| Pedestrian |
Apr 6, 2019 11:52 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by NYC2ATX
(Post 8532182)
Really??:dunno: Honestly that's a ridiculous reason to hold up something like this. An office space cap, or any kind of blanket cap in the city really, is just a ridiculous statute to have in place at all. I'm surprised there isn't a movement in favor of rolling that back, even in just the Transbay and Central SoMa areas.
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Quite the contrary. San Franciscans voted it in and so far have shown minimal interest in voting it out. It's not a cap on highrises--just on office highrises--the idea being to force development of more housing in the city rather than massive amounts of office space to which workers would have to try to commute into town on already maxed-out bridges and transit.
And so far, the effects have been better than most development fans had hoped. Since each annual allocation--875,000 sq ft--rolls over if not used, the regular recessions and boom/bust development cycles the nation and SF have experienced have largely kept the cap from really hurting. In fact, it arguably has just prevented the sort of overdevelopment other cities have experienced with consequent crashes in office rents and masses of vacant space.
As of last June, there remained about 2 million sq ft available under the cap with another 875,000 added this year. Meanwhile about 1.3 million sq ft of office space has been taken out of the pool through redevelopment as housing or other non-office uses and a proposal has been brought forward to add that, and any future conversion from office to other uses, to the pool.
So with almost 3 million, and potentially over 4 million sq ft available, I doubt this project will be held up by the cap. Yes, there are lots of other projects in various stages of proposal, but as San Franciscans know from seeing even approved projects get repeatedly sold and not actually built, I don't think the 9 million sq ft mentioned in that article is really worth worrying about. And I also think the Planning Dept., if it must, will give a project as prominent as this one a certain priority. Finally, keep in mind that this is a mixed use project. Only 375,000 sq ft of it is office and affected by the cap. So while I respect both Mr. Dineen and Mr. Li, I don't take the likelihood of the cap holding this one up seriously. |
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