4 ms·

> I'm not sure a few extra apartments in a city of thousands and thousands is going to reduce the value of anything nearby by any appreciable amount? No shit i

> I'm not sure a few extra apartments in a city of thousands and thousands is going to reduce the value of anything nearby by any appreciable amount? No shit it won't. We need vastly more housing. But you're just being defeatist if your attitude is to give up if you are unable to construct enough to get prices to drop. You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

mattlondon 9y ago
My attitude is not to give up. Of course there needs to be more housing built. The problem is, where do you build? Sounds like in this article there is a prime spot that is redeveloping a brownfield site - fine. But eventually you start running out of space. Eventually you need to build elsewhere - you cant simply just keep on piling more and more and more and density into a city. There is already a trend in London of literally piling on more density by adding additional floors to existing apartment buildings (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashsection.theobserver1 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashse...). How many times can you build on-top of an existing building? Eventually the amount of land runs out, especially in a tiny little mini-city like SF. I think it is when density gets "too high" that the NIMBY problems start to kick in - e.g. in my area in inner-outer-London on-street parking space is already super-competitive and local services like doctors and the tube are already super-busy, yet then we got a proposed development of adding 6000 (six thousand!) 2-and-3 bed apartments with zero parking spaces allocated, and absolutely zero money or effort going into improving the local infrastructure - no new schools, no new doctors, no new libraries, no new bus stops/routes, no new improvements to tube stations. You cant just add 12,000-18,000 new people into a local area and expect no one to own a car or need to go to the doctors etc etc. It is this kind of density-overload that understandably gets people pissed off. In the UK, the effort needs to go beyond just building more and more and more AND MORE apartments in London, but to also include persuading employers to not be in London and investing in decent infrastructure elsewhere where there is space. I suspect it is the same for SF and a lot of employers in the valley. The employers say they are there because the talent is there, and the talent say they are there because the employees are there. Someone needs to make the first move.
- Atheros 9y ago
  I do expect no one in the area to own a car. Cars only work in rural and suburban settings. Regarding your last paragraph, you basically just said this: https://i.redditmedia.com/ym0Xv9Jc_nVYFEsL6G5LPN07oziNzrU2ZFLCYkY63tA.png?w=503&s=890b3d5fe90703ad87b5fad5beff7ab4 https://i.redditmedia.com/ym0Xv9Jc_nVYFEsL6G5LPN07oziNzrU2ZF... There is no doubt that as more people move to a city, services have to scale up with them. San Francisco does have ample room to build more buildings. The article at the top demonstrates this. Cities can never be 'full'. No one in San Francisco is complaining that they can't get an appointment at a doctor's office. You are pulling that out of your behind. Under that logic, no cities would exist at all because they never would have been able to develop from detached single-story buildings. The fact that we do have some cities with at least medium sized buildings clearly demonstrate that your concerns about change are unfounded. Growing pains are inevitable and necessary.

mattlondon 9y ago

My attitude is not to give up. Of course there needs to be more housing built. The problem is, where do you build? Sounds like in this article there is a prime spot that is redeveloping a brownfield site - fine. But eventually you start running out of space. Eventually you need to build elsewhere - you cant simply just keep on piling more and more and more and density into a city. There is already a trend in London of literally piling on more density by adding additional floors to existing apartment buildings (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashsection.theobserver1 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2000/may/21/observercashse...). How many times can you build on-top of an existing building? Eventually the amount of land runs out, especially in a tiny little mini-city like SF. I think it is when density gets "too high" that the NIMBY problems start to kick in - e.g. in my area in inner-outer-London on-street parking space is already super-competitive and local services like doctors and the tube are already super-busy, yet then we got a proposed development of adding 6000 (six thousand!) 2-and-3 bed apartments with zero parking spaces allocated, and absolutely zero money or effort going into improving the local infrastructure - no new schools, no new doctors, no new libraries, no new bus stops/routes, no new improvements to tube stations. You cant just add 12,000-18,000 new people into a local area and expect no one to own a car or need to go to the doctors etc etc. It is this kind of density-overload that understandably gets people pissed off. In the UK, the effort needs to go beyond just building more and more and more AND MORE apartments in London, but to also include persuading employers to not be in London and investing in decent infrastructure elsewhere where there is space. I suspect it is the same for SF and a lot of employers in the valley. The employers say they are there because the talent is there, and the talent say they are there because the employees are there. Someone needs to make the first move.

Atheros 9y ago
I do expect no one in the area to own a car. Cars only work in rural and suburban settings. Regarding your last paragraph, you basically just said this: https://i.redditmedia.com/ym0Xv9Jc_nVYFEsL6G5LPN07oziNzrU2ZFLCYkY63tA.png?w=503&s=890b3d5fe90703ad87b5fad5beff7ab4 https://i.redditmedia.com/ym0Xv9Jc_nVYFEsL6G5LPN07oziNzrU2ZF... There is no doubt that as more people move to a city, services have to scale up with them. San Francisco does have ample room to build more buildings. The article at the top demonstrates this. Cities can never be 'full'. No one in San Francisco is complaining that they can't get an appointment at a doctor's office. You are pulling that out of your behind. Under that logic, no cities would exist at all because they never would have been able to develop from detached single-story buildings. The fact that we do have some cities with at least medium sized buildings clearly demonstrate that your concerns about change are unfounded. Growing pains are inevitable and necessary.