Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”
medium.com
medium.com
That, plus people assaulting my wife on the street, plus $3000 rent for a 1 bedroom, and I had it with the city. I loved it, it was a great experience, but I just couldn't take it anymore. Now I work from home in the central valley, where I can afford to rent a 3000 sq. ft. home (not because I'm paid much, but because housing is so cheap), and my commute is 1 minute. I'm much happier out here, yet I find when I tell people from SF where I live, some (not all, most people ask "Where the heck is that?") wrinkle their noses. I say, if you're tired of the city, give it a shot -- you might be happier.
The problem can be attacked from two angles. Either ramp up housing development to take care of the population influx, or slow down the population influx to match the rate of housing development. Obviously, the people of the area have a vested interest in keeping the area attractive; but for the rest of us, I think it's important to remember there are other places to live and you can be just as happy or happier elsewhere. I'm someone who could have used that reminder a year ago.
There's a lot of justification that goes into paying $3000 per month to live in a one bedroom apartment. You have to recoup that value elsewhere. A lot of it has to do with the job opportunities available to tech workers. That's undeniable. But some of the other justifications I used were more or less lies I started telling myself about why I had to stay.
> Are you proposing that everyone in SF move to places like the Central Valley (driving up price)
It's already happening, so maybe we should embrace it as a valid option. The town I'm living in has become sort of a telecommuter town, precisely because of rents in SF.
> and start driving around cars (increasing traffic and pollution)?
I actually went about 8 months without a car in SF. I took Uber, bike, and muni as my get around. Between me and my wife, we were spending $700 per month on transportation, so we ended up buying a car to get around -- it was just more convenient. Out in the valley, we actually put fewer miles on it, because it's easier to bike out here, and things are actually closer to us than they were in the city (both in miles and minutes).
care to elaborate?
I would bet >50% of the people working in the bay area who say they can't work remote are doing jobs that could very easily be done remote.
Do you work on a computer? You can do that remote.
Plenty of people work on, and require physical access to, computer systems that can’t practically be made available to remote workers.
I don't know where you came up with this. The OP implied that by moving away from a heavily populated area and working remotely, he was able to afford more space and shorten his commute. You managed to turn no commute into increased pollution and moving to a less densely populated place as "driving up price"?
Besides this obvious thing, what exactly is your point?
Saying "it's crowded here, let's go move somewhere else and make that crowded" is not just kicking the can, it's making the problem worse because often those areas have even less mass transit.
Infrastructure is not something the average citizen seems to give a fig about.
San Francisco is the most expensive and over-priced shithole. I’ve lived here for 10 years and I’m completely over it. I can’t wait for some startup or tech company to use this as a disruptive opportunity. I only live here because my job is here. I’d move if my job would let me.
They are starting a high speed rail line there. It is 500,000 people and much more spread out than the coastal big cities, so it is not nearly as dense. The bus system is the best I have ever seen in the US, so you can live without a car there, even though it sprawls. I have lived without a car for years and Fresno was a big improvement over previous experiences.
I considered doing a website* as an ode to the city/to promote a walkable lifestyle there. It didn't get off the ground and now I have moved out of state. But, if you want to stay in California and want to get away from some of the insanity in places like SF, I will second "just move to the Central Valley if you can arrange it."
The politicians they elect throughout the Central Valley are also absolutely bonkers.
I don't get it. There are national forests there. Woodward Park is huge. There is an international airport. What kinds of activities are you into that you can't get your needs met in a city of 500,000 people, about the 36th largest city in the US IIRC, which means there are entire states that don't have a city that big in them.
I grew up in Georgia. I'll take 110 in a dry place with low humidity over 101 in air thick enough to slice with a knife any day.
I was a military wife. I have lived all over. I just find your statements genuinely baffling and I would like to understand where you are coming from.
There’s nothing wrong with Fresno. Plenty of lovely people live there, and I’m sure there are all sorts of things happening all the time. It just doesn’t (to me at least) seem comparable to the Bay Area. As one example, Fresno State is a fine school, but it can’t compete with Berkeley and Stanford.
The population density is also relatively low, and it doesn’t seem like a very easy place to live without frequently using a car. (I end up using a car about once a month.) I really appreciate being able to walk to 3 different grocery stores within a 3 block radius, walk to 10 coffee/tea shops, walk to 100 restaurants of every imaginable type, walk to the park, walk to 2 library branches, walk to several little art galleries, walk to bakeries and fish markets, walk to all sorts of little shops, walk to the subway, ...
No, it isn't comparable. That is kind of the point here: If you are sick of the downside in the Bay Area of insane commutes, insane house prices, large numbers of increasingly aggressive homeless junkies, etc, then leaving might make more sense for some people than staying and hoping to fix some of these problems.
But thank you for giving me a meaty reply.
Housing prices are definitely a problem, but we are lucky to own a condo, so the main effect on us is a gradually gentrifying neighborhood (which process we are part of), which will probably mean less interesting neighbors in another 10 or 20 years.
I am struggling to understand this discussion with you. Do you have some objection to the suggestion that people who are dissatisfied should consider the Central Valley as an alternative? It isn't like it is a gun to your head insisting people who are happy should leave.
I’m just saying I wouldn’t choose to. My original phrasing (“can’t imagine”) was probably a bit hyperbolic.
Probably best to drop it though.
Seemed like a natural exchange to me.
It's the main reason why I left there to move to the bay. I just couldn't handle their politics anymore.
I feel like this is a hidden motivation for many people. Maybe just me.
Traditionally, work has been a very common place to meet future spouses. I believe the rate has dropped in recent decades, but I would be surprised if it was so low as to be inconsequential, especially when considering something as important as many people view this.
Just the graph: https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/internet-dating.pn...
>By meeting online, or meeting through the Internet, we mean that a couple’s relationship began with an online interaction and then developed into a personal and physical relationship. We coded couples as having met online only if the online interaction was crucial to their having met, regardless of how the couple communicated once they had met. … If the couple first met decades earlier, fell out of touch, and then rediscovered each other through Facebook, that would be “meeting online” for our purposes.
Based on my reading of their criteria, the relationship would be categorized as 'coworker' if they either knew the person at work prior to visiting the bar, they were introduced at the bar through a coworker, or a work event took place at a bar.
https://be.helpful.com/helpful-how-the-math-of-viral-growth-...
Transitive property of dating. You might not date your coworker but you might date their friend... or a bit less likely a friend of their friend. Etc...
Also known in social gaming as virality, a statistic you can measure.
Also applies to knowledge transfer which is a reason to live near a hub.
Huh? So why weren't you just walking in the first place? That's like a 45 minute brisk walk. That doesn't sound like any kind of hardship.
Was a great deal of that time spent walking? Because taking the N from Cole Valley to downtown normally takes 15 minutes.
But we make it so hard for people to get around. You can take a bus for 45m or take the BART which is overcrowded, unreliable, and has trains that can be as much as 20m apart.
Plus using transit around here requires way too much knowledge. There are so many different major transit agencies that don't make any effort to connect (Caltrain, Muni bus, Muni metro, BART, etc) and they all have different pricing schemes (flat rate, monthly passes, pay by distance, etc).
Living 10 miles from your job shouldn't mean you live an hour from your job. NYC gets that. SF Bay Area does not.
How did one of the richest areas in the world go so catastrophically wrong in this regard?
Everybody builds the infrastructure that the then-state-of-the-art calls for. That was roads and freeways for most of the US. It's an accident of history, not an idiotic mistake. Not doing anything about it for the past ten years is the possible mistake, but from the perspective of the people who already live somewhere, and like having relatively lower density, they have just as much right to doing things how they want as the new tech crowd interlopers do.
I tend to think these are further away than most people think. But I also have a lot of trouble seeing how they don't massively increase traffic. Maybe you need less parking and maybe inter-car communications can make traffic move more smoothly. But does anyone seriously believe that people will drive less when they effectively have a personal driver at their beck and call?
No it isn't. Many neighborhoods are quiet and/or cheap because they're difficult to access. Their residents have a vested interest in keeping it that way. You don't vote for a new subway stop if you'll be priced out or have your perception fo quiet and safety ruined by the people it brings.
The Key System is one notable example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_System
The new Bay Bridge span was specifically not designed to carry rail, so rail over the bridge is not coming back.
But it's so crowded and stinky, it's not worth it. That's my educated guess about why so many people use car sharing services
Also, why do they keep doing so many new buildings?
Those buildings are going to need people, and people need transportation, and a house...
(apologies to Y.B.)
The middle class is taxed to capacity. When ~30-40% of your paycheck is taxes (including federal), and another 30-40% is exorbitant rent costs, you're left feeling quite squeezed. I myself for example, simply mark NO on all tax supported programs on the ballot, regardless of their merit.
It sucks because many of those programs are so desperately needed. But asking me to raise my taxes any further is a non-starter. If you include property tax and sales tax in your estimation of how much you're getting taxed the number is astonishing. Yet look around and witness what that buys - failing infrastructure, skyrocketing housing prices, terrible roads, healthcare prices spiraling out of control, an educational system in decline, the list goes on, and on...
It's not that I have an "every man for them self" perspective, it's just that I have believe there are deeper issues with our country that we can't tax ourselves out of.
The federal budget is to a first approximation is 2/3 medicare/medicaid/social security/defense. In California across state and local has it's 2/3 being spent on health care/education/pensions. The Golden Gate Bridge cost $1.5B in today's dollars to build. Today-ish it took $6.4B to rebuild the east span of the Bay bridge.
How have things gotten so expensive, where does that money go, it just seems like despite paying a fair amount in taxes we're just not getting very much for our money.
Contractors and sub contractors. The more layers in the supply chain, the harder it is for that money to be tracked.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/05/16/us-rail-constr... https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726714-american-bu...
Put another way, why is my dollar buying exponentially less than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago? Don't even try to tell me it's inflation.
I don't know the answer. We pay politicians to know those things and to work on finding solutions. Funny how they don't seem any better at understanding the problem and finding a solution than you and me.
So while I don't honestly have any solid understanding, I can only posit that it may have something to do with wealth consolidation [1]. I'm no proponent of socialism or artificially redistributing wealth but I look to the growing divide between the rich and poor in the U.S. (and globally) and can't help but notice it correlates quite strongly with my dollar buying less, and less. Yes, correlation != causation, but you gotta start somewhere.
If you can get past the 90s era cinematography "The Money Makers" is a fascinating documentary which illuminates some of the issues with our monetary system.
[1] The top 0.01% of households, with net assets of over $40m, short-changed the taxman by a whopping 30%.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/06/daily-...
A big factor in the USA that we only have a few major cities with a built up core like New York.
We have many major cities built like LA or Houston where it's spread out and makes public transport less of a priority.
If you just add transport, what will happen is what's now happening in Brooklyn - you'll just see rents pushed up further away from the center as the wealthy utilize mass transport to buy up housing a bit further from the core. It ends up with everyone else just being pushed further away until they're again facing a 60-90 minute commute.
Manhattan is able twice as many residents as San Francisco, which means it can absorb a lot of people before they start to spread outwards. It also helps unburden the mass transit system by reducing the distance that the average resident is traveling to work - helping make room for people commuting from the edges. (And to be fair, anyone in NY now will tell you that their mass transit system is having serious problems, too.)
The Bay definitely needs better mass transit - but I'm not holding my breath waiting for Marin, or Palo Alto, to jump on board with the idea of both better transit and more housing.
In the meantime, SF should be doing everything it can to increase housing stock if it wants to remain affordable - and yes, that might mean high rises in the sunset, or near GG park, despite what the author says. That kind of "build housing, but not in a place I have to see it" attitude is a big part of why we have a housing crunch.
Build more places to live, and the cost of living will come down. It's that simple.
Interesting idea, but ultimately a fairy tale. It won't happen.
The article seems to ignore the idea of the denser urban core gives more places for the wealthy to live and possibly damping the sprawl of medium wealthy house.
Also one of the central ideas of the article is that there needs to be one governing body to make everything work together, but at the same time ignores the fact that half of the color coded map contains housing from a different state.
Furthermore, while public transportation in NYC (and the North east corridor in general) is better, it is still kind of slow. While I couldn't find a great example of 10 miles being an hour in NYC my closest was Astoria queens (relatively cheap) to Wall Street is about 10 miles and takes around 45 minutes on the subway (one transfer).
Uber/Lyft are causing declines in the usage of public transit
Brooklyn is still twice as dense as SF, and much more affordable.
(I happen to live in a $2.5k studio just a couple minutes away from Byrant Park. I picked it because it made my commute to work a 9 minute walk.)
Are these sub $2k places across from a public housing complex, rat infested, or just scam listings that magically have a new price once you call>?
That said:
> And we also probably don’t want high rise condos on the edge of Golden Gate Park. San Francisco isn’t New York.
Probably going to have to get over this objection for a plan like this to work. Transit and accessibility are great places to start, but transit-oriented development requires density to succeed. If people are going to be getting around via transit lines instead of by car, you need a lot of people to live within easy walking distance of each residential transit stop, and you need a lot of the places people are trying to get to (work, leisure, etc.) to be within easy walking distance of the stop on the other end of their trip. High transit ridership and neighborhoods comprised of single-family homes don't work well together, and while part of what makes the Bushwick example work well is the better transit, the density is a big part of the calculus as well (again, on both ends).
The weather is a drawback (in probably 200+ days in NYC over 10 years I can remember a single week of what I would consider nice weather). I have realized that crappy climate is a poor reason to avoid the move.
My one main concern is finding a job with similar pay and interesting work. 90+% of the job listings I see are for Java enterpise-type work paying a third of what my (admittedly more than comfortable) current total pay is.
I'd be interested to hear your reasons. For me, I'm the exact opposite. In the 3 years I've lived in CA, I haven't had bronchitis once, which used to happen almost every year on the east coast. Not having to deal with 14 degree weather and snow is one of the main reasons I moved away. For me, so much happiness flows this simple fact.
I’ve lived in Michigan, Texas, Washington, California. The weather in California is dramatically better than the others, but on balance I would much rather give up 3+ hrs of commuting a day for 1hr where some of that is in a humid subway station.
If you haven’t lived in the humid areas of Texas, you don’t know that it’s much worse than NYC/Boston/etc in summer. Rather than 85-90 with 85% humidity, think 104 with 85+% humidity. With virtually zero culture. And continual rain throughout the otherwise mild winter.
“Yeah, you say the 6-month-long Northeast winters are bad, but have you considered that it would be a lot worse if you were living under a blizzard in far-northern prairie?
“Also, there are 2 nice months every year!”
At the risk of sounding xenophobic, Portland is going to turn into San Francisco soon enough if people/companies keep immigrating from California and New York, and elected officials keep proposing policies modeled after the Bay Area. I'm not saying "stay away" as I enjoy much of the growth PDX has seen over the last few years, especially the fact we have a much easier time finding good developers these days. I'm just concerned that many of our newcomers had it so bad in regard to traffic and costs of living, that their tolerance for those things will, generally speaking, lift up the floor here in Portland.
So, welcome, but please please please push back against freeway expansions, push for more alternative transit, push for more walkable communities, and all that jazz. PDX can't stay small and easy going forever, but maybe we can avoid some of the pitfalls that have befallen other large metro areas.
It is already in the process of doing so.
> please please please push back against freeway expansions ...
And this attitude is the reason. I don't know why people think that adopting the same anti-growth, anti-construction, anti-roads attitude that has made San Francisco so unaffordable for regular people will have a different outcome here.
Again, I'm not advocating anti growth, I'm saying if it's done slapshod we'll be having the same conversations about PDX in ten years as we do San Fran now. 1.5 hour commutes for people living 10 miles or less from work.
This is on the major US West Coast interstate highway, going through the largest city in the state. I know of 100k person towns in the middle of nowhere that have better highway infrastructure than this.
On everything else you mention, we are in agreement. The increased density of the inner East side is hopefully going to play a big role in keeping costs down and avoiding massive sprawl as the city grows.
And on the regional level, the YIMBY movement has been very successful this year with several state legislative initiatives that hold cities accountable for meeting their planned housing goals, and for increasing funding for affordable housing.
There's the problem right there.
From the article:
"Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons."
"And we also probably don’t want high rise condos on the edge of Golden Gate Park. San Francisco isn’t New York."
I've voted in favor of every housing initiative available to me, but you can't make your favorite part of the Bay Area sacred and expect everyone else to give up theirs.
Now, imagine the opposite, Brisbane demanding San Francisco become more suburban because San Francisco is to city-like for their liking.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-control...
The attitude is essentially, "I've got mine, let's pull the ladder up after me and deny anyone else affordable housing."
It also has ensured that residents of San Francisco have very easy access to wilderness - I'm certainly better off being able to go hiking with just a 15 minute drive.
I live in a mixed SFH/midrise apartment neighborhood in Oakland, and our population density is 24,000 per square mile.
So putting 24k people in that part of Brisbane wouldn't even look particularly built up.
The Nob Hill, Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill areas (beautiful, treasured, highly desired places) in San Francisco all vary from 30k to 60k per square mile.
Putting 45k people on Brisbane baylands would be awesome.
What's really happening is that Brisbane loves the sweet tax revenues from all the businesses they host, but don't want the (expensive) responsibility to house all those people that work in town.
That's a common, often unstated problem, in many places. A new family often doesn't pay enough in taxes to cover the services they need, schools in particular. Which puts pressure on everyone's tax burden.
I live in a rural/exurban town in New England and the tax issue definitely comes up in any discussion of approving any sizable development. (The town tends to be against development in general for traffic etc. reasons but taxes are part of it.)
Prop 13 can take almost exclusive blame for cities in California giving preference to jobs and retail over housing. It's like a direct incentive if they want to keep their budgets balanced.
I think it's fair to say that the real calculus in Brisbane is simply opportunity cost: they get a better ROI with commercial than residential. And this calculus simply makes it easier to defend anti-development sentiment, which is really what it all comes down to.
Brisbane's city report from 2013 states there were ~6,500 jobs in the city. Add in children, unemployed, retired, etc... and that accounts for many times more residents than can actually live in Brisbane. Which means Brisbane is contributing heavily to the housing problem in the Bay Area.
Geographic mobility really is a huge hurdle. A lot of business is becoming centralized around major long-distance transportation hubs, San Francisco being chief among them. Live in Concord, but want to work in Los Gatos? Good luck getting there by train. I lived in the Mission and to get to China Basin was a bus to a train to a bus. I opted for the ten minute drive instead of forty-five minutes of transferring. It's embarrassing how much better we could do so much better moving people around. Right now I opt to drive the 101 south instead of taking Caltrain, even though my employer covers the cost, because it would cost me an additional $10 a day to take other trains/buses to get to the Milbrae transfer, and by the time I've driven myself either to 4th/King or San Bruno I could have already been half way to work just driving the whole way. We need to do better.
Not to mention, no one is asking to knock down the beautiful hillside neighborhoods - they want to build housing in the flat baylands across the 5-lane highway Bayshore Blvd. The SF Muni T-line basically already services this proposed baylands neighborhood.
As for the mobility issue - I agree 100% that transportation is a crucial part of this whole equation. I also understand that you can't build effective transportation if you keep surrendering to people who want car-oriented sprawling development patterns, including prioritizing cars even in our dense neighborhoods.
In 2016 San Francisco built twice as much housing per capita (EDIT: per new resident) as the state average. (https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/4/15543668/san-francisco-new-ho...)
The city could do much, much better. The issue here isn't approvals, per se; it's the high cost of construction, and a big part of that is the concessions that the city (and NIMBYs) squeeze out of developers. But in any event at least the city is _approving_ projects. Compared to every other city in the Bay Area San Francisco is leading. Unfortunately that says more about the Bay Area than it does SF, but in any event SF isn't being hypocritical when it criticizes Brisbane, Palo Alto, etc.
Give homeowners/developers incentives to turn low density blocks into mid to high density housing. And build Geary Street light rail (and put most of it underground so it doesn't take as long as the N-Judah does to get downtown)
There is a growing group of people on the west side of the city who do want density.
Imagine Tokyo was located near SF. Would you criticize Tokyo for complaining about the pace of development in SF, simply because Tokyo could be doing a better job?
By defending Brisbane, you defend every other city in the Bay Area that has been dragging its feet, especially those on the peninsula. Don't forget that both Santa Clara County and San Mateo County have substantially greater median incomes than SF, yet most of the cities in those counties--especially the richest ones--have literally flat-out opposed growth in residential units.
I call out SF for its/our blatant hypocrisy. It's a bona fide city but they/we act as if we're still in the late 1800s Victorian times. Oh, historic, oh, views, oh, character, oh residential displacement. Always some provincial excuse.
Good for them. I mean, probably not, but Brisbane is their town and they should determine their own values and courses of action.
The solution to San Francisco needs to occur in San Francisco - not CC county or Marin or Sonoma. There's a lot of very, very distinguished and historic and noteworthy 1-4 story housing stock in San Francisco that I hope stays around ... but there's a lot of 1-4 story housing stock that is complete shit and needs to be rebuilt, in-filled, brought up to 2017 sanitation and earthquake regs and served by new rail lines.
Notice how I didn't say "served by BRT[1]" ? Served by rail.
If you see a bus, they blew it.
[1] Bus Rapid Transit (and related half-assed bullshit)
None of our mass transit operates near the speed limit anyway, afaik.
Do you feel the same way about other critical shortages that cause massive human suffering?
If you are employed in a tech job somewhere in the United States, , you are very likely in the top 20% of Americans in terms of income, and the top 1% in the world. Perhaps much higher.
I take it you are willing to give all that up in the face of the crushing poverty in the rest of the world.
Bay area housing shortages are nothing compared to the critical shortages that cause massive human suffering in the rest of the world.
And if you see streetcars, they blew it worse. Streetcars combine the traffic creation of buses with the inflexibility of a rail line. As an added bonus they make biking extra treacherous.
If you have the budget to build a real buried or elevated rail line, go for it. Otherwise stick with BRT until you do.
Strictly, the entire area is paying the price for the entire area being willing to add jobs but not add housing.
San Francisco is no different from Palo Alto and Mountain View in that regard.
All but about 1/8th of the city is just a sprawling suburb.
Yeah, we have a problem, but razing 7/8ths of San Francisco? Yikes.
Also - there are suburbs and there are suburbs. The excelsior in SF, as an example of a generally SFH neighborhood, has a population density of 17,640/sq mi. Palo Alto has a population density of 2,808.46/sq mi . I think you can make a compelling case that because it is closer to job centers, we should increase density. I don't really object to the use of the word "suburb" to describe the excelsior (or the sunset), but if someone uses "suburb" to refer to a low density neighborhood more typical of what an American thinks of as "suburban" (7/8 of SF is "suburb"), I do think there may be an ambiguity creeping into the argument. The two things are very different.
At the same time it's not like Brisbane isn't building. They just aren't building housing, because they want to build commercial so they can get the taxes without having to get the population increase.
High rise condos around Golden Gate park wouldn't affect the usability of Golden Gate Park all that much. It would barely affect the beauty.
Yes, Brisbane ought to build more housing, but what is good for the goose is also good for the gander.
And if we want Brisbane to give up its autonomy so that we can cram housing into it, and significantly change the character of the place--and we do!--then we have to be willing to cram housing into other places that will significantly change the character of that place.
As soon as one goes all sacred cow, one loses the game.
The bottom line is that both cities have things they value and they don’t want someone else to tell them what to do. If we are to solve the problem, everyone will have to make sacrifices. Everyone’s neighborhood will need to change. Including golden gate park.
Incidentally, “disingenuous” implies active deception. There nothing like that here. I don’t live in Brisbane or San Fran, and I support Beale every housing initiative I have been exposed to.
What I'm advocating for is regional ("metropolitan") leadership and planning. We all have to make sacrifices. That doesn't mean we can't have planning - I think urban planning is essential to building a city that works. But we need to do the planning at the level we're having the problem - which is, the Bay Area level.
Maybe high-rises do make sense on Golden Gate Park, but then we'd better have BART stations there taking people down to Mountain View and Sunnyvale (or wherever they're working).
Allowing commuters to cover even longer distances is just another bandaid. One that will just add more environmental damage. The least environmentally damaging commute is the one that happens on foot.
Increasing supply to reduce costs to where EVERYONE can afford the city is the ultimate solution we should strive for, not more lotteries for a tiny percentage.
Eh? It is pretty easy to get to San Francisco from Oakland or Berkeley. Hell, its easier to get to fidi or soma from Oakland than from parts of San Francisco.
Edit: For the downvoters, I’m genuinely curious how BART from Oakland to San Fran is considerd hard? I was simply contesting the point that there is nowhere in the bay with easy access to San Francisco! Now San Jose to San Francisco? Maybe not.
I now live in El Cerrito, which makes people go "Oh god, how long is your commute?". 31 minutes. That's it. People seem to think it's a different planet, but I can't even get through a full podcast on the ride home.
Totally agree with you on the last part. It's WAY easier to get to FiDi/SOMA/The Mission/Embarcadero or the Ballpark area from Oakland on BART than it would be to get there from: The Presidio, Sunset, Richmond district, etc.
Shhhhhhh... don't let people know about El Cerrito ;)
And quick nit on the Presidio: it's a lovely place to live and if you live there, there is a free shuttle to downtown called the Presidigo that's easy and efficient.
You end up walking a lot in NYC, too, it isn't some panacea. I had a ~25 minute walk from the N train to my apartment in Queens when I lived in New York.
And there's also the fact that even if a+b are true for you it's very expensive (~$4-5 each way compared to $2.25 in NYC), overcrowded, and has horrible latency. The fact that on a Friday night at 9pm the trains are running 20m apart is embarassing.
$2.75 now! Depends where you are going on BART on how the fares match up to NYC. I'm often traveling from West Oakland to Downtown Berkeley, which is 2 bucks, and hence cheaper than NYC.
Here's a map of areas within 45 min public transit access of Powell Street BART: https://www.mapnificent.net/bayarea/#12/37.8342/-122.2933/27...
To the articles point, it's basically:
* All of SF
* Downtown Oakland and Berkeley
* Other areas next to BART
To be fair this isn't considering driving or biking to BART + Ferry stations, which is leaving out a lot of other areas. But I think the general pattern holds.
When I tell people where I live, they think I'm crazy for living in the middle of nowhere.
But, it's honestly great. On the weekend, I have the option of a 10 minute drive to an ancient redwood grove, a 20 minute drive to a national seashore, a 30 minute drive to Napa, a 10 minute walk to empty land and mountains, or a 15 minute drive into San Francisco. Or, I have the option to take the ferry into the city, drink as much as I want, and then take the bus back home.
Manhattan's: 71,998.9/sq mi
It's difficult to look at this without thinking that the initial problem to be solved is density in the urban core.
Eventually, yes, you need much better transit to outlying areas. This will take decades even with iron clad political will, which isn't happening short of a takeover by house of Bourbon.
Build effective transit, and dense housing automatically happens, because people will organically demand it -- the story plays out identically in nearly every city that builds a light rail line. The YIMBY activists in SF don't seem to understand this, despite lots of rhetoric about supply and demand.
The truth is, YIMBY folks in SF are myopically focused on a few core neighborhoods that are already pretty dense (i.e. the Mission), and completely ignoring the driving forces behind the demand. This is largely because they're being supported by people who want to re-develop already expensive neighborhoods, which is a quick way to make a buck in the short term, and a dubious way of responding to a housing crunch. An effective movement to increase housing density in SF should focus on better transit corridors, and leave the housing policy to happen of its own accord.
In other words: if you want density in SF, run a subway line down Geary.
My opinion, however, is that we should do everything we can to encourage prosperity in all our cities, including our superstar cities. If that means more concentrated urbanization in a few places, that's simply a continuation of a trend since 1870 that has resulted in tremendous growth and prosperity for this country and many others.
That's not universally true. Even leaving aside cities with fairly big problems like Detroit, many of the current destination cities saw significant outflow over the course of a number of decades. The current trend for a fair number of (mostly) college-educated millennials to desperately desire living in certain dense urban cores is a relatively recent phenomenon. (Which is part of the reason it's way outpaced things like mass transit infrastructure.)
Also worth asking, can a city not just find a comfortable homeostasis? Is it every city's goal to become increasingly dense? Do we measure the "success" of a city on GDP?
I don't. I think the best cities in the world would include Paris, St. Petersburg, Valpariaso, not the manufacturing centers of China or America.
So, define "save."
Additionally, dense urban areas tend to have the smallest environmental impact per capita (lower carbon footprint in particular), and help prevent the problem of urban sprawl invading rural areas. Nobody wants to live in a suburb that covers the whole country.
How we’re currently trying to address these problem is a bit like trying to address climate change while refusing to believe it exists.
In the 21st century, how great the need for physical proximity in the tech industry? Sure, it's convenient to have a ton of skilled devs in one place, but does that convenience outweigh the (rather extreme) cost? Is this sort of flocking behavior a cultural hand-me-down from a bygone area?
That said, this isn't an either/or situation. We can fix SF's mass transit situation AND we can find ways of spreading out businesses across the US.
Are you still developing your software, and is it downloadable?
Do you see a federal constitutional or statutory doctrine that would prevent it from doing so?
The votes would never materialize. In Palo Alto or Los Gatos you couldn't even get 2% of voters willing to surrender their right to local governance.
Why not turn this around...SF can agree to become part of San Jose. Are you still interested?
Whether or not you could actually get the votes is something I'm not equipped to answer. A big part of it would depend on what people in Southern California think of the idea given that it contains over half the state's population.
Few in California would vote to create a second Los Angeles.
An initiative can modify statues
But seriously, yes, statute law or the state Constitution can be modified by initiative. The latter requires more qualifying signatures than the former, but once it's on the ballot, simple majority is all it takes.
But the status of cities also involves the city's charter (not all cities are charter cities, but most major ones are).
Tell me how my life is upgraded when my local political context goes from 30k people to six million.
This would politically solve many intractable problems that are being naturally caused by local tribes sparring. I think it's likely the proper solution to the urban/suburban donut problem we have in many regions in the US.
If Google created a new HQ in Kansas City, with it's fiber links, and low cost of living, and added really great benefits like free day care, etc, then won't software engineers move there, especially those that are ready to start a family? I bet you they would. I definitely would. Then it would create a new ecosystem of economic prosperity there, and then it would take a lot of pressure off the Bay Area.
But eventually the bad times come, and the employees living in these places are cast off like so many worn shoes, along with their families.
I've seen this. I'm never moving out of the SF Bay Area until well after retirement (and maybe not even then :-). Going to a Kansas City HQ is a gamble that whatever company will always do well. Do you want to gamble your future on that ? Do you want to gamble your family on that ?
Not to mention, if they close down, you'll likely have a harder time finding another job than you would somewhere with a lot of tech places.
Plus the supply of cheap walkable neighborhoods in the Midwest is very high.
Maybe some, but I'd be really surprised if you get substantial numbers of your top people to move - which effectively blocks the overall team moving.
A Google Staff engineer makes $400k+. On such a salary, the high cost of living in the Bay Area really isn't a problem; sure in Kansas you could afford a mansion on that salary, but a lot of folks (myself included) prefer "paying" for the Bay Area's weather, scenery, and culture over larger living.
The underlying problem here is the same problem you have with remote work - it's vastly harder to get complex tasks done when people are remote. For all sorts of reasons (including project expediency), you ideally want the front-line programmers in the same office as the technical leaders.
I mean I moved out of a city to a distance of about an hour. I have the benefit of being able to work from home so I don't have to go to the office, but I'd very much appreciate if the company set up a satellite office closer to where I'm at. The alternative to having to work full time in the city isn't really an option. Either I work from home, or somewhere close. And these tech cos right now have to be losing people to rural companies, if they don't allow them to work from home and don't set up alternatives to SV offices.
There's always huge cost in fragmentation with adding an additional office; I'd imagine far more people would rather move to Seattle than a rural area.
After all, there are plenty of successful, non-startup companies that are quite distributed.
Optionally if we are committed to this current "everything must be in one region" mentality lets get together as communities (Mtn View, San jose, campbell, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, etc) and get the rail built now. One of the biggest stressors in this area (outside housing costs) is the traffic and aged infrastructure. Frankly its easily solved - if this supposed "progressive" area would do what needs to be done. Yes it would cost, but it would make daily life so much better for everyone.
Yes, I know its more complex than this (one issue is NIMBYs and those that bought in early to housing and need/want it to go up), but how can our children live in this area and make it home in its current state? Humans seem very short sighted.
(sorry for the overuse of quotes and my possibly incoherent rant :) )
It's also never going to happen. Or if it will, it's decades away.
I've become convinced that if we want real change, it needs to be done by technology. Lyft for example could solve the transit problem if they figure out how to lower the cost of a ride, perhaps with automated drivers. Then you wouldn't need to build too much more infrastructure -- no need to get the entire bay rallied around a hundred billion dollar public transit system that's just going to get outdated again. We might need to make another bridge though...
Housing is another problem though. I've been wondering if technology can help there too but I haven't come up with any good ideas yet.
I personally live out by the Delta surrounded by fresh air, fresh fruit, and nice people (we have a strong community and frequently see people we know out and about, it's great). My commute into SF is about 90 min one way, and it is the easiest, least stressful commute I have had in my life.
I live in a Peninsula community with a 10 minute bike ride to work and that is the easiest least stressful commute I've had in my life.
I'd love a 10 min bike ride commute, but my career is non technical therefore I don't have the same amount of opportunities as others on here may.
No complaints out of me though. My commute may be long, but my life is rich (and I am not talking about money).
My wife has never worked because she did not have a career established when we decided to have kids. Allowing her to stay home is one of my proudest accomplishments (and it has done wonders for our kids).
I am home every night to spend a few hours with my kids, and I read to them every night before bed.
I spend all day on the weekends with them.
Sure I would love a shorter commute, as I said, I am in a non technical, and not in as high demand profession as many on here.
This is what a regular person goes through Hackernews. Keep that in consideration the next time you feel like complaining.
What if people actually prefer the former? I mean, sure, their "stated preference" can be later but the "revealed preference" can actually be a myopic selfish one; which is not that abnormal and totally in line with basic human nature (claims of "being progressive" notwithstanding!)
It might come with being a local, but I always feel alarmed when people contrast to places like NY or LA, which have a dominant industry but isn't as dominated by it, and have costs of living that allow those outside of the high-paying industry to survive. Having a one-industry region is trouble both economically, and culturally. (Doesn't it get tiring to only meet people who are in tech? Doesn't it create bubbles cut off from the larger world?)
People spend $100 a day to experience this.
1) Build better transit to connect areas that are affordable (or areas at all i.e. San Jose / Oakland) to central business districts
2) To accomplish this by creating a centralized governing authority for the whole Bay Area.
I wonder if this kind of consolidation has ever happened before. Did New York City absorb areas that it now controls as it evolved, or did the parties agree afterward to some symbiotic relationship?
What surprises me is that there aren't more startups headquartered in Oakland. Sure, it's a bit more hassle for people in SF to get out there, but you're going against the flow of traffic, so the commute is pleasant. And my suspicion is there are a lot of senior people living in the East Bay (or even further out). People who've moved on from small apartments and roommates and and have their own places, or have a family, or want cheaper rent... whatever it is. I suspect there's enough of those people who'd love to be getting on and off at 19th St Oakland and working down near Lake Merritt, rather than commuting into the city. I have a senior engineer friend, living in Berkeley, who said he'd take a $20k pay cut not to have to commute into SF. And that's not even a bad commute.
If I was starting up, looking to save some money, and wanting to hire experienced developers, I would definitely be setting up in Oakland.
Wackier highlights: calls for politically reorganizing the bay area into a metropolitan government, and confuses regional work commutes with "diversity and inclusion."
SF masquerades as a world class city because there is literally nothing else for Northern California to compare it to.