Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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Though this is not an uncommon view in SF at the moment, I find it horrifying. What has made SF such a great place from the 1970s to ~2010 has been its willingness to accept new people, including the strange and the weird. That's not to say that it's been a great city for everyone, the first-wave gentrifiers from the 1960s pushed out Black people from the neighborhoods they took over, like Haight Ashbury, and the downzonings they enacted over the city have greatly amplified their material wealth while keeping out those without wealthy.

But for a brief 40 years before the super-constriction of supply happened, it was a welcoming place to lots of people that couldn't find homes elsewhere, because there were at least some empty places to rent out.

What drives up the prices isn't that people with big salaries are there, they've always been there. What's driving up the rents is that the people with big real estate holdings have said that the people with paychecks can't build anything new. So instead of those big paychecks going to building more infrastructure and subsidized low-income housing, those big paychecks are going only to current landlords, and pushing out anybody without a big paycheck.

SF housing is a game of musical chairs, and all the people that found their chair in the 1970s and 1980s easily because there were lots of empty chairs have decided that there should be no more chairs. That provincial, close-minded, and ultimately xenophobic attitude is what makes the housing market so unfair.

I think you make a lot of good points here, but I think a little more weight needs to be placed on the "big paychecks" part. When my wife and I bought a house here (in SF) a couple of years ago, we had to make offers on nearly 20 homes over the course of 18 months before we had an offer accepted, and we were coming in with an all cash offer at or above asking price every time. The problem we ran into was that there were usually ~7 offers ahead of us (also all cash obviously, but even higher over asking). The income disparity is so extreme these days, and I hesitate to say "income" because these are not senior engineers at FAANG that we were bidding against, these were people who likely earn 10s of millions a year and/or come from extreme family wealth. The wealth gap really is staggering.

Right, and imagine that if instead of all your money going to the profits of the previous owner, your money could be used productively to pay labor to build new housing for you!

Instead of your wealth being transferred to a laborer who has less wealthy, it was transferred to somebody who is likely quite a bit more wealthy. And instead of your wealth being used to improve the city, it was all used for the profits of somebody els.

> pay labor to build new housing for you!

good luck using labour to generate a piece of land to which you can build on that's near where you want it.

Exactly, that's what I am griping about. There's more than enough land to accommodate more housing to be built, but existing neighbors to that land have forbidden that through regulatory capture of city zoning laws.

“I find it horrifying”

Please, for the sake of your good content, don’t go hyperbolic. It makes you sound less credible.

Things that are horrifying: genocide, torture, slavery, famine, child abuse, elder abuse.

Things that are not horrifying: almost everything else. Maybe bad, really bad, destructive...but not horrifying.

Certainly not a personal view about The Zeitgeist of SF.

The downstream consequences of this "zeitgeist," the homelessness, the displacement, the destruction of communities, the people right on the edge of eviction doing everything they can to make rent, people overcrowding into apartments so they can get enough salaries together to cover the cost of a room... I'm tired of my friends being forced to move. I'm tired of people living in their cars until they can find some place to crash. In a land of great wealth, this is horrifying. We put people, with jobs, playing their part in society, through a damned meatgrinder just so some assholes don't have to see a new building. I'm not typically a fan of journalism that's driven by personal stories, but in the case of housing it's really important to pay attention to them because the stats alone don't tell the story of what it means to get evicted and to have your entire life upturned because the zeitgeist demands that rents MUST GO UP rather than somebody somewhere pay for a condo and subsidize below-market-rent for somebody else.

Calling the state of housing the Bay Area anything less than "horrifying" is sugar-coating it, and I would thank you not to tone-police others.

That's an odd point of view - you're xenophobic if you don't prioritize unending population increases above all else?

I certainly didn't say "unending population increases" or "above all else."

But if you think that building enough housing for the people means unending population increases, that's really in line with the garden variety xenophobic anti-immigrant thinking I grew up with in the Midwest.

The zero-sum philosophy of a newcomer arriving meaning that a current resident loses out, or that the newcomer is "extracting" from the community rather than contributing to it, is also gaining popularity in SF, and is also a very common xenophobic trope.

> I certainly didn't say "unending population increases" or "above all else."

If you don't think that, then there's a certain density level where it's considered fine to oppose it, and there are certain things one could prioritize above population increases that could lead people to favor restrictions. Maybe some of the people favoring restrictions think the high point of density has been reached, or perhaps they favor restrictions because of what values they place above population growth. It's worth at least considering before we simply dismiss them all as xenophobic.

Pointing out specific, xenophobic viewpoints doesn't mean dismissing everybody as xenophobic. If they have legitimate density complaints, please bring them. But I will also point out that these density complaints are even more xenophobic in origin. Density restrictions and zoning in San were invented a century ago to push the Chinese populations out of their neighborhoods.

And for me, this isn't about more or less restrictions. This is about meeting the needs of the people of a city. Not just the wealthy, not just keeping buildings the same, not just the people that have lived there the longest. The needs of the entire people. Which includes people that don't yet live in the city but need access to the economic resources.

So I definitely think that there should be density restrictions, but rather than maximums there should be density minimus. It should be illegal to build a single unit on a 5000 square foot lot anywhere in San Francisco. When somebody tears down a tiny Victorian, they had better replace it with many homes rather than just one. And if somebody remodels those exclusionary Pacific Heights homes, they better be adding more units, IMHO.

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