6 ms·

Shaken by the latest digital gold rush, San Francisco struggles for its soul.

31 points by smharris65 14y ago

surrealize 14y ago
Grrrr. Existing SF residents are facing an influx of newcomers, who are pushing out (pricing out) some existing residents. And somehow, it never occurs to them to just make room for more people, so that existing residents don't get pushed out. SF has plenty of opportunities to build upward, but as long as SF insists on being anti-development and anti-height, the housing supply problem is going to continue.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  Why is SF (I assume you mean local government?) anti-height? Are there downsides to building upwards (environmental? taxation?) or is it just a refusal to allow the landscape to change?
  - prostoalex 14y ago
    http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-world-capital-first-it-needs-to-get-over-itself/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-... "f you look at San Francisco’s zoning map, you’ll see height and density restrictions everywhere. There are also citywide building caps — restrictions on the number of new buildings that can be started every year. And finally there are labyrinthine regulatory procedures. Here, for your amusement, is a flowchart put together by the San Francisco Planning Department that outlines the steps a developer needs to go through to obtain a building permit. Despite the department’s use of Comic Sans, this is not meant to be a joke."
  - charonn0 14y ago
    After a building boom in the 70s-80s the city passed anti-Manhattanization laws.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanization
    - jstalin 14y ago
      So the government passes laws to limit housing stock, then passes laws to artificially keep rent low, then people complain about prices going up and a lack of housing stock? Has anyone in SF read an Economics 101 textbook?
      - mc32 14y ago
        I'm sure they understand that, but they understand 'elections' and their constituencies even better. Allowing building upwards would be seen as 'pandering' to 'special interests' by lots of locals --specially people who like to call themselves Xth-generation Franciscan. SF is always about the short-term but made to look long-term so as to seem forward looking and progressive. The only thing SF is progressive about two things, sex, and some minority causes (both of which are good things but hardly encompassing of the term 'progressive'.)
  - viscanti 14y ago
    SoMa is the only neighborhood with any 20+ story residential buildings going up. It's hard to say why so many of the other neighborhoods are against building up. The geography of SF lends to some beautiful views from atop the hills. Residents living on those hills are unlikely to welcome tall buildings to crop up and block their view. SoMa probably ends up being the big-city, tall building part of SF in the future. It would take a big mind-set change for many other neighborhoods to build up anytime soon.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    It's fairly common European cities to be anti-height in the city center for reasons that seem somewhat similar to SF's, though seems less common elsewhere. Some of it is a reaction (sometimes overreaction) to tall modernist housing blocks which nobody really liked. That and other things led to a preference for "human-scale" 5-7-story mid-rises. Another factor is a desire for light to be able to hit streets and parks in the "common areas" in the city center. A common compromise is to have a mid-rise historical center, but high-rises a bit outside of it, connected to good transit, e.g. central Paris banned skyscrapers after the Tour Montparnasse was so badly received, but there are skyscrapers a short distance away in the "new downtown" area of La Défense. An SF version of that might be to keep central SF mid-rise, but allow high-rise towers near the BART/Caltrain stations in Oakland, Daly City, and Burlingame. The Bay Area's problem is that nobody wants the high-rises: putting them in the center or putting them near transit a bit outside the center would both work, but everyone, except to some extent Oakland, is anti-development, so they go nowhere. Heck, Palo Alto won't even allow mid-rise apartments near the Palo Alto Caltrain, so you actually have people "reverse commuting" from SF down to Stanford, because as crazy as living in SF is, trying to live in downtown Palo Alto is even crazier. A few livable, urbanized downtowns on the peninsula might siphon off some of the demand in SF, not solving the problem, but at least reducing it. Other problems that seem like they exacerbate SF's problems: 1) poor intracity transit, e.g. lack of an east-west subway, concentrates demand in a handful of eastern districts; and 2) large areas of the city are not even mid-rise, but full of two-story houses (partly historical, partly anti-development, partly related to #1).
  - onetwothreefour 14y ago
    There are some city blocks in the Financial District where you're perpetually in the dark and are essentially in a wind tunnel due to the tall buildings. It's creepy as hell. :) I presume that's mostly the reason.
- charonn0 14y ago
  How are current residents being priced out? If they rent, then rent increases are limited by law and no-fault evictions are nearly impossible to get honestly. If they own, the no one can force them to move short of the city invoking eminent domain.
  - gwern 14y ago
    Property taxes being set on increasing market values of properties?
  - ryguytilidie 14y ago
    "then rent increases are limited by law" In certain cases, yes, but personally I lived in SOMA in an apartment for 2 years and my rent was going to go from 2k to 3k because Google had asked the building if they could rent some of the units. So I mean, maybe it was illegal and I don't know about it, but I can certainly say I don't live in San Francisco anymore because I was priced out by new incoming tech employees.
    - redthrowaway 14y ago
      I'm assuming you made a thinko there; as written your comment says you were forced to move because living got too inexpensive.
      - ryguytilidie 14y ago
        haha good call, thanks for noticing.
  - surrealize 14y ago
    One of the examples in the article is a couple who have lived in san francisco for a long time, and feel the need to move to a bigger place because they now have kids. But they keep getting outbid on houses.
  - tomsaffell 14y ago
    I agree with your sentiment, but just for completeness, there are a few ways existing residents get 'priced out': 1) the 'assessed value' of owned property (used to calculate property tax) can be raised ~2% per year[a], so over a decade a home owner's property tax may increase ~22% 2) Not all of SF has rent control. Any building constructed after 1979 does not. [b] 3) Not all renters are savvy enough to not get kicked out by greedy landlords, despite the laws protecting them. Apparently landlords often use 'renovations' as a way to do that. Just last week I overheard a conversation in Trader Joes about someone who had fallen pray to that [c] TLDR: money is like water - it will find its way through the cracks to the place it wants to be (the pockets of those with capital). a: http://www.sftreasurer.org/index.aspx?page=66 http://www.sftreasurer.org/index.aspx?page=66 b: http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html c: time travel to TJ's on 8th, ~8.30am last Sunday.
- gnosis 14y ago
  From what I understand, efforts in other cities to build upwards to house poor people have been a failure. That strategy results in large populations where poverty is highly concentrated. This leads to those areas becoming breeding grounds for crime and hopelessness. Over and over again in the US, large scale projects have exhibited this pattern of failure. That's not to say that building affordable housing shouldn't be a priority. Indeed it should. But it might make more sense to build lots of small scale housing, with a focus on building viable community spaces rather than large scale ghettoes. Also, rent control should be more widespread, instead of relentlessly fought against. This way, the housing that's created will have a chance to remain affordable, instead of constantly being at risk of gentrification.
  - greggman 14y ago
    The op said nothing of poor people. There are plenty of cities in the world that have built up without becoming ghettos. Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York to name a few. High rise housing != ghetto
    - gnosis 14y ago
      The gentrification that's happening in SF and that's described in the original article is happening because the rich are pushing out the original residents -- who were indeed poor. From the article: Again and again, you hear of teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, artists, hotel and restaurant workers, and others with no stake in the new digital gold rush being squeezed out of the city. ... Bernal Heights in those years was a glorious urban mix of deeply rooted blue-collar families, underground artists, radical activists, and lesbian settlers In general, the people described above would be considered poor. As for high rise apartments not necessarily being ghettoes. That's obviously true. High priced apartment complexes and skyscrapers housing businesses are what constitute much of the "building up" in the cities you mention. It's only when building up is combined with low-cost housing that problems begin. But building up isn't the problem per se, but rather it's the high concentration of poverty that such projects encourage.
      - 14y ago
- jseliger 14y ago
  >SF has plenty of opportunities to build upward, but as long as SF insists on being anti-development and anti-height, the housing supply problem is going to continue. Bingo. This: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/facebook_george_lucas_and_nimbyism_the_idiotic_rules_preventing_silicon_valley_from_building_the_houses_and_offices_we_need_to_power_american_innovation_.html/ http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... is good further reading if you're interested in the issue. I think we've now gotten to such an absurd place in coastal city building markets that more people are interested in learning about the fundamental forces at work. Matt Yglesias, who wrote the linked article above, is fond of pointing out that we can use complex, advanced technologies like elevators and steel to greatly ameliorate housing affordability problems.
zinssmeister 14y ago
blaming the "rich" techies for the over priced rental market in SF and the rest of the Bay Area is terrible. The real reason rent is sky high in my opinion is because SF is acting like a small city when it's not. Real estate development is pretty much kept flat. Yes they are adding units but if you look at the expected growth, we will stay flat at best. This results in bidding wars for rentals and real estate purchases, because frankly there isn't enough for everyone. Builders would like to buy up more space and crank out energy efficient/modern housing, but no sir, no permit for you.
- ryguytilidie 14y ago
  I can tell you that my SOMA apartment's rent went up 1k because Google wanted to rent some units in it. This pushed me out of San Francisco. I don't think most of these Embarcadero/SOMA startups are interested in high rises in the Sunset or in West Portal, they want high rises in SOMA, which is where they're being built.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    How does this change the fact that if you allow more high rises in SoMa, you can accommodate both the existing tenants and the new techies moving in, all without raising rents?
    - bennyg 14y ago
      The landlords can see more money, so they're likely trying to maximize profits.
      - w1ntermute 14y ago
        Do you know how supply and demand works? Profit maximization occurs within the context of supply and demand. Please study some basic economics before commenting further.
        ryguytilidie 14y ago
sakopov 14y ago
I was recently contemplating moving to the bay area from Midwest. Then a few months ago i shared a hostel room in Edinburgh with a guy from Portland. When we got to talking he told me that he is originally from San Francisco but decided to ran away to Portland to escape nearly insane cost of living. I don't know how much of this is true but he was telling me that some dingy studio apartments have 10-15 people in line to sign contract. Landlords are reluctant to negotiate mainly because the next person in line is a Googler who will pay $1000/month above the asking price without thinking twice. A couple of months later, an acquaintance of mine got a gig as a software engineer at Apple. When i got in touch with him, he told me that he's dishing out $5K/month to pay rent for the house his family lives in. My jaw dropped.
- prostoalex 14y ago
  Is your friend renting in Cupertino? That place has some other dynamics, such as excellent school district, so families compete price-wise to get there.
- greggman 14y ago
  I can verify that most apartments have a line. I visited one a half hour after there open house started. The realtor at the entrance said they already had 20 applications and 7 deposit checks so they didn't need mine but that I could look at the apartment if I wanted. It wasn't a good apartment IMO. 14th and Dolores That said, people do manage to find apartments. But yes, they are over priced. You can live in SF without a car so I suppose compared to most cities you could add the cost of a car minus the cost of public transportation to your rent.
- benkay 14y ago
  My "family" of roommates pays $1625 for a 1,408 ft2 3-br (from the 1880s) in Goose Hollow, one of the residential neighborhoods in downtown Portland. Gas can runs as high as ~150/mo in the winter, but that's not a bad deal for being able to: - chain bikes to the front porch without fear of theft (indefinitely). - leave our back door unlocked every day, and the front door most as well. - walk to some of the best coffee shops in the best coffee town in America (Public Domain, for instance). - walk to Powell's. - walk to network with ANY tech company in the downtown area. - eat amazing food for at most (95th percentile) 20 bucks/entree. - order fancy cocktails for ~9/ea. - order amazing beers for 4.50/pt. (max). - meet brilliant people (MBar's a good place to start). - breathe clean air. - not have to live in samey-samey suburban hell. - surround yourself with nature, wander through the nation's largest in-city park and visit natural wonders like the Columbia Gorge and Mt. Hood. The benefits are not completely enumerable online. Build your dream life here!
benkay 14y ago
Move to Portland, friends! CoL-wise, you can't beat our home on the price/quality curve. For those hiring, the your odds are better up here (but as they say in engineering school, the goods can be odd...). For those seeking work, your options are similarly good (but not as good as the beer...).
brendanib 14y ago
By far the funniest part of this is the image points "non-tech workers" straight towards SOMA: http://www.modernluxury.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/story-photo-with-inset-main/story/freeway2.png http://www.modernluxury.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/s... Geography fail.
- joeblau 14y ago
  That is pretty funny and ironic!
joeblau 14y ago
A little over a year ago, I moved out to San Francisco from D.C. because I knew this was the hotbed of innovation and start-ups. Before moving here, I had no prior knowledge of any of the culture or neighborhoods (beyond a little about the Mission) but after being a resident of this city for a little over a year I love it. The people I've met since I've been here are some of the smartest people I've associated with; the food is better than any city I've lived in, the people are friendly, and I feel like I can have intellectual discussions with like minded people that understand my passions. One thing I do struggle with is making this a permanent home. I feel like right now, people are coming here (as I did) because frankly, this is where the money is. Even Y-Combinator advertises that if they invest in your company; They want you to move here and encourage you to stay here. > If we invest in you, your group is expected to move to the Bay Area for January through March 2013. (You can of course leave afterward if you want, but it's a good place for a startup to be.) I'm curious to see what happens when/if the bubble pops. Will people stay or will they go back home? For people that have been here 15+ years, could you shed some insight into what happend in between 1999 and 2003 as the last influx of innovation left the area? I feel like those were the years when giants such as Apple, Yahoo, Google, Sales Force, and Mozilla were essentially minted.
mahyarm 14y ago
Does San Mateo county (home of daly city, san bruno, south SF, milbrae, colma, etc) have such development restrictions too?
- mc32 14y ago
  They have similar mechanisms in place, but this is more understandable because SM is composed mostly of small cities (under 100k inh), so any new development must take into account traffic impact and offer some way to mitigate that or in some way address the foreseen impact. In addition, each municipality (town, whatever) has relics of 1950s height restrictions reflective of their town sizes. It does not help that back in the planning phases of BaRT, San Mateo co. in the late 1950s, opted out of the system. Now they are plagued by a mediocre public transit system and they're in a catch-22. They don't have the density to sustain a working public transit system, so one does not get built and they don't allow higher densities due to the adverse effects on traffic. Eventually BaRT will reach San Jose, via the East Bay.... the idiocy. I think if SJ plays its cards right, it could take away the clout back from SF. Back in the 80-90s (the hardware days) SJ (the 237 triangle) was more or less the 'capital' of SV (as the peninsula was more amorphous and one could not annoint P.A. or Sunnyvale the capital of SV, for example)
jacques_chester 14y ago
This just in: economics applies to San Francisco. If demand rises faster than supply, prices go up. Demand is rising fast. Supply is being held down. Prices go up. I come from Darwin, a wonderful little city clinging to the northern edge of the Australian continent. About 10 years ago a confluence of factors (expanded Defence presence and the early stirrings of the resources boom) meant that property prices took off. At the same time, the hyper-local nature of politics in that part of the country (each member of parliament in the state-level government represents about 2500-3000 voters) means that infill doesn't happen because the margin of victory is easily less than two or three streets getting angry at you for authorising a new block of flats. So: demand shot up, supply did not. Unsurprisingly, Darwin is now one of the most expensive places in Australia to live. If you can find an unoccupied flat, good luck renting a nice one for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income. And good luck finding a house for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income. Supply and demand. It's the same everywhere for everyone. There are no exceptions. If SF wants to keep its middle class, it needs to make more housing available. Especially high density housing for the wealthy, not the poor. Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power. Every rich person who moves into a $2 million dollar apartment is a rich person who isn't bidding the price of an older building up and driving out the middle class, who in turn will drive out the poor. Another dumb policy: giving money for deposits or loans. It just drives up effective demand. Every seller knows you can get the $X thousand dollars and then, surprise, surprise! The price of every house just rose but ~$X thousand dollars. Everything that gets given to the middle and poorer classes to subsidise housing is in fact a wealth transfer to the landlords, via good old-fashioned populist policy making.
- _delirium 14y ago
  > Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power. Are there studies on this bit playing out in practice? My impression so far, mostly looking at Manhattan redevelopment, is that building high-end condos typically does not reduce prices for other buildings in the area, but rather raises them: the presence of new high-end housing increases demand in the immediate vicinity by more than the new building's own supply provides, assuming the area (like Manhattan or SF) is rather desirable in general terms to begin with. That may be good if you want to raise the housing values in an area (each building provides a multiplier effect that raises the prices of neighboring ones, making the whole area more desirable). But probably not good if you want to lower the prices. Good statistics either way would be interesting, though: are there cases where opening new high-end housing actually lowered the other prices in an expensive urban area? E.g. when new condo towers open in Manhattan, does it produce an observable downward move in prices? (The main point I'm getting at is that demand and supply aren't independent variables: demand for living in an area depends quite strongly on the housing stock in that area, so building more housing stock affects both supply and demand, in possibly complex ways, which need empirical data to tease out.)
iamwil 14y ago
I don't know. How does New York deal with people in finance and artists in the same place? Do all the artists just live in Brooklyn now, instead of Manhattan?
- subsystem 14y ago
  Yes, more or less. But there has been a number of areas getting gentrified before it. Meatpacking district, Lower East Side, Williamsburg. At least that's what I've heard, someone from NY could probably tell you if this story hadn't been flagged to death.
owyn 14y ago
Ugh. This city does have some bad housing shortages right now, but this kind of whiny name-dropping i-was-here-first essay doesn't help. Neither does this epic rant I am about to write, but I'm going to do it anyway... My favorite quote so far: "If San Francisco is swallowed whole by the digital elite, many city lovers fear, the once-lush urban landscape will become as flat as a computer screen." Lush urban landscape eh? Is that from all the feces on the sidewalks? Who are these city lovers? Are they the same NIMBY types who are trying to prevent any kind of night club or live music scene from being established in the city (google the "War on Fun" for fun). Well, that nameless person made up by the author is boring and terrible and they should probably move out to the suburbs to make room for someone who actually enjoys what this city has to offer now instead of what it was back when you couldn't take your kids to the park, a story which you told us yourself! "When I moved to this neighborhood in 1993, just before the first dot-com boom, I avoided taking my two toddlers to the playground across the street from the café, because local gangs sometimes stashed their guns in the sand." Yeah... soo.... that's bad, right? I didn't live here back then but I visited frequently and it was awful! Your fake nostalgia for the grittiness of urban life can go burn in a fire made from hobo shit. Another stupid quote: "The unique urban features that have made San Francisco so appealing to a new generation of digital workers—its artistic ferment, its social diversity, its trailblazing progressive consciousness—are deteriorating, driven out of the city by the tech boom itself, and the rising real estate prices that go with it." Wait, aren't techie types usually considered to be sort of trailblazing and progressive and friendly to the arts? What the hell are you talking about dude? Okay, rents have gone up in my building by 50% in the last 2 years. It's bad. The building, that is. It's basically been a slum apartment for a hundred years and 3 families do live upstairs from me in one unit. I WISH they'd move out, because I can hear everything that goes on up there. Ugh. We have new employees who are trying to move to the city and there aren't any good options, most of them have ended up in Emeryville or Oakland. I certainly wouldn't recommend my own building. I only stay here because the rent is cheap because I moved here before this current boom. So here I am taking advantage of the very upside-down rental market that's contributing to the whole problem! I don't know what the long term fix is besides building a LOT more new buildings, which seems to be happening... But it's only happening because rents are high enough to justify new construction, which is good for non-tech jobs and city property tax revenue in the long term, right? Would you rather have a bunch of fenced off city blocks with nothing but empty holes in the ground on market street? There's a new Draft House Cinema moving into a theater that's been empty for like 20 years two blocks away from McSweeny's. You don't think that's awesome? Eventually this mini-boom will end and that's going to suck WORSE than what's going on now. Oh man, it's going to suck. Maybe rents will go down then, but only if a lot of people lose jobs and move away. That's not good is it? In fact, that's a worst case scenario for the city. The cafe you were sitting in when you wrote that article will probably go out of business too. Is that what you'd prefer? Maybe one of those techies who moves to SF this year will invent an alternate fuel generator that runs off baby boomer hand wringing and then we'll all be amazed when you single handedly save the city. Still, until recently there were dozens of empty city blocks that had no development at all on them. Many stalled projects are in progress now, and it is all going to be high priced brand new luxury stuff. 3 new buildings have been built within a block of my current location in the Mission just in the last year. Sure, they're small and overpriced, and maybe only rich techie types can afford them but I'm FINE with that. When the people who can afford it move in to those places, they'll free up space in the dumps they moved out of and things will probably equalize in a couple of years, and that's probably the best case scenario.
wglb 14y ago
When I moved to this neighborhood in 1993 But isn't this how it always is? You form one idea of how the locale is and if it improves a bit but keeps going, you want to somehow freeze it at your favorite time. Travis McGee, in fact, many years ago, lamented something like this about San Francisco " . . . she now sells what she used to give away . . .". Florida too, if I am not mistaken. (Travis McGee is a fictional character, by the way). My Oregon friends say it is wonderful there, but we don't want any more folk to move here.

31 points by smharris65 14y ago

Grrrr. Existing SF residents are facing an influx of newcomers, who are pushing out (pricing out) some existing residents. And somehow, it never occurs to them to just make room for more people, so that existing residents don't get pushed out. SF has plenty of opportunities to build upward, but as long as SF insists on being anti-development and anti-height, the housing supply problem is going to continue.

citricsquid 14y ago
Why is SF (I assume you mean local government?) anti-height? Are there downsides to building upwards (environmental? taxation?) or is it just a refusal to allow the landscape to change?
- prostoalex 14y ago
  http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-world-capital-first-it-needs-to-get-over-itself/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-... "f you look at San Francisco’s zoning map, you’ll see height and density restrictions everywhere. There are also citywide building caps — restrictions on the number of new buildings that can be started every year. And finally there are labyrinthine regulatory procedures. Here, for your amusement, is a flowchart put together by the San Francisco Planning Department that outlines the steps a developer needs to go through to obtain a building permit. Despite the department’s use of Comic Sans, this is not meant to be a joke."
- charonn0 14y ago
  After a building boom in the 70s-80s the city passed anti-Manhattanization laws.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanization
  - jstalin 14y ago
    So the government passes laws to limit housing stock, then passes laws to artificially keep rent low, then people complain about prices going up and a lack of housing stock? Has anyone in SF read an Economics 101 textbook?
    - mc32 14y ago
      I'm sure they understand that, but they understand 'elections' and their constituencies even better. Allowing building upwards would be seen as 'pandering' to 'special interests' by lots of locals --specially people who like to call themselves Xth-generation Franciscan. SF is always about the short-term but made to look long-term so as to seem forward looking and progressive. The only thing SF is progressive about two things, sex, and some minority causes (both of which are good things but hardly encompassing of the term 'progressive'.)
- viscanti 14y ago
  SoMa is the only neighborhood with any 20+ story residential buildings going up. It's hard to say why so many of the other neighborhoods are against building up. The geography of SF lends to some beautiful views from atop the hills. Residents living on those hills are unlikely to welcome tall buildings to crop up and block their view. SoMa probably ends up being the big-city, tall building part of SF in the future. It would take a big mind-set change for many other neighborhoods to build up anytime soon.
- _delirium 14y ago
  It's fairly common European cities to be anti-height in the city center for reasons that seem somewhat similar to SF's, though seems less common elsewhere. Some of it is a reaction (sometimes overreaction) to tall modernist housing blocks which nobody really liked. That and other things led to a preference for "human-scale" 5-7-story mid-rises. Another factor is a desire for light to be able to hit streets and parks in the "common areas" in the city center. A common compromise is to have a mid-rise historical center, but high-rises a bit outside of it, connected to good transit, e.g. central Paris banned skyscrapers after the Tour Montparnasse was so badly received, but there are skyscrapers a short distance away in the "new downtown" area of La Défense. An SF version of that might be to keep central SF mid-rise, but allow high-rise towers near the BART/Caltrain stations in Oakland, Daly City, and Burlingame. The Bay Area's problem is that nobody wants the high-rises: putting them in the center or putting them near transit a bit outside the center would both work, but everyone, except to some extent Oakland, is anti-development, so they go nowhere. Heck, Palo Alto won't even allow mid-rise apartments near the Palo Alto Caltrain, so you actually have people "reverse commuting" from SF down to Stanford, because as crazy as living in SF is, trying to live in downtown Palo Alto is even crazier. A few livable, urbanized downtowns on the peninsula might siphon off some of the demand in SF, not solving the problem, but at least reducing it. Other problems that seem like they exacerbate SF's problems: 1) poor intracity transit, e.g. lack of an east-west subway, concentrates demand in a handful of eastern districts; and 2) large areas of the city are not even mid-rise, but full of two-story houses (partly historical, partly anti-development, partly related to #1).
- onetwothreefour 14y ago
  There are some city blocks in the Financial District where you're perpetually in the dark and are essentially in a wind tunnel due to the tall buildings. It's creepy as hell. :) I presume that's mostly the reason.
charonn0 14y ago
How are current residents being priced out? If they rent, then rent increases are limited by law and no-fault evictions are nearly impossible to get honestly. If they own, the no one can force them to move short of the city invoking eminent domain.
- gwern 14y ago
  Property taxes being set on increasing market values of properties?
- ryguytilidie 14y ago
  "then rent increases are limited by law" In certain cases, yes, but personally I lived in SOMA in an apartment for 2 years and my rent was going to go from 2k to 3k because Google had asked the building if they could rent some of the units. So I mean, maybe it was illegal and I don't know about it, but I can certainly say I don't live in San Francisco anymore because I was priced out by new incoming tech employees.
  - redthrowaway 14y ago
    I'm assuming you made a thinko there; as written your comment says you were forced to move because living got too inexpensive.
    - ryguytilidie 14y ago
      haha good call, thanks for noticing.
- surrealize 14y ago
  One of the examples in the article is a couple who have lived in san francisco for a long time, and feel the need to move to a bigger place because they now have kids. But they keep getting outbid on houses.
- tomsaffell 14y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, but just for completeness, there are a few ways existing residents get 'priced out': 1) the 'assessed value' of owned property (used to calculate property tax) can be raised ~2% per year[a], so over a decade a home owner's property tax may increase ~22% 2) Not all of SF has rent control. Any building constructed after 1979 does not. [b] 3) Not all renters are savvy enough to not get kicked out by greedy landlords, despite the laws protecting them. Apparently landlords often use 'renovations' as a way to do that. Just last week I overheard a conversation in Trader Joes about someone who had fallen pray to that [c] TLDR: money is like water - it will find its way through the cracks to the place it wants to be (the pockets of those with capital). a: http://www.sftreasurer.org/index.aspx?page=66 http://www.sftreasurer.org/index.aspx?page=66 b: http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html c: time travel to TJ's on 8th, ~8.30am last Sunday.
gnosis 14y ago
From what I understand, efforts in other cities to build upwards to house poor people have been a failure. That strategy results in large populations where poverty is highly concentrated. This leads to those areas becoming breeding grounds for crime and hopelessness. Over and over again in the US, large scale projects have exhibited this pattern of failure. That's not to say that building affordable housing shouldn't be a priority. Indeed it should. But it might make more sense to build lots of small scale housing, with a focus on building viable community spaces rather than large scale ghettoes. Also, rent control should be more widespread, instead of relentlessly fought against. This way, the housing that's created will have a chance to remain affordable, instead of constantly being at risk of gentrification.
- greggman 14y ago
  The op said nothing of poor people. There are plenty of cities in the world that have built up without becoming ghettos. Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York to name a few. High rise housing != ghetto
  - gnosis 14y ago
    The gentrification that's happening in SF and that's described in the original article is happening because the rich are pushing out the original residents -- who were indeed poor. From the article: Again and again, you hear of teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, artists, hotel and restaurant workers, and others with no stake in the new digital gold rush being squeezed out of the city. ... Bernal Heights in those years was a glorious urban mix of deeply rooted blue-collar families, underground artists, radical activists, and lesbian settlers In general, the people described above would be considered poor. As for high rise apartments not necessarily being ghettoes. That's obviously true. High priced apartment complexes and skyscrapers housing businesses are what constitute much of the "building up" in the cities you mention. It's only when building up is combined with low-cost housing that problems begin. But building up isn't the problem per se, but rather it's the high concentration of poverty that such projects encourage.
    - 14y ago
jseliger 14y ago
>SF has plenty of opportunities to build upward, but as long as SF insists on being anti-development and anti-height, the housing supply problem is going to continue. Bingo. This: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/facebook_george_lucas_and_nimbyism_the_idiotic_rules_preventing_silicon_valley_from_building_the_houses_and_offices_we_need_to_power_american_innovation_.html/ http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... is good further reading if you're interested in the issue. I think we've now gotten to such an absurd place in coastal city building markets that more people are interested in learning about the fundamental forces at work. Matt Yglesias, who wrote the linked article above, is fond of pointing out that we can use complex, advanced technologies like elevators and steel to greatly ameliorate housing affordability problems.

zinssmeister 14y ago

blaming the "rich" techies for the over priced rental market in SF and the rest of the Bay Area is terrible. The real reason rent is sky high in my opinion is because SF is acting like a small city when it's not. Real estate development is pretty much kept flat. Yes they are adding units but if you look at the expected growth, we will stay flat at best. This results in bidding wars for rentals and real estate purchases, because frankly there isn't enough for everyone. Builders would like to buy up more space and crank out energy efficient/modern housing, but no sir, no permit for you.

ryguytilidie 14y ago
I can tell you that my SOMA apartment's rent went up 1k because Google wanted to rent some units in it. This pushed me out of San Francisco. I don't think most of these Embarcadero/SOMA startups are interested in high rises in the Sunset or in West Portal, they want high rises in SOMA, which is where they're being built.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  How does this change the fact that if you allow more high rises in SoMa, you can accommodate both the existing tenants and the new techies moving in, all without raising rents?
  - bennyg 14y ago
    The landlords can see more money, so they're likely trying to maximize profits.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      Do you know how supply and demand works? Profit maximization occurs within the context of supply and demand. Please study some basic economics before commenting further.
      - ryguytilidie 14y ago

sakopov 14y ago

I was recently contemplating moving to the bay area from Midwest. Then a few months ago i shared a hostel room in Edinburgh with a guy from Portland. When we got to talking he told me that he is originally from San Francisco but decided to ran away to Portland to escape nearly insane cost of living. I don't know how much of this is true but he was telling me that some dingy studio apartments have 10-15 people in line to sign contract. Landlords are reluctant to negotiate mainly because the next person in line is a Googler who will pay $1000/month above the asking price without thinking twice. A couple of months later, an acquaintance of mine got a gig as a software engineer at Apple. When i got in touch with him, he told me that he's dishing out $5K/month to pay rent for the house his family lives in. My jaw dropped.

prostoalex 14y ago
Is your friend renting in Cupertino? That place has some other dynamics, such as excellent school district, so families compete price-wise to get there.
greggman 14y ago
I can verify that most apartments have a line. I visited one a half hour after there open house started. The realtor at the entrance said they already had 20 applications and 7 deposit checks so they didn't need mine but that I could look at the apartment if I wanted. It wasn't a good apartment IMO. 14th and Dolores That said, people do manage to find apartments. But yes, they are over priced. You can live in SF without a car so I suppose compared to most cities you could add the cost of a car minus the cost of public transportation to your rent.
benkay 14y ago
My "family" of roommates pays $1625 for a 1,408 ft2 3-br (from the 1880s) in Goose Hollow, one of the residential neighborhoods in downtown Portland. Gas can runs as high as ~150/mo in the winter, but that's not a bad deal for being able to: - chain bikes to the front porch without fear of theft (indefinitely). - leave our back door unlocked every day, and the front door most as well. - walk to some of the best coffee shops in the best coffee town in America (Public Domain, for instance). - walk to Powell's. - walk to network with ANY tech company in the downtown area. - eat amazing food for at most (95th percentile) 20 bucks/entree. - order fancy cocktails for ~9/ea. - order amazing beers for 4.50/pt. (max). - meet brilliant people (MBar's a good place to start). - breathe clean air. - not have to live in samey-samey suburban hell. - surround yourself with nature, wander through the nation's largest in-city park and visit natural wonders like the Columbia Gorge and Mt. Hood. The benefits are not completely enumerable online. Build your dream life here!

benkay 14y ago

Move to Portland, friends! CoL-wise, you can't beat our home on the price/quality curve. For those hiring, the your odds are better up here (but as they say in engineering school, the goods can be odd...). For those seeking work, your options are similarly good (but not as good as the beer...).

brendanib 14y ago

By far the funniest part of this is the image points "non-tech workers" straight towards SOMA: http://www.modernluxury.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/story-photo-with-inset-main/story/freeway2.png http://www.modernluxury.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/s... Geography fail.

joeblau 14y ago
That is pretty funny and ironic!

joeblau 14y ago

A little over a year ago, I moved out to San Francisco from D.C. because I knew this was the hotbed of innovation and start-ups. Before moving here, I had no prior knowledge of any of the culture or neighborhoods (beyond a little about the Mission) but after being a resident of this city for a little over a year I love it. The people I've met since I've been here are some of the smartest people I've associated with; the food is better than any city I've lived in, the people are friendly, and I feel like I can have intellectual discussions with like minded people that understand my passions. One thing I do struggle with is making this a permanent home. I feel like right now, people are coming here (as I did) because frankly, this is where the money is. Even Y-Combinator advertises that if they invest in your company; They want you to move here and encourage you to stay here. > If we invest in you, your group is expected to move to the Bay Area for January through March 2013. (You can of course leave afterward if you want, but it's a good place for a startup to be.) I'm curious to see what happens when/if the bubble pops. Will people stay or will they go back home? For people that have been here 15+ years, could you shed some insight into what happend in between 1999 and 2003 as the last influx of innovation left the area? I feel like those were the years when giants such as Apple, Yahoo, Google, Sales Force, and Mozilla were essentially minted.

mahyarm 14y ago

Does San Mateo county (home of daly city, san bruno, south SF, milbrae, colma, etc) have such development restrictions too?

mc32 14y ago
They have similar mechanisms in place, but this is more understandable because SM is composed mostly of small cities (under 100k inh), so any new development must take into account traffic impact and offer some way to mitigate that or in some way address the foreseen impact. In addition, each municipality (town, whatever) has relics of 1950s height restrictions reflective of their town sizes. It does not help that back in the planning phases of BaRT, San Mateo co. in the late 1950s, opted out of the system. Now they are plagued by a mediocre public transit system and they're in a catch-22. They don't have the density to sustain a working public transit system, so one does not get built and they don't allow higher densities due to the adverse effects on traffic. Eventually BaRT will reach San Jose, via the East Bay.... the idiocy. I think if SJ plays its cards right, it could take away the clout back from SF. Back in the 80-90s (the hardware days) SJ (the 237 triangle) was more or less the 'capital' of SV (as the peninsula was more amorphous and one could not annoint P.A. or Sunnyvale the capital of SV, for example)

jacques_chester 14y ago

This just in: economics applies to San Francisco. If demand rises faster than supply, prices go up. Demand is rising fast. Supply is being held down. Prices go up. I come from Darwin, a wonderful little city clinging to the northern edge of the Australian continent. About 10 years ago a confluence of factors (expanded Defence presence and the early stirrings of the resources boom) meant that property prices took off. At the same time, the hyper-local nature of politics in that part of the country (each member of parliament in the state-level government represents about 2500-3000 voters) means that infill doesn't happen because the margin of victory is easily less than two or three streets getting angry at you for authorising a new block of flats. So: demand shot up, supply did not. Unsurprisingly, Darwin is now one of the most expensive places in Australia to live. If you can find an unoccupied flat, good luck renting a nice one for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income. And good luck finding a house for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income. Supply and demand. It's the same everywhere for everyone. There are no exceptions. If SF wants to keep its middle class, it needs to make more housing available. Especially high density housing for the wealthy, not the poor. Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power. Every rich person who moves into a $2 million dollar apartment is a rich person who isn't bidding the price of an older building up and driving out the middle class, who in turn will drive out the poor. Another dumb policy: giving money for deposits or loans. It just drives up effective demand. Every seller knows you can get the $X thousand dollars and then, surprise, surprise! The price of every house just rose but ~$X thousand dollars. Everything that gets given to the middle and poorer classes to subsidise housing is in fact a wealth transfer to the landlords, via good old-fashioned populist policy making.

_delirium 14y ago
> Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power. Are there studies on this bit playing out in practice? My impression so far, mostly looking at Manhattan redevelopment, is that building high-end condos typically does not reduce prices for other buildings in the area, but rather raises them: the presence of new high-end housing increases demand in the immediate vicinity by more than the new building's own supply provides, assuming the area (like Manhattan or SF) is rather desirable in general terms to begin with. That may be good if you want to raise the housing values in an area (each building provides a multiplier effect that raises the prices of neighboring ones, making the whole area more desirable). But probably not good if you want to lower the prices. Good statistics either way would be interesting, though: are there cases where opening new high-end housing actually lowered the other prices in an expensive urban area? E.g. when new condo towers open in Manhattan, does it produce an observable downward move in prices? (The main point I'm getting at is that demand and supply aren't independent variables: demand for living in an area depends quite strongly on the housing stock in that area, so building more housing stock affects both supply and demand, in possibly complex ways, which need empirical data to tease out.)

iamwil 14y ago

I don't know. How does New York deal with people in finance and artists in the same place? Do all the artists just live in Brooklyn now, instead of Manhattan?

subsystem 14y ago
Yes, more or less. But there has been a number of areas getting gentrified before it. Meatpacking district, Lower East Side, Williamsburg. At least that's what I've heard, someone from NY could probably tell you if this story hadn't been flagged to death.

owyn 14y ago

Ugh. This city does have some bad housing shortages right now, but this kind of whiny name-dropping i-was-here-first essay doesn't help. Neither does this epic rant I am about to write, but I'm going to do it anyway... My favorite quote so far: "If San Francisco is swallowed whole by the digital elite, many city lovers fear, the once-lush urban landscape will become as flat as a computer screen." Lush urban landscape eh? Is that from all the feces on the sidewalks? Who are these city lovers? Are they the same NIMBY types who are trying to prevent any kind of night club or live music scene from being established in the city (google the "War on Fun" for fun). Well, that nameless person made up by the author is boring and terrible and they should probably move out to the suburbs to make room for someone who actually enjoys what this city has to offer now instead of what it was back when you couldn't take your kids to the park, a story which you told us yourself! "When I moved to this neighborhood in 1993, just before the first dot-com boom, I avoided taking my two toddlers to the playground across the street from the café, because local gangs sometimes stashed their guns in the sand." Yeah... soo.... that's bad, right? I didn't live here back then but I visited frequently and it was awful! Your fake nostalgia for the grittiness of urban life can go burn in a fire made from hobo shit. Another stupid quote: "The unique urban features that have made San Francisco so appealing to a new generation of digital workers—its artistic ferment, its social diversity, its trailblazing progressive consciousness—are deteriorating, driven out of the city by the tech boom itself, and the rising real estate prices that go with it." Wait, aren't techie types usually considered to be sort of trailblazing and progressive and friendly to the arts? What the hell are you talking about dude? Okay, rents have gone up in my building by 50% in the last 2 years. It's bad. The building, that is. It's basically been a slum apartment for a hundred years and 3 families do live upstairs from me in one unit. I WISH they'd move out, because I can hear everything that goes on up there. Ugh. We have new employees who are trying to move to the city and there aren't any good options, most of them have ended up in Emeryville or Oakland. I certainly wouldn't recommend my own building. I only stay here because the rent is cheap because I moved here before this current boom. So here I am taking advantage of the very upside-down rental market that's contributing to the whole problem! I don't know what the long term fix is besides building a LOT more new buildings, which seems to be happening... But it's only happening because rents are high enough to justify new construction, which is good for non-tech jobs and city property tax revenue in the long term, right? Would you rather have a bunch of fenced off city blocks with nothing but empty holes in the ground on market street? There's a new Draft House Cinema moving into a theater that's been empty for like 20 years two blocks away from McSweeny's. You don't think that's awesome? Eventually this mini-boom will end and that's going to suck WORSE than what's going on now. Oh man, it's going to suck. Maybe rents will go down then, but only if a lot of people lose jobs and move away. That's not good is it? In fact, that's a worst case scenario for the city. The cafe you were sitting in when you wrote that article will probably go out of business too. Is that what you'd prefer? Maybe one of those techies who moves to SF this year will invent an alternate fuel generator that runs off baby boomer hand wringing and then we'll all be amazed when you single handedly save the city. Still, until recently there were dozens of empty city blocks that had no development at all on them. Many stalled projects are in progress now, and it is all going to be high priced brand new luxury stuff. 3 new buildings have been built within a block of my current location in the Mission just in the last year. Sure, they're small and overpriced, and maybe only rich techie types can afford them but I'm FINE with that. When the people who can afford it move in to those places, they'll free up space in the dumps they moved out of and things will probably equalize in a couple of years, and that's probably the best case scenario.

wglb 14y ago

When I moved to this neighborhood in 1993 But isn't this how it always is? You form one idea of how the locale is and if it improves a bit but keeps going, you want to somehow freeze it at your favorite time. Travis McGee, in fact, many years ago, lamented something like this about San Francisco " . . . she now sells what she used to give away . . .". Florida too, if I am not mistaken. (Travis McGee is a fictional character, by the way). My Oregon friends say it is wonderful there, but we don't want any more folk to move here.