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> To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed.

This is xenophobia in another skin. There are a lot of people who don't want brown people coming into the country and changing the "feel" of their home too.

Anyways, as long as we severely restrict housing, techies will continue to outbid the locals on what remains. Passing this legislation might give the weirdo-freaks a chance to remain in the city.

Xenophobia is defined (by one source) as "intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries."

Maybe comparing this commenter to "a lot of people who don't want brown people" is ham fisted and inaccurate.

The commenter seems more interested in the culture, the freakiness or weirdness, of the people who come in, and not so much which country they came from. I do not see where the commenter mentioned race or skin color.

It's a fine line.

I'll bite:

Is it ever ok for a person to argue against policies that increase population in the city where they reside?

If so, what are some ethical reasons for resisting and/or advocating against population growth in a city?

> The commenter seems more interested in the culture, the freakiness or weirdness, of the people who come in, and not so much which country they came from

Go to a Trump rally and ask if they actually hate minorities for the color of the skin. They'll say no.

Xenophobes and racists always insist it's about "culture" and an invading army which is somehow destroying that "culture" and ruining their way of life with an outside culture.

I fail to see how this attitude is acceptable when it comes from privileged urban hippies, but unacceptable when it comes from poor rural workers.

There are plenty of xenophobes and racists who actually do insist that they're concerned about race itself.

Anyway, it seems that what you want to establish is not that xenophobes and racists "insist it's about culture", but that anyone who "insists it's about culture" is a xenophobe or racist.

> Anyway, it seems that what you want to establish is not that xenophobes and racists "insist it's about culture", but that anyone who "insists it's about culture" is a xenophobe or racist.

Yes, I do think that everyone who insists that culture is a valid reason for opposing the ability of people to migrate into their area is an xenophobe.

As an outsider I have a hard time seeing how the people living in and the people wanting to live in the bay area are of different cultures for any meaningful sense of the world. This is largely a political issue over priorities and not a fear of the unknown.

I guess you use "xenophobic" more broadly than I do.

For example, if a large influx of patriotic, Budweiser-drinking gun-owners from Texas occurred in Berkeley and a long-time Berkeley resident complained about it because they didn't want a "culture of watery-beer, flag-waving gun ownership" to expand in their neighborhood, I would not call that xenophobic. But it seems like you would.

Or, maybe you wouldn't. Can you clarify this a bit more?

Yes, I would consider it xenophobic. From my viewpoint, it's hard to see how any attitude which discriminates against people not like you isn't prejudices and backwards.

An example closer to home for me is that Vermonters constantly complain of "flatlanders" from NYC are moving in and ruining the culture. I consider this attitude xenophobic and ignorant of the fact that culture is never static.

Why should the national border make a difference? Why is it not xenophobic if Californians oppose Texans moving to town, but xenophobic when Texans oppose Mexicans moving a few miles north?

Thanks for clarifying.

FWIW, personally, I would refrain from using the word "xenophobic" so readily, especially because of its deeply negative connotations.

In my Berkeley/Texas example, imagine a scenario where the Texas transplants destroyed all their guns, recycled all of their cans of Budweiser, started buying Chimay Ales from the Berkeley Bowl and put Bernie Sanders bumper stickers on their cars. If some long-time Berkeley resident _still_ rejected these erstwhile Texans as outsiders, then I would trot out the label "xenophobe." But probably not before that.

San Francisco, and several other American cities, were places for freaks and weirdos in the mid-20th century because of a historical anomaly in which the US federal government deliberately subsidized white, middle-class families into leaving for nearly-created suburbs. This trend began reversing in the 1980s and now land-values in the urban core reflect what is seen in cities all over the rest of the world -- that central areas have higher land and housing costs than the periphery.

It was a great, interesting, trippy twenty to thirty-year period, but it doesn't exist anymore and its loss in the Bay Area was probably accelerated in part because California has such an unusually politicized and unpredictable land-use and development process that has led it to consistently underproduce housing for the last 40 years.

http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou...

The "young Gods" you speak of tend to have higher incomes not just because of the tech industry. They have higher costs because the elder babyboomer Californians rigged and created a system that is so constricted that only the wealthiest millennials can afford to participate in it.

Look at the differences in housing cost burdens based on year of birth here: http://www.lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/120

This is absolutely democracy. It's just democracy on the state level, rather than the local level. In this case, the state level is appropriate, because San Francisco's policies have an effect on all the surrounding cities, and all the other Americans who might want to live in SF. Would it be "undemocratic" to say that San Francisco can't unilaterally vote to stop paying federal income taxes?

In any case, cities will still have huge influence over what gets built, since every building under this law still has to comply with local zoning. All this law says is that cities can't pretend to allow development, and then arbitrarily block individual developers for no reason (or because they didn't pay enough bribes).

> San Francisco's policies have an effect on all the surrounding cities, and all the other Americans who might want to live in SF.

You could make that case for all regions of the world. Nobody is completely isolated. We breath the same air and everyone deals with the effects of pollution.

It's not a reason to prevent changing existing law.

It's a difference of degree. The effect of most local policies on the region, nation, or world is negligible. The effect of San Francisco's is very large.

See this magazine article on how NIMBYs pushed suburban sprawl on surrounding areas:

https://web.archive.org/web/20001001083046/http://www.sfweek...

See this article, on how restrictive urban land use is estimated to lower America's entire national GDP by 5-15%:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use...

There are plenty of things that lower GDP. Environmental policies, for one. That's not reason enough alone.

I suspect the impact of restrictions on SF growth at this point are large because as the parent notes, growth has been large there in the digital age. Tech businesses have had it good there for awhile. Maybe time for some change, no? At least get rid of Feinstein..

Edit: please explain down votes, thanks!!

and http://qz.com/169767/the-century-old-solution-to-end-san-fra...

> This is a town for freaks and weirdos.

Those are all the people currently getting forced out by the lack of housing supply. Opposing this legislation won't magically make the rich leave, instead the city will continue to be less accessible to the middle class.

I hope that some day everyone who wants to live in San Francisco can live here. It seems like the only way for that to happen is to increase the housing supply.

> Also, I hear Portland is nice.

As someone who grew up in Portland [1], I could write a post just like yours, and I'm sympathetic to the frustration...

But I still side with the pro-housing crowd. What are people who seek to move up in life (i.e., take that dream job and build a career), but who happen to have been born in the middle of nowhere, supposed to do? Is it fair to say "hey, my home, don't come here" when a large fraction of the industry is in one place and the individual software engineer has very little power to change that? Yes, long term, we should spread out and build clusters of industry elsewhere, but that doesn't help the fresh college grad today who gets an offer in the Bay Area but can barely afford rent.

[1] and I want to move back someday so please don't ruin it!

Too late, I'm afraid.

This town won't be for the freaks and weirdos for long: they're being priced out. You can rage against the techies all you want, but unless we can build more housing, the techies will be the only ones who can afford to live here.

It seems bizarre to me that those most fervently opposed to the influx of tech in SF are doing the most to harm the existing residents. If you make it hard to build in San Francisco, there won't be enough houses. If there aren't enough houses, who do you think gets the few that remain? It's not the freaks and the weirdos– it's the wealthy. The freaks and the weirdos have to leave because of your shortsighted policies.

I think they're hoping that eventually, investors will get tired of paying the high salaries needed to locate their engineers in the Bay Area (or salaries won't increase commensurate to cost of living, and they will stop finding engineers willing to move there).

Whether the city's culture or the tech community's attachment to the region will break first is, of course, an open question.

SF used to be beautiful. With tons more development, it will just look like Hong Kong/Singapore/Chicago/Manhattan, etc. and that beauty will be lost

That's a common sentiment, and I think there are a few points against it:

1. SF could double it's current housing density tomorrow and still have less than half of manhatten's density. That's not a serious concern.

2. Even if it were, we're faced with a tough choice: preserve SF's low-density housing, or preserve it's people. Which is better: a city with 20% taller buildings, or a city where the only the rich can afford to live, secure in their $10m victorians and $5k/mo NEMA towers?

3. Many would argue that SF's uniqueness is its population, its freespirited attitude, and its rich history of art and culture. The buildings themselves are only a small part of that. Losing them would be a bummer, but far worse than losing the real soul of the city.

I'm not disagreeing with anything that you said. I'm just lamenting the fact that SF will look just like every other skyscraper style skyline. You won't even know where you are

Count how many bridges and tubes connect Manhattan to the mainland vs. how many bridges and freeways connect SF to the rest of the world, and revisit that concept again.

When is the point of peak beauty? 1900? 1850?

Also, Hong Kong is a rather beautiful city.

Singapore looks like a giant shopping mall. It's nice in its own right, sure but I don't think I want every city in the world to look like it

don't worry. they won't. take LA for instance. most parts of it look like a giant traffic jam. looking like a nice shopping mall would be a welcome upgrade. LA will never look as nice as Singapore. Singapore has a huge amount of surplus investment cash. LA's budget is constantly at a breaking point.

I'm not arguing against development. I'm just saying that the iconic look and feel of SF will be lost. Maybe that's inevitable, but it saddens many people

Tokyo and Mexico City have very, very few buildings over five stories and still have double the density of SF. Paris and Barcelona have almost none over seven stories and have four times the density of SF.

So it doesn't have to be high rises and skyscrapers. SF can look like SF and build enough to make living affordable.

Of course, the real problem is the peninsula cities that insist on densities much lower than one third of SF. 80% of buildable land on the peninsula is tied up there being wasted.

You could cut housing prices in half by building 111,000 new units. You could do that by converting 6% of the city's single-family homes into six-story apartment buildings, leaving the other 94% untouched, and not building a single structure taller than that.

"To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed."

Isn't this just what natives say about every group of immigrants? The West Coast, in particular, has seen this before:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DXu9eKM4kJI/T_D5ucc8SPI/AAAAAAAABK...

Not sure you can equate the Chinese race with computer geeks.

> San Francisco is the largist metropolitan area with the most wilderness/open space around it in the world.

It's high on the list, but it's not the one with the most:

  Vienna 51% 
  Singapore 47% 
  Sydney 46% 
  Hong Kong 40% 70% is the total green space 40% is protected
  Rio De Janeiro 40%
  London 38.40% Almost 40%!
  Stockholm 30%
  Johannesburg-Gauteng 24%
  New York City 19.7 % or 14% Park Score/World Culture Report
  San Francisco 17.9%

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1660203

Believable (17.9%) if you are measuring only within the S.F. city limits. San Mateo and Marin counties and the East Bay have huge tracts of open space for metropolitan areas.

Same can be said for the surrounding areas of some of the other cities on the list.

Not Singapore or Hong Kong of course, but those are special cases.

I'm always amazed at how much open, undeveloped space one can see looking eastish when up in Tilden Park out here in the East Bay. It's fantastic.

That is the unspoken thing, the "third rail" of SF Bay area housing is the fact we have a huge Green Belt surrounding the bay.

Yes, we pride ourselves on our parks and reserves and natural beauty. But meanwhile Marin County's population hasn't really changed in 30 years, while commuters from Stockton have grown three or four orders of magnitude. There's a real bay incumbent insiders versus valley outsiders thing going on.

Where on earth did they get Singapore's 47% from? Here's a land-use map: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-C3jx_8qnyo0/UQvXDH4ksdI/AAAAAAAABL...

The light green bits are barely a quarter, and a good chunk of that is agricultural (mostly greenhouses), not "wilderness/open space".

I'm surprised Seattle doesn't make the list. Maybe thats based on parkland within the city. To the east you have immense tracks of wilderness in the cascade mountains and to the west the olympic peninsula.

>What is Considered Green Space?

>City proper is used as metropolitan boundaries are harder to determine. Will make a note if the data is for metropolitan area. Green spaces that are planned are used in the statistics. S For the most part the higher percentage of green space the most accessible to more people, however Hong Kong green spaces are usually not with many being in hills. Tree lined streets don't count as green spaces. Instead open green areas park, gardens, and squares? I'm not sure if squares are counted? Tree lined streets percent of tree canopy is not counted. This data is for open spaces."

This ranking only counts San Francisco city/county. I think the OP was referring to the San Francisco Bay Area [1]. It is comprised of nine Bay Area counties and has quite a bit of open space, as well as federal, state, county, and city parks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

As a life-long immigrant, I hear this everywhere I go. "My <geographical location> is the best. Go Away Hordes of invaders!". Hearing this from a progressive immigrant sanctuary city is especially disconcerting.

"San Francisco is the largist metropolitan area with the most wilderness/open space around it in the world."

This bill specifically applies to development in urban areas only. More development in areas that are already urban will reduce pressure for cities to expand outward, into pristine wilderness. That's why environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club support infill development: it's a low-water-use, low-greenhouse-gas alternative to suburban sprawl.

> That's why environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club support infill development

Except the Sierra Club in SF, which strongly opposes dense housing.

The modern Sierra Club's motives are political, not environmental. That's why they'll have rallies in SF against oil development in the Dakotas while remaining completely silent on groundwater poisoning right here in CA and the fact that (unlike the red oil states), CA has no oil extraction tax.

> I'm in favor of how "building in the Bay Area is approved by discretion", I call it having some power over what gets built. "Democracy" y'know?

That's what zoning laws are for, which the proposed legislation doesn't affect. The kind of thing Governor Brown wants to get rid of is Nosy Neighbor Syndrome being able to block or stall reasonable development that follows code.

I grew up in the bay area, and it sickens me how many people here are more interested in making sure homes have a front lawn than making sure homes can be affordable to people outside the upper class.

Those desires are not orthogonal.

Most homes with a front lawn were middle-class when they were built and for many years thereafter. Upper class types wouldn't live in tract neighborhoods, for the most part.

Sounds like you want to live in the past. Unfortunately this is not how life works. The more you try to keep something from happening that is inevitable the less effective your attempts will become until you lose.

NYC experienced this yesterday. SF is experiencing this today. Many cities will be experiencing this tomorrow. As population density grows this same scenario will repeat everywhere over the next century. There is no escaping it.

His point though was that SF isn't particularly suitable as a city for startups; there's no magical "tech gold" that you can't get elsewhere, like West Virginian coal - people go there just to be in the game, because that's where the VCs chose to be. Historical and geographical factors in fact make it a particularly unsuitable place for a bootstrapped startup to exist.

The difference perhaps is that although Hollywood is the place to make deals and host awards ceremonies, the actual work of filming is done around the world, from New Zealand to Ireland to Vancouver.

> His point though was that SF isn't particularly suitable as a city for startups; there's no magical "tech gold" that you can't get elsewhere, like West Virginian coal - people go there just to be in the game, because that's where the VCs chose to be. Historical and geographical factors in fact make it a particularly unsuitable place for a bootstrapped startup to exist.

While I agree with that I don't see any of that in the parent's post. It's actually pretty frustrating so many VCs insist that companies need to be in SV as there really isn't a real need to be and I know start-ups that would be much happier if they could get VC funding but not be in SV.

Except at the end of the day it does not really matter. "I was here first" has usually been a strong economic force, but has never been overriding or absolute. SF has spent decades doing its damned hardest to resist growth and development, and has failed to stop it so far, and it has only caused pain for everyone involved by gentrifying unevenly and having its present housing crisis.

In the same line of thinking about democracy - the entire established population of SF might not want to attract the tech industry, but the tech industry - many times more people, in effect, than SF - chose SF. The greatest flaw in democracy is being out of the majority opinion, and if "build up SF" were not so it would not even be on the radar as a question.

You do have some power over what gets built. It's called the zoning process, which allows us to decide ahead of time which types of things we will allow or not, so that people can plan and proceed accordingly. It's why we have laws that people can read, rather than just bringing everything before a jury to decide after it happens whether or not it was illegal.

Deciding what housing can be built should not be like a game of Scattergories, where we all just argue about whether or not something is okay after the fact.

Because the way it stands, only projects with high rate of return will be built--ie luxury housing. A 10% rate of return on investment might be okay for a project that takes one year, but if it drags on to 4 years, that's barely beating inflation. Time is money, and our process makes our housing more expensive.

>Y'all "young gods" will just have to figure out some other place to hatch the singularity. Move away.

Tech employees are hated everywhere. Portland, Seattle, etc. want us gone just as much as everyone else. Why is your hatred special?

My first day in SF after coming from London for a tech job I accidentally walked into a protest. I asked one of the protestors who they were protesting and he told me it was foreign tech people. So for fun I pretended to be a banker. Apparently bankers are ok.

> Y'all "young gods" will just have to figure out some other place to hatch the singularity. Move away. Build a floating "Seastead". Just please stop trying to cram a million more people into the Bay Area.

Money talks, whereas "just go away" is not an effective argument. Rather than be angry about the things you have no ability to change, consider how you might work with this "invading army" to find mutually agreeable circumstances. After all, tech nerds are their own kind of freak and weirdo.

You talk as if culture is some constant. Culture has throughout history been shaped by change. So why should SF somehow try to hold on to the good old times, whatever that is? Why shouldn't SF change to accommodate a revolution that will likely rival the industrial revolution in its impact.

You are right in that we need to make sure development is respectful of the environment but your attitude of "they are ruining it" is not helpful. Given that attitude of yours I do sincerely hope you are the one who leaves SF instead of discouraging the new comers. I hear Portland is nice.

scarcity has never brought the price of anything down. your idea only works if the freaks could still live here, which they can't (mostly due to prices). why not support a bill that allows everyone a space?

Portland is ok, but I'd rather price you out of the market.

Honest question, are your local friends mostly software engineers or do they work in other positions?

Edit: cool I see the down votes. Is this an unfriendly question? Just wondering what the diversity is like in SF and if people care

> What concerns me the most is that the newcomers might lack the environmental commitment, and tip the scales from valuing conservation to valuing rampant development.

Actually, if you care about the environment, dense development is the best option.

I hear what you're saying, but, maybe a "brick wall" of resistance is not the only possibility.

I'd like to suggest an alternative: a companion bill that requires local and regional governments to provide adequate service and infrastructure expansion once the inevitable building surge happens.

Access to government services and infrastructure really ought to be maintained at current levels for everyone.

And if that can't be guaranteed, then cramming more people into a given city or area should be recognized for what it is: a transfer of wealth. And _of course_ there will be resistance to government mandated transfers of wealth. We should expect such resistance as a fair and rational response to these kinds of laws.

The real question becomes: how do we make this as fair as possible for both the newcomers and the existing residents?

>The saddest part is, this city kinda sucks. It's not even a good place to locate a business.

San Francisco is the second-densest city in the country, and is one of only a few cities (and the only city in the West) that had a large urban core designed in the pre-car era, which means that its infrastructure is already designed to accomodate dense urban development moreso than any other American city west of Chicago.

Contrary to popular belief, making money in the Bay Area isn't that difficult or unlikely. I think the comparison to a gold rush is more of a meme than a representation of what's actually occurring (>95% of new arrivals are not entrepreneurs).

The good news is that tens of thousands of people from impoverished countries have been able to move here, become US citizens, and live a first-world life they might not have had access to otherwise. The sad part is, they're not cool -- or "weird" -- enough, so they have to live 90 minutes away.

"is one of only a few cities (and the only city in the West) that had a large urban core designed in the pre-car era, which means that its infrastructure is already designed to accomodate dense urban development moreso than any other American city west of Chicago"

.... Yea, maybe. But muni's average speed is 8 mph. For a city that is 7 miles across that's pretty sad.

(Slightly dated article:http://m.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/the-muni-death-spiral/Con... )

Opposing the construction of more housing will just maintain/accelerate the rate at which residents of SF will be driven out.

> Also, I hear Portland is nice.

It's precisely because of the bullshit NIMBY attitudes in SF that Portland is getting a huge influx of tech people, who, in turn end up, through no fault of their own, forcing out other people, because Portland isn't building quite fast enough either.

> Y'all "young gods" will just have to figure out some other place to hatch the singularity.

Lol. I've always found it amazing how many people run towards SV. Software is cool because you can do it from anywhere. To each his own, I guess.

Your statement is not false, but if you're into software engineering it's awesome know so many people who are world-class engineers. I've heard from multiple people that they've grown more in a year of being in SV than the 5 years before. Why? Because a lot of their friends are engineers (Kinda sucks too but...), you casually meet a lot of people working in cool stuff, you go to a lot of really really good meetups, and what you're doing at work is probably only a handful of companies in the world are tackling (at least me and most of my friends are working on stuff like that).

Yeah, you can do software from anywhere! But SF/SV is probably one of the best places in the world to do for it.

I can see that. I'm just optimistic that more and more regions will grow to have local VC capital, startup experience, and engineer-dense environments.

I've situated myself in southern Taiwan. I may be the only foreign coder in the city, haha, and the startup scene is almost entirely up north around Taipei, but I hope that changes =)

> To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking.

I assume you're also planning to vote for Drumpf this fall?

After all, the rights of "natives" to enjoy a nice place without any cultural changes is far more important than allowing others to seek new opportunities for themselves. Where you were born is the most important determinant of where you should be allowed to live.

>To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed.

California has a long history of newcomers coming in and destroying the local culture. LA 4 generations ago had roughly the same population as Sunnyvale.

>"This is a town for freaks and weirdos"

Because you say so? Because that's how you were taught when you grew up? I don't live in SF but that seems like a flimsy case to be made.

Funny isn't it, how some people only have one idea, which is, whenever there's a problem, the culprit is always "too much local oversight." "Too much interference in the free market." Let the forces of supply & demand straighten everything out as they always do, right?

Except how did it get this way in the first place? How did SF come to be? How did it become as it is now and get to have the problems it has now? Supply & demand, baby. The free market. Oh sure, the community having the audacity to block certain developments might've slowed it a little -- like shoveling seawater against an oncoming tide. And now the city that's overcrowded because of free market forces, will have all its problems solved by even freer markets? Good luck with that. I'm not saying a centrally-planned city would work out any better, but don't be surprised if this initiative produces more than a few unintended consequences.