
4 Years Trying to Get Approval to Turn SF Laundromat into Apartment Building - vinnyglennon
http://reason.com/blog/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-years-1-mi
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madaxe_again
This is par for the course in trying to develop in many western cities, and
it’s almost as though a system has been designed to exclude smaller developers
in favour of vast multi-billion-dollar-portfolio landlords.

Whether deliberate or not, it’s sick to the core - as an example, in Bath in
the UK, I’ve had a several year battle to simply carry out like-for-like
repairs on a subterranean vault on my property - it’s going to collapse soon,
and it’s directly under a major road - but even using 200 year old techniques
with no external disruption they keep denying it. At this point I’m just going
to let the arterial road through the city disappear into a hole.

Meanwhile, a neighbouring property owned by a large multinational landlord got
planning permission to build an external lift on a Georgian property, and the
same landlord recently won an application to evict 600 people (owners) from
perfectly serviceable housing to build fewer, more expensive houses.

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sdoering
How can you evict owners? Are 600 people behind with their payments?

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nine_k
Does UK have an analogue to the "eminent domain"?

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roywiggins
It does.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order?wp...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order?wprov=sfla1)

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SlowBro
Stories like these are why I am led to believe that more and more regulations
actually hurt the little guy. Big corporations do not fear more regulations.
They can afford the lobbyists to influence politicians to write loopholes, the
consultants to jump through the right hoops, and the lawyers to get them off
the hook. What can little startups do? Hope that they can raise millions in
series A, I suppose.

Big corps don't fear regulations, they fear competition. Big corps (I have
read elsewhere) /want/ more regulations, because it raises the barrier of
entry for the little guys to compete with them. They can afford a tightly-
regulated world but little guys cannot.

Google this: Corporations love regulations. Lots of examples.

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dawhizkid
SF is notoriously anti-chain though, so even corporations can't seem to open
or build new stores in SF. I'm sure many construction companies/apartment
complex owners would love to build more in SF as well and can't do it either.

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rendall
This reminds me of another struggle in SF to get an ice-cream parlor approved.

"The NYT's Scott James recounts the insane red-tape endured by Juliet Pries,
an entrepreneur who decided to open an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco's
Cole Valley. She had to pay rent on an empty storefront for over two years
while the necessary permits were processed, and tens of thousands of dollars
in fees (including the cost of producing a detailed map of nearby businesses,
which the city itself seemed not to have)."

[https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of-
getting-...](https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of-getting-
appr.html)

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MiscIdeaMaker99
San Francisco certainly has its share of self-righteous, self-important,
holier-than-thou types.

I grew up and live in Indianapolis. It's only happened a handful of times, but
while visiting San Francisco someone would say, "I'm sorry," after hearing
that I live in a "flyover state." Of course, these folks weren't from San
Francisco either. (I think I've only met one or two actual natives of San
Francisco.) This has also happened in New York City.

I don't mean to tarnish the people of San Francisco, though, because I love
visiting SF and the people there are the nicest I've ever met, anywhere.

I also understand that people want to preserve what good they have going on
there, though, but I often wonder if this is because they're thinking about
the greater good; or, some other self-satisfying motive.

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rayiner
The coasts are like that. Growing up in D.C., if you had told high-school me
that Chicago was far larger than D.C. I would've been floored. Illinois is
just a "flyover state" right?

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jcranmer
Chicago is the major interior city of the US, and has been for well over a
hundred years. I also grew up in the DC area, and I was never under any
illusion that Chicago wasn't a small city (visiting Chicago every Christmas
may have helped).

Of course, if you go by CSA, DC's CSA will become larger than Chicago's in the
next few years, if it hasn't already.

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anovikov
Well, obviously people who already own apartments nearby don't want values of
their own ones - mostly purchased on mortgage - to fall, because it could ruin
their retirement.

Within the democratic society, there is no fix for this problem.

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sdhgaiojfsa
The other democratic societies who have solved this problem seem to belie your
claim. The issue here is that the unit of democracy for this problem is too
local.

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anovikov
Simple fix: even MORE strict zoning and ban of private ownership on individual
apartments. They all will be owner by the city itself and rented out.

Basically, back to Soviet Union.

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sdhgaiojfsa
That is a bad idea. The Soviet Union was a shitty place to live, and its
economic policies were disastrous. As I pointed out in the comment you're
replying to, this problem has already been well-solved by simply expanding the
locus of control for zoning so that the interests served by it are more
global.

~~~
anovikov
That's what i meant. Sacking democracy and market economy to fix these things
is an overkill and there is hardly a better way.

European cities try to fix it in a half-Commie way: try to keep as many
apartment buildings in public property and lease them subsidized, with rental
contracts dating from early post-WWII days and passed as inheritance. Same
thing: keep the place to incumbents - only with no ability to cash out.

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yostrovs
It's surprising that San Francisco isn't doing a laundry assessment evaluating
whether anyone became dependent on the historic launderette.

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rebuilder
This sounds so ridiculous I have a hard time believing the issue isn't being
misrepresented. Does anyone have the other side on this?

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closeparen
It’s axiomatically true to a broad and well-organized segment of the San
Francisco polity that multifamily residential development is an unqualified
evil: accelerations gentrification, ruins the aesthetics, worsens traffic,
tightens the parking situation, etc. The reasons they give are sometimes
absurd because the particular reasons to oppose a project don’t matter. It’s
development - in particular, residential development in the Mission -
therefore it must be stopped by any means necessary.

