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'Plan To Save Downtown San Francisco From Doom Loop Approved by Lawmakers' (sfstandard.com) 233

An anonymous reader shared this report from the nonprofit journalism site, the San Francisco Standard: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved legislation that aims to shore up the city's beleaguered Downtown by filling empty storefronts and expediting the conversion of underused office buildings into housing. The bill is a major component of Mayor London Breed's recovery agenda. Co-sponsored by Board President Aaron Peskin, it amends the city's planning code to expand residential uses and Downtown office conversions. It also streamlines the review of certain projects, among other changes...

Even with speedier project approvals, converting San Francisco office buildings to housing remains a costly endeavor; few developers have explored the option to date. At an April 3 hearing of the board's Land Use Committee, lawmakers outlined the need for multiple reforms to make conversions economically feasible; Supervisor Dean Preston voiced concerns that even those reforms would not accommodate low-income housing. Many say San Francisco's Downtown is currently caught in a "doom loop" driven by economic knock-on effects of the pandemic, including an office vacancy rate approaching 30% and trophy office towers changing hands at deep discounts...

The bill passed Tuesday is one of several legislative efforts to aid Downtown and the city's overall economy. Initiatives have included legislation to delay tax increases for retail, food service and other businesses hit hard by the pandemic, an "Office Attraction Tax Credit" for new companies opening in the city and a program called "Vacant to Vibrant," which provides grants to businesses which open "pop-up" shops and art spaces in Downtown's empty storefronts.

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'Plan To Save Downtown San Francisco From Doom Loop Approved by Lawmakers'

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  • They're idiots (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @06:20PM (#63613806)

    While this is a positive move, nobody will want to move to the slums, just like nobody wants to shop in the slums or go to the office in the slums, and that's just what downtown SF has turned into. They need to send in the paddywagons to round up and drag away the hobos. Everything else is rearranging the deck chairs.

    • Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @06:27PM (#63613826)

      Gentrification happens. If you can convert a block of towers with the lower floors being light commercial, you can create a community that doesn't have much need to leave - and then you can police the hell out of it to ensure anyone breaking laws on the street is carted out.

      But criminalizing homelessness or mental illness isn't how you clear the streets - it's by making sure those things are extreme outliers that are most often taken care of by social services, whether that be education, medical care, or unemployment / welfare. It gets the right-wingers in a tizzy, but as long as you don't let the left-wingers con you into continually throwing money at their programs with no oversight it is the most humane AND cost-effective long term solution.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by kmahan ( 80459 )

        It depends on the people you fill the buildings with. If the area is still "high crime" then those "light commercial" businesses (stores primarily) won't last long. Especially with the "shoplifting isn't really a crime" policy.

        When the people you put into the apartments have pride in their area and work to keep it up then there is a greater chance of success. If you just stuff the apartments without a plan then you'll get the drug dealers mixed in, drug users who will steal to get their next fix, and peo

        • by rta ( 559125 )

          That's not actually the problem on the table here since nobody has the money to turn these things into "affordable housing" including the city or state.

          If/when they find anyone to redevelop these buildings it'll be into "luxury" units that will be $1Mil+. But idk who's going to buy them. Maybe the Chinese? (the ones from China, not Chinatown)

          I'm really curious what's going to happen.

      • Re:They're idiots (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @06:43PM (#63613852)

        Nobody wants to open a lovely pour over organic fair trade café when there's a 6' homeless dude sleeping, defecating, and jerking off in the front while screaming incoherently and periodically shooting up. And nobody wants to live above the cafe either.

        Criminalizing homelessness doesn't end homelessness, but it absolutely does clear the streets and allow for productive folk to get on with life.

        • Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @08:15PM (#63614060)

          Nobody wants to open a lovely pour over organic fair trade café when there's a 6' homeless dude sleeping, defecating, and jerking off in the front while screaming incoherently and periodically shooting up. And nobody wants to live above the cafe either.

          Criminalizing homelessness doesn't end homelessness, but it absolutely does clear the streets and allow for productive folk to get on with life.

          I can be voted down, but it's all 100% true.

          • Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Insightful)

            by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday June 19, 2023 @08:42AM (#63615184) Homepage Journal

            Criminalizing homelessness doesn't end homelessness, but it absolutely does clear the streets and allow for productive folk to get on with life.

            I can be voted down, but it's all 100% true.

            No, it isn't. Your first sentence, while denoting a clear bias, was actually fairly accurate. That kind of thing does happen, although it's a small minority of the class we're discussing, and people do not tend to enjoy it in the least. But your conclusion is unsupported by facts.

            Criminalizing homelessness does not clear the streets. Nobody can afford to incarcerate the homeless. And if they can, it makes far more sense to simply put them in an apartment, which is a lot cheaper. In fact, it is cheaper in every case to not put people into jail or prison. It doesn't matter (except on an ethical or moral level) whether your plan is to do nothing or to care for people, it is always cheaper than using the "justice" system to "solve" your "problem".

            In places where homelessness is criminal, you still have homeless. You simply also have a lot of time and money wasted abusing the homeless, when you could spend less of it helping them and have better outcomes for everyone.

            I do not propose for even a second that the best solution to "a 6' homeless dude sleeping, defecating, and jerking off in the front while screaming incoherently and periodically shooting up" is to do nothing. The best solution is to help that guy. He might well be a veteran (there's over a 10% chance!) or belong to some other class of person that our society has chewed up and shat out, and should really be considered our responsibility even in a world in which we don't care about others.

            I, for one, want to live in a world in which we do — so I reject your premise, and I don't need to ignore the facts adjacent to it to do so.

        • Actually, criminalizing homelessness makes the problem worse.

          You arrest somebody, which costs money, put them in jail, which costs even more money, send them to court(money), try to recover money from them, which besides being about as effective as getting blood from a stone, actually makes it HARDER for them to get a home, because now they have a criminal record(or a bigger one) and even more expenses. For which, if they don't pay(little money, homeless, remember?), you toss them back in jail, which is ev

          • by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Monday June 19, 2023 @12:55AM (#63614548)
            You are mixing 2 different issues. The working poor who cant afford rent and the mentally ill who cant get apartments because they smear shit on walls and destroy apartments. Solution is involuntary confinement for the crazies. Renting an apartment for them wont cost 12K as they will do 100K of damage every few months. Locking them up is cheaper. That solves the lifestyle issues. Solving the problem of the working poor is more complicated. The problem in SF is the administration is letting the crazy problem to fester in order to get support for solving the working poor problem.
      • Gentrification happens. If you can convert a block of towers with the lower floors being light commercial, you can create a community that doesn't have much need to leave - and then you can police the hell out of it to ensure anyone breaking laws on the street is carted out.

        But criminalizing homelessness or mental illness isn't how you clear the streets - it's by making sure those things are extreme outliers that are most often taken care of by social services, whether that be education, medical care, or unemployment / welfare. It gets the right-wingers in a tizzy, but as long as you don't let the left-wingers con you into continually throwing money at their programs with no oversight it is the most humane AND cost-effective long term solution.

        So we start building the projects again? That worked perfectly last time.

        The situation is much more complex than the give them a home, money, and all will be great!

        And miss me with that right wing instant accusation - I ain't.

        There are problems that have been exacerbated in the past - but if we're looking at the mentally ill people, there are very few instances where we can forcibly administer psych drugs. So it probably won't be a good situation to place mentally ill people in apartments. And what

        • Who said "projects" or giving away housing? A percentage probably should be - in fact, I'd say there should be housing for every demographic from single professional through family to nursing home resident, and from poor to wealthy. Blue and white collar.

          The more you mix it up, the easier it is to manage. It's when you get vast regions of one demographic that issues really start to fester.

          • Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Interesting)

            by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Monday June 19, 2023 @01:01AM (#63614556)
            In India the Delhi Development authority build flats where the Ground Floor is 3 BR with a garden, First floor is a 3BR, Second floor is a 2 BR, 3rd Floor is a 1 BR. It allots these flats by lottery and any family can own only one of these. Prices are lower than those built by private builders so the lotteries are very popular. These Flats mix all socio economic categories together and creates social mobility.
        • Re: They're idiots (Score:4, Interesting)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 ) on Monday June 19, 2023 @02:01AM (#63614626)
          For a proportion of those who are mentally ill, giving them an apartment AND support seems to work. For some, their mental illness is severe and more support is needed. Just giving someone who is mentally ill and has been on the streets an apartment and thinking that's all you need to do is a mistake, though. For example, someone ending up on the street due to an abusive relationship is unlikely to get much less depressed being on the streets. If you have no money then going to another town may not be an option, and will include losing what little support network you have, and if there's only one refuge in town then going there may not be an option as the abusive ex could simply wait outside.
      • by ccguy ( 1116865 )

        But criminalizing homelessness or mental illness isn't how you clear the streets

        No one does this. Stop with this BS rhetoric.

        It's the crime, the shitting on the street, the constant yelling, etc that is "criminalized".

        Being homeless doesn't give you a right to shit anywhere you want.
        Being mentally ill doesn't give you a right to yell non-stop to anyone you want, much less when you refused treatment.

    • Downtown isn't really a slum. There's the small section that's not too nice, but either side of that is pretty upscale. You need to back out a few streets off of market to where it feels more slumlike.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kurkosdr ( 2378710 )
      "Folks, we did it! Thanks to our leftist policies of decriminalizing crime, we have successfully reverse-gentrified Downtown San Francisco! Now we can give those buildings to the people. What do you mean nobody wants to leave there because it's a crime-ridden hellhole full of semi-feral drug addicts?"
    • Re: They're idiots (Score:2, Interesting)

      by reanjr ( 588767 )

      I feel like anyone speaking of SF slums should be required to specify which streets they're talking about. I keep going to SF and I can never find the slums, or the homeless, or the sidewalk feces everyone keeps talking about.

    • At one point the Docklands in London were worse than slums, but now they are highly desirable. Things can, and do, change.
  • Vacancy Tax (Score:5, Interesting)

    by An Ominous Cow Erred ( 28892 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @06:25PM (#63613820)

    The obvious problem here is that buildings are primarily stores of value, like NFTs, rather than productive properties. Owners would rather stomach vacancies than admit that maybe the rental value has gone down (and thus potentially affect property value). Supply and demand is broken here.

    With a steep vacancy tax, owners would actually be forced to rent out their properties at whatever rate matches demand.

    • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      Or switch from taxing by the number of floors to a land value tax [wikipedia.org] (a.k.a. the "perfect tax") so a few vacancies on an otherwise highly productive parcel of land don't cause the land owner too much pain.

      Attracting jobs back to SF as a vacancy tax would do, will just increase home prices again, which is the exact opposite of what the city needs right now in the middle of a homeless crisis.

      • I'm convinced after pointing the problems with a vacancy tax (what is an illegally vacancy like withholding vs. a legal like renovation, how will it be enforced, if rent is a dollar and it isn't still rented; what then, etc.), this is less about fixing the problem than punishing evil landlords.

        Nevermind LVT in concept has been around since Thomas Paine, and still gets no traction.

        • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

          Your arguments are the very same ones those "evil landlords" use to stifle any discussion of a LVT.

          What's your net worth?

          • Really? Please point the way to where evil landlords are arguing against LVT based upon the regulatory framework for occupancy.

            You'll have to offer me at least flowers or a handjob for that kind of info.

          • What does my net worth have to do with it?
            Richer people know more?

            • Rich people buy legislators who then subsidize them using government resources. So the rich are smarter, if being a parasite means being smarter.
          • Actually, I think that Quint's point is more that unless very carefully done, a vacancy tax would be completely unopposed by "evil landlords", because as Quint kind of said, they'd just work their way around it. Instead, it'd be the small business owners, those with only 1-2 rental units, that are most likely to be hit. As is the usual way of these things, the evil landlords would just twist this to benefit them.

            Unless very carefully worded, which is Quint's basic point. It wouldn't increase housing, and

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        You can't fix broken cities with taxation. They need to be redesigned to work properly, delivering a good mix of affordable quality housing, retail, and business.

        Unfortunately there is no way to do that without causing immense pain for current property owners. What usually happens is one of the following:

        A) Nothing substantial.
        B) The city dies, and those who can move to some other broken place to start the cycle again.

    • FWIW SF does have a vacant storefront tax. But it's pretty limp, so it doesn't accomplish what it's supposed to do; ultimately, it only really affects the relatively small property owners. The big ones can afford to just pay the tax. Typical SF shit.

      So your logic is entirely correct, they decided to spend other people's money to bolster business instead of penalizing the people keeping the units empty to the point where the vacancy tax would actually help. This rewards the biggest scum. Typical SF fail.

  • Is this even real? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by geekopus ( 130194 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @06:28PM (#63613830)

    This is rearranging deck chairs. They're not addressing the actual problem, which is that people do not feel safe or comfortable. It's the crime, stupid!

    Even more sad: the residential areas will almost certainly be used as low-income housing nearly immediately. Please don't misunderstand; I do not have a problem with wanting to house the poor....the issue is that if you're looking for an economic kickstart to your downtown area...well, this ain't it.

    • by cotu ( 412872 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @07:25PM (#63613940)

      tell me you've never been to San Francisco without saying you've never been to San Francisco.

      • by ccguy ( 1116865 )

        tell me you've never been to San Francisco without saying you've never been to San Francisco.

        I live in San Francisco and I agree with him.
        I also believe you live here, even are possibly originally from San Francisco, based on your god all-mighty attitude.

        • I live in San Francisco and I agree with him.

          Tell me you've never left San Francisco without saying you've never left San Francisco.

          There's two types of ignorance: Those people who talk about a place they've never been, and those who talk about a place they've never left. Pretty much everyone considers their own city to have gone down hill. But only some of them are actually right. It's hilarious that even Fox News needs to jump over leaps of logic to paint San Francisco in bad light, ... while in the same article noting that it ranks among one of the

    • That is the problem that damns many U.S. cities, not just SFO. And hence why fair but strict law enforcement is the first problem on my anti-poverty list. People won't willingly go to dangerous areas to shop, work, or build businesses. And thus those areas will continue to decay and to expand. Making them safer is a necessary first step if you want to fix this.

      There will be other problems (including "gentrification" in a place where rents are already absurdly high) that will have to be addressed, and in

  • by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @06:30PM (#63613832)

    Most office building's HVAC, electrical, plumbing and floor layouts are not easily converted into residences. Even if you gave a developer the building for free and rubber stamped all the building permits, the conversion cost may be so high that the project can't make money. It might be more feasible to tear down the office building and start fresh.

    Older buildings often have lots of systems that are not up to current code. If you change an electrical panel, the inspector will usually focus on the panel that was changed and ignore everything else. Convert the whole building, and everything is going to have to be brought up to current code. I'm not from California, but I'm going to guess that an old building stripped bare might have trouble meeting the current earthquake building code during inspections.

    • Most office building's HVAC, electrical, plumbing and floor layouts are not easily converted into residences.

      False. Most office buildings are designed with utility access between each floor meaning that conversion of utilities is cheaper and easier than any other type of building. You're saying something is difficult while ignoring the fact that it has been happening with great success the world over. San Francisco isn't doing anything new here.

      If you change an electrical panel, the inspector will usually focus on the panel that was changed and ignore everything else. Convert the whole building, and everything is going to have to be brought up to current code.

      Codes haven't changed anywhere near as much as you think. In many cases nearly everything that needs to be upgraded is in the panel itself, which needs to be done anyway to

      • by Tupper ( 1211 )

        The floor plan of office towers is an issue: people like bedrooms to have windows and code requires windowless bedrooms to have 2 doors.

      • You're right about the ease of changing stuff in a building with drop ceilings. However, the water and sewer connections may well be inadequate in which case more will have to be brought in if any kind of density is to be achieved. Power might also have to be upgraded, but that's relatively easy and cheap compared to water and sewer. You don't even necessarily need to add meters, if you just divide the expected cost plus a percentage overage between the residents. You can do occasional clamps to check for p

  • Pointless (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hoofie ( 201045 ) <mickey@@@mouse...com> on Sunday June 18, 2023 @06:57PM (#63613874)

    Art shops and pop-up stores will not bring anyone into the area if it's homeless and hobo city and your chances of being robbed etc are high.

    As for low-income housing - yes that will bring in the spending money of course.

    They really are not living in the same universe.

    • Agreed. Who wants to visit a town whose storefronts are occupied by miscreants and the behavior that goes along with them.

    • by cotu ( 412872 )

      yet another idiot who has never lived in San Francisco. downtown != the Tenderloin.

      • I last went to Union Square two Christmases ago. Beyond the deafening hobo "band" on distorted speakers and plastic barrels as drums, there was the cackling woman who took a dump on the street as we walked by. I haven't gone back to that cesspool since.

        The Embarcadero is essentially empty, just a place to walk without being on the streets.

        Wherever you park, your car is going to get broken into eventually. Take BART? Pray that some nasty person doesn't get into your car and stink up the place. 50/50 cha

      • by sfcat ( 872532 )
        Clearly you haven't been to the bay area in quite sometime. The Tenderloin was cleaned up for a while (about 10 years ago) mostly by gentrification. During that time, all the middle class folks who lived down there left (got ran off) and expensive restaurants and businesses moved in. Then SF decided to stop enforcing petty crime laws. Those expensive restaurants and business left and both the Tenderloin and Market Street fell apart. Then other businesses moved out along with their customers. Then COVI
    • and your chances of being robbed etc are high

      How high are your chances of being robbed? Please provide data that includes incidents of property crimes graphed over the past 2 decades and compare it to other American cities where people are living.

      I know the answer, but I want you to do your own research rather than just repeating what politicians tell you to believe.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @07:09PM (#63613902)

    Move to Texas. [babylonbee.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by trybywrench ( 584843 )
      Texas is a horrible horrible place, please don't move here. Seriously though, all the people leaving the coasts for Texas just bring their problematic politics with them. To the coastal refugees pouring into Texas, the place you're leaving isn't the cause of your problems, it's you.
  • Ctrl-F "crime" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cirby ( 2599 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @07:11PM (#63613908)

    No results in the article.

    Also nothing for ctrl-f "police".

    But I'm sure that converting those office blocks (where people used to work) into apartments (for the people who no longer work there) will do the trick.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Ctrl-F "crime" showed no results, probably because crime in San Francisco is very low compared to major cities in the USA and has fallen over the past 2 decades.

      What... doesn't fit the narrative fed to you by politicians? Go look up actual numbers before you become afraid of your own shadow because someone told you to be.

  • by david.emery ( 127135 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @07:22PM (#63613934)

    We have seen doom loops before, Detroit strikes me as the best example. Now the demographics aren't the same, but the net result is likely to be similar. And that's too bad, I remember visiting SF in the '80s when it was a bit funky, but still a nice place to visit.

    • Any neighborhood other than downtown [sfgate.com] is doing just fine. But that's generally not newsworthy.
      • by aergern ( 127031 )

        The MAGA crowd and folks who don't live in or near SF don't care about the other 85% of SF that isn't having a problem. It's all a bunch of woke this or woke that comments because they have their heads up their ass. It's the same old /. crap. Not even sure why I bother to click through from my RSS feed. It's always disappointing.

      • Fair enough. But it's interesting to compare city sizes. Detroit is 149 sq mi, San Francisco is 46 sq mi. So San Fran size-wise is more like 'downtown Detroit'.

        I still remember driving by the ruins of Hamtramck from the airport to Warren.

  • I swear I remember a time when this kind of thing was considered to be a failure of past policy.

    • We always hear that but why is it a failure? Lots of housing projects still are homes to people today.

      Even in eastern Europe the "commie block" was actually pretty successful and people still live in them today.

  • One only needs to study Manhattan's history over the past 50 years to understand why SF got this way, what to do to fix it, and what not to do to keep it that way.

  • It really feels like this has become a nimby canard to stifle housing projects. Worry about the income level of housing is something you consider when you have enough housing, not hb you are woefully short on supply which is the core issue in these cities.

    Just get more housing built, whatever can get done.

    Homelessness is a separate issue with different solutions but it also will need more homes at the end of the day.

    • by Jhon ( 241832 )

      "Homelessness is a separate issue with different solutions but it also will need more homes at the end of the day."

      Except California is both building housing at a snails pace with price tags are unsustainable (over $700k per unit with some breaking $900k per unit).

      Build shelter. Cheap, fast, FEMA type shelters and force people to sleep there vs. on public properties/right of ways. Also provide services.

      The kink is this fanatic belief in "housing first". Basically, house folks with active substance abuse

  • There won't be enough parking spaces, assuming two parking spots per unit. It'll even be a problem with one per unit. And no sane person will want to lease the lower floors for commercial businesses without enough parking to support the foot traffic. Community anchors like supermarkets require a lot of parking that these conversions can't provide. Not to mention high HOA fees that'll rival mortgage payments even with current high interest rates.
  • "'Plan To Save Downtown San Francisco From Doom Loop Approved by Lawmakers'"

    My eyes caught this: "Doom loop approved by Lawmakers".

    Yup. It sure was... I'm not sure any plan will save SF from their damage.

  • by upuv ( 1201447 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @09:05PM (#63614160) Journal

    Office buildings were constructed with a single purpose. To support white collar desk based work. The spaces did evolve over the decades optimising the buildings to support just office work.

    The optimisations meant a few things.
    - Lower ceiling heights
    - Utility hookups channelled to a single vertical shaft.
    - Utility capacity scaled to meet the needs of white collar work. Water scaled down, electricity down, Air conditioning up.
    - Parking and storage scaled way down.
    - Interior walls removed
    - etc

    The problem is white collar work just had a jump in evolution in the last 4 years. Work from home is here to stay. This dramatic social change of course means these highly engineered office spaces are in much lower demand. No news there of course.

    The problem is that these spaces are very difficult to adapt to other forms of productive work. Examples of productive work would be.
    - housing
    - manufacturing
    - logistics
    - agriculture

    All of which these buildings are unlikely to support. As they are just not flexible enough to support the change.

    Housing is the obvious choice. But to even support that so many things have to be done. The buildings literally have to be stripped back to the studs. Utilities have to be completely re-worked. Storage and parking have to be added. Surrounding infrastructure needs to be put in place, groceries, entertainment, medical, government services all have to be in place. Otherwise you are just building a slum. Where I live buildings are being stripped back to the iron beams and then being re-skinned for residential. It takes years. This process started before the Pandemic. As business were already migrating out of the core.

    I see evidence of hollow city cores where ever I go now. SF is further along the process than most. Meaningful strategies to deal with it a few and even more rarely implemented. Or these areas will face the same fate as the old warehouse and factory areas of our major cities. These places sat vacant, crime ridden and decaying for decades. Take a look at Detroit to see a modern example of this.

    As long as the city and state are only applying Band-Aid solutions the more the area will decline. Making the process of adaptation even more difficult and lengthy. Significant government investment is required to convert these spaces to accommodate new uses. Building codes need to be substantially overhauled so that buildings can be converted to other uses over time. As more changes are likely to come. Accommodation to civil services need to be in place so that they too can adapt as use cases change.

    • At least for residential, lower ceilings still work. While the electricity may be less than light industrial, the prospect of having to power a cube farm of computers back in the '80s means you still need a lot of electrical.

      Not sure about water. While you might not be running washing machines, dishwashers, bathtubs, and such, the water needs for a cube farm of workers just for coffee, toilets, and hand washing adds up as well.

      I will agree that code needs to be updated to not necessarily be less safe, but

    • by ccguy ( 1116865 )

      Storage and parking have to be added. Surrounding infrastructure needs to be put in place, groceries, entertainment, medical, government services all have to be in place.

      I know it's not the American way, but maybe consider having all of that in the very same buildings while you are doing the renovation? There's no reason for not having some of those services in the lower floors and residents on the top floors. In fact, many buildings even have separate elevator shafts for lower and upper floors.

      You can perfectly have a small local DMV branch that services the neighborhood, some medical services, small groceries, pharmacy, etc. A skyscraper can pretty much become a self-s

    • Storage and parking have to be added.

      Why parking? People in cities have much less need for cars. I say this as someone living in a city who doesn't own a car. Bringing in more cars will create all sorts of other problems too.

  • Part of the problem is jackasses like Elon Musk falsely publicizing cherry picked crime instances. SF today has less homicides than, say, 2010. San Francisco also has a lower homicide rate than most cities including right-wing run cities such as Miami. In fact California in general has a lower homicide rate than Florida in spite of Musk-endorsed governor De Santis providing us with advice on how to lower homicides and drug overdoses. Maybe Elon should ask Musk to fix Florida's homicide and drug OD rate? How

  • After reading through these comments and other stories on ./ over the years concerning California and SF I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to visit this place, let alone live there. I don't live far from Detroit. In the 80's it was still a place to visit and I attended a few downtown festivals back then. Today we all avoid it like the plaque. Corrupt city governments and failed policy is what brings down cities.

  • by Nocturrne ( 912399 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @10:25PM (#63614316)

    Enemy states, who want to destabilize the US, are laughing. I wonder how much Chinese money a financial audit of California law makers would uncover.

  • "driven by economic knock-on effects of the pandemic"? And a few other things... https://www.amazon.com/San-Fra... [amazon.com]
  • by devloop ( 983641 ) on Monday June 19, 2023 @01:09AM (#63614570)
    There is plenty of commercial space that can be converted to housing, but developers are only interested in building high margin, high price luxury units.
    The Adtech / Social Surveillance nerds are not coming to downtown to spend their money. It's dead, accept it.
    Start planning long term for affordable sustainable housing.
    • Converting commercial space to housing is expensive. Unit sizes are not the same. HVAC is different. There is a lot involved there. Blaming companies wanting to actually make some profit on "affluent nerd caste" is missing the basic economics. Moreover, even if you have more expensive housing, that means that the people who were going to move into the slightly less expensive housing are now there. Building more housing of all sorts is needed here. The city has not built nearly as much housing as they have
  • One problem is Americans have lost their handiness and even their imagination as to what a space could be. In the 1970's loft conversions were so bare bones that your bathroom may not have come with walls. It was the people who moved in that made the spaces habitable, not the person who put the walls in the warehouse to create the "conversion". You moved in to an empty rectangle that had minimal plumbing, minimal wiring and no appliances. Quite often heating was a building-wide radiator system, A/C window units were self-installed. You can't do this today because there are so many rules and even if it were not for the rules, people would be incapable either due to lack of skills or lack of imagination to make the spaces habitable. Buildings also had alleyways behind them and were never deeper than a half-block. Modern office buildings are much larger and give less opportunity for units to have windows on more than one side. I had an uncle that did projects like this and he leased A/C units separately from the apartments.

    Minimal conversions would reduce the costs and risks associated with converting office buildings, but reconfiguring fire suppression, A/C and providing more than bare bones plumbing and wiring are unavoidable costs in today's market. San Francisco should make sure that their rules do not get in the way of as minimal as possible conversions if they really want low rent conversions.

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. -- Jeremy S. Anderson

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