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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

As a European visitor, I had similar feelings about SF.

One moment I'm in Twitter HQ, enjoying free food from around the world, place is buzzing with techies. Next moment we wander around a bit and there's a whole park where the homeless are living in the bushes.

I was literally in a place where one guy I met was designing self driving cars, and another guy was wandering the street with no shoes on, fighting with his invisible friend.

I also thought the natural surroundings were a contrast with what people have built. Minus the bridge and a few landmarks, the city looks kinda bland. Too low-rise for such a popular place. But there's hills and natural features that are quite spectacular.

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> Minus the bridge and a few landmarks, the city looks kinda bland. Too low-rise for such a popular place. But there's hills and natural features that are quite spectacular.

Victorian houses on hills make SF one of the most beautiful city in the US in my opinion. It has decent transit (which should be better !), walking around is pleasant in most neighbourhoods, the parks are amazing (ever been to Glen Canyon ? Land's end ?)

> Victorian houses on hills make SF one of the most beautiful city in the US in my opinion.

From a distance, they look beautiful. Up close, most are sort of gross looking and not well maintained. You’d think the cost of taking care of a little house would be negligible compared to the price of the house itself.

If the house is being rented there's no incentive to make it nice given the housing shortage.

Home owners should still maintain the homes. If you have a leaking window and you don't fix it you might need to eventually replace an entire wall. Not cheap, especially in San Francisco where good contractors are on a wait list.

It's moreso because rent can't be increased to match the market price of the home.

There is no rent control for single family homes anywhere in CA.

>There is no rent control for single family homes anywhere in CA.

"Rent control is in effect for all San Francisco renters who reside in buildings constructed before June 1979. This means your rent can only increase by a governmentally mandated percentage each year, based on the cost of living index, and with a 30-day notice. If your landlord has improved the facilities in your building, he can petition for an additional increase, but the Rent Board must approve his request, which can't exceed 10 percent. If a landlord is negligent in his maintenance of the building or units, you can make application for a rent decrease to the Rent Board."

https://homeguides.sfgate.com/san-francisco-rent-control-inf...

Original Victorians definitely fall in the pre June 1979 category.

Costa Hawkins is a state wide law. Under Costa Hawkins rent control does not apply to single family homes, or homes constructed after 1995, or individually owned condos.

Many of those Victorians were actually converted into units back in the day and rent control applies. Some are being converted back into single family homes now.

I don’t have a stat to back this up, but many Victorian houses in SF (especially the areas that a tourist would visit) have been split into multiple units and are not single family homes.

Most of the victorians have been chopped up into 3 - 4 apartments though where rent control does apply.

Most victorians/Edwardians in SF are not single family homes. They just look like it from a distance...

I'd say 95% of them are actually 2-4 separate apartments.

There is a huge shortage of good contractors in San Francisco. They probably make more money than most Software Engineers at this point. Good earthquake retrofitters are even more costly, I know of people spending $2000 for someone to come by and look at their house for an hour.

It's definitely not cheap to own a Victorian in San Francisco even with renters.

If it's not a huge reno, you could always do things yourself. I'm pretty scrawny and renovation-illiterate but I've manage to rent and use one of those huge ass insulation blowing machine from Home Depot before, and on top of saving money - despite having to rent a van - I got a better job done than most commercial contractors would do, because they are known to skimp on both material quantity and quality to minimize costs (source: I was redoing the insulation on top of two existing layers).

Definitely, any small plumbing work or electrical work I've been able to take care of. Beats getting charged hundreds of dollars for a 20 minute job.

I'm also a firm believer in trying to do as much maintenance myself as possible whether it's home/vehicle. If you own something you're going to care about it more and go the extra mile to make sure the work is done correctly. There are some jobs though where I know it's over my head.

> Up close, most are sort of gross looking and not well maintained

Up close a lot of the USA looks unmaintained compared to Europe/Australia.

Every time a foreign friend visit me there it would only take a couple of hours for them to say something like "...everything looks kind of half finished" , or "wow, this place is falling apart"

> You’d think the cost of taking care of a little house would be negligible compared to the price of the house itself.

Why would you think that? Sure, SF has high real estate costs, but it also has high labor costs (including, for most people who can afford to live there through work, high opportunity costs of diverting personal labor to maintenance.)

I wouldn't consider Glen Canyon or Land's End to be part of the attractions of San Francisco. Yes, you're closer to them than you are in New York. No, you're not close to them. If you want to be close to them, go to Salt Lake or Phoenix.

If you had said Yosemite, I could agree with you.

Unfortunately Twitter HQ is pretty much ground zero for more or less the worst part of the city in terms of homelessness, etc. But, really, a lot of visitors don't get a great look of SF given that most of the Moscone area isn't great. There is actually some nice architecture scattered around the financial district but you mostly want to go north or northwest to get to Nob Hill, Coit Tower, areas with a lot of Victorians, etc.

If you want the really nice Victorians go West to Pac Heights and near Haight.

Last time I was in SF I went on one of the City Guides walking tours that focused on Victorians. I'm pretty sure it was Pacific Heights area--certainly over that way.

When I first flew in to San Francisco, I thought it looked like Mexico City.

After a while, I came to believe that lots of attached housing up and down hills is actually a pretty charming street form. On a flat plain, it would be claustrophobic, but the relief creates views that open up the dense landscape. Lots of San Francisco photography emphasizes this.

It makes me wonder why new developments today are always built in the flattest places -- the flatness practically forces us to include a lot of empty space, usually in the form of lawns.

>>It makes me wonder why new developments today are always built in the flattest places -- the flatness practically forces us to include a lot of empty space, usually in the form of lawns.

Generally speaking, it's more expensive to build on land with a significant slope. I heartily agree, however, that it results in a much more interesting built environment.

> It makes me wonder why new developments today are always built in the flattest places -- the flatness practically forces us to include a lot of empty space, usually in the form of lawns.

I think you've got the causality backwards there. A lot of people still want lawns and flat land is easier to build on. There's nothing about building in a plain that prevents building dense.

I think your mixing the cause and effect here. Development in Flatland middle America is not constrained by coast line. It’s much easier to build out than up, and land is on average cheaper than coastal cities. This means developments include large open spaces, because it’s affordable. A lawn in a Mid West city starts at 100k instead of 10mil like in San Francisco.

In a lot of Midwest, you can buy a decent house and a lawn for $150K all-in, where the land is under $25K of the assessed value.

That’s totally reasonable. The 100k quote was for inside a city, where prices are a bit more but still reasonable. But once you get into the burbs it’s more about finding a good neighborhood than an affordable price.

Source: Grew up and lived in Indiana, now live in SF.

It's much easier to design and build on flat ground, especially at scale. Things like road grids make sense, and designs can be spatially translated without custom geotechnical work per site. It also makes it MUCH easier to stage construction equipment and materials.

There are people willing to pay the design and construction premiums for a hillside location, but they are not buying developer houses :)

Also, the lawns provide a water buffer that's essential for managing stormwater runoff. The more densely paved a city is, the more likely it is to flood catastrophically when storm sewers overload. Which isn't a problem in SF though

I grew up in the city.

To be fair where Twitter is located, and that Sixth street corridor has literally been one of the worst ares of the city for years. Because of that there's a large number of drug rehabilitation, mental health, and community services that are in that area to be close to the population they serve and to take advantage of some lower rents. The flip side being that it also draws in a large population of the homeless seeking those services.

TLDR - Twitter chose to put their HQ in one of the worst parts of town.

Other interesting note, San Francisco has always distributed their low income housing and services across the city unlike some city's with concentrated neighborhoods of low income housing/projects.

They got pretty nice incentives from the city to locate there, if I remember correctly.

They did. SF wanted someone, anyone to take over the abandoned former mall and do something that wouldn't be adding to the blight of the area. Twitter was otherwise about to leave SF for somewhere on the peninsula.

Definitely one of the worst parts, although I think some corners of the Tenderloin are worse.

My office is also in that area (6th and Market), I would argue it's even worse there compared to Twitter. However, it has been getting better in the last year or so, and that trend is likely going to hold up. For example, the city is investing a lot of resources and capital to make it better: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-ge...

Having said that, I rarely feel unsafe walking around that area.

One note about the twitter choice to put their HQ at mid-market. The city wanted it, they incentivized businesses moving to the mid-market area with tax breaks.

That is the goal, to not encroach on the nature that runs right up against the city. See the save the bay campaigns of the 70s and 80s.

The goal is to keep housing prices high and rising.

The pretext is to not encroach on the nature.

Depends on who you're talking about. This is not universally true.

Here's the Sierra Club fighting to preserve... a historic garage.

https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fi...

Not wanting to pave over some of the green spaces sounds laudable, but the same people fight against growing 'in' and 'up', which is the only thing you can do to add to supply if you won't go out.

I'm aware of that particular case and think it's certainly representative of some peoples' goals in the area but it's not universal. I think it's helpful to shine a light on things like this. The parent comment I was replying to, however, just assigns a view to a grand, ambiguous They and implies that anybody arguing for preservation has ulterior motives. Not helpful.

Unfortunately this article gives me an HTTP 451 (I'm GDPR-walled)

It's easy to circumvent, but perhaps we shouldn't support sites that are so hostile to their users they block places with sane data protection laws.

I think you're in the minority with that view of GDPR being well-implemented judging by previous threads, and secondly that website (news org) is really is for/about a specific city and it's not really relevant if they are required to block some foreigners halfway across the world because of their foreign laws.

" it will have come as no surprise when Romanian authorities attempted to use the GDPR’s wide powers to threaten journalists investigating corruption in the country. "

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/year-gdpr-2018s-most-f...

There are other ways to dehoardify prime land that don't require tearing up nature. Raising property taxes (i.e. shredding prop 13) would help.

The NIMBYs would be less motivated if rising land values were captured by taxes rather than winners of the homeowner lottery (and who likes SF NIMBYs?)

A lot of people sitting on inefficiently used land would also be driven to sell (and their bungalow could be demolished and replaced with apartments, increasing supply).

Also more tax income.

>A lot of people sitting on inefficiently used land would also be driven to sell (and their bungalow could be demolished and replaced with apartments, increasing supply).

One problem with this is that a lot of land owners have been in the city for decades and their property tax rates are protected under Prop 13 [0]. Basically their tax rates get adjusted for inflation but aren't reassessed unless ownership changes or there's significant construction. Raising tax rates won't touch these people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Hence why I said "i.e. shredding prop 13" and why my other comment in the thread said "blame the Howard Jarvis taxpayers foundation".

Ah, missed that in your comment. I don't imagine you could get enough support to drop it altogether but I wonder if they could get exceptions passed in counties that could benefit the most. I believe Prop 13 already has a few nuances for specific counties.

> I don't imagine you could get enough support to drop it altogether

Support is rising quickly.

> Prop 13 already has a few nuances for specific counties.

It does not.

> One problem with this is that a lot of land owners have been in the city for decades and their property tax rates are protected under Prop 13 [0]. Basically their tax rates get adjusted for inflation but aren't reassessed unless ownership changes or there's significant construction.

No, they don't. The tax basis value is adjusted annually to the lesser of the actual value or 2% greater than the previous year’s tax basis value in the absence of an event allowing unrestricted full-market assessment (most sales, for instance.)

The 1% maximum increase does not (except when inflation happens to be unusually low) amount to adjusting for inflation, and it's not done without reassessment (value drops—rare in the Bay but still can happen—are immediately reflected, but increases are capped.)

> Raising tax rates won't touch these people.

Plus, the same thing that creates the limit on basis increases also puts a hard cap on rates.

Creating more density would greatly impact nature though. Having grown up not too far from Manhattan I can attest that for the most part the nature has been bulldozed over and polluted. SF is not so extreme and many people don’t want it to be more due to the unique natural environment it is in.

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