It goes beyond the lots and what is built on them - just look at the streets. A random residential street in SF: https://goo.gl/maps/GtKscWh1ko52 A random residential street in Tokyo: https://goo.gl/maps/QqtERUnBzXD2 According to my google maps eyeballing, the SF street is about 6 times wider building-to-building.
It's American cars. Y'all drive barges. Contrast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car
SF city occupies approximatively the same area as Paris, with only a third of the population. Most of Paris is developed with a 37m ceiling, hardly skyscrapers. Cost of land goes up with density, but that's the point. You build more and spread that cost among more units. Up to a point, it is economical to build higher in that situation (then for skyscrapers you start to see cost per unit going up again). Look at all…
Aren't the buildings somewhat limited in height for earthquake related reasons?
What I really don't get is why isn't the free market working? It seems like other cities in other states would compete for high tech jobs aggressively enough to make companies willing to move to cheaper areas where they could pay their employees less and the employees have a better cost of living.
>It seems like other cities in other states would compete for high tech jobs aggressively enough to make companies willing to move to cheaper areas where they could pay their employees less and the employees have a better cost of living.
SF city occupies approximatively the same area as Paris, with only a third of the population. Most of Paris is developed with a 37m ceiling, hardly skyscrapers. Cost of land goes up with density, but that's the point. You build more and spread that cost among more units. Up to a point, it is economical to build higher in that situation (then for skyscrapers you start to see cost per unit going up again). Look at all…
> Look at all the 3 or 4 stories apartment buildings sprouting in the city right now. Most of them could be double the height without increasing construction costs per unit. I'm not sure that's correct. I think the reason that you see a lot at that height is because building codes change quite a bit as you go past a certain height and the costs go up as well.
IIRC, 3 stories is about the max that US building codes allow for stick built structures. Beyond that you have to go to steel.
3-4 is also where you need to start thinking about adding an elevator. That adds to the cost and reduces the area available for units.
Wait, developers should pay for schools? What are property taxes for?
In California, under the Prop 13 tax reform, property tax values were rolled back and frozen at the 1976 assessed value level and only allowed to raise at 2% per year. Property values (and therefore property tax receipts) vary relatively modestly with the economic cycle, but income tax receipts are fully exposed to the booms and busts of the stock market. What this leads to is school funding that is somewhat directly…
Prop13 values reset on a sale. So the geriatric couple living in a million dollar cracker box might have low property taxes, but the next owner is in for a surprise.
One gallon per almond? But... one gallon of bottled water is more than a dollar. I know there's packaging and transportation, but there's packaging and transportation for the almonds, too. And almonds are not one dollar per almond. Do the almond growers receive subsidized water? I don't know how else the economics of this works out. (Unless the water used to grow almonds isn't up to the purity standards of drinking w…
I think people (especially urban dwellers) are disconnected from how agriculture works. It takes lots of water to support plants, and even more to support animals (including people). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/food-water-footprin... some highlights: 1 gallon of coffee - 1056 gallons of water 1 pound of chicken - 518 gallons 1 pound of beef - 1847 gallons 1 gallon of wine - 872 gallons 1 gallon of lentil…
The disconnect is with whoever decided that desert farms should receive water that could instead be used by cities. No one has a right to farm the desert. Quit subsidizing that, and agriculture will move back to areas that have plenty of water. Dairy, in particular, should be concentrated in the Midwest.
Pretty sure California's CEQA is independent of the EPA.
Yes, it is. And it's _much_ easier to bring and maintain a lawsuit under CEQA. The costs of environmental review under the federal law is basically baked into the cost of doing business these days. But CEQA is too easy to abuse, and NIMBYs can and do tie up projects for years, often killing them altogether, without any serious threat of substantive environmental harm. The procedural rules of CEQA make it difficult fo…
If someone could argue disparate impact along with 'delegating powers to the unelected' I would bet they would get a 9-0 ruling.
What I really don't get is why isn't the free market working? It seems like other cities in other states would compete for high tech jobs aggressively enough to make companies willing to move to cheaper areas where they could pay their employees less and the employees have a better cost of living.
> What I really don't get is why isn't the free market working?
That is an excellent question that you could ask about many of our modern social dilemmas. The beginning to an answer might be found in Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
It recently occurred to me that NIMBY policies probably are secretly promoted by US government as a way of protecting cities against nuclear attack: thanks to them cities get spread on the largest possible area, minimizing potential casualties and damages by exploding nukes.
That actually was a design consideration in the 50s, especially for infrastructure. Part of the reason that highways were more favored was that they're more resistant to attack than trains.
The Interstate Highway system was also sold as a way for the military to easily move around should there ever be an invasion.
IMO, it's gotten bad enough in the Bay Area that local control of zoning ought to get abolished. Make a new regional zoning commission, put together some clear and consistent rules about what can be built and where, and rubber-stamp everything that meets those rules. Literal rubber-stamp here, as in "you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day,…
> if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact You'd better be prepared to demolish a lot of buildings if you're going to play it that way. A developer can have the buildings up, sold, the money moved offshore and the shell company responsible for the building wound up before the court case about lying on the affidavit completes. Also, you'd better have a plan to deal with the angry voters.
Because the buyers are hapless fools with no means to protect themselves.