Mail Time!
Quality emails for your enjoyment
Graduate Students reached out with a couple questions…
From a policy perspective what more could be done in the city of San Francisco to increase the number of housing units available for families?
A TON OF THINGS. I’ll list a couple.
Currently San Francisco prohibits multifamily housing of more than 3 units in more than 70% of the city. Check out this interactive map. Simply allowing more multifamily housing in exclusionary neighborhoods, we would see many more units of housing available.
So, the biggest thing we could do is legalize apartment buildings city wide. This could mean “density decontrols” which wouldn’t touch the existing height restrictions but would allow for as many units on a lot as would be safe to building code. This would get us closer to what’s called Form Based Zoning.
We could allow more parking lots, single family homes and low-slung retail buildings to be turned into multifamily apartment buildings with thriving ground floor retail. This would require “upzoning.”
We could also speed up the entitlement process so the housing permitting process is fast, fair and predictable. That way zoning-compliant housing would get built faster, cheaper and more often because it wouldn’t be such a gamble. If there was more assurance that if you apply to build housing, you’d be able to build that housing, we would get more subsidized Affordable and other apartment buildings proposed and built.
San Francisco should also reform bad incentives like requiring parking. This just adds cost and reinforces our car-centric infrastructure that isn’t what families need. We need more people getting out of cars and using transit if we’re going to prevent the worst effects of global warming and have a habitable planet.
To get more subsidized Affordable Multifamily Housing, San Francisco could can pass parcel taxes or a vacant land tax, and spend that funding on building more Affordable Housing. And there is a ton of underutilized public land, owned by every government agency from the MTA to the School District. This land could be have multifamily housing on it, likely at 50% subsidized Affordable.
It’s worth noting that modern Affordable Housing is best built with a variety of unit types so that people can be moved around in a building as their families grow and shrink. This helps reduce disruptions in people’s lives when kids move out or a loved one dies. Without this variety of unit type in a single building, a widow might be encouraged to move across town to a different Affordable unit in order to make room for a low income family of four.
Are there policy initiatives that Yimby is supporting in the city of San Francisco or in the state that would change the zoning laws in the city so that more units can be built?
Yes. This ranges from Accessory Dwelling Unit Legislation we helped pass at the state and local level, to Affordable Housing Density Bonus legislation at the state and local level to SB 827 which will be returning this winter.
In our research we have found that there is a mismatch between people and housing in San Francisco. 30% of 3+bedrooms are occupied by families with children. Has your group done anything in terms of advocating for change here?
I’m not sure what you mean? You’re saying that only families with children should occupy 3+ bedroom housing? This seems a little silly. The question for me isn’t “Are people using the housing the way we think they should use the housing?”
I’d rather ask “Are people paying way too much for housing or being pushed out of communities?” And on this front the answer is very straightforward: YES. People are suffering due to the exorbitant cost of housing.
I’ve heard people say “young people are cannibalizing family housing.” Which seems like total victim blaming. Young people are suffering, just like everyone else, due to the extreme cost of housing, and you’re going to blame them for bunking up to reduce costs? Pardon my french, but fuck off with that noise.
We need dramatically more housing of all types, both subsidized affordable and market rate. And we should have a responsive market that can follow trends and say “people are demanding more multi-bedroom units, so we should build more of them.” And we need more subsidies for low income people that the market will likely never serve.
The mismatch isn’t really between the types of units and the types of people. The mismatch is between the quantity of units and the quantity of people. In a shortage, we see things like long lines (waiting lists), bidding wars, hoarding (land banking), overuse (packing people in), attempts to find substitute goods (moving really far away and commuting), and skyrocketing prices. These are all things that we see in the current Bay Area housing market.
People can’t afford to live in the communities that they would prefer, communities near good jobs, communities with schools and transit and restaurants and whatever else makes these desirable places to live.
If you think of the problem as “the wrong kind of people are living in the units” then you’re thinking from a perspective of redistributing a scarce resource. YIMBYs don’t believe housing has to be a scarce resource. We don’t believe it SHOULD be a scarce resource. We believe this is an artificial shortage created by bad housing policies that generally benefit incumbent landowners over everyone else.
Housing for all will inherently mean that more 3+ bedrooms are built. It will also mean that more of the existing 3+ bedrooms are freed up when folks currently in 3+ bedrooms find housing that better suits their needs. It will also mean more studios are built. Families are good. And single people who want to live on their own are good. And shelters are good. And people who have unconventional families are good. And people who live with their friends from high school are good. And non-monogamous triad people are good.
There is no group of people who are undeserving of housing. YIMBYs would like to remove restrictions on building all kinds of housing, until we have a glut of housing, prices fall, and people are only spending 30% of their income on rent.
