I don't think it's inevitable though, so the question is - how do we stop it? We have some of the brighter minds in tech on this forum, what are your thoughts?
The question with many cities is the same - is it worth saving? A lot of any city's downfall is often the fault of its older residents. Why do the poor stay? Why do the rich not focus on changing it? Why do communities fail to fix it together?
The obvious answer seems to be moving to somewhere nearby that's cheaper and roomier. But people seem very resistant to this for some reason.
Postwar sprawl is grossly underpopulated which makes SF seem like Kowloon by comparison, but it’s still lower density than a standard European capital.
Because that requires money.
How to stop it and create a city where anyone can live:
- build world class public transit
- double the number of houses but decommodify the housing market as much as possible with lots of social housing and controlled rent increases
>The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. [0]
If anything, housing is not enough of a commodity. Each site effectively has a bespoke regulatory framework that has to be discovered as expensively as possible, through a series of planning meetings. Each project requires an extremely high-touch political consensus process. Each building is expected to be unique-but-not-too-unique for its context, of-the-present-moment without altering historical character. As a practical matter, it's really expensive and take a long time and many iterations to arrive at a design that everyone agrees meets those criteria. Watch an SF Planning meeting video sometime. Most of the multifamily projects discussed on any given day are continuations. The curation process yields a great-looking museum, but we pay for the delay and uncertainty it creates in the price of admission.
Houses should be less like houses and more like soybeans: cheap, abundant, with many highly competitive producers and a price that floats just barely above the cost of production. Producers should be responding quickly and effectively to changes in demand, just as in the commodities markets. Commodities are the things we're most likely to have enough of for everyone!
Housing has effectively one producer, the San Francisco planning commission, and if it doesn't feel like meeting demand this year, everyone else has to just live with that. (There is no reason to think it would feel like meeting demand for social housing. Shadows, traffic impacts, neighborhood character changes, etc. are the same either way). Commodification would be an incredible improvement!
I'm not too sanguine about the possibility of either of those things happening in the United States. Public transit has always kind of gone nowhere in this nation outside of the great coastal cities and Chicago. And as for the housing proposal, I can already hear the howls of "SOCIALISM!!!" that will be raised by certain very powerful interests and political parties.
I'd say if "building a city where anyone can live" is the highest goal, that's an issue in and of itself.
Would you want to work for a company "where anyone could work?"
What do you have in mind? The stanford elites get to live in san francisco, and the less-elite get shipped elsewhere?