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San Francisco's zoning makes it illegal to build apartments in 73.5% of the city
- throwaway5752 8y agoWhere does San Francisco get its water supply and how secure is in the present/project climate?
- Aloha 8y agoHetch Hetchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy
- TulliusCicero 8y agoIs that really relevant to a housing discussion? California has water issues, but they're largely caused by agriculture, not residents.
- throwaway5752 8y agoYes, you shouldn't zone/permit for residential construction unless roads, utilities, and education systems can accommodate the increased load. I really didn't know the answer, and appreciate Aloha's response. edit: I left unsaid that my understanding is that a lot of CA water is snowcap melt, and that there is some degree of uncertainty about how the changing climate will impact that.
- Jamerson 8y agoThe people who want to increase housing don't ever bring up either the infrastructure of the city or the effect of urban density on communities. They just want to live close to work. Soon, I'm sure, the capacity will increase and in 20 years all of the articles will be about how to move tech companies to a nicer, less urban city.
- closeparen 8y agoLiving close to work has a drastically smaller infrastructure footprint than living far from work. Arguing against an urban development on traffic grounds is essentially always in bad faith: if the potential residents can’t take up space in your neighborhood, they will take up space on your freeway. Neighborhoods can scale; roads can’t. Every third sentence out of the YIMBY camp is about the effect of urban density in communities: how complete streets, walkable businesses, public space, etc. bring us both physically and socially closer together, walking back the hyperatomization of drive-alone commuting and automobile-scaled environments.
- throwaway5752 8y agoI'm not the tone police, but I don't see how that is a de facto bad faith point. I think your "potential residents .. will take up space on your freeway" as being way too reductionist. First, there's light rail which has a global and domestic track record of mitigating this. Second, "potential" residents can move elsewhere. There is no law or ethical principle that a city has to make housing available to all comers at the price they want. I think your second paragraph has great points about what makes a good/livable community, and is closer to what I think zoning should take into account.
- closeparen 8y ago>There is no law or ethical principle that a city has to make housing available to all comers at the price they want. That's essentially what's being litigated in this debate. YIMBYism argues that there is such an ethical principal: society ought to be inclusive, the playing field ought to be level, haves ought not to have too much power over have-nots, etc. We contend that they apply just as much to urban land use as to healthcare, immigration, and tax policy. Modern zoning is a deployment of state power to help reinforce and grow the asset values of a small group who were in the right place at the right time, valuing their aesthetic enjoyment above others' ability to make a living. Maybe we don't have a positive obligation to create an unlimited amount of affordable housing, but we at least have the obligation not to use the power of the state this way.
- zasz 8y agoThe vast majority of California's water usage is agricultural. http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108 http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108 In fact, an apartment dweller uses only as much water in a year as is required to grow $200 worth of almonds. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts-crazy-stats-charts http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts-... Acting like we can't build more housing because of the longstanding drought is a seriously NIMBY argument that is usually made in bad faith. Not that you're making it in bad faith, I'm just giving some context for the sake of being informative.
- mikeryan 8y agoThe same water supply supports generally the entire SF Bay area, increasing housing supply in SF would be a minor pull on any water supply required to support the entire area.
- ebikelaw 8y agoWhen San Francisco builds a desk for an office worker and no corresponding house, that person moves to Tracy where household water consumption is roughly triple what it is in San Francisco. Given that San Francisco enjoys a reliable water supply, you should be asking where everywhere else gets their water.
- the_economist 8y agoSan Francisco's water comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy. California has plenty of water for the humans. Whether we have enough for the current scale of industrial farming into the future is uncertain.
- stevenwoo 8y agoSan Francisco's supply of water from Hetchy Hetch is probably more guaranteed than the rest of the Bay Area, the SF Water company has large resources in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Almeda counties earmarked for SF that might appear to uninitiated as large spaces ripe for development - it's not and probably never will be.
- matchbok 8y agoSenate Bill 827 would have helped a lot of this. Unfortunately it was killed by "affordable" housing advocates and other NIMBYs.
- hsljekskfh 8y agoi agree with the dsa and chapo style socialists on everything except this issue. the “affordable housing” thing drives me absolutely crazy. pass laws that enforce affordable housing if you can, but the zoning thing is the biggest issue. their argument is always aesthetic as well. “nice homes are replaced with big brutalist nightmares.” the guy on the street would much prefer to live in a modernist building.
- debt 8y agoI think that was the moment I finally understood the insanity of California politics. Anti-development, pro-housing groups actively lobbied against a housing bill.
- Aloha 8y agoRent Seeking by incumbents is a huge issue with land use. I'd love to see a map like this of the whole Bay Area, or the Seattle area.
- ttul 8y agoSpeaking as your neighbour to the north, Vancouver has a similarly horrible NIMBY zoning problem. https://imgur.com/a/CftAdv5 https://imgur.com/a/CftAdv5 All the grey areas are single-family only zoning. Just eye-balling it, I'd say 80% of the land is for low density use only, despite Vancouver having some of the world's most expensive real estate relative to incomes and rents. This situation is perpetuated by successive city governments who owe their existence to wealthy single family home owners. Oddly, those same single family home owners would become rich if they could subdivide their properties for intensive development. I have never understood this paradox.
- artursapek 8y agoQuality of life in a single-family home neighborhood is higher than in a dense-housing neighborhood.
- sf_rob 8y agoNot for those who can't afford to live in an area with artificially constrained supply and instead will have to commute from the exurbs.
- cpursley 8y agoAccording to what metrics?
- rootusrootus 8y agoIf you like it quieter, with vastly fewer people around you, no vagrants, and you enjoy your own little bit of green space, then by those metrics a single-family dwelling is certainly better. It's really not an easy issue. It seems like objectively there are benefits to high density. But it's more expensive (to individuals, if not society as a whole), louder, more polluted, etc. It's easy to understand why plenty of people want to live in their own little castle, and it's also easy to understand why they would vote to preserve the status quo.
- 8y ago
- ClassAndBurn 8y agoSan Francisco is only 7 miles square and nearly a 1/3 is the Sunset and the Richmond which is almost entirely 2 story max, single family homes. Measure K which limited most of the big construction to South of Market pushed everything into an already packed downtown. Not everyone wants, or can afford, a condo on the 30th floor. I also hadn't realized how much of the city is green space. Kind of amazing that has been preserved.
- ebikelaw 8y agoThe green space is amazing but we didn't build the housing so everyone can enjoy it. All the blocks within walking distance of Golden Gate Park should be upzoned to five stories. The rest of the city should have, at a minimum, blanket approval for duplexes and other small multifamily dwellings. Statutory requirements for single-family detached housing is an abomination.
- hsljekskfh 8y agoYep. golden gate park was designed with the help of the same landscape architect as central park. but it’s almost an hour from downtown and inaccessible by bart, so it feels like it’s surrounded by eerie abandoned land. man this stuff makes me so mad
- mikeryan 8y ago(San francisco is 7 miles across, about 46 square miles)
- nwatson 8y ago(7 miles square == 49 square miles)
- natalyarostova 8y ago49 is about 46
- 16bytes 8y ago
- Jamerson 8y agoGood. You can't always fix housing demand with increase in supply. The streets and sidewalks and parking don't increase when the buildings get taller. After living in NYC for 11 years, I can tell you that just adding housing makes the real city: which is everything at street level worse. I know that many people that want to increase housing in SF just want to commute to their tech jobs, but that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland: too many people in a single area can't form a cohesive community. The people who already live in SF understand this, I think. Edit: Some specifics: The things that fall apart when density is too high. Here's an article about how density is making the subway worse than ever: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/28/nyregion/subway-delays-overcrowding.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/28/nyregion/subw... Schools overcrowded: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20170921/riverdale/overcrowded-schools-nyc-class-size-matters/ https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20170921/riverdale/overcrow... Traffic congestion: https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/18/16903152/nyc-traffic-congestion-cost-analysis https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/18/16903152/nyc-traffic-congest... Trash infrastructure overwhelmed: https://citylimits.org/2015/04/20/new-report-nyc-trash-is-worse-than-public-has-been-told/ https://citylimits.org/2015/04/20/new-report-nyc-trash-is-wo...
- mikert5671 8y agoI love NYC
- matchbok 8y agoThere are two ways to fix a supply/demand curve. Increase supply or decrease demand. Obviously increasing density would require more transit options and infrastructure. Not parking. Last time I checked, NYC was still one of the most diverse and vibrant places in the world.
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y agoWe could also decrease demand.
- bdhe 8y agoYou make a lot of strong assertions that don't seem obvious to me whatsoever. > but that's what turned NYC from neighborhoods and communities into a hellish wasteland: too many people in a single area can't form a cohesive community Can you elaborate what you mean by 'hellish wasteland'? What specific aspects of NYC (or even Manhattan) do you find to be a hellish wasteland? And how do you define 'too many people in a single area'?
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y agoSeems like the best fix is to make a new city.
- bazooka_penguin 8y agoOr move to Oakland?
- justinzollars 8y agoEast Bay is just as bad - low density with a lot of building restrictions.
- clarkmoody 8y agoIf it had the same government, you'd get the same problems.
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y agoOnly if you believe that zoning is the problem. Otherwise a big 10,000 acre plot turned into a little stoplight town but with some good employers would expand, people could define they way they want to live, maybe high density housing, maybe low density, maybe both. Maybe walkability, maybe drivability, maybe both. And so on and so on, evolving and growing organically. Upzoning is government-mandated redistribution and not even particularly good redistribution. Go somewhere else and we avoid the problem entirely.
- ProAm 8y agoRight? None of these people consider moving as a viable option. Hugely employable people seeking better quality of life and more affordable way of living choose the toughest path possible.
- Dirlewanger 8y agoThe Big One™ that sends the entire Bay Area into the Pacific can't come fast enough.
- 8y ago
- kindatrue 8y agoIt's surprising how "Owning a home is the most important investment you can make" collides with "Why isn't housing affordable?" Here's what parents are telling their kids: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/999364778907914245 https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/999364778907914245
- Dirlewanger 8y agoBoomers can't fuck off and die fast enough.
- sctb 8y agoIf you keep breaking the guidelines we'll ban the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- refurb 8y agoIf housing wasn't viewed as the middle class investment, housing prices would be much lower.
- ww520 8y agoI'm going to throw out an unpopular opinion. I think it's great that 73.5% of the city is low rise. 26.5% of the city having apartments is already more than plenty. 100% apartments would destroy SF. People fighting to get to live in SF because of its character. Destroying that you won't have San Francisco.
- closeparen 8y agoThey sure did. But why should the rest of us be sympathetic to the aesthetic taste of people who own $1.5 million assets? This concession is not free. It comes at the expense of others’ access to community, jobs, and shelter.
- greglindahl 8y agoI don't think anyone was advocating 100% apartments.
- Qworg 8y agoThe character is what brought them there? Not jobs? Also, which SF are you proposing to maintain? The 1850's version? Early '90's? Whenever you decided to move there? The only constant is change and renewal - you can't live in a museum.
- SCAQTony 8y agoWhy not? Rich people do. Bill Gates lives in a 66,000 square foot "house" with collectibles in it. Larry Ellison on a 23-acre estate. Why does the everyone below them have to be forced into cell block apartments?
- Karrot_Kream 8y agoWhat is your definition of a "cell-block apartment"?
- reaperducer 8y agohttp://time.com/4581230/hong-kong-apartments-property-sale-rent-small-housing/ http://time.com/4581230/hong-kong-apartments-property-sale-r... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-4306496/Coffin-apartments-Hong-Kong-one-room-families-LA.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-430649...
- rb808 8y agoLol I have a friend in SF who complains about high house prices and wants increased development. When I said he should move to NYC he said its too big and crowded and he doesn't want to live with a family in an apt. Didn't even blink.
- saosebastiao 8y ago/r/thatHappened/
- magduf 8y agoIs he perhaps seeking a middle ground, where he wants more development of spacious luxury condos? I wouldn't want to live in a crappy little (and usually old) apartment either, but I do like new luxury-ish condos. Theoretically, it should be cheaper to buy such a condo than a single-family home in a location where land value is very high. Apartments really suck for a lot of reasons: the rent goes way up every single year, forcing you to move out every year or two, because the management companies seek to maximize profit by screwing over existing renters, thinking they won't want to move. They're typically very poorly built, because they're not owned by the residents, so they're noisy. They're usually very pet-unfriendly. I could go on and on. Condos are almost always much nicer to live in, even though from the outside they look much the same. They do have their issues (crappy management at many of them, but at least in theory the mgmt is answerable to the owners and can be voted out), but there's big advantages to living in a condo over a single-family home in my experience: not needing to worry about landscaping, exterior maintenance, etc., various amenities (gym, etc.), and just convenience in general. I don't live in SF (I live in DC), but it seems to me that what SF really needs is a lot more high-rise condos like what we have here in DC. And DC isn't nearly as "crowded" as NYC.
- jrockway 8y agoI think you're painting apartments with a very broad brush. My rent in NYC has increased by a total of $125 a month over the 6 years I've lived in the same apartment. The building was built in something like 1839, and it's quite solid by today's standards. There are no noise issues to speak of. Only thing I really want is central AC, a modern innovation that New York has not seemed to have heard of.
- mrfusion 8y agoAt this point wouldn’t it be profitable to buy an old cruise ship and park it offshore and sell living space? Give folks a high speed ferry running back and forth.
- kindatrue 8y agoVoters (property owners and landlords) would instantly pressure the city to ban it for being blight. The resistance to adding more housing is amazingly strong. Can't stop the gravy train!
- kilroy123 8y agoThat's what I've wondered. Maybe the solution is to build land out in the ocean like Dubai has done. It would cost billions, but building enough housing to meet demand will already cost billions. I don't know, building a mile high building in the ocean doesn't sound so crazy anymore for San Fran. Like this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Tokyos-mile-high-skyscraper-to-be-the-tallest-in-the-world/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Tokyos-mile-high-sky...
- nradov 8y agoThe Reber Plan called for filling in San Francisco Bay, and it was seriously considered. In retrospect it was obviously a terrible idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan
- nradov 8y ago
- samstave 8y agowhen you talk about high density housing, the only people who then own land are billion dollar investment funds with robotic inhuman desire to maximize per square foot profit because fuck you thats why. sure, we need more housing - but it also perpetuates another set of problem factors by having such. as far as building and ciy planning, id look at singapore and other high density asian ities for lessons. heck, we cant even have good quality transportation. if you think bart and muni are good services, then you havent been to places like singapore, hong kong, tokyo or beijing. singapore digs down for every floor it puts up. sf will never solve true density problems. period.
- Wohlf 8y agoReal estate is not limited to land, plenty of people own property in large cities with condos and coops. Even if the building is owned by a business homeowners in multi-family buildings have the same protections as those in single-family.
- tovkal 8y agoSF is in a similar situation as Barcelona, kind of. SF is 121.4 km2 while BCN is 101.9 km². SF is sea-locked on three sides while BCN is sea-locked on one side and on the other has mountains. As per the map, SF is mainly single-family housing while BCN is mostly multi-family housing (average is 12 homes per building). Population (in 2016) is 870k vs 1.6m. If all those low density areas in SF were converted to high density, SF could grow a lot and housing issues could be plaited temporally (years?) but after a while it be the same thing, where there's more demand than supply. Personally, I think having single-family housing inside a city is a waste of space but a city full of 30 story buildings usually is not very pretty. I like the Eixample, were streets are wide and buildings just the right size so there is plenty of sunlight, airflow and all that. Obviously if I were an owner of a single-family home in SF I would be against of converting my quiet, low-density neighborhood into all high-rise. Tricky problem to solve.
- tyu100 8y agoYes, the nicest neighbourhoods in the world, in my opinion, are medium density, with a mix of mid-rise density that allows sunlight in while still getting a critical mass of people for services and transit, with some SFH that is nice for families and gets lots of green space in the neighbourhood.
- reaperducer 8y agoVery tricky. Tourism is still a very big industry in San Francisco. One of the reasons people go there is to see the charming old houses and nice old neighborhoods. While we think SF would look great if it were like in the Star Trek movies, that would pretty much destroy a large part of what makes San Francisco San Francisco.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- namesbc 8y agoThink about that for a moment. People come to SF to visit the attractions at the high density parts e.g fisherman's wharf, union square, chinatown, ghirardelli square, coit tower, etc. Look at a standard tourist map of SF: https://www.sftodo.com/sanfrancisco/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/san-francisco-map-mini.jpg https://www.sftodo.com/sanfrancisco/wp-content/uploads/2018/... No one comes to SF to visit the vast tracts of suburbia in the sunset: https://goo.gl/maps/p91HMQTcXBQ2 https://goo.gl/maps/p91HMQTcXBQ2
- nickstefan12 8y agoThe problem with "just build more" is that eventually you run out of space the same as now, only you get to do it with a worse quality of light / space / light / traffic / noise / etc. I wish more cities fought to maintain true pristine open space. There is no housing crises. There is a concentration of jobs problem and a wealth inequality problem. The internet's winner-take-all nature has created a world where one office in one city can do what used to require more sprinkled out offices of different businesses. Couple that with too many rich people, who will always have more money to park in desirable places than we have time to out build, and you get people priced out of the "one place" they can get a job. It's not housing. It's the structure of our economy. If you don't believe me, notice how every city in America right now talks about its "housing crisis". It's wealth inequality and job monopolies.
- nickstefan12 8y agoPeople are going to accuse me of "got mine", but I have none! What I'm saying is to consider that wanting cheaper housing today is throwing away a lot of natural beauty, vistas, and life, forever, just for a short term easement of housing pressure.
- saosebastiao 8y agoBuilding cities is exactly how you preserve natural beauty and vistas. Maybe you prefer we convert Mt Tamalpais to a SFH subdivision, but I would much prefer we house millions of people in a few sqm of land than millions of sqm of land. San Francisco at Paris densities could house 2.5M people. We could eliminate an entire Silicon Valley's worth of housing development if we would just allow density where there is demand for it.
- jknz 8y ago> The problem with "just build more" is that eventually you run out of space the same as now This argument misses the point. In the process of building more, you have made a lot of people richer/happier/commuting less, because now they can live within the city walls. Making a lot of people richer/happier/commuting less should be done everywhere where it's possible to do so. > The problem with "just build more" is that eventually you run out of space the same as now, only you get to do it with a worse quality of light / space / light / traffic / noise / etc. By admitting that you will eventually run out of space again, you acknowledge that demand will always keep increasing until saturation even if you build more, _because people are even more interested in denser city lives and its work/leisure/community opportunities than they are interested in suburban-type light/space/traffic/noise_. If people were interested at all in suburban-type light/space/traffic/noise, dense cities would not be in such high demand.
- stevehawk 8y agoOh, so it's still expensive to live in a city that refuses to build more housing? And here I thought that had changed since the last weekly article on the same subject. ;-)
- Karrot_Kream 8y agoMaintaining its culture is one thing, but it's irresponsible that SF has continued to allow commerical zoning and jobs to increase without upzoning for housing accordingly. It places strain on cities around SF and causes the transportation infrastructure to be unnecessarily stressed. SF is trying to pull a Palo Alto where they reap the benefits of having many jobs, but push the cost of housing to neighboring cities. It's irresponsible.
- zjaffee 8y agoThis 100%. We need federal legislation around zoning and job growth, as has been seen with the bay area, it leads to wealthy people moving to cheaper areas and causing property values to artificially rise there. SF are by under no obligation to grow, where the vast majority of times when they grow, they aren't doing so due to interest from residents, but from the interests of businesses. The only areas in the US that I've seen that truly want this sort of growth are ones in the sunbelt regions, and especially Texas. While these areas don't often have the same urban feel that NIMBY cities have, I'm sure part of that comes from the fact that theres less that's worthy of being preserved.
- macinjosh 8y ago> This 100%. We need federal legislation around zoning and job growth, as has been seen with the bay area, it leads to wealthy people moving to cheaper areas and causing property values to artificially rise there. Yeah, more government meddling in the housing and jobs market will solve the problem! /s The dichotomy you present of it being the interests of residents vs. the interests of business is false. I am sure many businesses want to build more housing for residents but the government prohibits it with zoning laws. If more companies were allowed to build new housing in and around the city it would be to the detriment of the landlords and businesses benefitting from the currently sky high rents as there would be more openings for residents and prices would be driven down accordingly.
- zjaffee 8y agoThe sort of legislation I'd be interested in seeing is more similar to SB 827 than it is to existing zoning laws. Namely, don't allow cities subsidize job growth while keeping housing constrained, or additionally, upzone for office/industrial space and then downzone housing. And it's absolutely a battle between residents and businesses. Cities subsidize multinational companies to grow within their borders and then allow them to contribute very little to the infrastructure needed to support these people. Due to the lack of proper transportation and educational investment, enabling high numbers of new comers just leads to more congestion and overcrowding. If we had employment head taxes (or any other sort of program that could solve infrastructure challenges in a 1:1 way with job migrant growth) around solving these sorts of problems, they wouldn't be problems.
- kyleblarson 8y agoEugene Wei summed it up well on Twitter: There should be an SF Fortnite mod that replaces the shrinking storm circles with encroaching zoning restrictions. Eventually no one can build any structures and all players are homeless and running around trying to avoid stepping in poop while getting in a long line for brunch.
- tranchms 8y agoThe problem isn’t even San Francisco. It’s the entire Bay Area. In 1 hour in any direction you have exorbitant rent/ housing. Building codes make it next to impossible anywhere in the bay to affordably build. I live in Belmont, and my gf lives on Van Ness downtown. They need to create more housing pretty much ANYWHERE in the bay. And somewhere close to the major business areas. When I moved here years ago to work at a startup, the cheapest housing I could find was $800 sharing a house with 10 roommates. Having 4-8 roommates it’s not uncommon. Who is making money off this scheme? And on an unrelated note, downtown San Francisco has turned into a writhing cess pool of filth. Homelessness, unstable/ crazy people. Rampant drug use and needles everywhere. Tents lining the streets. Prostitution. Human excrement all over the sidewalks. The only way to avoid it is stay in your bubble and pretend is doesn’t exist.
- incadenza 8y agoHave you or your gf been there for a while? Is the homelessness worse than before? I lived there about six years ago so I’m curious.
- nradov 8y agoBased on my subjective observations, homelessness definitely seems to have gotten worse in the South Bay Area in the past few years. If you go biking or walking along the various creek trails and railroad tracks you'll see more encampments. Some of them are fairly well hidden but if you stop and look you'll see the signs. By the way, this is one of the reasons why it's tough to get people out of their cars and commuting by bike. Many people don't feel safe cycling through those areas.
- alonmower 8y agoI've been here for 8, my (totally anecdotal) observation is that a lot of the homelessness + drug use has moved up market from the mid market/tenderloin area towards duboce triangle and the castro making it more noticeable/visible. I wouldn't be surprised if the absolute numbers increased too but it seems like a lot of the development/companies that moved into the mid market area may have led to an increase in police enforcement that has led to a dispersion.
- gaius 8y agoIt’s weird how NIMBY is a pejorative “Other people should sacrifice their wellbeing for me me me”
- gbear605 8y agoIt's because NIMBY is equivalent to defection in an iterated prisoner's dilemma[1]. By being NIMBY, you'll be a bit better off today, but because someone else is NIMBY, you'll be a lot worse off tomorrow. YIMBY makes everyone better in the long term. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
- evilolive 8y agothe same nimby who voted no Bart in the peninsula in the late 60's because it would: bring "unsavory" ppl from the east bay "to my snowflake walled community" you can see the result of that now: diesel caltrain unadequate for ppl to commute with, and crowded freeways
- imperialdrive 8y agoAgreed. Why should the city and its residents stretch thin... businesses and newcomers will simply wise up and spread out. Living and working here has become like a high on drugs, and people are doing whatever it takes to get their next hit. I'd love to see what an intelligent generation does to build up neighboring cities rather than complain about one that would do just fine without them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- emaginniss 8y agoIt's a pejorative because it is a short-hand for a longer statement: "Yes, of course, we need ${X}, but not in my back yard."
- danepowell 8y agoHonest question, is it truly possible to build yourself out of a housing crisis? Or is housing like roads, where an increased supply just leads to even more demand? In other words, traffic exists not because of a lack of roads per se, but because people are willing to accept a given level of traffic when deciding whether to drive somewhere. In an area as beautiful and in demand as SF, will people essentially keep on immigrating until it's unattractive enough that they stop, regardless of supply? Edit: thanks everyone for the thoughtful replies and for pointing out some of my potentially flawed assumptions. It's refreshing to have civilized exchanges of opinion on the internet every once in a while :)
- inputcoffee 8y agoGreat question. In theory, jobs put an upper limit on housing usage. People almost always follow jobs. There are many beautiful cities in the world but only SF is near Silicon Valley. You can find cheap housing in nice areas if they don’t depend on jobs (college towns, retirement communities). People will present counter examples at the margins of course, but generally the relationship holds.
- gascan 8y agoBut, also in theory, cost of living drives competitive salary, which in turn drives whether a company can afford to hire employees in a particular city. So if you build more housing, cost of living goes down, which attracts more companies to the city who were priced out of the labor pool before, which increases jobs in the city, which attracts people and increases housing usage...
- inputcoffee 8y agoThe part of this logical chain that I don’t follow is the low cost of living attracting companies. I can see why low cost of living ought to attract companies but in practice the new companies seem to gravitate towards already high cost of living cities. This may be because the other considerations (workers, education, infrastructure etc) May outweigh low cost of living alone. Or there might be another reason I cannot think of.
- 27182818284 8y agoIf you're looking to move to the Bay area, you should also look at moving to the like Lincoln, NE or Omaha, NE or Kansas City. A lot more so if you have a family. I know that sounds strange, but.... The Midwest is cheap. Albeit harder than the past, it is still possible and common in the Midwest to live a middle-class-ish lifestyle on a single income. A two bedroom apartment can be less than $500 a month. I have friends with $830/month mortgage payments on their house. The Internet is solid in the Midwest too, unless you're actually out on a farm. In the cities you can get Gigabit up/down for $90 a month. Most places don't have Google Fiber, but other fiber companies have sprung up. The majority of my tech friends have fiber in to their walls for Internet. It is very much a culture of YIMBY right now too. Driverless shuttles? Yeah sure. New apartment building? Yeah sure. New tech startups? Yeah sure. Lastly, (this is a hot topic issue so I am reluctant to put it in, but it is something that comes up from my friends on the west coast) the states are red states, but the cities are blue. As an example, Omaha is blue enough that it split the electoral vote of Nebraska to Obama in the past. (NE is a state that can split its electoral vote rather than winner-takes-all.) Yes it is true that if you start driving out in to the country you will see "Trump" painted on to barns and such, but in the cities you don't.
- wumpus 8y agoI live in the Bay Area because of the dense concentration of smart people and ease of joining/starting startups. There's more to tech than fast Internet.
- aquova 8y agoBelieve it or not there are smart people outside of the Bay area, even out in the Midwest. Over the last few years there’s been a big increase in startups out here the last few years, partially driven by the high cost of living in the traditional tech regions.
- decacorn 8y agoBelieve it or not, the most savvy investors in the nation are heavily biased to investing primarily within Silicon Valley. As soon as large tech giants move to the Midwest, sure the trend might start. No big tech companies, no reason for tech workers to move.
- stlava 8y agoThere was an NPR clip a month or so ago that likened homeowners to a cartel.
- saosebastiao 8y agoIt isn't a simile. If they are colluding to reduce supply and increase prices, they actually fit within the dictionary definition of a cartel.
- scottlegrand2 8y agoSB827 would have overturned zoning near transit hubs. It was shot down by a coalition of NIMBYs and Bernie-progressives accusing it of not being good enough despite acknowledging the existence of the problem. The upshot for me was making a donation to Scott Weiner's warchest - we need more new ideas and original thinking to get out of this mess. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/californias-transit-density-bill-stalls/558341/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/californias-transit-d...
- java_script 8y agoSeems like a total misrepresentation of what the critics to the left said about it, and like you're trying to pull a "both sides do it" / "the truth is in the middle" act without substance. For example the Los Angeles DSA argues that SB827 would not have even lowered rents [0] and would have worsened housing for poor families. You can disagree with that, but that is absolutely not the same as it "not being good enough". 0: https://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827 https://www.dsa-la.org/statement_in_opposition_to_sb_827
- scottlegrand2 8y agoSo that's the problem. No plan is going to be perfect. Better remains the enemy of good enough and I think this would have been a really good start. Note that the rebuttal posted here demands the repeal of Costa Hawkins. Doing so would strip all homeowners of the right to evict renters from their own home. Please tell me how that helps any homeowner whatsoever. Or if you don't care about homeowners (in which case why should they care about renters?), please tell me why California would be a better place by doing that to every single homeowner in the state? I personally think you need to build bridges not tear them down and there's a lot we can agree on when it comes to California infrastructure But if you're going to veto everything that's imperfect, IMO you're just perpetuating and exacerbating the existing situation. I suspect SB827 will be back next year because the hyperbole (from the left BTW not both sides in this case) about Scott Wiener being a closet Republican was absurd and it took an insane degree of cherry picking of his voting record to make that case. I read that ~54% of homeowners vote as opposed to ~28% of renters. I think the proposition to repeal Costa Hawkins is really going to bring out the vote here and the numbers are not on the side of renters. I note also that the cost of California Home Ownership is just not all that high once you get out of the major cities. I had to give a talk at UC Merced a couple months back and I was really tempted to immediately move there and buy a mcmansion for the price of a single room condo in SF. Finally, this could have been a wonderful opportunity to put an additional proposition out there that we could all agree on. Too bad we're so busy fighting with each other while the other side of the political fence slowly assimilates power.
- CodeSheikh 8y agoStop selling real estate to foreign investors and we might be able to solve one piece of the puzzle. NYC/SF has same issues. Greedy American based real estate investments companies are corroding the system for rest of us.
- ahoy 8y agoIf it wasn't going to foreign investors wouldn't it be going to oil millionaires from texas?
- CodeSheikh 8y agoStill USA citizens, not ideal either.
- davidw 8y agoGet involved: https://yimbyaction.org/ https://yimbyaction.org/ - there are YIMBY groups springing up all over the place, as well as groups like Strong Towns https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ This isn't an easy fix, but it's possible, and, hearteningly in this divisive day and age, something that people from all political points of view can find a reason to support.
- jagger27 8y agoWill SF reach a point where homeowners decide to build downwards (like they do in London) to gain living space? Is it feasible given the geography?
- spike021 8y agoNot sure if that's even possible. From what I can recall of SF history, much of downtown isn't really stable ground (see the Millennium Tower as an example, with the ground underneath shifting and the foundation not being built to consider that issue). Also, I believe there are ships buried underneath the ground in SF from the 1800's.
- macinjosh 8y agoHere is an instance of government getting in the way of the free market. The reason SF's housing market is so messed up is because of government meddling in the market. That's not to say the government shouldn't regulate anything and that all zoning laws are bad, but it is clear in this situation it is not helping. IMHO the answer here is less government, not more.
- siavosh 8y agoI've been really confused at why cities are becoming exponentially more important rather than less despite better and better remote-working tools and the general de-industrialization of America (reducing the benefits of agglomeration economics). I find the economic claim that a firm being close to other firms being a significant productivity advantage unconvicing. My current theory is after 2008, the suburbs pretty much went belly up. So young people had less money and no desire to get stuck with a dangerous mortgage like their parents. With no desire to own a house or even a car and an emphasis on experiences, people started moving to the cities and the companies followed them there which created a positive feedback loop. So the jobs followed the people, not the other way around. My sense is that there just aren't that many good jobs even in the cities since there isn't any real advantage any more outside some old industrial sectors of being geographically close to others. It's primarily a cultural phenomena not an economic one of the growth of cities. So at what point is the cultural gain no longer rationale and trend flows back to the suburbs?
- gweinberg 8y agoFor some people the glass is always 3/4 empty. I would say zoning allows building on 26.6%.
- imh 8y agoI can't think of a way to write this that doesn't come across as a little facetious, but I swear this is an honest question. Would the YIMBYs here be happy replacing the parks in SF (especially Golden Gate Park) with high density housing? It would be a huge and likely effective trade of city character for affordability.
- abalone 8y agoWe need more density. Serious question: do you guys think market rate development will push down prices enough to make SF affordable to the working class (service industry, teachers, etc.)? Or do we need subsidized / below market rate housing? This is an issue that affects all of us. Commuting in 1+ hours for low wage jobs is not a viable growth model. Already small businesses in SF are having a very hard time hiring. Unless Elon Musk builds us some tunnels, we need local housing for the working class just to function as a city that’s desirable to live in. My thought on market rate: it will certainly make it more affordable for folks like us (upper 5 - lower 6 figure incomes). But there is a long queue of white collar professionals particularly in tech that would like to move into the city. All that demand needs to be soaked up before the market rate becomes “affordable” for the working class — which means dirt cheap for professionals. How many tech professionals would decide to move here if SF was dirt cheap? That’s a lot of induced demand to satiate. So that’s where the real debate is here when it comes to upzoning the west side. Do you open it up to maximum market rate, or do you negotiate with developers for maximum BMR units? I feel the “nimby vs yimby” dichotomy here tends to cloud that issue.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Serious question: do you think guys think market rate development will push down prices enough to make SF affordable to the working class (service industry, teachers, etc.)? Or do we need subsidized / below market rate housing? Just a thought, but maybe no to both questions. You need working class people to be able to work in SF, but is it necessary (with adequate transit) that they live there?
- abalone 8y ago> (with adequate transit) Well, do we have adequate transit? I saw some maps that visualized where you could get from affordable neighboods on public transit within an hour in several major metros. Can’t find it now but it was striking. Even in NYC you could go from affordable parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx to most of Manhattan. But in the Bay Area... it was tiny areas around BART stops only. Most of SF was cut off. That’s why businesses are having such a hard time hiring. I tried to address this when I noted that either Musk needs to build tunnels or we need local working class housing.
- josh2600 8y agoFWIW, I would totally live in Berkeley if my commute to the dogpatch could be shortened. Right now, there's no obvious mass transit way to get to my office in SF in less than 80 minutes (assuming every connection is hit perfectly). With an Uber, it's highly variable (between 40 minutes and 90 minutes depending upon the day).