California Bill Wants To Scrap Environmental Reviews To Save Downtown San Franci...
source link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/02/17/0156233/california-bill-wants-to-scrap-environmental-reviews-to-save-downtown-san-francisco
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California Bill Wants To Scrap Environmental Reviews To Save Downtown San Francisco
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by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Friday February 16, 2024 @10:52PM (#64246768)
It's WAY too expensive to build anything there.They need to cut regulations so that unused commercial space can be converted to housingAnd no, I don't want shoddy, dangerous construction, reasonable building codes are fine, but there are way too many rules and endless lawsuits that make it impossible to build anything except ultra high end stuff
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People and businesses won't comeback if the actual problem is still there.
So San Francisco is one of the most expensive housing markets on the planet because nobody wants to live there?
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So San Francisco is one of the most expensive housing markets on the planet because nobody wants to live there?
San Francisco is in it's early Detroit phase. Crime is high, services are poor, but a lot of rich people still live there, so property is fairly valuable. However, people are starting to move out. Speculators and corporations are buying up properties as investment vehicles hoping the prices will stay high, but there is no guarantee.
The other pressure keeping prices high, which is the point of the article, is that building anything in San Francisco takes forever due to the multiple permitting processes and thusly is very expensive, even if property itself was cheap.
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Building lots of affordable housing would probably go a long way to addressing the crime problems. The other big issue is that US politics are so afraid of anything socialist, even Democrats are largely unable to do any of the things that are proven to work elsewhere in the world. Decriminalize drugs and treat them as a healthcare issue, free mental health care, social housing, strong safety nets etc.
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Ahhh yes social housing has always been known to bring safety to an area. There is certainly no issues with crime near social housing.
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As I said, it has worked in other places.
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You have the cart in front of the horse. Drugs and mental health are what push people into becoming homeless and wanting to stay homeless.
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This really reeks of ignorance. San Francisco's financial district is in distress because it is an older office stock and there are enough square feet in new buildings South of Market that the flight-to-quality in lease renewals has left it in a very high vacancy rate-- bordering on 50% IIRC.
The city is still a desirable place to live, and the winter homeless situation is not bad. Summer is worse as people leave shelters, but that is different issue. Housing (rent) affordability is comparable to Long Beach,
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So you're just going to refuse to acknowledge the stated safety issue?
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The one saving grace for San Francisco (and many other expensive areas in California) which will probably keep it from "going Detroit" is climate (fog beats sleet any day in my book). In addition, geography is on its side - coastal city/region and varied geography nearby making being conducive to a variety of recreational activities and make the area aesthetically pleasing.
These attributes alone make it attractive regardless if it's run by "liberals" or "conservatives" (or any other form of "idiots").
Had SF
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This reminds me of Gavin Newsom's famous response when asked about people fleeing the state. With absolutely no self awareness he challenged the notion people would leave because where else will they get such nice weather and natural beauty then goes on to talk about a wealthy friend that left the state for Utah as if that didn't completely contradict his point.
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reason downtown is empty is something called 'work from home' you might be familiar with
If that was the only reason, the office buildings would have been sublet or bought out a long time ago. Look at the downtown regions everywhere else. If that was the reason, this would be very pronounced everywhere, yet it's not. Just the SF Bay Area which has a net 30% drop in office occupancy and that's pretty much it, some places like Boise and Austin even saw it increase a fair bit, other places saw it decrease but not nearly as bad as SF.
Will SF turn into Detroit? I don't know, but it's stupid to just assume that it won't. I personally couldn't care less what happens to it. They made their bed. It's not as if people haven't been talking about California's horrid regulations and tax policies for decades. Sometimes, the only way people learn is after a disaster has already happened.
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That is the main reason, and the other reason is that the tech industry has seen significant job loss lately. You can only sublet a building if you can find someone who wants to move in, and for those two reasons, most businesses in the Bay Area are cutting their office space, not increasing it, so there's nobody to move in.
That's why they're trying to convert some of that unused office space into residential space, but this often requires rezoning, environmental review, etc.
No other part of the country ha
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ep, you call the cops because someone is stealing from you they'll be right there to arrest them. Oh, wait... no.
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We're all pretty familiar with the thing called "work from home" and it's the best thing that could have happened for the tech sector. I'm exceedingly grateful that my morning commute consists of walking across the hall to my home office instead of being stuck in traffic on clogged freeways or having to ride public transit that reeks of urine and feces so I can sit in a cube farm all day.
If that means entire swaths of San Francisco's downtown district wither and die, then so be it. The dinosaurs were also k
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" a glut of empty offices, shuttered retail and public safety concerns plaguing the city's once vibrant downtown."
Gaslight much? The market is in decline because businesses and people don't feel safe. It's literally the stated problem.
"Major developers have reiterated that they have no plans to start work on significant new projects any time soon."
Expediting approval for non existent new builds won't solve the problem.
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I'd argue that crime is only one of many straws on that camel's back. I've read plenty of development horror stories about San Francisco. For example, I live on the opposite side of the country, but with a bit of research, I could bring a development to a halt for a few months just by writing a letter to the right agency claiming that the development would be bad for the "character" of the area.
Yes, they need to control the crime better, but they also need to make getting construction authorized faster and more dependable. Not require the review of a half dozen different committees, any one of which can torpedo a development until their demands are met.
The net result is raising the cost of development to the point that, yes, only the highest end "luxury" housing is worth it. And will continue to be the only housing worth it until the glut is addressed, which would take decades of construction short of von neumann building robots or something.
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And part of the issue is the objections can be done sequentially.
So you file your first complaint, let the developer work through that issue over the course of a couple months. Then file your second complaint, and that takes a couple of months.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
Suddenly very few developers have the stomach to develop in that area. And people wonder why there isn't any development in that area of the country.-
There was tons of development. San Francisco has been under continual development for many decades. What has happened now is that many of the most recent buildings are intended as office space for a workforce that is never returning to the office either because it has been laid off or because it now works from home. So downtown, which used to have many office workers, is now kind of empty. If they convert those office buildings to housing they can probably rent it out. This will bring people back downtown which is desperately needed. Of course they need to deal with quality of life issues also.
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"Major developers have reiterated that they have no plans to start work on significant new projects any time soon."
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If the relavent authorities had the guts to stand up to the NIMBYs and vested interests and pass laws that take away their ability to stop new housing being built, so many of the problems plaguing the bay area could be solved.
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Besides, that would involve capitalism, which every politician there knows is bad.
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Yes and red state politicians are all Nazis. You're ridiculous.
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Hmm...well, currently the only openly fascist politicians actively holding office are in the EU and some immediate surrounding countries, and that's the closest you even get to Nazi politicians. So no, not really.
Meanwhile, right here in the US we've got a lot of self-described anti-capitalist politicians, most heavily concentrated in SF and NYC.
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I never said otherwise. Which makes you look ridiculous.
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Oh, a semantics debate. The true sign of an intellectual!
Fuck off with your bullshit.
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They need to do both.
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Of 23 US cities with populations of 750k or more, San Francisco is #14/23 in violent crime [sfchronicle.com]. On the subject of murders, it's even lower - #18/23 - one of the lowest among major US cities. The only thing it ranks relatively highly on is property crime, which ironically is NOT what the US right complains about when talking about SF. SF crime hit historic LOWS in 2020/2021, and in 2022 only inched back to pre-pandemic levels; it's overall been on a long-term downtrend (like most of the US).
It's a politically
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The right does mostly complain about property crime in SF: things like a news crew having their car looted [cnn.com] while they were there to report on crime, or this piece [hoover.org] complaining about the combined property and violent crime rate. This is another example, not from the right but from local residents.
That last article touches on a related problem with statistics like you cite: A major problem is that lots of crime goes unreported. That's especially the case when the city's top prosecutor is somebody like George Gascon or Chesa Boudin. The people in that neighborhood complained to the non-profit running a drug recovery center, or they used their phones. They didn't bother filling police reports, because they knew that wouldn't change anything, and so the crimes they see don't get counted in your numbers.
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The third link should have been https://abc7news.com/soma-rise... [abc7news.com], but Slashdot ate the hyperlink for some reason.
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I think when people talk crime they conflate SF with SF bay. The extremes the bay area is either safe, or out of Robocop. The same can be said for about the same amount of area under the mega city of LA, Dallas Ft Worth or Chicago. Some places crime is unheard of, Some places crime is the only industry.
What the current discussion is about is the core of SF, that has gone from ready to be a tech billionaire playground to oakland in the matter of 4 years. The places where the normies live it tak
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Property crime is literally what the US right complains about when talking about SF. It's also what the businesses fleeing talk about.
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Why do you think people turn to crime? Subquestion: After you answer "they can't afford anything otherwise" remember that housing is the single largest expense people face.
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Lack of accountability appears to be a major driving force as of late. Why bust your ass working a low paying job when you can just run around stealing with no consequences?
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You need to be very careful using per-capita numbers when measuring relatively rare events like homicides in small cities, because small random fluctuations can cause big per-capita figures. I'm pretty sure I've seen numbers tossed around before where the huge homicide rate is the result of as little as one single homicide.
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Detroit is 50 years in front of San Francisco, they never had environmental impact statements in saving a high rise, they had we have to improve the sewer before the project is completed, and watch the wrecking ball swing. San Francisco is still 5 years before the Robocop period in urban renewal. The getting the Californian committees out of redevelopment is an interesting take. The problem the left will have San Diego to Bakersfield is going to want the same treatment without the same self indu
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You may reduce rampage style shootings, but 99% of US homicides are not rampage style. The 1950s was the safest era we had (only a little safer than today btw in terms of homicide rate), but what about 1920s? Guns were freely available back then and the homicide rate was 3 times today's. Obviously culture and economic status plays the biggest role.
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Yeah, that was prohibition and organized crime causing the rise in homicides during the 1920's.
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Right, so allowing guns won't magically make us safer if people want to and are motivated to do crime (as they were in the 20s).
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It's a good thing they got rid of environmental reviews to solve the homicide rate of the 1920s.
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