16 ms·

San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

226 points by sunils34 7y ago

danso 7y ago
For those who are wondering, given the publisher, no, the essay is not simply a rant against rent-control: > True revolution would involve curbing the authority of the San Francisco Planning Commission. If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment (density is green), they would enact a land-value tax and establish a redistributive policy to align the interests of the city, current residents, and future citizens. Strong government housing policy could spur growth and redistribute the city’s wealth fairly. But most of all, the freedom to build and experiment is the engine of Silicon Valley dynamism. Allow the experiments of the few to become the prosperity and fulfillment of the many, and the city could thrive once again.
- _jal 7y ago
  > they would enact a land-value tax and establish a redistributive policy They can't bring themselves to mention Proposition 13, somehow.
  - zenkat 7y ago
    Prop 13 isn't really in the control of SF city residents. But damn, California ... time to put that wealth-transfer tax for the old, rich, landed elite to bed already.
    - viscanti 7y ago
      They've made millions from the appreciation of their houses, but they are still active in preventing new housing to try to juice their returns even more. It's a problem of how many Americans see their house as their biggest investment (and if you were a granny who bought in California 50 years ago it likely is). So naturally these wealthy landowners who bought property decades ago are going to fight to preserve their investment, but like the article points out, they're actually slowly killing their investment.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    Repeal of Prop 13 would be implicit in any land value tax, so not mentioning it is a severe deficiency of understanding the power of San Francisco to properly govern itself. Prop 13, despite benefitting landlords and commercial property owners more than homeowners, has an unfair reputation of keeping "grannies" in their homes in face of unfair taxation. Mention repeal of Prop 13 for commercial property, and even otherwise sensible people will start saying how heartless it is to ignore the plight of grannies, since this inappropriate connection is so strong in the collective psyche.
  - perpetualpatzer 7y ago
    Sorry, not familiar with CA politics ... is the subtext here that a land-value tax would be impossible without a constitutional amendment? Or that California already enacted a 1% ad valorem tax in the 70s? From what I can tell, Prop 13 seems generally popular[0], but could see an argument that it exacerbates the housing shortage in the Bay Area, so not sure which way you're pointing. [0] https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-their-government-january-2019.pdf https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/ppic-statewide-surve...
    - _jal 7y ago
      That is my point, yes. And doing so is essentially impossible. It is popular among property owners, who have a huge interest in defeating any attack on it. (It was also slightly amusing to see a history-free call for more taxation in that particular rag, given tribal affiliations.) It does drive up housing costs. It also distorts commercial transactions weakens, local control, and generally casts a large shadow over, well, any conversation about taxation and anything taxation touches (like real estate) in California.
      - perpetualpatzer 7y ago
        gotcha. Thanks for the reply.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    Yeah, it's an unfair criticism to ask them why they aren't levying a tax they're constitutionally prohibited from. With that said, it's reasonable to expect them to propose reforms to prop 13 that preserve its core intent but cut back on the death spiral it encourages.
- justin66 7y ago
  Is there anything in the world quite as dumb as this form of argument? If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment
  - veryworried 7y ago
    The argument that Democrats are all the best people who always have a genuine interest for others and the environment has it beat.
    - justin66 7y ago
      I'm sure that matters to you, but I was talking about the form of the argument. It'd be equally stupid if it were something starting with If Republicans cared about free markets or low taxes... It's a completely useless way to preface any statement, signalling useless text to follow. See what I mean?
      - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        Yes, but no. "X is not acting in accordance with X's stated values" is a perfectly valid statement, for all values of X. "It would help problem Y if X did act in accordance with their stated values" is also a valid statement. What's not valid is to act all surprised that X does not in fact act in accordance with their stated values - especially where politics is involved. (It's still valid to point out that it's happening.) Politicians dissemble, lie, act hypocritically, mislead voters, and... did I leave anything out? If you want to change their actual behavior, you have to change their incentives. One way to do that is to get the voters to hold their feet to the fire, to get them to act consistently with the values that the voters elected them to embody. (Which gets us back to "X is acting inconsistently..." being a perfectly valid thing to say.) But the problem can run deeper than that. The voters themselves may mouth certain values, but actually desire things inconsistent with those values. At that point, the politicians are embodying the desires of the voters; the problem is the voters' hypocrisy. Once again, though, pointing out the hypocrisy is about the only way to try to attack the problem. (Changing the voters' incentives would almost always require the voters' acquiescence...)
- zzzeek 7y ago
  yeah this was odd, it goes into a typical "meh DEMOCRATS ruin everything" but then he calls for new taxes, a redistributive policy and however vague "strong government housing policy". Doesn't sound very free markety ?
  - jonathankoren 7y ago
    Most of the article was simply stating the obvious about SF, but the end was very weird. When the National Review starts calling for a land-value tax and a “redistributive policy”, I’m sorry, but I’m going to call this disingenuous trolling by the author, because these are not policies the National Review honestly advocates for.
    - TMWNN 7y ago
      "There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago." —Milton Friedman
      - jonathankoren 7y ago
        Now do how wealth redistribution from rich to the poor is good.
cobbzilla 7y ago
“Up and down the city’s disorienting hills, you notice homeless men and women — junkies, winos, the dispossessed...“ Did the author ever actually walk in SF? The homeless mostly stay in the flats, the hills are fine (and higher rent of course).
- jostmey 7y ago
  I don’t even want to visit San Francisco anymore. Why would the writers want to? I’m making a point about how bad it’s become in San Francisco relative to the rest of the US
  - leesalminen 7y ago
    My partner and I visited SF last summer and were fairly shocked with all the homelessness, drug use on the streets and human feces scattered about. We won’t be back.
    - tvanantwerp 7y ago
      My wife and I had the same experience. As an east coast programmer, I was curious about what it would be like in SF and arrange a vacation to see it for myself. We spent a week there, and both decided that we never ever wanted to move to a place like that. Nothing looked clean (certainly nowhere smelled clean) nor inviting. It would've been a considerable decline in our quality of living to move there.
    - dekhn 7y ago
      I'd just like to say, as somebody who used to live in SF, I feel sorry for tourists. What the city is permitting is unthinkable, but up to about a year ago, even saying that it wasn't acceptable was social suicide. Now it's changed a bunch- people are much more clearly stating that allowing people to put up tents and litter the sstreets with poop and needles isn't OK. However, the city really can't do anything about it because it's tolerated this for so long and anything they did would be massively controversial.
      - 7y ago
beeskneecaps 7y ago
[deleted]
- prolikewhoa 7y ago
  "This homelessness seems just dandy!"
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - beeskneecaps 7y ago
    Didn’t say this..
prolikewhoa 7y ago
Infinite growth is the goal of literal cancer. Add in heirarchal systems and the lowest class mobility in first world nations, raising the cost of everything while stagnating wages while the rich shareholders simultaneously take even more wealth (how many yachts do you really need?), and you're just left with shitholes of clearly failed or failing Capitalism like SF and now Seattle where society can't take care of its most vulnerable or solve literally any issues that can't be commodified and sold as a "tech" product. Society needs a change. The lower classes need a raise.
- delfinom 7y ago
  >Society needs a change. The lower classes need a raise. The lower classes may get a raise but so will the ones above them to compensate and eventually cost of living just goes up to match the previous status quo.
dawhizkid 7y ago
Having lived in SF for a number of years now, I 100% agree that SF is just dystopian as hell. Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all over downtown & SOMA, depressing mix of aggressive and zombie-like homeless, very few kids/families, very few minorities (especially African-Americans), barely functioning public transportation system, high rents forcing six-figure earners to live with 2 roommates and still pay $2500/month, 400 sq ft studios going for $700k, every other non-tech worker is an Uber driver/Instacart Shopper/DoorDash delivery person
- prolikewhoa 7y ago
  Seattle too!
  - Aloha 7y ago
    Seattle is at least marginally cheaper
    - dawhizkid 7y ago
      Even though Seattle has gotten more expensive, it still pales in comparison to SF...plus no state income tax.
      - Aloha 7y ago
        My rent has still effectively more than doubled since 2014
  - davidw 7y ago
    Seattle has been building enough that apparently it has started to curb prices. Supply and demand are real. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-rents-growing-at-among-slowest-rates-in-country-as-apartment-boom-reaches-record/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...
- atom-morgan 7y ago
  How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
api 7y ago
San Francisco is a bonsai kitten. It wants to grow into a major world city like NYC, LA, or Tokyo, but its older residents are steadfastly opposed and want to keep it in a jar so it stays cute. The result is a painful deformed mess. I don't really think city planning boards can control how cities grow. A city is a living thing. If it "wants" to grow, let it grow. If it doesn't, I don't think it can be forced. Detroit learned the opposite lesson and is recovering in part by realizing that the Detroit of today is destined to be a much smaller city population wise than it once was and they are adjusting and "right-sizing" the city accordingly. They are concentrating on the living areas and demolishing and transforming the dead ones into parks, public gardens, urban farming, or natural land. The result will be a smaller city with a ton of really cool history and a cool "post-industrial" vernacular.
- AFascistWorld 7y ago
  Have you heard of Boston subway's daily breakdowns?
  - api 7y ago
    Sorry I ninja edited with a better thesis. :P Yes I used to live there. The subway system in Boston and NYC is very badly run, but the city as a whole at least for Boston isn't bad. They do a better job with urban planning at least.
    - Finnucane 7y ago
      It is a conundrum that most American cities do not really support their public transit systems very well, and yet they seem to desire the kind of urban organization that basically requires a well-run transit system.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  I've lived in New York. Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that? Is NYC cheap, clean, free of homeless people? No, it is crowded, smelly, expensive, and only livable for the extremely wealthy.
szbalint 7y ago
It's weird that technology oriented people see code/IT in terms of infrastructure, but too little from a city as such. I'm living in Vienna, Austria which is a city consistently rated to be in the top 5 most livable cities by multiple independent evaluations. How did that happen? A strong sense of ownership and infrastructure thinking over a _century_. Just to mention the obvious, property prices do not exist in a vacuum and cities where property prices go through such a steep and continuous rise as in London, Moscow, San Francisco etc. are not a reflection of desirability or market forces but rather the total abdication of planning and responsibility from the local authorities. There are dozens of things local leadership can do to fix infrastructure and living standards issues, never let anyone tell you otherwise.
- dev_dull 7y ago
  Cities like SF have a strong survival bias. People who disagreed, tried to change things, etc are leaving or already left. Over time you end up with a place that’s broken and a group of people who want it that way.
  - jseliger 7y ago
    It's like watching Exit, Voice, and Loyalty play out in real time: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organizations/dp/0674276604 https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza...
- Creationer 7y ago
  It also helps that Vienna's population has been basically flat for many years. By contrast the prior #1 most liveable city - Melbourne - has grown from 2 million 30 years ago to 5 million currently, forecast to get to 8 million by 2050, all due to mass immigration. Livability has fallen directly in line with population growth. I've lived in a lot of cities around the world and think there is a 'sweet spot' population number: big enough to allow the provision of niche services and the agglomeration of talent, yet not too big as to introduce costly dis-economies of scale (usually through very expensive housing and transportation.) That level seems to be about 1-3 million.
nkingsy 7y ago
The author draws a very unsubtle if not direct line between housing costs and homelessness. Is there any? I was under the impression that most of the homeless are mentally ill and/or transplants from other areas. What percent of them just can't afford the rent?
- bluejekyll 7y ago
  This is a popular myth. https://www.sftu.org/2018/06/five-myths-about-the-homeless-problem-in-san-francisco/ https://www.sftu.org/2018/06/five-myths-about-the-homeless-p... According to that, 71% of people on the streets of SF used to be homed, and aren’t on the streets due to drugs.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Great article, but their bias needs to be seen through.
  - rsync 7y ago
    This, and other statistics like it, are really disingenuous and framed for a very specific interpretation. Here is the actual quote from the article (strikethrough is in the original - not sure why - maybe a bad stat ?): "The vast majority of the people who are homeless today used to be housed – in San Francisco. According to the city’s 2015 homeless count, 71 percent of the people on the streets were living in San Francisco when they lost their housing. That means seven out of ten homeless people used to be your neighbors – before the tech boom and the eviction epidemic. " So the presentation here is that average-joe-normal-churchgoer was minding his own business as a lifelong SF resident and was then evicted by an evil landlord, so his apartment could go to a techie, which sent him into a downward spiral to homelessness. I have not done independent research into this myself, but I have a suspicion that the actual narrative is something like: "borderline mentally healthy individual moves to San Francisco because it's interesting and fun and romantic (and warm) and, while still on their meds, manages to rent a room or an SRO or something, lives there for a month or two or six, runs out of either money or meds or familial support (or all three) and suffers their financial/emotional/mental breakdown here, on our streets, far from any support or family they have, if they had any at all." If this suspicion is correct, it doesn't imply we shouldn't be compassionate or helpful or progressive in our responses, but it does suggest that we are importing problems and should consider how we might limit that tendency. It also does not place some kind of moralistic "maybe they shouldn't be doing drugs in the first place" judgement on people - at the end of the day it is indeed a mental health issue. Just maybe it doesn't need to be our mental health problem.
jlewis_st 7y ago
The article omits SB 50 [1], the effort by Scott Wiener (state senator from SF) to increase housing density and remove regulatory hurdles for housing development near transit. From what I’ve seen it’s the most promising method to increase housing supply CA-wide given that many municipalities resist development. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/california-home-prices-climate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/california-home-p...
- the_watcher 7y ago
  And nearly unanimously opposed by the SF Board of Supervisors, which is typical of anything that would improve the housing situation here.
dev_dull 7y ago
Here’s what I don’t get. The real struggle seems to always be against local governments and the residents. The residents all know how jacked up it is and have good ideas for fixes, but constantly butt heads against their city. Somehow everybody knows this, but votes in people who increase the power, scope, and responsibility of the local government which works against their interest?
- bluejekyll 7y ago
  Not sure what you mean exactly. A lot of the issues are people “protecting their neighborhoods” from development and preserving the “feel”. People generally are voting against policies that would raise inventory of housing, which is really the only way to reduce its cost.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    There is the issue: people know how to solve the problem, but to many voters it is directly against their personal interest. They do need to watch out though: there is nothing about San Francisco (or any other area) that means the rich need to live there, or you need to move there to get rich. (unless you are into mining for wealth where you obviously need to be where your mineral is). If some other area becomes hot the people in San Francisco have the most to lose: your house that you paid so much for and work so hard to protect the value of has the farther to fall. When/if the bubble collapses those in more reasonable areas who voted for policies that keep property values reasonable (ie allowing more development and/or not driving people out) won't fall as far.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      > people know how to solve the problem, but to many voters it is directly against their personal interest. The thing is voting to preserve the feel of their neighborhood is in their personal interest too. They like the area they live in and simultaneously want to see some of the problems solved. The issue is these are in conflict because pretty much everyone else is also making the same decisions so everyone fights to protect 'their' piece of SF hoping they're not the ones who will have to change and move (because they can't afford to in a lot of cases) to densify SF.
davidw 7y ago
People working to fix the problems: https://yimbyaction.org https://yimbyaction.org - get involved!
- asdf21 7y ago
  So the only solution is a even higher population density?
  - swarnie_ 7y ago
    Does SF have high population density? That's never been my impression from reading HN.
    - rlanday 7y ago
      Yes, it does. Ignoring cities with fewer than 75,000 people, it’s the fourth most dense city in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density#List_of_incorporated_cities_in_the_United_States_with_over_75,000_residents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... Automobile-based suburban sprawl is the only functional development pattern in the US because we’re so bad at building and maintaining public transit systems.
  - davidw 7y ago
    Pick two: * A desirable place to live * No growth * Affordable And for growth, you get to pick a mix of growing out, in and up. San Francisco proper obviously can't sprawl, so it needs to grow in and up. And the surrounding suburbs need to start doing their part too.
redm 7y ago
Although a bit overdramatic at times, there is so much truth on this article. I wish i could do more than upvote it. “Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.” This really touched me because the police in SF, if you ever see one, look disinterested at best.
- asdf21 7y ago
  Are they supposed to be interested in every druggie?
- et2o 7y ago
  Homelessness and mental health issues leading to homelessness aren't really an issue the police can address alone. Housing is indeed a big part of the problem; other cities (New Orleans for example) have had excellent results relocating formerly homeless people into inexpensive apartments.
  - redm 7y ago
    Maybe you haven't been harassed or panhandled while walking in SOMA and had the police just watch and ignore, but that is an issue the police can help with. I've also seen the police help, but it's few and far between because there are so few police on the streets in SOMA. It's not that the police are bad, that they are the cause, or they are the only solution. I think the police are probably underfunded, understaffed, and under supported; the issue is more systemic then specific as the author states. Edit: typo
    - et2o 7y ago
      That's fair. I haven't.
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zzzeek 7y ago
I've lived in New York City for about 25 years in three different boroughs, and as as a member of the "arty bohemian gentrifier" class I was in transitional low-income areas and things like occasional street crime, gunshots and stuff like that were not unusual. But only once did I actually see two street people start a knife fight on a subway train and it was during one of my probably less than five short visits to SF. It's equally rare that I'd agree with a National Review writer but SF was really ugly and quite unsafe feeling. Manhattan in the late 80s was probably a little more comparable to that. But I can't imagine why anyone would want to live in SF nowadays, if you're in tech you should aspire to work remotely and live anywhere you want.
- deleted 7y ago
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- tmh79 7y ago
  maybe 1/2 of my friends from college live in SF. I have a huge social network here. Objectively the city is not awesome, but I can't imagine moving somewhere else and starting from scratch. Lots of tech workers are in this situation IMO.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    Isn't it normal to graduate college and move to another city for a job? I've never heard of anyone wanting to stick around the same city as their college friends before. Granted the Bay Area is a tech hub so that's a reason to stay if you're in the industry but living in a new city on your own is definitely an experience most people should have.
    - tmh79 7y ago
      Only 25% of US adults have a bachelors degree. Of the 25% of those with bachelors degrees, the large majority come from regional public schools, think "Cal State Sacramento", or "Northern Illinois University". Graduates of these types of schools often grew up within 2 - 3 hours of their university, and after school the majority end up in the largest city within a 2 - 3 hour drive of their university. If you didn't get a degree, you're much more likely to live close to where you grew up. If you went to a top school (top 25 - 50 in USNWR), then your social circle was much more "mobile" than average.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
The silver lining here is that fewer people will be present when the next big one comes and wipes out the city (predicted to occur in the next 500 years). It makes sense societally to spread out innovation centers in a number of areas to reduce catastrophic risk.
kerkeslager 7y ago
The elites of SF and many people on HN are caught in this loop: 1. Companies don't take personal responsibility when they do antisocial things, claiming they can't be blamed, since they are just following incentives in order to compete. 2. Companies follow incentives, and lobby government to incentivize the behaviors that make them the most money (even if those behaviors are antisocial). 3. Government, influenced by the belief that the only way to do things is incentives (since regulation risks losing companies to other jurisdictions) gives companies the incentives they ask for (even when those incentives incentivize antisocial behavior). 4. GOTO 1. We cannot trust markets to regulate the behaviors of companies. There is little to no benefit to any company, i.e. investing in ending homelessness when they can simply wall off their campus and prevent the homeless from entering. Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas. Until SF (and indeed, the rest of the world) becomes more willing to regulate companies, things are only going to continue on their current trajectory.
- mushufasa 7y ago
  Absolutely. One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial owners of the majority of public company common stock. And as shareowners, you have rights. So, you can change this loop if as a shareowner, you change what happens between steps 1 and 2 by engaging with those companies. I built this site to try and make that process accessible. For example, this NGO campaign for fund managers to require companies to disclose political spending: https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-political-activity/ https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-politi...
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    While I applaud your intentions and effort, you're basically hoping that we can start trusting companies to self-regulate if we ask them to do so nicely. I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned: > "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas." So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage. And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless. It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively. The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.
dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
The author lost me at > Cities are nearly immortal; though they decline, they rarely die. Cities great and small die all the time. Ur died, Babylon died. SF will die. Cities die when their purpose no longer justifies their expense. And the purpose of most cities is concentrating people to facilitate trade. But increasingly there’s nothing to do in SF, especially for the masses. If people don’t figure out something for these people to do, SF will definitely die.
- notsofastbuddy 7y ago
  Your examples are more than 2000 years old.
  - dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
    That was for dramatic effect, if you will ;). SF isn't exactly a legendary human habitation like Ur or Babylon. There are thousands of cities that have come and gone since Ur and Babylon, just because they stopped "making sense" their inhabitants.
- tntn 7y ago
  > die all the time > ur died, Babylon died. Your two examples are from 2-3 millennia ago. I would think if cities "die all the time," you would have more recent examples. Maybe it proves the author correct that the first cities that came to mind are from 2500 years ago?
  - dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
    Good criticism of my post. Here's a more extensive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city. So when the author writes "they rarely die" it seems to me like the author has a serious historical blind spot. But why do we need to only talk about "great cities?" Why aren't all the "ghost towns" of the wild west a good enough example?
    - 7y ago
xivzgrev 7y ago
It’s interesting how this guy cherry picks examples. He mentions Sam Altman but declined to mention how Y Combinator is relocating to SF. And there are incubators and small companies etc. not saying there’s no negative trend but this articles comes off as a biased rant vs a more balanced perspective, which given the title i suppose is fair just not compelling.
- zaroth 7y ago
  YC moving to SF for more signals the beginning of the end for them more than anything else. There’s such a thing as being high on your own emissions. SF is antithetical to the kind of startup that YC used to be all about, for many reasons stated eloquently by TFA.
padseeker 7y ago
I've seen articles that are less political get reported a lot faster than this.
KirinDave 7y ago
This is a National Review opinion article offered as a news piece (as they are wont to do). It features a seamless conflation of SF's problems with Silicon Valley's somewhat corrosive lobbying effects on the urban expansion problems of SF, as if they're the same thing. It suggests that San Francisco's housing problem is NOT directly at the feet of the folks who own the majority of the property, and instead implicates... uh, let me just check the article again... "Baby Boomer civil servants [acting] as urban taxidermists stuffing and mounting a dead city so it always resembles the past." The implication of that paragraph is that it's democratic "regulation" that is halting SF's expansion, but if you live in the city you're looking at the recent unsuccessful public/private partnership building projects wondering why building codes aren't stricter (I'm looking at you, ridiculous Salesforce(tm) transbay terminal). The implication that it's bureaucracy and not a bitter generational argument between young and old residents about "preserving the city" vs. "meeting the housing demand" is likewise absurd; it's SF citizens as a whole that are debating how to proceed. A republican governance wouldn't be better off here, except it might find more alignment with property owners (who benefit enormously from this state of affairs) instead of less. It suggests that SF doesn't have culture, but that's wrong. It has tons of culture, but it's not accessible to rich white people hoping to stroll through like tourists. You can still access it if you code yourself correctly, but if you roll up with merino wool shoes and $800 vest over a tech t-shirt and iWatch, you're not gonna make a lot of progress because people will avoid you. But if you are that person, it's not like there aren't a dozen hopeful artists lurking around the edges of popular rich mission spots hoping to get your spare $20s. It's not like public spaces don't exist for you. Most humorously, it features at least one nationally reviled industrialist who has increasingly had a hard time finding anyone willing to work with him anywhere where Software Engineers make good money. Thiel avoids popping up in SF because people don't like his politics here and would rather he retreat back to his bubble in orange county. We don't, strictly speaking, need his money. We have enough money, we need to build up the will to use it to solve the problems we have more acutely, but that are shared in kind with every city that's finding a way to prosper in an era where many other cities are struggling to recover from even more acute decline. This article is everything I'd expect from a National Review piece about SF. It is confused about the geography, tone deaf to the politics, quick to blame local government for problems brought about by citizens, and steeped in the popular meme that "art is dead because I don't see marble busts anymore" memes that sound like they're fresh out of a PragerU video.
rndmize 7y ago
> But somewhere in the bureaucratic hierarchy faceless city functionaries administer labyrinthine regulations that benefit the rich over the poor, the old over the young, the here over those to come, the past over the future. One would think that, given this article comes to us from the National Review, this would be presented as a positive. Jokes aside, the city and really the Bay as a whole are unlikely to change much. Prop 13 goes unmentioned in the article, somehow, though it remains a core part of the problem; so does the tendency for tech companies to build their headquarters on the peninsula or the west side of SJ. One would think that with the extraordinary amount of wealth floating around the bay that there would be some effort put into making the place better for everyone, ie. the old "changing the world for the better" idea that presumably drives a lot of startups, but I don't see it. The standard for tech seems to be avoiding the hard problems of politics and long-term local issues that require campaigns and consensus rather than code and servers. I remember finding it striking a couple years ago to see that on the list of corporate sponsors for https://www.spur.org/ https://www.spur.org/, Microsoft was donating more money than Google. Perhaps there's another non-profit dedicated to urban planning in the bay that Google prefers to support, but I haven't heard of it. Apple could have considered building their HQ closer to public transport, but last I checked decided to go with tacking on a set of ugly massive parking structures to set the backdrop for their nice shiny new building. I'm not really sure what should be done. The transient nature of many people that live in SF/the bay means they're unlikely to have an interest in city/area politics, much less take action on it (if they even can - several of my co-workers are on various kinds of visa). I'd guess that in the coming years tech will wax and wane but never really fade and the wealthy will gradually retreat from the public sphere and areas, surrounded by an ever-increasing array of private software functions that replace public services for those that can pay.
freyir 7y ago
A good video on the topic: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw It’s not a homelessness crisis. Homelessness is a symptom. Our cities are in the grips of a heroin & meth epidemic. Until we acknowledge that, it won’t get better.
pelemele 7y ago
'SnapCrap' app invites San Francisco residents to report poop on city streets https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SnapCrap-app-San-Francisco-poop-feces-dirty-street-13281837.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SnapCrap-app-San-Fran...
supernova87a 7y ago
1) Affordable housing 2) Population density 3) Reasonable work-home distances You get to choose 2 of the 3 constraints. Much of California's political situation is about people believing they can buck the constraints and have it all. You cannot, as long as there's free movement in this country. People come here for jobs, and the old residents demanding that the constraints all be met is causing things to go down the toilet. And people are getting angry at the failure of government to take a position against fantastical thinking and actually solve the problems.
theNJR 7y ago
I particularly liked the top comment on the article (not mine): > In the early seventies, the sport fishing Mecca of choice turned from the warm southern states where fish grew all year long, to oddly, some of the finger lakes in upstate New York. Record size fish were being taken almost daily. A sportsfisherman’s dream from lakes that unbeknownst to them had died ten yeas earlier from acid rain. With no new fish being born, the bottom of the food chain had already collapsed. With no small fish left for anglers to catch and release, eventually only the largest were left. Within a few years, the collapse was finally evident, and brutal for anyone who invested in a fishing lodge industry in the region.
rsync 7y ago
"“Where I grew up, no one would walk past a person collapsed on the side of the street on their way to work and not do something about it. I hope I never get used to the fact that that happens in San Francisco.”" Oh, just stop. I have lived, full-time, in many, many cities in the United States and nobody - not the good Lutherans in Minneapolis nor the heirs-of-cowboys in Denver nor the tanned youth in San Diego nor anyone in NYC or DC - is stopping to attend to a filthy, passed-out drunk slumped over in the middle of a sidewalk. The people (that I live and work with) in San Francisco are a lot of things but they're not monsters and I imagine they compare, roughly equivalently, to whatever golden locale Sam Altman grew up in.
coryfklein 7y ago
I live in Utah but work remote for an SF company. Utah is getting a huge influx of outsiders moving to the state (as are other urban centers like Austin, TX). Sure, SF has better weather than we do. But this year we had 6-7 ft of powder in mountains a 30-45 minute drive away. Homes with 5 bedrooms and a quarter acre are $350k. We have plentiful public parks, tons of museums, and great utility prices. Oh and my SF salary means I can fly/live elsewhere for the 2-3 hottest and coldest weeks of the year, whether or not I take that as PTO. This SF company pays me more than local Utah companies would, but probably less than many of their SF-based employees. Win-win all around. They gave me a standing desk, 4k monitor, all the supplies. I get an office with a door and plenty of space for my plants. I don't even use headphones - I just have a receiver and some Onkyo speakers. This is my second remote job and everywhere I look more and more companies are moving to a distributed working model. It just so much more financial sense than giving 1/3 of your own revenue to landlords, as well as the huge portion of employee salaries that go to landlords as well. Out here in Utah a company's budget can go to actually building the product. Pretty soon all the "San Francisco companies" will have to compete with others that can strongly undercut them on price due to not having "San Francisco overhead" but still have amazing talent. My favorite thing about it: heads-down time. Folks interrupt me far less and I just get to hide away in my office and code for hours at a time. The only downside here is that I need to schedule time for explicitly socializing: I have 3 separate "lunch" groups that I attend at least once a week and I fly into SF quarterly and spend that week almost entirely socializing.
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nerder92 7y ago
I'm planning to move to SF form Barcelona next year and this kind of article always makes me doubt a lot about my decision. Especially because of the fact that seems like that there's nothing less then tech to talk about in SF, and i'm seriously worried about how this can affect not only my creativity but also my relationship (my girlfriend is not tech). Can you advise me any other place (in the US) to move for a while where i can improve my network, discuss interesting ideas that have a similar wheather condition to Spain??? I'm starting to consider new options. Thank you!
- doctorcroc 7y ago
  Don't get sucked into all the drama - it's very fashionable to hate on SF right now. For all its flaws, SF is still a top tier city with amazing things to do within an hours reach.
purplezooey 7y ago
Hmm an article on SF from the National Review. I'll pass on that one.
- apoph3nia 7y ago
  The article could have been written ~5 years ago with maybe a few interchangeable variables and would have expressed the same feeling of being frozen in an unchanging dystopian time loop.
RickJWagner 7y ago
I've visited San Franscisco a few times. First in the 80s, it was a lot nicer then. Most recently last year, where I found the awful zombie apocalypse around Moscone Center. What a change! I hope SF can find a way to revitalize, sort of like NYC has done. It seemed to go through some dark times in the 70s, but now is much nicer. Wishing the same luck for SF.
JohnClark1337 7y ago
Democrats need more control over their territory. This is getting embarrassing.

226 points by sunils34 7y ago

For those who are wondering, given the publisher, no, the essay is not simply a rant against rent-control: > True revolution would involve curbing the authority of the San Francisco Planning Commission. If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment (density is green), they would enact a land-value tax and establish a redistributive policy to align the interests of the city, current residents, and future citizens. Strong government housing policy could spur growth and redistribute the city’s wealth fairly. But most of all, the freedom to build and experiment is the engine of Silicon Valley dynamism. Allow the experiments of the few to become the prosperity and fulfillment of the many, and the city could thrive once again.

_jal 7y ago
> they would enact a land-value tax and establish a redistributive policy They can't bring themselves to mention Proposition 13, somehow.
- zenkat 7y ago
  Prop 13 isn't really in the control of SF city residents. But damn, California ... time to put that wealth-transfer tax for the old, rich, landed elite to bed already.
  - viscanti 7y ago
    They've made millions from the appreciation of their houses, but they are still active in preventing new housing to try to juice their returns even more. It's a problem of how many Americans see their house as their biggest investment (and if you were a granny who bought in California 50 years ago it likely is). So naturally these wealthy landowners who bought property decades ago are going to fight to preserve their investment, but like the article points out, they're actually slowly killing their investment.
- epistasis 7y ago
  Repeal of Prop 13 would be implicit in any land value tax, so not mentioning it is a severe deficiency of understanding the power of San Francisco to properly govern itself. Prop 13, despite benefitting landlords and commercial property owners more than homeowners, has an unfair reputation of keeping "grannies" in their homes in face of unfair taxation. Mention repeal of Prop 13 for commercial property, and even otherwise sensible people will start saying how heartless it is to ignore the plight of grannies, since this inappropriate connection is so strong in the collective psyche.
- perpetualpatzer 7y ago
  Sorry, not familiar with CA politics ... is the subtext here that a land-value tax would be impossible without a constitutional amendment? Or that California already enacted a 1% ad valorem tax in the 70s? From what I can tell, Prop 13 seems generally popular[0], but could see an argument that it exacerbates the housing shortage in the Bay Area, so not sure which way you're pointing. [0] https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-their-government-january-2019.pdf https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/ppic-statewide-surve...
  - _jal 7y ago
    That is my point, yes. And doing so is essentially impossible. It is popular among property owners, who have a huge interest in defeating any attack on it. (It was also slightly amusing to see a history-free call for more taxation in that particular rag, given tribal affiliations.) It does drive up housing costs. It also distorts commercial transactions weakens, local control, and generally casts a large shadow over, well, any conversation about taxation and anything taxation touches (like real estate) in California.
    - perpetualpatzer 7y ago
      gotcha. Thanks for the reply.
- SilasX 7y ago
  Yeah, it's an unfair criticism to ask them why they aren't levying a tax they're constitutionally prohibited from. With that said, it's reasonable to expect them to propose reforms to prop 13 that preserve its core intent but cut back on the death spiral it encourages.
justin66 7y ago
Is there anything in the world quite as dumb as this form of argument? If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment
- veryworried 7y ago
  The argument that Democrats are all the best people who always have a genuine interest for others and the environment has it beat.
  - justin66 7y ago
    I'm sure that matters to you, but I was talking about the form of the argument. It'd be equally stupid if it were something starting with If Republicans cared about free markets or low taxes... It's a completely useless way to preface any statement, signalling useless text to follow. See what I mean?
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Yes, but no. "X is not acting in accordance with X's stated values" is a perfectly valid statement, for all values of X. "It would help problem Y if X did act in accordance with their stated values" is also a valid statement. What's not valid is to act all surprised that X does not in fact act in accordance with their stated values - especially where politics is involved. (It's still valid to point out that it's happening.) Politicians dissemble, lie, act hypocritically, mislead voters, and... did I leave anything out? If you want to change their actual behavior, you have to change their incentives. One way to do that is to get the voters to hold their feet to the fire, to get them to act consistently with the values that the voters elected them to embody. (Which gets us back to "X is acting inconsistently..." being a perfectly valid thing to say.) But the problem can run deeper than that. The voters themselves may mouth certain values, but actually desire things inconsistent with those values. At that point, the politicians are embodying the desires of the voters; the problem is the voters' hypocrisy. Once again, though, pointing out the hypocrisy is about the only way to try to attack the problem. (Changing the voters' incentives would almost always require the voters' acquiescence...)
zzzeek 7y ago
yeah this was odd, it goes into a typical "meh DEMOCRATS ruin everything" but then he calls for new taxes, a redistributive policy and however vague "strong government housing policy". Doesn't sound very free markety ?
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  Most of the article was simply stating the obvious about SF, but the end was very weird. When the National Review starts calling for a land-value tax and a “redistributive policy”, I’m sorry, but I’m going to call this disingenuous trolling by the author, because these are not policies the National Review honestly advocates for.
  - TMWNN 7y ago
    "There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago." —Milton Friedman
    - jonathankoren 7y ago
      Now do how wealth redistribution from rich to the poor is good.

cobbzilla 7y ago

“Up and down the city’s disorienting hills, you notice homeless men and women — junkies, winos, the dispossessed...“ Did the author ever actually walk in SF? The homeless mostly stay in the flats, the hills are fine (and higher rent of course).

jostmey 7y ago
I don’t even want to visit San Francisco anymore. Why would the writers want to? I’m making a point about how bad it’s become in San Francisco relative to the rest of the US
- leesalminen 7y ago
  My partner and I visited SF last summer and were fairly shocked with all the homelessness, drug use on the streets and human feces scattered about. We won’t be back.
  - tvanantwerp 7y ago
    My wife and I had the same experience. As an east coast programmer, I was curious about what it would be like in SF and arrange a vacation to see it for myself. We spent a week there, and both decided that we never ever wanted to move to a place like that. Nothing looked clean (certainly nowhere smelled clean) nor inviting. It would've been a considerable decline in our quality of living to move there.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    I'd just like to say, as somebody who used to live in SF, I feel sorry for tourists. What the city is permitting is unthinkable, but up to about a year ago, even saying that it wasn't acceptable was social suicide. Now it's changed a bunch- people are much more clearly stating that allowing people to put up tents and litter the sstreets with poop and needles isn't OK. However, the city really can't do anything about it because it's tolerated this for so long and anything they did would be massively controversial.
    - 7y ago

beeskneecaps 7y ago

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prolikewhoa 7y ago
"This homelessness seems just dandy!"
- deleted 7y ago
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- beeskneecaps 7y ago
  Didn’t say this..

prolikewhoa 7y ago

Infinite growth is the goal of literal cancer. Add in heirarchal systems and the lowest class mobility in first world nations, raising the cost of everything while stagnating wages while the rich shareholders simultaneously take even more wealth (how many yachts do you really need?), and you're just left with shitholes of clearly failed or failing Capitalism like SF and now Seattle where society can't take care of its most vulnerable or solve literally any issues that can't be commodified and sold as a "tech" product. Society needs a change. The lower classes need a raise.

delfinom 7y ago
>Society needs a change. The lower classes need a raise. The lower classes may get a raise but so will the ones above them to compensate and eventually cost of living just goes up to match the previous status quo.

dawhizkid 7y ago

Having lived in SF for a number of years now, I 100% agree that SF is just dystopian as hell. Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all over downtown & SOMA, depressing mix of aggressive and zombie-like homeless, very few kids/families, very few minorities (especially African-Americans), barely functioning public transportation system, high rents forcing six-figure earners to live with 2 roommates and still pay $2500/month, 400 sq ft studios going for $700k, every other non-tech worker is an Uber driver/Instacart Shopper/DoorDash delivery person

prolikewhoa 7y ago
Seattle too!
- Aloha 7y ago
  Seattle is at least marginally cheaper
  - dawhizkid 7y ago
    Even though Seattle has gotten more expensive, it still pales in comparison to SF...plus no state income tax.
    - Aloha 7y ago
      My rent has still effectively more than doubled since 2014
- davidw 7y ago
  Seattle has been building enough that apparently it has started to curb prices. Supply and demand are real. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-rents-growing-at-among-slowest-rates-in-country-as-apartment-boom-reaches-record/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...
atom-morgan 7y ago
How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?

api 7y ago

San Francisco is a bonsai kitten. It wants to grow into a major world city like NYC, LA, or Tokyo, but its older residents are steadfastly opposed and want to keep it in a jar so it stays cute. The result is a painful deformed mess. I don't really think city planning boards can control how cities grow. A city is a living thing. If it "wants" to grow, let it grow. If it doesn't, I don't think it can be forced. Detroit learned the opposite lesson and is recovering in part by realizing that the Detroit of today is destined to be a much smaller city population wise than it once was and they are adjusting and "right-sizing" the city accordingly. They are concentrating on the living areas and demolishing and transforming the dead ones into parks, public gardens, urban farming, or natural land. The result will be a smaller city with a ton of really cool history and a cool "post-industrial" vernacular.

AFascistWorld 7y ago
Have you heard of Boston subway's daily breakdowns?
- api 7y ago
  Sorry I ninja edited with a better thesis. :P Yes I used to live there. The subway system in Boston and NYC is very badly run, but the city as a whole at least for Boston isn't bad. They do a better job with urban planning at least.
  - Finnucane 7y ago
    It is a conundrum that most American cities do not really support their public transit systems very well, and yet they seem to desire the kind of urban organization that basically requires a well-run transit system.
Finnucane 7y ago
I've lived in New York. Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that? Is NYC cheap, clean, free of homeless people? No, it is crowded, smelly, expensive, and only livable for the extremely wealthy.

szbalint 7y ago

It's weird that technology oriented people see code/IT in terms of infrastructure, but too little from a city as such. I'm living in Vienna, Austria which is a city consistently rated to be in the top 5 most livable cities by multiple independent evaluations. How did that happen? A strong sense of ownership and infrastructure thinking over a _century_. Just to mention the obvious, property prices do not exist in a vacuum and cities where property prices go through such a steep and continuous rise as in London, Moscow, San Francisco etc. are not a reflection of desirability or market forces but rather the total abdication of planning and responsibility from the local authorities. There are dozens of things local leadership can do to fix infrastructure and living standards issues, never let anyone tell you otherwise.

dev_dull 7y ago
Cities like SF have a strong survival bias. People who disagreed, tried to change things, etc are leaving or already left. Over time you end up with a place that’s broken and a group of people who want it that way.
- jseliger 7y ago
  It's like watching Exit, Voice, and Loyalty play out in real time: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organizations/dp/0674276604 https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza...
Creationer 7y ago
It also helps that Vienna's population has been basically flat for many years. By contrast the prior #1 most liveable city - Melbourne - has grown from 2 million 30 years ago to 5 million currently, forecast to get to 8 million by 2050, all due to mass immigration. Livability has fallen directly in line with population growth. I've lived in a lot of cities around the world and think there is a 'sweet spot' population number: big enough to allow the provision of niche services and the agglomeration of talent, yet not too big as to introduce costly dis-economies of scale (usually through very expensive housing and transportation.) That level seems to be about 1-3 million.

nkingsy 7y ago

The author draws a very unsubtle if not direct line between housing costs and homelessness. Is there any? I was under the impression that most of the homeless are mentally ill and/or transplants from other areas. What percent of them just can't afford the rent?

bluejekyll 7y ago
This is a popular myth. https://www.sftu.org/2018/06/five-myths-about-the-homeless-problem-in-san-francisco/ https://www.sftu.org/2018/06/five-myths-about-the-homeless-p... According to that, 71% of people on the streets of SF used to be homed, and aren’t on the streets due to drugs.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Great article, but their bias needs to be seen through.
- rsync 7y ago
  This, and other statistics like it, are really disingenuous and framed for a very specific interpretation. Here is the actual quote from the article (strikethrough is in the original - not sure why - maybe a bad stat ?): "The vast majority of the people who are homeless today used to be housed – in San Francisco. According to the city’s 2015 homeless count, 71 percent of the people on the streets were living in San Francisco when they lost their housing. That means seven out of ten homeless people used to be your neighbors – before the tech boom and the eviction epidemic. " So the presentation here is that average-joe-normal-churchgoer was minding his own business as a lifelong SF resident and was then evicted by an evil landlord, so his apartment could go to a techie, which sent him into a downward spiral to homelessness. I have not done independent research into this myself, but I have a suspicion that the actual narrative is something like: "borderline mentally healthy individual moves to San Francisco because it's interesting and fun and romantic (and warm) and, while still on their meds, manages to rent a room or an SRO or something, lives there for a month or two or six, runs out of either money or meds or familial support (or all three) and suffers their financial/emotional/mental breakdown here, on our streets, far from any support or family they have, if they had any at all." If this suspicion is correct, it doesn't imply we shouldn't be compassionate or helpful or progressive in our responses, but it does suggest that we are importing problems and should consider how we might limit that tendency. It also does not place some kind of moralistic "maybe they shouldn't be doing drugs in the first place" judgement on people - at the end of the day it is indeed a mental health issue. Just maybe it doesn't need to be our mental health problem.

jlewis_st 7y ago

The article omits SB 50 [1], the effort by Scott Wiener (state senator from SF) to increase housing density and remove regulatory hurdles for housing development near transit. From what I’ve seen it’s the most promising method to increase housing supply CA-wide given that many municipalities resist development. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/california-home-prices-climate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/california-home-p...

the_watcher 7y ago
And nearly unanimously opposed by the SF Board of Supervisors, which is typical of anything that would improve the housing situation here.

dev_dull 7y ago

Here’s what I don’t get. The real struggle seems to always be against local governments and the residents. The residents all know how jacked up it is and have good ideas for fixes, but constantly butt heads against their city. Somehow everybody knows this, but votes in people who increase the power, scope, and responsibility of the local government which works against their interest?

bluejekyll 7y ago
Not sure what you mean exactly. A lot of the issues are people “protecting their neighborhoods” from development and preserving the “feel”. People generally are voting against policies that would raise inventory of housing, which is really the only way to reduce its cost.
- bluGill 7y ago
  There is the issue: people know how to solve the problem, but to many voters it is directly against their personal interest. They do need to watch out though: there is nothing about San Francisco (or any other area) that means the rich need to live there, or you need to move there to get rich. (unless you are into mining for wealth where you obviously need to be where your mineral is). If some other area becomes hot the people in San Francisco have the most to lose: your house that you paid so much for and work so hard to protect the value of has the farther to fall. When/if the bubble collapses those in more reasonable areas who voted for policies that keep property values reasonable (ie allowing more development and/or not driving people out) won't fall as far.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    > people know how to solve the problem, but to many voters it is directly against their personal interest. The thing is voting to preserve the feel of their neighborhood is in their personal interest too. They like the area they live in and simultaneously want to see some of the problems solved. The issue is these are in conflict because pretty much everyone else is also making the same decisions so everyone fights to protect 'their' piece of SF hoping they're not the ones who will have to change and move (because they can't afford to in a lot of cases) to densify SF.

davidw 7y ago

People working to fix the problems: https://yimbyaction.org https://yimbyaction.org - get involved!

asdf21 7y ago
So the only solution is a even higher population density?
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  Does SF have high population density? That's never been my impression from reading HN.
  - rlanday 7y ago
    Yes, it does. Ignoring cities with fewer than 75,000 people, it’s the fourth most dense city in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density#List_of_incorporated_cities_in_the_United_States_with_over_75,000_residents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... Automobile-based suburban sprawl is the only functional development pattern in the US because we’re so bad at building and maintaining public transit systems.
- davidw 7y ago
  Pick two: * A desirable place to live * No growth * Affordable And for growth, you get to pick a mix of growing out, in and up. San Francisco proper obviously can't sprawl, so it needs to grow in and up. And the surrounding suburbs need to start doing their part too.

redm 7y ago

Although a bit overdramatic at times, there is so much truth on this article. I wish i could do more than upvote it. “Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.” This really touched me because the police in SF, if you ever see one, look disinterested at best.

asdf21 7y ago
Are they supposed to be interested in every druggie?
et2o 7y ago
Homelessness and mental health issues leading to homelessness aren't really an issue the police can address alone. Housing is indeed a big part of the problem; other cities (New Orleans for example) have had excellent results relocating formerly homeless people into inexpensive apartments.
- redm 7y ago
  Maybe you haven't been harassed or panhandled while walking in SOMA and had the police just watch and ignore, but that is an issue the police can help with. I've also seen the police help, but it's few and far between because there are so few police on the streets in SOMA. It's not that the police are bad, that they are the cause, or they are the only solution. I think the police are probably underfunded, understaffed, and under supported; the issue is more systemic then specific as the author states. Edit: typo
  - et2o 7y ago
    That's fair. I haven't.

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zzzeek 7y ago

I've lived in New York City for about 25 years in three different boroughs, and as as a member of the "arty bohemian gentrifier" class I was in transitional low-income areas and things like occasional street crime, gunshots and stuff like that were not unusual. But only once did I actually see two street people start a knife fight on a subway train and it was during one of my probably less than five short visits to SF. It's equally rare that I'd agree with a National Review writer but SF was really ugly and quite unsafe feeling. Manhattan in the late 80s was probably a little more comparable to that. But I can't imagine why anyone would want to live in SF nowadays, if you're in tech you should aspire to work remotely and live anywhere you want.

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tmh79 7y ago
maybe 1/2 of my friends from college live in SF. I have a huge social network here. Objectively the city is not awesome, but I can't imagine moving somewhere else and starting from scratch. Lots of tech workers are in this situation IMO.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Isn't it normal to graduate college and move to another city for a job? I've never heard of anyone wanting to stick around the same city as their college friends before. Granted the Bay Area is a tech hub so that's a reason to stay if you're in the industry but living in a new city on your own is definitely an experience most people should have.
  - tmh79 7y ago
    Only 25% of US adults have a bachelors degree. Of the 25% of those with bachelors degrees, the large majority come from regional public schools, think "Cal State Sacramento", or "Northern Illinois University". Graduates of these types of schools often grew up within 2 - 3 hours of their university, and after school the majority end up in the largest city within a 2 - 3 hour drive of their university. If you didn't get a degree, you're much more likely to live close to where you grew up. If you went to a top school (top 25 - 50 in USNWR), then your social circle was much more "mobile" than average.

mensetmanusman 7y ago

The silver lining here is that fewer people will be present when the next big one comes and wipes out the city (predicted to occur in the next 500 years). It makes sense societally to spread out innovation centers in a number of areas to reduce catastrophic risk.

kerkeslager 7y ago

The elites of SF and many people on HN are caught in this loop: 1. Companies don't take personal responsibility when they do antisocial things, claiming they can't be blamed, since they are just following incentives in order to compete. 2. Companies follow incentives, and lobby government to incentivize the behaviors that make them the most money (even if those behaviors are antisocial). 3. Government, influenced by the belief that the only way to do things is incentives (since regulation risks losing companies to other jurisdictions) gives companies the incentives they ask for (even when those incentives incentivize antisocial behavior). 4. GOTO 1. We cannot trust markets to regulate the behaviors of companies. There is little to no benefit to any company, i.e. investing in ending homelessness when they can simply wall off their campus and prevent the homeless from entering. Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas. Until SF (and indeed, the rest of the world) becomes more willing to regulate companies, things are only going to continue on their current trajectory.

mushufasa 7y ago
Absolutely. One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial owners of the majority of public company common stock. And as shareowners, you have rights. So, you can change this loop if as a shareowner, you change what happens between steps 1 and 2 by engaging with those companies. I built this site to try and make that process accessible. For example, this NGO campaign for fund managers to require companies to disclose political spending: https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-political-activity/ https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-politi...
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  While I applaud your intentions and effort, you're basically hoping that we can start trusting companies to self-regulate if we ask them to do so nicely. I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned: > "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas." So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage. And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless. It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively. The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.

dmitryminkovsky 7y ago

The author lost me at > Cities are nearly immortal; though they decline, they rarely die. Cities great and small die all the time. Ur died, Babylon died. SF will die. Cities die when their purpose no longer justifies their expense. And the purpose of most cities is concentrating people to facilitate trade. But increasingly there’s nothing to do in SF, especially for the masses. If people don’t figure out something for these people to do, SF will definitely die.

notsofastbuddy 7y ago
Your examples are more than 2000 years old.
- dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
  That was for dramatic effect, if you will ;). SF isn't exactly a legendary human habitation like Ur or Babylon. There are thousands of cities that have come and gone since Ur and Babylon, just because they stopped "making sense" their inhabitants.
tntn 7y ago
> die all the time > ur died, Babylon died. Your two examples are from 2-3 millennia ago. I would think if cities "die all the time," you would have more recent examples. Maybe it proves the author correct that the first cities that came to mind are from 2500 years ago?
- dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
  Good criticism of my post. Here's a more extensive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city. So when the author writes "they rarely die" it seems to me like the author has a serious historical blind spot. But why do we need to only talk about "great cities?" Why aren't all the "ghost towns" of the wild west a good enough example?
  - 7y ago

xivzgrev 7y ago

It’s interesting how this guy cherry picks examples. He mentions Sam Altman but declined to mention how Y Combinator is relocating to SF. And there are incubators and small companies etc. not saying there’s no negative trend but this articles comes off as a biased rant vs a more balanced perspective, which given the title i suppose is fair just not compelling.

zaroth 7y ago
YC moving to SF for more signals the beginning of the end for them more than anything else. There’s such a thing as being high on your own emissions. SF is antithetical to the kind of startup that YC used to be all about, for many reasons stated eloquently by TFA.

padseeker 7y ago

I've seen articles that are less political get reported a lot faster than this.

KirinDave 7y ago

This is a National Review opinion article offered as a news piece (as they are wont to do). It features a seamless conflation of SF's problems with Silicon Valley's somewhat corrosive lobbying effects on the urban expansion problems of SF, as if they're the same thing. It suggests that San Francisco's housing problem is NOT directly at the feet of the folks who own the majority of the property, and instead implicates... uh, let me just check the article again... "Baby Boomer civil servants [acting] as urban taxidermists stuffing and mounting a dead city so it always resembles the past." The implication of that paragraph is that it's democratic "regulation" that is halting SF's expansion, but if you live in the city you're looking at the recent unsuccessful public/private partnership building projects wondering why building codes aren't stricter (I'm looking at you, ridiculous Salesforce(tm) transbay terminal). The implication that it's bureaucracy and not a bitter generational argument between young and old residents about "preserving the city" vs. "meeting the housing demand" is likewise absurd; it's SF citizens as a whole that are debating how to proceed. A republican governance wouldn't be better off here, except it might find more alignment with property owners (who benefit enormously from this state of affairs) instead of less. It suggests that SF doesn't have culture, but that's wrong. It has tons of culture, but it's not accessible to rich white people hoping to stroll through like tourists. You can still access it if you code yourself correctly, but if you roll up with merino wool shoes and $800 vest over a tech t-shirt and iWatch, you're not gonna make a lot of progress because people will avoid you. But if you are that person, it's not like there aren't a dozen hopeful artists lurking around the edges of popular rich mission spots hoping to get your spare $20s. It's not like public spaces don't exist for you. Most humorously, it features at least one nationally reviled industrialist who has increasingly had a hard time finding anyone willing to work with him anywhere where Software Engineers make good money. Thiel avoids popping up in SF because people don't like his politics here and would rather he retreat back to his bubble in orange county. We don't, strictly speaking, need his money. We have enough money, we need to build up the will to use it to solve the problems we have more acutely, but that are shared in kind with every city that's finding a way to prosper in an era where many other cities are struggling to recover from even more acute decline. This article is everything I'd expect from a National Review piece about SF. It is confused about the geography, tone deaf to the politics, quick to blame local government for problems brought about by citizens, and steeped in the popular meme that "art is dead because I don't see marble busts anymore" memes that sound like they're fresh out of a PragerU video.

rndmize 7y ago

> But somewhere in the bureaucratic hierarchy faceless city functionaries administer labyrinthine regulations that benefit the rich over the poor, the old over the young, the here over those to come, the past over the future. One would think that, given this article comes to us from the National Review, this would be presented as a positive. Jokes aside, the city and really the Bay as a whole are unlikely to change much. Prop 13 goes unmentioned in the article, somehow, though it remains a core part of the problem; so does the tendency for tech companies to build their headquarters on the peninsula or the west side of SJ. One would think that with the extraordinary amount of wealth floating around the bay that there would be some effort put into making the place better for everyone, ie. the old "changing the world for the better" idea that presumably drives a lot of startups, but I don't see it. The standard for tech seems to be avoiding the hard problems of politics and long-term local issues that require campaigns and consensus rather than code and servers. I remember finding it striking a couple years ago to see that on the list of corporate sponsors for https://www.spur.org/ https://www.spur.org/, Microsoft was donating more money than Google. Perhaps there's another non-profit dedicated to urban planning in the bay that Google prefers to support, but I haven't heard of it. Apple could have considered building their HQ closer to public transport, but last I checked decided to go with tacking on a set of ugly massive parking structures to set the backdrop for their nice shiny new building. I'm not really sure what should be done. The transient nature of many people that live in SF/the bay means they're unlikely to have an interest in city/area politics, much less take action on it (if they even can - several of my co-workers are on various kinds of visa). I'd guess that in the coming years tech will wax and wane but never really fade and the wealthy will gradually retreat from the public sphere and areas, surrounded by an ever-increasing array of private software functions that replace public services for those that can pay.

freyir 7y ago

A good video on the topic: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw It’s not a homelessness crisis. Homelessness is a symptom. Our cities are in the grips of a heroin & meth epidemic. Until we acknowledge that, it won’t get better.

pelemele 7y ago

'SnapCrap' app invites San Francisco residents to report poop on city streets https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SnapCrap-app-San-Francisco-poop-feces-dirty-street-13281837.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SnapCrap-app-San-Fran...

supernova87a 7y ago

1) Affordable housing 2) Population density 3) Reasonable work-home distances You get to choose 2 of the 3 constraints. Much of California's political situation is about people believing they can buck the constraints and have it all. You cannot, as long as there's free movement in this country. People come here for jobs, and the old residents demanding that the constraints all be met is causing things to go down the toilet. And people are getting angry at the failure of government to take a position against fantastical thinking and actually solve the problems.

theNJR 7y ago

I particularly liked the top comment on the article (not mine): > In the early seventies, the sport fishing Mecca of choice turned from the warm southern states where fish grew all year long, to oddly, some of the finger lakes in upstate New York. Record size fish were being taken almost daily. A sportsfisherman’s dream from lakes that unbeknownst to them had died ten yeas earlier from acid rain. With no new fish being born, the bottom of the food chain had already collapsed. With no small fish left for anglers to catch and release, eventually only the largest were left. Within a few years, the collapse was finally evident, and brutal for anyone who invested in a fishing lodge industry in the region.

rsync 7y ago

"“Where I grew up, no one would walk past a person collapsed on the side of the street on their way to work and not do something about it. I hope I never get used to the fact that that happens in San Francisco.”" Oh, just stop. I have lived, full-time, in many, many cities in the United States and nobody - not the good Lutherans in Minneapolis nor the heirs-of-cowboys in Denver nor the tanned youth in San Diego nor anyone in NYC or DC - is stopping to attend to a filthy, passed-out drunk slumped over in the middle of a sidewalk. The people (that I live and work with) in San Francisco are a lot of things but they're not monsters and I imagine they compare, roughly equivalently, to whatever golden locale Sam Altman grew up in.

coryfklein 7y ago

I live in Utah but work remote for an SF company. Utah is getting a huge influx of outsiders moving to the state (as are other urban centers like Austin, TX). Sure, SF has better weather than we do. But this year we had 6-7 ft of powder in mountains a 30-45 minute drive away. Homes with 5 bedrooms and a quarter acre are $350k. We have plentiful public parks, tons of museums, and great utility prices. Oh and my SF salary means I can fly/live elsewhere for the 2-3 hottest and coldest weeks of the year, whether or not I take that as PTO. This SF company pays me more than local Utah companies would, but probably less than many of their SF-based employees. Win-win all around. They gave me a standing desk, 4k monitor, all the supplies. I get an office with a door and plenty of space for my plants. I don't even use headphones - I just have a receiver and some Onkyo speakers. This is my second remote job and everywhere I look more and more companies are moving to a distributed working model. It just so much more financial sense than giving 1/3 of your own revenue to landlords, as well as the huge portion of employee salaries that go to landlords as well. Out here in Utah a company's budget can go to actually building the product. Pretty soon all the "San Francisco companies" will have to compete with others that can strongly undercut them on price due to not having "San Francisco overhead" but still have amazing talent. My favorite thing about it: heads-down time. Folks interrupt me far less and I just get to hide away in my office and code for hours at a time. The only downside here is that I need to schedule time for explicitly socializing: I have 3 separate "lunch" groups that I attend at least once a week and I fly into SF quarterly and spend that week almost entirely socializing.

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nerder92 7y ago

I'm planning to move to SF form Barcelona next year and this kind of article always makes me doubt a lot about my decision. Especially because of the fact that seems like that there's nothing less then tech to talk about in SF, and i'm seriously worried about how this can affect not only my creativity but also my relationship (my girlfriend is not tech). Can you advise me any other place (in the US) to move for a while where i can improve my network, discuss interesting ideas that have a similar wheather condition to Spain??? I'm starting to consider new options. Thank you!

doctorcroc 7y ago
Don't get sucked into all the drama - it's very fashionable to hate on SF right now. For all its flaws, SF is still a top tier city with amazing things to do within an hours reach.

purplezooey 7y ago

Hmm an article on SF from the National Review. I'll pass on that one.

apoph3nia 7y ago
The article could have been written ~5 years ago with maybe a few interchangeable variables and would have expressed the same feeling of being frozen in an unchanging dystopian time loop.

RickJWagner 7y ago

I've visited San Franscisco a few times. First in the 80s, it was a lot nicer then. Most recently last year, where I found the awful zombie apocalypse around Moscone Center. What a change! I hope SF can find a way to revitalize, sort of like NYC has done. It seemed to go through some dark times in the 70s, but now is much nicer. Wishing the same luck for SF.

JohnClark1337 7y ago

Democrats need more control over their territory. This is getting embarrassing.