Residents increasingly unhappy with Bay Area life, new poll finds | Hacker News Reader

Residents increasingly unhappy with Bay Area life, new poll finds

mercurynews.com

46 pointsundefined139 comments

I wonder how many of the respondents rent vs own. It seems to be that mostly owners are happy with how things are going and renters are not (for obvious reasons). However, since owners have all the power, they prevent any decent solution from getting approved.

When I go to meetings with my fellow homeowners, I'm literally the only one advocating for additional housing. All the other owners "want to keep things like they've been", which is code for only large single family homes for rich people.

I'm fine with my property value dropping as more housing is built. None of my neighbors agree with me.

I assume no matter if you rent or own you don’t enjoy stepping on feces and syringes.

This is an SF thing - that kind of environment simply doesn’t exist outside the city to my knowledge.

The rest of the Bay Area still deals with teachers and service workers unable to live without a lot of assistance due to really high real estate and rents. My local school district lost a dozen teachers and aides last 2 years due to this.

  that kind of environment simply doesn’t exist outside of SF

And L.A.... and San Jose... and Oakland... and Hayward...

Don't forget East Palo Alto.

For a lot of people their house literally is their savings. Property values dropping means no old age care, etc. That may or may not be true for your friends but its true for a lot of people.

Housing as financial instrument is for my money one of the worst things in our economic systems, but I have no idea how to back out of it without vaporizing the savings of at least one generation.

In San Francisco, long term homeowners can afford to have it vaporized because the gains they've made far outstrip what they'd get from other investments. Morally, it should be vaporized because the value comes directly from their political action causing other people to be excluded, not from anything productive or even from successful speculating.

> Morally, it should be vaporized because the value comes directly from their political action causing other people to be excluded, not from anything productive or even from successful speculating.

Slippery slope. I don't necessarily disagree, but it's a dangerous path, ripe for abuse.

> I'm fine with my property value dropping as more housing is built. None of my neighbors agree with me.

Property values typically increase as density goes up, see eg. SF or NYC (Manhattan) real estate.

so much this.

I'm a homeowner in the bay area (been one for almost 10 years; and lived here for 20+ years) and I'm very unhappy with living here and am actively working on moving away. Most of my friends who are around my age (mid to late 30s), which include friends I made in college and early in my career, are also homeowners and are generally less than happy with the bay area as well; but do not want to give up the bay area tech salary to move away.

If anything, it seems like people who want to be in San Francisco for its tech industry are the ones who have moved in over the past few years and are renting, and currently enjoy "that city life".

Instead of categorizing the situation as homeowners being happy (NIMBYism) and renters being unhappy, it might actually be: Young, tech industry people are happy in the bay area, and pretty much everyone else are unhappy (non-tech people, lower income people, in tech but older people, etc.).

California has been exporting "poor" people for years. The Good Life that well paid folks in the state expect basically requires a servant class that can't actually afford to live there.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article136478098.html

The real plot twist when California finally manages to manifest its rail expansions will be that it was all just a plan to enable ultra long distance commutes from Oregon.

Last I read, planned high speed rail was from SF to LA through Fresno. Fresno is relatively affordable for the state.

For your plot to come to life they need to be creating high speed rail north from SF, not south. But if they do, I wouldn't actually be surprised by that as an outcome.

Ding. Ding. Ding. California has always relied on a steady rotation of people from poorer outlying areas coming, getting broken by the system, then leaving back to the more rural areas that have almost zero representation in the state.

Thus, the myth of the valley persists.

I get pessimistic because I've lost all faith in the city of San Francisco's politicians to solve problems. So many issues are self inflicted and I just keep seeing signs of corruptions or gross incompetence everywhere.

Maybe it will get better; I'm kinda of excited to ride the T extension in 2025.

Until you ride the T extension in 2026 and it's filled with wet garbage and excrement.

Maybe it will get better; I'm kinda of excited to ride the T extension in 2025.

Why? The T is an excellent case study in shittacular urban planning. The above ground T cut a vital link between BHVP and City College, fueled real estate speculation, and black flight. It doesn't go far enough (e.g. North Beach, Crissy Field) and the city has made it essentially impossible to extend. The extension is astronomically expensive and has been gimped ostensibly to save costs. What is being built are tiny platforms that can only support short trains, no express tracks, nada. There's zero room for expansion and it's basically going to be at capacity when it opens. The plan, last time I checked a loong time ago, was to gut the 30 and other surface routes to fund the underground operations so it's not like subway really represents additional capacity.

I assume you weren't around in 2007 when the T opened and shit hit the fan. Muni/SFMTA (whatever you want to call them these days) used all the new streetcars meant for T service to make up for abysmal dispatch reliability. Service along the other lines was an utter disaster. We're almost guaranteed to see similar problems in addition to whatever fresh hell beta testing the new subway infrastructure will bring.

I meant it as a joke it's supposed to finish in 2021, just a couple of years late, so I figure it might work by 2025.

But yeah the T is an embarrassment.

Prop 47, they forgot to mention that. These poor criminals shouldn't be punished for stealing everything and from everyone.

Those are just Socialism scouts, paving the way for the day when everyone forcibly shares everything.

Living in SF doesn't seem sustainable. I'm one of the lucky ones making $175k/year living with 9 housemates. Refusal to build more housing to meet demand is cruel. Combined with multi-hour commutes and stepping around homeless people and their needles and feces makes you wonder how this all ends.

Is this hyperbole?

Unfortunately not. Hoping to go remote asap.

You earn $175k per year and have to live with nine other people?

I'm not the person you're replying to but if you actually wanted to live by yourself in SF you could easily spend anywhere between $3500-5000 on rent. Even at a $175k salary that's more or less half of your post-tax pay monthly. For sure that's still livable, but may not make financial sense. Staying with a few housemates take that monthly cost down to $1500-2000 which allows for much more savings, so eventually you could buy a house (maybe somewhere else outside of the bay!). 9 housemates is a bit extreme though.

I would say so. The problems are problems but they aren't absolute crises.

It ends with tech geographically diversifying.

Last time I was in SF, an odd thought just randomly popped into my head as I was walking around downtown: "San Francisco is someone else's house."

I've never been able to put my finger on that deep vibe the place has until then.

You have various groups that come and go -- hippies, hackers, techbros, whatever -- but beneath the surface there is this old property owner base that owns the city completely and does not want to see it change much. They are willing to let various groups of transients pass through and perhaps a few stay but most leave in the end, and they don't want that to change either.

SF is superficially liberal but deeply conservative in an odd and very specifically SF way. Reminds me quite a lot of Boston but with a West Coast and Bohemian veneer.

I don't know if my random insight is spot on or not, but that's what came to mind.

I don't know if my random insight is spot on or not, but that's what came to mind.

Most new property being built in SF proper is being used as secondary housing for rather wealthy folks. I'm sure some of it is also being soaked up in an attempt to expatriate money (kinda like what you see in Vancouver).

It's someone else's house in some sense but not likely what you're thinking.

This isn’t true at all. The vast majority of housing being built is used as the primary residence for SF residents, people from SF move into these new buildings and open up cheaper units in older buildings.

https://sfist.com/2014/09/30/almost_half_of_newly_built_cond...

I don't think that's changed appreciably in five years.

When is it time to ask some fundamental questions about the end state of the political philosophy that produces such aggregate outcomes?

Careful, you'll get labeled and ridiculed, or worse.

Bay Area life is terrible. I earn a good living but between high taxes, high rents, and abysmal commutes it’s just not worth it.

It's crazy. The Bay Area used to be probably the most desirable place in the world. Now it's descended into something much, much worse.

It's hard to see how the descent can stop. Short of very firm "cleanup" measures, things will probably get worse. But a great many of the citizens would oppose such measures.

I usually see things in a positive light, but this is a hard one. I'd love to be wrong and see the Bay Area thriving in 20 years.

I understand the cost of living issues, and appreciate efforts that try to improve things. Having said that, California is an amazing place with more opportunities that almost any other place. I definitely think that people there have the ability to solve these problems.

The people there created these problems.

>more opportunities that almost any other place

Not true anymore - you can find a great job that probably treats you much better in virtually 48* other states.

I understand the tech bubble _wants_ you to think that any/all opportunity is localized in one specific place, but that's just naive and absurd.

*Except probably NY or NJ...because I personally really don't like NYC and it's fun to hate on Jersey...

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I am not from the US.

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