17 ms·

Yeah, the comment section on that article is pretty sad. The number of people whose argument against building more housing is a fear that it will make the city

by skewart 11y ago

Yeah, the comment section on that article is pretty sad. The number of people whose argument against building more housing is a fear that it will make the city "ugly" is astounding. It's mind-numbingly selfish and greedy to think that a family should barely be able to make ends meet, and children should spend less time with their long-commuting parents, just so that SF can meet your personal aesthetic sensibilities. Look, I love architecture and design, and I love beautiful cities, and I would love to remake all of North America according to my personal taste. But I'm not so entitled as to think that my occaisional aesthetic pleasure is more important than someone else's basic livelihood. Also, not to mention, the whole argument that density has to be ugly and "unliveable" is utterly ridiculous and false - there are lots of dense cities that are widely considered beautiful - Paris and Barcelona come to mind. /rant As the article says, it's easy to get worked up about this stuff. I suspect the "but it will be ugly" commenters are actually well-intentioned.

rconti 11y ago
Well absolutely. And one commenter there (or here) mentioned the negative externalities of someone else's development driving down your property values or making your schools overcrowded or whatever. All of these things are deserving of sympathy and consideration, but.. well, currently they're getting too much of it.
- skewart 11y ago
  Absolutely. > or making your schools overcrowded To which I say, build more schools! With more housing and people comes a bigger tax base and more money to fund infrastructure improvements. I don't know a single pro-construction person who doesn't also vigorously support improving urban infrastructure.
  - bhickey 11y ago
    With Prop 13 in place, cities and towns can't adjust taxes to cover their budgets. It behooves a Bay Area municipality to seek out commercial investment and drive away residential.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > It behooves a Bay Area municipality to seek out commercial investment and drive away residential. AIUI, (and I might not understand correctly) that's not quite right. If you make significant improvements [0] to a piece of land the value of just those improvements are assessed and added to the assessed value of that land. So -IIRC- if the owner of a two-story multi-family dwelling demolishes the building and builds a fifty-story building in its place, his assessed property value would be the same as it would if he had purchased that property with the new construction on it. [0] Like -for instance- adding on a new room to a house.
      - bhickey 11y ago
        What you've said is true, but misses the point. Office buildings don't require schools in the same way houses do. Look at the development in Palo Alto over the last ten years. It's largely commercial and this isn't an accident.
        simoncion 11y ago
        I'm afraid you've missed the point. :) Prop 13 caps the rate of property tax increase... only if there is either no new development on a property, or if the property changes hands in one of the ways that triggers the property valuation reassessment. A city should be strongly encouraging the periodic demolition and/or radical improvement of existing structures... whether they be commercial or residential. New construction and new improvements get taxed at their "market rate" valuation. Given how insane prices are in the area (and how very, very little teachers make), I find it hard to believe that tax revenues from new construction wouldn't cover the costs required to support new families. > Look at the development in Palo Alto over the last ten years. It's largely commercial and this isn't an accident. coughredliningcough :)
    - rconti 11y ago
      Well, or new residential assessed at new rates. I'm not sure how free cities are to change their tax rates, my understanding is the major problem with Prop 13 is that existing owner's taxes can't go up very fast. But if a new resident displaces an older one, the tax value resets and the tax receipts go up. Same for building new residential, you get a bunch of taxpayers at the 'current' rate. But I'm guessing there are also limits on overall rates because otherwise property tax rates would have gone up to make up for the 'lost' revenue from owners who are grandfathered in.
- davidf18 11y ago
  Actually, because of the "rent seeking" of using politics to artificially constrain supply creating artificial scarcity, their property is valued much more than it should be valued without the market inefficiency. So, yes, their property values will fall because they were artificially inflated. The same happened to NYC Taxi Medallion owners where each medallion had a market value of $1.2 million because of the artificial limit of medallions and once Uber came along, the value dropped to $700,000. Similarly, billionaire developers like Donald Trump will see his property values drop but that is only because they were artificially inflated.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    > the value dropped to $700,000. Looks more like $500,000 now[1]. Although, I have no idea how accurate or trustworthy that site is, it just came up quick from Google. 1: http://nycitycab.com/business/taximedallionlist.aspx http://nycitycab.com/business/taximedallionlist.aspx
  - warfangle 11y ago
    Wasn't just uber and lyft, the outer borough taxis steppd up their game after they were allowed to pick up street hails (but not in Manhattan).
Animats 11y ago
Paris has a height limit. It only applies within the city proper, though. So, at the end of the Champs-Élysées, there is now La Defense, just outside the city limit and full of skyscrapers. La Defense is now referred to as the financial center of Paris, much to the annoyance of Parisians.
- skewart 11y ago
  Sure. The point is that Paris is about three times as dense as SF and it still is widely considered a "beautiful" city.
  - fizx 11y ago
    Paris's characteristic "beautiful" architecture is six stories tall stone, SF's is three stories tall wood. Unfortunately SF was started on a major fault, and probably without nearby quarries (which would be insane to use in an earthquake zone anyways). So now we're stuck in a dichotomy between 4+ stories steel and glass, and the "original" SF Edwardian architecture, which doesn't scale as well as Paris's stone.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      DC's architecture is converging on 12-14 stories steel and glass and it looks great while allowing a lot of density.
      - blackbagboys 11y ago
        Speak for yourself. Considerations of urban policy and planning aside, I think the massive identical condo blocks popping up everywhere, and especially the developments in Navy Yard, are awful to look at and unpleasant to live around.
        Philadelphia 11y ago
        I agree. DC is really unfriendly at street level in a lot of areas. Giant blank-walled buildings that take up multiple entire blocks.
henrikschroder 11y ago
Every single house in this city "ruined" the view of another house, or destroyed a piece of nature to be built, and was considered "ugly" at one point. Every single house except the first. Every single person who moved to this city either displaced someone already living here, or caused a new house to be built. The whole purpose of a city is to put buildings in front of each other! It's astounding that the negative people think that a city of a million people is "just right", and any larger is a priori wrong. We could build a city this size where there was nothing, but building a city twice as dense is apparently impossible, despite overwhelming evidence of it being possible elsewhere. /rant
CamperBob2 11y ago
There are two things that continually surprise me about life in the modern, Internet-enabled age... two things that I would never have dreamed would happen, if you'd asked the 1996 version of me what American life would be like in 2016. One is our increasing indulgence in irrationality, to the extent that we almost celebrate it. I would never have guessed that hard-right social conservatism would still be a dominant force in American politics, much less a booming business. So I got that wrong, and I'm willing to admit that happened because I didn't take the time to understand those who thought differently from myself, or how their social motivations, family backgrounds, and economic pressures are different from my own. So, my bad. The other is the continuing notion that it's somehow desirable, much less necessary, to cram everyone into a few high-density cities on either coast. From a 1990s perspective, it appeared that the growing availability of fast Internet connections and the rise of online social, technical, and business networking resources was finally going to liberate us from crowded, noisy, polluted urban prisons with endless traffic jams, out-of-control taxes, and multi-kilobuck rents. It should have become both possible and desirable to do anything from anywhere, from the middle of flyover territory to the north coast of Alaska to the freaking International Space Station. Instead, we just get more of the same complaints. Rent is too damn high, there's too much traffic, and man, San Francisco/Seattle/Austin/New York used to be cool until all these techies/hippies/yuppies/homeless people/Republicans showed up and ruined it. I'm not willing to concede that my worldview is wrong about this. This time, it's everyone else who's being stupid and needs to get a clue. Just leave.
- willholloway 11y ago
  You're not wrong. Any developer for example that can find remote work can benefit from the plummeting real estate costs to be found in any of the areas that have seen an outflow of people in search of work in urban areas. There are countless communities across the US that are aging, as the youth have moved to the metropolis to work. Anyone that can extract money from the internet can benefit from this trend. Couple that with low interest rates, good credit and a duplex and you can live without paying a cent for housing. This works well in towns with some sort of natural beauty, but few jobs. Grab those tourist dollars via airbnb rentals and take it easy.
freyr 11y ago
On the one hand, you have established residents pushing back against expansion, construction, and denser housing -- perhaps to preserve what they value in their community, or perhaps out of personal interest and to drive up their property values. On the other, you have a massive influx of tech workers who have convinced themselves that they must live in this small, overpriced city for their basic livelihood, and that the city should rapidly rebuild itself to accommodate them. There's entitlement on both sides. Could San Francisco have higher population density to accommodate the recent surge in housing demand? Sure. It already has the second highest population density in the U.S., but it could be denser. But the truth is there's no way to guarantee affordable housing for everyone who decides they would like to live in a small, in-demand city on the tip of a tiny peninsula. There will always be people who can't afford it. > But I'm not so entitled as to think that my occaisional aesthetic pleasure is more important than someone else's basic livelihood. No, but you're entitled enough to think that a city should be rebuilt to accommodate your livelihood, rather than your livelihood determining where you can reasonably afford to live. You're entitled enough to think you must live in SF, and you shouldn't have to consider living somewhere more affordable. If you can barely make ends meet and can't see your kids because you're commute is so long, why subject yourself to that? As much as I'd like San Francisco's housing prices to come down, I also think rebuilding should be done responsibly and not rushed to accommodate a relatively recent surge in demand.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  Man "entitlement" is such a weird word, and such a weird way to frame the issue. There are property owners who would like to build on their own property, not hurting anyone. And being told they're not allowed to because rich people like the aesthetic. There's poor people being priced out of their own city because of this. Who's entitled? And this is hardly the first time a US city has experienced growth.
  - freyr 11y ago
    Yes, it's somewhat a matter of perspective. Although I'd point out that it's not just rich people who appreciate San Francisco's aesthetic.
technofiend 11y ago
I'm not defending her view but in my limited experience (Houston) developers build for profitablility and not aesthetics, and actively fight any laws designed to constrain their aesthetic choices again due to profitablility. So I think it's perfectly fine to build a Paris-like building if you must build something. It'll just never happen without legal action.
rayiner 11y ago
Also, San Francisco is already ugly. It's not like you'd be razing historically important beaux arts buildings to build more.
- mc32 11y ago
  Beautiful and ugly architecture can be pretty subjective. But, yeah, SFists have an above average tendency towards preservation. Not even sure why when in most other senses SFists believe in change.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    Environmentalism is a movement devoted to stasis for its own sake; I bet it would poll pretty well in SF.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  Many would disagree. But if you think it's ugly, that's fine -- you don't need to visit or live there.
- chmaynard 11y ago
  In my experience, San Francisco is a beautiful city when viewed from a distance, but rather unfriendly and dirty up close.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Really? The view from Sausalito is mistakable for that of a garbage dump.
  - dipnuggetron 11y ago
    Well said, never thought of it that way.
patmcguire 11y ago
Saw one about Sunset, "hey, maybe we should mix a three to four story building in there some places" followed by outrage about the ascetic value of the Sunset. Nonsense friend who grew up there used to get lost growing u because they built the whole neighborhood from a few dozen house designs... everything repeats after a few blocks, it's like Sim City 2000.

by skewart 11y ago

rconti 11y ago

Well absolutely. And one commenter there (or here) mentioned the negative externalities of someone else's development driving down your property values or making your schools overcrowded or whatever. All of these things are deserving of sympathy and consideration, but.. well, currently they're getting too much of it.

skewart 11y ago
Absolutely. > or making your schools overcrowded To which I say, build more schools! With more housing and people comes a bigger tax base and more money to fund infrastructure improvements. I don't know a single pro-construction person who doesn't also vigorously support improving urban infrastructure.
- bhickey 11y ago
  With Prop 13 in place, cities and towns can't adjust taxes to cover their budgets. It behooves a Bay Area municipality to seek out commercial investment and drive away residential.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > It behooves a Bay Area municipality to seek out commercial investment and drive away residential. AIUI, (and I might not understand correctly) that's not quite right. If you make significant improvements [0] to a piece of land the value of just those improvements are assessed and added to the assessed value of that land. So -IIRC- if the owner of a two-story multi-family dwelling demolishes the building and builds a fifty-story building in its place, his assessed property value would be the same as it would if he had purchased that property with the new construction on it. [0] Like -for instance- adding on a new room to a house.
    - bhickey 11y ago
      What you've said is true, but misses the point. Office buildings don't require schools in the same way houses do. Look at the development in Palo Alto over the last ten years. It's largely commercial and this isn't an accident.
      - simoncion 11y ago
        I'm afraid you've missed the point. :) Prop 13 caps the rate of property tax increase... only if there is either no new development on a property, or if the property changes hands in one of the ways that triggers the property valuation reassessment. A city should be strongly encouraging the periodic demolition and/or radical improvement of existing structures... whether they be commercial or residential. New construction and new improvements get taxed at their "market rate" valuation. Given how insane prices are in the area (and how very, very little teachers make), I find it hard to believe that tax revenues from new construction wouldn't cover the costs required to support new families. > Look at the development in Palo Alto over the last ten years. It's largely commercial and this isn't an accident. coughredliningcough :)
  - rconti 11y ago
    Well, or new residential assessed at new rates. I'm not sure how free cities are to change their tax rates, my understanding is the major problem with Prop 13 is that existing owner's taxes can't go up very fast. But if a new resident displaces an older one, the tax value resets and the tax receipts go up. Same for building new residential, you get a bunch of taxpayers at the 'current' rate. But I'm guessing there are also limits on overall rates because otherwise property tax rates would have gone up to make up for the 'lost' revenue from owners who are grandfathered in.
davidf18 11y ago
Actually, because of the "rent seeking" of using politics to artificially constrain supply creating artificial scarcity, their property is valued much more than it should be valued without the market inefficiency. So, yes, their property values will fall because they were artificially inflated. The same happened to NYC Taxi Medallion owners where each medallion had a market value of $1.2 million because of the artificial limit of medallions and once Uber came along, the value dropped to $700,000. Similarly, billionaire developers like Donald Trump will see his property values drop but that is only because they were artificially inflated.
- kbenson 11y ago
  > the value dropped to $700,000. Looks more like $500,000 now[1]. Although, I have no idea how accurate or trustworthy that site is, it just came up quick from Google. 1: http://nycitycab.com/business/taximedallionlist.aspx http://nycitycab.com/business/taximedallionlist.aspx
- warfangle 11y ago
  Wasn't just uber and lyft, the outer borough taxis steppd up their game after they were allowed to pick up street hails (but not in Manhattan).

Animats 11y ago

Paris has a height limit. It only applies within the city proper, though. So, at the end of the Champs-Élysées, there is now La Defense, just outside the city limit and full of skyscrapers. La Defense is now referred to as the financial center of Paris, much to the annoyance of Parisians.

skewart 11y ago
Sure. The point is that Paris is about three times as dense as SF and it still is widely considered a "beautiful" city.
- fizx 11y ago
  Paris's characteristic "beautiful" architecture is six stories tall stone, SF's is three stories tall wood. Unfortunately SF was started on a major fault, and probably without nearby quarries (which would be insane to use in an earthquake zone anyways). So now we're stuck in a dichotomy between 4+ stories steel and glass, and the "original" SF Edwardian architecture, which doesn't scale as well as Paris's stone.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    DC's architecture is converging on 12-14 stories steel and glass and it looks great while allowing a lot of density.
    - blackbagboys 11y ago
      Speak for yourself. Considerations of urban policy and planning aside, I think the massive identical condo blocks popping up everywhere, and especially the developments in Navy Yard, are awful to look at and unpleasant to live around.
      - Philadelphia 11y ago
        I agree. DC is really unfriendly at street level in a lot of areas. Giant blank-walled buildings that take up multiple entire blocks.

henrikschroder 11y ago

Every single house in this city "ruined" the view of another house, or destroyed a piece of nature to be built, and was considered "ugly" at one point. Every single house except the first. Every single person who moved to this city either displaced someone already living here, or caused a new house to be built. The whole purpose of a city is to put buildings in front of each other! It's astounding that the negative people think that a city of a million people is "just right", and any larger is a priori wrong. We could build a city this size where there was nothing, but building a city twice as dense is apparently impossible, despite overwhelming evidence of it being possible elsewhere. /rant

CamperBob2 11y ago

There are two things that continually surprise me about life in the modern, Internet-enabled age... two things that I would never have dreamed would happen, if you'd asked the 1996 version of me what American life would be like in 2016. One is our increasing indulgence in irrationality, to the extent that we almost celebrate it. I would never have guessed that hard-right social conservatism would still be a dominant force in American politics, much less a booming business. So I got that wrong, and I'm willing to admit that happened because I didn't take the time to understand those who thought differently from myself, or how their social motivations, family backgrounds, and economic pressures are different from my own. So, my bad. The other is the continuing notion that it's somehow desirable, much less necessary, to cram everyone into a few high-density cities on either coast. From a 1990s perspective, it appeared that the growing availability of fast Internet connections and the rise of online social, technical, and business networking resources was finally going to liberate us from crowded, noisy, polluted urban prisons with endless traffic jams, out-of-control taxes, and multi-kilobuck rents. It should have become both possible and desirable to do anything from anywhere, from the middle of flyover territory to the north coast of Alaska to the freaking International Space Station. Instead, we just get more of the same complaints. Rent is too damn high, there's too much traffic, and man, San Francisco/Seattle/Austin/New York used to be cool until all these techies/hippies/yuppies/homeless people/Republicans showed up and ruined it. I'm not willing to concede that my worldview is wrong about this. This time, it's everyone else who's being stupid and needs to get a clue. Just leave.

willholloway 11y ago
You're not wrong. Any developer for example that can find remote work can benefit from the plummeting real estate costs to be found in any of the areas that have seen an outflow of people in search of work in urban areas. There are countless communities across the US that are aging, as the youth have moved to the metropolis to work. Anyone that can extract money from the internet can benefit from this trend. Couple that with low interest rates, good credit and a duplex and you can live without paying a cent for housing. This works well in towns with some sort of natural beauty, but few jobs. Grab those tourist dollars via airbnb rentals and take it easy.

freyr 11y ago

On the one hand, you have established residents pushing back against expansion, construction, and denser housing -- perhaps to preserve what they value in their community, or perhaps out of personal interest and to drive up their property values. On the other, you have a massive influx of tech workers who have convinced themselves that they must live in this small, overpriced city for their basic livelihood, and that the city should rapidly rebuild itself to accommodate them. There's entitlement on both sides. Could San Francisco have higher population density to accommodate the recent surge in housing demand? Sure. It already has the second highest population density in the U.S., but it could be denser. But the truth is there's no way to guarantee affordable housing for everyone who decides they would like to live in a small, in-demand city on the tip of a tiny peninsula. There will always be people who can't afford it. > But I'm not so entitled as to think that my occaisional aesthetic pleasure is more important than someone else's basic livelihood. No, but you're entitled enough to think that a city should be rebuilt to accommodate your livelihood, rather than your livelihood determining where you can reasonably afford to live. You're entitled enough to think you must live in SF, and you shouldn't have to consider living somewhere more affordable. If you can barely make ends meet and can't see your kids because you're commute is so long, why subject yourself to that? As much as I'd like San Francisco's housing prices to come down, I also think rebuilding should be done responsibly and not rushed to accommodate a relatively recent surge in demand.

Houshalter 11y ago
Man "entitlement" is such a weird word, and such a weird way to frame the issue. There are property owners who would like to build on their own property, not hurting anyone. And being told they're not allowed to because rich people like the aesthetic. There's poor people being priced out of their own city because of this. Who's entitled? And this is hardly the first time a US city has experienced growth.
- freyr 11y ago
  Yes, it's somewhat a matter of perspective. Although I'd point out that it's not just rich people who appreciate San Francisco's aesthetic.

technofiend 11y ago

I'm not defending her view but in my limited experience (Houston) developers build for profitablility and not aesthetics, and actively fight any laws designed to constrain their aesthetic choices again due to profitablility. So I think it's perfectly fine to build a Paris-like building if you must build something. It'll just never happen without legal action.

rayiner 11y ago

Also, San Francisco is already ugly. It's not like you'd be razing historically important beaux arts buildings to build more.

mc32 11y ago
Beautiful and ugly architecture can be pretty subjective. But, yeah, SFists have an above average tendency towards preservation. Not even sure why when in most other senses SFists believe in change.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  Environmentalism is a movement devoted to stasis for its own sake; I bet it would poll pretty well in SF.
kafkaesq 11y ago
Many would disagree. But if you think it's ugly, that's fine -- you don't need to visit or live there.
chmaynard 11y ago
In my experience, San Francisco is a beautiful city when viewed from a distance, but rather unfriendly and dirty up close.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Really? The view from Sausalito is mistakable for that of a garbage dump.
- dipnuggetron 11y ago
  Well said, never thought of it that way.

patmcguire 11y ago

Saw one about Sunset, "hey, maybe we should mix a three to four story building in there some places" followed by outrage about the ascetic value of the Sunset. Nonsense friend who grew up there used to get lost growing u because they built the whole neighborhood from a few dozen house designs... everything repeats after a few blocks, it's like Sim City 2000.