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Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
- corysama 10y agoVery beautiful, poetic, relevant to a lot of the audience of HN, and props for detailing the tech behind it. Meanwhile... the highest and lowest hex I can spot is 1265 / 457 = a ratio of 2.76 with both endpoints having relatively steep curves compared to the rest of the histogram. With the graph's Z0 set to 457 and Zscale set to an arbitrary ratio, the sculpture-graph conveys the impression that there is a discrepancy of 5 or more times between the top of hill on the bottom tier vs the nearby flat area of the top tier. When the reality is something more like 1234 / 810 = 1.5
- tantalor 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY
- corysama 10y agoVery true. So, the question becomes: is this 3D printed chart misleading or is it focused on the relevant data? I must stress that I'm realize I'm being very analytic about a piece of art. As art and as a statement, I recognize that it is very well done. I just don't have much to say about it other than wondering if it is misleading.
- dougmccune 10y agoCan the answer be both? If you're trying to use it as a chart to figure out home prices it doesn't provide enough information and it's misleading when it comes to determining the numeric relationship between regions. But if you're using it to get a sense of the impossibility of moving from one of the lower-cost parts of the city to one of the more expensive areas of SF, I think this captures that emotional feeling. I say that as a former SF homeowner who used to live right below the base of that big cliff face going from the Richmond up to Twin Peaks/Noe Valley. Looking at home prices in those areas gives you that feeling of smashing your face against one of those cliff walls.
- corysama 10y agoI feel ya. Thanks for making this and thanks for sharing it!
- Camillo 10y agoWhat are you talking about? The Richmond is not adjacent to Twin Peaks or Noe Valley. It's not even close. There are several neighborhoods in between.
- dougmccune 10y agoYou're right, but I was talking about the steady increase in price as you move from the Inner Richmond southeast toward Noe Valley on the sculpture. That cuts through the Haight, Cole Valley, Castro, etc. In terms of how I binned the data by hexagons, that's a diagonal progression across 4 adjacent hexagons, moving from an average price of $766/sq ft on the eastern side of the Inner Richmond across all the way up to $1,050 in Noe Valley. In the photos of the sculpture it might be hard to identify how much that rising part of the sculpture is actually moving south, but it is (and can be seen a bit better if you play with the model yourself or watch the animated gif of it rotating).
- dougmccune 10y agoVery good point! Yeah, please be advised there's artistic license taken and the Z-axis scale is arbitrary (well, not arbitrary, it's linear but stretched and certainly doesn't start at 0). You're totally right that the difference between the lowest areas and the highest isn't really as exaggerated as it appears. The real delta between lowest and highest is about 2.7x. I'd argue though that a difference between ~$500/sq ft vs $1,200/sq ft is enough of a difference to make the top of the range feel entirely out of reach for anyone living in the bottom of the range, and that's what the sculpture was meant to convey.
- arcticbull 10y agoMy interpretation of it was that a 2.7X delta in price between lowest and highest isn't correlated linearly with affordability. i.e. a house that's twice as expensive per square foot doesn't make it half as affordable. People who already have to leverage themselves extensively to mortgage a property will never afford a property twice as expensive per square foot so it's actually infinitely less affordable, if you see what I mean.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- oldmanjay 10y agoThat's the sort of "artistic license" that leads the adherents to the politics of envy to make proclamations about how life is somehow less worth living when you know someone else has more than you. When charitable, people call it hyperbole. At its core, it is simple emotional manipulation. At least you were subtle about it!
- ramses0 10y agoTruly, you'd want to pin rent as 25% of income and then have the height be related to where you would need to be on the U.S. income scale as a percentile to be able to afford it. ie: You've got a $899,000 home sale, that's supposedly a ~$4000/mo rent, which leads towards a "25% rule" of $16,000/mo income => $192,000/yr => which is supposedly 93.9%-ile. Going from $4000/mo => $5000/mo, it seems like it takes you to 96.8%-ile.
- moseandre 10y agoThis is really nice art and data visualization too. It's common to scale the elevation of a topographic map to exaggerate features [1], even non-linearly [2]. If you try to 3d print a raised relief globe without exaggeration it is surprisingly flat. If you're buying an expensive classroom globe, the specs talk about the exaggeration [2]. This is a sculpture, so whatever goes, but perhaps the designer looked at the version without exaggeration and noticed that it looked less emphatic. I also think, as data visualization, this sculpture nicely shows the extreme change in price which occurs over small spatial distances. That's really important, and, actually, the tendency to make real estate price heatmaps with models that force continuity and prefer smoothness, like cubic splines, suppresses that aspect of the data. Railroad tracks and some beautification really are sometimes the only thing between million dollar homes and mobile parks. It would be cool to see this with neighborhood boundaries/names on the mesh. [1] "A raised-relief map or terrain model is a three-dimensional representation, usually of terrain, materialized as a physical artifact. When representing terrain, the vertical dimension is usually exaggerated by a factor between five and ten; this facilitates the visual recognition of terrain features." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised-relief_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised-relief_map [2] "Raised Relief: Yes. Elevations from 0-3,280 feet are magnified 60 times, higher elevations and ocean floor are exaggerated by 40 times." http://www.1worldglobes.com/1WorldGlobes/classroom_relief_globe.htm http://www.1worldglobes.com/1WorldGlobes/classroom_relief_gl...
- khoury 10y agoCool
- Cenk 10y agoWow, this looks amazing. I’d love to see more sculptures based on data.
- tomschlick 10y agoAs an outsider, the solution to the SF housing issues seem pretty simple... Vote out the NIMBY politicians and replace them with people who will change zoning laws to allow for more building. I'd assume almost no one likes the current situation unless they are a landlord.
- umeshunni 10y ago>> almost no one likes the current situation unless they are a landlord. Anyone who owns property in the city, whether they are a homeowner or a landlord, likes the current situation. For non-landlord homeowners, the current situation keeps their property values and home equity high and it ensures that the neighborhood and quality of life they bought into stays permanently stuck in time. My local Nimby group, for e.g., sends out monthly notices (e.g http://pastebin.com/0TJiV0aM http://pastebin.com/0TJiV0aM ) letting us know where the next development is, why we should protest it and sends us sample templates on how to email politicians to protest any new development. While large developers are probably able to lobby politicians, I doubt they're able to do this kind of astroturfing.
- lr 10y agoA lot of people who do not own (i.e., renters) in SF also do not want high rises. They feel like SF would have a long way to go before all of the foreign money runs out and those apartments would become affordable to them. In short, they don't think more building will benefit them in terms of housing, but will instead be bad for them in terms of quality of life, e.g., more people and traffic, etc.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoHigh rises are one thing but they are not the way to solve SF's housing shortage. One 5-story building on one corner of every block in the sunset would easily relieve the shortage. Geographically speaking most of SF already suffers from poor quality of life. Except for the northeast quadrant of the city, SF is dominated by flat, boring, ugly zones of car-centered banality. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7398485,-122.5023375,3a,75y,171.61h,76.92t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s1DuoxbLQ7H7iToQ9TZGoYA!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D1DuoxbLQ7H7iToQ9TZGoYA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D48.55154%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7398485,-122.5023375,3a,75y,... There's nothing in this photo worth preserving.
- audleman 10y agoWhy hasn't this guy donned all black and put this piece for sale in a swanky gallery for $1mil? It's the perfect blend of art and social commentary, and beautiful to boot!
- dougmccune 10y agoIf you come pick it up it can be yours for the low low price of a cool half mil. But seriously, I'm just dipping my toes into this whole artist thing, I definitely don't know how to navigate the gallery/sales world. Right now I just like making shit, maybe one day I'll try to make some money doing it.
- ethanbond 10y agoWatch Exit Through the Gift Shop and be inspired, or disgusted, then wealthy! This is awesome work, really cool concept and fantastic execution.
- iaw 10y agoDoug, set up a shop with your designs for sale.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoAnd if you don't want to (because you'd rather be making art than websites, say), then ask. There are a metric truckload of people here who could do one for you...
- dougmccune 10y agoThanks for the suggestion. It's not the website aspect of selling stuff that's the blocker. It's more the figuring out how to do pricing, shipping, networking in the art world, etc. And I'm still working up the self confidence to be able to call myself an artist with a straight face and say it confidently enough to ask for money and get someone to write a check.
- swampthinker 10y agoSeems like the site went down, and Google Cache isn't helping.
- dougmccune 10y agoYeah, it was up and down for a bit. If it's down again and people want to see the visuals, here's the post as one large image: http://imgur.com/a/cIk1h http://imgur.com/a/cIk1h
- adt2bt 10y agoMirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://dougmccune.com/blog/2016/07/21/sculpture-of-housing-prices-ripping-san-francisco-apart/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- dougmccune 10y agoAlso, in case that doesn't work for some reason, here's the post as one big image: http://imgur.com/a/cIk1h http://imgur.com/a/cIk1h
- johnwheeler 10y agowhen i first saw the sculpture, i was like, hmm... then, when i read the article, i was like... WHOA!!!
- abritinthebay 10y agoLovely piece! A little misleading with it's z-axis (given the range isn't very much and it seems exaggerated or logarithmic at least) but that's more artistic license, which is fair (and pretty). I would be interested to see what it would look like with a more linear scale though.
- notadoc 10y agoWhy is SF so opposed to building up? Build more high rises filled with apartments and condos, there are plenty of areas that could be rezoned to accommodate high rise living.
- lr 10y agoI lived in SF for 17 years (moved to NYC 3 years ago), and there is one very simple reason: NIMBY. Most SFers would rather see suburban sprawl and the destruction of precious farmland than build up "their" city. They are fundamentally opposed to the "Manhattan-ization of SF".
- mmanfrin 10y agoThere are a lot of buildings going up, however many people (who are ironically most affected by the high prices) oppose new building because it displaces locals. It's a catch-22 of displacement: high prices are making the city unaffordable, but adding new housing displaces current residents. So in the end, people just blame tech, because it's an easier boogeyman than dealing with the issue of housing directly.
- stevewilhelm 10y agoThis ignores the impact on all the services and infrastructure that would be effected by additional housing: transit, roads, hospitals, schools, etc.
- Houshalter 10y agoAll of which could be paid for much better by distributing the taxes over the new residents. Economies of scale should make denser cities cheaper and more efficient.
- stevewilhelm 10y agoIt is very expensive and time consuming to do major infrastructure projects in San Francisco. Case in point: "Due to the capital cost ($1.578 billion for the 1.7 mile light rail line), the Central Subway project has come under criticism from transit activists for what they consider to be poor cost-effectiveness.[20] In particular, they note that Muni's own estimates[21] show that the project would increase Muni ridership by less than 1% and yet by 2030 be adding $15.2 million a year to Muni's annual operating deficit." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway
- bsurmanski 10y agoThe one thing that is missing from the article is a top view of the sculpture. Although I believe it, I would like to see the sculpture align to the outline of the city.
- dougmccune 10y agoIt does if you can get far enough away to take a photo without the perspective distortion being too great. Here's the model with a few shots going from looking directly straight down and then slowly rotating the perspective: http://imgur.com/a/b4SGy http://imgur.com/a/b4SGy
- rubidium 10y ago"but if neighboring areas are too far from each other I allow them to split, tearing the city along its most severe economic divides." Interesting that, from an artistic standpoint, the high delta's in nearby neighborhoods house price leads to a more interesting sculpture. The city may be 'torn', but in this case it's a good thing... assuming you think mixed neighborhoods are better than the alternative (gated communities and slums).
- largote 10y agoThanks, this is great for not giving the site traffic.
- thinkpad20 10y agoThe sculpture is really beautiful, but is the real issue that San Francisco is "ripping apart"? Even the lowest numbers on that chart ($457/square foot) are more than double the average price per square foot in Chicago ($219 according to trulia.com), for example. Is SF ripping apart, or simply becoming so gentrified as to be only livable by the wealthy?
- unstatusthequo 10y agoMaybe if he sells a lot of these he can afford a million dollar fixer upper or teardown.
- dougmccune 10y agoI moved to Oakland
- Apocryphon 10y agoLet's hope that you won't have to build a second sculpture for there in the future, too. But Oakland seems to have more prudent housing measures in place.
- etrautmann 10y agoI love the aesthetics and implementation - very cool. In reality, however, I think of the rip more between everything that's there and what's not pictured. The difference between the top and bottom home sales is not all that much, though the social divide between those who could afford to stay and those who can't even live here at all anymore is the underlying purpose. I guess I don't buy that the home prices are dividing the landed gentry in Noe valley from pac heights as much as the rich elite from everyone else who's not buying homes in SF.
- thatsso1999 10y agoyou should post this on thingiverse! you'd get a lot of appreciation there for the impressiveness of the print itself (as a fellow 3D printerer, daaaaaaaamn), and honestly it's so gorgeous I wouldn't be surprised if it got featured.
- dougmccune 10y agogood call, will do!
- SocksCanClose 10y agoThis is actually -- and I'm sure the artist will agree, albeit with a heavy heart -- a really great representation of investment opportunities.
- bunkydoo 10y agoIf you don't like the house prices, move out of San Francisco
- imh 10y agoI don't like the housing prices. I would love to move somewhere I could afford a house with a nice yard, instead of my little condo. But I don't know anywhere else I can have the career security as a data scientist that I have here. If something goes wrong in the bay area, there are always tons of other places hiring.
- laksjd 10y agoBut I guess that means that the prices are justified. If it's better for you to live in SF, even at the high rent/prices, than it is to move somewhere else, then the prices seem to be low enough.
- whordeley 10y agoWOW, this is utterly profound! Like that time someone put an empty McDonalds cup on the floor of a fine art museum and everyone stood around proclaiming its genius.
- sliverstorm 10y agoOr, somewhat the reverse: http://qz.com/535482/italian-museum-cleaners-mistook-a-contemporary-art-piece-for-trash/ http://qz.com/535482/italian-museum-cleaners-mistook-a-conte...
- hoprocker 10y agoLovely idea, fascinating way to visualize demographics. One comment, and not at all a criticism of the art: I'm not sure if relative property values between neighborhoods really describes how SF is being ripped apart over time; for that, it might be more accurate to graph, say, proportional difference in median rent over the past n years, which might more closely hew to contested neighborhoods (ie, Pacific Heights doesn't usually catch headlines for how much it's changed in the last 5 years).
- kofejnik 10y agoPeople keep saying 'SF should allow for more development' as if it's a universal human right to live in SF; while current residents are being mean by not wanting highrises on their block. SF is nice, more people want to live there than there's space, hence, not everyone can afford it. Why would the current owners/residents want to change that? I really don't get it.
- heartsucker 10y agoThink of it reverse. Is it a universal right to have luxurious places to live in a high demand area? Why would people who want to move into or remain in SF on a budget not want to change that? This is why issues like this are complicated. Both sides have some merit. (also, not taking sides since I don't live there any more)
- kofejnik 10y agoNot very complicated, there are universal human rights, plus whatever is guaranteed in a relevant constitution. Everything else is for those who can afford it. Luxurious place in high demand area is one example. (should we strive to make Ferraris affordable?) Otherwise, can people come live in your apartment? Why do you keep your place and your food and your car to yourself? Certainly a lot of people would want to change that.
- heartsucker 10y agoOk, sure. It's not a universal human right, but we can do better than the absolute minimum to give some semblance of equality to people instead of leaving people's lives to the fate of where they were born in the world and how rich their parents were. If there was universal health care out in the world that said vaccinations and emergency procedures were free for everyone, but if you were born on Feb 1st, you also got a personal trainer and free cosmetic surgery, everyone else would be within reason to complain about such a system. This is effectively what is happening here.
- 10y ago
- bborud 10y agoThis is indeed poetic: sculpture bemoaning gentrification realized through the kind of technology that is celebrated by bearded hipster millionaires that drive up housing prices.
- dougmccune 10y agoThe irony of a rich white male bay-area programmer using a 3D printer and data viz to explore/comment on housing prices in SF does not escape me.
- smoyer 10y agoI'm in awe ... it's so organic looking (but then I guess homo sapiens are technically organic). The only problem I see with sculpture for data visualization is when your boss asks for an updated report next week. Thanks for sharing!