6 ms·

I for one "treat the people starting these little restaurants and cafes as your users" in SF and I can tell you, the permitting process is not the biggest probl

by abalone 11y ago

I for one "treat the people starting these little restaurants and cafes as your users" in SF and I can tell you, the permitting process is not the biggest problem. It's costs. Commercial rents have skyrocketed. Moreover, residential rents have skyrocketed to the point where few people in the service industry can afford to live in SF at market rates. Even if you can find a space, how are you going to staff it? Who's willing to commute in from Oakland (which is getting expensive too) for a low wage job with grueling hours? Nopa, one of the most successful SF restaurants in the past 10 years, is posting job ads for cooks on their menus now. This isn't because of a slow permit process. Nopa hasn't applied for a permit in years. It's a result of the macroeconomic effects of a tech boom. So while I'm very happy to see PG highlight macroeconomic factors that foster economic growth in cities, I see a missed opportunity to fully address their complex effects. This is probably because this issue has been politicized here in SF, with the tech industry often lambasted for "destroying" the city (this comes from a lot of the people getting pushed out), so tech folks often get hyperdefensive and contort themselves trying to point fingers elsewhere. I think that's what's happened here with PG trying to blame the government's permitting process. But clearly if we want to continue making SF an attractive startup hub, we need to help "little restaurants and cafes" continue to open and operate. And the elephant in the room there is quite simply the high rents and high cost of living for workers in the service industry, driven by a huge influx of wealthier residents competing for space. You want a startup hub, you need city policies that manage that growth.

Swizec 11y ago
> for a low wage job with grueling hours? Maybe it shouldn't be such a low wage job, if [good?] talent is in short supply? Just a thought. I for one would be happy to pay higher prices, if it meant we could avoid the whole 20% restaurant subsidy (tips) song and dance. Charge me a fair price and I'll pay you a fair price. There's no need for the whole "And oh yeah, we don't pay our staff enough so you're a bad person if you don't pay extra".
- spitfare 11y ago
  You're talking about serving/wait staff, whose hours are significantly shorter and wages (including tips) are significantly higher than cooking staff, which is what the parent comment was actually talking about.
  - Swizec 11y ago
    Ok, let me try that again: I for one would love to pay higher prices so the entire staff can get paid normal wages and I can get tastier noms.
- abalone 11y ago
  SF restaurant prices have in fact already gone way up. ("The biggest factor: labor") [1] It doesn't sound like you're actually offering to pay higher prices. You just want tipping built into the base price. There are restaurants experimenting with this, but it generally doesn't make them more money. [2] [1] http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Why-is-it-so-expensive-to-dine-out-in-San-6856554.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Why-is-it-so-... [2] http://sf.eater.com/2015/10/16/9557877/tipping-restaurants-san-francisco http://sf.eater.com/2015/10/16/9557877/tipping-restaurants-s...
timr 11y ago
Yep. San Francisco no longer has marginal spaces -- every conceivable inch of it has been claimed, developed, and/or bid into the stratosphere. And it has nothing to do with "NIMBYs" or lack of development. It's a tiny, tiny patch of land, all of the build-able portions of which have been speculated upon since the early 20th century. This is important, because while cafes and universities and whatnot are important, you need marginal spaces to be a creative hub. Creative people tend not to be wealthy. They need affordable, amenable places to live and work. And San Francisco doesn't fit the bill -- unless you have connections, power, fame or access to unlimited capital. Which is why SF is suffering right now. The last time this city was on discount was probably the late 1980s, when SOMA was a wasteland and everyone wanted to live in the suburbs. And surprise surprise...along came the first dot-com boom. All of those (comparatively) cheap spaces where creative kids were having raves and making art became the birthplace of the modern web. Creativity happens in marginal spaces. I was actually surprised that pg kept emphasizing the need for constraints on development in this essay ("The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about historic preservation. The tougher cities are about it, the better they seem to do.") The conventional wisdom around here is that we must refer to this kind of thinking as "NIMBYism", and condemn it as backwards-thinking. "Obviously," says the technorati, "we should be knocking those tiny old buildings down and replacing them with skyscrapers!" But he's right. San Francisco was once a cheap, pleasant place to live, precisely because of those sorts of constraints, coupled with demographic trends. But it's at a different point in the development curve today. It isn't for scrappy, poor innovators anymore. It's for ambitious, get-rich-quick types who will tolerate paying $4,000 a month for an apartment to be part of the scene. And as soon as the scene moves somewhere else, those people will be gone, too.
- wbl 11y ago
  Actually, much of the city isn't a city but a suburb. If you stand on Twin Peaks looking south, you will not see a single part denser than New Jersey. There is plenty of room above SF that is not used.
  - timr 11y ago
    Yes, you're right. And that's one of the most ironic parts of the SF development debate: the folks who complain about "NIMBY opposition" the loudest are (usually) talking about already dense neighborhoods, like the Mission, when they should be thinking about the Outer Sunset or Laguna Honda. That said, it doesn't change my point: to change the density of these places, you have to buy out a bunch of people who know exactly what their land is worth if it's zoned for higher density. Many of them are actually betting on that windfall. There is no equivalent in SF to the vast tracts of undeveloped land in, say, Texas.
draw_down 11y ago
Maybe we don't want to continue. Maybe the insane rents will cause closures of a lot of the places that make SF attractive to the tech workers, and slowly SF will become less of a destination for them, and they will start flocking to other places instead of to SF. And then maybe tech companies will have to open offices elsewhere and the situation will equalize itself that way. But then I'm not personally invested in SF staying a tech hub.
- mooreds 11y ago
  Would be nice. There are network effects, though, that make this less likely. If prices "succeed" in driving people out, prices will fall to the point that people come back in (as long as the network of money and jobs stays intact).

by abalone 11y ago

Swizec 11y ago

> for a low wage job with grueling hours? Maybe it shouldn't be such a low wage job, if [good?] talent is in short supply? Just a thought. I for one would be happy to pay higher prices, if it meant we could avoid the whole 20% restaurant subsidy (tips) song and dance. Charge me a fair price and I'll pay you a fair price. There's no need for the whole "And oh yeah, we don't pay our staff enough so you're a bad person if you don't pay extra".

spitfare 11y ago
You're talking about serving/wait staff, whose hours are significantly shorter and wages (including tips) are significantly higher than cooking staff, which is what the parent comment was actually talking about.
- Swizec 11y ago
  Ok, let me try that again: I for one would love to pay higher prices so the entire staff can get paid normal wages and I can get tastier noms.
abalone 11y ago
SF restaurant prices have in fact already gone way up. ("The biggest factor: labor") [1] It doesn't sound like you're actually offering to pay higher prices. You just want tipping built into the base price. There are restaurants experimenting with this, but it generally doesn't make them more money. [2] [1] http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Why-is-it-so-expensive-to-dine-out-in-San-6856554.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Why-is-it-so-... [2] http://sf.eater.com/2015/10/16/9557877/tipping-restaurants-san-francisco http://sf.eater.com/2015/10/16/9557877/tipping-restaurants-s...

timr 11y ago

Yep. San Francisco no longer has marginal spaces -- every conceivable inch of it has been claimed, developed, and/or bid into the stratosphere. And it has nothing to do with "NIMBYs" or lack of development. It's a tiny, tiny patch of land, all of the build-able portions of which have been speculated upon since the early 20th century. This is important, because while cafes and universities and whatnot are important, you need marginal spaces to be a creative hub. Creative people tend not to be wealthy. They need affordable, amenable places to live and work. And San Francisco doesn't fit the bill -- unless you have connections, power, fame or access to unlimited capital. Which is why SF is suffering right now. The last time this city was on discount was probably the late 1980s, when SOMA was a wasteland and everyone wanted to live in the suburbs. And surprise surprise...along came the first dot-com boom. All of those (comparatively) cheap spaces where creative kids were having raves and making art became the birthplace of the modern web. Creativity happens in marginal spaces. I was actually surprised that pg kept emphasizing the need for constraints on development in this essay ("The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about historic preservation. The tougher cities are about it, the better they seem to do.") The conventional wisdom around here is that we must refer to this kind of thinking as "NIMBYism", and condemn it as backwards-thinking. "Obviously," says the technorati, "we should be knocking those tiny old buildings down and replacing them with skyscrapers!" But he's right. San Francisco was once a cheap, pleasant place to live, precisely because of those sorts of constraints, coupled with demographic trends. But it's at a different point in the development curve today. It isn't for scrappy, poor innovators anymore. It's for ambitious, get-rich-quick types who will tolerate paying $4,000 a month for an apartment to be part of the scene. And as soon as the scene moves somewhere else, those people will be gone, too.

wbl 11y ago
Actually, much of the city isn't a city but a suburb. If you stand on Twin Peaks looking south, you will not see a single part denser than New Jersey. There is plenty of room above SF that is not used.
- timr 11y ago
  Yes, you're right. And that's one of the most ironic parts of the SF development debate: the folks who complain about "NIMBY opposition" the loudest are (usually) talking about already dense neighborhoods, like the Mission, when they should be thinking about the Outer Sunset or Laguna Honda. That said, it doesn't change my point: to change the density of these places, you have to buy out a bunch of people who know exactly what their land is worth if it's zoned for higher density. Many of them are actually betting on that windfall. There is no equivalent in SF to the vast tracts of undeveloped land in, say, Texas.

draw_down 11y ago

Maybe we don't want to continue. Maybe the insane rents will cause closures of a lot of the places that make SF attractive to the tech workers, and slowly SF will become less of a destination for them, and they will start flocking to other places instead of to SF. And then maybe tech companies will have to open offices elsewhere and the situation will equalize itself that way. But then I'm not personally invested in SF staying a tech hub.

mooreds 11y ago
Would be nice. There are network effects, though, that make this less likely. If prices "succeed" in driving people out, prices will fall to the point that people come back in (as long as the network of money and jobs stays intact).