10 ms·

San Francisco Is Eating Itself

40 points by timr 13y ago

calcsam 13y ago
1400 for a 2br in Glen Park? Good luck getting that for 2000 today...
- raldi 13y ago
  Glen Park doesn't really have apartments; 99% of its residential buildings are houses. If someone's advertising an apartment as "Glen Park" it's almost certainly going to turn out to actually be in Sunnyside or Diamond Heights.
  - deleted 13y ago
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- kchoudhu 13y ago
  2K for a 2 bedroom. Man, maybe I should move from NY to SF.
- deleted 13y ago
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lambdaphage 13y ago
I'm pretty confused about how shuttle buses became the preferred metonymy for corporate evil. As if replacing each bus with twenty cars would make SF a better place for anyone?
- gruseom 13y ago
  Perhaps because there's such a clear symmetry with public transport. Symbolism has its own logic, and the thing that becomes emblematic usually is not the most important one physically or rationally.
- bluekeybox 13y ago
  You are using logic. Stop where you are.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - lambdaphage 13y ago
      If you believe an argument to be unsound, you can point out the error. That is one of many advantages arguments have over rhetorical questions.
      - supersystem 13y ago
        I did. "replacing each bus with twenty cars" You assume that either is this solution or no solution, which isn't necessarily true. In fact I would argue that this proprietary solution makes other solutions less viable. Both from a political and economic standpoint, with less pressure on the government and less usage for any public solution.
        lambdaphage 13y ago
        I anticipate this reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7088378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7088378
- wmf 13y ago
  The theory is that without buses Silicon Valley employees would stay in the valley, causing less competition for housing. Of course, this theory ignores all the tech companies with offices in San Francisco.
  - lambdaphage 13y ago
    Not to mention the 70% of Silicon Valley workers in the linked study (http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/01/15/study-30-percent-tech-shuttle-riders-would-move-sf-if-there-weren%E2%80%99t-tech-shuttle http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/01/15/study-30-percent-tec...) [note: figure comes from self-reports] who would stay and presumably commute by car.
  - supersystem 13y ago
    I'm not sure that's the core of the issue so much as disappointment over the tech companies preserving the status quo making it easy for those in power to avoid the issues.
- shalmanese 13y ago
  I'm pretty confused about how shuttle buses became the object of ire given that, from my perspective, it seems like most of the growth is being driven by startups now preferring SF as their home base of operation rather than bussed employees to south bay companies. AirBNB, Dropbox, Twitter, Uber etc are all thousand people companies and almost all of the employees live in SF.
- patio11 13y ago
  My theory for this is that Google is essentially a functioning welfare state which is geographically co-located with a dysfunctioning welfare state. If it weren't the Google bus it would be the Google food kitchens, the Google social insurance, the Google healthcare, the Google subsidized apartments, the Google free education, etc etc. Nothing so frustrating to hear that your dream polity has been realized in your town and you're not invited.
  - ahomescu1 13y ago
    I'm not sure I'd call Google a "welfare state". They're not really tolerant of slackers, if you stop pulling your weight then you're out in the street.
    - patio11 13y ago
      Among the type of people who think "'welfare state' describes the kind of society I wish to live in", welfare state does not mean "we pay people to be slackers", it means "we have fairly robust systems for preventing the vagaries of life from materially impacting our citizens." n.b. Not to infringe upon the HN politics rule but, for avoidance of doubt, the above does not describe my personal politics.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- IvyMike 13y ago
  There is an argument that "shared pain" is the foundation of community within a city. And by avoiding the pain of commuting, the shuttle riders raise the ire of everyone who does have that pain.
- batbomb 13y ago
  Rebecca Solnit http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary
  - lambdaphage 13y ago
    I appreciate this link. I read it through, but I'm afraid it doesn't really present much of a case for... whatever it is Solnit wants to do about housing policy in SF, besides sneer at tech workers. I found the piece frustratingly long on vague innuendo and ressentiment, and short on arguments about what we ought to value, and how we ought to achieve it. Many of her arguments, such as they are, seem to follow backwards from the desired conclusion that tech workers are awful and their employers, even worse. For example, consider: > The Google Bus means so many things. It means that the minions of the non-petroleum company most bent on world domination can live in San Francisco but work in Silicon Valley without going through a hair-raising commute by car ... the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train. Of course, if the companies didn't organize shuttle buses, then they'd be accused of ruining the environment by letting their employees drive nine hours every day. "How come the most powerful corporations in the world can't shell out for a shuttle bus", you can just imagine the author asking. Furthermore, suppose Google et al. did lobby California for a fifty mile commuter rail project from SF to SV that serves practically no one but... Google et al.'s employees. Headline: Greedy Corporations Buy Off Transit Authority for Tech Nerd Express, Shift Costs to Public. In general, I'm a big fan of public transit because I think it's a situation where collective action can often improve efficiency. But arguing that Google is destroying civil society by not 'heightening the contradictions' in order to get the transit authority to build a railway to nowhere is kind of rich. Solnit's discussion of rent control is also pretty amazing. She punctuates her (completely understandable) complaints about the rental market with astonishment that the textbook unintended consequences of rent control persist despite rent control, never considering that they might be due to rent control. Prospective tenants supplicating to landlords, live-in couples occupying two units just to lock in tenancy, landlords dis-preferring long-term tenants, the overall lack of response in the housing supply to demand; these are classic symptoms which noted conservative Paul Krugman diagnoses in the article I linked elsewhere in this thread. If someone wants to write a piece in LRB defending rent control in SF, I'd sincerely like to read it. But you have to argue for it, not simply assume the desirability of a policy which is practically unanimously opposed by the people who study it professionally. Finally, although I'm of mixed mind about whether I even want to indulge this line of thought, I find it pretty stunning that someone with Solnit's pedigree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit#Early_life_and_education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit#Early_life_and_e...) presumes to speak for the poor and downtrodden, those "more frail", in a first-person piece called "Diary". It's the same sort of tenor you find on flyers like this one (http://25.media.tumblr.com/3fd37355541474385f8db330e58ebb0f/tumblr_my4qs5jHQq1rb85lvo1_500.png http://25.media.tumblr.com/3fd37355541474385f8db330e58ebb0f/...). The author, who fancies themselves immersed in "poverty, homelessness and death..violence and degradation", makes it painfully obvious that they have at least one liberal arts degree. From what I've read so far, it seems to me like the "opponents"* of tech workers in the bay area are basically the cultural ancien regime, upset about losing their cool digs and relative status to a bunch of nerds (Solnit is pretty explicit about this). If that's what this is about, I wish they'd just say it. And if they're genuinely concerned about the legitimately poor,* they should recommend serious proposals, and would probably have the support of many of the "technocrats" Solnit so despises. But mixing and matching leaves me short on both pathos and policy. --- * I use scare quotes because I still don't understand what they want to do about tech workers in SF, except disdain them so hard. Which, have at it... * * A group that, by the way, has practically zero intersection with the set of people to whom it would occur to hand out passive-aggressive, Flesch-Kincaided-out typeset essays concluding with "GET THE FUCK OUT OF OAKLAND" * * * I also suspect I am less outraged than Solnit is that a man cannot make a living as the almost-Poet-Laureate of San Francisco, and must find a cheaper place. I'm not making this up.
Semiapies 13y ago
Maybe tech companies don't have to live in overpriced, overhyped coastal cities.
- asveikau 13y ago
  When the non-coastal cities have the same job prospects, the same thing will happen to them.
  - Semiapies 13y ago
    No, there's far too much cachet to living on the East or West coasts.
- lolwutf 13y ago
  Fun fact: San Francisco is one of the few places where it's cheaper to live near the ocean, than it is to live inland! That is, 'coastal' is irrelevant to your point.
  - Semiapies 13y ago
    Not going by any of the prices I can find for San Fran.
    - bmelton 13y ago
      http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/San_Francisco,CA/37.719154916262774,37.78823846382069,-122.5297457519531,-122.38640850219724_xy/13_zm/map_v/ http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/San_Francisco,CA/37.719154916... Looking at that, the adage seems to hold true -- prices appear to fall off as you radiate away from the heart of the city. There's even a 1BR/1BA near the ocean by the USS San Francisco Memorial for $425k.
      - Semiapies 13y ago
        So we're pretending moving a few miles inland is not living on the two major US coasts.
onedev 13y ago
Do I complain about not being able to afford living in Manhattan? No. It's historically one of the most important areas in one of the most important cities in the world. In the same way, why are people constantly complaining about not being able to afford living in San Francisco? It's one of the hottest cities on the planet right now. I don't get where this entitlement is coming from that people feel that they SHOULD be able to live there without paying the price? I'm not saying there aren't real societal issues in San Francisco, but I think the entitlement from the people who can't afford to live there doesn't make sense to me. Yes, we should try to make San Fran affordable as possible. Yes, more housing should be built, etc, etc. However, the entitled way in which the less fortunate approach this situation is what baffles me.
- supersystem 13y ago
  I don't see how the "money should trump everything" argument is less entitled. Of course I'll think this will change if the fortunate side becomes reserved for the very fortunate, like has happened in some other cities.
  - lambdaphage 13y ago
    What criterion do you suggest to determine who lives in SF, besides "let people come to mutually beneficial arrangements among themselves"? Keep in mind that the most common alternative policy, rent control, is widely acknowledged (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...) to turn rental markets into basket cases. There are currently a host of policies that keep people from doing what they would otherwise very much like to do, which is building new higher-density housing and living in it. That would result in net gains, whereas arguing about who gets to live in SF is pretty much zero-sum. Yet people really seem to like to argue over the latter, and are weirdly quiet about the former.
    - supersystem 13y ago
      I don't have time to do this largr discussion justice, but if you can't tell I think value associated with stable, and preferably cheap, housing is important enough to protect. Regardless if it's preventing a housing market crash, having rent control or forcing increased development.
mooreds 13y ago
Cached version for those who are getting a database connection error: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S1lWjQ6p8wQJ:alexcastle.net/2014/01/17/san-francisco-is-eating-itself/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S1lWjQ6...
asveikau 13y ago
What I dislike the most about the anti-techie rhetoric is how they seem to think every 22 year old kid who takes an offer from Google is basically a clone of Larry Ellison. This group may have a wage above the average but is still middle class. That guy's boss's boss's boss's boss is who they should be more worried about. (But he probably lives in the south bay.) Then again, I was walking around SoMa with my family one day not too long ago and found myself stuck on the sidewalk in a large crowd of fratboy types who might as well have been straight out of the caricatures in a bunch of these articles... They were talking about working in the south bay and speculating on real estate. Really annoying kids. I get irritated too.
Tossrock 13y ago
" I don’t have any answers to how to make it better. I’m not even sure it can be made better. " Sorry, but isn't the answer just to change the zoning laws preventing residential buildings over 3 stories from being built in most neighborhoods? This seems pretty straightforward.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  There are ultimately other constraints on density. For California, as with much of the West, water is an ultimate limit. Though the argument that San Francisco cannot increase housing densities on account of water access is ... even in this drought year ... likely invalid. Largely as the housing is being constructed elsewhere within the same larger watershed. There are other constraints. San Francisco traffic, parking, and transit are all fairly strained as it is, particularly in the the denser core of the City (downtown, SOMA, Mission). Access from the outer neighborhoods to the core can be as long or longer than suburban commutes, though bicycles offer a pretty good year-round alternative. For San Francisco, biting the bullet and allowing additional housing to be built, yes, even housing that is primarily marketed to the nouveau riche and upscale, would likely relieve much of the pressure for the rest of the community. Another solution, of course, would be to provide more housing and more attractive housing throughout the rest of the region. As Geoffrey Nunberg recently commented icily, Palo Alto is a wonderful place to raise a car (and PA is positively urban compared to much of the greater, or should I say, worser, Silicon Valley). While much of SF is limited to heights of 3 stories, the Valley is, with very, very few scattered exceptions, one. Accepting that it is in fact part of a larger megapolis and acting like it would be a net benefit. Too would be for employers to locate to other locations accessible via transit. Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, and other stops along BART have the benefit of a commute system with high levels of service and a broad collection region. And yet the bulk of tech jobs continue to be located either along the 101 corridor (a hellhole), in the South Bay, or, increasingly, in San Francisco. With the exception of the last, transit is a barely viable option, and even within SF, unless you're in the dense cores (again: downtown, SOMA, Mission), access to what transit there is down the Peninsula is highly limited. The dedicated company shuttles are an extremely appropriate response to the situation, and the outrage against them wholly misplaced. Is this a bubble? Probably. Are some of the new arrivals annoying and socially maladroit? Quite. Does that change any of my commentary? No. San Francisco isn't the only region faced with high housing costs: New York, London, and Mumbai all have similar (and arguably worse) challenges. There are many parts of the world, and numerous of those within the US, which would love to have these problems. Addressing the situation rationally, unfortunately, seems difficult to impossible, and sadly many of the tantrum-throwing children (on all sides of the issue) draw the most attention. Shame on the media for that.
cllns 13y ago
> It is a free country, right? People are still free to live anywhere they can pay the rent, right? That's true, if you're white. http://www.propublica.org/series/living-apart http://www.propublica.org/series/living-apart http://www.urban.org/publications/410821.html http://www.urban.org/publications/410821.html
ryanobjc 13y ago
I find it interesting how the SF's rent control seems to not be well understood by many. For example, people quote the ellis act as a frequent way in which people are evicted, and hold it up as proof that long time renters have no security. But that's not exactly 100% of the truth. Sure Ellis act can be used to do a owner-move-in (for a new owner of a rented house for example), and in theory can be used for condo conversion, BUT San Francisco strictly regulates condo conversions. Specifically buildings with > 6 units cannot be converted to condos: http://www.andysirkin.com/HTMLArticle.cfm?Article=2 http://www.andysirkin.com/HTMLArticle.cfm?Article=2 Which means that, for all intents and purposes, renters in a larger building, are just as secure as any property owner. There are guys in my building who have lived here since the moon landing. One was telling me he had to buy a black-and-white TV to watch it! In our building! Amazing history here in SF.
- dnr 13y ago
  No, not really. Buildings larger than six units can still be Ellis-ed and turned into TICs. Even if those TICs can never convert to condos, it's still often profitable to do that. (Btw, owner-move-in evictions have nothing to do with the Ellis Act. Separate laws.)
blazespin 13y ago
" They’re just individual people that learned a very boring but high-paying skill," Wait, what?
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  Programming probably seems boring to the author; it's sad he/she generalizes like this (the article link didn't work for me, so I don't know who wrote it).
  - peferron 13y ago
    From the sidebar: "ALEX CASTLE is a writer, musician, filmmaker, editor, husband, father, and hand model based in Brooklyn." Given his profile I'm not suprised he's not interested in programming, but the jump to suggesting that the activity itself is inherently boring is hilarious.
- jasonkester 13y ago
  Other people finding your dream job to be boring is benefit. The less people who choose to compete for the ludicrously overpaid, relatively straightforward knowledge work that is so much in demand at the moment, the more of it you and me get to break off for ourselves, and the more people will be willing to pay us to do so. Good thing we can stand the boredom, but it's a living, eh?
buro9 13y ago
As an outsider (London, UK based) I keep wondering why SF isn't building skywards? By which, rent prices reflect supply and demand (and some other things, but mostly basic supply and demand), there is water on three sides and a park to the South. The only thing to relieve pressure on prices will be more floor space for residential, and the only space for that is above the existing floor space. For a long while there will be a lot of profit in supplying the additional demand, so I don't get why profiteering by developers hasn't led to enormous swathes of existing housing being knocked down and 8+ story buildings being laid in their place. And if this is happening, why it doesn't happen at a far more rapid pace. Is there something preventing developers from doing this? Are there local NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard!) groups who resist the building of additional residential units? Are there city disincentives to doing this? Or is this more a case of waiting for the "big one" and starting over when that happens? To an outsider, can the question be answered: Why not build up?
- pavpanchekha 13y ago
  I believe (so don't quote me) that city ordinances ban buildings higher than 3 floors. I'm sure it makes the city look nice.
- nerfhammer 13y ago
  Anti-development attitudes are endemic to the Bay Area.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  Because San Francisco greatly perceives itself, and desperately wants to remain, as a small friendly hamlet of sorts. It wants to have its cake and eat it too: the prestige and economy of a world city, and the friendliness and pleasantness of a small town. Because also San Francisco perceives itself as radical - this is true both in SF tech and outside of it - and perceives mass urbanization as symptom of all that is stodgy, traditional, and old (see: Chicago, New York City, London, etc). "Manhattanization" is a pejorative with no defense in the city - "being like New York" is anathema to a large number of people, and suggesting that SF should be like other skyward cities is immediately painting a giant bulls-eye on your own head and a guarantee that you'll never be a meaningful participant in civic discourse. In simple words, SF hates skyward-building because its worst fear is becoming New York City. To answer your questions more directly: - The city government, in response to voter demand, opposes most development outside of the downtown core, where there are actually plenty of tall buildings (almost entirely commercial). As a (shitty) compromise they've marked out a section of previously underdeveloped light industry just south of downtown for active development. This is where most of the action is. It's also not connected to mass transit, and there's currently an expensive project underway to build a brand new subway line to connect this area of town. This, despite other parts of SF being underdeveloped and already accessible to transit. - The population of San Francisco, and this includes the techies, loudly opposes dense developments. San Francisco is well known for its picturesque neighborhoods of colorful old Victorian houses. The long-time residents are loathe to see this disappear in favor of mid-rises or high-rises, and the wealthy newcomers are loathe to lose what is an aesthetic gain. Neither side seems willing to admit that the price of their aesthetic preference comes directly out of their pocket book. Proposals to knock these houses down in favor of denser housing are opposed across the board and across the wealth spectrum. All of this is official policy: http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/General_Plan/index.htm http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/General_Plan/index.htm - specifically this one: "That existing housing and neighborhood character be conserved and protected in order to preserve the cultural and economic diversity of our neighborhoods;"
aspensmonster 13y ago
And now we are at #111 on page four. Slow clap.
ps4fanboy 13y ago
As a foreigner rent control seems like a bizarre concept in a capitalist country even more bizarre that its america.
imsofuture 13y ago
This whole debate sounds as if they'd just invented gentrification. I'm having a hard time mustering outrage for anyone involved.

40 points by timr 13y ago

calcsam 13y ago

1400 for a 2br in Glen Park? Good luck getting that for 2000 today...

raldi 13y ago
Glen Park doesn't really have apartments; 99% of its residential buildings are houses. If someone's advertising an apartment as "Glen Park" it's almost certainly going to turn out to actually be in Sunnyside or Diamond Heights.
- deleted 13y ago
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kchoudhu 13y ago
2K for a 2 bedroom. Man, maybe I should move from NY to SF.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

lambdaphage 13y ago

I'm pretty confused about how shuttle buses became the preferred metonymy for corporate evil. As if replacing each bus with twenty cars would make SF a better place for anyone?

gruseom 13y ago
Perhaps because there's such a clear symmetry with public transport. Symbolism has its own logic, and the thing that becomes emblematic usually is not the most important one physically or rationally.
bluekeybox 13y ago
You are using logic. Stop where you are.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - lambdaphage 13y ago
    If you believe an argument to be unsound, you can point out the error. That is one of many advantages arguments have over rhetorical questions.
    - supersystem 13y ago
      I did. "replacing each bus with twenty cars" You assume that either is this solution or no solution, which isn't necessarily true. In fact I would argue that this proprietary solution makes other solutions less viable. Both from a political and economic standpoint, with less pressure on the government and less usage for any public solution.
      - lambdaphage 13y ago
        I anticipate this reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7088378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7088378
wmf 13y ago
The theory is that without buses Silicon Valley employees would stay in the valley, causing less competition for housing. Of course, this theory ignores all the tech companies with offices in San Francisco.
- lambdaphage 13y ago
  Not to mention the 70% of Silicon Valley workers in the linked study (http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/01/15/study-30-percent-tech-shuttle-riders-would-move-sf-if-there-weren%E2%80%99t-tech-shuttle http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/01/15/study-30-percent-tec...) [note: figure comes from self-reports] who would stay and presumably commute by car.
- supersystem 13y ago
  I'm not sure that's the core of the issue so much as disappointment over the tech companies preserving the status quo making it easy for those in power to avoid the issues.
shalmanese 13y ago
I'm pretty confused about how shuttle buses became the object of ire given that, from my perspective, it seems like most of the growth is being driven by startups now preferring SF as their home base of operation rather than bussed employees to south bay companies. AirBNB, Dropbox, Twitter, Uber etc are all thousand people companies and almost all of the employees live in SF.
patio11 13y ago
My theory for this is that Google is essentially a functioning welfare state which is geographically co-located with a dysfunctioning welfare state. If it weren't the Google bus it would be the Google food kitchens, the Google social insurance, the Google healthcare, the Google subsidized apartments, the Google free education, etc etc. Nothing so frustrating to hear that your dream polity has been realized in your town and you're not invited.
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  I'm not sure I'd call Google a "welfare state". They're not really tolerant of slackers, if you stop pulling your weight then you're out in the street.
  - patio11 13y ago
    Among the type of people who think "'welfare state' describes the kind of society I wish to live in", welfare state does not mean "we pay people to be slackers", it means "we have fairly robust systems for preventing the vagaries of life from materially impacting our citizens." n.b. Not to infringe upon the HN politics rule but, for avoidance of doubt, the above does not describe my personal politics.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
IvyMike 13y ago
There is an argument that "shared pain" is the foundation of community within a city. And by avoiding the pain of commuting, the shuttle riders raise the ire of everyone who does have that pain.
batbomb 13y ago
Rebecca Solnit http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary
- lambdaphage 13y ago
  I appreciate this link. I read it through, but I'm afraid it doesn't really present much of a case for... whatever it is Solnit wants to do about housing policy in SF, besides sneer at tech workers. I found the piece frustratingly long on vague innuendo and ressentiment, and short on arguments about what we ought to value, and how we ought to achieve it. Many of her arguments, such as they are, seem to follow backwards from the desired conclusion that tech workers are awful and their employers, even worse. For example, consider: > The Google Bus means so many things. It means that the minions of the non-petroleum company most bent on world domination can live in San Francisco but work in Silicon Valley without going through a hair-raising commute by car ... the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train. Of course, if the companies didn't organize shuttle buses, then they'd be accused of ruining the environment by letting their employees drive nine hours every day. "How come the most powerful corporations in the world can't shell out for a shuttle bus", you can just imagine the author asking. Furthermore, suppose Google et al. did lobby California for a fifty mile commuter rail project from SF to SV that serves practically no one but... Google et al.'s employees. Headline: Greedy Corporations Buy Off Transit Authority for Tech Nerd Express, Shift Costs to Public. In general, I'm a big fan of public transit because I think it's a situation where collective action can often improve efficiency. But arguing that Google is destroying civil society by not 'heightening the contradictions' in order to get the transit authority to build a railway to nowhere is kind of rich. Solnit's discussion of rent control is also pretty amazing. She punctuates her (completely understandable) complaints about the rental market with astonishment that the textbook unintended consequences of rent control persist despite rent control, never considering that they might be due to rent control. Prospective tenants supplicating to landlords, live-in couples occupying two units just to lock in tenancy, landlords dis-preferring long-term tenants, the overall lack of response in the housing supply to demand; these are classic symptoms which noted conservative Paul Krugman diagnoses in the article I linked elsewhere in this thread. If someone wants to write a piece in LRB defending rent control in SF, I'd sincerely like to read it. But you have to argue for it, not simply assume the desirability of a policy which is practically unanimously opposed by the people who study it professionally. Finally, although I'm of mixed mind about whether I even want to indulge this line of thought, I find it pretty stunning that someone with Solnit's pedigree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit#Early_life_and_education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit#Early_life_and_e...) presumes to speak for the poor and downtrodden, those "more frail", in a first-person piece called "Diary". It's the same sort of tenor you find on flyers like this one (http://25.media.tumblr.com/3fd37355541474385f8db330e58ebb0f/tumblr_my4qs5jHQq1rb85lvo1_500.png http://25.media.tumblr.com/3fd37355541474385f8db330e58ebb0f/...). The author, who fancies themselves immersed in "poverty, homelessness and death..violence and degradation", makes it painfully obvious that they have at least one liberal arts degree. From what I've read so far, it seems to me like the "opponents"* of tech workers in the bay area are basically the cultural ancien regime, upset about losing their cool digs and relative status to a bunch of nerds (Solnit is pretty explicit about this). If that's what this is about, I wish they'd just say it. And if they're genuinely concerned about the legitimately poor,* they should recommend serious proposals, and would probably have the support of many of the "technocrats" Solnit so despises. But mixing and matching leaves me short on both pathos and policy. --- * I use scare quotes because I still don't understand what they want to do about tech workers in SF, except disdain them so hard. Which, have at it... * * A group that, by the way, has practically zero intersection with the set of people to whom it would occur to hand out passive-aggressive, Flesch-Kincaided-out typeset essays concluding with "GET THE FUCK OUT OF OAKLAND" * * * I also suspect I am less outraged than Solnit is that a man cannot make a living as the almost-Poet-Laureate of San Francisco, and must find a cheaper place. I'm not making this up.

Semiapies 13y ago

Maybe tech companies don't have to live in overpriced, overhyped coastal cities.

asveikau 13y ago
When the non-coastal cities have the same job prospects, the same thing will happen to them.
- Semiapies 13y ago
  No, there's far too much cachet to living on the East or West coasts.
lolwutf 13y ago
Fun fact: San Francisco is one of the few places where it's cheaper to live near the ocean, than it is to live inland! That is, 'coastal' is irrelevant to your point.
- Semiapies 13y ago
  Not going by any of the prices I can find for San Fran.
  - bmelton 13y ago
    http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/San_Francisco,CA/37.719154916262774,37.78823846382069,-122.5297457519531,-122.38640850219724_xy/13_zm/map_v/ http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/San_Francisco,CA/37.719154916... Looking at that, the adage seems to hold true -- prices appear to fall off as you radiate away from the heart of the city. There's even a 1BR/1BA near the ocean by the USS San Francisco Memorial for $425k.
    - Semiapies 13y ago
      So we're pretending moving a few miles inland is not living on the two major US coasts.

onedev 13y ago

Do I complain about not being able to afford living in Manhattan? No. It's historically one of the most important areas in one of the most important cities in the world. In the same way, why are people constantly complaining about not being able to afford living in San Francisco? It's one of the hottest cities on the planet right now. I don't get where this entitlement is coming from that people feel that they SHOULD be able to live there without paying the price? I'm not saying there aren't real societal issues in San Francisco, but I think the entitlement from the people who can't afford to live there doesn't make sense to me. Yes, we should try to make San Fran affordable as possible. Yes, more housing should be built, etc, etc. However, the entitled way in which the less fortunate approach this situation is what baffles me.

supersystem 13y ago
I don't see how the "money should trump everything" argument is less entitled. Of course I'll think this will change if the fortunate side becomes reserved for the very fortunate, like has happened in some other cities.
- lambdaphage 13y ago
  What criterion do you suggest to determine who lives in SF, besides "let people come to mutually beneficial arrangements among themselves"? Keep in mind that the most common alternative policy, rent control, is widely acknowledged (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...) to turn rental markets into basket cases. There are currently a host of policies that keep people from doing what they would otherwise very much like to do, which is building new higher-density housing and living in it. That would result in net gains, whereas arguing about who gets to live in SF is pretty much zero-sum. Yet people really seem to like to argue over the latter, and are weirdly quiet about the former.
  - supersystem 13y ago
    I don't have time to do this largr discussion justice, but if you can't tell I think value associated with stable, and preferably cheap, housing is important enough to protect. Regardless if it's preventing a housing market crash, having rent control or forcing increased development.

mooreds 13y ago

Cached version for those who are getting a database connection error: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S1lWjQ6p8wQJ:alexcastle.net/2014/01/17/san-francisco-is-eating-itself/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S1lWjQ6...

asveikau 13y ago

What I dislike the most about the anti-techie rhetoric is how they seem to think every 22 year old kid who takes an offer from Google is basically a clone of Larry Ellison. This group may have a wage above the average but is still middle class. That guy's boss's boss's boss's boss is who they should be more worried about. (But he probably lives in the south bay.) Then again, I was walking around SoMa with my family one day not too long ago and found myself stuck on the sidewalk in a large crowd of fratboy types who might as well have been straight out of the caricatures in a bunch of these articles... They were talking about working in the south bay and speculating on real estate. Really annoying kids. I get irritated too.

Tossrock 13y ago

" I don’t have any answers to how to make it better. I’m not even sure it can be made better. " Sorry, but isn't the answer just to change the zoning laws preventing residential buildings over 3 stories from being built in most neighborhoods? This seems pretty straightforward.

dredmorbius 13y ago
There are ultimately other constraints on density. For California, as with much of the West, water is an ultimate limit. Though the argument that San Francisco cannot increase housing densities on account of water access is ... even in this drought year ... likely invalid. Largely as the housing is being constructed elsewhere within the same larger watershed. There are other constraints. San Francisco traffic, parking, and transit are all fairly strained as it is, particularly in the the denser core of the City (downtown, SOMA, Mission). Access from the outer neighborhoods to the core can be as long or longer than suburban commutes, though bicycles offer a pretty good year-round alternative. For San Francisco, biting the bullet and allowing additional housing to be built, yes, even housing that is primarily marketed to the nouveau riche and upscale, would likely relieve much of the pressure for the rest of the community. Another solution, of course, would be to provide more housing and more attractive housing throughout the rest of the region. As Geoffrey Nunberg recently commented icily, Palo Alto is a wonderful place to raise a car (and PA is positively urban compared to much of the greater, or should I say, worser, Silicon Valley). While much of SF is limited to heights of 3 stories, the Valley is, with very, very few scattered exceptions, one. Accepting that it is in fact part of a larger megapolis and acting like it would be a net benefit. Too would be for employers to locate to other locations accessible via transit. Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, and other stops along BART have the benefit of a commute system with high levels of service and a broad collection region. And yet the bulk of tech jobs continue to be located either along the 101 corridor (a hellhole), in the South Bay, or, increasingly, in San Francisco. With the exception of the last, transit is a barely viable option, and even within SF, unless you're in the dense cores (again: downtown, SOMA, Mission), access to what transit there is down the Peninsula is highly limited. The dedicated company shuttles are an extremely appropriate response to the situation, and the outrage against them wholly misplaced. Is this a bubble? Probably. Are some of the new arrivals annoying and socially maladroit? Quite. Does that change any of my commentary? No. San Francisco isn't the only region faced with high housing costs: New York, London, and Mumbai all have similar (and arguably worse) challenges. There are many parts of the world, and numerous of those within the US, which would love to have these problems. Addressing the situation rationally, unfortunately, seems difficult to impossible, and sadly many of the tantrum-throwing children (on all sides of the issue) draw the most attention. Shame on the media for that.

cllns 13y ago

> It is a free country, right? People are still free to live anywhere they can pay the rent, right? That's true, if you're white. http://www.propublica.org/series/living-apart http://www.propublica.org/series/living-apart http://www.urban.org/publications/410821.html http://www.urban.org/publications/410821.html

ryanobjc 13y ago

I find it interesting how the SF's rent control seems to not be well understood by many. For example, people quote the ellis act as a frequent way in which people are evicted, and hold it up as proof that long time renters have no security. But that's not exactly 100% of the truth. Sure Ellis act can be used to do a owner-move-in (for a new owner of a rented house for example), and in theory can be used for condo conversion, BUT San Francisco strictly regulates condo conversions. Specifically buildings with > 6 units cannot be converted to condos: http://www.andysirkin.com/HTMLArticle.cfm?Article=2 http://www.andysirkin.com/HTMLArticle.cfm?Article=2 Which means that, for all intents and purposes, renters in a larger building, are just as secure as any property owner. There are guys in my building who have lived here since the moon landing. One was telling me he had to buy a black-and-white TV to watch it! In our building! Amazing history here in SF.

dnr 13y ago
No, not really. Buildings larger than six units can still be Ellis-ed and turned into TICs. Even if those TICs can never convert to condos, it's still often profitable to do that. (Btw, owner-move-in evictions have nothing to do with the Ellis Act. Separate laws.)

blazespin 13y ago

" They’re just individual people that learned a very boring but high-paying skill," Wait, what?

ahomescu1 13y ago
Programming probably seems boring to the author; it's sad he/she generalizes like this (the article link didn't work for me, so I don't know who wrote it).
- peferron 13y ago
  From the sidebar: "ALEX CASTLE is a writer, musician, filmmaker, editor, husband, father, and hand model based in Brooklyn." Given his profile I'm not suprised he's not interested in programming, but the jump to suggesting that the activity itself is inherently boring is hilarious.
jasonkester 13y ago
Other people finding your dream job to be boring is benefit. The less people who choose to compete for the ludicrously overpaid, relatively straightforward knowledge work that is so much in demand at the moment, the more of it you and me get to break off for ourselves, and the more people will be willing to pay us to do so. Good thing we can stand the boredom, but it's a living, eh?

buro9 13y ago

As an outsider (London, UK based) I keep wondering why SF isn't building skywards? By which, rent prices reflect supply and demand (and some other things, but mostly basic supply and demand), there is water on three sides and a park to the South. The only thing to relieve pressure on prices will be more floor space for residential, and the only space for that is above the existing floor space. For a long while there will be a lot of profit in supplying the additional demand, so I don't get why profiteering by developers hasn't led to enormous swathes of existing housing being knocked down and 8+ story buildings being laid in their place. And if this is happening, why it doesn't happen at a far more rapid pace. Is there something preventing developers from doing this? Are there local NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard!) groups who resist the building of additional residential units? Are there city disincentives to doing this? Or is this more a case of waiting for the "big one" and starting over when that happens? To an outsider, can the question be answered: Why not build up?

pavpanchekha 13y ago
I believe (so don't quote me) that city ordinances ban buildings higher than 3 floors. I'm sure it makes the city look nice.
nerfhammer 13y ago
Anti-development attitudes are endemic to the Bay Area.
potatolicious 13y ago
Because San Francisco greatly perceives itself, and desperately wants to remain, as a small friendly hamlet of sorts. It wants to have its cake and eat it too: the prestige and economy of a world city, and the friendliness and pleasantness of a small town. Because also San Francisco perceives itself as radical - this is true both in SF tech and outside of it - and perceives mass urbanization as symptom of all that is stodgy, traditional, and old (see: Chicago, New York City, London, etc). "Manhattanization" is a pejorative with no defense in the city - "being like New York" is anathema to a large number of people, and suggesting that SF should be like other skyward cities is immediately painting a giant bulls-eye on your own head and a guarantee that you'll never be a meaningful participant in civic discourse. In simple words, SF hates skyward-building because its worst fear is becoming New York City. To answer your questions more directly: - The city government, in response to voter demand, opposes most development outside of the downtown core, where there are actually plenty of tall buildings (almost entirely commercial). As a (shitty) compromise they've marked out a section of previously underdeveloped light industry just south of downtown for active development. This is where most of the action is. It's also not connected to mass transit, and there's currently an expensive project underway to build a brand new subway line to connect this area of town. This, despite other parts of SF being underdeveloped and already accessible to transit. - The population of San Francisco, and this includes the techies, loudly opposes dense developments. San Francisco is well known for its picturesque neighborhoods of colorful old Victorian houses. The long-time residents are loathe to see this disappear in favor of mid-rises or high-rises, and the wealthy newcomers are loathe to lose what is an aesthetic gain. Neither side seems willing to admit that the price of their aesthetic preference comes directly out of their pocket book. Proposals to knock these houses down in favor of denser housing are opposed across the board and across the wealth spectrum. All of this is official policy: http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/General_Plan/index.htm http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/General_Plan/index.htm - specifically this one: "That existing housing and neighborhood character be conserved and protected in order to preserve the cultural and economic diversity of our neighborhoods;"

aspensmonster 13y ago

And now we are at #111 on page four. Slow clap.

ps4fanboy 13y ago

As a foreigner rent control seems like a bizarre concept in a capitalist country even more bizarre that its america.

imsofuture 13y ago

This whole debate sounds as if they'd just invented gentrification. I'm having a hard time mustering outrage for anyone involved.