6 ms·
What's the Matter with San Francisco?
- wyclif 11y agoIt seems to me one of the biggest problems is rampant NIMBYism.
- nemo44x 11y agoThis was voted down and is something of an inflammatory comment but there's truth to it. You see it throughout the Valley and the entire Bay Area. It's why there is little density in the Valley in my opinion, why the public transit isn't very good among other things. I'm afraid it's hard to change. People who paid so much for their Valley homes certainly do not like the idea of the supply dramatically increasing and their pleasant, small communities becoming drastically urbanized. And I understand that. But the progressive nature of this area has always seemed face value to me as an outsider who travels to this region often. It's incredibly nice here but I believe it is time to begin building lots of high rises (scaled for quakes) in some city near SF and urbanizing areas while creating mix zoned housing and commercial similar to what you'd see in NYC. It's time for an experiment like that in the Valley somewhere.
- x0x0 11y agoBut a big piece of it is sf getting fucked by the nimbyism elsewhere. viz Mountain View: they just authorized something like 3.4 million ft2 of office space between LinkedIn, Google, etc while supposedly they're giong to add 1.5k to 5k housing units. In the future. Where are the other, say, 15 to 20 thousand people going to live? Mountain View doesn't give a shit, but a bunch of them are going to have to life in sf, because that's where there's housing.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoHow about just having the state use eminent domain to seize half of Atherton, hook it back up to CalTrain, and build dense urban housing there, with easy commuting to Mountain View and Redwood City? I jest... partially. Atherton is horrible for the whole area.
- nemo44x 11y agoHonestly, that would be a great place to start. Build lots of streets with high rises with light rail and commercial and residential stacked. With a location near Palo Alto/Stanford and the region I would bet it becomes unbelievably high in demand. Obviously this could never happen there!
- narrator 11y agoThe NIMBYism is what makes San Francisco a nice place to live. You know Marin Headlands? They had plans to cover that whole area with a subdivision[1]. A bunch of NIMBYs got together back in the 60s and blocked that and now all these people who left some overbuilt sprawl to live here want to live near there. However, they want it to be cheap and want to drastically expand the urban footprint to make it cheap. Go figure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marincello https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marincello
- refurb 11y agoThe NIMBYism is what makes San Francisco a nice place to live. So the next time someone complains about how expensive the city is I should point across the bay at Marin and say "that's your trade off"?
- narrator 11y agoYeah. Tell them they could live in a nice big apartment tower in the Marin Headlands and have a quick commute to the Presidio and Chrissy Fields across the Marin BART, which also got shot down in part by Marin NIMBYs concerned about population density[1]. Of course, Chrissy Fields and the Presidio would just be quaint names as they would be massively built up and look like SOMA if there weren't all these darned NIMBYs around. [1].http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/23/imagine_hopping_on_bart_to_get_to_marin_county.php http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/23/imagine_hopping_on_...
- throwaway2048 11y agosome city near SF, but not in SF and not in my city!
- BurningFrog 11y agoThe problem is not that people don't want new developments near their homes. People are always going to want things that benefit them. The problem is the legal situation where a lot of people and organizations that stand to gain from stopping development can veto it. In other words: We don't need better people, we need better laws.
- sbuttgereit 11y agoAs a San Franciscan all I can say is... where does one even begin to answer such a question? :-)
- smtddr 11y agoI just had a discussion about this with a coworker. I very strongly agree with this article. Diversity does not survive in expensive areas and I strongly believe that is worth preserving in San Francisco. I understand the problems rent-control causes, but if it were removed and all residential areas jump up to market price then diversity would be completely destroyed. That might not mean anything to a lot of people who work in tech(the feeling I get when I talk about it with coworkers), but I think it means a lot.
- civilian 11y agoYou're comparing two different solutions, removing rent control & allowing new housing to be built. For the sake of the argument, let's keep the rent-control, but let's let developers build new buildings! If they build on a property with rent-controlled units, they have to replace those rent-controlled units in the new building and provide housing for the tenants somewhere else while the building is being built. It's just a supply/demand problem. We should to increase the amount of housing available in SF to lower prices so we can bring in the new generation of creatives, freaks and outcasts. We've got a big hill to climb, and there would be a lot of apartment towers going up, but SF could do it. As far as rent-control goes, there's a moral argument to be made. What makes the person who's already living in SF more deserving of a place to live than the person who wants to move to SF? Rent-control is fundamentally anti-immigrant.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dylanjermiah 11y agoWhat do you mean by 'diversity'? Can you please define it?
- ectoplasm 11y ago"People with diverse incomes" satisfies his argument.
- Lazare 11y ago> Diversity does not survive in expensive areas Arguably true. > I understand the problems rent-control causes, but if it were removed and all residential areas jump up to market price then diversity would be completely destroyed. As a matter of theory, it's hard to see that rent control actually protects diversity. And emperically, it's absolutely not doing that, in San Francisco or in other cities which have tried it. Here are you choices: 1. Remove restrictions on building. Housing will be plentiful, diversity will be expanded, but what currently makes the city special will be lost (and maybe it'll end up even better, but it'll certainly change). 2. Maintain restrictions on building. Housing will be scarce, diversity will be lost, but the city won't change. Rent control is entirely orthogonal to this. IF you have scarce housing, then you must allocate it among the people who want it. One way to do this is via the market. If you do not like the way the market will allocate it, then you can cap the rents and allocate it in some other fashion. But as a society, we are extremely bad at allocating things fairly (hence why we rely on markets so much; it's not that they're very good, it's that we're really crap). Which means that the way housing under rent control will inevitably be allocated isn't going to preserve diversity. Rent control makes the lucky few who get to live in the city even luckier, but it doesn't tell you who ends up being one of those lucky few. But we know, from decades of experience, that the lucky few end tend to up being the already privileged. Notice that San Francisco—with strong rent control laws—is actually not a diverse city. Oakland—with weak ones—is one of the most diverse cities in the US. Similar patterns can be seen across the US. Your assumption that rent control aids diversity is supported neither by theory nor evidence; the fact that rent control could enable the poor to afford to live in a city doesn't mean that it will. And it doesn't. What really helps diversity is having a lot of housing relative to the number of people who want to live there. San Francisco has scarce housing.
- encoderer 11y agoThe problem to me is that people want an amazing city with a booming economy and gorgeous landscapes to be "affordable" for the man on the street. I think our progressive politics IS to blame: for deluding San Franciscans into believing such a thing is possible.
- civilian 11y agoI agree. They didn't intend this to happen, but they hold blame for being ignorant.
- dylanjermiah 11y ago"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
- schraeds 11y agoHousing restrictions protecting home values in Palo Alto. Lack of social services. These are relatively easy problems to exist that do not involve existential crisis.
- vrrm 11y agoI agree. How embarrassing for them that they even think they're worthy to be in the same geography as those who live in SF. Poor people should go to poor cities without economic resources, jobs or infrastructure. Say Detroit! That way they can be with other poor people and know their 'place'. Residents of those cities can barely wait for the influx to take what few jobs they have and drive down already low wages, that's why illegal aliens are welcomed with such open arms.
- xanderjanz 11y agoHmm, it seems like you've forgotten Detroit's history. Why it became your go-to example for a failed city.
- vrrm 11y ago
- Tiktaalik 11y agoAre there any good brownfield (old industrial land) sites left in SF that can be rezoned to high density residential? If you build residential in those sites then you'll typically get little to no push back from progressives as you are not evicting existing, low income, residents in order to build more expensive housing. By extensively rezoning vast swaths of downtown industrial land to residential Vancouver got around these problems SF is currently encountering for a few decades.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- debaserab2 11y agoWoah. I don't think any of these arguments even touched on the ones the article brought up.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bduerst 11y agoIt's funny you mention homelessness in SF and attribute it to liberalism, because it is partly attributed to Reagan closing California’s public mental health institutions and releasing the mentally disabled into the streets. It sounds more like you have a bias than a point.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- refurb 11y agoFirst off, Reagan wasn't the initiator of closing mental health facilities, it was a broader trend. Second, they didn't close them to save money, they closed them because locking someone up in a facility was deemed inhumane.
- bduerst 11y agoI never said anything about price, and that "trend" definitely wasn't liberalism. Why are you splitting hairs? Did you reply to the right comment?
- jnbiche 11y agoWhile I agree with many of your indictments of liberal policies, your statement about drug addicts gives you away as someone who has little experience with addicts, except perhaps from a distance. Anyone who has spent time around more than a handful of addicts knows that the addict experience spans the range of human personality types: slothful, industrious, peaceful, violent, smart, and dumb. Go to an AA meeting and you will see them all, just as you do in everyday society. And while there are certain personality traits that many addicts share (impulsiveness, etc), these traits have nothing to do with laziness or industriousness. So while rewarding sloth makes for happy lazy people, the only thing that causes drug addicts is... drug addiction. And its causes -- mostly biological, but also situational -- go far beyond what anyone could describe in an HN comment.
- ectoplasm 11y agoThe problem is that San Francisco is/was at the epicenter of two cultural explosions (the hippies and the hackers, to put it bluntly), and they kind of clash just a little bit.
- fapjacks 11y agoPlease don't confuse the frat boys with business degrees with the hackers who have strong roots in hippie culture.
- ectoplasm 11y agoDon't worry, I took some discrete math, and I know that A is a subset of C and B is a subset of C does not imply A intersects B.
- fapjacks 11y agoYour response reads like you're saying that the frat boys in tech management are somehow a subset of or descended from hippie culture. I know better than to think you're actually saying that, though, because that is insane.
- coldcode 11y agoIt's very difficult to build a city to serve two populations, one rich and one poor (or at least average). I would love to work in SF but have zero desire to live there because it's too expensive for everyone but the IPO crowd.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Pyxl101 11y agoThere is another way to look at this. The city serves two populations: people who currently live in a city, and people who would like to immigrate to the city. As a resident of a growing city, I find it somewhat puzzling and inconvenient that it's taken as an article of faith that large city growth is a good thing. Growth is good, but it's also bad: it brings congestion, filth, and higher housing prices. Even with the development of affordable housing, housing prices still rise. Furthermore, the traffic associated with high-density houses places a strain on the transit system and other public infrastructure and services that the city is usually unequipped to handle. Transit is often upgraded far too late, long after congestion has negatively impacted the lives of residents. It's happening to me right now in my city: coworkers have reported their commute rising considerably over the past year. So as the resident of a city who is happy with the way that it was, and is increasingly unhappy with the way it's becoming, what I'm wondering is: why should I not vote to block and prevent this growth? A lot of city politics talks as if growth is naturally a good thing that should always be pursued, but talk far less often of quality of life for residents. Growth often comes at the expense of current residents. (Gradual growth is healthy and necessary, but excess growth harms everyone.) If discouraging high-density housing means higher housing prices, but buys me less congestion and a higher quality of life, then that seems like a good tradeoff to me as a resident. Otherwise, I get higher housing prices and more congestion and a worse quality of life. Cities should serve their current residents first, and prospective future immigrants second. I suspect that the strategy that San Francisco residents are pursuing is a strategy designed specifically to make it expensive to live there, to discourage further immigration that they do not want.
- secstate 11y ago
- bradgessler 11y agoWhat's being done to change or reverse the damage these policies have inflicted on San Francisco?
- nether 11y agoFlight to the suburbs and hope that urbanization occurs before one turns 30 (unlikely).
- icanhackit 11y agothe city reveled in its diversity, with groups claiming distinct neighborhoods as their own in a modern twist on the tradition of ethnic urban enclaves. I live in a similarly diverse area where people of all backgrounds hang out. The surrounding cities are ethnically homogeneous yet this one is not. Individualism, despite some of the shittier aspects of human behavior it can bring to the table, broke people up from being in ethnicity X and thus area X to being defined by sexuality, political leaning, consumption habits and expressive tendencies, seeking those who had similar traits. Ignoring any narcissistic aspects, defining people by those traits has the benefit of producing better social liquidity.
- ams6110 11y agothe city reveled in its diversity, with groups claiming distinct neighborhoods
- caseysoftware 11y agoSo I'm not the only one who thought that was an odd line?
- corysama 11y agoThe neighborhoods in SF are very distinct. The Marina and the Mission are very different from each other. This makes the city as a whole diverse. Bikes of San Francisco: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4084/5112789301_da50dca4bd_b.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4084/5112789301_da50dca4bd_b.j...
- DonHopkins 11y agoI could never figure out why fixies were so popular with the SF hipsters in a city with such steep hills. Or how fixies make hipsters so hip, for that matter. In Amsterdam, where it's flat enough that one-speed bikes are practical, fixies are called "Oma Fiets" for "Granny Bikes". http://www.workcycles.com/home-products/handmade-city-bicycles/workcycles-omafiets-dutch-granny-bike http://www.workcycles.com/home-products/handmade-city-bicycl...
- corysama 11y agoI don't bike in the city. But, what I've heard is that fixies are popular because they are so crappy and cheap that they aren't worth stealing. They are also easy to repair. As hipness goes, a big theme of hipsters is to work really hard at looking like you aren't trying and don't care. Throw on some second-hand-store clothes to ride up the hill on a crappy, completely inappropriate bike to a very expensive dive bar to overpay for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and a dirty well whisky because that's how much you don't care.
- jmspring 11y agoSan Francisco is basically 7 miles by 7 miles. How much of what is there are you going to tear down to accommodate the influx of tech? Since gold rush times San Francisco has seen ebb and flow of populations and boom and bust periods. There is continual change, that said if it allows continual teardown of existing buildings and building of high rises, might as well be in Manhattan.
- debaserab2 11y agoManhattan island is 33 square miles and its population is 1.6 million. San Fransisco's population is 800k. There's a lot of potential room for growth before it becomes Manhattan.
- Chinjut 11y agoOh, no, not that awful hellscape Manhattan! What a fate to be avoided...
- ytpete 11y agoDoes anyone have stats on what percentage of newcomers to SF actually work in tech? I'd be very curious: is it the vast majority, or are tons of other people coming here too because the local economy's doing well in general, or because SF just is a culturally trendier place to live than it used to be?
- caseysoftware 11y agoAustin is going through some similar issues. After a generation or two of anti-growth city leaders and crazy growth the last ~10 years, our roads are crowded, the public transport is a mess, and housing is going through the roof. Now they're playing catch up trying to make up for 25 years in the next few.. and it's physically impossible. * I moved here 5 years ago, so I admit to "being part of the problem."
- nugget 11y agoCalifornia: incessantly talks about the need for equality more than anyone else in the world; creates least equal, most economically stratified society in the United States where all except the independently wealthy feel uneasy. Texas: makes fun of Californians who constantly preach about inequality; creates a pretty equal, egalitarian society that most citizens feel comfortable in.
- guelo 11y agoCitation needed.
- tstactplsignore 11y agoShame that this has been upvoted, because it's not really true. The Gini coefficient of CA and TX are extremely similar [1]- CA is ranked #44 in the US, and TX is ranked #43. However, social mobility of the poorest percentiles is significantly higher in Californian cities [2]. In fact, of the major US metropolises, the top four best cities for social mobility of children in the bottom quintile are: San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego, in order. [2] Social mobility in Texas is significantly lower, and extraordinarily lower throughout the rest of the southern US. (Texas is a nice exception) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...
- nugget 11y agoIt's about quality of life, not relative income. I used these two states as examples because I've spent a lot of time and have a lot of friends in both. In Texas, a middle class income sets you up with a decent house, in a decent hood, with a decent school district, and a fairly low stress life. You mix with others from random walks of life. In California, it feels like you spend every dollar just to survive, and you tend to associate with a narrower spectrum of peers.
- 11y ago
- throw_away_555 11y agoFor those who haven't studied economics: When you restrict the supply of something scarce or the demand for it goes up, the price increases. In this case the "something" is housing. It's essentially illegal to build anything in the bay area which means the supply isn't changing much. But the demand is skyrocketing. Therefore the price is skyrocketing. This would all be fixed very quickly if it was legal to buy some land, demolish what's on there, and build a skyscraper instead. San Francisco would look like Manhattan within two years. If you study the 1906 earthquake, you find that a lot of people suddenly didn't have homes. They were all rehoused within a couple of weeks. Today, being illegal to build anything, and with rent controls on what does exist, we'd have a lot of homeless people for a long time. We all want everyone to have a nice life, and we intend well with these laws. Economics concerns itself with what actually happens when you incent people though, not what we intend by those incentives.
- dylanjermiah 11y agoAnd when a price is artificially lowered below its market rate, there will be a shortage. In this case, rent control. The combination of those two factors is what makes the housing situation so terrible.
- iofj 11y agoAnd building skyscrapers on a 2d surface doesn't scale ... so the only other option doesn't work either.
- dylanjermiah 11y agoWhat exactly do you mean?
- diogen 11y ago"San Francisco would look like Manhattan within two years." A crowded, hyper-expensive, tourist trap with limited housing that most locals avoid? Good goals. "This would all be fixed very quickly if it was legal to buy some land, demolish what's on there, and build a skyscraper instead." "Economics concerns itself with what actually happens when you incent people though, not what we intend by those incentives." Simple narratives make for good rhetoric but poor action. Especially when those narratives are driven by what I'm assuming is your libertarian politics.
- baddox 11y ago> The city’s devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain—its famed progressive politics. Who deems that unlikely? Isn't that the widely-accepted answer?
- SeoxyS 11y ago> It invented new models of delivering affordable housing and health care. It invested deeply in public space, from parks to bike lanes. It adopted a transit-first policy Is that really true? San Francisco, as much as I love it, never struck me as a particularly forward-thinking place when it comes to public transportation, bike-friendliness, healthcare, or housing policies. Compare it to any European city (e.g. bike lanes in Amsterdam, transit in London, health care in Switzerland, or Germany in housing policy), and San Francisco looks pretty weak. The only thing it really has going for it is its population density and diversity. Don't get me wrong, I adore this city. But I feel like it has succeeded despite its policies, not because of them.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoCalifornia has always managed to think of itself as forward-thinking because they've never asked what anyone else thinks.
- ytpete 11y agoForward-thinking for a US city might be a fair description though. That's still no small thing. (Though I'd certainly quibble with the article's notion that SF's transit-first policy has been a shining success story so far).
- michaelochurch 11y agoNo one made San Francisco the most expensive place in the country on purpose. That’s the tragedy. I disagree. I've worked for a couple "limousine liberals" in New York. So has my wife and so have many of my friends. Many of the limousine liberals are assholes (not that he's very liberal, nor is he wealthy, and he's also fictional... but think of Frank Underwood). Sure, they vote Democratic, but they're nasty, elitist people who will hurt your career for any reason or no reason at all, and who put a lot more stock into meaningless social prestige (connections, pedigree) than typical conservatives. Their liberalism is mostly an air they put on in order to make themselves socially acceptable since they can't hide their wealth. (That's not to say that all wealthy liberals are like that. The type certainly exists, though.) Frankly, it's at the point that I don't really care about a person's macropolitics. Some of my favorite people are conservative (I think they're wrong, but that's another issue) and some of the worst people are nominally progressive (and probably sincere in their support for left-of-center politics). As with religious belief, some expect a correlation between position and ethical character, but the actual correlation seems to be near zero. Frankly, I think that this was intentional. It has nothing to do with being "a conservative" or "a liberal". This NIMBYism is about maintaining high house prices; it is about being a selfish piece of shit. It just gets a leftist veneer because these people are good at coming up with an argument that other people will listen to. End of story. I think the progressive anti-growth sentiment is earnest; it’s people honestly trying to protect their city from unwanted change. That's the opposite of "progressive". They're leftist, but that's not the same thing as being progressive. Kim Jong-Un is a leftist. So was Stalin. So are many of the Euro-rednecks The U.S. is different from Europe in that our mouth-breathers, kooks, racists, regressives, and assholes are more numerous on the right of the economic spectrum... to the point where tropes are made of it. In Europe (and in NYC and San Francisco) the authoritarian nutjobs and the xenophobes and the anti-progress crowd is more evenly split between the left and right. Some component of the Bay Area housing evil is ill-thought-out liberal politics (see: legacy rent control systems that don't allow rents to rise even with inflation) but much more of this stuff is exclusionary than people will admit to.
- vinceyuan 11y agoThis One Intersection Explains Why Housing Is So Expensive In San Francisco [1] [1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-housing-is-so-expensive-in-san-francisco-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-housing-is-so-expensiv...