Why doesn't San Francisco want to build more skyscrapers?

Pay a visit to San Francisco's Twin Peaks and you'll gaze upon miles of the city's Victorian row homes, postmodern houses, and low-rise apartment buildings. In the distance, you will see the skyscrapers, roped off to their little section by the water. Unless you have been paying attention to the Bay Area's housing crisis, your first thought at this sight probably wouldn't be "Where are all the high-rises?" But with home prices steadily climbing in San Francisco since the 1980s, the height of the city has been on the minds of developers and city planners.

In order to answer the question why San Francisco doesn’t want to build more skyscrapers it is important to bear in mind that San Francisco is a city in which quality of experience is taken into account with buildings and businesses. This seems to be true to a greater extent than many other places in the United States. For example, a freeway was actually torn down in San Francisco because it blocked the view of the Bay along the Embarcadero. Seismic reasons were cited but the freeway was disliked and the City is the kind of place where such concerns are taken seriously, unlike in many other places in the US and worldwide for that matter.

Furthermore, San Francisco has a lot of rules regarding the height of buildings, called air rights. To build larger and higher buildings, you need to do so in areas where air rights are not enforced or work out special deals. We also have to consider that San Francisco is a 7 mile x 7 mile plot of land. The city has underground rivers, a lot of hills, and homes that are so close to each other, they practically look attached. Simply building more towers sounds easier than it really is. The transportation system requires a massive change, but at this time it is still a work in progress. By adding more towers and bringing in more people, the City needs to plan for more public transportation and road improvements.
But, building taller constructions would create more housing and, in theory, an increase in supply should reduce demand and bring down prices. Some San Franciscans haven’t altogether trusted this logic to account for the city’s working class, while others have counted on it to maintain their property values. A highly participatory planning process allows neighborhood groups to contest each new construction project and the city’s leadership wring their hands as they welcome tech jobs into the city but fail to come up with places for their new populace to live. San Francisco’s housing issue is incredibly complicated, with many different interest groups involved, but if the city hopes to maintain any sort of middle class, it will need to promote denser developments, experts warn.
Earthquakes, by the way, aren’t really a factor. Structural engineers are confident that modern high-rises i.e. skyscrapers are able to withstand even the worst seismic activity. Instead, the city’s height restrictions go back to efforts made in the 1970s and 1980s by a coalition of preservationists, environmentalists, and affordable housing advocates to limit growth in their neighborhoods. While each group had different aims, they saw how growing pains in other cities affected their respective causes. The environmentalists feared that the expanding downtown would have a negative impact on parks and cut off sunlight and views of the bay, while preservationists hoped to prevent the destruction of San Francisco’s historic architecture. Affordable housing advocates wanted slow-growth policies to prevent the displacement of low-income residents through urban renewal, rising rents, and evictions, and middle-class homeowners were concerned about rising property taxes and traffic congestion
Together, this slow-growth coalition was able to accomplish a lot, including imposing a 40-foot limit on all buildings in residential areas as well as Proposition M, a citizen-sponsored initiative that limited the amount of high-rise developments the city could approve to 475,000 square feet per year. The high-rise cap was the first of its kind in the country and while critics said that it hurt economic growth, Proposition M managed to save San Francisco from overbuilding. By the late 1980s, cities that left construction up to the market faced steep office vacancy rates, while San Francisco hovered at 10-13% vacancy.

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