Strong disagreement.
The best thing for developers would be minimal zoning, Houston style.
As the Bay Area built to expand from 7M people to, say, 20M in a decade, enormous fortunes and livelihoods would be made from all that construction work.
It's like in many industries; the interests of the group as a whole push towards deregulation, while the interests of the biggest, politically well-connected firms is to increase regulation that will be harder for competitors to deal with and will allow them to get or maintain a stranglehold over the market.
A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and powerful actually like growth.
The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.
Prime example is oil wealth. With their massive coffers, fossil fuel companies could be leading the transition to renewable energy, massive increasing human wealth as they drive the cost of energy down and drive their former competitors out of business by acquiring all the new renewables startups that will become the large companies of the future.
Tech, and the HN crowd in general, pursues a strategy of generally increasing the pie size, of disrupting themselves before somebody else disrupts them. But that is not the case for the majority of the economy in developed countries. And in undeveloped countries it's painfully easy to see so many wealthy people maximizing their own position in society over maximally growing their wealth.
Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out?
Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit?
If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.
Developers who are entrenched enjoy the fact it is hard to get a permit. Then, the specialty becomes navigating the system (which the surviving developers are de facto good at). It is hard for the best developers from other cities, who may be amazing at cheap/efficient/quality construction to challenge the incumbents in SF.
It is like saying that government contractors who build websites want the bid system to be simpler. In some ways they do, since on paper they would save a lot of money if they could get rid of their dozen employees who specialize in navigating it. At the same time, most government website contractors probably are not the best web developers - jsut the best at navigating the system.
The post you reply too says "we need minimal zoning". You say "its hard to work because of too many restrictions".
Am I reading it wrong, but you disagree but seem to agree on the main points: Government needs to get out of the way to allow progress.
Imagine how much a developer with Coastal Commission expertise could charge. That's probably a specialty in itself.
The handful of developers who are working in the current environment? No.
You see this with every regulated industry. The people who pissed away a ton of time and money to get into the club don't want the club to fall apart.
Even if it did, remote-work-driven sprawl would be terrible for humanity. We should still congregate for environmental reasons, whether that means 5 story walkable towns, or 20 story city. No where does SFH fit in the picture. Li-on will not save us.
They're political similar, economically as similar as you'll get (silicon forest in Hillsboro and Seattle's whole tech scene rivals SF), and geographically similar in terms of climate to parts of the bay area.
Neither comes very close in terms of climate, although that argument is muted lately due to California being on fire for 4 months out of each year now. But Portland and Seattle are already experiencing their own climate-change-related impacts.
And no, neither measures up economically either. Comparing the tech industry in Portland or Seattle to the Bay Area (Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and basically all of the startup scene) is a joke.
I could go on, but really, there is no competition.
> Neither has a world-class orchestra or opera
Seattle Symphony is fantastic and has multiple Grammy awards. The one that stands out to me is the 2014 premiere of John Luther Adams' work, Become Ocean. Not everyone's cup of team, but a phenomenal performance nonetheless.
> to say nothing of the early-music scene in the Bay Area, which is easily the best in the US
Grunge is very distinctly Seattle. I have a feeling you are incorrectly attributing certain bands with California because they moved there after they became famous.
> And no, neither measures up economically either. Comparing the tech industry in Portland or Seattle to the Bay Area (Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and basically all of the startup scene) is a joke.
Google is heavily in Seattle. You are ignoring the powerhouses of Microsoft and Amazon which are headquartered there. Additionally, the startup scene is thriving. Vulcan Ventures (Paul Allen's firm) has a major presence.
> Neither measures up to the Bay Area in the art scene
I can't speak to the art scene but the Seattle Art Museum was pretty cool, not sure how it ranks. I do know that Seattle attracts a lot of artsy types from personal experience.
> Or the wine scene
If you look at Seattle in a hyper-focused fashion, yes there is no wine, it's a city and Bay Area is an area. But wine in Washington state is also thriving (extended family operates a small vineyard for fun). The climate issues have ironically made Washington a better place for wine in the past years
I could go on, but really, there is quite a bit of competition ;)
But no, the Seattle Symphony is not a world-class orchestra. The SF Symphony is, though.
I mean, do five minutes of research. At least Google it.
Also, if you think a random "classic" [sic] music station in your car teaches you anything significant about this topic, please do think again. Classical music radio station are almost universally awful.
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/the-world-s-gr...
And speaking as an experienced professional musician who has performed a lot in both places, I'd take the Bay Area over LA, at least for classical music, overall.
If we blow it in the US there are plenty of people ready to work for TikTok or whatever other overseas company takes over.
Though I am surprised NYC doesn't have more tech jobs
If someone said you could live in one of the most desirable places in the entire world on an 'ordinary' job but you had to share a room (which TBH could just be your significant other anyway) that would seem like a great deal right?
When many categories of essential workers start to be priced out of living locally and need to commute long distances from undesirable far-flung suburbs, it is (a) a grossly inefficient use of resources, and (b) makes the city much less pleasant and effective. A city where all of the residents are wealthy professionals with other workers as second-class commuters is not a very nice place to live, more like a theme park or resort hotel than a real city.
i.e There is pressure for people living in that area or moving into that area to find a SO or something similar.
We do need to get rid of stupid zoning, but also cannot rely on a housing market to do the right thing. We need to force a shift to anti-car rather than pro-car development (and it really is a dichotomy, with the midpoint being a highly unstable equilibrium).
The fact that they are talking about 4-plexes shows they really don't get the scale of density that is needed. Everything should be 5 stories minimum. Maybe some shorter Victorians can be grandfathered in, but the Sunset and western half more broadly needs to be almost entirely redeveloped.
The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer".
They set the table when they built it, and to undo all of that is going to be crazy expensive and difficult.
Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible.
Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse. A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous. And the Miami disaster just goes to show that not only can your HOA affect your sanity, but also your life safety.
> No one wants to move, no one wants to change.
A large percentage of the people living in my R-1 neighborhood are retired now. They could sell their houses and "cash out", but what would be the point? Money is no substitute for a lifestyle. We chose this lifestyle because of the attractions it offered. A couple of my neighbors have moved away, but for every one that moved, there are ten who have stayed. Once we retire we aren't making that long commute any more, and most of us don't leave our neighborhood during the week because we have almost everything we need within a mile or two. For the people who are working in tech, a lot of them used to have WFH days, but now most of them expect to have more regular WFH days - perhaps even a majority. That's pretty much the utopia that people want to achieve through dense development, namely living locally.
I think there is one major issue that doesn't get mentioned, namely the fact that companies have chosen to site themselves in areas where there was a shortage of nearby housing. The south bay areas are the best example of this, with so many of the employers being north of 101 but almost no housing north of 101. This is not a new problem - I remember people commuting long distances to Lockheed and other defense employers north of bayshore in the 70s. As employers have continued to pack more and more jobs into tight spaces, they have exacerbated the problem.
There is a severe problem with affordability of housing, but that is caused by increased demand as much as limited supply. We worship at the altar of economic growth, and refuse to consider the consequences of that growth. Urban planning is about maintaining balances, in much the same way that we seek to strike balances in our lifestyles. Would anyone accept that employment growth is constrained to not exceed housing supply? It's hard to imagine.
> The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's the reality of redeveloping a single family residence one at a time.
I wish they could at least talk about 2 lots at a time!
> If you could do it city block by city block there would be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest.
Amen.
> The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble that much land to make such projects actually happen.
If only we could do just one, and then for the next one give people units and free moving in the prior one. That can become a virtuous cycle.
> No one wants to move, no one wants change.
Very true, but for all those perks and a nice cache out people can be persuaded. We would need some eminent domain for the stragglers, however.
> The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer".
Just gotta talk about how Better is getting $5M, a condo, and the elevator she will need anyways as she gets older.
> Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible.
They aren't! Spineless compromises as described in https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-train... (pork for both sides!) is spineless politics that will diffuse outrage now, but at the cost mutually-undermining investment that just makes people disrespect government more later.
> Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse.
:(
> A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous.
The irony is suburbia is full of annoying HOAs. Just like the fact that without more broad economic growth homeowners will have a hard time paying off their mortgage in their lifetimes means that it is a lot closer to paying rent than they would like to think.
The government shouldn't be telling people what they can or can't build (beyond safety)
It’d be great if this was done parametrically (Eg setting max noise output at your property boundaries, particulate output, etc,), but I guess it’s been historically more convenient to do it via broad zoning instead. Japan’s max-use zoning seems like a good compromise.
The Bay Area cannot hope to cancel all the car subsidization done at the state and national level. More active measures are needed.
> The government shouldn't be telling people what they can or can't build (beyond safety)
I really fundamentally disagree. Even if we accept liberatarianism for individual and business choices by default, land is a public good in finite supply in fixed position. Isolated actors developing land as they please can cause public harm because the utility of land is based on how surrounding land is used.
We need to collectively agree cars and single family homes hold the bay area back, and then collectively work to move away from both, to replace wholesale self-perpetuating car culture with self-perpetuating public transit apartment culture.
SF and adjacent cities need to both reduce the approval process and encourage higher density.
1. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/as-if-you-needed...
I’m not alone in this - several cities have already banned AirBNB.