6 ms·

An interesting counterfactual I think about a fair amount is what would cities like NYC or SF look like if they just built tons of housing. Given the allure and

• kajecounterhack 3y ago
  SF needs more public transportation as much as it needs housing :(
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    With that tax base, is there any reason BART couldn’t be expanded and enhanced?
    • doublespanner 3y ago
      In my experience, the motivation for rapid growth in an area comes from an opposite direction to improving services in an area.
    • farzinadil 3y ago
      BART is struggling to fund it's operations currently as ridership is down significantly from per-pandemic. Bart is already constructing a 5 mile extension into downtown San Jose and Santa Clara. But BART should not prioritize any more extensions after that. It is better for BART to focus on transit oriented development (TOD). There are many good opportunities for TOD. Currently. too many stations are surrounded by low density housing and surface parking lots. Also, it is better for BART to use money to improve operations as frequency is abysmal on weekends and nighttime. Better to use money on expanding service and building TOD before any further extensions.
      • epicureanideal 3y ago
        Get the smelly mentally ill and drug using people off of Bart and I’ll use it more.
        • farzinadil 3y ago
          I think the best way to do that is installing better fare gates that prevent fare evasion. Seems reasonable to believe anti-social people on BART causing trouble are fare evaders and a crack down on fare evasion would keep them off the system.
          • epicureanideal 3y ago
            I’ve seen some supposed attempts to crack down on fare evasion but the people doing the enforcement seem to be intentionally misapplying it to say, old folks and working professionals who have only $2 on their clipper card and who are likely going to refill it when they arrive at their destination (which used to be totally normal), hitting them with $75 citations. Meanwhile the homeless and mentally unstable remain..
  • newshackr 3y ago
    Usually it is possible to invest with this when you know there will be population and therefore revenue growth.
  • farzinadil 3y ago
    The public transit needs more ridership. Hasn't recovered as well as other cities from pre-2020 and is very low currently. Ridership would increase with transit oriented development (TOD). A lot of good opportunities for TOD around BART and Caltrain stations.
  • xnx 3y ago
    SF is getting the most modern public transportation system in the world via Waymo and (kind of) Cruise.
    • woodruffw 3y ago
      Taxis are not a sustainable public transportation system; they're supplemental, at best.
      • jeffbee 3y ago
        On the other hand a self-driving bus route that comes much more frequently than any existing Muni line would be nice and cuts down on the main cost, which is operator labor.
        • woodruffw 3y ago
          I can't claim to understand Muni's problems, but it occurs to me that an train is a much simpler problem (technically speaking) to solve than a self-driving bus. The former doesn't have to flow in and out of unstructured traffic, has only one degree of freedom, has well-deployed reference systems, etc. Maybe one day we'll have fully automated buses without any operators at all, but for the time being my understanding is that even self-driving cars still need a tender. The kind of bus volume (and corresponding idle drivers) you'd need to make up for a train's worth of commuters probably takes a heavy cut into any operator labor savings.
          • xnx 3y ago
            Waymo does have a support team, but it is not 1:1 with its vehicles. Trains a transportation system from a different era when there were peak commute times. They run at a fraction of their capacity now.
            • woodruffw 3y ago
              The trains seem busy enough here in NYC (too busy: they need to run more of them). I'm not aware of a city on Earth that's been able to obtain the kind of simultaneous density and livability that places like NYC have without mass transit. Comparatively dense cities without mass transit (like Manila) are choked in traffic; changing that traffic to electric traffic will make the air cleaner (good!) but will not address the latter problem.
  • chrischen 3y ago
    SF public transit is actually decent. It was just a little pricey especially if you had to combine BART with Muni. And some people had a bad view of it as dangerous.
  • jltsiren 3y ago
    New housing is pretty much the only valid reason to build public transit. Good transit is expensive. The people who already live in the area are not willing to pay enough to justify the investment. They have already figured out their lives without the transit. If you want transit, you have to build it primarily for new residents. And the costs should be covered by increased land value, usually either by taxing the land, selling it, or developing it. Trying to cover investment costs with fares just destroys the value of the investment.
• farzinadil 3y ago
  The population would absolutely be higher and the economy would be better. More startups and more people willing to work for startups since housing costs are less of a burden.
  • ryukoposting 3y ago
    Ask any startup worker from a mid-size midwestern city why this doesn't work in practice. Reputation matters. Stereotypes matter.
    • woodruffw 3y ago
      > Reputation matters. Stereotypes matter. This is very oblique. What do you mean?
      • ryukoposting 3y ago
        I'm saying that 9/10 startups in Chicago could move 70 miles north to Milwaukee, pay less in taxes, offer their employees a shorter commute and a more favorable housing market, and position themselves in the "internship sphere" of three Big 10 universities instead of two, but they don't. The reasons for that trace back to the basic fact that there are fewer people in Milwaukee, fewer people who have been there, and thus, fewer people willing to move there sight unseen. Not to mention the perception of status that comes with the California tech valleys. I use Milwaukee as an example, but the same logic applies to Detroit and Minneapolis, among others.
        • woodruffw 3y ago
          Thank you, that's much clearer!
        • farzinadil 3y ago
          There are benefits from economies of agglomeration that are lost when relocating to distant areas for affordability which is the main reason the midwest or other parts of the country haven't been able to scale up startup economies. If everyone (founders, investors, employees, customers, vendors, etc.) are in one area, it facilitates better collaborations and also increases chances of random collisions. Employers get wider pool of talent; employees get greater options of employers that they can bounce around without having to relocate. Edit (meant to add): I believe these factors explain this better than simply reputation or prestige.
• 7speter 3y ago
  Theres a NYC nonprofit named Picture The Homeless that contends that if all the boarded up apartment buildings that have open storefronts on the first floor were lawfully required to open their stock to renters, rent in NYC could go down significantly just because of the sheer number of these apartments that are excluded from the market, to the point that there would be significantly less need to build new housing units.
  • tutorialmanager 3y ago
    Why are so many units empty? The conventional wisdom is that being a residential landlord in NYC can be a nightmare. Can that really be the reason?
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    Increasing utilization requires a massive effort and cannot solve the crisis. Vacancy rates are currently at all-time lows. NYC's vacancy rate is the lowest in the nation, and the lowest ever measured in that city. To intuitively understand why increasing occupancy from. 97% to 98% is difficult, try filling your refrigerator to 97% by volume and then try putting one more thing in there. Counterintuitively the way to attack the housing crisis is to increase vacancy. 10% is a robust vacancy rate that allows the market to function. New buildings are vacant by nature, so building new buildings until the vacancy rate hits 10% is the way to go. The market will clear, rents will decline, developers will make reasonable profits for providing a needed service and landlords will get kicked in the teeth, which is right and proper.
• el_benhameen 3y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised (though I could be wrong!) if more housing stock and a larger population in SF/the bay proper would mean a commensurate decrease in the population in the suburbs and exurbs. There are a lot of lower wage workers who now commute from Stockton/Pittsburg/the Sacramento area who I’m sure would prefer to be closer to their jobs.
  • WillPostForFood 3y ago
    Counter example - the suburbs around NYC have not suffered population loss to Manhattan. Though unlike the bay area, there is an extensive public transport system to get people into the city.
• xwolfi 3y ago
  But let's assume the whole thing is a money blackbox, you must realize you cannot output that much good from the little change "build build build" without inputting something. This something, the tax rate increase, or any other way to finance this whole operation like an increase in loan risk by large builders, would probably be phenomenal enough to make it completely off putting to most workers. People are not rational long term altruist thinkers: they want the best deal possible, and it's not to make SF more affordable in 30 years by over financing house construction today before they finally die of proud exhaustion like "I contributed to cheap rents for my descendants". I prefer natural selection: you talked of Paris, the city is half stable now. It's always been the hyper center of France, we've always had higher inflow than outflow, prices have raised slowly every year since 1800 at a higher pace than wages, and now it's going down. We're developing stuff elsewhere, not only the outskirt but other part of France entirely that people would dream to move to after a stay in Paris. The alternative you propose is to build the city I live in now: Hong Kong. Here, since we can't escape anywhere, all we can do is build build build. Our long inflow of desperate Chinese has made construction efficient, fast and cheap enough. Price are more commensurate with wages than Paris, even if they can appear absurd to the poor people in America. But, do you want to live like me in a small 2-room flat on the 44th floor of a giant tower surrounded by other towers ? That's the future you propose, eventually. Lots of homes in the single most important city, the dream ! I like the alternative: to just jump elsewhere and start over. Let the people starve due to mortgages in California and build a new hub in Ohio or whatever, they'll figure it out eventually.
  • gnopgnip 3y ago
    The economy is not a zero sum black box. With a better allocation of resources, (the density of paris in the most desirable areas) it can actually result in lower taxes, shorter commutes, etc.
    • xwolfi 3y ago
      But why oh why does everything need to be in Paris ? We're not retards in Lyon, Rouen or Bordeau. Even Marseille can handle some stuff. See the point ? Why waste to hyper densify one crappy city/area when we could spread development keeping low density ? Or maybe I guess I mean: low density provide more benefit to more people than hyper density, the only future proposed by OP, will ever compensate due to "low rent" (which will explode once there's not one single meter square free left), because once you chose SF as the only IT hub that ever will be and commit for 25 years of future development, then no IT worker will ever think of any other city and will move there faster than you're building anyway. Just like Paris for French people: the only place I wanted to go after Uni was there, because that's the only place with interesting/important/paid jobs: isn't THIS the issue ?
• rr808 3y ago
  I live in NY metro and my 2 bed apartment has $2k/mo city tax. As cities get denser costs get more expensive. I replaced my HVAC, hot water heater and rebuilt a bathroom and it cost me the same price I could buy a whole detached house in Chicago. Urban sprawl Houston style is the only way to keep costs low as you suggest, and I wouldn't want to live there.
  • dublinben 3y ago
    New York has been getting less dense though, which is the point of TFA. As demand has outstripped supply, prices of real estate and everything consequent to that (labor, professional services, retail goods, transportation etc.) will increase in price as well. "Costs" in Houston don't look so much better than NYC when you add the significantly higher transportation expenses to their lower rents. Also, local salaries are a third less, so you have that much less money for everything.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    As you pointed out houses are cheap in Chicago and the north side is quite dense, comparable to most of Brooklyn.
• mushbino 3y ago
  Of all the cities that have been rapidly expanding housing, the zero of them have become more affordable. I used to think market rate housing would bring down prices but it has proven to not. What we need are affordable housing units, price caps, rent as percentage of income, rent control, and things along those lines. Singapore and Vienna have done a good job but 70% of all housing in Vienna is government owned and 80% of all housing in Singapore was built by the government.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Cities that rapidly expand housing are much, much cheaper than cities that don't. Houston vs Austin, Chicago vs. new york, phoenix vs LA. Yes all metros are getting more expensive, that's because there are no cities in this country that are building faster than people are arriving.
• thunky 3y ago
  I disagree with the entire premise here. Forget about the housing market, take a step back for a second and try to rationalize the idea of cramming millions of people into a small area to work on their computers together? I don't think so. Computers didn't exist when Manhattan grew, there were natural reasons for people to cluster together and live on top of eachother. Now, not so much.