Organized Labor

Tall Buildings are expensive to build.

According to the most recent valuation tables from the International Code Council used to recommend permitting fees, square foot costs of the steel or reinforced concrete frame building types used in tall buildings can be well over half again higher than costs of basic wood frame construction.

Contrary to what some of our opponents here have claimed, this cost difference is independent of the relative unionization of the different construction types; the tables are meant to apply anywhere, whether or not tall building construction is unionized. The difference is a function instead of costs of materials and methods, of steel and concrete versus Douglas fir and waferboard, of welding machines, man lifts, and cranes versus framing hammers, extension ladders, and Gradalls.

These higher costs can have social and political consequences.

They mean that developers of tall residential buildings commonly need a higher price per unit to profit than developers of small wood-frame buildings – although other factors, such as land costs and tax structure, complicate this calculation. Higher prices demand higher incomes. Those with higher incomes will often have more disposable income, and retailers where higher incomes proliferate will either change products and prices to serve them or be replaced by retailers who do. Those with lower incomes may then find it harder to buy what they need, until they reach the point where they must move to afford to live.

This brings accusations against tall buildings of “displacement” and of “gentrification,” even when they physically displace no one and even when no hitherto affordable housing is demolished to make way for them. An influx of higher incomes can also shift political balances.

Some who bill themselves “progressives” thus come to resist tall buildings politically. As noted in last month’s column, others oppose tall buildings politically for other reasons. Some of these reasons are not at all “progressive,” but a matter of preserving views and property values, and so entirely bourgeois. Strange political alliances result.

The entry of politics into the question of whether or not to build tall buildings means on the one hand that delays and tradeoffs further increase costs of building, prices of units, and incomes required to buy them, and on the other that developers and their money become more deeply involved in politics. These effects further excite “progressives” to oppose tall buildings.

And so buildings that are a source of joy to us in their construction and of pride to us in their completion, buildings that feed, clothe, and house our families, that put our spouses and children through college, and that help secure our retirements, enmesh us in conflict at once with “progressives” who proclaim themselves champions of the very working class to which we belong and with those who have theirs and guard it ferociously against all comers, including the working class. We seem at times left with few allies but the developers themselves, who see us as such only insofar as we are useful to business ends. Meanwhile some accuse us of being tools of the developers.

What a happy place to be, especially in a time like the present.

Some trends strongly favor tall buildings, however. “New Urbanists” see them as one way of achieving density of work and residency in areas rich with public transit, and this density as critical in preventing climate change.

Opponents of tall residential buildings counter that they serve in large part only to provide pieds-à-terre, second and third homes for wealthy world-hoppers. While developers do indeed market units in tall buildings as pieds-à-terre, residents of those buildings have described to me a kind of stratification in them, with the jet set taking pricier view units in the upper stories and the great majority of units going to local professionals, managers, and business owners. Without the option of high rise residences, many of those locals would spread into the neighborhoods. There they would accelerate the gentrification of working-class neighborhoods, much as in my lifetime I have seen happen to Noe Valley, followed by Upper Noe Valley, into which I was born, and Bernal Heights, where I was raised.

Another trend favoring tall buildings is that of our growing linkage with economies and populations of East Asia, where both density and tall buildings are widely accepted. We see this trend reflected both in our memberships and in the rolls of our signatory contractors, and it suggests potent future alliances for us.

And even affordable housing has moved into tall buildings, as exemplified by recent projects in the Tenderloin and South of Market. Given scarcity of land, this trend will continue.
The present may be difficult, then, but San Francisco, a city with a long history of tall buildings, has a future of them, as well.