What happens to the SF Bay area when the next major earthquake strikes? | Hacker News Reader

What happens to the SF Bay area when the next major earthquake strikes?

bloomberg.com

20 pointschampagnepapi22 comments

I hate to say it, but an earthquake is probably San Francisco's best bet at getting more housing built.

Also, it would take care of the homeless problem.

2 birds, one stone.

I'm curious. How? Isn't homelessness a social symptom? Homelessness doesn't just disappear because the current homeless are displaced, I thought.

That being said, I'm certainly not learned on the subject.

An earthquake would open up new ground that is currently prohibitively expensive by regulation (the 'social' part of the problem ) to allow enough housing to be built to reduce cost significantly.

Homeless people still exist where housing is dirt cheap. It doesn't matter whether the rent is $2500 or $500 when you don't have the skills or mental health to be employed at all.

I imagine that strained resources in a disaster would drive many to leave the area. Katrina, for example, led many poorer people to leave New Orleans permanently.

On the other hand, the homeless are used to dealing with meager resources and might be able to better tolerate a crisis situation.

Wouldn't homeless people be less likely to be harmed by roofs caving in on them? (thankfully)

I'm not sure if your comment was meant to echo Jonathan Swift.

Nah, if their point had been satirical, they wouldn't have used a throwaway account. Poster isn't exactly overflowing with the milk of human-kindness.

In the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake a few years back many of those killed were from the masonry facade of buildings collapsing into the street.

There was even an earthquake a few months earlier that killed nobody because it was in the middle of the night.If something similar happened in SF then the front of buildings falling into the street/sidewalk could kill lots of homeless even if the buildings themselves stayed fairly intact.

This also reminds me of rent control.

The real problem with rent control is SFs /bizarre/ implementation: it's determined by the age of the house, not the financial position or age of the residents.

I know multiple 20-30 year olds earning Bay Area tech salaries who have rent control. Which is insane.

Which suggests that rent control is not about protecting those that need low cost housing. It's also interesting the one-on-one adversarial relationship that rent control creates. What is the goal of rent control? Presumably it's something more beneficial and less tautological than to "control rent".

I have been looking for a house to buy in SF for the last 6 months. What's been very interesting is that most of the houses we have reviewed, did not have solid foundations (many being 2-unit condos). They are all located in liquefaction zones and the disclosure packages mentioned the foundations had cracks (or needed retrofitting). Still, buyers did not care and bid huge amount of money. Our estate agent told us the average buyer does not take that into consideration nor care to retrofit the foundation. Scary.

What is retrofitting? News to me from the Midwest.

In this case, it means increasing a structure's ability to survive an earthquake.

Could be a decent way to solve the current zoning / housing crysis. The only disruption not welcome in the Bay seems to be from Mother Nature.

And concurrently, may rattle the echo chamber a bit

Foster city real estate is an enigma. Had anecdotally heard from a lot of people that houses close to the bay are sinking very gradually. Nothing seems to affect the prices though :-)

Bart delays probably won't be any longer than usual ;)

Full telecommuting becomes more widely accepted?

I know one building in particular that may be problematic. It also happens to be sinking.

There will be a movie about it and it'll be called "Disrupt: 2019"

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