Demolishing the California Dream: How SF Planned Its Own Housing Crisis

Denser housing in areas such as SOMA — where you're close enough to bike or walk to work if you work nearby — could actually reduce the need for better public transit, as more people now have the option to live closer to where they work. Or at the very least, they wouldn't need to transit as far. You bemoan an hour long commute, but thousands of people in the Bay Area whose commute is far worse would welcome it.

And that's not to say that better public transit isn't something worth striving towards; it should be done together with housing. But currently, the area's general attitude is to have neither.

Yes of course you'd need to improve transportation, but the existing built environment of the Sunset is self-sabotaging. It's car-dependent and the cars are in the way of the buses and trains.

True, but I think the housing problem is much bigger than the traffic problem.

If the price for housing getting better is traffic getting worse, that is a good trade IMHO.

From the fine article: "However, many citizens were rightfully growing frustrated with the department’s actions, particularly decisions to bulldoze thriving neighborhoods to better serve suburban commuters. ... [I]n 1959, citizen activists presented the Board of Supervisors with a petition with more than 30,000 signatures demanding for most of these projects to be halted."

There's a huge amount of difference between the apparent demand for housing and the availability of housing; there's also a lot of hidden demand -- people living with roommates who would prefer to live alone if it were more affordable. I wouldn't look for new construction to make things affordable, but to reduce the rate of price increases.

If well-off people are moving into SF, they're most likely making their old units available too. I would predict that SF would remain unaffordable even if it added 10% more units, but surrounding areas might become affordable. Also, other municipalities will likely take queues from SF, if for no other reason than to avoid being in the news for being 'more restrictive than San Francisco', certain restrictive communities excluded.

I'm not sure if I can agree. For example, an analysis that puts a lower bound on the magnitude of rent decreases is here:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2018035pap...

They perform a simulation where everybody from Monterey to Marin to Stockton is equally happy living anywhere, and only cares about a handful of neighborhood characteristics. They then add a small amount of housing for individual desirable areas, holding everything else constant, and let people move whereever they will; i.e. if a person in Monterey gets to save $5 on rent for a place in the Sunset that's otherwise identical in "desirability" to their Monterey place, they're likely to move.

Even in this outlandish situation, rents decrease quite a bit. For a 5% increase in supply, there's a 0.5% decrease in rents. A 20% increase in supply, there's a 1.8% decrease in rents.

This study is often cited to make the opposite point: that it's impossible build to decrease rent. However, even small, focused amounts of building result in decreases in rents in this model.

Increasing density in the Sunset with lots of apartments where there are single family homes would have a huge impact, that would be potentially a 100% or 200% increase in supply. That would do a ton for the crisis in San Francisco.

They often turn into that. Unfortunately, in many ares you don't have a lot of choice - nearly all new housing is in an HOA, most established "good neighborhoods" are in an HOA, and not enough housing turns over in non-HOA, non-crappy neighborhoods.

I became president of ours on a promise to reduce dues and shrink the scope of the HOA as much as possible. It's a giant PITA, but less so than if the crazy, bored and power-hungry types took it over. We remind people with truly out of control maintenance issues to clean it up, and will only get more aggressive on super egregious things. As it should be.

I can see situations where they'd be helpful; mostly in areas where local ordinances are either insufficient or not sufficiently enforced.

They also make things like neighborhood "taxes" for fixing infrastructure issues more likely to happen - at least for things everyone agrees are a useful priority (like paved roads).

Related, and very much so.

The biggest indicator of future socioeconomic status is educational attainment. The biggest indicator of educational attainment is wealth.

> Where does the biggest source of material wealth typically come from? Housing!

> Was housing policy racist? Very explicitly so, even in the progressive Bay Area. See: redlining.

> Are some of the policies that stemmed from racism still on the books in major metropolitan areas? Yes! Many of these exact policies are what's keeping from more housing from being built right now!

What policies, you ask? Here's a few.

- Excessively large minimum lot sizes

- High setback requirements

- Very low height limits

- Very high car parking requirements

While many of these requirements sound reasonable on their face, they were in fact implemented to keep out PoC [1]. Now they're used by people on the top of the socioeconomic pyramid to keep those on the bottom out.

[1] Further reading: The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

Poor white people are significantly less likely to live in cities. This has widespread impact, for example urban populations have more frequent police contact.

ex: "Poor African Americans are four times more likely than poor whites to live in the central city, and twenty five times more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods." https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/67111/...

Wow another regulation with "unintended" consequences!

> Another way of looking at it, perhaps, is that Chinese, Japanese, and Indians have become "white", at least within Silicon Valley, even though the latter actually have brown skin. But doesn't that dilute the meaning of "white" so much that it basically becomes meaningless, and that we should just call it classism rather than racism?

This is actually really interesting because in America the boundaries of who is "white" and who is not has constantly shifted from a social standpoint.

There was time that Italians, Jews and Irish were not considered white (as in Anglo-Saxon or Nordic white) but this obviously isn't the case today.

South East Asians will probably never be considered "white" socially because of skin tone and cultural differences, but I'd argue it might be more important to be considered "not-black" or "not-Hispanic" than anything in America.

>Curious who you're referring to as "this particular commenter"? The quote in question was from a Cupertino resident at a recent city council meeting, and he's a 60 year old white man.

Oops. By "this particular commenter" I meant the Cupertino resident. I (think?) I had heard about that comment or a similar one on a podcast (Gimme Shelter) that interviewed the Cupertino mayor the day after all that debacle, and I thought the mayor said that the commenter was 14 and that his mom had asked for permission for him to show slides. I hope I didn't completely misremember that.

60 years old? Then yeah, probably intentional dog whistle. I'd give the ignorance of youth a bit more of a pass.

Why would absence of racism against Asians be equivalent to absence of racism against blacks?

Many of the traits that distinguish African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S., and which people react to, are not correlated with socio-economic circumstance but rather race and culture.

I grew up in the D.C. suburbs in the 1990s (when people were less guarded about this stuff) in a Virginia town that was at the time almost entirely white. I remember hearing how PG County (a majority African american county just east of DC) was the "ghetto" and "scary." How did you know? Well there were "youths" with "baggy pants" listening to "gangster rap" and speaking in "ebonics." It was only a couple of decades later when I moved nearby that I realized how racist that view was. PG County is, in fact, solidly middle class county that happens to be 2/3 African American. Yes, the teenagers speak in African American vernacular (at least to each other) and dress in a certain style, which is different than how white teenagers of the same socio-economic class would speak and dress, but odds are that their parents work for the federal government or one of the nearby hospitals. Nonetheless, my classmates thought that the area was "ghetto" based on those outward traits.

That's why the Trayvon Martin shooting was such a big deal in the U.S. Martin was solidly middle class, the son of a white collar government worker and a truck driver. There's tons of kids in PG County who look just like him, who have parents that make $80,000 household income. But lots of people find those kids "scary" and "ghetto." Not because of their socio-economic status, but because of their race and their cultural expression.

IMO it's mostly about class, but it seems like it's mostly about race because there is a correlation between class and race (at least, if you count Asians as white, which is nonsensical, but what many people seem to want to do these days). The neighborhood I live in is right next to an extremely poor neighborhood (both are mixed race, but majority white). Most of my neighbors are a lot more comfortable with the middle class black/asian/latino people in our neighborhood than they are with the poor white people in the neighborhood next door.

There are studies that show that when Americans are shown pictures of white people and black people doing the same act, they perceive the black person as more threatening [1].

[1]: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1977-21139-001

It's difficult to quantify, because it's hard to distinguish between what someone claims as justification and their actual motivations. Having grown up in a part of the US where racism has a long and strong history (South Carolina, where the American Civil War began), my own experience is that racism has changed its face. Old-fashioned overt, visible racism is less prevalent due to a wider shift in culture. Overt racism is publicly condemned and considered an embarrassment, but that doesn't mean it has gone away and it lurks just beneath the surface. I know and grew up with tons of people who are without a doubt strongly racist, but they find other justifications to present in public.

It's somewhat of a secret language, where certain phrases sound ok on the surface but have racist connotations. For example, "urban" or "inner city" is often a code word for "black". I have a rather racist uncle for example, he often rails about how the Democratic party has a strong grip on the "urban" vote, while the real America is the "rural" population, who are of course all true patriots and thus Republicans. Of course he is perfectly aware that political lines are not so neatly divided by population density, but that's because what he actually means is "urban" == "black" and "rural" == "white". Intentions are obscured, so everything gets fuzzy.

Going back to the Cupertino city council meeting, it makes it really hard to know what they really mean for sure. This is all based on my own experience, but I've seen enough cloak and dagger racism to know it's definitely a possibility. I think they would absolutely prefer an affluent black person over a poor white drug dealer, but on the other hand I would bet that for a significant number of the residents if you say "poor", the image that pops into their head is a black person.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a political issue, given that there is a pretty strong racial gap between political parties. I think that's where a lot of this doublespeak lingo came from, as a way to discuss race in politics (which, practically speaking is important) without sounding racist.

All that said, I think that the prevalence of sincere racism has definitely decreased significantly, so it's not all bad. Edit: I should also add, this is not universal on the American right, I know plenty of conservatives who aren't racists, nor is it only white Republicans who are racists.

In my experience, with something that extreme %99.999 of people prefer Obama over the white drug addict. But racism is on a spectrum, it's not a yes/no thing. Most of the existing racism is far more subtle, like fears over foreigners, or the different and the new. The full-on give-me-white-drug-addict-over Obama is usually only constrained to the super rare neo-Nazi breed of racism.

Different cultures are also quite shocking. So even if that new family that moved in makes just as much money, has just as much education, but cooks different foods that smell funny to you, or talks in different ways, or puts on different displays, that can greatly impact acceptance.

I mean, I can't say that I don't have some racist attitudes, because over my life time I've discovered that some things that I thought were perfectly reasonable non-racial preferences end up getting really intertwined. Especially because I grew up in a very white area, with almost no history of the racial prejudices that affect parts of the US, I didn't understand how racism played out until I was in an area with more diversity, and it was a learning process to even spot it, or figure out what was insulting or derogatory, since I had so little experience with it. But because so much of the racism is not the neo-Nazi type, is more subtle and probably less conscious, it's important to not be too moralizing about it, because moralizing just entrenches it. Instead of beating someone up over it, it's far better to show how the attitude has negative effects, and how there can be positive effects from not having that attitude.

Of course, when people are speaking in codes, like they do in these meetings about "preserving neighborhood character," all that goes out the window. The article goes through lots of great examples of how even in the past, the racism was perpetuated with the cover of other excuses.

Those statistics are tricky to get right, in order to compare apples and apples you have to account for all sources of funding and/or subsidy, and also normalize across all services provided (and their need). Some of the spending studies I've seen are done very sloppily.