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Comment by umeshunni | Hacker News Reader

>> almost no one likes the current situation unless they are a landlord.

Anyone who owns property in the city, whether they are a homeowner or a landlord, likes the current situation. For non-landlord homeowners, the current situation keeps their property values and home equity high and it ensures that the neighborhood and quality of life they bought into stays permanently stuck in time.

My local Nimby group, for e.g., sends out monthly notices (e.g http://pastebin.com/0TJiV0aM ) letting us know where the next development is, why we should protest it and sends us sample templates on how to email politicians to protest any new development. While large developers are probably able to lobby politicians, I doubt they're able to do this kind of astroturfing.

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Quoting the linked notice:

It is bad enough that the recent monster home epidemic is consuming every inch of a lot up to its maximum permissible limit to build supersized single-family homes. This legislation, in effect, enables the trend for a monster-home-plus-in-law at the cost of further eroding our mid-block open space that is a community resource providing residents with light, air, privacy, visual relief, and a much-needed psychological comfort zone.

I've never actually seen words like these penned, in favor of NIMBYism. SF is experiencing a "monster home epidemic"??? This is legitimately disgusting.

I don't know that it's an "epidemic", but houses are certainly getting bigger in the US[1]. I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else. This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government. I doubt I'd personally agree with many of their stances, but I really can't see how it's "legitimately disgusting".

[1]: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-02/business/chi-a...

This just seems like a newsletter for people who care about things like that enough to participate in their local government.

For other cities/locales you may be right, but in SF, it just seems offensive. We all know what the consensus epidemic is in the Bay Area, and attempting to use that word to imply that these poor landowners are being encroached upon is something I find reprehensible. Their "epidemic" is a trifling concern compared to what some are going through.

I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else.

There are plenty of places in the country where you can find that. When very wealthy people stubbornly want to hold onto that in the middle of one of the most dense metro areas in the country, while people are being pushed out of their homes and homeless fill the streets, yeah I find it disgusting for them to talk about preserving their "much-needed psychological comfort zone." They can move out to the country if they really want all that stuff, they can afford it, not everyone can.

> while people are being pushed out of their homes and homeless fill the streets

i find it hard to believe that the homeless problem is due to the soaring house prices in SF.

>> I can see why a block filled with yards/gardens and small buildings is preferable to a block filled with large buildings and not much else.

Preferable to whom, though? Look at it from the perspective of one of those people who are renting in SF, and can barely afford that rent given your paycheck (or cannot afford it, actually, if you had to pay market value). I bet they would prefer a residence they can afford to the one they cannot.

So long as freedom of movement and freedom to buy and sell property are in place, it's either-or - either a given block will be affordable, or it will have yards/gardens and small buildings. The latter carries an implied statement that people below a certain income level simply shouldn't be there. I think it's clear why some would find it "legitimately disgusting".

Are you saying the fear-mongering is legitimately disgusting? Or the idea of a "monster home epidemic"?

Astroturfing is when they send out of a bunch of professional advocacy designed to look "grassroots" in the sense of "just ordinary people who care about the issue".

I don't see how "a legit neighborhood group asking residents to contact their officials" fits that model; why do you say it's astroturfing?

I thought the key ingredient of astroturfing is the concealment of the source of the message. The idea is to make a centralized effort appear to not be centralized. I would say that providing templates to contact public officials would qualify as astroturfing. And yes, I would extend that attribution to many advocacy groups whose proposals I agree with.

It may seem similar enough, but that does not seem to match the standard usage[1], in which the critical ingredient is the false impression of pre-existing grassroots consensus.

Telling the existing John/Jane Q. Public, who already agrees with you on the issue, to actually do something based on that agreement, is just regular activism and doesn't connote the "aha! caught you" aura of an astroturfing allegation.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#Definition

I think he's trying to say it's not astroturfing - ie that is too large-scale for that. Thereby preempting dismissal of this anecdotal evidence.

A lot of people who do not own (i.e., renters) in SF also do not want high rises. They feel like SF would have a long way to go before all of the foreign money runs out and those apartments would become affordable to them. In short, they don't think more building will benefit them in terms of housing, but will instead be bad for them in terms of quality of life, e.g., more people and traffic, etc.

High rises are one thing but they are not the way to solve SF's housing shortage. One 5-story building on one corner of every block in the sunset would easily relieve the shortage.

Geographically speaking most of SF already suffers from poor quality of life. Except for the northeast quadrant of the city, SF is dominated by flat, boring, ugly zones of car-centered banality.

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7398485,-122.5023375,3a,75y,...

There's nothing in this photo worth preserving.

> There's nothing in this photo worth preserving.

In the Midwest, if someone built that photo (exactly) it would get called a strong downtown urban design, and the builder would be praised for creating "missing middle" housing.

Well I heard there's a couple of nice towns in the midwest, like Chicago :-) Even in the most reactionary fringes of the midwest people are starting to realize that exurban sprawl isn't working. See for example http://newsok.com/article/5505468

Chicago is the best city in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin. They have nothing to compare. I'd live there except the lack of mountains, lack of an ocean (surfing doesn't work on the Great Lakes even though they're beautiful), and freezing winters + hot humid Summer's would kill me. I can't go back to that. West coast; best coast.

Yes, it is a suburb inside of a city. And the inhabitants of that area of The City like it that way. The people who live in the Sunset and Richmond form very powerful political blocks, and you're going to have to do a lot to unseat their representatives on the Board of Supervisors.

Maybe start-ups can convince their employees to move to the Sunset with the singular goal of voting in a pro-growth person to the Board of Supervisors. You can do this one district at a time.

Or startups could just go to cheaper COL cities.

It's strange how far out of the way people will go to avoid the obvious.

Actually, Katy Tang, the Supervisor from the Sunset, is a major proponent of building more. Unlike many of the other Supervisors, Katy Tang is actually looking out for the good of the local economy.

Now, Eric Mar, the Supervisor from the Richmond. This is a man I detest.

Right, the notion that there is no room in SF is a complete lie. The Sunset and the Richmond could be completely razed to the ground and rebuilt at mid-rise density.

Wow, do you read what your writing? Razing a neighborhood like some sort of conquering force?!

Yeah, we can't do that right? Not to well-off, straight, white people!

https://hoodwork-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/story/i...

http://www.janetdelaney.com/south-of-market/

http://oaklandplanninghistory.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/1/1/181...

Richmond always feels distinctly Asian to me.

"In the Richmond District neighborhood in San Francisco, CA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Asian (50.0%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (10.9%), and residents who report Irish roots (6.9%), and some of the residents are also of Italian ancestry (4.5%), along with some Russian ancestry residents (4.1%), among others. In addition, 35.2% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country."

http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/richmond-d...

You're right about that. In light of history I was using "white" to mean "not black". Over the decade we haven't seen any problem in displacing black people by the thousands to build even things that weren't worth having, like the Cypress freeway and the Western Addition.

But a couple 45 story buildings will mean you don't have to put up a 5 story building on every corner. Or do both and make it really affordable.

You also have to consider that decreasing cost in SF will lead to increased demand.

A 45-story building is much more expensive than 9 5-story buildings and causes localized transportation problems. You really want your housing, jobs, education, retail, and leisure spread around such that people can conduct most or all of their daily affairs on foot.

If you want people to be able conduct all of your daily affairs on foot 45 story buildings are the way to go.

There are examples of that working and there are examples of shorter heights working equally well. I enjoy them both (Manhattan and Paris as examples of the two types) but what SF is doing doesn't really work for me. All the high rise residences are being built in a small area south of Market, but in the same neighborhoods there's nothing to do, nothing to eat, no public spaces. It's not very livable.

I can't agree, there are lots of restaurants in SOMA as well as the city's best nightlife IMO.

Nightlife I'll grant you. But I bet if you moved into the new apartments on Beale and Folsom you'd take an Uber everywhere, because there's nowhere to eat lunch on a Saturday within half a mile, and the nightlife is 1.5+ miles away.

That part in the middle of South Beach is a weird little restaurant desert. However if you are willing to make the 10 minute walk I'd recommend the Delancey Street Restaurant for a nice place for brunch with a good social mission. I had many a mimosa there when living in the corporate housing across the street.

High-rise buildings really aren't necessary for a walkable lifestyle. 5-6 stories (Berlin style) and everything you need is within a couple of blocks. Even with UK style terraced streets usually mean you have shops/cafes/pubs within easy walking distance.

>A 45-story building is much more expensive than 9 5-story buildings

Including land costs, is that really true? I sort of doubt it, since those sorts of high rises are built in cities where land prices aren't that high.

> You really want your housing, jobs, education, retail, and leisure spread around such that people can conduct most or all of their daily affairs on foot.

Don't you want the opposite of that? If it is spread, you spend more time traveling. Public transit that is spread out is very hard to accomplish. Cities with that stuff all spread out are car cities.

If things are spread out and randomly distributed then you have a living economy reachable by foot. There will be a bakery, a barber, a library, and a cafe in your neighborhood. If you put all the houses in one place and all the bakeries in another, then you have to get in your car or on the bus to travel between them.

I always trot out Paris, but that's only because it's such a good example.

https://www.google.com/maps/search/bakery/@48.8858374,2.3347...

I actually think it would be very hard to soak up demand at this point.

I think adding high rise is the right choice, as long as it is accompanied with increases in transport links. It's all very well to add in a couple of thousand people, but they all have to get in and out and buy groceries etc. you don't want each of those people owning a car and making the traffic worse.

I think there should be mor emphasis on making other parts of the Bay Area more like the things people want from the city / peninsular proper. Whether that is transport, cultural or liveability, it should all be possible.

>as long as it is accompanied with increases in transport links

That point so often seems ignored in these discussions (with respect to many growing/popular cities).

So an example of the reality in the Boston area is that the Green Line extension is on hold last I read because costs have doubled to $2 billion or so. (And the Green Line is basically the oldest and crappiest line in the overall not-bad Boston metro system. It's essentially a trolley with underground sections dating to the turn of the last century.)

So 20 years and $20 billion or so in transportation infrastructure would certainly set San Francisco up to do more building in areas where there are good opportunities to expand housing stock beyond what's already being built.

The problem with building mid sized apartments everywhere, is that now you have to be involved in political fights everywhere.

With high rise buildings, all you need to do is convince ONE place to build a bunch of them. Perhaps in a place such as south SOMA, which is packed with industrial warehouses that could be replaced with apartment sky scrapers.

Nobody is going to be gentrified when the old dirty warehouses in south SOMA get replaced.

Agreed. I hate how people keep casually mentioning that "oh, you could just build up n% of the low-rise areas", as if convincing all those neighborhoods to go along with it and replacing all those buildings were somehow easier -- politically or otherwise -- than 20 SoMa/FiDi high-rises.

Ideally the political solution would be only a single step that allows property owners to build x-story buildings in certain zones. That shouldn't require the persuasion of every single neighborhood, because "neighborhood" shouldn't be a political unit with the ability to stop a property owner from building a structure that is permitted by the larger government's (i.e. the city's) zoning laws.

> Nobody is going to be gentrified when the old dirty warehouses in south SOMA get replaced.

FWIW, the city thinks that warehouses and auto body shops are an important part of its jobs plan for non-techies. Apparently it pays better than working in the service industry.

>Nobody is going to be gentrified when the old dirty warehouses in south SOMA get replaced.

Well, there was a decent uproar when a large wholesale flower market was slated to be shut down.

I can see the problems in that picture.

+street five times too wide

+snout houses with huge garages and driveways but few yards and porches

+low rise housing with one floor devoted to parking in a high demand area

+not nearly enough trees

+no street corner retail

But if you think that's bad, you should see 98% of the United States where it's much worse than the worst of San Francisco.

Those homes have yards, porches, and trees in the back (check the overhead view), and often rooms on the same floor as the garage (which is one car wide). This set-up is clearly not ideal but it's more efficient than the large unused front lawns present in most US suburbs.

It's also how they do it in Montreal and parts of Europe. Check out "Avenue de Chateaubriand, Montréal, Québec H2S 2N8, Canada" . They even have alleys for pairing and the bins so those don't have to sit out on the street (there is also street parking in some areas).

> There's nothing in this photo worth preserving.

Holy crap. Every inch of ground is covered in concrete yet it looks like less actual housing than say a rowhouse neighborhood like: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/55d2a119e4b03323486a5e...

How do you square the narrative "units in these high rises would be bought out by investors and so no one would get to rent them" with "these high rises would attract too many people and too much traffic to the neighborhood"

+1. If the problem is that absent foreign investors are buying up all the housing stock, maybe we should make a 100 story tower on some parking lot in SOMA and sell each floor as a $5M luxurious penthouse unit with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country. Boom, we just took a bunch of those foreign investors out of the market without increasing traffic and decreased the annual US trade deficit by 1% to boot.

Fundamentally, if people outside the country want to buy our housing, we should be happy about that, and create jobs by building housing to meet the demand. Imagine if our reaction to Chinese demand for Buicks was to limit car manufacturing and complain that foreign investors are making Buicks unaffordable.

"with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country."

If we could prevent them from getting a visa to come at all, we could do the same thing and we wouldn't even have to build the building. Just allocate a few address numbers on ritzy street corners and sell the "buildings" to investors stashing Russian or Chinese black market cash.

Think about all the future and derivative opportunities, too...

Heck, we could do high-frequency house trading!

Of course it's an absurd analogy, there would not be much value if there is no underlying property you can make use of. But I think it illustrates the point well: if the high prices were caused by absent foreign investors, 101 would not be jammed.

More realistically, investors rent out the properties they buy. So a market with tons of foreign investors spending irrationally would have an undersupply of homes to buy and corresponding oversupply of homes for rent. Renters would get a great deal and buyers would get bad ROI.

You could actually do that. If you sold options in an approved development with a five years delay in start time, you'd probably get in plenty of cash and not actually have any new residents. You could get a healthy market going in just the right to own an apartment in the future.

China already had a big problem with empty housing and cities of empty housing http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/business/international/...

> In short, they don't think more building will benefit them in terms of housing, but will instead be bad for them in terms of quality of life

The frustrating thing about this NIMBY argument, is that it's usually presented as the progressive option, it's standing up for the people. But in reality it's often selfish - homeowners/landlords who have a lot to gain are gaining support for their cause, by getting the disenfranchised to basically decide "If I'm going to be priced out of the city anyway, I'm gonna take as many other people as I can out with me". When in reality, many of them would have a shot at not getting priced out at all with better policy (or at least a shot at making "getting priced out" not so bad, e.g. more housing supply in the city & in neighboring towns -> prices drop a little in the city -> prices drop a lot outside of the city within easy commuting distance).

I think the answer to this is the city should do all the land acquisition/architecture/engineering/environmental impact research/planning approval, and then offer that completed package for developers to bid on. This will make it much easier for developers to build projects as they'll not have to worry about paying these up-front costs only to have the city reject their proposals, while still allowing voters to ensure truly terrible projects aren't built. Surely there must be downsides to this approach, what are they?

Not to say I'm in favour of NIMBYism, but if SF had to have a serious, rustbelt scale economic downturn in the future then lack of overdevelopment would be a positive thing.

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