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I doubt it. I owned a house in SF. For me it was looking at the city. I grew up in the bay area and have been going to SF since the 70's. San Francisco is a bea

I doubt it. I owned a house in SF. For me it was looking at the city. I grew up in the bay area and have been going to SF since the 70's. San Francisco is a beautiful city. Architecturally fantastic. In the 60's, 70's and 80's there were waves of mass fast building of apartment units and much of it is really, really ugly. I would not like to see San Francisco go in another ugly direction just so people can say they have an SF address. Further, I just felt the city could not take a boom in population. Public transportation, road usage already felt maxed out. There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work. You could call me highly skeptical on that front, especially the Bay Area where a car is just so useful even if public transportation is used to get to work. Another thing is looking at single cities rather than the entire metro areas. San Jose is first and San Francisco second. Where would Manhattan and Brooklyn be on the list if Queens and the Bronx were not there to bring the numbers down? Workers need affordable housing but I'm not convinced they need to be in specific arbitrary lined off areas rather than in the greater metro area with reasonable commute time to work...

tdeck 3y ago
> There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work. And yet as a software professional making a six figure income in SF, I had so many colleagues and friends who didn't own a car. There are very few places in the US where that would be true, and all of them are cities with transit policies you'd probably describe in the same terms.
syntheweave 3y ago
Right, that's the older generation speaking circuitously about what the Bay Area can do with land use and conveniently landing on the status quo being best-of-all-possible-worlds. The fact is, the city changes anyway. More and more newcomers in the past two decades ended up with roommates because of rent. E-bikes changed the game with getting over the hills and a lot of families are using them now, pulling kids and groceries despite the lack of infrastructure. Lots of people opt to get things delivered instead of driving down the peninsula to Colma. On the roads themselves, the self-driving taxis are all over the city every day - and mostly they do work, even if "Cruise gets stuck" is a meme; if they expand to achieve the current market share of Uber and Lyft at the projected cost metrics, SF's auto fleet will be majority centralized and professionally-operated. Meanwhile the fastest expanding public transit in the Bay is the ferry system, which in its current incarnation is largely a product of the '89 quake jumpstarting ridership, and now serves as a link to some relatively distant locales. What the whole Bay Area government did - not just SF - is spend a generation kicking cans down roads and letting real estate prices run up, and the time is ripe for a transformation that leverages all the new stuff. Right now everything, big and small, good and bad, gets challenged by CEQA and affordable unit requirements. It's an excuse for graft to run through City Hall. But the entire west side of the city has ample room to grow. It is not particularly beautiful as it is - it's just row housing. The transit and traffic problem is just geometry, doing more in less space. The way in which the city streets are currently designed is "every street is a stroad" - garage curb cuts are everywhere, every inch is available for parking, everything on the grid is a thru street. Many of the garages are not used as garages, they are used as rentals. Most of the delays are from intersections along major corridors, not access to destinations. So in practice, the city is subsidizing a lot of street space as a parking lot, which exacerbates the need for cars and car infra. All you have to do to make the kind of transformation Paris has made and go heavier into bike use is to carve out the block into a cul-de-sac with bollards - a stronger version of what's already been experimented with in "Slow Streets" and "Neighborways" since 2020. You don't get a fight over parking and lane space, but the fast thru traffic goes away and it becomes dead easy to set up a few consecutive blocks like that to create bicycle corridors, while reducing delay along the fast corridor by eliminating conflict points. There's plenty more, but that's basically where I see things going. A lot of changes will be precipitated by self-driving taxis because adoption of those removes the "owner's rights" element of why constituents vote to keep the streets exactly as-is.
- BashiBazouk 3y ago
  Older generation, eh? Is San Francisco's tourist industry "Older generation"? The house I owned was in the Sunset, so pardon me if I don't agree with your assessment of the west side of the city. I have watched property prices since the seventies always go up. My parents bought a house in Santa Cruz for $16,000 and sold for $28,000 and thought they made a killing in real estate. The hippy generation happened in the Haight Ashbury because no one could afford North Beach and they still all had roommates. Of course communes were cool at the time, but still. Anything with an ocean view between the Ferry Building and the Presidio, especially if on a hill, has been unaffordable for decades. Other than momentary blips due to earthquakes and deep financial downturns, property prices have always gone up. Some the greatest jumps in property prices happened during the gold rush. Has the city really changed or do not know enough history of the city to understand that it has always been like this?

tdeck 3y ago

> There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work. And yet as a software professional making a six figure income in SF, I had so many colleagues and friends who didn't own a car. There are very few places in the US where that would be true, and all of them are cities with transit policies you'd probably describe in the same terms.

syntheweave 3y ago

Right, that's the older generation speaking circuitously about what the Bay Area can do with land use and conveniently landing on the status quo being best-of-all-possible-worlds. The fact is, the city changes anyway. More and more newcomers in the past two decades ended up with roommates because of rent. E-bikes changed the game with getting over the hills and a lot of families are using them now, pulling kids and groceries despite the lack of infrastructure. Lots of people opt to get things delivered instead of driving down the peninsula to Colma. On the roads themselves, the self-driving taxis are all over the city every day - and mostly they do work, even if "Cruise gets stuck" is a meme; if they expand to achieve the current market share of Uber and Lyft at the projected cost metrics, SF's auto fleet will be majority centralized and professionally-operated. Meanwhile the fastest expanding public transit in the Bay is the ferry system, which in its current incarnation is largely a product of the '89 quake jumpstarting ridership, and now serves as a link to some relatively distant locales. What the whole Bay Area government did - not just SF - is spend a generation kicking cans down roads and letting real estate prices run up, and the time is ripe for a transformation that leverages all the new stuff. Right now everything, big and small, good and bad, gets challenged by CEQA and affordable unit requirements. It's an excuse for graft to run through City Hall. But the entire west side of the city has ample room to grow. It is not particularly beautiful as it is - it's just row housing. The transit and traffic problem is just geometry, doing more in less space. The way in which the city streets are currently designed is "every street is a stroad" - garage curb cuts are everywhere, every inch is available for parking, everything on the grid is a thru street. Many of the garages are not used as garages, they are used as rentals. Most of the delays are from intersections along major corridors, not access to destinations. So in practice, the city is subsidizing a lot of street space as a parking lot, which exacerbates the need for cars and car infra. All you have to do to make the kind of transformation Paris has made and go heavier into bike use is to carve out the block into a cul-de-sac with bollards - a stronger version of what's already been experimented with in "Slow Streets" and "Neighborways" since 2020. You don't get a fight over parking and lane space, but the fast thru traffic goes away and it becomes dead easy to set up a few consecutive blocks like that to create bicycle corridors, while reducing delay along the fast corridor by eliminating conflict points. There's plenty more, but that's basically where I see things going. A lot of changes will be precipitated by self-driving taxis because adoption of those removes the "owner's rights" element of why constituents vote to keep the streets exactly as-is.

BashiBazouk 3y ago
Older generation, eh? Is San Francisco's tourist industry "Older generation"? The house I owned was in the Sunset, so pardon me if I don't agree with your assessment of the west side of the city. I have watched property prices since the seventies always go up. My parents bought a house in Santa Cruz for $16,000 and sold for $28,000 and thought they made a killing in real estate. The hippy generation happened in the Haight Ashbury because no one could afford North Beach and they still all had roommates. Of course communes were cool at the time, but still. Anything with an ocean view between the Ferry Building and the Presidio, especially if on a hill, has been unaffordable for decades. Other than momentary blips due to earthquakes and deep financial downturns, property prices have always gone up. Some the greatest jumps in property prices happened during the gold rush. Has the city really changed or do not know enough history of the city to understand that it has always been like this?