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SF has so many car unfriendly policies, that adding a garage ups your home value by about $80k. Neighborhoods have permits and street sweeping several times a week so you'd spend all the time looking for parking or moving your car. Add that to the fact a parking ticket is $100, and the math for a garage makes sense.
Other old, dense cities have similar "car unfriendly policies". I think this is also true in Boston / Cambridge and definitely New York City and garage retrofits in older homes (as opposed to new construction) are rare. What's the cause?
Building materials, for starters--those San Francisco homes are more likely to be wood, while the New York and Boston equivalents are more likely to be brick or stone. Elevation helps too--California homes don't have basements, but many were built almost a full floor up to provide storage and a "root cellar" as well as to give the building more prominence. This space is generally unfinished, like a garage, all that is needed is a door and a concrete pad. The housing stock is relatively newer: remember, there was no city of San Francisco until about 160 years ago, and a reasonable chunk of it got burned down in 1906, after the invention of the automobile.
Northern California has also traditionally been a more car-centered society, especially after the end of regional electric rail service like Sacramento Northern and BART, and because a lot of places in California that are now built out never had passenger railroads. I'm sure that contributes a little bit.
And some may not actually be retrofits: it was very fashionable to have an automobile, and most San Francisco homes don't have alley access, driveways or much street parking space, so room for a garage on the ground floor helps advertise the fact that you have a car.
Building materials, for starters--those San Francisco homes are more likely to be wood, while the New York and Boston equivalents are more likely to be brick or stone. Elevation helps too--California homes don't have basements, but many were built almost a full floor up to provide storage and a "root cellar" as well as to give the building more prominence. This space is generally unfinished, like a garage, all that is needed is a door and a concrete pad. The housing stock is relatively newer: remember, there was no city of San Francisco until about 160 years ago, and a reasonable chunk of it got burned down in 1906, after the invention of the automobile.
I was comparing old dense San Francisco neighborhoods to East Coast neighborhoods of similar density and housing style (see the two street view). Much of Boston is wooden as well, the street view link I posted look like wood. In fact, I saw San Francisco before Boston, so a few Boston neighborhoods made me think of San Francisco!
I think the root cellar might be it. Adding a garage into most New England homes would involve deleting a living room or bedroom, there is no unfinished part of the ground floor. In old, dense housing, the square footage of the living area is rather small, and few would want to sacrifice living space. I didn't realize that many garages were formerly unfishened areas; I had assumed that Californians like to sacrifice their living room for a car.
Still, from what I've seen, Californians tend to add garages wherever practical, while on the East Coast they often don't (the first house I grew up in didn't have one and it was a suburban early 60s house). A street of this density would probably get garages in California (I think?) but here the locals just use their driveways:
It seems pretty accurate. What I'm wondering is why did it all develop that way? In many if not most towns in the U.S., you can find the oldest part of town and as you work your way outward toward the newest areas, everything becomes low, wide, and spread out. I'm assuming it's partly due to the increased prevalence and speed of the automobile, but is that the only reason?
This talk about most of want I posted in this thread can be found reading this book.
Has for why did it all develop that way. It is do to as automobile caught on.
The boom of middle class and almost everyone had automobile in 50's and 60's mean city planners no longer had to built city for walking.
Los Angeles is good example of city making a switch to the automobile but keeping urban fabric. That is why LA does not look like typical suburb cities.
Where most city planners would frown on LA urban fabric and embrace car cetric city.
I was comparing old dense San Francisco neighborhoods to East Coast neighborhoods of similar density and housing style (see the two street view). Much of Boston is wooden as well, the street view link I posted look like wood. In fact, I saw San Francisco before Boston, so a few Boston neighborhoods made me think of San Francisco!
I think the root cellar might be it. Adding a garage into most New England homes would involve deleting a living room or bedroom, there is no unfinished part of the ground floor. In old, dense housing, the square footage of the living area is rather small, and few would want to sacrifice living space. I didn't realize that many garages were formerly unfishened areas; I had assumed that Californians like to sacrifice their living room for a car.
Still, from what I've seen, Californians tend to add garages wherever practical, while on the East Coast they often don't (the first house I grew up in didn't have one and it was a suburban early 60s house). A street of this density would probably get garages in California (I think?) but here the locals just use their driveways:
Well it also depends, I live in Oakland CA. Take a look at some of the garages in some nearby areas (where I live is a bit denser, so it is half like these and the rest are 4 story condos and apartments with ground level parking): Rockridge Detatched Garages - Google Maps
There are actually detached garages in this area, and driveways too. So not all CA areas developed the same way. This are was on the east bay street car route.
The streets with victorian housing stock also does not have attached garages. All over the bay area, I haven't seen one yet. It is mostly that style of home where the garages have been retrofitted in.
I was comparing old dense San Francisco neighborhoods to East Coast neighborhoods of similar density and housing style (see the two street view). Much of Boston is wooden as well, the street view link I posted look like wood. In fact, I saw San Francisco before Boston, so a few Boston neighborhoods made me think of San Francisco!
I think the root cellar might be it. Adding a garage into most New England homes would involve deleting a living room or bedroom, there is no unfinished part of the ground floor. In old, dense housing, the square footage of the living area is rather small, and few would want to sacrifice living space. I didn't realize that many garages were formerly unfishened areas; I had assumed that Californians like to sacrifice their living room for a car.
Still, from what I've seen, Californians tend to add garages wherever practical, while on the East Coast they often don't (the first house I grew up in didn't have one and it was a suburban early 60s house). A street of this density would probably get garages in California (I think?) but here the locals just use their driveways:
Don't use San Francisco as an example for how anything is done in the rest of California. They are an exception to pretty much everything else. Most California residential neighborhoods feature detached houses rather than row houses, and if there is room for driveways in between houses, that's generally what is done--but in some cases, for certain eras of houses (roughly 1880s to about 1910) it was the common fashion to build a sort of "ground floor basement" 7 or so feet off the ground, left unfinished. It's actually kind of rare outside of San Francisco, where it is common, but some of the owners of those houses built ground-floor garages in the unfinished "basement" space. It isn't really a "root cellar" either, although some of them were probably used for that.
After 1910, styles changed and the low-slung Craftsman bungalow (and even lower-slung California bungalow) came into fashion. They didn't have sufficient space for a first-floor garage, and generally the lot was wide enough to allow a narrow driveway, perhaps to a garage in the back, or if there were alleys, an alley-facing garage. More often than not, since most Californians don't have basements, and most of California doesn't get harsh summer weather, garages are more often used for storage or workshops than for automobile storage--except, of course in San Francisco, where parking is precious like gold.
The first-floor garage as a commonplace usage is basically a San Francisco thing, and San Francisco only. It's not unheard of elsewhere, but it's more common to find other methods used for car storage--or no method at all.
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