What's the Matter with San Francisco?

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/07/whats-the-matter-with-san-francisco/399506/

by qzervaas • 11 years ago

65 83 11 years ago

wyclif• 11 years ago

It seems to me one of the biggest problems is rampant NIMBYism.

nemo44x2• 11 years ago

This 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• 11 years ago

But 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.

narrator2• 11 years ago

The 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

throwaway2048• 11 years ago

some city near SF, but not in SF and not in my city!

BurningFrog2• 11 years ago

The 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• 11 years ago

As a San Franciscan all I can say is... where does one even begin to answer such a question? :-)

smtddr• 11 years ago

I 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.

civilian2• 11 years ago

You'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.

dylanjermiah4• 11 years ago

What do you mean by 'diversity'? Can you please define it?

ectoplasm4• 11 years ago

"People with diverse incomes" satisfies his argument.

Lazare• 11 years 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.

ectoplasm4• 11 years ago

Rent control is about not increasing rents by too much each year while you are living there. Once you move out, the landlord can agree to a new lease at any amount. The only way to circumvent this is to assign your lease to the next tenant when you move out. Most people just move out after a while and the apartment goes back on the market. You get some very long term tenants, but so what? It's a small percentage of the population.

Given this, I think rent control is fairly ineffective at preserving diversity, but I like it because it means that people can't be forced to move all of a sudden because their landlord puts the rent up by $500 a month. I don't believe that the already astronomical rents in SF would go much higher if rent control was abolished anyway.

That said, building more housing obviously helps. As does making nearby cities nicer places to live.

eli_gottlieb5• 11 years ago

The problem isn't that some existing housing has rent-control. The problem is that 75% of rental stock is under rent-control, and there's a 35% owner-occupancy rate (with a strict limit on property-tax increases), meaning that ~84% of the city's available housing stock is allocated to subsidize old residents at the expense of new ones.

How does anyone expect to have affordable housing with a growing population if, effectively, only 16% of the entire housing stock is allowed to be allocated to new arrivals at market rates? It would be another thing if some form of subsidized-rate housing was also offered for newcomers to SF, but instead what we get is a tiered system in which existing residents are set against newcomers, with landowners being the only ones to really benefit.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

BurningFrog2• 11 years ago

if it were removed and all residential areas jump up to market price

Nit pick: If all these units came out on the open market, it would mean a substantial lowering of the market price.

It would also mean that a lot more people could live in SF, both because more people would share existing apartments, and because many of the apartments now empty would be rented out.

encoderer• 11 years ago

The 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.

civilian2• 11 years ago

I agree. They didn't intend this to happen, but they hold blame for being ignorant.

dylanjermiah4• 11 years ago

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

schraeds• 11 years ago

Housing restrictions protecting home values in Palo Alto. Lack of social services. These are relatively easy problems to exist that do not involve existential crisis.

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

And in addition to all those things, they want to do it in a fixed land area with low density housing for everyone.

It's the ol' iron triangle. In this case the corners are something like "Affordable, desirable, no growth, pick two"

nopinsight• 11 years ago

I believe you meant: "affordable, desirable, growth", pick two.

devalier4• 11 years ago

I think our progressive politics IS to blame: for deluding San Franciscans into believing such a thing is possible.

Actually it is possible. But the irony is that the person who came up with best idea that would have fixed/prevented this problem, has now been ostracized as a "fascist" by the left-wing tech community: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formali...

If circa 2007, San Francisco itself had been turned into a join-stock corporation, with all the existing residents given shares, then all residents would have grown wealthy as the city grew rich. Furthermore, the government would have had an incentive to allow new housing, since that would increase total tax revenues, and thus increased dividends for all residents. Right now, the politically powerful have no incentive to improve new building, since they do not directly benefit.

skybrian• 11 years ago

Do new residents get shares? If so, how do you deal with dilution? Seems like that would become a reason to want to keep people out.

r00fus• 11 years ago

A simple idea that would likely lead to isolation and calcification. Things like NIMBY and decision to properly address share dilution for newcomers sound like things that simply

The problem is really about how real-estate is now securitized and bought/sold primarily as investments rather than living/working quarters.

tptacek• 11 years ago

He's been ostracized for more complicated reasons than "fascism" --- I'm not sure what that word means. I think it's a little misleading to suggest that this is a case of hair-trigger political correctness.

The irony of the "fascism" dig on this thread is that the source you've provided appears to be this person literally arguing for privatization in order to create a corporatist autocracy. By that way: that's the solution to San Francisco's problems you find promising? Or am I misunderstanding you?

I think the author's "practical" political ideas are comical and worthy of ridicule, but that they alone don't make the author problematic. The virulent strain of scientific crypto-racism that seems to run through their writing though; that's a problem for me.

crzwdjk• 11 years ago

Isn't the basic problem that existing residents already get rich (or at least, don't get any worse off) as the city gets richer, because they have the power to extract rents from new residents? Current owners have every incentive to prevent construction of new housing, because it makes their own assets more valuable. Renters protected by rent control have no inventive to care either way, since their rent isn't going up. The only people who do care are newcomers who didn't get the benefit of rent control, and all the people who aren't moving to SF and contributing to its economy because they're priced out, but they don't get a vote in either case.

Sami_Lehtinen• 11 years ago

I would love to be in that kind of situation. If property prices would boom, I would just sell off and leave. Hopefully making so much money that you can live elsewhere with only on index fund investment profits. I just wish that would happen.

Tiktaalik• 11 years ago

Are 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.

joeyo• 11 years ago

Presumably this is what will happen to the entirety of the Central Waterfront from Mission Bay to Candlestick point.

baddox2• 11 years ago

There are a fair number of high-rise condos being built in Soma right now, and several more than are planned.

ectoplasm4• 11 years ago

The 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.

fapjacks2• 11 years ago

Please don't confuse the frat boys with business degrees with the hackers who have strong roots in hippie culture.

ectoplasm4• 11 years ago

Don'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.

coldcode• 11 years ago

It'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.

Pyxl101• 11 years ago

There 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• 11 years ago

That's all well and good, but you missed the fact that what made SFO the melting pot that it's known for today was a liberal immigration stance and an egalitarian mindset. What you're describing is conservative immigration and a preservation mindset, which is fine, but the opposite of what made San Francisco, San Francisco.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

plorkyeran• 11 years ago

It's a good tradeoff for you up to the point where you're priced out of the city, and much of the current hubbub about rising prices is from people who incorrectly thought they were safe from that.

eli_gottlieb5• 11 years ago

why should I not vote to block and prevent this growth?

Because you don't want to be Detroit.

ytpete3• 11 years ago

why should I not vote to block and prevent this growth?

Because all you can vote to block is the growth in housing - you can't block the influx of people. So then demand continues to rise while supply stagnates... and prices keep skyrocketing as a result. And that doesn't freeze the city into being exactly what it's like now - as more low-to-mid income people are priced out, the city WILL change in character and in culture. Discouraging high-density housing gives you higher prices AND a much less diverse city.

Either way you cut it, there's no way to freeze San Francisco like a time capsule. It's going to change, the question is how do we maximize how much of that change is for the better?

(Btw, I think wanting the city to stay exactly how it is currently is fundamentally a NIMBY / selfish attitude - 'I got here first, but no one should be allowed to come after me and change things any further').

bradgessler• 11 years ago

What's being done to change or reverse the damage these policies have inflicted on San Francisco?

nether2• 11 years ago

Flight to the suburbs and hope that urbanization occurs before one turns 30 (unlikely).

icanhackit• 11 years ago

the 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• 11 years ago

the city reveled in its diversity, with groups claiming distinct neighborhoods

caseysoftware2• 11 years ago

So I'm not the only one who thought that was an odd line?

corysama2• 11 years ago

The 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.j...

jmspring• 11 years ago

San 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• 11 years ago

Manhattan 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• 11 years ago

Oh, no, not that awful hellscape Manhattan! What a fate to be avoided...

ytpete3• 11 years ago

Does 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?

caseysoftware2• 11 years ago

Austin 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."

nugget3• 11 years ago

California: 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• 11 years ago

Citation needed.

tstactplsignore• 11 years ago

Shame 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_co...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...

nugget3• 11 years ago

It'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.

saryant• 11 years ago

I think "significant" is probably overstating things. In the bottom quintile in San Jose has a 12.9% chance of making it to the top, Houston is 9.3% (nearly the same as Sacramento).

I grew up in California but moved to Houston half-way through high school. The school I wound up in in Houston was light-years better than the one I left in California.

nether2• 11 years ago

At least California lets Tesla sell cars without dealerships. How's that for Texas small government?

dang2• 11 years ago

No tangential flamewars on Hacker News, please.

Perhaps there's a substantive point to be made about California and Texas, but flat-out tribal/ideological provocation is the opposite of that, and not ok here.

nugget3• 11 years ago

My comment wasn't meant to be tangential or start a flamewar. I think the article hits upon one of the most important issues of our time, namely how we want to structure our most important urban centers moving forward. There are very real quality of life issues at stake. Like many others here, I don't think of myself as Californian or Texan but as an American who has lived in various places at various times and who votes with his feet as opportunity arises. I used a bit of tongue in cheek snarkiness to drive the point home. Imagine my first comment as a political cartoon and you might see it in a better light.

throw_away_555• 11 years ago

For 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.

dylanjermiah4• 11 years ago

And 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• 11 years ago

And building skyscrapers on a 2d surface doesn't scale ... so the only other option doesn't work either.

diogen• 11 years 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.

eecsninja• 11 years ago

A crowded, hyper-expensive, tourist trap with limited housing

You just described SF.

baddox2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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_gottlieb5• 11 years ago

California has always managed to think of itself as forward-thinking because they've never asked what anyone else thinks.

ytpete3• 11 years ago

Forward-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• 11 years ago

No 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• 11 years ago

This One Intersection Explains Why Housing Is So Expensive In San Francisco [1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-housing-is-so-expensiv...

What's the Matter with San Francisco?

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