How San Francisco makes it insanely hard to build housing
I don&#x27;t know about SFO.  I can say from painful personal experience that, if it is worse than LA County --which is a nightmare-- I cannot imagine building anything in SFO.<p>In one of my projects the plan-checker got into a fight with the civil engineering firm I hired over the method used to calculate static and wind loads on a structure.  I had done all of this work myself --including running FEA simulations.  However, because I am not a Civil Engineer, I had to hire a firm to, effectively, duplicate my work.  Physics is physics, right?  That&#x27;s OK.  No problem.<p>The issue was that the plan-checker did not like the method the civil engineering firm used to do the math.  He called it the &quot;European&quot; method.  This was a US civil engineering firm bonded for operation on all 50 states, BTW.<p>What was absolutely perplexing to witness and endure was that the numbers were correct.  My numbers, the civil engineering company&#x27;s numbers and the non-European method (whatever that means) numbers were the same (within the margin of error).<p>The plan checker (a Civil Engineer) knew this.  The results were the same.  He just wanted it done <i>his way</i>.  That cost me weeks and thousands of dollars.<p>The problem with these people is that they have an incredible amount of power.  One cannot challenge this power without being willing to delay a project for months or years <i>and</i> incur thousand, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) in costs.  It is as close as one can get to dealing with a totalitarian regime within a free society.<p>The same permit office forced me to install 64000 lbs. of concrete as the footings for my ground-mounted 13 kW solar array.  An architect friend of mine told me those footings can support a four-story building.  There was no way to have that decision reversed.  I tried.  It cost me a couple of months and tens of thousands of dollars.<p>Building safety and zoning regulations are most-definitely important.  However, there needs to be a mechanism in place to ensure there&#x27;s fairness in the system all-around.  I don&#x27;t want unsafe buildings anywhere around me.  I also want construction projects to be able to execute on reasonable timelines and at the lowest possible cost; one that is not inflated by bureaucracy and, yes, incompetence.