San Francisco and California.
What it is
ReasonTV tells the story of Bob Tillman, who spent nearly five years and $1.4 million trying to convert his San Francisco laundromat into apartments. It walks through the permitting, appeals and neighborhood opposition he faced.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2019 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec pneill · 2019-06 · on “$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes”
Politics is a huge factor in the lack of affordable housing. Both legislation and concerns by citizen about how new housing will "change" a neighbor make it next to impossible to build higher density housing. Watch this video - it's eye opening [this video]
Strong rec pneill · 2024-07 · on “U.S. now short 4.5M homes as housing deficit grows”
Asking why there isn't enough housing is like asking why water is wet. The answer is state/local government regulation. There's an old saying "your margin is my opportunity" and I suspect that the current crop of homes that are built have decent margins, but in a deregulated market an entrepreneur could come in offer more affordable housing options with lower margins. You can see this in vehicles. Nobody complains about the vehicle affordability problem because there are far fewer regulations in the transportation industry (don't get me wrong, there are regulations, but not a constraining as you see in the housing market). There's a vehicle at every price point. You got bikes, then ebikes, m
Recommends ransom1538 · 2019-01 · on “SF restaurants are suffocating”
"You can't have it both ways. Either change the city and build upwards or stop complaining about the price of living" Yes. Here is an awesome video documenting one persons struggle to create an apartment building: [this video]
Recommends brianpgordon · 2019-01 · on “SF restaurants are suffocating”
Landlords, yes, but also people who think that new market rate housing will destroy the character of their neighborhoods, or something. Take it with a grain of salt because it's reason.com, but this video does do a good job of conveying a sense of how ridiculous the situation has gotten: [this video]
Recommends pneill · 2020-02 · on “California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build”
It's very complicated. People have conflicting ideas - one the one hand, they want affordable housing (ie their rent to go down) or the other, not in my backyard. Worth a view The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis [this video]
Cites jeffbax · 2019-01 · on “'Dear NIMBYs' – An Open Letter from a Homeless Woman in LA”
Profit is a function of materials, land, labor, margin, and very much regulatory cost. When town laws limit the height you can build, that means you have fewer units to distribute total costs across. Building 10 stories might be 70% the cost of 20 stories… so if you have double the units to spread things across, price per unit WILL be lower. Now extrapolate for things like 1. Minimum square footage 2. Parking requirements 3. "low income housing" units or other terms the local housing authority might put on top of any deal 4. Getting approval for the design (and the cycle of going back and forth to the drawing board) 5. Buying out surrounding rights holders like that old church you have to mo
Cites manfredo · 2019-05 · on “San Francisco proposes “IPO tax” on eve of Uber offering”
> I read in the SF Chronicle that there’s permitted and approved projects that developers are not moving forward with, like around the new hospital off of Van Ness, due to the “tightening of capital markets” and “soaring construction costs.”[1] Not NIMBYs or government regulations. No doubt that construction costs exacerbate the problem. But there absolutely are people deliberately blocking housing construction. There was a proposition to outright block private housing construction in the Mission that got ~40% yes votes. For further examples, see the infamous case of the developer that wanted to replace a laundromat with an apartment building: [this video] > And then I dig a little deeper into th
Cites Reedx · 2019-06 · on “$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes”
> SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. Pretty much. When I lived in SF I received fliers in the mail urging residents to oppose new apartment construction literally on the basis that it was too tall. If you want to see how difficult it is to build there, check out this story[1] of a laundromat owner who spent almost 5 years and $1.4 million attempting to convert to an apartment building. This is even though it was already zoned for housing, didn't have any units above it (wouldn't displace anyone) and eligible for streamlined approval since it was close to public transit. And yet... 1. [this video]