by Eric Miller
If there's one thing increasing faster than rents in San Francisco, it's the number of garages being built under Victorian homes. Hundreds of century-old front yard gardens are being ripped out in order to get a personal parking space in what is probaby the most walkable and transit-friendly city in North America.
If you own a house without a garage, there's little doubt you thought about putting one in. A garden is a small thing to sacrifice for the convenience of parking. If you've been shopping for a house, there aren't many that don't view a garage as a premium attraction that adds to the value of a property.
But walking down San Francisco's streets is becoming increasingly unpleasant, and parking increasingly scarce, because of the outbreak of under-house garage construction. Instead of walking past porches, gardens, and pleasing views of types of architecture not found in many other cities, pedestrians are confronted with blank concrete walls, imposing garage doors and lights that glare accusingly at you as you go by.
Take Ford Street, for example. The one-block-long street in the Castro up until recently was lined with attractive Victorian and Edwardian homes, nicely set back and graced with flowers and vines hanging over wrought-iron fences and walls. Undoubtedly the gardens added to the street's desirability and value. But today many homeowners on the street are tearing down the walls and fences and digging up the gardens just to have a garage. While the garage may add to the value of a single house, it detracts from the aesthetics and value of the street as a whole.
The unfriendly blank walls and ugly rolling doors are replacing flowers and long stairways all over the city, obscuring the view of many gracious housefronts and changing the face of San Francisco's streets forever.
The personal parking pads do nothing to increase the amount of parking in the city. Because a garage needs a curb cut, every personal parking space under a house is one less on the street. While it may make parking available to city residents, it makes it more difficult for visitors to other neighborhoods to find a spot.
Real-estate agents estimate that a garage under house is adds at least $100,000 to its value. Therefore, the permission to knock over walls and dig into the basement to add a garage also has a value, or should we say, a cost. Perhaps housing prices would not be so high in our city if garage construction permits weren't given so easily. Without parking, many of those bred to the habits of suburbia would not be so anxious to move into the city and displace the very people and civic practices that make San Francisco so attractive in the first place.
While I respect property rights, I think the proliferation of personal garages detracts from the value of the streets, and of the city as a whole. They are ugly. Cars parked illegally in front of them block the sidewalk for pedestrians and force the elderly and wheelchair-bound into street traffic. And they make finding a parking space more difficult for those without a garage, further increasing the demand for their construction.
Living effectively in the city requires learning how to use public transit and to get around without a car. There may be times when you need a car, but an occasional cab or a rental will suffice for many. If you must have a car to use every day, perhaps Walnut Creek or Fremont is a better place to live. Let's consider stopping the endless construction of garages in the city, and in doing so bring down housing costs, keep our streets interesting to walk on, and keep San Francisco a city whose streets brim with life and delight, rather than transforming it into a tarted-up facsimile of an industrial park, just so a bunch of ex-suburbanites can store their SUVs under their bedrooms.
