8 ms·

I walked around downtown San Bruno recently and it's honestly pathetic how this city is squandering their potential. Even on el camino real itself a lot of the

I walked around downtown San Bruno recently and it's honestly pathetic how this city is squandering their potential. Even on el camino real itself a lot of the property is being wasted on auto repair shops and fast food places, 2-3 story buildings, etc. This place could be way, way better given its proximity to the airport and SF.

CPLX 7y ago
I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula (including SF) looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense. Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay. In the Embarcadero there are actual motor inns, crappy hotels with one story raised 10 feet off the ground with parking spaces below them. Like a whole bunch of them. You don't even see those in abandoned small towns any more. You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man. Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces. Yet the entire city is dominated by garages at street level. And two story buildings, and mile after mile of awful zero-architecture postwar commercial properties. Yes the painted ladies are pretty, don't bulldoze them. Landmark Lombard street and some of the other charming blocks, Sure why not. But it's a global commercial city willing to build 50+ story office towers, and unwilling to do anything about the dozens of square miles of 1-2 story unredeemable residential surrounding them. It's insane.
- api 7y ago
  It's quite sane if you bought property in the 60s-90s and are riding property appreciation to fortune.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - yks 7y ago
    And then you what, die in the appreciated property? If you want to make money, it's already very profitable for you to sell the house for condo development but no one is doing that. Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then.
    - siphon22 7y ago
      >Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then. I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majority Southern Californian neighborhood all their life in the same homes they've always been in. Imagine ripping on them for trying to preserve their neighborhood and therefore their culture. And for what? To make it possible for more people to move in and potentially make things worse for the people already there? If it's a minority-majority neighborhood, making it possible for more whites to move in is gentrification. How do you argue for that? I'm not saying I agree with any of this by the way, just playing devil's advocate.
      - yks 7y ago
        Btw, the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person and not about SoCal neighborhood. Regardless, these people are not "natives" who got SF entirely in its current state from God, it was growing up, as prosperous cities do, and neighborhoods were changing. So why should it stop its development in 1976, why are people who moved in to SF back then entitled to this? If you ask me, this is becoming uncannily feudal.
        siphon22 7y ago
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  There I was, thinking I was the only one. It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned. I used to live in NYC, a city that's had its own difficulties adding new housing, corruption in the permitting process, considering too many areas "historic." But the Bay Area is something completely different. It seems that everyone who already owns a single family home is strongly in favor of pulling up the ladder. Perhaps too much money is riding on the existing "market value" of homes here. If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? Proposition 13 can't be helping, either.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned. It's actually quite the opposite. So-called soft story buildings are more dangerous in an earthquake and property owners are taking quite a while to bring them up to code. Californians just love their cars.
  - ProblemFactory 7y ago
    > If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? I don't see how that could be the case. The property value of a plot of land on which a 50, or even 5 story building can be built is much higher than the property value of a single-family home.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      There's a substitution effect. If zoning restrictions are relaxed and developer turns an acre into a 50 unit condo complex, that developer reaps a huge windfall. But everyone else who owns an Eichler on a 1/4 acre has fewer buyers competing for their property. It's sorta like when labor unions go away. The company that hires non-unionized labor at half the price and double the productivity reaps an enormous windfall. So do the employees, who were presumably in other, less well-paying jobs. Everyone else who chooses not to play the new game ends up out of a job.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Not just east coasters can subscribe to this thinking. A citizen of pretty much any other country can. Compare with Hong Kong. Right off the Victoria Peak there are 40+ story apartment buildings. There's forest to one side of them, and more 40+ story buildings to the other side.
  - scrumbledober 7y ago
    You don't need to live outside of the bay area to think this way. I've grown up on the peninsula and think it's absurd. I'm a software engineer and if I ever want to buy a house I feel like I'll be forced to relocate away from family and hometown. My friend's 90 year old grandmother constantly complains about new housing development in the town we live in, but then also questions why my friend has to live with her and his cousin had to move away. Stop voting to make this area too expensive to live in and your younger family won't have to move away.
    - MiroF 7y ago
      Every single homeowner I've talked to here has complained about the housing crisis, yet has been opposing development near their house. Incredible that people can be so willfully blind that they don't see how their own actions are contributing to the crisis. It's a real tragedy of the commons
      - foobarian 7y ago
        If there was a law aggressively limiting the property tax rate, skyrocketing demand, and I happened to be in a house I got in the 70s... you better bet I'd be opposing development too.
        MiroF 7y ago
        Sure, but you wouldn't be bemoaning the housing crisis.
- brent_noorda 7y ago
  The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s BART is a basket case of incompetence on its own. SF residents were largely willing to support an infill station at 30th and Mission, but BART stuck its thumbs up its ass and eventually built a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport (ripping up recent renovations to the street along the way). San Mateo residents bought into BART in the 90s, but as they've learned public transit (BART especially) is a cost not profit center so the regional (SamTrans) service got gutted to fund BART (whose ridership numbers consistently lag predictions).
    - DrScump 7y ago
      a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport ... which was suspended mid-construction for several years. The empty trestles over Hegenberger were reminiscent of the "Freeway to Nowhere" (the 280/680/101 interchange in San Jose).
  - ImplicitNone 7y ago
    That's not true! Peninsula voters never got the chance to vote on the November 1962 BART referendum. Instead, on April 12, 1962 the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors opted out, citing high costs and concerns over shoppers leaving their county for stores in Downtown San Francisco. Keep in mind that Silicon Valley did not exist yet. There was no support for BART in San Mateo County-grassroots or otherwise. Many Peninsula civic leaders were also against it–including JR Clinton owner of the San Mateo Times (predecessor of San Mateo Daily Journal). Also opposing BART was David Bohannon the developer of the Hillsdale Shopping Mall, Tom Casey of the San Mateo Co Development Associations. They, and the San Mateo Times, published Op-eds arguing that BART was not needed; instead more freeway lanes was the proposed solution to congestion woes. The neighboring Santa Clara County's obsession with building and publicly financing the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol) didn't help either. You can read more about it in BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System by Michael C. Healy.
- kalessin 7y ago
  I'm sad that the SFCHA proposition [1] could not be petitioned successfully for last year's ballot in San Francisco. I thought it was an interesting one, with a progressive property tax scheme that would be used by the city to acquire housing for people under the median income (among other things). [1] https://www.sfcommunityhousingact.com/press/landmark-housing-initiative-san-francisco https://www.sfcommunityhousingact.com/press/landmark-housing...
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense. The Peninsula is bland and awful. Plenty of affluent folks that just like to fuck with people (a.k.a. Atherton and the NIMBY's asinine fight against electrifying Caltrain). Plenty of folks (a.k.a. Brisbane) that like to pretend they're rich and only want to develop commercial property and leave the housing to SF. But... the Bay Area is incredibly provincial. San Mateo county (most of the peninsula) is not San Francisco. Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay. Part if it is that there are chain retail bans in many neighborhoods, but the other part is where are you going to put the big stores? Cities in San Mateo county fight tooth and nail over the big box stores (see the Target in Colma directly across the highway from the Target in Daly City). Retail = tax revenue. Middle class jobs = less tax revenue. San Francisco can afford to levy payroll taxes and whatnot, but other cities don't have that prestige. You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man. You're starting to see more multi-unit housing in the Sunset, but again SF is not the peninsula. As bad as things are in San Francisco, things are far worse to the south. The garages are often two car sized and likely converted into illegal residential units. Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces. Curb cuts make walking in SF worse than it has to be, but try walking in the suburbs where there are sometimes no sidewalks, higher speed limits, and wider roads to cross on foot.
- cryptozeus 7y ago
  May be earthquake fear plays into not building too many high stories building!
- jjtheblunt 7y ago
  So true, so well described, so depressing, and just true.
- carapace 7y ago
  It's because we're hella young out here. Relative to the East Coast anyway (I mean, London has Roman ruins...) Do an image search for old timey SF and you'll see: the Sunset was sand dunes until about last Tuesday, etc. Dudes used to pan for gold out by Lake Merced. Also, this was the weirdo town. Bohemia on the Bay. Serious folk didn't really come here to be serious and sane. The old line was, "All the crazy people move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to San Francisco." To which residents add, "And all the people too crazy for San Francisco move to Berkeley." So yeah, you've got a young town full of nuts and flakes that no one really paid much attention to until the last ~50 years or so, whadda ya expect, eh? Things are changing though. I was over in the Inner Sunset the other day and the beautiful people were there casting me in the shade because I look too close to homeless on the hipster/homeless spectrum. My concern is the weakening of the commitment to keeping the wild areas of the Bay Area wild. SF is the largest city with the most wilderness around it in the world. Marin Headlands, Wildcat canyon et. al., nearly half of the peninsula is forest. I saw a coyote in someone's front yard on Junipero Serra the other day not three blocks from Stonestown Mall! In a neighborhood of single family homes, FWIW. I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo. On the other hand, it sucks that I can't afford an apartment in my home town, let alone ever own a home, despite making programmer money. I can't imagine what it would be like if I didn't have tech skills. I'd probably be living in a tent under the freeway.
  - refurb 7y ago
    Your comment about SF being young is really true. Take a look at a 1950's picture of the east side of Twin Peaks and you'll see huge tracks of open land. This is ~2 miles from downtown. A lot of SF was built in the last 60-70 years. And also the trend of people wanting to live in SF is a pretty recent phenomenon. The population of SF in 2000 was the same as it was in the 1950's. People were leaving SF in droves 40 years ago. Cities can't just turn on a dime.
    - laurencerowe 7y ago
      While this is true of SF itself the Bay Area as whole has been growing at a steady million per decade (one and a bit San Franciscos) for the past 70 years. Other urban areas undergoing growth seem to have done much better by allowing more density. Unfortunately the California tax system incentivizes municipalities to build office space over housing. With the Bay Area's patchwork local organization and no metropolitan level layer of governance local municipalities instead play beggar-thy-neighbour as they promote only development that expands their tax base while the burdens of providing schools etc. falls to the municipality next door.
- tssva 7y ago
  Outside of the older large northeast cities, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc, this is pretty much the norm for much of the east coast as well.
- entee 7y ago
  Speaking of the painted ladies, a clear example of how completely dysfunctional the market is, there's been a vacant lot ON Alamo Square, less than a block for the painted ladies for years. https://goo.gl/maps/7iW3oiqN3FcPhVXq6 https://goo.gl/maps/7iW3oiqN3FcPhVXq6 Who owns it? Why is this still not housing or at least something? Who knows! There's a vacant boarded up mansion/victorian multiunit building on Grove as well that has been that way forever as well. Also years ago there was a natural grocery store that closed on Divisadero. There was some controversy but the council decided to let it become a Core Power Yoga. That was almost a year ago. Zero progress has been made on building that studio, still an empty shop front. http://www.sfweekly.com/news/with-corepower-divisadero-loses-its-first-formula-retail-battle-in-years/ http://www.sfweekly.com/news/with-corepower-divisadero-loses... I don't have a strong opinion on that fight, but it's insane that these things take so long. I don't understand it, I've been meaning to go to a neighborhood meeting to ask, but I've been busy the rare nights they happen.
  - wahern 7y ago
    Maybe stuck in regulatory limbo, not unlike most projects in the city? https://socketsite.com/archives/2011/03/802_804_808_steiner_as_revised_and_proposed_below_postc.html https://socketsite.com/archives/2011/03/802_804_808_steiner_... Seems there was once a school there: https://sf.curbed.com/2012/5/31/10366476/painted-ladies-have-new-empty-lot-big-white-neighbor-ready-for-your https://sf.curbed.com/2012/5/31/10366476/painted-ladies-have...
  - natecham 7y ago
    Funny enough, it seems the vacant Victorian on Grove is making some progress, saw some scaffolding up around it this evening. http://www.sfweekly.com/news/news-news/entropy-on-grove-street/ http://www.sfweekly.com/news/news-news/entropy-on-grove-stre... (2017) elaborates on why its been vacant, seems like the owner doesn't have the funds/desire to make it habitable. Also mentions how much red tape exists to develop in the neighborhood in the last couple paragraphs, maybe the owner doesn't feel like enduring that adventure.
- zippergz 7y ago
  I agree with almost all of this, but in a city as crime-riddled as San Francisco, there is a huge difference between parking on the street and in a garage. I get that the way the garages are built and arranged is beyond suboptimal, but lets not act as if having those same cars parked on the street would be equally as good.
- MiroF 7y ago
  Thank you!!!
- MiroF 7y ago
  okay! so i'm not insane!!
- skunkpocalypse 7y ago
  > from the perspective of an east coaster > And two story buildings, Here on the West Coast we have these things called earthquakes. Tall, easily built, or safe: pick two, you can't have all three out here.
cbhl 7y ago
> auto repair shops Apparently the city governments want lots of these. They call it PDR zoning; apparently auto repair shops pay more for non-college-educated workers than other jobs.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  "Production, distribution, and repair", for the curious.
BurningFrog 7y ago
> it's honestly pathetic how this city is squandering their potential. San Bruno is working exactly as intended: It is maximizing the value increase of the home owners of the city. None of that potential is squandered.

CPLX 7y ago

I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula (including SF) looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense. Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay. In the Embarcadero there are actual motor inns, crappy hotels with one story raised 10 feet off the ground with parking spaces below them. Like a whole bunch of them. You don't even see those in abandoned small towns any more. You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man. Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces. Yet the entire city is dominated by garages at street level. And two story buildings, and mile after mile of awful zero-architecture postwar commercial properties. Yes the painted ladies are pretty, don't bulldoze them. Landmark Lombard street and some of the other charming blocks, Sure why not. But it's a global commercial city willing to build 50+ story office towers, and unwilling to do anything about the dozens of square miles of 1-2 story unredeemable residential surrounding them. It's insane.

api 7y ago
It's quite sane if you bought property in the 60s-90s and are riding property appreciation to fortune.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- yks 7y ago
  And then you what, die in the appreciated property? If you want to make money, it's already very profitable for you to sell the house for condo development but no one is doing that. Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then.
  - siphon22 7y ago
    >Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then. I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majority Southern Californian neighborhood all their life in the same homes they've always been in. Imagine ripping on them for trying to preserve their neighborhood and therefore their culture. And for what? To make it possible for more people to move in and potentially make things worse for the people already there? If it's a minority-majority neighborhood, making it possible for more whites to move in is gentrification. How do you argue for that? I'm not saying I agree with any of this by the way, just playing devil's advocate.
    - yks 7y ago
      Btw, the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person and not about SoCal neighborhood. Regardless, these people are not "natives" who got SF entirely in its current state from God, it was growing up, as prosperous cities do, and neighborhoods were changing. So why should it stop its development in 1976, why are people who moved in to SF back then entitled to this? If you ask me, this is becoming uncannily feudal.
      - siphon22 7y ago
i_am_proteus 7y ago
There I was, thinking I was the only one. It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned. I used to live in NYC, a city that's had its own difficulties adding new housing, corruption in the permitting process, considering too many areas "historic." But the Bay Area is something completely different. It seems that everyone who already owns a single family home is strongly in favor of pulling up the ladder. Perhaps too much money is riding on the existing "market value" of homes here. If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? Proposition 13 can't be helping, either.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned. It's actually quite the opposite. So-called soft story buildings are more dangerous in an earthquake and property owners are taking quite a while to bring them up to code. Californians just love their cars.
- ProblemFactory 7y ago
  > If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? I don't see how that could be the case. The property value of a plot of land on which a 50, or even 5 story building can be built is much higher than the property value of a single-family home.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    There's a substitution effect. If zoning restrictions are relaxed and developer turns an acre into a 50 unit condo complex, that developer reaps a huge windfall. But everyone else who owns an Eichler on a 1/4 acre has fewer buyers competing for their property. It's sorta like when labor unions go away. The company that hires non-unionized labor at half the price and double the productivity reaps an enormous windfall. So do the employees, who were presumably in other, less well-paying jobs. Everyone else who chooses not to play the new game ends up out of a job.
H8crilA 7y ago
Not just east coasters can subscribe to this thinking. A citizen of pretty much any other country can. Compare with Hong Kong. Right off the Victoria Peak there are 40+ story apartment buildings. There's forest to one side of them, and more 40+ story buildings to the other side.
- scrumbledober 7y ago
  You don't need to live outside of the bay area to think this way. I've grown up on the peninsula and think it's absurd. I'm a software engineer and if I ever want to buy a house I feel like I'll be forced to relocate away from family and hometown. My friend's 90 year old grandmother constantly complains about new housing development in the town we live in, but then also questions why my friend has to live with her and his cousin had to move away. Stop voting to make this area too expensive to live in and your younger family won't have to move away.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    Every single homeowner I've talked to here has complained about the housing crisis, yet has been opposing development near their house. Incredible that people can be so willfully blind that they don't see how their own actions are contributing to the crisis. It's a real tragedy of the commons
    - foobarian 7y ago
      If there was a law aggressively limiting the property tax rate, skyrocketing demand, and I happened to be in a house I got in the 70s... you better bet I'd be opposing development too.
      - MiroF 7y ago
        Sure, but you wouldn't be bemoaning the housing crisis.
brent_noorda 7y ago
The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  The cities of the Peninsula voted against getting a BART subway line decades ago, leaving them in the car-dependent, flat suburbs of the 60s BART is a basket case of incompetence on its own. SF residents were largely willing to support an infill station at 30th and Mission, but BART stuck its thumbs up its ass and eventually built a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport (ripping up recent renovations to the street along the way). San Mateo residents bought into BART in the 90s, but as they've learned public transit (BART especially) is a cost not profit center so the regional (SamTrans) service got gutted to fund BART (whose ridership numbers consistently lag predictions).
  - DrScump 7y ago
    a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport ... which was suspended mid-construction for several years. The empty trestles over Hegenberger were reminiscent of the "Freeway to Nowhere" (the 280/680/101 interchange in San Jose).
- ImplicitNone 7y ago
  That's not true! Peninsula voters never got the chance to vote on the November 1962 BART referendum. Instead, on April 12, 1962 the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors opted out, citing high costs and concerns over shoppers leaving their county for stores in Downtown San Francisco. Keep in mind that Silicon Valley did not exist yet. There was no support for BART in San Mateo County-grassroots or otherwise. Many Peninsula civic leaders were also against it–including JR Clinton owner of the San Mateo Times (predecessor of San Mateo Daily Journal). Also opposing BART was David Bohannon the developer of the Hillsdale Shopping Mall, Tom Casey of the San Mateo Co Development Associations. They, and the San Mateo Times, published Op-eds arguing that BART was not needed; instead more freeway lanes was the proposed solution to congestion woes. The neighboring Santa Clara County's obsession with building and publicly financing the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol) didn't help either. You can read more about it in BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System by Michael C. Healy.
kalessin 7y ago
I'm sad that the SFCHA proposition [1] could not be petitioned successfully for last year's ballot in San Francisco. I thought it was an interesting one, with a progressive property tax scheme that would be used by the city to acquire housing for people under the median income (among other things). [1] https://www.sfcommunityhousingact.com/press/landmark-housing-initiative-san-francisco https://www.sfcommunityhousingact.com/press/landmark-housing...
inferiorhuman 7y ago
I mean, I don't know how to tell you guys, but from the perspective of an east coaster, the entire peninsula looks like this. It feels like some kind of parallel universe where nothing makes sense. The Peninsula is bland and awful. Plenty of affluent folks that just like to fuck with people (a.k.a. Atherton and the NIMBY's asinine fight against electrifying Caltrain). Plenty of folks (a.k.a. Brisbane) that like to pretend they're rich and only want to develop commercial property and leave the housing to SF. But... the Bay Area is incredibly provincial. San Mateo county (most of the peninsula) is not San Francisco. Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay. Part if it is that there are chain retail bans in many neighborhoods, but the other part is where are you going to put the big stores? Cities in San Mateo county fight tooth and nail over the big box stores (see the Target in Colma directly across the highway from the Target in Daly City). Retail = tax revenue. Middle class jobs = less tax revenue. San Francisco can afford to levy payroll taxes and whatnot, but other cities don't have that prestige. You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man. You're starting to see more multi-unit housing in the Sunset, but again SF is not the peninsula. As bad as things are in San Francisco, things are far worse to the south. The garages are often two car sized and likely converted into illegal residential units. Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces. Curb cuts make walking in SF worse than it has to be, but try walking in the suburbs where there are sometimes no sidewalks, higher speed limits, and wider roads to cross on foot.
cryptozeus 7y ago
May be earthquake fear plays into not building too many high stories building!
jjtheblunt 7y ago
So true, so well described, so depressing, and just true.
carapace 7y ago
It's because we're hella young out here. Relative to the East Coast anyway (I mean, London has Roman ruins...) Do an image search for old timey SF and you'll see: the Sunset was sand dunes until about last Tuesday, etc. Dudes used to pan for gold out by Lake Merced. Also, this was the weirdo town. Bohemia on the Bay. Serious folk didn't really come here to be serious and sane. The old line was, "All the crazy people move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to San Francisco." To which residents add, "And all the people too crazy for San Francisco move to Berkeley." So yeah, you've got a young town full of nuts and flakes that no one really paid much attention to until the last ~50 years or so, whadda ya expect, eh? Things are changing though. I was over in the Inner Sunset the other day and the beautiful people were there casting me in the shade because I look too close to homeless on the hipster/homeless spectrum. My concern is the weakening of the commitment to keeping the wild areas of the Bay Area wild. SF is the largest city with the most wilderness around it in the world. Marin Headlands, Wildcat canyon et. al., nearly half of the peninsula is forest. I saw a coyote in someone's front yard on Junipero Serra the other day not three blocks from Stonestown Mall! In a neighborhood of single family homes, FWIW. I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo. On the other hand, it sucks that I can't afford an apartment in my home town, let alone ever own a home, despite making programmer money. I can't imagine what it would be like if I didn't have tech skills. I'd probably be living in a tent under the freeway.
- refurb 7y ago
  Your comment about SF being young is really true. Take a look at a 1950's picture of the east side of Twin Peaks and you'll see huge tracks of open land. This is ~2 miles from downtown. A lot of SF was built in the last 60-70 years. And also the trend of people wanting to live in SF is a pretty recent phenomenon. The population of SF in 2000 was the same as it was in the 1950's. People were leaving SF in droves 40 years ago. Cities can't just turn on a dime.
  - laurencerowe 7y ago
    While this is true of SF itself the Bay Area as whole has been growing at a steady million per decade (one and a bit San Franciscos) for the past 70 years. Other urban areas undergoing growth seem to have done much better by allowing more density. Unfortunately the California tax system incentivizes municipalities to build office space over housing. With the Bay Area's patchwork local organization and no metropolitan level layer of governance local municipalities instead play beggar-thy-neighbour as they promote only development that expands their tax base while the burdens of providing schools etc. falls to the municipality next door.
tssva 7y ago
Outside of the older large northeast cities, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, etc, this is pretty much the norm for much of the east coast as well.
entee 7y ago
Speaking of the painted ladies, a clear example of how completely dysfunctional the market is, there's been a vacant lot ON Alamo Square, less than a block for the painted ladies for years. https://goo.gl/maps/7iW3oiqN3FcPhVXq6 https://goo.gl/maps/7iW3oiqN3FcPhVXq6 Who owns it? Why is this still not housing or at least something? Who knows! There's a vacant boarded up mansion/victorian multiunit building on Grove as well that has been that way forever as well. Also years ago there was a natural grocery store that closed on Divisadero. There was some controversy but the council decided to let it become a Core Power Yoga. That was almost a year ago. Zero progress has been made on building that studio, still an empty shop front. http://www.sfweekly.com/news/with-corepower-divisadero-loses-its-first-formula-retail-battle-in-years/ http://www.sfweekly.com/news/with-corepower-divisadero-loses... I don't have a strong opinion on that fight, but it's insane that these things take so long. I don't understand it, I've been meaning to go to a neighborhood meeting to ask, but I've been busy the rare nights they happen.
- wahern 7y ago
  Maybe stuck in regulatory limbo, not unlike most projects in the city? https://socketsite.com/archives/2011/03/802_804_808_steiner_as_revised_and_proposed_below_postc.html https://socketsite.com/archives/2011/03/802_804_808_steiner_... Seems there was once a school there: https://sf.curbed.com/2012/5/31/10366476/painted-ladies-have-new-empty-lot-big-white-neighbor-ready-for-your https://sf.curbed.com/2012/5/31/10366476/painted-ladies-have...
- natecham 7y ago
  Funny enough, it seems the vacant Victorian on Grove is making some progress, saw some scaffolding up around it this evening. http://www.sfweekly.com/news/news-news/entropy-on-grove-street/ http://www.sfweekly.com/news/news-news/entropy-on-grove-stre... (2017) elaborates on why its been vacant, seems like the owner doesn't have the funds/desire to make it habitable. Also mentions how much red tape exists to develop in the neighborhood in the last couple paragraphs, maybe the owner doesn't feel like enduring that adventure.
zippergz 7y ago
I agree with almost all of this, but in a city as crime-riddled as San Francisco, there is a huge difference between parking on the street and in a garage. I get that the way the garages are built and arranged is beyond suboptimal, but lets not act as if having those same cars parked on the street would be equally as good.
MiroF 7y ago
Thank you!!!
MiroF 7y ago
okay! so i'm not insane!!
skunkpocalypse 7y ago
> from the perspective of an east coaster > And two story buildings, Here on the West Coast we have these things called earthquakes. Tall, easily built, or safe: pick two, you can't have all three out here.

cbhl 7y ago

> auto repair shops Apparently the city governments want lots of these. They call it PDR zoning; apparently auto repair shops pay more for non-college-educated workers than other jobs.

dredmorbius 7y ago
"Production, distribution, and repair", for the curious.

BurningFrog 7y ago

> it's honestly pathetic how this city is squandering their potential. San Bruno is working exactly as intended: It is maximizing the value increase of the home owners of the city. None of that potential is squandered.