8 ms·

Critics Blame Airbnb for San Francisco's Housing Problems

35 points by jfaat 12y ago

idlewords 12y ago
I like Sausalito (pop 8,000), but I've come to think it should be covered in high-density housing, with a BART stop. Same for the vast areas of the Penninsula owned by Stanford. If you drive from AT&T park southward, keeping close to the water, you will see an enormous amount of unused land. Drive through Palo Alto and you'll see McMansions with huge lawns where there should be apartment buildings. Drive up San Bruno Mountain and look around, and you'll see entire swathes of Visitacion Valley that are just empty wasteland. Colma is an entire city made of graveyards. What's missing is any kind of regional government capable of coming up with a housing and transit plan and finding the money to fund it. The result is no new homes in an area that is seeing a huge influx of workers, most of them in tech. Since those workers earn a lot of money, they price out other people. We know how to build out our cities, but for some reason that is politically impossible in the Bay Area. It's a pretty despicable abrogation of responsibility.
- justizin 12y ago
  BART was originally intended to reach Marin, but fierce opposition kept it out. Sausalito doesn't have the infrastructure for high density living, there certainly isn't room for, say, 5x as many people to commute into SF. A lot more people need to start both living and working in the east bay, it's not tenable for most of the lucrative work to be isolated in downtown SF, leaving vast swaths of the bay area largely vacant during the day, with basically noone able to live near their work in the city. Those other communities have worries about gentrification and displacement as well, but the bay area as a whole would be better off if growth were spread more evenly. This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there.
  - packetslave 12y ago
    This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. That would require those cities allowing enough housing development to support the growth.
  - pcwalton 12y ago
    > This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. The problem is that the residents of Palo Alto and Mountain View don't want more people to live there.
  - 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
    Do you also oppose cars and public transportation? Those "luxury shuttles" are just a means of transport. There are far more Bay Area commuters traveling to work every day using cars and public transportation than Google buses. A lot of people don't want to live where their employers are based, and for a variety of reasons. If these folks want to waste two hours of their life each day sitting in traffic, or be shuttled around by their employers like elementary school students so that they can live in a location more desirable to them and their families, who are you to suggest that they shouldn't be able to?
  - joe_the_user 12y ago
    Hmm, I think his first two example are parody to show how absurd the random development happening today has become. Sure, once Silicon Valley fills SF, it can go North and fill-in Marin instead of biting the bullet and building some damn high rises itself. Also, some National Parks need to be developed to feed that Valley-generated housing demand that the Vally itself has no intention of satisfying itself.
  - binarycrusader 12y ago
    I don't know why you refer to them as "luxury" shuttles. As far as I can tell, most of them don't even have working Wi-Fi. Those shuttles are keeping extra cars off the highway and the road. Why is that not a good thing? Also, not all of those shuttles are for Apple or Google, and many of them are not going anywhere near SF. They're going to areas of the South Bay where there are no practical public transport options. Even people that live in or near Mountain View take those shuttles (instead of driving) to places where they work in the South Bay. Same goes for Santa Clara caltrain and the Fremont BART station. Shuttles go from there to other places too. Personally, I think the shuttles would have been far less necessary or popular if the California Bay Area had a fast, efficient transport system that actually covered it. It's no wonder most people want to live in San Francisco, Palo Alto or Mountain View -- those locations all have some of the best public transport options and connections to other forms of transport as well. There are obviously other desirable aspects to those cities as well. As for your argument that people should live where they work -- there's not enough housing for that. Mountain View alone certainly doesn't have enough space for everyone that works at Google. Likewise, San Francisco doesn't have enough space for everyone that works there. Oh, sorry, let me correct that, Mountain View has plenty of housing -- if you're willing to pay ~$2700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment built in the 70s, $1.5 million+ for a new house (attached) or $2 million+ for a new, detached house. So before you grouse about so-called Luxury shuttles, stop and think about what the real problem is.
    - idlewords 12y ago
      It literally says "LUXURY" on the side of some of these buses.
      - binarycrusader 12y ago
        Yeah, so do some of the bars of soap in the dollar store, but that doesn't make them "luxury" in the dictionary sense of the word.
      - samstave 12y ago
        Used the same way the USG uses the word "Freedom"
  - batbomb 12y ago
    "If you want to work in fast food, you should be okay with the wages they provide". You are assuming people want to work there and that they have a large latitude of choice. Yes, it's not entirely the same because if you are educated, you do have some mobility and discretion at where you work, but there's much more available affordable housing in SF (all of SF, not just the popular places) then there is between Sunnyvale and SF combined. Just do a search of housing under $2k a month on Craigslist if you don't believe me. Available units for rent doesn't start picking up until you hit Santa Clara or Campbell. This is why I oppose people who oppose luxury shuttles: Because they should be putting their effort into increasing available housing for everyone in the bay area.
  - pjlegato 12y ago
    There are simply not enough housing units available in Mountain View, etc. Local governments authorized the construction of huge office parks, but deliberately kept residential density very low. They want the economic benefits of big business while maintaining the physical characteristics of the quaint small towns that they were a century ago, or at least of the sleepy, low density semi-rural suburbs that they were 50 years ago. Companies like Apple opened shop there precisely because at the time it was much cheaper than San Francisco. Cupertino in 1975 was something like Concord or Vallejo today. As for the shuttles, they are a sign of the profoundly broken nature of the local public transportation infrastructure rather than anything else. If there were a properly functioning integrated regional transport infrastructure, as in, say, Berlin, they would not be necessary at all.
    - landryraccoon 12y ago
      I think this is still due to Prop 13. Businesses are easy to tax, residential is impossible. There is an incentive for cash strapped municipalities to zone retail and commercial over residential. If property taxes on residential were allowed to rise, you'd see a shift in the balance.
  - eastbayjake 12y ago
    Since most people are latching onto the throwaway sentence at the end about luxury shuttles, I'm going to thank you for pointing out that distributed growth should be part of the strategy. Downtown Oakland has the transportation infrastructure to handle higher density (in a way that Sausalito, or anywhere in Marin, would take billions in investment to match) and I think Oakland should openly court more taxpayers and taxpaying businesses relocating across the bridge.
    - samstave 12y ago
      The oakland city government is focused on being a police state/surveillance city. They worked closely with the USG against Occupy Wallstreet (where they were actively working with officials on how to handle the leaders of OWS) they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring. I can only assume that they are also a customer of the Stingray cell tower MIMs.
      - dllthomas 12y ago
        "they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring." The Domain Awareness Center was originally supposed to be city-wide, but has been cut back to focus only on the port. http://oaklandwiki.org/domain_awareness_center http://oaklandwiki.org/domain_awareness_center
  - curun1r 12y ago
    > If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. You can't talk about this stuff without going all the way back to the beginning with the "worm at core" of this issue. California's prop 13 gives homeowners a significant financial incentive to do everything in their power to discourage new housing development in high demand areas like SF and Silicon Valley (all while gutting California's public school system). So Mountain View/Palo Alto residents and the elected officials that represent them all vote against any significant increase in housing all while approving a ton of new office space which raises the value of their houses by millions. Thanks to prop 13, their property taxes are capped, so that increase comes with zero down side. Repeal prop 13 and the current housing crisis will go away.
- NoPiece 12y ago
  Wouldn't make more sense to push employers to move jobs to existing urban areas (Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco) instead of trying to build more transit to suburbs, and creating even more urban sprawl?
  - idlewords 12y ago
    It would make most sense to urbanize Silicon Valley
  - afafsd 12y ago
    De-ghettofying Oakland would make a lot more sense than ruining Sausalito. Though it'll never happen, for the same reason -- local politicians depend for their livelihoods on keeping exactly the same class of people in there and voting for them. Perhaps what should really be done is to merge the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a single political unit (the City of San Francisco).
- seanflyon 12y ago
  Regional government doesn't even need a housing plan or funding. They just need to allow people to build.
  - joe_the_user 12y ago
    Basically, regional government needs a big legal stick able to knock down all local objections to building more housing the regions where the jobs are. However, to get that, regional government needs all the other stuff - a housing plan that illustrates why you need to allow people to build near the jobs and so-forth. Given the present environment, they'd probably need a good deal of money for lawyers even once you have a state or regional legal structure giving them authority to override local regulations.
    - pjlegato 12y ago
      Yep. But even the big stick doesn't always work. For example, Silicon Valley cities have managed to indefinitely delay the (approved and funded) state-level plans to upgrade the CalTrain link between San Francisco and San Jose to become a modern, high-speed train with frivolous lawsuits while they work on how to manage the cancellation.
  - binarycrusader 12y ago
    Some regional governments can't keep up with demand. For example, a month or so ago, the Mountain View department responsible for reviewing and approving new developments asked the council for a temporary moratorium. They had over 90 projects in review or development and simply couldn't keep up with them all. New (expensive) housing is popping up all over Mountain View right now...
    - pjlegato 12y ago
      They need to start building medium or high density apartments near public transport, not $2m low density McMansions.
      - 12y ago
- capkutay 12y ago
  > We know how to build out our cities, but for some reason that is politically impossible in the Bay Area. It's a pretty despicable abrogation of responsibility. The most insane part is that the drive between SF and Palo Alto/MountainView on the MAIN highway (101) is surrounded by miles of uninhabited land. Especially just north of Redwood city. I have no idea why this is the case. Are they keeping prices astronomically high to preserve marsh fauna?
  - svachalek 12y ago
    Yes. The SF Bay used to be surrounded by marshland but huge parts of it got landfilled and paved over. Turns out that leads to big problems with flooding etc. so most of the few wetlands that are left are now protected areas.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  What about the concerns of the actual people who live there, rather than the midwesterners who will be out there for the 5-10 years to start their career or figure out that they're not cut out for computers, then move either back home or somewhere that isn't a horrible place to live because it's covered in high-density housing?
  - pjlegato 12y ago
    Unlike the Soviet Union or China, we do not have internal passports and residence permits in the United States. Residents are free to move whereever they can rent or buy a place to live. Who do you think is charging those insane rents for a hole in the wall? The people who already live there. Nobody's forcing them to do that. You also presume that high density housing is inherently bad. Many people disagree with you. Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there. The problem is that Silicon Valley cities want high density offices but not high density houses. They reap the tax benefits of having big business in their city, but foist the problem of housing all of their workers off onto other nearby cities.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      Have I been red-baited? I'm not saying anything that you attribute to me. I'm saying that cities are destroying their current residents and cultures for the sake of rich tourists, and asking what will be left when they go back to Ohio because living where they live now is awful. >Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there. And because people use overpriced real estate to launder money.
LandoCalrissian 12y ago
I think the problem isn't the conversion of rent controlled apartments, it's that there are rent controlled apartments. Rent control artificially limits supply and drives up prices for everyone else. This is one of the few things economists can agree on regardless of political affiliation. This isn't Airbnb's fault.
- idlewords 12y ago
  Rent control is a political tool that allows at least some poorer people to keep living in the city. The underlying problem is severe and chronic lack of supply in absolute terms. Rent control is a way to mitigate social tension enough so the people on Google buses don't end up with their heads on a pike.
  - afafsd 12y ago
    What's the advantage of having poor people living in the city? Is it advantageous to the rich, so they can get a minimum-wage cleaner who doesn't have to commute in from Oakland? Meh, I don't think it makes a big difference. Or is it advantageous to the poor, so that they too can stand in line for a $70 bottomless mimosa brunch every Sunday or buy some nice eighteen-buck cocktails? No, that's stupid, the poor would be better off in a poorer city where (a) everything is cheaper, and (b) they don't have to suffer the indignity of being constantly surrounded by people much more successful than themselves. No poor people live in Beverley Hills, and it works out just fine for them.
    - pjlegato 12y ago
      It is psychologically advantegous for bourgeois bohemians (rich people who profess liberal or leftist political views) to find a way to magnanimously allow a few poor people to live nearby, so they can disingenuously convince themselves that they are part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Voting for housing subsidies is an easy moral balm with no downside; it lets them not feel like total hypocrites for living a high income lifestyle despite professing a profound sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged. Otherwise, they might have to give up their biannual $3,000 laptop upgrades and join the Peace Corps. In that regard, it should be noted that San Francisco's much lauded Below Market Rate (BMR) housing program actually accepts only a tiny fraction of the many eligible applicants, by lottery.[1] The actual impact on the poor at large, or on the social composition of the city, are both marginal. It's a lottery. Running a lottery undoubtedly helps the few winners, but it's not a strategy for helping any significant number of people; it's a strategy for making people feel good about themselves for seeming to help people. [1] For example, the recent Natoma Family Apartments had 60 units available, and 2,800 eligible applicants. If anything, this is an unusually high ratio for San Francisco BMR projects. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Affordable-housing-in-S-F-Depends-on-whom-you-5321064.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Affordable-housing-in-...
Camillo 12y ago
I blame the fact that BART was never extended down the Peninsula.
- idlewords 12y ago
  Or into Marin! Even a BART line along Geary to the ocean would be transformative.
  - pjlegato 12y ago
    Almost equivalently, a Muni subway along Geary that wasn't slow, overcrowded, and prone to breakdowns would be transformative. The N-Judah should also become a subway for most of its aboveground route; there's too much traffic now for it to run at street level. There used to be Muni streetcar tracks along Geary, but they became buses long ago. Both are subject to sitting in traffic for long periods. They have been talking about a Geary Bus Rapid Transit line -- a dedicated bus-only lane. If it works, it'll be better. I am at a loss to explain how the city requires 8 years (and counting) to debate whether to paint "BUS ONLY" on a street.
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  Not BART's fault -- Santa Clara county officials backed out in 1957, which caused San Mateo to back out in 1961: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_5162648 http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_5162648
deleted 12y ago
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DavidAdams 12y ago
San Francisco is has extremely low population density across vast swaths of its territory for a city with such a high demand for housing. And, unlike other world cities, most of the buildings are not architectural masterpieces with historic value. They're cheaply built, ugly little boxes. The only things that will reduce this tension would be limiting the number of people allowed to move into the city (obviously not legal) or increasing the supply of housing. There isn't a lot of new land, but it would be easy to increase the density by a factor of 2-3x by giving developers incentive to raze lower density housing and replace it with larger buildings. The could be compelled to pay impact fees and fund neighborhood improvements to ensure that transit capacity, parking, public amenities, and street life are actually improved rather than degraded. Unfortunately, the current regulatory climate in SF is 180 degrees opposed to this solution, with NIMBYism run rampant and any improvement or expansion of existing housing stock subject to a thicket of roadblocks and regulations.
- idlewords 12y ago
  This holds even more strongly for Silicon Valley, where housing density is even lower, and zoning way more restrictive. A lot of people would like to live in San Francisco, but I bet a lot of people would be happy to live in Palo Alto or Mountain View if it stopped pretending to be a suburb and became halfway affordable.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    Agreed. The entire Bay Area needs a lot more apartment buildings and far fewer suburbs. I'm surprised, sometimes, with all the perks that Google offers, they don't own an apartment building near the Googleplex. They're already 90% of the way to "company town" status; might as well embrace it.
    - potatolicious 12y ago
      Googled tried. The lack of apartments around those parts is not the fault of Google, but entirely the fault if NIMBy residents.
    - 12y ago
steven2012 12y ago
One of my friends said that their friend bought a unit at Divisidero and Fell and then another one in the same location a few years later, and AirBNB both for over $5000/month. I asked why they don't just rent it out, and they said it's easier to rent it out vs getting a tenant and being subject to draconian SF rent-control laws.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  Does your friend pay hotel/occupancy or visitor taxes on the rentals? I'm guessing not, if they're opposed to following rental tenancy laws. I guess a whole new reason to dislike the "AirBnB effect" on housing in America.
- geebee 12y ago
  I'm guessing that these are rentals for less than 30 days? If so, your friend is making a lot of money by breaking the law. Your friend may have contempt for this particular law, so in this case, this profit is an assumption of risk. Illegal activities tend to be quite profitable because they are higher risk. Honestly, though, I doubt there's all that much risk to this. Maybe even less than renting out to a permanent tenant (who has powerful rights in SF). Unfortunately, SF seems to be unusually good at passing restrictive laws with low enforcement, encouraging people to test the limits and profit, and making chumps of people who follow the rules. I just paid over $8k for permits (hell, I paid a few hundred in permit fees to replace my windows and furnace with energy efficient ones). In response, SF wouldn't allow me to put a sink in my laundry room "to make sure that I'm not putting in an illegal in-law". Meanwhile, there are illegal in-laws left and right, all done with zero permits, and no apparent enforcement. Here's the thing, I don't have contempt for the law. I think that a structural engineer and licensed electrical work with required firewalls to prevent an inferno that starts in the illegal in-law from spreading next door are actually pretty good regulations. It sounds like SF may soon allow legal airbnb with some restrictions, but like permits, this will probably be an option to register, pay money, and be regulated vs breaking the law in a nearly zero consequence environment.
  - steven2012 12y ago
meritt 12y ago
I guess AirBNB is also responsible for the vast number of high-paying jobs in the SF vicinity and the utter lack of housing development.[2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120070 [2] http://www.newgeography.com/content/003899-plan-bay-area-telling-people-what-do http://www.newgeography.com/content/003899-plan-bay-area-tel...
tilsammans 12y ago
The article mentions that Amsterdam has recently allowed short-term rental. I live in Amsterdam. While it's true that this law exists, it was created to set rules surrounding the practice. It doesn't exactly encourage it, in fact the law limits short term rental: only allowed by the main occupant less than 2 months per year you must pay tourist tax you must have permission from home ownership association your house must be rated safe by the fire department maximum 4 people no disturbances of any kind The list (in Dutch): http://www.amsterdam.nl/wonen-leefomgeving/wonen/informatie/verhuren/particuliere/@663963/pagina/ http://www.amsterdam.nl/wonen-leefomgeving/wonen/informatie/... In practice hardly anyone complies with the full list. All rent-controlled apartments are excluded from short term rental anyway, as are most free-market rental apartments. edit: removed unrelated rant :)
logfromblammo 12y ago
Yes, of course. When there is a big, ugly design flaw in the program, blame the big, ugly workaround for it. City planning is difficult. The engineering itself is actually pretty straightforward for skilled laborers, but that isn't the only thing to it. The problems usually stem from all the buildings being filled with irrational yard apes that hate and fear change, and have an unjustified interest in what their neighbors do with their property. SF needs a higher density of residental building space. People who live in SF use their political power to make demolition and construction projects aimed at increasing housing density unprofitable, or at least less profitable than similar projects undertaken elsewhere. Result: housing shortage. Solution: blame AirBnB and continue to ignore the underlying problem. The critics should be blaming those actually responsible: every person in the Bay Area that has ever opposed new construction, by any means, for any reason.
- cpncrunch 12y ago
  Agreed, there seem to be a lot of scapegoats for the SF housing problems and AirBnB is just the latest one to be pilloried.
seanflyon 12y ago
There is not enough housing and we won't allow people to build more... It must be Airbnb causing the shortage.
lnanek2 12y ago
What's really funny is the AirBnb hosts often will not let you stay 30 days, but are fine with it if you have a day missing, then book another thirty. So the hosts understand and fight really hard to prevent anyone from possibly being considered a tenant which would give them more protections under the law. If it weren't for that I'd say, yay, AirBnb, help us make more efficient use of our housing. But really it is very prejudiced against long term residency in practice, so it is really choosing a certain type of tenant and taking long term housing off market.
gregatragenet2 12y ago
I was complaining to a friend recently about how the city of Mountain View has approved so much new commercial property development while approving very little residential property development. And he brought up a good point. A lot of the unused space in Mountain View is superfund sites. The development of new commercial space is happening at these sites (the whole area around Moffett including Google). It's easy to ensure commercial entities are meeting the requirements to mitigate the pollutants in these areas (proper HVAC and ventilation systems, etc) than with individual residences - and the limits on the amount of exposure are also lower for commercial areas vs. residential areas. So this could be a strong factor on why there's way more commercial development than residential in Mountain View and surrounding communities.
owyn 12y ago
Local building policies are creating a huge problem here, but a big part of what's causing prices to skyrocket is not tech workers, it's foreign investment... for the period April 2013 through March 2014, total international sales have been estimated at $92.2 billion, an increase from the previous period’s level of $68.2 billion [1] And according to some reports, 90% of new condos sold in Miami are to foreign buyers. A soon-to-be-released study by New York consulting firm Integra Realty Resources for the Miami Downtown Development Authority, an economic-development agency, found that about 90% of the buyers of new residential units are from abroad. Despite steadily increasing prices, their appetite doesn't appear to be waning... [2] Rules for purchasing real estate in the US are generally pretty relaxed, and as wealth grows in the rest of the world, people are looking for places to invest (and probably in some cases "hide") their money. The "premier" cities receive the bulk of that investment. Tech workers and private buses do make it more convenient to live in SF and I'm sure it helps drive up the cost of renting in the city, but only 7% of the population of the city works in Tech. There are much bigger forces at play here. [1] http://www.realtor.org/news-releases/2014/07/international-home-buyers-continue-to-invest-in-profitable-us-market-realtors-report http://www.realtor.org/news-releases/2014/07/international-h... [2] http://online.wsj.com/articles/condo-builders-fuel-land-rush-in-miami-1406052941 http://online.wsj.com/articles/condo-builders-fuel-land-rush...

35 points by jfaat 12y ago

I like Sausalito (pop 8,000), but I've come to think it should be covered in high-density housing, with a BART stop. Same for the vast areas of the Penninsula owned by Stanford. If you drive from AT&T park southward, keeping close to the water, you will see an enormous amount of unused land. Drive through Palo Alto and you'll see McMansions with huge lawns where there should be apartment buildings. Drive up San Bruno Mountain and look around, and you'll see entire swathes of Visitacion Valley that are just empty wasteland. Colma is an entire city made of graveyards. What's missing is any kind of regional government capable of coming up with a housing and transit plan and finding the money to fund it. The result is no new homes in an area that is seeing a huge influx of workers, most of them in tech. Since those workers earn a lot of money, they price out other people. We know how to build out our cities, but for some reason that is politically impossible in the Bay Area. It's a pretty despicable abrogation of responsibility.

justizin 12y ago
BART was originally intended to reach Marin, but fierce opposition kept it out. Sausalito doesn't have the infrastructure for high density living, there certainly isn't room for, say, 5x as many people to commute into SF. A lot more people need to start both living and working in the east bay, it's not tenable for most of the lucrative work to be isolated in downtown SF, leaving vast swaths of the bay area largely vacant during the day, with basically noone able to live near their work in the city. Those other communities have worries about gentrification and displacement as well, but the bay area as a whole would be better off if growth were spread more evenly. This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there.
- packetslave 12y ago
  This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. That would require those cities allowing enough housing development to support the growth.
- pcwalton 12y ago
  > This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. The problem is that the residents of Palo Alto and Mountain View don't want more people to live there.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  Do you also oppose cars and public transportation? Those "luxury shuttles" are just a means of transport. There are far more Bay Area commuters traveling to work every day using cars and public transportation than Google buses. A lot of people don't want to live where their employers are based, and for a variety of reasons. If these folks want to waste two hours of their life each day sitting in traffic, or be shuttled around by their employers like elementary school students so that they can live in a location more desirable to them and their families, who are you to suggest that they shouldn't be able to?
- joe_the_user 12y ago
  Hmm, I think his first two example are parody to show how absurd the random development happening today has become. Sure, once Silicon Valley fills SF, it can go North and fill-in Marin instead of biting the bullet and building some damn high rises itself. Also, some National Parks need to be developed to feed that Valley-generated housing demand that the Vally itself has no intention of satisfying itself.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  I don't know why you refer to them as "luxury" shuttles. As far as I can tell, most of them don't even have working Wi-Fi. Those shuttles are keeping extra cars off the highway and the road. Why is that not a good thing? Also, not all of those shuttles are for Apple or Google, and many of them are not going anywhere near SF. They're going to areas of the South Bay where there are no practical public transport options. Even people that live in or near Mountain View take those shuttles (instead of driving) to places where they work in the South Bay. Same goes for Santa Clara caltrain and the Fremont BART station. Shuttles go from there to other places too. Personally, I think the shuttles would have been far less necessary or popular if the California Bay Area had a fast, efficient transport system that actually covered it. It's no wonder most people want to live in San Francisco, Palo Alto or Mountain View -- those locations all have some of the best public transport options and connections to other forms of transport as well. There are obviously other desirable aspects to those cities as well. As for your argument that people should live where they work -- there's not enough housing for that. Mountain View alone certainly doesn't have enough space for everyone that works at Google. Likewise, San Francisco doesn't have enough space for everyone that works there. Oh, sorry, let me correct that, Mountain View has plenty of housing -- if you're willing to pay ~$2700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment built in the 70s, $1.5 million+ for a new house (attached) or $2 million+ for a new, detached house. So before you grouse about so-called Luxury shuttles, stop and think about what the real problem is.
  - idlewords 12y ago
    It literally says "LUXURY" on the side of some of these buses.
    - binarycrusader 12y ago
      Yeah, so do some of the bars of soap in the dollar store, but that doesn't make them "luxury" in the dictionary sense of the word.
    - samstave 12y ago
      Used the same way the USG uses the word "Freedom"
- batbomb 12y ago
  "If you want to work in fast food, you should be okay with the wages they provide". You are assuming people want to work there and that they have a large latitude of choice. Yes, it's not entirely the same because if you are educated, you do have some mobility and discretion at where you work, but there's much more available affordable housing in SF (all of SF, not just the popular places) then there is between Sunnyvale and SF combined. Just do a search of housing under $2k a month on Craigslist if you don't believe me. Available units for rent doesn't start picking up until you hit Santa Clara or Campbell. This is why I oppose people who oppose luxury shuttles: Because they should be putting their effort into increasing available housing for everyone in the bay area.
- pjlegato 12y ago
  There are simply not enough housing units available in Mountain View, etc. Local governments authorized the construction of huge office parks, but deliberately kept residential density very low. They want the economic benefits of big business while maintaining the physical characteristics of the quaint small towns that they were a century ago, or at least of the sleepy, low density semi-rural suburbs that they were 50 years ago. Companies like Apple opened shop there precisely because at the time it was much cheaper than San Francisco. Cupertino in 1975 was something like Concord or Vallejo today. As for the shuttles, they are a sign of the profoundly broken nature of the local public transportation infrastructure rather than anything else. If there were a properly functioning integrated regional transport infrastructure, as in, say, Berlin, they would not be necessary at all.
  - landryraccoon 12y ago
    I think this is still due to Prop 13. Businesses are easy to tax, residential is impossible. There is an incentive for cash strapped municipalities to zone retail and commercial over residential. If property taxes on residential were allowed to rise, you'd see a shift in the balance.
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  Since most people are latching onto the throwaway sentence at the end about luxury shuttles, I'm going to thank you for pointing out that distributed growth should be part of the strategy. Downtown Oakland has the transportation infrastructure to handle higher density (in a way that Sausalito, or anywhere in Marin, would take billions in investment to match) and I think Oakland should openly court more taxpayers and taxpaying businesses relocating across the bridge.
  - samstave 12y ago
    The oakland city government is focused on being a police state/surveillance city. They worked closely with the USG against Occupy Wallstreet (where they were actively working with officials on how to handle the leaders of OWS) they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring. I can only assume that they are also a customer of the Stingray cell tower MIMs.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      "they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring." The Domain Awareness Center was originally supposed to be city-wide, but has been cut back to focus only on the port. http://oaklandwiki.org/domain_awareness_center http://oaklandwiki.org/domain_awareness_center
- curun1r 12y ago
  > If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there. You can't talk about this stuff without going all the way back to the beginning with the "worm at core" of this issue. California's prop 13 gives homeowners a significant financial incentive to do everything in their power to discourage new housing development in high demand areas like SF and Silicon Valley (all while gutting California's public school system). So Mountain View/Palo Alto residents and the elected officials that represent them all vote against any significant increase in housing all while approving a ton of new office space which raises the value of their houses by millions. Thanks to prop 13, their property taxes are capped, so that increase comes with zero down side. Repeal prop 13 and the current housing crisis will go away.
NoPiece 12y ago
Wouldn't make more sense to push employers to move jobs to existing urban areas (Oakland, San Jose, and San Francisco) instead of trying to build more transit to suburbs, and creating even more urban sprawl?
- idlewords 12y ago
  It would make most sense to urbanize Silicon Valley
- afafsd 12y ago
  De-ghettofying Oakland would make a lot more sense than ruining Sausalito. Though it'll never happen, for the same reason -- local politicians depend for their livelihoods on keeping exactly the same class of people in there and voting for them. Perhaps what should really be done is to merge the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a single political unit (the City of San Francisco).
seanflyon 12y ago
Regional government doesn't even need a housing plan or funding. They just need to allow people to build.
- joe_the_user 12y ago
  Basically, regional government needs a big legal stick able to knock down all local objections to building more housing the regions where the jobs are. However, to get that, regional government needs all the other stuff - a housing plan that illustrates why you need to allow people to build near the jobs and so-forth. Given the present environment, they'd probably need a good deal of money for lawyers even once you have a state or regional legal structure giving them authority to override local regulations.
  - pjlegato 12y ago
    Yep. But even the big stick doesn't always work. For example, Silicon Valley cities have managed to indefinitely delay the (approved and funded) state-level plans to upgrade the CalTrain link between San Francisco and San Jose to become a modern, high-speed train with frivolous lawsuits while they work on how to manage the cancellation.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  Some regional governments can't keep up with demand. For example, a month or so ago, the Mountain View department responsible for reviewing and approving new developments asked the council for a temporary moratorium. They had over 90 projects in review or development and simply couldn't keep up with them all. New (expensive) housing is popping up all over Mountain View right now...
  - pjlegato 12y ago
    They need to start building medium or high density apartments near public transport, not $2m low density McMansions.
    - 12y ago
capkutay 12y ago
> We know how to build out our cities, but for some reason that is politically impossible in the Bay Area. It's a pretty despicable abrogation of responsibility. The most insane part is that the drive between SF and Palo Alto/MountainView on the MAIN highway (101) is surrounded by miles of uninhabited land. Especially just north of Redwood city. I have no idea why this is the case. Are they keeping prices astronomically high to preserve marsh fauna?
- svachalek 12y ago
  Yes. The SF Bay used to be surrounded by marshland but huge parts of it got landfilled and paved over. Turns out that leads to big problems with flooding etc. so most of the few wetlands that are left are now protected areas.
pessimizer 12y ago
What about the concerns of the actual people who live there, rather than the midwesterners who will be out there for the 5-10 years to start their career or figure out that they're not cut out for computers, then move either back home or somewhere that isn't a horrible place to live because it's covered in high-density housing?
- pjlegato 12y ago
  Unlike the Soviet Union or China, we do not have internal passports and residence permits in the United States. Residents are free to move whereever they can rent or buy a place to live. Who do you think is charging those insane rents for a hole in the wall? The people who already live there. Nobody's forcing them to do that. You also presume that high density housing is inherently bad. Many people disagree with you. Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there. The problem is that Silicon Valley cities want high density offices but not high density houses. They reap the tax benefits of having big business in their city, but foist the problem of housing all of their workers off onto other nearby cities.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    Have I been red-baited? I'm not saying anything that you attribute to me. I'm saying that cities are destroying their current residents and cultures for the sake of rich tourists, and asking what will be left when they go back to Ohio because living where they live now is awful. >Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there. And because people use overpriced real estate to launder money.

LandoCalrissian 12y ago

I think the problem isn't the conversion of rent controlled apartments, it's that there are rent controlled apartments. Rent control artificially limits supply and drives up prices for everyone else. This is one of the few things economists can agree on regardless of political affiliation. This isn't Airbnb's fault.

idlewords 12y ago
Rent control is a political tool that allows at least some poorer people to keep living in the city. The underlying problem is severe and chronic lack of supply in absolute terms. Rent control is a way to mitigate social tension enough so the people on Google buses don't end up with their heads on a pike.
- afafsd 12y ago
  What's the advantage of having poor people living in the city? Is it advantageous to the rich, so they can get a minimum-wage cleaner who doesn't have to commute in from Oakland? Meh, I don't think it makes a big difference. Or is it advantageous to the poor, so that they too can stand in line for a $70 bottomless mimosa brunch every Sunday or buy some nice eighteen-buck cocktails? No, that's stupid, the poor would be better off in a poorer city where (a) everything is cheaper, and (b) they don't have to suffer the indignity of being constantly surrounded by people much more successful than themselves. No poor people live in Beverley Hills, and it works out just fine for them.
  - pjlegato 12y ago
    It is psychologically advantegous for bourgeois bohemians (rich people who profess liberal or leftist political views) to find a way to magnanimously allow a few poor people to live nearby, so they can disingenuously convince themselves that they are part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Voting for housing subsidies is an easy moral balm with no downside; it lets them not feel like total hypocrites for living a high income lifestyle despite professing a profound sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged. Otherwise, they might have to give up their biannual $3,000 laptop upgrades and join the Peace Corps. In that regard, it should be noted that San Francisco's much lauded Below Market Rate (BMR) housing program actually accepts only a tiny fraction of the many eligible applicants, by lottery.[1] The actual impact on the poor at large, or on the social composition of the city, are both marginal. It's a lottery. Running a lottery undoubtedly helps the few winners, but it's not a strategy for helping any significant number of people; it's a strategy for making people feel good about themselves for seeming to help people. [1] For example, the recent Natoma Family Apartments had 60 units available, and 2,800 eligible applicants. If anything, this is an unusually high ratio for San Francisco BMR projects. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Affordable-housing-in-S-F-Depends-on-whom-you-5321064.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Affordable-housing-in-...

Camillo 12y ago

I blame the fact that BART was never extended down the Peninsula.

idlewords 12y ago
Or into Marin! Even a BART line along Geary to the ocean would be transformative.
- pjlegato 12y ago
  Almost equivalently, a Muni subway along Geary that wasn't slow, overcrowded, and prone to breakdowns would be transformative. The N-Judah should also become a subway for most of its aboveground route; there's too much traffic now for it to run at street level. There used to be Muni streetcar tracks along Geary, but they became buses long ago. Both are subject to sitting in traffic for long periods. They have been talking about a Geary Bus Rapid Transit line -- a dedicated bus-only lane. If it works, it'll be better. I am at a loss to explain how the city requires 8 years (and counting) to debate whether to paint "BUS ONLY" on a street.
eastbayjake 12y ago
Not BART's fault -- Santa Clara county officials backed out in 1957, which caused San Mateo to back out in 1961: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_5162648 http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_5162648

deleted 12y ago

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DavidAdams 12y ago

San Francisco is has extremely low population density across vast swaths of its territory for a city with such a high demand for housing. And, unlike other world cities, most of the buildings are not architectural masterpieces with historic value. They're cheaply built, ugly little boxes. The only things that will reduce this tension would be limiting the number of people allowed to move into the city (obviously not legal) or increasing the supply of housing. There isn't a lot of new land, but it would be easy to increase the density by a factor of 2-3x by giving developers incentive to raze lower density housing and replace it with larger buildings. The could be compelled to pay impact fees and fund neighborhood improvements to ensure that transit capacity, parking, public amenities, and street life are actually improved rather than degraded. Unfortunately, the current regulatory climate in SF is 180 degrees opposed to this solution, with NIMBYism run rampant and any improvement or expansion of existing housing stock subject to a thicket of roadblocks and regulations.

idlewords 12y ago
This holds even more strongly for Silicon Valley, where housing density is even lower, and zoning way more restrictive. A lot of people would like to live in San Francisco, but I bet a lot of people would be happy to live in Palo Alto or Mountain View if it stopped pretending to be a suburb and became halfway affordable.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  Agreed. The entire Bay Area needs a lot more apartment buildings and far fewer suburbs. I'm surprised, sometimes, with all the perks that Google offers, they don't own an apartment building near the Googleplex. They're already 90% of the way to "company town" status; might as well embrace it.
  - potatolicious 12y ago
    Googled tried. The lack of apartments around those parts is not the fault of Google, but entirely the fault if NIMBy residents.
  - 12y ago

steven2012 12y ago

One of my friends said that their friend bought a unit at Divisidero and Fell and then another one in the same location a few years later, and AirBNB both for over $5000/month. I asked why they don't just rent it out, and they said it's easier to rent it out vs getting a tenant and being subject to draconian SF rent-control laws.

wavefunction 12y ago
Does your friend pay hotel/occupancy or visitor taxes on the rentals? I'm guessing not, if they're opposed to following rental tenancy laws. I guess a whole new reason to dislike the "AirBnB effect" on housing in America.
geebee 12y ago
I'm guessing that these are rentals for less than 30 days? If so, your friend is making a lot of money by breaking the law. Your friend may have contempt for this particular law, so in this case, this profit is an assumption of risk. Illegal activities tend to be quite profitable because they are higher risk. Honestly, though, I doubt there's all that much risk to this. Maybe even less than renting out to a permanent tenant (who has powerful rights in SF). Unfortunately, SF seems to be unusually good at passing restrictive laws with low enforcement, encouraging people to test the limits and profit, and making chumps of people who follow the rules. I just paid over $8k for permits (hell, I paid a few hundred in permit fees to replace my windows and furnace with energy efficient ones). In response, SF wouldn't allow me to put a sink in my laundry room "to make sure that I'm not putting in an illegal in-law". Meanwhile, there are illegal in-laws left and right, all done with zero permits, and no apparent enforcement. Here's the thing, I don't have contempt for the law. I think that a structural engineer and licensed electrical work with required firewalls to prevent an inferno that starts in the illegal in-law from spreading next door are actually pretty good regulations. It sounds like SF may soon allow legal airbnb with some restrictions, but like permits, this will probably be an option to register, pay money, and be regulated vs breaking the law in a nearly zero consequence environment.
- steven2012 12y ago

meritt 12y ago

I guess AirBNB is also responsible for the vast number of high-paying jobs in the SF vicinity and the utter lack of housing development.[2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120070 [2] http://www.newgeography.com/content/003899-plan-bay-area-telling-people-what-do http://www.newgeography.com/content/003899-plan-bay-area-tel...

tilsammans 12y ago

The article mentions that Amsterdam has recently allowed short-term rental. I live in Amsterdam. While it's true that this law exists, it was created to set rules surrounding the practice. It doesn't exactly encourage it, in fact the law limits short term rental: only allowed by the main occupant less than 2 months per year you must pay tourist tax you must have permission from home ownership association your house must be rated safe by the fire department maximum 4 people no disturbances of any kind The list (in Dutch): http://www.amsterdam.nl/wonen-leefomgeving/wonen/informatie/verhuren/particuliere/@663963/pagina/ http://www.amsterdam.nl/wonen-leefomgeving/wonen/informatie/... In practice hardly anyone complies with the full list. All rent-controlled apartments are excluded from short term rental anyway, as are most free-market rental apartments. edit: removed unrelated rant :)

logfromblammo 12y ago

Yes, of course. When there is a big, ugly design flaw in the program, blame the big, ugly workaround for it. City planning is difficult. The engineering itself is actually pretty straightforward for skilled laborers, but that isn't the only thing to it. The problems usually stem from all the buildings being filled with irrational yard apes that hate and fear change, and have an unjustified interest in what their neighbors do with their property. SF needs a higher density of residental building space. People who live in SF use their political power to make demolition and construction projects aimed at increasing housing density unprofitable, or at least less profitable than similar projects undertaken elsewhere. Result: housing shortage. Solution: blame AirBnB and continue to ignore the underlying problem. The critics should be blaming those actually responsible: every person in the Bay Area that has ever opposed new construction, by any means, for any reason.

cpncrunch 12y ago
Agreed, there seem to be a lot of scapegoats for the SF housing problems and AirBnB is just the latest one to be pilloried.

seanflyon 12y ago

There is not enough housing and we won't allow people to build more... It must be Airbnb causing the shortage.

lnanek2 12y ago

What's really funny is the AirBnb hosts often will not let you stay 30 days, but are fine with it if you have a day missing, then book another thirty. So the hosts understand and fight really hard to prevent anyone from possibly being considered a tenant which would give them more protections under the law. If it weren't for that I'd say, yay, AirBnb, help us make more efficient use of our housing. But really it is very prejudiced against long term residency in practice, so it is really choosing a certain type of tenant and taking long term housing off market.

gregatragenet2 12y ago

I was complaining to a friend recently about how the city of Mountain View has approved so much new commercial property development while approving very little residential property development. And he brought up a good point. A lot of the unused space in Mountain View is superfund sites. The development of new commercial space is happening at these sites (the whole area around Moffett including Google). It's easy to ensure commercial entities are meeting the requirements to mitigate the pollutants in these areas (proper HVAC and ventilation systems, etc) than with individual residences - and the limits on the amount of exposure are also lower for commercial areas vs. residential areas. So this could be a strong factor on why there's way more commercial development than residential in Mountain View and surrounding communities.

owyn 12y ago

Local building policies are creating a huge problem here, but a big part of what's causing prices to skyrocket is not tech workers, it's foreign investment... for the period April 2013 through March 2014, total international sales have been estimated at $92.2 billion, an increase from the previous period’s level of $68.2 billion [1] And according to some reports, 90% of new condos sold in Miami are to foreign buyers. A soon-to-be-released study by New York consulting firm Integra Realty Resources for the Miami Downtown Development Authority, an economic-development agency, found that about 90% of the buyers of new residential units are from abroad. Despite steadily increasing prices, their appetite doesn't appear to be waning... [2] Rules for purchasing real estate in the US are generally pretty relaxed, and as wealth grows in the rest of the world, people are looking for places to invest (and probably in some cases "hide") their money. The "premier" cities receive the bulk of that investment. Tech workers and private buses do make it more convenient to live in SF and I'm sure it helps drive up the cost of renting in the city, but only 7% of the population of the city works in Tech. There are much bigger forces at play here. [1] http://www.realtor.org/news-releases/2014/07/international-home-buyers-continue-to-invest-in-profitable-us-market-realtors-report http://www.realtor.org/news-releases/2014/07/international-h... [2] http://online.wsj.com/articles/condo-builders-fuel-land-rush-in-miami-1406052941 http://online.wsj.com/articles/condo-builders-fuel-land-rush...