svelte seems to be using an article comparing the SF housing market to the rest of the housing market in CA for his argument that old bldgs with 2-4 flats in them can be torn down to build high-rise “affordable” condos or apts in their place (or create more “competition” for housing, ostensibly making the City more “affordable” to live in). This comparison is flawed because SF is apples to oranges to the rest of the housing market in CA. SF is an animal unto itself.
First of all, a developer who had visions of building condos/apts in SF would need to successfully acquire 2-4 adjacent lots to have enough room to build a higher rise condo or apt complex and would have both the City and County of SF to deal with in doing so. A good portion of these buildings are rent-controlled and have been for ~35 years. Regardless of the actual condition of these buildings today, a builder today wouldn’t likely be able to acquire a building in any condition for less than $1M per 5-7K sf parcel. Therefore, they would likely already have an outlay of $3M+ in just the land purchase (sans any demo and permit fees) before even beginning to start the eviction process on the building’s tenants. This is also entirely assuming the developer is successful in purchasing enough adjacent lots for their proposed project AND that longtime residents in that district (residing within 300 feet of the proposed project) don’t successfully fight their evictions and keep the developer’s permits in suspense for years and are successful themselves in getting the developer’s project scrapped, which is a distinct possibility. Longtime homeowners and LL’s in SF aren’t going anywhere. Many SF LL’s live in their own buildings, next door to their (rent-controlled) buildings or down the street in another building they own. Their property assessments are ultra low, due to this group heavily benefiting from Props 13, 58 and 193. As such, they can well-afford to minimally maintain their propertie(s) for habitability and keep them rent-controlled into oblivion. Many (most?) SF tenants have been occupying the same rent-controlled unit for decades.
If a luxury or even mid-grade high or low-rise apt bldg in SF IS successfully completed, it does absolutely nothing for the city’s “affordability crisis.” In fact, it likely displaced dozens of longtime tenants from their rent-controlled units and created “luxury” condos or very high-rent apts for the “nouveau-riche” newbies to move into SF and scoop up.
SF is the worst possible example svelte could have used to bolster an argument here that infill in the choicest CA urban areas could be razed and rebuilt to create more units and thus more “affordability” (if that is actually what he was trying to convey here), IMO. Because of the exorbitant land cost in SF, the “numbers” don’t pencil out to create “affordable units” today, although I did read somewhere that an “affordable housing commission” of some sort purchased up adjacent parcels many years ago in the Mission District and was looking for a developer to create “affordable” units on them. However, this situation is a Big Outlier in SF.
Again, CA owes newcomers nothing. Especially brand new housing in a coastal county. Newcomers can live in what is on offer in CA or go elsewhere. CA doesn’t need any more people. Nearly all CA counties (except the most rural) have had a larger population than they could properly service for at least the past 25 years.
