10 ms·

>> 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, like

>> 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 ago
A 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 ago
  High 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.
  - maxsilver 10y ago
    > There's nothing in this photo worth preserving. In the Midwest, if someone built that photo (exactly) it would get called a strong downtown urban design, and the builder would be praised for creating "missing middle" housing.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      Well I heard there's a couple of nice towns in the midwest, like Chicago :-) Even in the most reactionary fringes of the midwest people are starting to realize that exurban sprawl isn't working. See for example http://newsok.com/article/5505468 http://newsok.com/article/5505468
      - seanp2k2 10y ago
        Chicago is the best city in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin. They have nothing to compare. I'd live there except the lack of mountains, lack of an ocean (surfing doesn't work on the Great Lakes even though they're beautiful), and freezing winters + hot humid Summer's would kill me. I can't go back to that. West coast; best coast.
  - lr 10y ago
    Yes, it is a suburb inside of a city. And the inhabitants of that area of The City like it that way. The people who live in the Sunset and Richmond form very powerful political blocks, and you're going to have to do a lot to unseat their representatives on the Board of Supervisors.
    - lr 10y ago
      Maybe start-ups can convince their employees to move to the Sunset with the singular goal of voting in a pro-growth person to the Board of Supervisors. You can do this one district at a time.
      - meddlepal 10y ago
- rictic 10y ago
  How do you square the narrative "units in these high rises would be bought out by investors and so no one would get to rent them" with "these high rises would attract too many people and too much traffic to the neighborhood"
  - 3s933x7dpsh 10y ago
    +1. If the problem is that absent foreign investors are buying up all the housing stock, maybe we should make a 100 story tower on some parking lot in SOMA and sell each floor as a $5M luxurious penthouse unit with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country. Boom, we just took a bunch of those foreign investors out of the market without increasing traffic and decreased the annual US trade deficit by 1% to boot. Fundamentally, if people outside the country want to buy our housing, we should be happy about that, and create jobs by building housing to meet the demand. Imagine if our reaction to Chinese demand for Buicks was to limit car manufacturing and complain that foreign investors are making Buicks unaffordable.
    - WildUtah 10y ago
      "with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country." If we could prevent them from getting a visa to come at all, we could do the same thing and we wouldn't even have to build the building. Just allocate a few address numbers on ritzy street corners and sell the "buildings" to investors stashing Russian or Chinese black market cash.
      - int_19h 10y ago
        Think about all the future and derivative opportunities, too... Heck, we could do high-frequency house trading!
      - 3s933x7dpsh 10y ago
        Of course it's an absurd analogy, there would not be much value if there is no underlying property you can make use of. But I think it illustrates the point well: if the high prices were caused by absent foreign investors, 101 would not be jammed. More realistically, investors rent out the properties they buy. So a market with tons of foreign investors spending irrationally would have an undersupply of homes to buy and corresponding oversupply of homes for rent. Renters would get a great deal and buyers would get bad ROI.
- dcosson 10y ago
  > 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 The frustrating thing about this NIMBY argument, is that it's usually presented as the progressive option, it's standing up for the people. But in reality it's often selfish - homeowners/landlords who have a lot to gain are gaining support for their cause, by getting the disenfranchised to basically decide "If I'm going to be priced out of the city anyway, I'm gonna take as many other people as I can out with me". When in reality, many of them would have a shot at not getting priced out at all with better policy (or at least a shot at making "getting priced out" not so bad, e.g. more housing supply in the city & in neighboring towns -> prices drop a little in the city -> prices drop a lot outside of the city within easy commuting distance).
SilasX 10y ago
Astroturfing is when they send out of a bunch of professional advocacy designed to look "grassroots" in the sense of "just ordinary people who care about the issue". I don't see how "a legit neighborhood group asking residents to contact their officials" fits that model; why do you say it's astroturfing?
- baddox 10y ago
  I thought the key ingredient of astroturfing is the concealment of the source of the message. The idea is to make a centralized effort appear to not be centralized. I would say that providing templates to contact public officials would qualify as astroturfing. And yes, I would extend that attribution to many advocacy groups whose proposals I agree with.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    It may seem similar enough, but that does not seem to match the standard usage[1], in which the critical ingredient is the false impression of pre-existing grassroots consensus. Telling the existing John/Jane Q. Public, who already agrees with you on the issue, to actually do something based on that agreement, is just regular activism and doesn't connote the "aha! caught you" aura of an astroturfing allegation. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#Definition
- azernik 10y ago
  I think he's trying to say it's not astroturfing - ie that is too large-scale for that. Thereby preempting dismissal of this anecdotal evidence.
resu_nimda 10y ago
Quoting the linked notice: It is bad enough that the recent monster home epidemic is consuming every inch of a lot up to its maximum permissible limit to build supersized single-family homes. This legislation, in effect, enables the trend for a monster-home-plus-in-law at the cost of further eroding our mid-block open space that is a community resource providing residents with light, air, privacy, visual relief, and a much-needed psychological comfort zone. I've never actually seen words like these penned, in favor of NIMBYism. SF is experiencing a "monster home epidemic"??? This is legitimately disgusting.
- pauloday 10y ago
  I don't know that it's an "epidemic", but houses are certainly getting bigger in the US[1]. I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else. This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government. I doubt I'd personally agree with many of their stances, but I really can't see how it's "legitimately disgusting". [1]: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-02/business/chi-average-home-size-sets-new-record-20140603_1_home-size-home-builders-new-record http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-02/business/chi-a...
  - resu_nimda 10y ago
    This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government. For other cities/locales you may be right, but in SF, it just seems offensive. We all know what the consensus epidemic is in the Bay Area, and attempting to use that word to imply that these poor landowners are being encroached upon is something I find reprehensible. Their "epidemic" is a trifling concern compared to what some are going through. I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else. There are plenty of places in the country where you can find that. When very wealthy people stubbornly want to hold onto that in the middle of one of the most dense metro areas in the country, while people are being pushed out of their homes and homeless fill the streets, yeah I find it disgusting for them to talk about preserving their "much-needed psychological comfort zone." They can move out to the country if they really want all that stuff, they can afford it, not everyone can.
jdavis703 10y ago
I think the answer to this is the city should do all the land acquisition/architecture/engineering/environmental impact research/planning approval, and then offer that completed package for developers to bid on. This will make it much easier for developers to build projects as they'll not have to worry about paying these up-front costs only to have the city reject their proposals, while still allowing voters to ensure truly terrible projects aren't built. Surely there must be downsides to this approach, what are they?
ctack 10y ago
Not to say I'm in favour of NIMBYism, but if SF had to have a serious, rustbelt scale economic downturn in the future then lack of overdevelopment would be a positive thing.

lr 10y ago

A 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 ago
High 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.
- maxsilver 10y ago
  > There's nothing in this photo worth preserving. In the Midwest, if someone built that photo (exactly) it would get called a strong downtown urban design, and the builder would be praised for creating "missing middle" housing.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    Well I heard there's a couple of nice towns in the midwest, like Chicago :-) Even in the most reactionary fringes of the midwest people are starting to realize that exurban sprawl isn't working. See for example http://newsok.com/article/5505468 http://newsok.com/article/5505468
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      Chicago is the best city in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin. They have nothing to compare. I'd live there except the lack of mountains, lack of an ocean (surfing doesn't work on the Great Lakes even though they're beautiful), and freezing winters + hot humid Summer's would kill me. I can't go back to that. West coast; best coast.
- lr 10y ago
  Yes, it is a suburb inside of a city. And the inhabitants of that area of The City like it that way. The people who live in the Sunset and Richmond form very powerful political blocks, and you're going to have to do a lot to unseat their representatives on the Board of Supervisors.
  - lr 10y ago
    Maybe start-ups can convince their employees to move to the Sunset with the singular goal of voting in a pro-growth person to the Board of Supervisors. You can do this one district at a time.
    - meddlepal 10y ago
rictic 10y ago
How do you square the narrative "units in these high rises would be bought out by investors and so no one would get to rent them" with "these high rises would attract too many people and too much traffic to the neighborhood"
- 3s933x7dpsh 10y ago
  +1. If the problem is that absent foreign investors are buying up all the housing stock, maybe we should make a 100 story tower on some parking lot in SOMA and sell each floor as a $5M luxurious penthouse unit with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country. Boom, we just took a bunch of those foreign investors out of the market without increasing traffic and decreased the annual US trade deficit by 1% to boot. Fundamentally, if people outside the country want to buy our housing, we should be happy about that, and create jobs by building housing to meet the demand. Imagine if our reaction to Chinese demand for Buicks was to limit car manufacturing and complain that foreign investors are making Buicks unaffordable.
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    "with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country." If we could prevent them from getting a visa to come at all, we could do the same thing and we wouldn't even have to build the building. Just allocate a few address numbers on ritzy street corners and sell the "buildings" to investors stashing Russian or Chinese black market cash.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      Think about all the future and derivative opportunities, too... Heck, we could do high-frequency house trading!
    - 3s933x7dpsh 10y ago
      Of course it's an absurd analogy, there would not be much value if there is no underlying property you can make use of. But I think it illustrates the point well: if the high prices were caused by absent foreign investors, 101 would not be jammed. More realistically, investors rent out the properties they buy. So a market with tons of foreign investors spending irrationally would have an undersupply of homes to buy and corresponding oversupply of homes for rent. Renters would get a great deal and buyers would get bad ROI.
dcosson 10y ago
> 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 The frustrating thing about this NIMBY argument, is that it's usually presented as the progressive option, it's standing up for the people. But in reality it's often selfish - homeowners/landlords who have a lot to gain are gaining support for their cause, by getting the disenfranchised to basically decide "If I'm going to be priced out of the city anyway, I'm gonna take as many other people as I can out with me". When in reality, many of them would have a shot at not getting priced out at all with better policy (or at least a shot at making "getting priced out" not so bad, e.g. more housing supply in the city & in neighboring towns -> prices drop a little in the city -> prices drop a lot outside of the city within easy commuting distance).

SilasX 10y ago

Astroturfing is when they send out of a bunch of professional advocacy designed to look "grassroots" in the sense of "just ordinary people who care about the issue". I don't see how "a legit neighborhood group asking residents to contact their officials" fits that model; why do you say it's astroturfing?

baddox 10y ago
I thought the key ingredient of astroturfing is the concealment of the source of the message. The idea is to make a centralized effort appear to not be centralized. I would say that providing templates to contact public officials would qualify as astroturfing. And yes, I would extend that attribution to many advocacy groups whose proposals I agree with.
- SilasX 10y ago
  It may seem similar enough, but that does not seem to match the standard usage[1], in which the critical ingredient is the false impression of pre-existing grassroots consensus. Telling the existing John/Jane Q. Public, who already agrees with you on the issue, to actually do something based on that agreement, is just regular activism and doesn't connote the "aha! caught you" aura of an astroturfing allegation. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#Definition
azernik 10y ago
I think he's trying to say it's not astroturfing - ie that is too large-scale for that. Thereby preempting dismissal of this anecdotal evidence.

resu_nimda 10y ago

Quoting the linked notice: It is bad enough that the recent monster home epidemic is consuming every inch of a lot up to its maximum permissible limit to build supersized single-family homes. This legislation, in effect, enables the trend for a monster-home-plus-in-law at the cost of further eroding our mid-block open space that is a community resource providing residents with light, air, privacy, visual relief, and a much-needed psychological comfort zone. I've never actually seen words like these penned, in favor of NIMBYism. SF is experiencing a "monster home epidemic"??? This is legitimately disgusting.

pauloday 10y ago
I don't know that it's an "epidemic", but houses are certainly getting bigger in the US[1]. I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else. This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government. I doubt I'd personally agree with many of their stances, but I really can't see how it's "legitimately disgusting". [1]: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-02/business/chi-average-home-size-sets-new-record-20140603_1_home-size-home-builders-new-record http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-02/business/chi-a...
- resu_nimda 10y ago
  This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government. For other cities/locales you may be right, but in SF, it just seems offensive. We all know what the consensus epidemic is in the Bay Area, and attempting to use that word to imply that these poor landowners are being encroached upon is something I find reprehensible. Their "epidemic" is a trifling concern compared to what some are going through. I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else. There are plenty of places in the country where you can find that. When very wealthy people stubbornly want to hold onto that in the middle of one of the most dense metro areas in the country, while people are being pushed out of their homes and homeless fill the streets, yeah I find it disgusting for them to talk about preserving their "much-needed psychological comfort zone." They can move out to the country if they really want all that stuff, they can afford it, not everyone can.

jdavis703 10y ago

I think the answer to this is the city should do all the land acquisition/architecture/engineering/environmental impact research/planning approval, and then offer that completed package for developers to bid on. This will make it much easier for developers to build projects as they'll not have to worry about paying these up-front costs only to have the city reject their proposals, while still allowing voters to ensure truly terrible projects aren't built. Surely there must be downsides to this approach, what are they?

ctack 10y ago

Not to say I'm in favour of NIMBYism, but if SF had to have a serious, rustbelt scale economic downturn in the future then lack of overdevelopment would be a positive thing.