11 ms·

I remember when I lived there everyone was so against the “manhattanization” of the city, so it was a big uproar every time a new building went in. I never quit

I remember when I lived there everyone was so against the “manhattanization” of the city, so it was a big uproar every time a new building went in. I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable

ASM_god 6y ago
lots of hypocrisy when it comes to housing
imajoredinecon 6y ago
Rent controls!
- aaronbrethorst 6y ago
  I assume this is meant to be read in the same tone as "The Aristocrats!"
- ralusek 6y ago
  That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery, in addition to all sorts of perverse incentives/disincentives for landlords and tenants alike, rather than a place where the people who are most willing/able to pay to live there are the ones that do. Rent control is one of the worst solutions to any problem.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    > That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery That's how property ownership works, after all. Extending the same benefits to renters has a lot of obvious appeal even if it does nothing to fix overall price increase trends.
    - kar5pt 6y ago
      Yeah, property _ownership_ not property renting. They work differently for a reason. When housing prices rise, owners are incentivized to sell. When rents rise on rent controlled buildings, renters are incentived to stay put, even if they don't need the space. This incentivizes building owners to not maintain the buildings since they know renters won't leave anyway. There's tons of ways to make housing affordable without resorting to policies that have been rejected almost unanimously by economists.
    - ralusek 6y ago
      No it's not. If I walk into SF with 2 million dollars, there are more than a few people who would give up their 1 million dollar house for that amount of money. My desire and means to live there would just have to exceed their own. If someone is in a rent-controlled situation, they were simply lucky to get there first, and there is no mechanism in place for anybody else to rotate into that position.
- umeshunni 6y ago
  I hope you're being sarcastic.
  - imajoredinecon 6y ago
    I was! Looking at the reception, the single exclamation mark evidently wasn't quite enough to connote that. Ah well.
SllX 6y ago
A collective delusion that we can have our cake and eat it too. In my early 20s I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable. Got a lot of proposals that essentially boiled down to “control who can live here, kick out everyone that doesn’t fit and cap the city’s population”. Don’t ask me how, I never got a straight answer whenever I pointed out the problems. People can express what they want, they can’t usually tell you how they would obtain it.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  > I never got a straight answer whenever I pointed out the problems What are the problems?
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    Not the OP, but the ones that come immediately to mind is that a) capping the population will reduce the market and therefore increase prices and b) if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich [0] one way or another, making the market even more competitive. [0] Unless the place is not actually worth striving to live in, but in that case you probably don't have a rent price problem.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      > reduce the market and therefore increase prices Why is that a problem? > if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich Why is that a problem?
      - milkytron 6y ago
        > to make the city more affordable It doesn't achieve the goal, in fact further distances it.
      - dghlsakjg 6y ago
        > Why is that a problem? Shelter is one of the few goods which a society necessarily needs. The alternatives (being homeless) are unacceptable. People give up food, electricity and healthcare before they give up shelter. It's fine at a micro scale (oceanfront is expensive, but a few blocks away is affordable), but causes incredible problems at a macro scale as the bay area demonstrates (people not able to live within 50+ miles of their support networks). It is VERY hard to uproot an entire life and move to an area where cost of living is lower, especially when you are poor. People in poverty form informal local support networks (neighbors watching kids, friends that can loan you $5 to top up your phone), making it that much harder to move to a lower cost area.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable It’s more of a desire to “keep housing affordable [for me without decreasing quality of life by attracting more people]”.
- olliej 6y ago
  I'd argue it's more "keep housing affordable without reducing the value of my home". I recall seeing some article in which people were arguing that a council relaxing zoning laws to make more/cheaper housing possible was a "government taking" as it would reduce the value of their homes. Unfortunately I don't recall where/when so I can't guarantee it's not my mind merging unrelated stories. Or (because it's insane) the onion :D
  - imtringued 6y ago
    It's quite selfish because there is a savings glut. Lots of reasons why people cut consumption but those savings have to go somewhere and this leads to low interest rates which then fuel the housing market. If the housing market crashes but the savings glut doesn't disappear then the housing market will recover within a year. If you did the obvious thing, namely building more housing then some of that money would have a place to go instead of just driving up the prices of existing houses.
closeparen 6y ago
This is "de-manhattanization" - as buildings reach end of life they will have to be replaced by more suburban forms, in 100 years San Francisco will have turned into Palo Alto.
ruined 6y ago
housing isn't affordable in manhattan either so
- jedberg 6y ago
  Because building up isn't actually any cheaper. As the building gets taller, the construction costs go up per sq foot, not down, and so does ongoing maintenance.
  - smabie 6y ago
    I mean, you build a building as tall as necessary to maximize the total return of selling or renting. Saying that it costs more per sq ft to build each additional story is kind of missing the point.
majormajor 6y ago
Manhattan is hardly affordable. Development alone is hardly an answer for affordability. Most development projects in the US are designed to increase growth and demand, not to decrease price. Increased growth and demand actively work against affordability, so if your development is contributing to increased demand as much as it is to supply, it's not helping. It's like how building wider freeways doesn't solve traffic. Demand is not independent of what has been built.
- wisty 6y ago
  You're talking about "induced demand". Induced demand is not so high for housing. I might decide to drive 15 minutes to get a hotdog from Costco is the traffic isn't too awful. I probably won't buy an extra house just because it looks like a better deal than before. It does exist to some extent, but it's nowhere near as big a deal as for roads (at least in the short-medium term), at least I think that's the currently thinking on it - https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper25811.html https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper25811.ht...
  - majormajor 6y ago
    It's not induced demand through increased housing stock, it's city development that becomes a cycle of residential/commercial/business development (or all-in-one mixed development), all of which have feedback loops into each other. Simply going for growth-at-all-costs gets you a more crowded but still expensive city. That may be better for the people running the cities and their budgets, but it's not clear to me it's better for anyone else than having things spread out to more places across the state or country.
    - kelp 6y ago
      Sprawl is probably worse for the environment overall. More driving, more land taken over. More density also reduces that.
- moultano 6y ago
  NYC has one of the lowest rates of housing starts per capita in the US.
voidfunc 6y ago
> I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable. It is easy, there is no absolutely no desire to keep housing "affordable" by anyone that owns property in SF. This is a problem through the US. Property owners vote and do things that are in their favor while renters and people that are trying to enter the market scream it is too expensive.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  There are plenty of property owners who want housing to remain dirt cheap so that the kind of people who need dirt cheap housing stick around and the kind of people who don't need dirt cheap housing don't show up and bring their zoning and their bylaws and their opinions with them.
- smabie 6y ago
  Current renters are part of the problem too: they lobby for rent control. The people who are really fucked are people who want to move to a city and rent or buy.
joshuamorton 6y ago
You can do both. Manhattanization is perhaps bad, but low-mid rise, Brooklynization or Barcelonazation or even Missionization of more of the city would help vastly. The highest population density parts of SF are Mission and Haight and similar midrise mixed use areas, they're significantly denser (50-100% more) than Richmond and Sunset. Imagine fitting an extra 100K people without adding any buildings higher than 3 stories.
vineyardmike 6y ago
I'll give you a direct answer that no one wants to say, but disclosure, I no longer live in SF due to work. I also don't own land or have a financial incentive to have high prices. TLDR: I would rather have SF as it is now (because i like it now and dislike change) than an affordable SF. "Manhattanization" is worse than the attempt of keeping it affordable. I would rather (to a limit) have an expensive SF than an SF that has more people in it. The manhattanization is not likely to drive down prices significantly. I read a article (cant find source) that said there would need to be ~4x the number of rental units in the city before prices fell meaningfully due to supply/demand. Even if the actual number isn't true, demand is so high that i don't believe any achievable increase in housing would help at any meaningful way. If you accept the premise that prices won't go down (this is an assumption of course), you need to consider if more people would be better. Of course more people can enjoy it, and that is good, but here is why i think it will make the city a worse city: SF is great in many ways. There are so many parks, all so close together so its very fun and walkable. So many restaurants and shops all so close. Walking SF is a joy compared to many cities, where most of SF is great for walking while some cities only have a few neighborhoods that are great for walking. This is my opinion on SF, not all agree. The "manhattanization" of SF would destroy some of that by changing the "street view" details of the city. Sure, its just more people and likely no fewer "things", but bigger facades that change less "per foot" are more boring - bigger buildings tend to have fewer doors and things per foot of sidewalk frontage. Not universally true, but often true. Also, SF has some great historic architecture, and that would get lost as new building destroy the existing "feel" of a neighborhood. Some neighborhoods this would be good, but some are great how they are, and new buildings should improve not deteriorate the beauty of the city.
- incadenza 6y ago
  I hear you. I get where people are coming from in a general sense. On the other hand, it strikes me as a kind of provincialism. I feel like the same argument could have been made in 1930s San Francisco: “ok everybody, time to hit the pause button, I like it here now!” But on the other hand people should have a say in what their cities are like and how they develop.
- webdood90 6y ago
vmception 6y ago
I listened to everything that people told me they miss about San Francisco and they are absolutely correct that this gentrifying transplant (aka anybody that signs a new lease, shrug) would find San Francisco unappealing I mean I find it unappealing now too, but would have found it more so unappealing Every single currently desirable neighborhood was an undesirable neighborhood within the last 30 years. "But the culture and the artists are gone" yeah, so is a gigantic abandoned highway through Hayes Valley replaced by ice cream shops eeeeeverywhere. There isn't a coherent consensus, just angst.
- asveikau 6y ago
  > Every single currently desirable neighborhood was an undesirable neighborhood within the last 30 years. This kind of thing is true of many (most?) cities in the US. (Well, I don't know about every desirable neighborhood. Pacific Heights is going to be nice on either side of 30 years.)
  - vmception 6y ago
    Sort of but the other US cities aren’t longing for a worse iteration of the city while simultaneously blaming the last decade or two on a 100-year long pricing trend but acting like its recent
    - dghlsakjg 6y ago
      There was a period after forced integration/busing, and the advent of suburbs where housing in cities was very much not a sure thing upward trend like it is now. If you go to a lot of cities in between coasts the revitalization of downtown areas is most definitely a "last decade or two" trend.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      I think the thinking about American cities in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s was pretty different. Remember that New York nearly went bankrupt in the 70s. Then the crack epidemic in the 80s. Crime was much worse and cities were seen as undesirable.
phendrenad2 6y ago
It's simple, the people who are against "manhattanization" do NOT want to keep housing affordable.
jariel 6y ago
How is it remotely hard to understand that someone doesn't want their neighbhourhood and greater neighbourhood plowed into the ground and replaced with skyscrapers? They can disagree about it sure, but it should't be remotely hard to 'understand'. America is a very large places, there are tons of places for people to build out and build up if that's a primary issue. The most vertical city in the US - NYC - is one of the least affordable. In fact - the 'most dense' places tend to be the least affordable, paradoxically. So even in the event affordability becomes a primary concern, even then the answers may not be more obvious. More than likely getting different companies to move to adjacent areas might be a more suitable problem to the affordability crisis. Surely Morgan Hill, Pleasanton, Fremont or Santa Rosa could equally opt to 'build up'.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Yes, San Francisco is a perfect city, it shouldn't change because it was already perfect in 2020 and by keeping it that way it will stay perfect in 2120. Anything you do will only make it worse.
  - jariel 6y ago
    People can chose to manage their communities as they wish, if you're not a resident, it's basically none of your business. If SF residents want to knock down homes to build parks, or build skyscrapers, all the power to them.

ASM_god 6y ago

lots of hypocrisy when it comes to housing

imajoredinecon 6y ago

Rent controls!

aaronbrethorst 6y ago
I assume this is meant to be read in the same tone as "The Aristocrats!"
ralusek 6y ago
That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery, in addition to all sorts of perverse incentives/disincentives for landlords and tenants alike, rather than a place where the people who are most willing/able to pay to live there are the ones that do. Rent control is one of the worst solutions to any problem.
- majormajor 6y ago
  > That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery That's how property ownership works, after all. Extending the same benefits to renters has a lot of obvious appeal even if it does nothing to fix overall price increase trends.
  - kar5pt 6y ago
    Yeah, property _ownership_ not property renting. They work differently for a reason. When housing prices rise, owners are incentivized to sell. When rents rise on rent controlled buildings, renters are incentived to stay put, even if they don't need the space. This incentivizes building owners to not maintain the buildings since they know renters won't leave anyway. There's tons of ways to make housing affordable without resorting to policies that have been rejected almost unanimously by economists.
  - ralusek 6y ago
    No it's not. If I walk into SF with 2 million dollars, there are more than a few people who would give up their 1 million dollar house for that amount of money. My desire and means to live there would just have to exceed their own. If someone is in a rent-controlled situation, they were simply lucky to get there first, and there is no mechanism in place for anybody else to rotate into that position.
umeshunni 6y ago
I hope you're being sarcastic.
- imajoredinecon 6y ago
  I was! Looking at the reception, the single exclamation mark evidently wasn't quite enough to connote that. Ah well.

SllX 6y ago

A collective delusion that we can have our cake and eat it too. In my early 20s I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable. Got a lot of proposals that essentially boiled down to “control who can live here, kick out everyone that doesn’t fit and cap the city’s population”. Don’t ask me how, I never got a straight answer whenever I pointed out the problems. People can express what they want, they can’t usually tell you how they would obtain it.

lightgreen 6y ago
> I never got a straight answer whenever I pointed out the problems What are the problems?
- Sebb767 6y ago
  Not the OP, but the ones that come immediately to mind is that a) capping the population will reduce the market and therefore increase prices and b) if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich [0] one way or another, making the market even more competitive. [0] Unless the place is not actually worth striving to live in, but in that case you probably don't have a rent price problem.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    > reduce the market and therefore increase prices Why is that a problem? > if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich Why is that a problem?
    - milkytron 6y ago
      > to make the city more affordable It doesn't achieve the goal, in fact further distances it.
    - dghlsakjg 6y ago
      > Why is that a problem? Shelter is one of the few goods which a society necessarily needs. The alternatives (being homeless) are unacceptable. People give up food, electricity and healthcare before they give up shelter. It's fine at a micro scale (oceanfront is expensive, but a few blocks away is affordable), but causes incredible problems at a macro scale as the bay area demonstrates (people not able to live within 50+ miles of their support networks). It is VERY hard to uproot an entire life and move to an area where cost of living is lower, especially when you are poor. People in poverty form informal local support networks (neighbors watching kids, friends that can loan you $5 to top up your phone), making it that much harder to move to a lower cost area.

lotsofpulp 6y ago

> I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable It’s more of a desire to “keep housing affordable [for me without decreasing quality of life by attracting more people]”.

olliej 6y ago
I'd argue it's more "keep housing affordable without reducing the value of my home". I recall seeing some article in which people were arguing that a council relaxing zoning laws to make more/cheaper housing possible was a "government taking" as it would reduce the value of their homes. Unfortunately I don't recall where/when so I can't guarantee it's not my mind merging unrelated stories. Or (because it's insane) the onion :D
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's quite selfish because there is a savings glut. Lots of reasons why people cut consumption but those savings have to go somewhere and this leads to low interest rates which then fuel the housing market. If the housing market crashes but the savings glut doesn't disappear then the housing market will recover within a year. If you did the obvious thing, namely building more housing then some of that money would have a place to go instead of just driving up the prices of existing houses.

closeparen 6y ago

This is "de-manhattanization" - as buildings reach end of life they will have to be replaced by more suburban forms, in 100 years San Francisco will have turned into Palo Alto.

ruined 6y ago

housing isn't affordable in manhattan either so

jedberg 6y ago
Because building up isn't actually any cheaper. As the building gets taller, the construction costs go up per sq foot, not down, and so does ongoing maintenance.
- smabie 6y ago
  I mean, you build a building as tall as necessary to maximize the total return of selling or renting. Saying that it costs more per sq ft to build each additional story is kind of missing the point.

majormajor 6y ago

Manhattan is hardly affordable. Development alone is hardly an answer for affordability. Most development projects in the US are designed to increase growth and demand, not to decrease price. Increased growth and demand actively work against affordability, so if your development is contributing to increased demand as much as it is to supply, it's not helping. It's like how building wider freeways doesn't solve traffic. Demand is not independent of what has been built.

wisty 6y ago
You're talking about "induced demand". Induced demand is not so high for housing. I might decide to drive 15 minutes to get a hotdog from Costco is the traffic isn't too awful. I probably won't buy an extra house just because it looks like a better deal than before. It does exist to some extent, but it's nowhere near as big a deal as for roads (at least in the short-medium term), at least I think that's the currently thinking on it - https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper25811.html https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper25811.ht...
- majormajor 6y ago
  It's not induced demand through increased housing stock, it's city development that becomes a cycle of residential/commercial/business development (or all-in-one mixed development), all of which have feedback loops into each other. Simply going for growth-at-all-costs gets you a more crowded but still expensive city. That may be better for the people running the cities and their budgets, but it's not clear to me it's better for anyone else than having things spread out to more places across the state or country.
  - kelp 6y ago
    Sprawl is probably worse for the environment overall. More driving, more land taken over. More density also reduces that.
moultano 6y ago
NYC has one of the lowest rates of housing starts per capita in the US.

voidfunc 6y ago

> I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable. It is easy, there is no absolutely no desire to keep housing "affordable" by anyone that owns property in SF. This is a problem through the US. Property owners vote and do things that are in their favor while renters and people that are trying to enter the market scream it is too expensive.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
There are plenty of property owners who want housing to remain dirt cheap so that the kind of people who need dirt cheap housing stick around and the kind of people who don't need dirt cheap housing don't show up and bring their zoning and their bylaws and their opinions with them.
smabie 6y ago
Current renters are part of the problem too: they lobby for rent control. The people who are really fucked are people who want to move to a city and rent or buy.

joshuamorton 6y ago

You can do both. Manhattanization is perhaps bad, but low-mid rise, Brooklynization or Barcelonazation or even Missionization of more of the city would help vastly. The highest population density parts of SF are Mission and Haight and similar midrise mixed use areas, they're significantly denser (50-100% more) than Richmond and Sunset. Imagine fitting an extra 100K people without adding any buildings higher than 3 stories.

vineyardmike 6y ago

I'll give you a direct answer that no one wants to say, but disclosure, I no longer live in SF due to work. I also don't own land or have a financial incentive to have high prices. TLDR: I would rather have SF as it is now (because i like it now and dislike change) than an affordable SF. "Manhattanization" is worse than the attempt of keeping it affordable. I would rather (to a limit) have an expensive SF than an SF that has more people in it. The manhattanization is not likely to drive down prices significantly. I read a article (cant find source) that said there would need to be ~4x the number of rental units in the city before prices fell meaningfully due to supply/demand. Even if the actual number isn't true, demand is so high that i don't believe any achievable increase in housing would help at any meaningful way. If you accept the premise that prices won't go down (this is an assumption of course), you need to consider if more people would be better. Of course more people can enjoy it, and that is good, but here is why i think it will make the city a worse city: SF is great in many ways. There are so many parks, all so close together so its very fun and walkable. So many restaurants and shops all so close. Walking SF is a joy compared to many cities, where most of SF is great for walking while some cities only have a few neighborhoods that are great for walking. This is my opinion on SF, not all agree. The "manhattanization" of SF would destroy some of that by changing the "street view" details of the city. Sure, its just more people and likely no fewer "things", but bigger facades that change less "per foot" are more boring - bigger buildings tend to have fewer doors and things per foot of sidewalk frontage. Not universally true, but often true. Also, SF has some great historic architecture, and that would get lost as new building destroy the existing "feel" of a neighborhood. Some neighborhoods this would be good, but some are great how they are, and new buildings should improve not deteriorate the beauty of the city.

incadenza 6y ago
I hear you. I get where people are coming from in a general sense. On the other hand, it strikes me as a kind of provincialism. I feel like the same argument could have been made in 1930s San Francisco: “ok everybody, time to hit the pause button, I like it here now!” But on the other hand people should have a say in what their cities are like and how they develop.
webdood90 6y ago

vmception 6y ago

I listened to everything that people told me they miss about San Francisco and they are absolutely correct that this gentrifying transplant (aka anybody that signs a new lease, shrug) would find San Francisco unappealing I mean I find it unappealing now too, but would have found it more so unappealing Every single currently desirable neighborhood was an undesirable neighborhood within the last 30 years. "But the culture and the artists are gone" yeah, so is a gigantic abandoned highway through Hayes Valley replaced by ice cream shops eeeeeverywhere. There isn't a coherent consensus, just angst.

asveikau 6y ago
> Every single currently desirable neighborhood was an undesirable neighborhood within the last 30 years. This kind of thing is true of many (most?) cities in the US. (Well, I don't know about every desirable neighborhood. Pacific Heights is going to be nice on either side of 30 years.)
- vmception 6y ago
  Sort of but the other US cities aren’t longing for a worse iteration of the city while simultaneously blaming the last decade or two on a 100-year long pricing trend but acting like its recent
  - dghlsakjg 6y ago
    There was a period after forced integration/busing, and the advent of suburbs where housing in cities was very much not a sure thing upward trend like it is now. If you go to a lot of cities in between coasts the revitalization of downtown areas is most definitely a "last decade or two" trend.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    I think the thinking about American cities in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s was pretty different. Remember that New York nearly went bankrupt in the 70s. Then the crack epidemic in the 80s. Crime was much worse and cities were seen as undesirable.

phendrenad2 6y ago

It's simple, the people who are against "manhattanization" do NOT want to keep housing affordable.

jariel 6y ago

How is it remotely hard to understand that someone doesn't want their neighbhourhood and greater neighbourhood plowed into the ground and replaced with skyscrapers? They can disagree about it sure, but it should't be remotely hard to 'understand'. America is a very large places, there are tons of places for people to build out and build up if that's a primary issue. The most vertical city in the US - NYC - is one of the least affordable. In fact - the 'most dense' places tend to be the least affordable, paradoxically. So even in the event affordability becomes a primary concern, even then the answers may not be more obvious. More than likely getting different companies to move to adjacent areas might be a more suitable problem to the affordability crisis. Surely Morgan Hill, Pleasanton, Fremont or Santa Rosa could equally opt to 'build up'.

imtringued 6y ago
Yes, San Francisco is a perfect city, it shouldn't change because it was already perfect in 2020 and by keeping it that way it will stay perfect in 2120. Anything you do will only make it worse.
- jariel 6y ago
  People can chose to manage their communities as they wish, if you're not a resident, it's basically none of your business. If SF residents want to knock down homes to build parks, or build skyscrapers, all the power to them.