First, I am not in favor of housing over existing industry. I’m also not in favor of people complaining about things that have been around since long before they bought their uber-loft. But what I’m REALLY not in favor of is misguided ideas about how to solve problems.

This week’s SF Bay Guardian gets it wrong AGAIN by suggesting that limiting housing to save industry might bring prices down…

It’s almost an axiom in San Francisco planning policy: High-end housing drives out industry. That’s only logical: When people buy million-dollar condos, they don’t expect to get woken up in the middle of the night by delivery trucks or deal with the smell of diesel fuel or look out their windows at barrels of chemicals. When the dot-com boom turned parts of South of Market into a housing mecca for the newly rich and hip, the problem became serious: Businesses (including some nightclubs) that had been around for years and were operating entirely within the law, conducting operations that were well within the existing zoning, found themselves under attack from an influx of residents who considered many of the traditional uses of the area to be nuisances.

As high-end housing creeps farther and farther into San Francisco’s industrial areas and the Planning Department continues to push for expensive housing in the southeast neighborhoods, the potential for even more clashes — which tend to end with an industrial business being forced either to leave or to spend a fortune revamping its operations — just grows.

The simple answer, of course, is to stop building pricey condos in industrial areas. But it’s unlikely that anyone at City Hall is going to put a total halt to housing construction in or near industrial areas, so at the very least there ought to be some protection for existing businesses. [more...]

I do, however, agree with the concept of further disclosure about neighborhood noise and nuisances. I have an acquaintance who was under-informed when she bought her loft on Townsend about the all-night train noise. In case you’ve never been down there in the middle of the night, they don’t shut down the CalTrain engines. Ever. They just run all night. And she didn’t find this out till the first night she slept there. Yes, she was told it was near CalTrain, but full disclosure is always the best way to transact real estate.

Rethinking the Guardian’s suggested homebuilding moratorium [SFHomeBlog]
Moratoriums, Loopholes, and Housing Fees [SFHomeBlog]

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.