Hacker News Reader

Comment by stellar678 | Hacker News Reader

The Brisbane baylands area is a full square mile, which is contiguous with parts of San Francisco and is separated by a 5-lane highway from the current residential part of Brisbane.

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.

View on HN

>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.)

And it's even harder in California where so much of the property tax roll is frozen at tiny values from the past.

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.

OTOH, real estate prices are extremely inflated. The immediate effect of new housing would be a deluge of property tax revenue. I would guess that it'd take at least 10-20 years for the net negative effects of Prop 13 to take hold, perhaps longer. But because of increased density (lower infrastructure cost per unit), they'd probably still be ahead of where they are now.

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.

Have you ever been to Brisbane? Most people move there for the small-town feel; I personally tried, but got out-cashed by a Chinese investor. You're not going to convince them to become San Francisco's housing overflow.

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.

I lived in Brisbane for a year. It was beautiful and calm and peaceful and pastoral. I had 3 apple trees, a peach tree and a pear tree. It's totally unsustainable for cities like Brisbane to have such a huge jobs/housing imbalance.

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.

Brisbane does not attract 45k workers to their business parks. Nowhere near that.

I didn't say that. 45k is just the midpoint in density between Nob Hill and Telegraph Hill. Seems like a good target for the baylands neighborhood.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com