If expensive permitting is the problem, since it's the government doing the building shouldn't that not really be a "cost", order the department to waive any fees.
Also, If that were the case I would suspect that adding a bathroom to your house in SF would cost upwards of a million dollars as well but I doubt that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong.
A similar effect can be seen in ancient Rome, towards the end of the empire the millers started to produce less and less product from the same amount of grain. The mint that produced the coins would mysteriously lose large amounts of them, or they wouldn't contain the correct percentages of metals and nobody in power did anything about it. Well that's not entirely right, one person did and they killed him.
It couldn't cost more than say 200k (and that is pretty crazy the article says the plumbing hookups are there it's not like they have to dig up a city block to run a sewer line or something) to actually build the thing so we are talking what? A million and a half in illustration, planning and review for a single toilet?
I don't have any special insight here but, in other cases, environmental reviews and environmental lawsuits are tools used to stifle new developments.
> a rejected San Francisco apartment complex...required a more than 1,110-page environmental assessment [1]
It is not socially acceptable to charge a million dollar permit for constructing a toilet. It is socially acceptable to make the process so onerous that it costs more than a million dollars to complete. Think of the environment.
Also, If that were the case I would suspect that adding a bathroom to your house in SF would cost upwards of a million dollars as well but I doubt that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong.
A similar effect can be seen in ancient Rome, towards the end of the empire the millers started to produce less and less product from the same amount of grain. The mint that produced the coins would mysteriously lose large amounts of them, or they wouldn't contain the correct percentages of metals and nobody in power did anything about it. Well that's not entirely right, one person did and they killed him.