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Comment by johnwatson11218 | Hacker News Reader

Every time one of these articles appears it seems like the comments always mention prop 13, rent control, NIMBY and environmental regulations, and a difficult permitting process as the underlying reasons for the high rents in sf. It seems pretty obvious that if the market had its way the whole area would look like Tokyo.

Why can't we move beyond this and say "OK keep your 100 year old row houses and vineyards", lets continue to decentralize tech and create a world where moving to sf is not required to work in a startup?

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I work remotely in SF. I live here because I like not owning a car, walking and biking most places, and non-tech things to do. I'm just lucky I can afford it. The solution is to build more good US cities that aren't car centric. I'm not aware of any. Build a from scratch city with a target of at least 250k residents on the California coast and I'll move.

I don't know how many people think similarly, but there's still a lot of non-tech people in SF.

The best way i've seen this framed is: in all of the US, there are only about 2,000 blocks of housing with sufficient density & walkable services to support car free living. This is some of the most sought after and expensive real estate in the country, but zoning codes won't allow more of it to be built.

Example zoning restrictions: mandatory building setbacks, mandatory parking requirements, mandatory building separations, maximum units per building, 1 or 2 story maximum heights, high minimum lot sizes.

Note: a significant % of those 2,000 blocks are in San Francisco.

This is very interesting, but I can't use it unless you have a reference I can cite.

I'm also curious how many units there are in those 2000 blocks.

Manhattan alone is on the order of 2000 blocks, I don't know where you came up with that figure.

Poorly recalling from my memory. Given that a "block" is a variable metric, the actual number is less important than the concept that it is a static. There are only ~5 cities in the US with > 1,000 of these blocks: NYC, Boston, DC, SF, Chicago (Philadelphia?, Baltimore?)* AND with a transportation network that makes car-free living possible. Developers would build more such areas if zoning allowed.

* Forgive my ignorance for being from the West Coast. Even in SF its difficult to live car free if you don't live on BART or Muni Metro.

  high minimum lot sizes.

I'm confused. I can hardly think of an area with smaller average single family house lot areas than SF.

Exactly. Developers are economically incentivized to subdivide to the maximum extent. Low minimum lot sizes encourages small lot sizes = high density.

Right. Something like a third of Manhattan buildings could not be built today due to similar zoning restrictions.

>> The solution is to build more good US cities that aren't car centric. I'm not aware of any.

NYC is definitely not car-centric or even car-friendly. Indeed, the non-car-centric zone there is considerably larger than SF's. Other cities like Washington DC and Boston are not too different so long as you don't venture too far from downtown.

The weather and people there are crap if you're used to the west coast. Winters suck and the rudeness of NYC people is insufferable in the long run for me.

Portland and Seattle are both excellent cities to live in if you want a car free existence on the west coast.

Seattle? Downtown maybe. The east side (across Lake Washington) is very suburban, and not particularly suited to car-free living. I lived there car-less for a couple of summers and got into alarmingly good shape biking up and down the eastside hills.

"alarmingly good shape"

I'm imagining you one day looking down at your body and realizing, "Oh shit, I'm way too fit. Better cut out all this biking!"

US cities that aren't car centric: Portland, Seattle, New York, Boston. Nearby: Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto. Afar: London, Paris, Berlin.

Arguably San Francisco is the most car-centric of the bunch with its comparatively non-functional transportation system.

You can get around D.C. without a car---by which I mean the city proper and not the other metro areas.

In fact in the city, you're burdened by having a car.

You can easily extend that across the river to Arlington, VA. There's extensive public transportation. Cycling is taken seriously. Maybe the City of Alexandria, too; but, not the "Alexandria" part of Fairfax.

Before the Metro ceased to exist.

Most of these lose on weather, culture or proximity to the ocean for me.

All of SF isn't easy car free, but I live downtown. SF could have significantly better mass transit. In order to get completely car free in my lifetime would probably require opt in to a new city due to people who have jobs related to things that should be removed.

NYC is too dense and the main prominent industries appear to be wall Street, advertising, and fashion which are not things I like. Car traffic is also pretty horrible.

As somebody who lives in Portland it still seems very much "car centric". There are some people who are able to get along without a car. There are others who can commute via bus or bike.

But it's really difficult to get around without a car. What sucks is that the city is making it more difficult to get around by limiting the number of cars on streets (Glisan, Division, heading into town on Burnside, soon Foster) without providing much in the way of alternatives. Buses aren't running more often and they don't have protected right-of-ways that would let get around traffic jams.

I'll agree that what they're doing on NE Broadway, protecting bicyclists, looks good. But they're doing it that very rarely.

How about Chicago? The #2 biggest non-car centric city in the nation?

What's wrong with making San Francisco more like Tokyo? Do you know how much economic productivity is lost because zoning regulations prevent further densification that is otherwise desired?

... And the inefficiency of delivering services to a large, low-density population; and the societal burdens of municipalities designed around automobiles as the primary mode of transportation. Air quality, sedentary lifestyles, loss of wildlands, and so on.

If street construction and maintenance were paid for solely by usage...

I'm not against making it look like Tokyo, I agree that it would be more productive if it were more dense. I don't live there so it isn't my problem. I do think that it limits the amount of economic growth and could hurt the national economy. I think it could also make it easier for other countries to leap frog us in terms of software but that is very speculative.

There's a lot of room between SF now and Tokyo. Even moderate increases in density and building housing stock. It's not a binary choice of the status quo or a dystopian nightmare.

Is Tokyo a dystopian nightmare? The density offers a high quality of living while controlling expenses for all but housing (which is understandably expensive). The mass transit there is world class, and so you don't need to own a car with all of its attendant costs. You can buy cheap groceries to cook at home. The standard of living and options for things to do is better than living in the country once you account for the higher average salaries in Tokyo.

I live in Manhattan and it's the same here. Rent is expensive (but not horribly so if you have roommates or an SO). Everything else is reasonable.

Wouldn't that be nice? If SF is unreasonable, we'll just take our ball and play elsewhere. :)

But how to make it happen?

There is an awful lot of resistance to hiring remote staff. I checked the latest "Who's Hiring?" post here at HN and of the top 10 postings, only 2 were open to hiring remotely.

yea I agree that remote is a big part of the solution. Despite all the talk about how easy it is to "work from anywhere" remote still has a lot of pain points. Where I work we can do it one day a week but it sucks when people are dialing in to a meeting. Remote Desktop and ssh aren't really that great. I'm thinking we need fiber to the curb and VR fueled telepresence that is able to convey nuance and emotion when interacting with co-workers.

Yeah, it basically requires a lot of structuring the way people work together to make it so that remote workers are first class citizens in meetings etc. Otherwise, remote workers miss way too much of the context that comes from informal chatter at the office and end up being isolated from the main flow of things.

We can barely even teleconference people into formal meetings in a way that works consistently and isn't a huge pain, I think we're a very long way from remote work being a solution for a large percentage of workers.

There's something to be said for being in close proximity with a lot of other people working in the same profession. I came from working in tech for 8 years before moving to Silicon Valley and it's a world of difference.

In other words, Country Music will always exist outside of Nashville, but if you make Country music, Nashville is the place to be.

People don't move to Nashville or Hollywood to be near colleagues; they move there to "make it big". I'm sure the same is true of most who ingress into SV. At least programmers can move to pretty much any big city and find a job paying upper middle-class wages (and can do pretty good living anywhere with decent Internet working remotely)

The city wouldn't have to look like Tokyo; we could end the housing crisis by increasing the supply by 30%, and we could do that by replacing just 6% of the city's single-family houses with six-story apartment buildings. The other 94% could be left alone, as could every other parcel in the city, and nothing over six stories would be necessary.

http://tinyurl.com/6storySF

Because despite all the talk about "disruption" tech is still surprisingly conservative. Things are changing though. I've seen a huge increase in the number of companies willing to consider remote work in the last couple of years.

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