12 ms·

The San Francisco Exodus

212 points by blackjack48 13y ago

bparsons 13y ago
I am always baffled at how other people are baffled that desirable places to live are more expensive than less desirable places.
bronbron 13y ago
I've long thought that the bay area's major problem is not necessarily problems with San Francisco proper (though the strong aversion to high-rises while complaining about the increasingly cut-throat and expensive real estate market is hilarious to me), but that the "outer boroughs" are so incredibly unattractive because the transit system is incredibly inadequate. Living in Queens, Brooklyn, hell even Jersey is an incredibly reasonable option if you live in New York. You trade some commuting time for lower prices, and certainly Flushing doesn't have the same appeal as SoHo. But it's never a question of "oh my god it's after midnight how am I going to get home?" like I experienced when living in the bay area. It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  "It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter." You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't. Since the income of people who will choose to live in the city places an upper limit on market rents, this is pretty clearly untrue -- either rents can go up forever and so can citizen's incomes or neither can go up forever. I think that, given sufficient transit infrastructure to allow people who can't afford to live in the city proper to commute in to perform essential jobs to support those who do live in the city, that -- whether it is desirable or not -- the situation is more that both rents and the income of residents of the City and County of San Francisco can go up without bound, as residing in the City itself becomes more and more elite/exclusive.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      I apologize that my comment was not clear. The income of existing citizens will reach an upper limit, and they'll be pushed out by those with much higher income bounds. In San Francisco's quest to preserve its character, its pushing out the very people who create the character, and its turning itself into London proper, where only the very wealthy can afford to reside. Citation re: London: http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/09/mapping-gentrification http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/09/mapping-gentr...
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  "It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter." I've lived in the Bay Area for 30 years and this is my take on it as well. The city of San Francisco (and by that I mean its government) sounds like a 35 year old insisting they are still a teenager. The most interesting thing to watch was that some development "snuck in" in the south of market area and that really really surprised people in terms of people living there. When I moved here SoMa was 'warehouses, drunks, and a train station." Now it is a growing and thriving community of the new executive class. Oops.
  - deleted 13y ago
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- cylinder 13y ago
  This is exactly the problem. If people stop thinking of SF as its own city and rather just an expensive neighborhood in the larger "city" of the Bay Area, they wouldn't clamor so much about high costs. It's the lack of good transit connecting all these scattered neighborhoods that is the main problem.
- habosa 13y ago
  This. Transportation in the bay area is awful. I lived in San Jose and it would take me 2+ hours to get to SF by public transit, even at peak times. If I was in SF after midnight, I was literally stuck for the night. One time I had to take an airport SuperShuttle back to SJC just to get anywhere near my apt. because I tried to leave SF at 11pm on a Sunday. I can't even imagine what would happen if it was that hard to get between Newark and NYC.
  - jowiar 13y ago
    San Jose to SF is, by East Coast standards, a pretty long ways. Newark to New York is about 10 miles. SF to San Jose is about 50 - more comparable to New York to New Brunswick or Trenton or Stamford. Find me a 50-ish-mile distance in the US that is easier to cover by public transit than SF/San Jose. Boston/Providence? DC/Baltimore? Philadelphia/Wilmington? New York/Trenton? Comparable at best, but in all cases, you're generally talking the absolute far edge of regional rail that runs hourly at best.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      The far-end (~50 miles) of the mainline regional rail line in Philly (used to be the R5, I forget what it's called after they renamed it) has half-hour coverage in the mornings for commutes, settling back on hourly during the day. To be fair that is unusually good coverage, but it is certainly possible to do elsewhere.
      - Apocryphon 13y ago
        Certainly with the wealth of the Bay Area, it be a shame if we didn't at least try to create such a system for convenience.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Part of the difference may be that several of the communities along the R5 near Philly are affluent for the area (or in general, in some cases (Gladwyne)). Transit to poorer areas like Upper Darby isn't quite as nice.
- LordHumungous 13y ago
  I recently spent some time in SF for the first time, coming from Seattle, and I was amazed to find that the transit is barely on par with Seattle's (which is not a compliment) despite the fact that SF is a much denser, more urban city. Bart is a joke- there's a single line within the actual city.
ajiang 13y ago
I've always wondered why more people don't live in Oakland or Berkeley, which are both a relatively short commute to downtown SF. The housing prices are significantly cheaper, and especially in Berkeley, there seems to be a strong tech community. Without going into all of my guesses as to why this hasn't happened in droves, I think one of the larger reasons is the access to cheap transportation back to those areas at night. BART stops too early, so for the younger crowd that likes to stay out, it's too expensive to constantly take a $40-60 ride out of SF. Without the advent of additionally public transportation, would it be economically viable to provide a paid shuttle service to and from SF / Berkeley / Oakland?
- nicholas73 13y ago
  I've never considered Easy Bay because of its much higher crime rate. There is a reason it's cheaper. Maybe things are different now, but I wouldn't know, because I've never considered it.
  - rgbrgb 13y ago
    That's some very poor circular logic. You've never considered it because of the crime rate that you don't know because you've never considered it.
    - nicholas73 13y ago
      It was high enough to demotivate me from checking again.
  - rhubarbquid 13y ago
    You say that like San Francisco is crime free while the whole Easy Bay has a high crime rate...
    - DanBlake 13y ago
      Uh, yeah. SF may have crime but its nowhere near the danger level of oakland. IIRC, SF isnt even on the "top 100 most dangerous cities" list, but oakland usually is in the top 5. So, yes- Big difference. 10x higher chance to get murdered in oakland than SF.
11001 13y ago
Given this, and the recent article on "The London exodus", I'll just leave this new online course here because it may be interesting to some: https://www.coursera.org/course/designingcities https://www.coursera.org/course/designingcities
blackjack48 13y ago
If any SF residents agree with the sentiment of this article, I'd recommend voting in the upcoming election. Props B & C will allow a project with new housing, retail, and open space to be built downtown. I support the project not because it's perfectly designed, but because it would set a terrible precedent for future development in the city if opponents successfully use the referendum process to block it. Ironically, many of the same people opposed to the project are the ones who are complaining the most about rising rents. Even though the project certainly isn't low- or middle-income housing, it will relieve some of the demand that would otherwise be placed on housing for lower incomes.
- papa 13y ago
  Yes, Prop C is a ridiculous attempt to subvert the planning process. For the record, 8 Washington was approved by the Port Commission, Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors. And yet, here we are with this measure. Another one to watch out for is the Mexican Museum Tower (706 Mission). There have been rumblings that a few of the owners in the Four Seasons Tower don't care for the tall building obstructing their views: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2013/07/an_unfriendly_ultimatum_so_the_sun_can_shine_in_san_fra.html http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2013/07/an_unfriendly_ult... Depending on the results of the November ballot, we may be seeing more of these.
- objclxt 13y ago
  > it will relieve some of the demand that would otherwise be placed on housing for lower incomes. I don't know if this is necessarily true, in the same way that if you build an extra lane on a freeway you don't inherently reduce congestion - traffic simply expands to fill the available space. Many people buying these new apartments and condos will be buying as an investment and renting out, which does nothing to help those in housing need.
  - jerf 13y ago
    That's because the increase in supply will be too small to undo the fact that the economy will still be heavily demand-driven. If you want to completely undo that, you need to saturate the demand. However, you can't get from here to there without that intermediate step. Plus, on the margins, it will still increase supply and drop prices, as the price those can be rented out at are driven by supply and demand. Continue to reliably raise supply, and you'll also lower the value of those investments and cause them to sell out as they cease to be good investments. The reason why that is an attractive strategy in the first place is that demand is grossly in excess of supply. Fix the root cause, the problem will go away. San Francisco may not believe in market forces, but market forces believe in San Francisco.
integraton 13y ago
The whole western side of the city could really use some development. Nothing there is particularly nice as it is now. A lot of units don't even have laundry machines in the buildings, so people end up spending thousands per month on rent while still using laundromats. The location, however, is amazing given the proximity to the parks and beaches, and there are solid commercial arteries. There's not much character there, and almost everything is relatively new, built within the past century.
- Fluxx 13y ago
  There does seem to be a "center of gravity" in SF that is incredibly bizarre to me. For a lot of people, if you live west of Divis or south of 24th st, you might as well be, for all intents and purposes, in Oakland. Seems like a lot of the complacent crowd of SF lives in the Mission/SOMA/Pacific Height/Marina/Russian Hill bubble and never gets out of it. Yet there is a whole 3/4 of the city that isn't encompassed by that part that is really, really awesome. It may not be "trendy" or anything, but they're full of great neighborhood places and "real" people. I think it's easy for everyone analyzing this situation to forget those places exist.
  - malyk 13y ago
    This comes back to transportation a bit. Living in the outer sunset or outer richmond and commuting to soma or the financial district is either a really long bus ride on packed buses or an N/T/etc fraught with delays getting onto and down market street. It takes me 35 minutes to get from my house in north oakland to work off the embarcadero station. When my wife and I lived in the inner richmond (6th and fulton) it took her 55 minutes to get to her office near 16th and bryant. I think transit here generally gets a bad rap (my wife and I used the muni basically without issue for 5 years living in the city and loved it), but when considering where to live the commute from (and the colder weather of) the western neighborhoods is a big deal.
    - tommaxwell 13y ago
      Yup, public transit in areas like Outer Sunset is pretty bad. I've never lived there, but I did stay in a hacker house there once while searching for an apt, and it takes a good 40 minutes on a crowded bus to get to Market St. Also I rarely ever find an Uber or Lyft nearby.
vondur 13y ago
Regarding people moving to Oakland, there has been some people here talking about how bad the crime was there. Then again to me, San Francisco is a really dirty city with a ton of homeless people. I'm from Socal, so I'm not unfamiliar with the homeless, I've just never seen them concentrated like they are in San Francisco.
- objclxt 13y ago
  SF has a lot of homelessness, which seems to be due to a combination of both culture (generally liberal, reasonably good provision of social services, reasonably relaxed attitude to drugs) and climate. As brutal as it sounds, cities like New York will never have as large or visible a homelessness problem for the simple reason you're quite likely to die sleeping rough over the winter.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Everything in San Francisco is more concentrated than in SoCal, not just homeless people.
ghshephard 13y ago
I lived in Oakland (17th, on Lake Merritt) back in 97/98, coming in from Canada and attracted by the low rent. I got the hell out of there as quickly as possible (moved to Sunnyvale) - Every night consisted me of taking my life into my own hands as I tried to walk the 5 or so blocks from Bart to my apartment. A week ago, after not having visited for about 10 years, I toured the old neighborhood and was astonished at how much it had changed - it was after dark on a friday night - and there were actually a lot of people out, walking around the lake, restaurants open. HUGE shift in gentrification of the area. This is a very positive impact of the San Francisco housing situation.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  Still not quite safe enough for me to consider a nightly walk home from BART. Looking for a place in Oakland a few months ago, I was amazed how blasé people were about being assaulted, mugged or having their car stolen. Much as I prefer the EB vibe, I think living under constant threat of violence would stress me out.
  - gmjosack 13y ago
    About a year ago I was at a dinner party with some friends that live in Oakland, off Lake Merritt. They were all recalling stories about times when they'd been mugged like it was normal! Another friend of mine tells me about shootings she's seen outside her window as recently as a few weeks ago. She's only a few blocks South of Lake Merritt around 18th and 5th. I'm sorry but I wouldn't feel at all safe living in that area.
    - staunch 13y ago
      I've been made to seem like crazy person more than once for suggesting that people in the bay area live in intolerably crime-ridden/filthy conditions.
      - WalterSear 13y ago
        A few do, most don't. It's a big place.
subpixel 13y ago
I was surprised to learn about the level of disfunction in SF government (which of course includes zoning): http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-city-in-the-u-s/ http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-ci...
bovermyer 13y ago
This is why I prefer Minneapolis to SF. All the character, none of the problems. Though we do only have two seasons - winter and construction.
- wyclif 13y ago
  It's also why I prefer Boulder, Austin, Philly, and even Omaha to SF. It's time for some pioneering spirit, and with location mattering less than ever because of the maturation of collaboration tools, I'm happy to save money and let others spend it.
  - danenania 13y ago
    I like the concept, but there's so much intangible benefit to being in a center of gravity. There seems to be some tipping point where the random possibilities you encounter hit an exponential curve due to so many people doing so many interesting things in close proximity. Unfortunately, it also coincides with expense, crime, and high levels of general inconvenience.
    - mitchty 13y ago
      This is too true, while I love where I live for certain reasons, its undeniably true that San Francisco has quite a larger talent pool and chances for things to occur due to the increase in talented people.
- jpea 13y ago
  Not quite "all" the character... it's great in many ways (awesome biking infrastructure, very affordable housing, great restaurants/bars/coffee), but there's a huge upside to the weather that San Francisco has. Perhaps as a cause and effect situation, Minneapolis also doesn't have the talent pool that the bay area has.
- mitchty 13y ago
  I'm in St Paul myself, much more sedate than either and soon the green line will mean I can visit Brits pub and drink in Minneapolis as well and still have a zombie city to live in. I thought the seasons were more, construction, and snow preventing construction.
fogonthedowns 13y ago
This title is false. San Francisco's population is increasing and Oakland's is decreasing. It should be called the San Francisco influx.
- ScottWhigham 13y ago
  I think you're missing part of the point - are the people moving into SF buying houses/condos or are they renting? I think the point of the article was that housing prices are so high that people can't buy, thus it's going to become a city of renters where properties are only owned by the very wealthy. From a city culture standpoint, I think we would all be in agreement that a city where people own their own homes results in a better environment (more people would be politically active within their district, kids go from K-12 at the same school district thus grow up with a stronger sense of community, etc). I also think we would be in agreement that it's a stronger country when the citizens can afford to buy their own homes rather than rent them from the 0.0005% who can afford to own in SF.
auctiontheory 13y ago
The article mentions New York. One difference between SF and NYC is that public transport in NYC is at least 10X better. Especially as people spread out, that makes a big difference to quality of life.
stevewilber 13y ago
It's really refreshing to see some intelligent commentary on the issues SF is facing, as opposed to the mindless tech-bashing that has been going on in the local media. The only way to have a meaningful impact on housing prices is to increase supply.
r0h1n 13y ago
Related: NYT just a few days back on "London's Great Exodus" - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/londons-great-exodus.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/londons-gre... >> The gap between London prices and those of the rest of the country is now at a historic high, and there is only one way to explain it. London houses and apartments are a form of money.
- wazoox 13y ago
  Related again: the very same thing is happening in Paris.
- rmk2 13y ago
  I'm not sure that is in the US, but I'd wager the very British notion of the "housing ladder" has much to do with the skyrocketing prices in London. The idea, in essence, is that you buy a house (ideally under market value, but that won't happen, so you buy at value). However, since everything spins around moving up (wherever that may lead you), you now need to move into a better property (or, at least, a property/area that is perceived to be better). Thus, in order to be able to afford that, everybody now tries to "add value" to their places. This leads to a number of things: 1) The very British sport of "extending" and, really, slapping extensions on absolutely everything. 2) Avoidance of any actual, structural work. Completely modernising a flat (or, worse even, a house) is expensive, i.e. you risk spending a lot of money without the certainty that you will get all of it (and, ideally, more) back. 3) In connection with the point above, this means "adding value" usually really means painting things over, plastering things over and superficially "fixing" (i.e. covering up) the most obvious flaws. All of the above leads to an upward spiral, where everybody tries to sell essentially the same places for more and more money. Give it two or three rounds on the spiral, and a house that used to be, say, £300,000 is now £400,000, with nicer visible features but the same rotten core. The other problem with London property prices is that they influence the prices of most of the South-East of England, with certain places (within commutable distance) experiencing the same price-hikes.
- jwillgoesfast 13y ago
  This is interesting. With the "remotization" of the workplace where anyone, especially engineers can work from anywhere, instead of moving outward, we're moving inward to these "hubs". I wonder if this is in part because, now that our work is less social, we want our environment to be geared toward more social, i.e. big cities.
SurfScore 13y ago
People keep talking about the rising prices, but what is being done? What CAN be done? Its supply and demand. San Francisco will always be expensive because it is a desirable location for certain groups of high-earning people. Being "progressive" is great, but we live in the real world and if you refuse to do things to lower prices in the name of culture, prices will keep going up. Ironically, this will also hurt, if not destroy, the "culture" that they're trying to protect in the first place.
- tomkarlo 13y ago
  There's a lot that can be done. The most obvious thing to do is remove rent control and zoning restrictions and push for the construction of higher buildings with more units. Stop living in the past and pretending it's a quaint coastal town. San Francisco is statistically the second most dense city in the US, wedged into a geographically bounded ~50 sq miles. It's dumbfounding that there were probably more high rise apartment buildings (>20 stories) in my zip code back in NY than in all of SF.
- mahyarm 13y ago
  SF and the bay area have an anti-development attitude in general, leading to a predictable supply shortage and thus the crazy rents you have now. This is how you solve it: 1. Allow development, stop getting in the way. 2. Create punitive pigovian long term unused property taxes to encourage property use. Stop land owners from letting property just sit there unused and discourage using property just as a fancy bank account for the wealthy.
- Miyamoto 13y ago
  Eh, lots of things can be done. They all involve development though, and SF is stubborn. Build vertically. Look at Tokyo if you need ideas of super density.
- rprospero 13y ago
  I find it interesting that everyone sees this as a sliding scale with culture on one side and rent on the other. There's a third variable that the city could play with to keep the rent down while not building a single building: Raise Taxes If you want to lower prices and you can't/won't increase supply, the obvious solution is to lower demand. Adding a sharp jump in the local income tax at a high income level will free up housing space as wealthy citizens leave the city. The less affluent won't see a tax increase, since it's outside their bracket, but they will see housing become available, lowering rent prices. Of course, this will be a hit on the economy as all the wealthy individuals leave the area, but it decreases rent while keeping culture constant.
tomkarlo 13y ago
An agenda-driven article based on an unsupported anecdote (that lots of his friends are moving to Oakland) and topped with a click-bait headline. If there was really any net "exodus" going on, landlords wouldn't be raising rents 25-30% each year.
- equalarrow 13y ago
  Well, what it really is is families and non-millionaires looking to buy. I mean, you can buy studios/1br's for around $300k-$400k (my wife and I have a close friend doing this). But for the most part, it's all cash everywhere and a lot of it. We are contemplating the exodus in a few years but not so much because of prices, but schools. Before I had kids, I was in step with SF politics / justifications of how things are done here. But, of course, after kids you're like "hey, wait a minute". The school lottery is a family bug spray here. It's not just the fact that you're kid could be: a) bused to a different area of the city away from the possible school right across the street from you b) bused to a crappy school across the city but also that this destroys neighborhoods. When I grew up (in southern california), I went to school with all the kids in my neighborhood. Not here, that would be too simple. So what this does is forces you to east bay or north bay if you don't want to partake in this social experiment and can't afford private school (I won't even mention the fact that even if you can afford private school, there's massive competition to then get into one). All in all, this puts huge pressure on parents and they have to ask the question "do I want to be part of a social experiment where my kids won't even go to school with other neighborhood kids or do I just want them to go to a good school so they can grow up and then have some sort of normal life"? So, the reality I see consists of 2 groups (of which we have friends in both): those that can't afford to buy or our outbid on everything and those parents that can't afford or are out-competed on private schools. That said, I love SF. I've live here for 20+ years. I'll always love it here. Do I hold a grudge towards the city? Nope. I see it mostly as just the way things are and even if some people did have a short time where they were able to stall growth, it won't last forever. The city has to expand and it will. If it doesn't it will die and I just can't see that happening.
  - tomkarlo 13y ago
    I agree 100% with you about the schools problem (and I'm facing it myself.) I've lived in a number of cities and SF has stunned me at the near total lack of school-age children. It's stunning - especially in my neighborhood (SOMA) you just never see kids walking to school in the morning. This has to be the largest drawback to living in SF, and one of the biggest reason middle-income to upper-middle-income families move out of town.
peterwwillis 13y ago
See, this is why I love Baltimore. We've got charm out the ass AND our rents are low. Quite frankly i'm disappointed in how cartoonish SF's neighborhoods seem. Here's the hippie burner neighborhood, and here's the spanish hipster neighborhood, and here's the rich white boating neighborhood, and here's the dingy chinese black market neighborhood, and here's the financial district complete with skyscrapers and shops that close at 6pm. It's like a dirty spicy version of DC.
- geuis 13y ago
  You have a very stilted view of neighborhoods here. There's nothing at all cartoonish about any part of the city. Well, Fisherman's Warf, I'll grant you that one. That's as typical a tourist trap as any.
- gregd 13y ago
  I'm not even sure what "cartoonish" means. Where did you get that assessment? Having grown up in and around SF for my formidable years, SF has charm but seriously lacks in affordability. I can't imagine what you mean by cartoonish.
  - hallowtech 13y ago
    Maybe this is why he thinks they're cartoonish? http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/1958-moving-to-san-francisco http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/1958-moving-to-san-fra... http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/2138-moving-to-san-francisco-part-2 http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/2138-moving-to-san-fra...
    - peterwwillis 13y ago
      Yep. When visiting SF, I tried to walk a lot to see the city change. Going into different neighborhoods felt more like stepping into completely different cities. I'd hear X neighborhood was full of Y, and it was exactly that. Perhaps it blends more once you live there, but I was really struck by the cultural divisions.
songzme 13y ago
I just bought a house in Berkeley. I wanted to buy a condo in SF, but for the same price of a 2 bedroom condo in SF with 1200 sqft I could buy a house in berkeley with 6700sq ft lot size with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and a huge backyard all to myself. Even if I had all the money in the world, I'll buy rather buy a house in berkeley over a condo in SF. There are plenty of restaurants around berkeley, and many places to hang out. The only thing I'm missing out if I live in Berkeley is all the awesome tech events in SF.
steven2012 13y ago
My wife and I are blessed to be bottom-end 1%-ers, and even we could not afford to live in SF, so we moved down into the peninsula. Well, we might be able to afford it if we got a crippling mortgage, but then we couldn't afford day care for our kids, and the 1hr+ commutes would have wreaked havoc on our lives. You can't raise a family in SF without making enough money to afford a $1.4M house, and spending $2000/month on private school per kid because the SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity).
- geebee 13y ago
  Here's a link to API scores for SF elementary schools. http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/schools/?gradeLevels=e&st=public http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/schools... Test scores don't tell the whole story, and I'll agree that there is some political stupidity, but think it's fair to say that the blanket statement "SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity)" is incorrect. For an urban district, I believe SFUSD has an unusually high number of extremely high performing schools. There are some very bad ones too. You'll see this pattern in the surrounding areas as well. The difference is that owning a house in a high-rent district doesn't get you priority access to that school, they way it does in the burbs. As a result, a lot of people who can afford a 1.4 mil house leave SF if they don't get their top school choice, because in Marin, your high mortgage guarantees you priority access to the good school. Of course, a lot of people stay in SF precisely because they can get their kid into a 9 or 10 school even though they can't afford the 1.4mil house.
  - steven2012 13y ago
    One of my coworkers lives near us, and I believe they were told to list a dozen schools in order of preference. Given the lottery nature of the system, they didn't get into a single one of them, which forced them to go the private school route.
    - geebee 13y ago
      This is a long standing and very intense debate in SF. You can reasonably criticize the "lottery" system, and you can reasonably defend the "school choice" system. Kind of funny that Reason magazine, not normally a big cheerleader for SF politics, kind of likes the approach. http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-educatio http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-... Anyway, I think it's perfectly reasonable to defend or criticize the assignment process, I just don't think you can accurately claim that SF public schools are horrible.
n0rb3rt 13y ago
I just turned down an offer at Apple because, even with the (by any other standards) generous salary and options, the cost of housing just doesn't leave any room for saving for college, retirement, no less owning a home.
- gregd 13y ago
  SF makes San Jose, Cupertino, Mountain View, etc., look affordable.
bluedino 13y ago
>> If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams, >> a place a parent can raise kids and not have to spend every minute at work—we have to fix the supply problem. Why? Why can't it stay the playground of the rich and people who are trying to pursue their dreams can live in <insert name of nearby city> >> Subsidizing affordable homes for 10,000 families comes at a price of tag of $2.5 billion. >> So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can. No. While I am for subsidized housing, I don't feel it should be done in extremely rich areas just for the heck of it. I'm not saying to start housing projects where nobody wants to live, but there's no sense in burning money to build them where costs are extraordinary.
- netcan 13y ago
  I totally agree with you on subsdization. Subsidizing a few thousand people so they people can live someplace expensive is insane. OTOH, this and other manifestations of what feels like a binary income distribution is a tricky thing. Rich neighbourhoods are one thing. Rich schools. Rich cities is a new thing. It creates feedback.
crazygringo 13y ago
> To subsidize affordable homes for 100,000 people would cost $25 billion. So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can. What?! Why on earth would I want my tax dollars subsidizing your rent? I mean, charity to the poor, homeless, etc. is one thing (it's good), but subsidizing your rent so you can be closer to boutique coffee shops? Instead of, you know, helping the truly needy get health care? Or investing in education? Gimme a break. > If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams Why does San Fran specifically have to be that place? The Bay Area's a big place. By the end of the article, the author's right about needing a more integrated metropolitan policy, but this attitude that "everyone deserves to live in San Francisco, even people with no money" gets tiring after a while. Neighborhoods and cities gentrify. People move elsewhere, to the new-and-upcoming-and-more-interesting neighborhoods/cities. Places change. That's just how it is.
- bsullivan01 13y ago
  To subsidize affordable homes for 100,000 people would cost $25 billion. and then another 100,000 people would move in there. So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can. Skip as many meals as you want, work as many hours and you want to do that. People can move to different cities you know...
- mbreese 13y ago
  Any thriving city needs a mix of people. If for no other reason, then think out support staff. What about waitresses, cooks, cleaning staff, janitors, bus drivers or any number of low-paying/skill but absolutely needed workers. Where should they live? Why can't they live close to work? And if they need to commute into the city to work, how far out can they get pushed before it's not worth it any more? Thinking that an entire city could consist of highly paid tech workers is a fantasy. And what about families? It's next to impossible to afford to have a family in the city. What will those tech workers do when they want to start a family? Do you really want them all moving to the east bay instead of helping to grow the city?
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geebee 13y ago
This article makes an interesting comparison between San Francisco and Seattle. "San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it's starting from a smaller overall population base). While Seattle decided to embrace infill development as a way to save open space at the edge of its region and put more people in neighborhoods where they could walk, San Francisco decided to push regional population growth somewhere else." Interesting point, but are we comparing apples-to-apples? Here's the wikipedia page for Seattle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle land area is 142 sq miles, current population density is 7,402/sq mi . For San Francisco, we get: https://www.google.com/#q=wikipedia+san+francisco https://www.google.com/#q=wikipedia+san+francisco land area is 46.87 sq mi, population density is 17,620/sq mi. Now, the article did mention "infill" which sounds more urban, so maybe there's a difference in the city and county of Seattle? I don't really know how that works up there. San Francisco is a very rare case where the city and county are the same. The article doesn't seem clear about this - how are we defining "Seattle" for the purposes of this article? If we cherry picked a 142 square mile area around SF, I think we could probably substantial construction and growth. In some ways, the article even goes on to mention this by talking about how SF and Oakland aren't part of the same city, but that this is where the growth is starting to happen. SF is at the point where there isn't much left to be infilled. There certainly is some, but by and large, you'd have to tear something down to build something up - at least to a much larger extent than cities that get to be defined as a 150 square mile area or more. I don't think there's much to be done here... but I think people are coming down pretty hard on SF. My guess is that you could easily circle 48 square miles of most major cities with comparable population density that haven't allowed much construction in the last 50 years or so, and you could easily circle 150 square miles around SF that make it look like it has pursued rapid growth policies. The difference is that because of the way borders work in the bay area, SF appears to be hostile to development because the new growth happens elsewhere.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Now, the article did mention "infill" which sounds more urban, so maybe there's a difference in the city and county of Seattle? Seattle is in King County, which has a total area of 2,307 sq. mi. This is clearly referring to the city proper, which is, as you note, still much bigger than the City and County of SF, and much less densely populated to start with.
thehme 13y ago
I always thought that public transit in the tri-state area was something you could not get anywhere else in the country and this article helps enforce that thought. However, it does bother me that gentrification moves people out of areas they once called home, and I wish this was not the collateral damage of what otherwise seems to be a positive trend. I certainly would not like to have to move because people who can pay more than me move in and force me out of my town. Then again, if moving to the town next door forces schools and services to become better, than maybe it's not so bad. It looks to me like no matter how positive the intentions, supply and demand will always rule along with their friend $$.
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legohead 13y ago
Doesn't NYC have a rent problem as well? I have lived in Russia, and visited San Francisco once. I have to say, I was more uncomfortable in SF than I ever was in Russia. Personally, I don't see the appeal. Reading this article, it makes me feel the author has on rose colored glasses when it comes to this city.
- chrisgw 13y ago
  Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn have a rent problem, but most people commute from the outer boroughs, Long Island, and New Jersey where rent is much cheaper.
tsotha 13y ago
Did I just miss it, or did he really lament the lack of new housing in SF without even mentioning rent control?
- malyk 13y ago
  What does new housing have to do with rent control? Housing built after 1979 isn't rent controlled.
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Futurebot 13y ago
There are a couple of ways to alleviate this: 1) Build higher. A lot higher. 2) Massively increase supply. Put in place a regulation that says all new buildings must be X stories high (20,40,60, whatever.) Along with that, include a regulation that force said buildings to fit in with the neighbhorhood look. UWS and the West Village here in NYC have great examples of extremely tall buildings that are not Jetson's-style eyesores. Also put in place a regulation that says existing building that can be built higher (while keeping the existing external facade) should be. Where this isn't possible, knock it down and replace it with a building that keeps the old facade. Change the zoning restrictions and regulations to allow the above, and supply will go up, prices will (eventually) come down, and the neighbhorhood looks will remain similar. Everyone gets some of what they want, and the place stays diverse, vibrant, and does not force local workers to deal with punishing commutes just so they can do their jobs. The above applies just as much to NYC or any other large city that is holding back this kind of development. As per the UN: "In 1950, one-third of the world’s people lived in cities. Just 50 years later, this proportion has risen to one-half and will continue to grow to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. Cities are now home to half of humankind." Policies need to change to deal with this new reality.
CalRobert 13y ago
Perhaps if the cities to the south of SF weren't so stultifyingly boring, people wouldn't feel so compelled to live in the city. Imagine you're 25 and single, do you really want to live in low density single-family housing? Hellholes like Fremont? Unfortunately zoning laws and nimbys prevent the construction of livable, high density housing in favor of more suburban prisons.
cmbaus 13y ago
Subsidizing is NOT the answer. This will drive up prices for everyone living above subsidies. The problem is demand WAY outstrips housing supply. In my opinion the one thing that could kill the Bay Area economy is the aversion to residential construction. Housing stock on the Geary corridor could be easily increased, and even a modest improvement to the transit system in that area could make a big difference. It is absolutely crazy to artificially restrict residential building in areas where there is high employment demand. It is almost like we want to prevent economic growth. The US is a crazy place. We complain that there isn't enough economic growth, but when it happens, we put in all kinds of restrictions that limit it.
- gdubs 13y ago
  This is kind of like arguing that the way to fix LA's traffic problem is to build more freeways. For a time congestion will ease, and then before you know it there will just be more cars, and the traffic will return. More concrete, more cars, same problem.
  - cmbaus 13y ago
    No it isn't. Building high density housing is nothing like building more freeways. Edit: Many people argue in favor of building restrictions on the basis of environmental concerns, but limiting housing in SF is just pushing more people out to places like Sacramento, which are suburban waste lands and models of inefficiency.
    - gdubs 13y ago
      I'm not arguing that urban density is less efficient, but that the increased capacity would simply be filled with more high-paid workers. The city would have to throw up a ton of housing projects to have an effect on the median housing costs. IMHO it would be better to spend that money transforming the transportation and public education systems...
jff 13y ago
I've often thought that while everyone complains about how hard transit is in the bay area, we're kind of screwed by geography. The Bay is this big asshole sitting right in the middle of everyone. All of our development is spread out in a ring around the bay, which inflates the distance from one place to another. If you took a map and cut out the bay, then pulled all the shorelines together, it would only be 15 minutes to get from San Jose to Oakland or San Francisco. But nope, we have to go in a big damn ring.
ffrryuu 13y ago
I'm looking to move to Texas here.
sAuronas 13y ago
I used to build mixed-income housing (one third subsidizes public housing units, one third 80% of area median and one third market rate) for a private partnership to redevelop Chicago's public housing. I can tell you this...fail. Does not compute. Does not work, socially or financially. The best thing to do is to give mayors the ability to buget city planners
sAuronas 13y ago
I used to build mixed-income housing (one third subsidizes public housing units, one third 80% of area median and one third market rate) for a private partnership to redevelop Chicago's public housing. I can tell you this...fail. Does not compute. Does not work--socially (as an experiment) or financially. The best thing to do is to give mayors the ability to build and get city planners (disclaimer: I'm trained as one) out of the way. Affordable housing cannot be built new, but is usually created as a side effect when replacement units come on line and push down prices in existing units. SF will never be able to accommodate all incomes as long as there is no open-source planning guidelines that are geared to meeting this demand and give developers that " by right" to build. On Oakland, I lived there and it is awesome except for crime and politics and shifty characters. Especially the Quantics [sic]. Oakland can be THAT place, if the above happens here as well. It could, conceivably be better (yeah, I said it) than SF.
pconf 13y ago
This is typical real-estate developer rhetoric "we can continue growing forever". Don't look behind the curtain, though, at the real reason redeveloped neighborhoods are sometimes more affordable i.e., you get what you pay for. IMO not every city is well served by demolishing large tracts of historic buildings for the glass-facade utilitarian apartment buildings predicated on Quonset hut structural engineering principles (cheap, fast, profitable, not to be confused with architecture). Let the developers work where they're needed, Brisbane, Millbrae, SSF, etc. but leave San Francisco's character and beautiful neighborhoods to those who appreciate _living_ in them (vs profiting off of them). The Examiner did a great article on the damage done to the City by redevelopment of the type this article advocates, in the 50s and 60s. Seems now to be available at USA Today: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-09-2450995649_x.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-09-245099... IMO, if you want to see exactly what Gabriel Metcalf is talking about go to the City's Western Addition and while there ask yourself if it was worth it.

212 points by blackjack48 13y ago

I am always baffled at how other people are baffled that desirable places to live are more expensive than less desirable places.

bronbron 13y ago

I've long thought that the bay area's major problem is not necessarily problems with San Francisco proper (though the strong aversion to high-rises while complaining about the increasingly cut-throat and expensive real estate market is hilarious to me), but that the "outer boroughs" are so incredibly unattractive because the transit system is incredibly inadequate. Living in Queens, Brooklyn, hell even Jersey is an incredibly reasonable option if you live in New York. You trade some commuting time for lower prices, and certainly Flushing doesn't have the same appeal as SoHo. But it's never a question of "oh my god it's after midnight how am I going to get home?" like I experienced when living in the bay area. It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
"It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter." You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't. Since the income of people who will choose to live in the city places an upper limit on market rents, this is pretty clearly untrue -- either rents can go up forever and so can citizen's incomes or neither can go up forever. I think that, given sufficient transit infrastructure to allow people who can't afford to live in the city proper to commute in to perform essential jobs to support those who do live in the city, that -- whether it is desirable or not -- the situation is more that both rents and the income of residents of the City and County of San Francisco can go up without bound, as residing in the City itself becomes more and more elite/exclusive.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    I apologize that my comment was not clear. The income of existing citizens will reach an upper limit, and they'll be pushed out by those with much higher income bounds. In San Francisco's quest to preserve its character, its pushing out the very people who create the character, and its turning itself into London proper, where only the very wealthy can afford to reside. Citation re: London: http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/09/mapping-gentrification http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/09/mapping-gentr...
ChuckMcM 13y ago
"It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter." I've lived in the Bay Area for 30 years and this is my take on it as well. The city of San Francisco (and by that I mean its government) sounds like a 35 year old insisting they are still a teenager. The most interesting thing to watch was that some development "snuck in" in the south of market area and that really really surprised people in terms of people living there. When I moved here SoMa was 'warehouses, drunks, and a train station." Now it is a growing and thriving community of the new executive class. Oops.
- deleted 13y ago
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cylinder 13y ago
This is exactly the problem. If people stop thinking of SF as its own city and rather just an expensive neighborhood in the larger "city" of the Bay Area, they wouldn't clamor so much about high costs. It's the lack of good transit connecting all these scattered neighborhoods that is the main problem.
habosa 13y ago
This. Transportation in the bay area is awful. I lived in San Jose and it would take me 2+ hours to get to SF by public transit, even at peak times. If I was in SF after midnight, I was literally stuck for the night. One time I had to take an airport SuperShuttle back to SJC just to get anywhere near my apt. because I tried to leave SF at 11pm on a Sunday. I can't even imagine what would happen if it was that hard to get between Newark and NYC.
- jowiar 13y ago
  San Jose to SF is, by East Coast standards, a pretty long ways. Newark to New York is about 10 miles. SF to San Jose is about 50 - more comparable to New York to New Brunswick or Trenton or Stamford. Find me a 50-ish-mile distance in the US that is easier to cover by public transit than SF/San Jose. Boston/Providence? DC/Baltimore? Philadelphia/Wilmington? New York/Trenton? Comparable at best, but in all cases, you're generally talking the absolute far edge of regional rail that runs hourly at best.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    The far-end (~50 miles) of the mainline regional rail line in Philly (used to be the R5, I forget what it's called after they renamed it) has half-hour coverage in the mornings for commutes, settling back on hourly during the day. To be fair that is unusually good coverage, but it is certainly possible to do elsewhere.
    - Apocryphon 13y ago
      Certainly with the wealth of the Bay Area, it be a shame if we didn't at least try to create such a system for convenience.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Part of the difference may be that several of the communities along the R5 near Philly are affluent for the area (or in general, in some cases (Gladwyne)). Transit to poorer areas like Upper Darby isn't quite as nice.
LordHumungous 13y ago
I recently spent some time in SF for the first time, coming from Seattle, and I was amazed to find that the transit is barely on par with Seattle's (which is not a compliment) despite the fact that SF is a much denser, more urban city. Bart is a joke- there's a single line within the actual city.

ajiang 13y ago

I've always wondered why more people don't live in Oakland or Berkeley, which are both a relatively short commute to downtown SF. The housing prices are significantly cheaper, and especially in Berkeley, there seems to be a strong tech community. Without going into all of my guesses as to why this hasn't happened in droves, I think one of the larger reasons is the access to cheap transportation back to those areas at night. BART stops too early, so for the younger crowd that likes to stay out, it's too expensive to constantly take a $40-60 ride out of SF. Without the advent of additionally public transportation, would it be economically viable to provide a paid shuttle service to and from SF / Berkeley / Oakland?

nicholas73 13y ago
I've never considered Easy Bay because of its much higher crime rate. There is a reason it's cheaper. Maybe things are different now, but I wouldn't know, because I've never considered it.
- rgbrgb 13y ago
  That's some very poor circular logic. You've never considered it because of the crime rate that you don't know because you've never considered it.
  - nicholas73 13y ago
    It was high enough to demotivate me from checking again.
- rhubarbquid 13y ago
  You say that like San Francisco is crime free while the whole Easy Bay has a high crime rate...
  - DanBlake 13y ago
    Uh, yeah. SF may have crime but its nowhere near the danger level of oakland. IIRC, SF isnt even on the "top 100 most dangerous cities" list, but oakland usually is in the top 5. So, yes- Big difference. 10x higher chance to get murdered in oakland than SF.

11001 13y ago

Given this, and the recent article on "The London exodus", I'll just leave this new online course here because it may be interesting to some: https://www.coursera.org/course/designingcities https://www.coursera.org/course/designingcities

blackjack48 13y ago

If any SF residents agree with the sentiment of this article, I'd recommend voting in the upcoming election. Props B & C will allow a project with new housing, retail, and open space to be built downtown. I support the project not because it's perfectly designed, but because it would set a terrible precedent for future development in the city if opponents successfully use the referendum process to block it. Ironically, many of the same people opposed to the project are the ones who are complaining the most about rising rents. Even though the project certainly isn't low- or middle-income housing, it will relieve some of the demand that would otherwise be placed on housing for lower incomes.

papa 13y ago
Yes, Prop C is a ridiculous attempt to subvert the planning process. For the record, 8 Washington was approved by the Port Commission, Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors. And yet, here we are with this measure. Another one to watch out for is the Mexican Museum Tower (706 Mission). There have been rumblings that a few of the owners in the Four Seasons Tower don't care for the tall building obstructing their views: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2013/07/an_unfriendly_ultimatum_so_the_sun_can_shine_in_san_fra.html http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2013/07/an_unfriendly_ult... Depending on the results of the November ballot, we may be seeing more of these.
objclxt 13y ago
> it will relieve some of the demand that would otherwise be placed on housing for lower incomes. I don't know if this is necessarily true, in the same way that if you build an extra lane on a freeway you don't inherently reduce congestion - traffic simply expands to fill the available space. Many people buying these new apartments and condos will be buying as an investment and renting out, which does nothing to help those in housing need.
- jerf 13y ago
  That's because the increase in supply will be too small to undo the fact that the economy will still be heavily demand-driven. If you want to completely undo that, you need to saturate the demand. However, you can't get from here to there without that intermediate step. Plus, on the margins, it will still increase supply and drop prices, as the price those can be rented out at are driven by supply and demand. Continue to reliably raise supply, and you'll also lower the value of those investments and cause them to sell out as they cease to be good investments. The reason why that is an attractive strategy in the first place is that demand is grossly in excess of supply. Fix the root cause, the problem will go away. San Francisco may not believe in market forces, but market forces believe in San Francisco.

integraton 13y ago

The whole western side of the city could really use some development. Nothing there is particularly nice as it is now. A lot of units don't even have laundry machines in the buildings, so people end up spending thousands per month on rent while still using laundromats. The location, however, is amazing given the proximity to the parks and beaches, and there are solid commercial arteries. There's not much character there, and almost everything is relatively new, built within the past century.

Fluxx 13y ago
There does seem to be a "center of gravity" in SF that is incredibly bizarre to me. For a lot of people, if you live west of Divis or south of 24th st, you might as well be, for all intents and purposes, in Oakland. Seems like a lot of the complacent crowd of SF lives in the Mission/SOMA/Pacific Height/Marina/Russian Hill bubble and never gets out of it. Yet there is a whole 3/4 of the city that isn't encompassed by that part that is really, really awesome. It may not be "trendy" or anything, but they're full of great neighborhood places and "real" people. I think it's easy for everyone analyzing this situation to forget those places exist.
- malyk 13y ago
  This comes back to transportation a bit. Living in the outer sunset or outer richmond and commuting to soma or the financial district is either a really long bus ride on packed buses or an N/T/etc fraught with delays getting onto and down market street. It takes me 35 minutes to get from my house in north oakland to work off the embarcadero station. When my wife and I lived in the inner richmond (6th and fulton) it took her 55 minutes to get to her office near 16th and bryant. I think transit here generally gets a bad rap (my wife and I used the muni basically without issue for 5 years living in the city and loved it), but when considering where to live the commute from (and the colder weather of) the western neighborhoods is a big deal.
  - tommaxwell 13y ago
    Yup, public transit in areas like Outer Sunset is pretty bad. I've never lived there, but I did stay in a hacker house there once while searching for an apt, and it takes a good 40 minutes on a crowded bus to get to Market St. Also I rarely ever find an Uber or Lyft nearby.

vondur 13y ago

Regarding people moving to Oakland, there has been some people here talking about how bad the crime was there. Then again to me, San Francisco is a really dirty city with a ton of homeless people. I'm from Socal, so I'm not unfamiliar with the homeless, I've just never seen them concentrated like they are in San Francisco.

objclxt 13y ago
SF has a lot of homelessness, which seems to be due to a combination of both culture (generally liberal, reasonably good provision of social services, reasonably relaxed attitude to drugs) and climate. As brutal as it sounds, cities like New York will never have as large or visible a homelessness problem for the simple reason you're quite likely to die sleeping rough over the winter.
dragonwriter 13y ago
Everything in San Francisco is more concentrated than in SoCal, not just homeless people.

ghshephard 13y ago

I lived in Oakland (17th, on Lake Merritt) back in 97/98, coming in from Canada and attracted by the low rent. I got the hell out of there as quickly as possible (moved to Sunnyvale) - Every night consisted me of taking my life into my own hands as I tried to walk the 5 or so blocks from Bart to my apartment. A week ago, after not having visited for about 10 years, I toured the old neighborhood and was astonished at how much it had changed - it was after dark on a friday night - and there were actually a lot of people out, walking around the lake, restaurants open. HUGE shift in gentrification of the area. This is a very positive impact of the San Francisco housing situation.

auctiontheory 13y ago
Still not quite safe enough for me to consider a nightly walk home from BART. Looking for a place in Oakland a few months ago, I was amazed how blasé people were about being assaulted, mugged or having their car stolen. Much as I prefer the EB vibe, I think living under constant threat of violence would stress me out.
- gmjosack 13y ago
  About a year ago I was at a dinner party with some friends that live in Oakland, off Lake Merritt. They were all recalling stories about times when they'd been mugged like it was normal! Another friend of mine tells me about shootings she's seen outside her window as recently as a few weeks ago. She's only a few blocks South of Lake Merritt around 18th and 5th. I'm sorry but I wouldn't feel at all safe living in that area.
  - staunch 13y ago
    I've been made to seem like crazy person more than once for suggesting that people in the bay area live in intolerably crime-ridden/filthy conditions.
    - WalterSear 13y ago
      A few do, most don't. It's a big place.

subpixel 13y ago

I was surprised to learn about the level of disfunction in SF government (which of course includes zoning): http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-city-in-the-u-s/ http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-ci...

bovermyer 13y ago

This is why I prefer Minneapolis to SF. All the character, none of the problems. Though we do only have two seasons - winter and construction.

wyclif 13y ago
It's also why I prefer Boulder, Austin, Philly, and even Omaha to SF. It's time for some pioneering spirit, and with location mattering less than ever because of the maturation of collaboration tools, I'm happy to save money and let others spend it.
- danenania 13y ago
  I like the concept, but there's so much intangible benefit to being in a center of gravity. There seems to be some tipping point where the random possibilities you encounter hit an exponential curve due to so many people doing so many interesting things in close proximity. Unfortunately, it also coincides with expense, crime, and high levels of general inconvenience.
  - mitchty 13y ago
    This is too true, while I love where I live for certain reasons, its undeniably true that San Francisco has quite a larger talent pool and chances for things to occur due to the increase in talented people.
jpea 13y ago
Not quite "all" the character... it's great in many ways (awesome biking infrastructure, very affordable housing, great restaurants/bars/coffee), but there's a huge upside to the weather that San Francisco has. Perhaps as a cause and effect situation, Minneapolis also doesn't have the talent pool that the bay area has.
mitchty 13y ago
I'm in St Paul myself, much more sedate than either and soon the green line will mean I can visit Brits pub and drink in Minneapolis as well and still have a zombie city to live in. I thought the seasons were more, construction, and snow preventing construction.

fogonthedowns 13y ago

This title is false. San Francisco's population is increasing and Oakland's is decreasing. It should be called the San Francisco influx.

ScottWhigham 13y ago
I think you're missing part of the point - are the people moving into SF buying houses/condos or are they renting? I think the point of the article was that housing prices are so high that people can't buy, thus it's going to become a city of renters where properties are only owned by the very wealthy. From a city culture standpoint, I think we would all be in agreement that a city where people own their own homes results in a better environment (more people would be politically active within their district, kids go from K-12 at the same school district thus grow up with a stronger sense of community, etc). I also think we would be in agreement that it's a stronger country when the citizens can afford to buy their own homes rather than rent them from the 0.0005% who can afford to own in SF.

auctiontheory 13y ago

The article mentions New York. One difference between SF and NYC is that public transport in NYC is at least 10X better. Especially as people spread out, that makes a big difference to quality of life.

stevewilber 13y ago

It's really refreshing to see some intelligent commentary on the issues SF is facing, as opposed to the mindless tech-bashing that has been going on in the local media. The only way to have a meaningful impact on housing prices is to increase supply.

r0h1n 13y ago

Related: NYT just a few days back on "London's Great Exodus" - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/londons-great-exodus.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/londons-gre... >> The gap between London prices and those of the rest of the country is now at a historic high, and there is only one way to explain it. London houses and apartments are a form of money.

wazoox 13y ago
Related again: the very same thing is happening in Paris.
rmk2 13y ago
I'm not sure that is in the US, but I'd wager the very British notion of the "housing ladder" has much to do with the skyrocketing prices in London. The idea, in essence, is that you buy a house (ideally under market value, but that won't happen, so you buy at value). However, since everything spins around moving up (wherever that may lead you), you now need to move into a better property (or, at least, a property/area that is perceived to be better). Thus, in order to be able to afford that, everybody now tries to "add value" to their places. This leads to a number of things: 1) The very British sport of "extending" and, really, slapping extensions on absolutely everything. 2) Avoidance of any actual, structural work. Completely modernising a flat (or, worse even, a house) is expensive, i.e. you risk spending a lot of money without the certainty that you will get all of it (and, ideally, more) back. 3) In connection with the point above, this means "adding value" usually really means painting things over, plastering things over and superficially "fixing" (i.e. covering up) the most obvious flaws. All of the above leads to an upward spiral, where everybody tries to sell essentially the same places for more and more money. Give it two or three rounds on the spiral, and a house that used to be, say, £300,000 is now £400,000, with nicer visible features but the same rotten core. The other problem with London property prices is that they influence the prices of most of the South-East of England, with certain places (within commutable distance) experiencing the same price-hikes.
jwillgoesfast 13y ago
This is interesting. With the "remotization" of the workplace where anyone, especially engineers can work from anywhere, instead of moving outward, we're moving inward to these "hubs". I wonder if this is in part because, now that our work is less social, we want our environment to be geared toward more social, i.e. big cities.

SurfScore 13y ago

People keep talking about the rising prices, but what is being done? What CAN be done? Its supply and demand. San Francisco will always be expensive because it is a desirable location for certain groups of high-earning people. Being "progressive" is great, but we live in the real world and if you refuse to do things to lower prices in the name of culture, prices will keep going up. Ironically, this will also hurt, if not destroy, the "culture" that they're trying to protect in the first place.

tomkarlo 13y ago
There's a lot that can be done. The most obvious thing to do is remove rent control and zoning restrictions and push for the construction of higher buildings with more units. Stop living in the past and pretending it's a quaint coastal town. San Francisco is statistically the second most dense city in the US, wedged into a geographically bounded ~50 sq miles. It's dumbfounding that there were probably more high rise apartment buildings (>20 stories) in my zip code back in NY than in all of SF.
mahyarm 13y ago
SF and the bay area have an anti-development attitude in general, leading to a predictable supply shortage and thus the crazy rents you have now. This is how you solve it: 1. Allow development, stop getting in the way. 2. Create punitive pigovian long term unused property taxes to encourage property use. Stop land owners from letting property just sit there unused and discourage using property just as a fancy bank account for the wealthy.
Miyamoto 13y ago
Eh, lots of things can be done. They all involve development though, and SF is stubborn. Build vertically. Look at Tokyo if you need ideas of super density.
rprospero 13y ago
I find it interesting that everyone sees this as a sliding scale with culture on one side and rent on the other. There's a third variable that the city could play with to keep the rent down while not building a single building: Raise Taxes If you want to lower prices and you can't/won't increase supply, the obvious solution is to lower demand. Adding a sharp jump in the local income tax at a high income level will free up housing space as wealthy citizens leave the city. The less affluent won't see a tax increase, since it's outside their bracket, but they will see housing become available, lowering rent prices. Of course, this will be a hit on the economy as all the wealthy individuals leave the area, but it decreases rent while keeping culture constant.

tomkarlo 13y ago

An agenda-driven article based on an unsupported anecdote (that lots of his friends are moving to Oakland) and topped with a click-bait headline. If there was really any net "exodus" going on, landlords wouldn't be raising rents 25-30% each year.

equalarrow 13y ago
Well, what it really is is families and non-millionaires looking to buy. I mean, you can buy studios/1br's for around $300k-$400k (my wife and I have a close friend doing this). But for the most part, it's all cash everywhere and a lot of it. We are contemplating the exodus in a few years but not so much because of prices, but schools. Before I had kids, I was in step with SF politics / justifications of how things are done here. But, of course, after kids you're like "hey, wait a minute". The school lottery is a family bug spray here. It's not just the fact that you're kid could be: a) bused to a different area of the city away from the possible school right across the street from you b) bused to a crappy school across the city but also that this destroys neighborhoods. When I grew up (in southern california), I went to school with all the kids in my neighborhood. Not here, that would be too simple. So what this does is forces you to east bay or north bay if you don't want to partake in this social experiment and can't afford private school (I won't even mention the fact that even if you can afford private school, there's massive competition to then get into one). All in all, this puts huge pressure on parents and they have to ask the question "do I want to be part of a social experiment where my kids won't even go to school with other neighborhood kids or do I just want them to go to a good school so they can grow up and then have some sort of normal life"? So, the reality I see consists of 2 groups (of which we have friends in both): those that can't afford to buy or our outbid on everything and those parents that can't afford or are out-competed on private schools. That said, I love SF. I've live here for 20+ years. I'll always love it here. Do I hold a grudge towards the city? Nope. I see it mostly as just the way things are and even if some people did have a short time where they were able to stall growth, it won't last forever. The city has to expand and it will. If it doesn't it will die and I just can't see that happening.
- tomkarlo 13y ago
  I agree 100% with you about the schools problem (and I'm facing it myself.) I've lived in a number of cities and SF has stunned me at the near total lack of school-age children. It's stunning - especially in my neighborhood (SOMA) you just never see kids walking to school in the morning. This has to be the largest drawback to living in SF, and one of the biggest reason middle-income to upper-middle-income families move out of town.

peterwwillis 13y ago

See, this is why I love Baltimore. We've got charm out the ass AND our rents are low. Quite frankly i'm disappointed in how cartoonish SF's neighborhoods seem. Here's the hippie burner neighborhood, and here's the spanish hipster neighborhood, and here's the rich white boating neighborhood, and here's the dingy chinese black market neighborhood, and here's the financial district complete with skyscrapers and shops that close at 6pm. It's like a dirty spicy version of DC.

geuis 13y ago
You have a very stilted view of neighborhoods here. There's nothing at all cartoonish about any part of the city. Well, Fisherman's Warf, I'll grant you that one. That's as typical a tourist trap as any.
gregd 13y ago
I'm not even sure what "cartoonish" means. Where did you get that assessment? Having grown up in and around SF for my formidable years, SF has charm but seriously lacks in affordability. I can't imagine what you mean by cartoonish.
- hallowtech 13y ago
  Maybe this is why he thinks they're cartoonish? http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/1958-moving-to-san-francisco http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/1958-moving-to-san-fra... http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/2138-moving-to-san-francisco-part-2 http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/2138-moving-to-san-fra...
  - peterwwillis 13y ago
    Yep. When visiting SF, I tried to walk a lot to see the city change. Going into different neighborhoods felt more like stepping into completely different cities. I'd hear X neighborhood was full of Y, and it was exactly that. Perhaps it blends more once you live there, but I was really struck by the cultural divisions.

songzme 13y ago

I just bought a house in Berkeley. I wanted to buy a condo in SF, but for the same price of a 2 bedroom condo in SF with 1200 sqft I could buy a house in berkeley with 6700sq ft lot size with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and a huge backyard all to myself. Even if I had all the money in the world, I'll buy rather buy a house in berkeley over a condo in SF. There are plenty of restaurants around berkeley, and many places to hang out. The only thing I'm missing out if I live in Berkeley is all the awesome tech events in SF.

steven2012 13y ago

My wife and I are blessed to be bottom-end 1%-ers, and even we could not afford to live in SF, so we moved down into the peninsula. Well, we might be able to afford it if we got a crippling mortgage, but then we couldn't afford day care for our kids, and the 1hr+ commutes would have wreaked havoc on our lives. You can't raise a family in SF without making enough money to afford a $1.4M house, and spending $2000/month on private school per kid because the SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity).

geebee 13y ago
Here's a link to API scores for SF elementary schools. http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/schools/?gradeLevels=e&st=public http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/schools... Test scores don't tell the whole story, and I'll agree that there is some political stupidity, but think it's fair to say that the blanket statement "SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity)" is incorrect. For an urban district, I believe SFUSD has an unusually high number of extremely high performing schools. There are some very bad ones too. You'll see this pattern in the surrounding areas as well. The difference is that owning a house in a high-rent district doesn't get you priority access to that school, they way it does in the burbs. As a result, a lot of people who can afford a 1.4 mil house leave SF if they don't get their top school choice, because in Marin, your high mortgage guarantees you priority access to the good school. Of course, a lot of people stay in SF precisely because they can get their kid into a 9 or 10 school even though they can't afford the 1.4mil house.
- steven2012 13y ago
  One of my coworkers lives near us, and I believe they were told to list a dozen schools in order of preference. Given the lottery nature of the system, they didn't get into a single one of them, which forced them to go the private school route.
  - geebee 13y ago
    This is a long standing and very intense debate in SF. You can reasonably criticize the "lottery" system, and you can reasonably defend the "school choice" system. Kind of funny that Reason magazine, not normally a big cheerleader for SF politics, kind of likes the approach. http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-educatio http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-... Anyway, I think it's perfectly reasonable to defend or criticize the assignment process, I just don't think you can accurately claim that SF public schools are horrible.

n0rb3rt 13y ago

I just turned down an offer at Apple because, even with the (by any other standards) generous salary and options, the cost of housing just doesn't leave any room for saving for college, retirement, no less owning a home.

gregd 13y ago
SF makes San Jose, Cupertino, Mountain View, etc., look affordable.

bluedino 13y ago

>> If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams, >> a place a parent can raise kids and not have to spend every minute at work—we have to fix the supply problem. Why? Why can't it stay the playground of the rich and people who are trying to pursue their dreams can live in <insert name of nearby city> >> Subsidizing affordable homes for 10,000 families comes at a price of tag of $2.5 billion. >> So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can. No. While I am for subsidized housing, I don't feel it should be done in extremely rich areas just for the heck of it. I'm not saying to start housing projects where nobody wants to live, but there's no sense in burning money to build them where costs are extraordinary.

netcan 13y ago
I totally agree with you on subsdization. Subsidizing a few thousand people so they people can live someplace expensive is insane. OTOH, this and other manifestations of what feels like a binary income distribution is a tricky thing. Rich neighbourhoods are one thing. Rich schools. Rich cities is a new thing. It creates feedback.

crazygringo 13y ago

> To subsidize affordable homes for 100,000 people would cost $25 billion. So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can. What?! Why on earth would I want my tax dollars subsidizing your rent? I mean, charity to the poor, homeless, etc. is one thing (it's good), but subsidizing your rent so you can be closer to boutique coffee shops? Instead of, you know, helping the truly needy get health care? Or investing in education? Gimme a break. > If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams Why does San Fran specifically have to be that place? The Bay Area's a big place. By the end of the article, the author's right about needing a more integrated metropolitan policy, but this attitude that "everyone deserves to live in San Francisco, even people with no money" gets tiring after a while. Neighborhoods and cities gentrify. People move elsewhere, to the new-and-upcoming-and-more-interesting neighborhoods/cities. Places change. That's just how it is.

bsullivan01 13y ago
To subsidize affordable homes for 100,000 people would cost $25 billion. and then another 100,000 people would move in there. So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can. Skip as many meals as you want, work as many hours and you want to do that. People can move to different cities you know...
mbreese 13y ago
Any thriving city needs a mix of people. If for no other reason, then think out support staff. What about waitresses, cooks, cleaning staff, janitors, bus drivers or any number of low-paying/skill but absolutely needed workers. Where should they live? Why can't they live close to work? And if they need to commute into the city to work, how far out can they get pushed before it's not worth it any more? Thinking that an entire city could consist of highly paid tech workers is a fantasy. And what about families? It's next to impossible to afford to have a family in the city. What will those tech workers do when they want to start a family? Do you really want them all moving to the east bay instead of helping to grow the city?
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geebee 13y ago

This article makes an interesting comparison between San Francisco and Seattle. "San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it's starting from a smaller overall population base). While Seattle decided to embrace infill development as a way to save open space at the edge of its region and put more people in neighborhoods where they could walk, San Francisco decided to push regional population growth somewhere else." Interesting point, but are we comparing apples-to-apples? Here's the wikipedia page for Seattle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle land area is 142 sq miles, current population density is 7,402/sq mi . For San Francisco, we get: https://www.google.com/#q=wikipedia+san+francisco https://www.google.com/#q=wikipedia+san+francisco land area is 46.87 sq mi, population density is 17,620/sq mi. Now, the article did mention "infill" which sounds more urban, so maybe there's a difference in the city and county of Seattle? I don't really know how that works up there. San Francisco is a very rare case where the city and county are the same. The article doesn't seem clear about this - how are we defining "Seattle" for the purposes of this article? If we cherry picked a 142 square mile area around SF, I think we could probably substantial construction and growth. In some ways, the article even goes on to mention this by talking about how SF and Oakland aren't part of the same city, but that this is where the growth is starting to happen. SF is at the point where there isn't much left to be infilled. There certainly is some, but by and large, you'd have to tear something down to build something up - at least to a much larger extent than cities that get to be defined as a 150 square mile area or more. I don't think there's much to be done here... but I think people are coming down pretty hard on SF. My guess is that you could easily circle 48 square miles of most major cities with comparable population density that haven't allowed much construction in the last 50 years or so, and you could easily circle 150 square miles around SF that make it look like it has pursued rapid growth policies. The difference is that because of the way borders work in the bay area, SF appears to be hostile to development because the new growth happens elsewhere.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Now, the article did mention "infill" which sounds more urban, so maybe there's a difference in the city and county of Seattle? Seattle is in King County, which has a total area of 2,307 sq. mi. This is clearly referring to the city proper, which is, as you note, still much bigger than the City and County of SF, and much less densely populated to start with.

thehme 13y ago

I always thought that public transit in the tri-state area was something you could not get anywhere else in the country and this article helps enforce that thought. However, it does bother me that gentrification moves people out of areas they once called home, and I wish this was not the collateral damage of what otherwise seems to be a positive trend. I certainly would not like to have to move because people who can pay more than me move in and force me out of my town. Then again, if moving to the town next door forces schools and services to become better, than maybe it's not so bad. It looks to me like no matter how positive the intentions, supply and demand will always rule along with their friend $$.

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legohead 13y ago

Doesn't NYC have a rent problem as well? I have lived in Russia, and visited San Francisco once. I have to say, I was more uncomfortable in SF than I ever was in Russia. Personally, I don't see the appeal. Reading this article, it makes me feel the author has on rose colored glasses when it comes to this city.

chrisgw 13y ago
Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn have a rent problem, but most people commute from the outer boroughs, Long Island, and New Jersey where rent is much cheaper.

tsotha 13y ago

Did I just miss it, or did he really lament the lack of new housing in SF without even mentioning rent control?

malyk 13y ago
What does new housing have to do with rent control? Housing built after 1979 isn't rent controlled.
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Futurebot 13y ago

There are a couple of ways to alleviate this: 1) Build higher. A lot higher. 2) Massively increase supply. Put in place a regulation that says all new buildings must be X stories high (20,40,60, whatever.) Along with that, include a regulation that force said buildings to fit in with the neighbhorhood look. UWS and the West Village here in NYC have great examples of extremely tall buildings that are not Jetson's-style eyesores. Also put in place a regulation that says existing building that can be built higher (while keeping the existing external facade) should be. Where this isn't possible, knock it down and replace it with a building that keeps the old facade. Change the zoning restrictions and regulations to allow the above, and supply will go up, prices will (eventually) come down, and the neighbhorhood looks will remain similar. Everyone gets some of what they want, and the place stays diverse, vibrant, and does not force local workers to deal with punishing commutes just so they can do their jobs. The above applies just as much to NYC or any other large city that is holding back this kind of development. As per the UN: "In 1950, one-third of the world’s people lived in cities. Just 50 years later, this proportion has risen to one-half and will continue to grow to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. Cities are now home to half of humankind." Policies need to change to deal with this new reality.

CalRobert 13y ago

Perhaps if the cities to the south of SF weren't so stultifyingly boring, people wouldn't feel so compelled to live in the city. Imagine you're 25 and single, do you really want to live in low density single-family housing? Hellholes like Fremont? Unfortunately zoning laws and nimbys prevent the construction of livable, high density housing in favor of more suburban prisons.

cmbaus 13y ago

Subsidizing is NOT the answer. This will drive up prices for everyone living above subsidies. The problem is demand WAY outstrips housing supply. In my opinion the one thing that could kill the Bay Area economy is the aversion to residential construction. Housing stock on the Geary corridor could be easily increased, and even a modest improvement to the transit system in that area could make a big difference. It is absolutely crazy to artificially restrict residential building in areas where there is high employment demand. It is almost like we want to prevent economic growth. The US is a crazy place. We complain that there isn't enough economic growth, but when it happens, we put in all kinds of restrictions that limit it.

gdubs 13y ago
This is kind of like arguing that the way to fix LA's traffic problem is to build more freeways. For a time congestion will ease, and then before you know it there will just be more cars, and the traffic will return. More concrete, more cars, same problem.
- cmbaus 13y ago
  No it isn't. Building high density housing is nothing like building more freeways. Edit: Many people argue in favor of building restrictions on the basis of environmental concerns, but limiting housing in SF is just pushing more people out to places like Sacramento, which are suburban waste lands and models of inefficiency.
  - gdubs 13y ago
    I'm not arguing that urban density is less efficient, but that the increased capacity would simply be filled with more high-paid workers. The city would have to throw up a ton of housing projects to have an effect on the median housing costs. IMHO it would be better to spend that money transforming the transportation and public education systems...

jff 13y ago

I've often thought that while everyone complains about how hard transit is in the bay area, we're kind of screwed by geography. The Bay is this big asshole sitting right in the middle of everyone. All of our development is spread out in a ring around the bay, which inflates the distance from one place to another. If you took a map and cut out the bay, then pulled all the shorelines together, it would only be 15 minutes to get from San Jose to Oakland or San Francisco. But nope, we have to go in a big damn ring.

ffrryuu 13y ago

I'm looking to move to Texas here.

sAuronas 13y ago

I used to build mixed-income housing (one third subsidizes public housing units, one third 80% of area median and one third market rate) for a private partnership to redevelop Chicago's public housing. I can tell you this...fail. Does not compute. Does not work--socially (as an experiment) or financially. The best thing to do is to give mayors the ability to build and get city planners (disclaimer: I'm trained as one) out of the way. Affordable housing cannot be built new, but is usually created as a side effect when replacement units come on line and push down prices in existing units. SF will never be able to accommodate all incomes as long as there is no open-source planning guidelines that are geared to meeting this demand and give developers that " by right" to build. On Oakland, I lived there and it is awesome except for crime and politics and shifty characters. Especially the Quantics [sic]. Oakland can be THAT place, if the above happens here as well. It could, conceivably be better (yeah, I said it) than SF.

pconf 13y ago

This is typical real-estate developer rhetoric "we can continue growing forever". Don't look behind the curtain, though, at the real reason redeveloped neighborhoods are sometimes more affordable i.e., you get what you pay for. IMO not every city is well served by demolishing large tracts of historic buildings for the glass-facade utilitarian apartment buildings predicated on Quonset hut structural engineering principles (cheap, fast, profitable, not to be confused with architecture). Let the developers work where they're needed, Brisbane, Millbrae, SSF, etc. but leave San Francisco's character and beautiful neighborhoods to those who appreciate _living_ in them (vs profiting off of them). The Examiner did a great article on the damage done to the City by redevelopment of the type this article advocates, in the 50s and 60s. Seems now to be available at USA Today: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-09-2450995649_x.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-09-245099... IMO, if you want to see exactly what Gabriel Metcalf is talking about go to the City's Western Addition and while there ask yourself if it was worth it.