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Comment by skewart | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the comment section on that article is pretty sad. The number of people whose argument against building more housing is a fear that it will make the city "ugly" is astounding. It's mind-numbingly selfish and greedy to think that a family should barely be able to make ends meet, and children should spend less time with their long-commuting parents, just so that SF can meet your personal aesthetic sensibilities. Look, I love architecture and design, and I love beautiful cities, and I would love to remake all of North America according to my personal taste. But I'm not so entitled as to think that my occaisional aesthetic pleasure is more important than someone else's basic livelihood. Also, not to mention, the whole argument that density has to be ugly and "unliveable" is utterly ridiculous and false - there are lots of dense cities that are widely considered beautiful - Paris and Barcelona come to mind.

/rant

As the article says, it's easy to get worked up about this stuff. I suspect the "but it will be ugly" commenters are actually well-intentioned.

View on HN

Every single house in this city "ruined" the view of another house, or destroyed a piece of nature to be built, and was considered "ugly" at one point. Every single house except the first. Every single person who moved to this city either displaced someone already living here, or caused a new house to be built.

The whole purpose of a city is to put buildings in front of each other!

It's astounding that the negative people think that a city of a million people is "just right", and any larger is a priori wrong. We could build a city this size where there was nothing, but building a city twice as dense is apparently impossible, despite overwhelming evidence of it being possible elsewhere.

/rant

On the one hand, you have established residents pushing back against expansion, construction, and denser housing -- perhaps to preserve what they value in their community, or perhaps out of personal interest and to drive up their property values.

On the other, you have a massive influx of tech workers who have convinced themselves that they must live in this small, overpriced city for their basic livelihood, and that the city should rapidly rebuild itself to accommodate them.

There's entitlement on both sides.

Could San Francisco have higher population density to accommodate the recent surge in housing demand? Sure. It already has the second highest population density in the U.S., but it could be denser. But the truth is there's no way to guarantee affordable housing for everyone who decides they would like to live in a small, in-demand city on the tip of a tiny peninsula. There will always be people who can't afford it.

> But I'm not so entitled as to think that my occaisional aesthetic pleasure is more important than someone else's basic livelihood.

No, but you're entitled enough to think that a city should be rebuilt to accommodate your livelihood, rather than your livelihood determining where you can reasonably afford to live. You're entitled enough to think you must live in SF, and you shouldn't have to consider living somewhere more affordable. If you can barely make ends meet and can't see your kids because you're commute is so long, why subject yourself to that?

As much as I'd like San Francisco's housing prices to come down, I also think rebuilding should be done responsibly and not rushed to accommodate a relatively recent surge in demand.

Man "entitlement" is such a weird word, and such a weird way to frame the issue. There are property owners who would like to build on their own property, not hurting anyone. And being told they're not allowed to because rich people like the aesthetic. There's poor people being priced out of their own city because of this. Who's entitled?

And this is hardly the first time a US city has experienced growth.

Yes, it's somewhat a matter of perspective.

Although I'd point out that it's not just rich people who appreciate San Francisco's aesthetic.

But of course it's rich people who are prioritizing it above affordable housing.

Have you met poor people who care about vertical zoning laws in San Francisco or are you just assuming they exist and speaking for them?

Are you suggesting there's no gray area between rich and poor?

I appreciate San Francisco's aesthetic, and I'm not rich. Many of my friends appreciate San Francisco's aesthetic, and they're not rich. Many tourists come to San Francisco every day to admire the city's aesthetic. I don't think you read my statement very well.

You'd expect property owners to be entitled to build on their titled property, yet somehow this has turned into a pejorative.

It reminds me of people arguing for higher taxes accusing others of being selfish. Yes, it's completely selfish that someone would like to keep the money they've earned and yet completely selfless that you feel you have a right to it.

Down and down we go into opposite land.

> Yes, it's completely selfish that someone would like to keep the money they've earned

Well yeah. The very concept of ownership is inherently selfish. It means you want there to be a particular set of resources you get to use, and no one else. It's pretty much the definition of selfishness.

Not that I think this is a bad thing, but if you're trying to argue with this particular rhetorical framing, you're going to lose hard.

How is it not equally selfish for someone to claim they are entitled to other peoples' money?

Because it's more selfish?

Not at all because it's not "I am entitled to your money" but "everyone's entitled to everyone's money".

Until you have a property system there is no "other people's" stuff.

Well we do have a property system so what are you trying to say?

That expecting there to be "your stuff" is already inherently selfish, so trying to argue that particular reallocations of "your stuff" are selfish is kind of ridiculous.

And now we are back where we started, with why is it selfish for me to claim it, but not you? Without property rights, no one has any right to anything and the world would be anarchy.

There is nothing selfish about property rights. If you make something, and want to use it, that's not selfish. If someone else comes and demands you give it to them instead, that is selfish.

> Not that I think this is a bad thing, but if you're trying to argue with this particular rhetorical framing, you're going to lose hard.

I think you missed the other half of the sentence:

> and yet completely selfless that you feel you have a right to [the money someone else earned]

The other half of the sentence only makes sense within a property system. My point is that the very act of saying "That's mine, you can't have it" is already incredibly selfish.

Taken to this extreme (wherein private property is selfish), human life is selfish. In living, you consume resources that no one else can use. As such, arguing that reallocation of your life (e.g. your death or enslavement) is selfish would be ridiculous.

"entitlements" as used as a framing for this issue boils down essentially to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

Out of many fallacies, this one is among the top 5 I consider most insidious. By taking advantage of our collective desire for compromise, the un-empathetic, even the sociopathic, can appear reasonable, or at least as reasonable as the side they're vilifying. "No, brah, both sides are wrong! Let's get to that middle ground, which just so happens to allow me to trample upon other human beings!"

> There are property owners who would like to build on their own property, not hurting anyone.

If they are impairing their neighbors' views, it seem pretty obvious they are actually hurting someone. San Franacisco has already experienced the extreme: Charles Crocker's spite fence on Nob Hill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_fence#San_Francisco

"Ownership of a view" is a pretty dubious argument. It amounts to no being allowed to construct anything anywhere because it will always change someone's view. A taller building is not the same as a spite fence, at all.

If someone pays $X million for a house in San Francisco with a view, you can assume it will hurt when an affordable-living highrise is constructed next door that blocks their view.

Now, perhaps the happiness of the people who live in that highrise and get a spectacular view at a government-mandated affordable price outweighs the pain of the individual who paid market price. But somebody got hurt.

I argued below that "ownership of a view" is a dubious claim. Taken too far and it amounts to no one being allowed to build anything, anywhere. Which sadly has become the norm in most places, see NIMBYism.

I'd be willing to consider a compromise where developers compensate neighbors for whatever market value is lost from their construction. That seems fair. But even that assumes that the owners had a "right" to the view to begin with, or some kind of ownership over it. Which seems kind of absurd.

It also assumes that new development necessarily hurts property values, which isn't true either. Development usually increases the value.

> and that the city should rapidly rebuild itself to accommodate them.

On the contrary, the city should rapidly rebuild to accommodate the current residents that the tech workers would otherwise displace. Building benefits everyone, but lower income residents benefit the most.

The city of San Francisco doesn't need to accommodate anyone, they simply need to get out of the way to let others do it.

If you're going by incorporated municiple.... SF is something like 21 on the list.

Well absolutely. And one commenter there (or here) mentioned the negative externalities of someone else's development driving down your property values or making your schools overcrowded or whatever.

All of these things are deserving of sympathy and consideration, but.. well, currently they're getting too much of it.

Absolutely.

> or making your schools overcrowded

To which I say, build more schools! With more housing and people comes a bigger tax base and more money to fund infrastructure improvements. I don't know a single pro-construction person who doesn't also vigorously support improving urban infrastructure.

With Prop 13 in place, cities and towns can't adjust taxes to cover their budgets. It behooves a Bay Area municipality to seek out commercial investment and drive away residential.

> It behooves a Bay Area municipality to seek out commercial investment and drive away residential.

AIUI, (and I might not understand correctly) that's not quite right.

If you make significant improvements [0] to a piece of land the value of just those improvements are assessed and added to the assessed value of that land. So -IIRC- if the owner of a two-story multi-family dwelling demolishes the building and builds a fifty-story building in its place, his assessed property value would be the same as it would if he had purchased that property with the new construction on it.

[0] Like -for instance- adding on a new room to a house.

What you've said is true, but misses the point. Office buildings don't require schools in the same way houses do. Look at the development in Palo Alto over the last ten years. It's largely commercial and this isn't an accident.

I'm afraid you've missed the point. :)

Prop 13 caps the rate of property tax increase... only if there is either no new development on a property, or if the property changes hands in one of the ways that triggers the property valuation reassessment.

A city should be strongly encouraging the periodic demolition and/or radical improvement of existing structures... whether they be commercial or residential. New construction and new improvements get taxed at their "market rate" valuation. Given how insane prices are in the area (and how very, very little teachers make), I find it hard to believe that tax revenues from new construction wouldn't cover the costs required to support new families.

> Look at the development in Palo Alto over the last ten years. It's largely commercial and this isn't an accident.

coughredliningcough :)

Well, or new residential assessed at new rates. I'm not sure how free cities are to change their tax rates, my understanding is the major problem with Prop 13 is that existing owner's taxes can't go up very fast. But if a new resident displaces an older one, the tax value resets and the tax receipts go up. Same for building new residential, you get a bunch of taxpayers at the 'current' rate.

But I'm guessing there are also limits on overall rates because otherwise property tax rates would have gone up to make up for the 'lost' revenue from owners who are grandfathered in.

This is behind the correlation between "new areas" and "good school districts".

Agreed, Prop 13 is a huge part of the problem. Anyone concerned about the problem of housing in CA should consider calling their state representative and telling them to repeal prop 13.

While prop 13 limits the rate cites can charge for property taxes, if your average tract home is selling for a million bucks %1 is still plenty of money for city services.

Actually, because of the "rent seeking" of using politics to artificially constrain supply creating artificial scarcity, their property is valued much more than it should be valued without the market inefficiency. So, yes, their property values will fall because they were artificially inflated. The same happened to NYC Taxi Medallion owners where each medallion had a market value of $1.2 million because of the artificial limit of medallions and once Uber came along, the value dropped to $700,000.

Similarly, billionaire developers like Donald Trump will see his property values drop but that is only because they were artificially inflated.

> the value dropped to $700,000.

Looks more like $500,000 now[1]. Although, I have no idea how accurate or trustworthy that site is, it just came up quick from Google.

1: http://nycitycab.com/business/taximedallionlist.aspx

Wasn't just uber and lyft, the outer borough taxis steppd up their game after they were allowed to pick up street hails (but not in Manhattan).

Paris has a height limit. It only applies within the city proper, though. So, at the end of the Champs-Élysées, there is now La Defense, just outside the city limit and full of skyscrapers. La Defense is now referred to as the financial center of Paris, much to the annoyance of Parisians.

Sure. The point is that Paris is about three times as dense as SF and it still is widely considered a "beautiful" city.

Paris's characteristic "beautiful" architecture is six stories tall stone, SF's is three stories tall wood. Unfortunately SF was started on a major fault, and probably without nearby quarries (which would be insane to use in an earthquake zone anyways).

So now we're stuck in a dichotomy between 4+ stories steel and glass, and the "original" SF Edwardian architecture, which doesn't scale as well as Paris's stone.

DC's architecture is converging on 12-14 stories steel and glass and it looks great while allowing a lot of density.

Speak for yourself. Considerations of urban policy and planning aside, I think the massive identical condo blocks popping up everywhere, and especially the developments in Navy Yard, are awful to look at and unpleasant to live around.

I agree. DC is really unfriendly at street level in a lot of areas. Giant blank-walled buildings that take up multiple entire blocks.

And Paris was started on a muddy riverbank. Also not ideal substrate for heavy stonework.

There are plenty of quarries nearby, that I’ve seen in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. It would be a better idea to build using reinforced concrete, though.

But even wood is not so limited. Most parcels here are limited by zoning to 2 stories. We could easily build 4-story wooden buildings, and double the city’s density. Some of the oldest wooden buildings are 5-story buildings in earthquake country,[0] and allegedly there are plenty of 10-story wooden buildings that have survived earthquakes in Vancouver.[1]

I think some of the appetite for reinforced concrete is because housing is so difficult to build around here, that it’s only worth going through the effort if the prices are high enough to justify expensive materials. Also, steel and glass allow you to have big windows.

[0] http://gizmodo.com/5846501/how-japans-oldest-wooden-building...

[1] https://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2015/07/how-tall-can-...

Also, San Francisco is already ugly. It's not like you'd be razing historically important beaux arts buildings to build more.

Beautiful and ugly architecture can be pretty subjective. But, yeah, SFists have an above average tendency towards preservation. Not even sure why when in most other senses SFists believe in change.

Environmentalism is a movement devoted to stasis for its own sake; I bet it would poll pretty well in SF.

Many would disagree.

But if you think it's ugly, that's fine -- you don't need to visit or live there.

In my experience, San Francisco is a beautiful city when viewed from a distance, but rather unfriendly and dirty up close.

Really? The view from Sausalito is mistakable for that of a garbage dump.

There are two things that continually surprise me about life in the modern, Internet-enabled age... two things that I would never have dreamed would happen, if you'd asked the 1996 version of me what American life would be like in 2016.

One is our increasing indulgence in irrationality, to the extent that we almost celebrate it. I would never have guessed that hard-right social conservatism would still be a dominant force in American politics, much less a booming business. So I got that wrong, and I'm willing to admit that happened because I didn't take the time to understand those who thought differently from myself, or how their social motivations, family backgrounds, and economic pressures are different from my own. So, my bad.

The other is the continuing notion that it's somehow desirable, much less necessary, to cram everyone into a few high-density cities on either coast. From a 1990s perspective, it appeared that the growing availability of fast Internet connections and the rise of online social, technical, and business networking resources was finally going to liberate us from crowded, noisy, polluted urban prisons with endless traffic jams, out-of-control taxes, and multi-kilobuck rents.

It should have become both possible and desirable to do anything from anywhere, from the middle of flyover territory to the north coast of Alaska to the freaking International Space Station. Instead, we just get more of the same complaints. Rent is too damn high, there's too much traffic, and man, San Francisco/Seattle/Austin/New York used to be cool until all these techies/hippies/yuppies/homeless people/Republicans showed up and ruined it.

I'm not willing to concede that my worldview is wrong about this. This time, it's everyone else who's being stupid and needs to get a clue.

Just leave.

You're not wrong. Any developer for example that can find remote work can benefit from the plummeting real estate costs to be found in any of the areas that have seen an outflow of people in search of work in urban areas.

There are countless communities across the US that are aging, as the youth have moved to the metropolis to work. Anyone that can extract money from the internet can benefit from this trend.

Couple that with low interest rates, good credit and a duplex and you can live without paying a cent for housing. This works well in towns with some sort of natural beauty, but few jobs. Grab those tourist dollars via airbnb rentals and take it easy.

What cities or towns would you put at the top of this list?

Southeastern CT is cheap, and well located, in my opinion.

You can buy a house in walking distance to the decent downtown of Westerly, RI for 120,000 and hop on an Amtrak train and be in Manhattan in 3 hours.

And if you like sailing, there are some great harbors here, like Mystic.

There are plenty of places to adventure to, Block Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vinyard, Cape Cod.

The problem with your analysis is that it undervalues the benefits of living and working in a major city, especially as a young person. I don't really want to remote -- I want to get out, interact with people, take a coffee break and people watch, grab drinks with coworkers. I want to meet people my age doing interesting things. I want to go out drinking/clubbing/whatever without worrying about driving home after.

Admittedly part of the problem is I, like most of my generation, grew up in the suburbs. Once I turned 18 I couldn't wait to get out.

I could work remote and move back to my hometown or Missouri or Thailand -- but why would I? I'd be sacrificing much of my current life to do so. Of course my opinion would probably change if I had kids, but for now I live in a city for a reason.

And that's great, I wouldn't argue with any of the choices you've made for yourself. For you, the social benefits of urban life are apparently worth the costs, and that's fine. You and your friends probably aren't the ones who are doing most of the complaining.

But if it's that important to someone that they live in that particular city, to the exclusion of all other possibilities available on the planet, then they shouldn't complain when it turns out that real estate and transportation are limited resources that somebody has to pay for. It's the whining about the costs and downsides that bothers me the most about these articles.

People who act like they don't have a choice, when they do have a near-infinite variety of choices compared to most people on Earth, annoy me.

The real problem in the Bay is not SF, it's the lack of commuting infrastructure and quality. Lack of urban life around transportation hubs in the suburbs. The fact that CalTrain is a thing and BART doesn't go all the way around the Bay is a joke.

> they shouldn't complain when it turns out that real estate and transportation are limited resources that somebody has to pay for.

I whole-heartedly disagree. It's much better to try to change things and improve the world instead of throwing your hands up and accepting the status quo as immutable fact. The truth is that real estate in SF is limited largely by anti-growth laws. People have to pay exohorbinantly high prices for it only because of these laws (for the most part). I think we should try to change those laws and make the region a better place for everyone to live. I don't want to give up and let SF become a haven for the rich (plus the handful of affordable housing lottery winners).

Of course, if it turns out that we can't make the Bay Area into the welcoming, inclusive, fun, and livable place I would love to see it be then, yeah, I'll move somewhere else. Life's too short.

Also, I cometely agree with how surprising it is that cities have surged in popularity for well-paid, technically smart workers. And yet, I really like living in a city for all the reasons the grandparent comment mentioned. Maybe VR will change that value proposition though :-)

The truth is that real estate in SF is limited largely by anti-growth laws.

Someone in another thread pointed out that if this were the problem, New York would be the cheapest place in the country.

The local anti-growth political sentiment is a problem but ultimately there's just not that much space in SF to expand into, being a peninsula. Any sustained expansion of housing in SF will have to happen vertically, at which point we're back to the NYC example. The additional housing won't be "affordable" unless the developers are forced to build the 21st-century equivalent of Cabrini Green.

"techies/hippies/yuppies/homeless people/Republicans"?

Let me guess you write poems for a living?

Because I'm suggesting that overly-entitled whining is an equal-opportunity avocation?

Well, the 90s were probably the peak of suburban living, before people decided the hours of commuting per day and countless gallons of gasoline burned were not really worth it. So people moved to where the jobs are. (considering that most people still cannot fully work remotely).

Also, as you point out, living in urban areas is a luxury good; as wealth increases (for a large enough segment of the population, at least), they're choosing to use that wealth to live somewhere a bit more exciting than a field in Kansas. I agree they shouldn't complain that it costs more than a house in flyover country, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't complain about a city making it unnecessarily difficult to add housing stock. Those who already live there are, of course, more entitled than anyone to complain about their lack of options when they get kicked out of their rent-controlled unit.

Funny anecdote about "north coast of Alaska." My dad visited the oilfields up there a few times as part of his job. In the early 90s I got a phone call from him on a satellite phone as he watched a midnight pickup softball game after the summer solstice. The delay in the phone connection was really entertaining and fascinating for me as a young-ish kid. I shudder to think how expensive that call was at the time, per minute.

20 years later, I rode up there on my motorcycle. I unclipped my iPhone 3GS from my handlebars, had a 5 bar 3G signal, and called my dad, effectively for free. It wasn't even roaming, because I was in the US! I didn't have to know how it worked, and in fact I still don't. It certainly wasn't a laggy satellite connection. Amazing how times change.

Nobody has left suburban living. Young people have just delayed marriage due to financial instability and career preferences, and thus delayed childbirth. Older folks have sensibly sought to downsize when empty nesting.

The hyper dense mega city model is a failure for quality of life. Instead, a dense CBD with trains distributing the population to the suburbs, with medium then low density, with shopping zones on walkable strips built around the train stations, is the way to go. Add in good planning, with buses and cycle infrastructure for last mile. And lots of parks.

Melbourne, where the modern concept of suburban living as we know it originated, executes well on this. Perfect, no. But a good framework.

Failure by who's definition? I live in Tokyo, the largest city on the planet. It's a "Hyper Dense Mega City" and it's an amazing fun city with a high quality of live AFAICT. There are certain things about Japanese work culture that suck for some but that has nothing to do with the city itself and everything to do with traditional culture.

After seeing how a number of Japanese acquaintances live, I've concluded the lack of personal space is a kind of paucity that makes them very poor. Barely room for a couple with one child to keep the tiniest amount of personal belongings. A pet, a small garden, bicycles for the family, any number of personal possessions I consider normal are out of the question. People living in other capital cities experience similar, although not as extreme, paucity of personal space. I don't understand how so many people feel this is a high quality of life.

>finally going to liberate us from crowded, noisy, polluted urban prisons

What are you, a suburban developer from the 50's?

Urban areas often provide a higher quality of life than The Geography of Nowhere. Do some introductory research into urban design. Read some Jane Jacobs. You thought the human desire for community and activity was just going to leave?

They only do so for a specific type of person, who is happy externalizing and surrendering ownership. It is too expensive to own a workshop, so you go to a makerspace. You do not have land to have your own garden, so you go to a communal one. If you feel the desire to see nature, public park. To entertain, bars in stead of your own dwelling. You cannot transport yourself beyond walking distance, you rely on communal transport. In Japan, even bathing, quiet studying and reading, and practice for activities must be externalized.

To be uncharitable, urban areas are perfect for housing worker drones bereft of ownership rights.

>urban areas are perfect for housing worker drones

That's what I'd call the suburbs: Nothing to do, no competition, and labor is kept cheap. http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/stuck-in-1950s-subu...

If one cares about resources and climate change it's a non starter: Unless you are productive with the land, sprawl is a horrible waste of resource. (About half of a suburban family's energy use is transportation.)

I love articles like that, because they're so good at packing the maximum number of leftist dog whistles possible into the available physical space and rhetorical spectrum. Just to pull a typical quote:

   Meanwhile, as the labor movement gained steam, corporate 
   leaders were struggling to prevent employees from 
   unionizing. “In the early 20th century, there was a 
   limited but influential set of companies engaging in 
   what is commonly referred to as ‘welfare capitalism,’” 
   Mozingo explains. “The idea was to prevent turnover 
   and control workers better by making factory sites that 
   were tidy, safe, and well-ventilated with good lighting 
   and all those things.

The entire premise of the article, as far as I can tell, is that the corporate pigs should be condemned because they kept their workers from unionizing by actually treating them like human beings. So, if the "welfare capitalists" hadn't tried to create "tidy, safe, and well-ventilated" factory sites, could we expect Ms. Mozingo's judgment, handed down on all history's behalf, to be more sympathetic? I'm guessing not.

For what it's worth, I actually agree with a lot of the criticism directed toward campuses like Apple's. It's hard to describe the renderings we've seen in any terms other than dystopian. A building designed to keep everyone looking inward is better suited to a religious cult than to a creative organization.

>The entire premise of the article, as far as I can tell

The premise of the article is that choice is good for workers, and urbanity fosters choice. Corporations creating isolated campuses removes choice and reduces quality of life.

>A building designed to keep everyone looking inward is better suited to a religious cult than to a creative organization.

That's not the intent of the design and the view is pretty much identical for both sides: trees. The point of the shape is to connect as much as possible while creating a secure courtyard. The closest path from one side of the building to another is outside.

The premise of the article is that choice is good for workers, and urbanity fosters choice. Corporations creating isolated campuses removes choice and reduces quality of life.

Regardless, it's very clear that there's no way to win with these people. No matter what decisions the managers and architects arrive at, there will always be some ankle-biting from noncontributing journalists and academics with political axes to grind.

The point of the shape is to connect as much as possible while creating a secure courtyard. The closest path from one side of the building to another is outside.

Interesting, I didn't know that. My understanding was that the courtyard area would be easily accessible to everyone working there.

But ugh. Suburbs and driving.

If there was a light rail to an urban center and I could get my daily/weekly errands done via walking or cycling, sure.

But the car centric culture of, well, just about everywhere is IMHO grosser than an "urban prison"

Saw one about Sunset, "hey, maybe we should mix a three to four story building in there some places" followed by outrage about the ascetic value of the Sunset. Nonsense friend who grew up there used to get lost growing u because they built the whole neighborhood from a few dozen house designs... everything repeats after a few blocks, it's like Sim City 2000.

I'm not defending her view but in my limited experience (Houston) developers build for profitablility and not aesthetics, and actively fight any laws designed to constrain their aesthetic choices again due to profitablility.

So I think it's perfectly fine to build a Paris-like building if you must build something. It'll just never happen without legal action.

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