6 ms·

Good God almighty that's a giant claptrap of words... "Maybe if we just create/change a few more rules everything will be better" type mentality probably won't

Good God almighty that's a giant claptrap of words... "Maybe if we just create/change a few more rules everything will be better" type mentality probably won't fix things. I see there are ideas to relax rules, which is good, but ultimately that might actually remove the 'money' aspect of the situation. My mentality is that if the costs are too high then don't pay them (hint: move away).

pcwalton 9y ago
You can rationalize almost any injustice with "if you don't like it, move away". And telling an entire generation that they shouldn't be allowed to live, or raise families, in the Bay Area is an injustice.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  We live in a market economy. The fact is, the SF Bay area is a housing shitshow, mostly because of a boom economy, which will end. Nobody was talking about this crisis in 2002 when the economy hit the skids, and all of the wacky California policy issues with property taxes and development challenges were all there. I don't live in California. I live in an urban environment in a neighborhood a mixed 1-4 family freestanding units. A major component of my property's valuation is that neighborhood cohesion. When you hear people characterizing turning potting sheds into shitty rental units as some sort of victory for social justice, you're hearing a movement that is poised to be upsurped by well capitalized real estate developers. I grew up in Queens, NYC, which has pretty loose zoning controls. My neighborhood, which in the 80s was a mix a 1-2 family detached and attached homes, changed dramatically, starting with the 80s real estate boom and continuing in waves in the 90s boom and the 2000's boom. The end result is a mix of cut-up single family homes and a bunch of teardown situations where nasty condo units eliminated open space, made parking a nightmare and killed the community. The only happy stakeholders are the real estate people who walked away with millions and left a mess for the residents and the city to deal with.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    If we lived in a market economy, the market would find the most efficient use for each parcel. We don't. We live in a centrally planned economy with respect to real estate, and the central planners have got their priorities backwards. Your framing of the residents of high-density housing as not "stakeholders" or "the community" is a common NIMBY talking point, but the condo/apartment dwellers whose humanity you choose to deny are not less deserving of space than you. If the "well-capitalized developers" want to help people like me (who were born too late to own city land) fight for the right to occupy space, I'll take it.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      Sure we do. It’s much more efficient to have some engineer pulling down crazy money to buy existing housing stock or move in with 6 roommates as compared to ripping down and replacing buildings. It just sucks for everyone when there are thousands of those engineers sucking the oxygen out of the city. You could say the same things about the $2000/mo trailer parks in South Dakota when gas booms. I live 4,000 miles away. My humanity doesn’t require that I have an apartment on 5th Avenue. Instead, I own a home where high quality housing runs around $100/ft. Fundamentally, the reason you don’t live in Cleveland or Buffalo is that aerospace and other industries left and moved to California 80 years ago, largely because it was cheap to buy an Orange grove. Capital and the investment culture of tech is why SFO is the way it is. Until that changes and Google Omaha starts impacting demand, you are stuck. Markets are about control. Not fairness, not what is right. If you don’t control the votes, and don’t control the land, you don’t have a stake.
      - pcwalton 9y ago
        The fact that only engineers and similarly well-off individuals can afford to buy property in the Bay Area is because of NIMBYs. More NIMBYism will only make the problem worse. If you prevent wealthy people from buying new homes, they'll just buy old ones instead. This isn't a theoretical concern. In fact, it's precisely what has been happening throughout the SF Bay Area.
  - 9y ago
- Romanulus 9y ago
  Did I say that families should or shouldn't be allowed to do something? By all means, go there, live there, do whatever you want as long as you're not harming anyone else. By the by, it's also a grave injustice that I'm not driving a lambo; someone needs to sort that snafu out, because it's not my fault.
  - SllX 9y ago
    I believe our fellow poster was referring to the generation that grew up in San Francisco and are finding it too expensive to continue living here.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  An injustice? They have a fundamental right to live in the Bay Area? My bar for "injustice" is a bit higher than that...
  - wffurr 9y ago
    If you're born somewhere, have family and roots in a place, and then can't afford to live there because of people coming in and jacking up the rent and property prices, that's definitely injustice. Is it injustice that a new CS grad who got a job at Facebook can't afford a place in San Francisco? Not really, plenty of other places to work.
    - Kalium 9y ago
      So, not to put too fine a point on it, in your mind there's a privileged class that deserves to have housing they can afford and an unprivileged class that does not. And this privilege is largely hereditary. Do I follow you correctly? I have to assume not, because such a notion is an affront to equity, fairness, and progressive principles. I would very much like to know where I erred in following your logic.
      - watwut 9y ago
        His point was not inheritance, it was being part of community for years. If your parents lived there, but you did not, you don't count. It is disingenuous to call that hereditary. I dont care about SF, the best would be for tech to move away from there. It just dont fit in, spacewise. Companies should more to place where they fit. But I find it funny that the same forum that yap and cry about lack of community or loneliness in every single loosely related topic (and especially when it is possible to blame women not being at home anymore), puts exactly zero value on it when it comes to people who were born in San Francisco and are not one of us. The parent you complain about here is literally about social ties and community. Newcomers don't have it and young tech people don't really value it, so maybe it would make sense for us to move away. Unless we make it about entering contracts and all that, in which case people who been there first has the same right to make rules they do like.
tacostakohashi 9y ago
Yes - in particular, whenever I hear "housing crisis" being used to describe a permanent and stable state of affairs, I know I can stop taking the rest of the article seriously. Mercifully, that clue was present in the second sentence.
jernfrost 9y ago
But the issue here is the opposite of deregualtion. The problem is overly strict zoning rules. They should be relaxed. Less rules, not more. I am Norwegian myself but when I lived in the US I was always puzzled by the extremely segmented feel of cities. Everything in one area was the same, and when you meet people you get the feeling that most people only know people from their own economic class. As a country that prides itself on diversity, there doesn’t seem to be much diversity where people live. I think cities with less rules which are able to grow more organically will tend to develop better. Or I guess it depends on the type of planning. Where I live in Oslo a lot of thought went into making it possible for kids to walk to school, playgrounds etc without crossing car roads or walking next to car roads.
- mjevans 9y ago
  I often like to revisit the Japanese concept of zone planning. Mostly it's based on how much impact activities have on neighboring land / buildings. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html It's from a while back... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  As an American who moved to Munich, this is exactly correct. In American cities, I can always tell whether a neighborhood is rich or poor or middle-class. I notice even without thinking about it, it's blatantly obvious by the homes and the cars and the environment. In Munich, even when I'm trying to figure out how rich an area is, I usually can't tell. In terms of income distribution at least, most parts of the city -- and its suburbs -- feel roughly similar, in that they have a mix of people. This undoubtedly has to do with the fact that even "low density" parts of Munich still have duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment complexes (but more tastefully designed than ones in the states, I admit).
- rexgallorum2 9y ago
  I live in a middle-sized city in Germany that is also struggling with a housing shortage and rising rents (though not anything like San Francisco). This particular city is somewhat unique in that it is rather sprawling (for Germany) with a lot of low-rise buildings and single family homes. The first solution to the problem was to build houses behind houses behind houses and to build on (formerly generous) back gardens. Now, with land values so high, much of the older housing stock (old enough to be inefficient but too young to be protected by historic preservation laws) is being torn down and replaced by small, low-rise blocks of flats. This has its own problems (small unit sizes are family unfriendly, for example), but it is slowly easing the supply of housing without significant geographical expansion of the city. I bring this up because this strategy is exactly what is being discussed in a number of US cities. New construction in Germany is highly regulated, but the rules themselves do not produce the sort of socially and economically homogeneous residential enclaves you often see in the US, nor do they result in a strict separation of residential and commercial districts (shops of all kinds are often mixed into residential areas or have flats on top). In short, there are no ghettos, most residential areas are very mixed in terms of income and property types, and businesses and basic services are always readily accessible on foot or with a bike (you don't see those typically American situations where, due to terrible urban planning and strict zoning, one has to drive 3 miles to travel 150 yards from a home to a supermarket or some other destination). I think there must be some middle path whereby local stakeholders and municipal officials can regulate urban land use without arbitrarily dividing a city into self-contained, homogeneous zones.

pcwalton 9y ago

You can rationalize almost any injustice with "if you don't like it, move away". And telling an entire generation that they shouldn't be allowed to live, or raise families, in the Bay Area is an injustice.

Spooky23 9y ago
We live in a market economy. The fact is, the SF Bay area is a housing shitshow, mostly because of a boom economy, which will end. Nobody was talking about this crisis in 2002 when the economy hit the skids, and all of the wacky California policy issues with property taxes and development challenges were all there. I don't live in California. I live in an urban environment in a neighborhood a mixed 1-4 family freestanding units. A major component of my property's valuation is that neighborhood cohesion. When you hear people characterizing turning potting sheds into shitty rental units as some sort of victory for social justice, you're hearing a movement that is poised to be upsurped by well capitalized real estate developers. I grew up in Queens, NYC, which has pretty loose zoning controls. My neighborhood, which in the 80s was a mix a 1-2 family detached and attached homes, changed dramatically, starting with the 80s real estate boom and continuing in waves in the 90s boom and the 2000's boom. The end result is a mix of cut-up single family homes and a bunch of teardown situations where nasty condo units eliminated open space, made parking a nightmare and killed the community. The only happy stakeholders are the real estate people who walked away with millions and left a mess for the residents and the city to deal with.
- closeparen 9y ago
  If we lived in a market economy, the market would find the most efficient use for each parcel. We don't. We live in a centrally planned economy with respect to real estate, and the central planners have got their priorities backwards. Your framing of the residents of high-density housing as not "stakeholders" or "the community" is a common NIMBY talking point, but the condo/apartment dwellers whose humanity you choose to deny are not less deserving of space than you. If the "well-capitalized developers" want to help people like me (who were born too late to own city land) fight for the right to occupy space, I'll take it.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Sure we do. It’s much more efficient to have some engineer pulling down crazy money to buy existing housing stock or move in with 6 roommates as compared to ripping down and replacing buildings. It just sucks for everyone when there are thousands of those engineers sucking the oxygen out of the city. You could say the same things about the $2000/mo trailer parks in South Dakota when gas booms. I live 4,000 miles away. My humanity doesn’t require that I have an apartment on 5th Avenue. Instead, I own a home where high quality housing runs around $100/ft. Fundamentally, the reason you don’t live in Cleveland or Buffalo is that aerospace and other industries left and moved to California 80 years ago, largely because it was cheap to buy an Orange grove. Capital and the investment culture of tech is why SFO is the way it is. Until that changes and Google Omaha starts impacting demand, you are stuck. Markets are about control. Not fairness, not what is right. If you don’t control the votes, and don’t control the land, you don’t have a stake.
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      The fact that only engineers and similarly well-off individuals can afford to buy property in the Bay Area is because of NIMBYs. More NIMBYism will only make the problem worse. If you prevent wealthy people from buying new homes, they'll just buy old ones instead. This isn't a theoretical concern. In fact, it's precisely what has been happening throughout the SF Bay Area.
- 9y ago
Romanulus 9y ago
Did I say that families should or shouldn't be allowed to do something? By all means, go there, live there, do whatever you want as long as you're not harming anyone else. By the by, it's also a grave injustice that I'm not driving a lambo; someone needs to sort that snafu out, because it's not my fault.
- SllX 9y ago
  I believe our fellow poster was referring to the generation that grew up in San Francisco and are finding it too expensive to continue living here.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
An injustice? They have a fundamental right to live in the Bay Area? My bar for "injustice" is a bit higher than that...
- wffurr 9y ago
  If you're born somewhere, have family and roots in a place, and then can't afford to live there because of people coming in and jacking up the rent and property prices, that's definitely injustice. Is it injustice that a new CS grad who got a job at Facebook can't afford a place in San Francisco? Not really, plenty of other places to work.
  - Kalium 9y ago
    So, not to put too fine a point on it, in your mind there's a privileged class that deserves to have housing they can afford and an unprivileged class that does not. And this privilege is largely hereditary. Do I follow you correctly? I have to assume not, because such a notion is an affront to equity, fairness, and progressive principles. I would very much like to know where I erred in following your logic.
    - watwut 9y ago
      His point was not inheritance, it was being part of community for years. If your parents lived there, but you did not, you don't count. It is disingenuous to call that hereditary. I dont care about SF, the best would be for tech to move away from there. It just dont fit in, spacewise. Companies should more to place where they fit. But I find it funny that the same forum that yap and cry about lack of community or loneliness in every single loosely related topic (and especially when it is possible to blame women not being at home anymore), puts exactly zero value on it when it comes to people who were born in San Francisco and are not one of us. The parent you complain about here is literally about social ties and community. Newcomers don't have it and young tech people don't really value it, so maybe it would make sense for us to move away. Unless we make it about entering contracts and all that, in which case people who been there first has the same right to make rules they do like.

tacostakohashi 9y ago

Yes - in particular, whenever I hear "housing crisis" being used to describe a permanent and stable state of affairs, I know I can stop taking the rest of the article seriously. Mercifully, that clue was present in the second sentence.

jernfrost 9y ago

But the issue here is the opposite of deregualtion. The problem is overly strict zoning rules. They should be relaxed. Less rules, not more. I am Norwegian myself but when I lived in the US I was always puzzled by the extremely segmented feel of cities. Everything in one area was the same, and when you meet people you get the feeling that most people only know people from their own economic class. As a country that prides itself on diversity, there doesn’t seem to be much diversity where people live. I think cities with less rules which are able to grow more organically will tend to develop better. Or I guess it depends on the type of planning. Where I live in Oslo a lot of thought went into making it possible for kids to walk to school, playgrounds etc without crossing car roads or walking next to car roads.

mjevans 9y ago
I often like to revisit the Japanese concept of zone planning. Mostly it's based on how much impact activities have on neighboring land / buildings. http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html It's from a while back... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845
TulliusCicero 9y ago
As an American who moved to Munich, this is exactly correct. In American cities, I can always tell whether a neighborhood is rich or poor or middle-class. I notice even without thinking about it, it's blatantly obvious by the homes and the cars and the environment. In Munich, even when I'm trying to figure out how rich an area is, I usually can't tell. In terms of income distribution at least, most parts of the city -- and its suburbs -- feel roughly similar, in that they have a mix of people. This undoubtedly has to do with the fact that even "low density" parts of Munich still have duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment complexes (but more tastefully designed than ones in the states, I admit).
rexgallorum2 9y ago
I live in a middle-sized city in Germany that is also struggling with a housing shortage and rising rents (though not anything like San Francisco). This particular city is somewhat unique in that it is rather sprawling (for Germany) with a lot of low-rise buildings and single family homes. The first solution to the problem was to build houses behind houses behind houses and to build on (formerly generous) back gardens. Now, with land values so high, much of the older housing stock (old enough to be inefficient but too young to be protected by historic preservation laws) is being torn down and replaced by small, low-rise blocks of flats. This has its own problems (small unit sizes are family unfriendly, for example), but it is slowly easing the supply of housing without significant geographical expansion of the city. I bring this up because this strategy is exactly what is being discussed in a number of US cities. New construction in Germany is highly regulated, but the rules themselves do not produce the sort of socially and economically homogeneous residential enclaves you often see in the US, nor do they result in a strict separation of residential and commercial districts (shops of all kinds are often mixed into residential areas or have flats on top). In short, there are no ghettos, most residential areas are very mixed in terms of income and property types, and businesses and basic services are always readily accessible on foot or with a bike (you don't see those typically American situations where, due to terrible urban planning and strict zoning, one has to drive 3 miles to travel 150 yards from a home to a supermarket or some other destination). I think there must be some middle path whereby local stakeholders and municipal officials can regulate urban land use without arbitrarily dividing a city into self-contained, homogeneous zones.