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"Someone else should make the sacrifice." There's the problem right there. From the article: "Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development

"Someone else should make the sacrifice." There's the problem right there. From the article: "Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons." "And we also probably don’t want high rise condos on the edge of Golden Gate Park. San Francisco isn’t New York." I've voted in favor of every housing initiative available to me, but you can't make your favorite part of the Bay Area sacred and expect everyone else to give up theirs.

mc32 9y ago
Faulting Brisbane is myopic. Brisbane could add maybe a few thousand units. San Francisco could add a hundred thousand units, if they really wanted to, but no, instead they blame a town of 3,500 for their problems. It shows how non introspective they are and how willing to blame others they are.
- epistasis 9y ago
  We can fault Brisbane just as we can fault every municipality in the Bay Area. That's not short sighted, it's necessary.
  - mc32 9y ago
    They are not a "city" and they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand. San Francisco is but, while they advertise themselves as a city, promote growth, grant tax breaks for cachet employers, etc., they do very little, in terms of creating and building housing for those workers. They demand others do what they themselves are unwilling to do. Now, imagine the opposite, Brisbane demanding San Francisco become more suburban because San Francisco is to city-like for their liking.
    - tomkarlo 9y ago
      They are in fact planning to do just that - put more office space in that zone, which will create demand for housing in SF (the nearest major residential area) rather than adding housing. And in the past, they've blocked a proposal that would have added 70K residential units. http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-controls-big-housing-project-20170728-story.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-control... The attitude is essentially, "I've got mine, let's pull the ladder up after me and deny anyone else affordable housing."
      - usaar333 9y ago
        To be fair, unlike the Baylands proposal, there were very valid environmental reasons to block that 70k units of housing on San Bruno Mountain. It also has ensured that residents of San Francisco have very easy access to wilderness - I'm certainly better off being able to go hiking with just a 15 minute drive.
        tomkarlo 9y ago
        That's fair. But it's also worth recognizing those 70K units may mean that some middle-income SF resident had to move to Pleasanton or something instead due to affordability, so our nice hiking proximity is their 90-minute commute.
      - DrScump 9y ago
        You emphasize the 70K, but the Brisbane Baylands proposal in your link is for 4,400 units.
        tomkarlo 9y ago
        Sorry. The link was to support the first sentence (and my main point) which is to refute the parent post's statement that "they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand". Brisbane is planning to do exactly that in this case.
- stellar678 9y ago
  The Brisbane baylands area is a full square mile, which is contiguous with parts of San Francisco and is separated by a 5-lane highway from the current residential part of Brisbane. I live in a mixed SFH/midrise apartment neighborhood in Oakland, and our population density is 24,000 per square mile. So putting 24k people in that part of Brisbane wouldn't even look particularly built up. The Nob Hill, Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill areas (beautiful, treasured, highly desired places) in San Francisco all vary from 30k to 60k per square mile. Putting 45k people on Brisbane baylands would be awesome. What's really happening is that Brisbane loves the sweet tax revenues from all the businesses they host, but don't want the (expensive) responsibility to house all those people that work in town.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >but don't want the (expensive) responsibility to house all those people that work in town. That's a common, often unstated problem, in many places. A new family often doesn't pay enough in taxes to cover the services they need, schools in particular. Which puts pressure on everyone's tax burden. I live in a rural/exurban town in New England and the tax issue definitely comes up in any discussion of approving any sizable development. (The town tends to be against development in general for traffic etc. reasons but taxes are part of it.)
    - stellar678 9y ago
      And it's even harder in California where so much of the property tax roll is frozen at tiny values from the past. Prop 13 can take almost exclusive blame for cities in California giving preference to jobs and retail over housing. It's like a direct incentive if they want to keep their budgets balanced.
      - wahern 9y ago
        OTOH, real estate prices are extremely inflated. The immediate effect of new housing would be a deluge of property tax revenue. I would guess that it'd take at least 10-20 years for the net negative effects of Prop 13 to take hold, perhaps longer. But because of increased density (lower infrastructure cost per unit), they'd probably still be ahead of where they are now. I think it's fair to say that the real calculus in Brisbane is simply opportunity cost: they get a better ROI with commercial than residential. And this calculus simply makes it easier to defend anti-development sentiment, which is really what it all comes down to.
- wahern 9y ago
  Do you live in San Francisco? For the past 5 years there have been housing projects _everywhere_ across the city. Last year there were 62,000 units in the pipeline (anywhere from approved to under construction). (http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/a-record-62000-units-in-san-franciscos-housing-pipeline.html http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/a-record-62000-un...) I can't find a link, but I think the goal several years ago was to have built 30,000 units between 2015 and 2020, and progress has been okay. In 2016 San Francisco built twice as much housing per capita (EDIT: per new resident) as the state average. (https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/4/15543668/san-francisco-new-home-construction-population-2017 https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/4/15543668/san-francisco-new-ho...) The city could do much, much better. The issue here isn't approvals, per se; it's the high cost of construction, and a big part of that is the concessions that the city (and NIMBYs) squeeze out of developers. But in any event at least the city is _approving_ projects. Compared to every other city in the Bay Area San Francisco is leading. Unfortunately that says more about the Bay Area than it does SF, but in any event SF isn't being hypocritical when it criticizes Brisbane, Palo Alto, etc.
  - mc32 9y ago
    I do live here, but I've also lived in the far east. There is no comparison. We see cranes in a few places, mainly SoMa, that is not sufficient. We should see building along geary, van ness, sunset Blvd, third, Octavia, California, etc.,etc.
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      Agreed, the Sunset and Richmond is too low density if SF really wants to address its housing shortage. Give homeowners/developers incentives to turn low density blocks into mid to high density housing. And build Geary Street light rail (and put most of it underground so it doesn't take as long as the N-Judah does to get downtown)
      - NickC_dev 9y ago
        Grow The Richmond (https://growtherichmond.com/ https://growtherichmond.com/) will have a table set up tomorrow at Balbooa Fright Fest. Come say hi! There is a growing group of people on the west side of the city who do want density.
rsync 9y ago
"Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons." Good for them. I mean, probably not, but Brisbane is their town and they should determine their own values and courses of action. The solution to San Francisco needs to occur in San Francisco - not CC county or Marin or Sonoma. There's a lot of very, very distinguished and historic and noteworthy 1-4 story housing stock in San Francisco that I hope stays around ... but there's a lot of 1-4 story housing stock that is complete shit and needs to be rebuilt, in-filled, brought up to 2017 sanitation and earthquake regs and served by new rail lines. Notice how I didn't say "served by BRT[1]" ? Served by rail. If you see a bus, they blew it. [1] Bus Rapid Transit (and related half-assed bullshit)
- rthomas6 9y ago
  What's wrong with buses?
  - rpearl 9y ago
    Slow, unreliable due to traffic, difficult to scale with the number of people.
    - tomkarlo 9y ago
      If we added bus lanes they way they do in other countries, it would address the traffic problem. But we always favor the lone-commuter-in-car.
      - rpearl 9y ago
        It doesn't help with scaling (you can have multi-car trains but it's much harder to have multi-car busses) or max speed, but it would certainly be an improvement over the current situation!
        tomkarlo 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-articulated_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-articulated_bus None of our mass transit operates near the speed limit anyway, afaik.
tedivm 9y ago
There's a difference between the major park in a major city that is used by thousands of people a day, and that shitty town of 5k people that doesn't want anyone else to move in. Shit, there are more people in GGP right now than there will be all week in Brisbane. At the same time it's not like Brisbane isn't building. They just aren't building housing, because they want to build commercial so they can get the taxes without having to get the population increase.
- compiler-guy 9y ago
  Yes there is a difference. The difference is that Golden Gate Park is near the author's home, and Brisbane isn't. High rise condos around Golden Gate park wouldn't affect the usability of Golden Gate Park all that much. It would barely affect the beauty. Yes, Brisbane ought to build more housing, but what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. And if we want Brisbane to give up its autonomy so that we can cram housing into it, and significantly change the character of the place--and we do!--then we have to be willing to cram housing into other places that will significantly change the character of that place. As soon as one goes all sacred cow, one loses the game.
  - tedivm 9y ago
    There is a huge difference between "lets build our denser high rises in these areas so as to protect our park" versus "lets not build any residential properties in our city at all", and trying to act as if they are the same is horribly disingenuous.
    - rhino369 9y ago
      You wouldn't really be protecting the park. Just a view from the edge of the park.
    - compiler-guy 9y ago
      That’s not the trade off the article proposed, and you will note that the author responded directly with an opinion much different than yours. The bottom line is that both cities have things they value and they don’t want someone else to tell them what to do. If we are to solve the problem, everyone will have to make sacrifices. Everyone’s neighborhood will need to change. Including golden gate park. Incidentally, “disingenuous” implies active deception. There nothing like that here. I don’t live in Brisbane or San Fran, and I support Beale every housing initiative I have been exposed to.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
krausejj 9y ago
Very true, and I definitely didn't mean to imply in the article that the areas around SF should "make the sacrifice." What I'm advocating for is regional ("metropolitan") leadership and planning. We all have to make sacrifices. That doesn't mean we can't have planning - I think urban planning is essential to building a city that works. But we need to do the planning at the level we're having the problem - which is, the Bay Area level. Maybe high-rises do make sense on Golden Gate Park, but then we'd better have BART stations there taking people down to Mountain View and Sunnyvale (or wherever they're working).

mc32 9y ago

Faulting Brisbane is myopic. Brisbane could add maybe a few thousand units. San Francisco could add a hundred thousand units, if they really wanted to, but no, instead they blame a town of 3,500 for their problems. It shows how non introspective they are and how willing to blame others they are.

epistasis 9y ago
We can fault Brisbane just as we can fault every municipality in the Bay Area. That's not short sighted, it's necessary.
- mc32 9y ago
  They are not a "city" and they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand. San Francisco is but, while they advertise themselves as a city, promote growth, grant tax breaks for cachet employers, etc., they do very little, in terms of creating and building housing for those workers. They demand others do what they themselves are unwilling to do. Now, imagine the opposite, Brisbane demanding San Francisco become more suburban because San Francisco is to city-like for their liking.
  - tomkarlo 9y ago
    They are in fact planning to do just that - put more office space in that zone, which will create demand for housing in SF (the nearest major residential area) rather than adding housing. And in the past, they've blocked a proposal that would have added 70K residential units. http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-controls-big-housing-project-20170728-story.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-control... The attitude is essentially, "I've got mine, let's pull the ladder up after me and deny anyone else affordable housing."
    - usaar333 9y ago
      To be fair, unlike the Baylands proposal, there were very valid environmental reasons to block that 70k units of housing on San Bruno Mountain. It also has ensured that residents of San Francisco have very easy access to wilderness - I'm certainly better off being able to go hiking with just a 15 minute drive.
      - tomkarlo 9y ago
        That's fair. But it's also worth recognizing those 70K units may mean that some middle-income SF resident had to move to Pleasanton or something instead due to affordability, so our nice hiking proximity is their 90-minute commute.
    - DrScump 9y ago
      You emphasize the 70K, but the Brisbane Baylands proposal in your link is for 4,400 units.
      - tomkarlo 9y ago
        Sorry. The link was to support the first sentence (and my main point) which is to refute the parent post's statement that "they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand". Brisbane is planning to do exactly that in this case.
stellar678 9y ago
The Brisbane baylands area is a full square mile, which is contiguous with parts of San Francisco and is separated by a 5-lane highway from the current residential part of Brisbane. I live in a mixed SFH/midrise apartment neighborhood in Oakland, and our population density is 24,000 per square mile. So putting 24k people in that part of Brisbane wouldn't even look particularly built up. The Nob Hill, Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill areas (beautiful, treasured, highly desired places) in San Francisco all vary from 30k to 60k per square mile. Putting 45k people on Brisbane baylands would be awesome. What's really happening is that Brisbane loves the sweet tax revenues from all the businesses they host, but don't want the (expensive) responsibility to house all those people that work in town.
- ghaff 9y ago
  >but don't want the (expensive) responsibility to house all those people that work in town. That's a common, often unstated problem, in many places. A new family often doesn't pay enough in taxes to cover the services they need, schools in particular. Which puts pressure on everyone's tax burden. I live in a rural/exurban town in New England and the tax issue definitely comes up in any discussion of approving any sizable development. (The town tends to be against development in general for traffic etc. reasons but taxes are part of it.)
  - stellar678 9y ago
    And it's even harder in California where so much of the property tax roll is frozen at tiny values from the past. Prop 13 can take almost exclusive blame for cities in California giving preference to jobs and retail over housing. It's like a direct incentive if they want to keep their budgets balanced.
    - wahern 9y ago
      OTOH, real estate prices are extremely inflated. The immediate effect of new housing would be a deluge of property tax revenue. I would guess that it'd take at least 10-20 years for the net negative effects of Prop 13 to take hold, perhaps longer. But because of increased density (lower infrastructure cost per unit), they'd probably still be ahead of where they are now. I think it's fair to say that the real calculus in Brisbane is simply opportunity cost: they get a better ROI with commercial than residential. And this calculus simply makes it easier to defend anti-development sentiment, which is really what it all comes down to.
wahern 9y ago
Do you live in San Francisco? For the past 5 years there have been housing projects _everywhere_ across the city. Last year there were 62,000 units in the pipeline (anywhere from approved to under construction). (http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/a-record-62000-units-in-san-franciscos-housing-pipeline.html http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/a-record-62000-un...) I can't find a link, but I think the goal several years ago was to have built 30,000 units between 2015 and 2020, and progress has been okay. In 2016 San Francisco built twice as much housing per capita (EDIT: per new resident) as the state average. (https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/4/15543668/san-francisco-new-home-construction-population-2017 https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/4/15543668/san-francisco-new-ho...) The city could do much, much better. The issue here isn't approvals, per se; it's the high cost of construction, and a big part of that is the concessions that the city (and NIMBYs) squeeze out of developers. But in any event at least the city is _approving_ projects. Compared to every other city in the Bay Area San Francisco is leading. Unfortunately that says more about the Bay Area than it does SF, but in any event SF isn't being hypocritical when it criticizes Brisbane, Palo Alto, etc.
- mc32 9y ago
  I do live here, but I've also lived in the far east. There is no comparison. We see cranes in a few places, mainly SoMa, that is not sufficient. We should see building along geary, van ness, sunset Blvd, third, Octavia, California, etc.,etc.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Agreed, the Sunset and Richmond is too low density if SF really wants to address its housing shortage. Give homeowners/developers incentives to turn low density blocks into mid to high density housing. And build Geary Street light rail (and put most of it underground so it doesn't take as long as the N-Judah does to get downtown)
    - NickC_dev 9y ago
      Grow The Richmond (https://growtherichmond.com/ https://growtherichmond.com/) will have a table set up tomorrow at Balbooa Fright Fest. Come say hi! There is a growing group of people on the west side of the city who do want density.

rsync 9y ago

"Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons." Good for them. I mean, probably not, but Brisbane is their town and they should determine their own values and courses of action. The solution to San Francisco needs to occur in San Francisco - not CC county or Marin or Sonoma. There's a lot of very, very distinguished and historic and noteworthy 1-4 story housing stock in San Francisco that I hope stays around ... but there's a lot of 1-4 story housing stock that is complete shit and needs to be rebuilt, in-filled, brought up to 2017 sanitation and earthquake regs and served by new rail lines. Notice how I didn't say "served by BRT[1]" ? Served by rail. If you see a bus, they blew it. [1] Bus Rapid Transit (and related half-assed bullshit)

rthomas6 9y ago
What's wrong with buses?
- rpearl 9y ago
  Slow, unreliable due to traffic, difficult to scale with the number of people.
  - tomkarlo 9y ago
    If we added bus lanes they way they do in other countries, it would address the traffic problem. But we always favor the lone-commuter-in-car.
    - rpearl 9y ago
      It doesn't help with scaling (you can have multi-car trains but it's much harder to have multi-car busses) or max speed, but it would certainly be an improvement over the current situation!
      - tomkarlo 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-articulated_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-articulated_bus None of our mass transit operates near the speed limit anyway, afaik.

tedivm 9y ago

There's a difference between the major park in a major city that is used by thousands of people a day, and that shitty town of 5k people that doesn't want anyone else to move in. Shit, there are more people in GGP right now than there will be all week in Brisbane. At the same time it's not like Brisbane isn't building. They just aren't building housing, because they want to build commercial so they can get the taxes without having to get the population increase.

compiler-guy 9y ago
Yes there is a difference. The difference is that Golden Gate Park is near the author's home, and Brisbane isn't. High rise condos around Golden Gate park wouldn't affect the usability of Golden Gate Park all that much. It would barely affect the beauty. Yes, Brisbane ought to build more housing, but what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. And if we want Brisbane to give up its autonomy so that we can cram housing into it, and significantly change the character of the place--and we do!--then we have to be willing to cram housing into other places that will significantly change the character of that place. As soon as one goes all sacred cow, one loses the game.
- tedivm 9y ago
  There is a huge difference between "lets build our denser high rises in these areas so as to protect our park" versus "lets not build any residential properties in our city at all", and trying to act as if they are the same is horribly disingenuous.
  - rhino369 9y ago
    You wouldn't really be protecting the park. Just a view from the edge of the park.
  - compiler-guy 9y ago
    That’s not the trade off the article proposed, and you will note that the author responded directly with an opinion much different than yours. The bottom line is that both cities have things they value and they don’t want someone else to tell them what to do. If we are to solve the problem, everyone will have to make sacrifices. Everyone’s neighborhood will need to change. Including golden gate park. Incidentally, “disingenuous” implies active deception. There nothing like that here. I don’t live in Brisbane or San Fran, and I support Beale every housing initiative I have been exposed to.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

krausejj 9y ago

Very true, and I definitely didn't mean to imply in the article that the areas around SF should "make the sacrifice." What I'm advocating for is regional ("metropolitan") leadership and planning. We all have to make sacrifices. That doesn't mean we can't have planning - I think urban planning is essential to building a city that works. But we need to do the planning at the level we're having the problem - which is, the Bay Area level. Maybe high-rises do make sense on Golden Gate Park, but then we'd better have BART stations there taking people down to Mountain View and Sunnyvale (or wherever they're working).