SAN FRANCISCO | Projects: Under Construction, Approved, and Proposed

[combusean]

I'm completely lost how razing the Sunset would somehow make housing there affordable.

Buying up houses in the Sunset where the median price for a tiny house is just shy of a million gets you very close to the $20 million/acre absurdity that's fundamental to high prices in the central areas of the City. Anything that's not a high-rise will have that much more difficult of a time absorbing the land prices into the final sale or rental price, and as long as developers can sell housing that's priced for higher incomes, they will. Never mind that construction costs vastly increase once you go beyond 4 - 5 story wood frame and into concrete and steel for taller structures.

Plus, anything built new is hardly going to be cheap--Panoramic's construction costs are something like $400,000 a miniscule unit before developer profit. Even before developer profit, those kinds of prices would be unaffordable for just two people making the median household income and be too small for housing a family.

I don't know what the solution to SF's affordability is, honestly--short of paying non-union prisoners $1/hr for construction labor and have government gobble up the supply chain for building materials and still do it efficiently. If we built the 100,000 units we should have been building long ago today all of a sudden to make a dent in pricing as has oft been quoted, that would just reduce the developer profit to build that number of units.