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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's being overdone. A solid wall of railroad flats (cheezy "luxury" condos) is going up for miles along the Caltrain tracks. Those wooden multistory buildings are the slums of tomorrow.

It's about time for the next Bay Area recession. Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?

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I am about to move into one of those and the demand seems very high... very crowded open houses and <1 week turnaround time (par for course for bay area but still). You don't have to live there if you don't want. I don't think they're ever going to be slums but probably will become middle class housing in 10-15 years - only because hopefully sometime before then there will be a sort of zoning/regulatory intervention and developers can finally start building highrise luxury condos

If you want to see slums I can share some pins of places in the East Bay and the hinterlands of SF, and you can tell me if you think midrise condos on the caltrain/camino real corridor in the peninsula will ever look like that. I'll even take out a 15 year bet with you

What about Caltrain grade separation, where you suddenly find trains running even with the second floor of your building at many major road crossings?

> It's being overdone.

No economist agrees with you. It's indisputable that there is a housing shortage in the Bay Area.

> It's about time for the next Bay Area recession.

Do you really want misery for the working class because you don't want to see "cheezy luxury condos" along the tracks?

> Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied.

I recently bought a condo near 22nd St. and I can tell you the building filled up very quickly. With real residents, not foreign investors.

It's fair to suppose that in the far-off future, midrise high-density housing (the five-over-ones and texas donuts) built cheaply years ago would become some of the least desirable housing around. Unlike with detached housing, rehabilitating the structure is a package deal, so its quality will likely decline until the entire structure is demolished, likely in conjunction with a redevelopment of its lot.

The likely ossification of such midrises shows why incremental, small-scale increases of density, like allowing threeplexes on small lots, is so useful.

We should be building housing for people now though, and heavily discount whatever the heck we think might happen with that housing in 100 years. And what alternative do you think is really guaranteed to age much better anyway?

Haha - only someone in the bay area would say something like this.

I used to live in the "slums" of the bay area back in 2008. Trust me - by now even those slum houses are going for at least 2008 prices before crash and better and the neighborhood I lived in in SF is crazy expensive.

> Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?

Aren't those buildings fully occupied today?

Isn't that where you'd want flats? Nobody wants a SFH next to tracks. Certain types of people (I won't generalise) always seem to want to call apartment buildings "future slums." This almost never materialises. Is it a racial thing for you?

No, it's a wood thing. Miles of tightly packed five story wooden buildings are a worry.

> is it a racial thing

I mean I've encountered this enough that I know the answer now: obviously.

You won't ever get them to admit it though

> It's about time for the next Bay Area recession. Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?

Yeah, and every office park that felt empty in the fallout of 2008 is now bursting with businesses and people. Why are you so worried about the threat of a recession and unoccupied land that you don't want to add housing in a region with record homelessness numbers? This feels extremely conservative.

I am also pro- adding housing to the Bay, but

> add housing in a region with record homelessness numbers

is disingenuous as it suggests that one cause of the homelessness problem is actually the only cause of it

So .. you prefer seeing a derelict furniture store and its empty parking lot in your community than a maybe "cheezy condo" unit, a new grocery store, and some affordable housing units. Care to explain the motivation for statu quo here?

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