What a progressive utopia does to outdoor dining
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
* The sidewalk is public space. Does the public give away free real estate to the restaurant, to be used to generate revenue by the square foot? If the restaurant wants outdoor dining, they can build it on their own property. Perhaps the city should at least charge rent (in non-pandemic times).
* Cities don't want loud drunk people on sidewalks, i.e., a bar scene on the sidewalk. Public alcohol consumption is generally banned in most places in the US, afaik.
* It obstructs sidewalks, which have an important purpose and were built to a certain capacity. Analogously, should we allow dining in the street, blocking a lane of traffic (structures could be built that would shield patrons from the street). Possibly, there was less foot traffic during the pandemic so the problem wasn't as noticeable.
* Laws that apply to one person apply to every restaurant in the city. Maybe the temporary pandemic situation limited how many and how did it, and we don't want every restaurant building outdoor dining on the sidewalk.
The title is inflammatory: Assuming 'progressives' are bad, caused the issue, the issue is somehow bad. I expect more from the Atlantic than joining the lynch-the-progressives mob.
Which is ironic, because if you sit down anywhere outside in SF for an hour, there's a rather high and predictable chance that a person suffering from severe mental illness and/or narcotics abuse will park themselves next to you, begin to scream unintelligible sentences, to hurl insults at the patrons and act in a generally threatening fashion. Everybody will try not to make eye contact or acknowledge their presence in any way, hoping they leave of their own accord in a few minutes. You do the usual dance of pretending that the screams aren't at all distracting to the conversation you're having, while also being barely able to pay attention to anything else, in the off chance you need to dodge something thrown in your general direction. Usually nobody gets hurt, but sometimes you get unlucky and lose the stab lottery. Life goes on.
High rents -> Homelessness -> Debilitating mental illness -> drug use -> even worse mental illness.
Nowhere has rents quite as absurd as SF but what you describe has happened to me in London.
Reducing homelessness and ever rising property values are not compatible goals.
It hasnt been going on as long and isnt nearly as bad in Munich as it is in SF but the same problem is there.
A key word is visible. Some places solve the problem by hiding the homeless, chasing them to poor neighborhoods or into shelters, etc. (It's the same solution suburbs and small towns use, in a way: Bus them to the city. Then they criticize cities for the homeless problem.)
It could be a coincidence that SF has an epidemic of mental issues and sky high rents.
(although it seems to have gotten slightly better over the past 5-6 years)
Care to venture a guess how much of that is salaries for government employees in charge of the program? Keep in mind government can only grow in size; never shrink.
[0] https://nypost.com/2021/06/26/san-francisco-run-homeless-enc...
> "If the United States still hospitalized its mentally ill at the same rate it did in 1955, its mental health institutions would house almost 1.1 million people any given day. Instead, they house fewer than 50,000 patients," - Michael Shellenberger.
What? No. Obviously not. What?
I mean, basically yes. We just call them parking spaces. We decided most of the street should be a carve-out to vehicles and the people who can afford to drive and park them. Whenever a Rapid Transit bus lane is being proposed, shopkeepers oppose it because it "removes parking spaces", aka "the free real estate that the shop uses to generate revenue".
So that public subsidy exists, we're just debating whether we want to allocate it towards drivers or pedestrians.
Ok ok but what about parking meter revenue...
> If the restaurant wants outdoor dining, they can build it on their own property.
This I this we're on the same page, we're just haggling over price. Lets say a parking meter charges $2/hour (peak event meters in SF can go as high as $4, others can be less than $1, tweak your own napkin math). Let's assume full occupancy (x 8hr) for the full year (x 356) and we get $6,000 with these optimistic utilization-equivalency numbers. I'm not an expert on commercial real estate, but $6,000/yr or $500/mo doesn't feel unreasonable as an upper bound for an annual lease on a parking spot.
The road upkeep and maintenance almost certainly costs more, but we already agree this is a public subsidy, we're just trying to figure out who gets it.
I know we are interested in the economics of it right now, but I think we often get caught up in the money involved in what are ultimately community space management decisions. Surely someone should pay or be compensated for all this right? It doesn't have to be that way. Sometimes as a community we decide to put a little garden in a little spot, and that shouldn't need an arcane ritual of currency and bureaucracy.
B/c of the large amount of corruption that progressive cities tend to support.
The obvious point of comparison are most southern (and some northern) european countries that have lots of outdoor (often on-street) dining, apparently without much deleterious effect.
What would be so different in the USA as to create a different outcome?
Sometimes, that asshole Chesterton put up a fence without a good reason at all.
I love outdoor dining, but from my experiences walking in both SF and Paris, the sidewalks are typically much wider in Paris. They even have space for enormous newspaper kiosks [1]. Meanwhile, in the US, the structures typically encroach on an already crowded sidewalk [2].
Others have mentioned a car-centric culture, but there are plenty of cars in Paris too, it just seems bigger. I wonder if I can back this supposition up with actual street measurements.
Also, Paris for whatever reason seems to have way fewer visible problems with homelessness than SF. It's possible they are just keeping it away from the public eye though.
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[1] https://frenchmoments.eu/newspaper-kiosks-of-paris/
[2] https://ny.eater.com/2021/5/25/22452773/new-yorkers-debate-o...
But there are crowded 'us city sized' sidewalks in plenty of places in Paris where the space to walk between tables probably wouldn't make accessible code in the US; too narrow and uneven and busy.
Here is a hip area comes to mind in paris [1]. it has those built out wooden platforms onto what used to be parking spaces like in the eater article. narrow sidewalks. Odd there are no people in the satellite I wonder if the most recent one was early pandemic. It was packed last I went.
One big difference is car size & number of cars per person. It's a lot lower than most US cities save a couple. [2]
They are decades ahead in trying to reclaim cities from cars & invest in alternative infrastructure. That area for example is now a 'pedestrian street' and they are doing great things taking back the seine. there were major differences & amazing improvements from when I went pre and during covid.
In contrast my city Denver also closed a couple streets that ran through parks during coviv (shouldn't have been built in the first place).
They added some roundabouts and other things to encourage a more bike/ped friendly space on just a couple roads.
Only to take them right back out... So infuriating. Paris used COVID to speed up and we seem to be going backwards. [3]
https://www.google.com/maps/dir//Maison+Sauvage+Saint-Germai...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/how-paris...
https://slate.com/business/2021/09/paris-cars-bicycles-walki...
While France isn't above trying to hide poverty, it's still not as prevalent an attitude as it is in Britain and the US.
I think the answer's pretty simple : the welfare and healthcare system is just better. It's harder to be homeless and addicted in France than the US. SF in particular seems to have a drug problem.
I suspect you won't be able to back this up with actual street measurements and that they just make better use of the available space. We give a lot of space over to cars in the US.
IME, in Europe, the outdoor dining is usually directly adjascent the restaurant (in the US, it's often on the curb side of the sidewalk), though that is really speculation based on limited experience. Perhaps that is actually on restaurant property, and they set back the indoor structure. Or perhaps European sidewalks were built with that capacity in mind.
Also, perhaps the US, usually more restrictive with alchohol, has been less accepting of drinking in public. It doesn't seem like a problem to me, but then I hardly ever see anyone drinking in public. A city block with lots of restaurants and drinkers?
> Sometimes, that asshole Chesterton put up a fence without a good reason at all.
I find that is very rarely the case, especially for rules widespread across the country. Usually 'no good reason' means 'no reason I know' or 'not a reason I care about'.
Security isn't advocating something positive since it implies that you would need it.
Trying to accommodate irrational fears is often not helpful, it can even be abusive because you validate these fears. This is even a common mechanism to isolate people in abusive relationships. Don't go outside, there is danger in every dark alley!
Some other women might just try emphasize their vulnerability to fish for a protector. How evil of them, but hard to be angry about that.
If you always accommodate people for their comfort, you refuse them growth. As I said, it depends on the location. The locations that don't have the problem did not solve it by arbitrary security mechanisms.
How does it work?
So the actual process is dominated by "Does the project avoid X?", "Does the project ensure that Y cannot happen?", "Will the project ever exceed limit Z?" rather than "Does the project bring <positive-good> to its location?", because people have not yet agreed upon a clear definition of <positive-good> things. In contrast, the stuff to avoid makes itself known, and the stuff we can mostly agree on becomes part of our civic codes.
On the other hand, the heroin addicts don’t really have anything to lose, other than freedom to roam around the city. Since city is not interested in depriving them of that freedom (as jailing the homeless addicts for disorderly conduct would be inhumane, according to San Franciscans), it has no tools to actually incentivize different behavior — it has no punishments left, and so it’s left powerless.
I think you have the right idea, but maybe turned around: Pre-automobile cities can have narrow streets and cram in space for cars, including driving and parking. Newer cities are built with roads (and sometimes sidewalks) at such capacity that the distance to cross them becomes a pedestrian obstacle - 'pedestrian unfriendly'.
Regardless, the question stands.
For one the roads and sidewalks were designed quite a bit differently.
Most other countries are far more well designed for foot traffic, where many places in us are more well designed for vehicles.
Actual steps were taken to change that.
I don't know California enough to compare. From the comments it seems worse.
Sometimes. It depends on the city. Sometimes the landowner owns the sidewalk, or at least has responsibility for it. If you are responsible for cleaning the sidewalk and assume liability if someone slips and falls on it, why not also have the ability to use it? I'm not sure where SF lands on this.
> Cities don't want loud drunk people on sidewalks, i.e., a bar scene on the sidewalk. Public alcohol consumption is generally banned in most places in the US, afaik.
Sidewalk cafes are not nightclubs. There's a difference between people sitting at a table and having a bottle of wine with a meal vs. a frat party. I don't think anyone is proposing a nightclub or bar scene on the sidewalk. These are people sitting at tables eating dinner.
> It obstructs sidewalks, which have an important purpose and were built to a certain capacity. Analogously, should we allow dining in the street, blocking a lane of traffic (structures could be built that would shield patrons from the street). Possibly, there was less foot traffic during the pandemic so the problem wasn't as noticeable.
It sounds like they're built in parking spaces, which are obviously not on the sidewalk or in the street. It's a space that would otherwise be obstructed with a parked car.
> Laws that apply to one person apply to every restaurant in the city. Maybe the temporary pandemic situation limited how many and how did it, and we don't want every restaurant building outdoor dining on the sidewalk.
Why not? It seems unlikely that every single restaurant would, but it also seems like people like eating outdoors. So, why not?
I'm generally in favor of all this stuff. Neverthless, I did see an article in either The Guardian about complaints from residents in London (I think) regarding the expansion of sidewalk dining because it tends to up being not "just people sitting at tables eating dinner". Then there's this NYT recently about similar questions in NYC:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/nyregion/outdoor-dining-n...
My neighborhood has a lot more bars with parklets than restaurants with parklets.
> We were told the same thing about cabs ... and Uber exist, the world is fine.
Lots of traffic problems in major cities due to giving Uber unlimited public resource capacity, rather than using the free market to bid it out (which is what medallions are, if I understand correctly).
Did the world blow up? Is that our standard for success? The world of many medallion owners blew up because Uber bought off government and propagandized the public to give them for free what others have to pay for.
> Airbnb
Regulated in many/most cities.
that's pushing the use of "the free market" quite a bit. Cities control the supply of medallions. The fact that people can bid whatever they want for them doesn't make it a "free market".
Why not? Every market and auction is premised on limited resources. There is limited road space, which is auctioned off in the form of tokens, which are the mediallions.
Why do you say that? It's not clear to me, especially sans any support.
If you mean 'Don't mediallions ...', no. They take a real scarcity, road space (and pollution capacity) and shift it from an externality, something an entity consumes and but doesn't pay for, to something they do pay for.
It is actually pretty funny that they managed to pick two of the most well known "evading regulatory oversight to harm communities for fun and profit" companies out there.
Ultimately, it's a bad situation. It's not being handled well, but I don't really think there's a good outcome that doesn't compromise on either safety, parking or screwing over the restaurant operators.
Good points. Imagine that we allowed other businesses to build extra structures on the public sidewalk. Does the hardware store just build more retail space? It's a bit absurd from that perspective.
> The max parking spot coverage thing is probably about parking capacity.
Many see reducing parking capacity as a benefit: Parking capcity consumes limited real estate (imagine a dense downtown), driving up all other real estate prices. It's a public subsidy for greenhouse gas producing cars. However, the solution is probably not random takeover of parking spots.
If we, the public, decide that dining facilities on public sidewalks are something we want, then so shall it be.
We, the public, are not likely to decide that Home Depot should expand their shelving onto the sidewalk.
Really if this stuff was allowed there would be no big problem, even if home depot put a couple planters on the sidewalk for sale. The outside of their business reflects on them, so they probably at least try to make it sort of pretty.
I never really minded street hawkers though, or all of the window/street advertising you typically see in a large Asian city.
I thought we, Hacker News commenters, decided? ;)
It's no different than allowing private bus companies to drive on public roads, or ice cream vendors to sell from their carts in a city park. We think those are good things, so we allow private businesses to do them.
Take a look at Prague, for example. [0]
There is a chaotic maze of medieval streets in the Old Town (around the Astronomical Clock). But the New Town to the southeast, which was founded in 1348, is already much more regular; the king who founded it had a certain vision and the street grid reflects that vision. Interestingly, a mid 14-th century grid was able to accomodate some degree of car traffic of our modern era.
In case of Kraków [1], there isn't any unplanned corner of the city left, the grid in the Old Town is perfectly regular. This was designed around 1260, so a pretty old grid, but a planned city nonetheless.
The US needs to change how it does planning and learn from the experiences of other countries that actually took steps to become less car-centric.
The city I live in, in the northeastern US, started with no particular plan in the 1600s, and indeed, some of the streets were too narrow for cars.
In the late 1700s, a plan was laid out, whereby "the east–west streets were named for mammals while the north–south streets were named for birds".
The town I was born in, was founded in the 1660s. Probably not with a plan for the next 300 years.
I can only speak for Zurich, where there is a lot of outdoor dining during the season.
The space used by restaurants for outdoor dining on public space is "leased" to the restaurant. They pay a fee for the use of public space to the city.
Get rid of the cars and make the road the sidewalk.
It works fine all around the world.
I live in a city with a car free city core. Of course we have more cars today than before the change around 20 years ago.
There is no need to travel specifically along those roads if there are a dozen others to chose from.
There are very, very few specific roads that individuals have some kind of attachment to.
They close my high street to traffic in summer and it makes 0 difference to traffic. We're talking less than 0.1% of roadway.
Also look at the pic in article - its parking spaces that have been converted.
From experience in the UK its not patrons of restaurants with outdoor dining or drinkers outside of pubs in the evening that are the real problem.
1. Charging rent would cost more administratively than giving the space for free, in 99.9% of cases. Yes, the city should allow the restaurants to "borrow" public space for free. People want this! It's in the public interest!
2. This is false. Public "outdoor" alcohol consumption is generally acceptable and if put on the ballot would win in most places. It's legal where I live, in Austin TX.
3. Sidewalks were built to encourage pedestrian foot traffic in cities. Outdoor dining also increases foot traffic. The two concepts aren't opposed, they are mutually beneficial.
4. ...Okay? Laws shouldn't discriminate between businesses of the same class, this is a good thing.
Sure, there might be reasons a fence was built. But there might not be! We shouldn't become a veto-ocracy.
I don't see it. Imagine rent in Manhatten or SF - it's hard to believe they couldn't make a mint. People want lots of things that commercial businesses sell; that's not what public interest means or all business is 'in the public interest'.
> 2. This is false. Public "outdoor" alcohol consumption is generally acceptable and if put on the ballot would win in most places. It's legal where I live, in Austin TX.
Can you back up your claim about popularity? It's illegal in most places I know.
> 3. Sidewalks were built to encourage pedestrian foot traffic in cities. Outdoor dining also increases foot traffic. The two concepts aren't opposed, they are mutually beneficial.
That's called a public nuiscance: We could have concerts and everything else on sidewalks, which would both attract foot traffic and obstruct it. That doesn't lead to good results.
> We shouldn't become a veto-ocracy.
That doesn't tell us much: Do we throw out all laws? Traffic lights? The question is, where to draw lines. But let's assume our anscestors weren't idiots, that you and I aren't smarter than all of them, but that they were people who had good ideas that we can benefit from.
For many of us, we have ancestors (and cousins) in parts of the world where this is all just fine. So why would we prefer one set of ancestors over another? Why should we believe that the decisions the US-based ancestors somehow reflect a different reality here, rather than just, say, the motivations of the Prohibition movement?
The law formalizes the boundaries between people. Without any restrictions people will consume as much land as possible until they come into conflict with others and use informal means to resolve disputes. Banning sleeping in your car or tents seems cruel until you experience the logical extreme of people settling permanently on public space. Stores would use the sidewalk as extensions of their sales floor and let pedestrians walk on the road.
It's called a "government", and its both a process and an institution that can, in a pinch, be used to make decisions like this.
https://www.wideopeneats.com/states-can-drink-public/
Scroll to the map.
Looks pretty mixed. California and Texas in the "mostly OK" bucket, but then you've got Illinois, New York, and Florida as high-pop states in the "mostly not OK" bucket. State-wide bans in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, too. I'd guess, based on that, that more people live places with significant restrictions on open containers in public than not, but it may be fairly close to an even split.
wow
It costing more isn't an argument, if society wants it. Building a road costs money. Keeping it clean costs money. We invest in roads. We invest in bureaucracy enforcing policy. The cost can then be a measure to control the behavior.
Here in my European city there is a few between 16 and 77€/m²/year depending on the district for using sidewalks for a restaurant. As well as other regulation (remaining space, noise, ...)
If you agree with the article ...
I used to do this, but 99% of the time it was to enforce economic or racial segregation, so I don't find the maxim very useful anymore.
The public collects a 10%ish[0] tithe on all that additional revenue, acting as if there is no financial benefit for the state (and public at large) is silly.
[0]Sales tax + income tax
I do t think there’s an assumption, politically active progressives in office are pushing the policy?
If I’m incorrect, who’s policies should we be evaluating to fix the issue?
And yes, American govt is vastly inefficient at all levels, mostly because the individual is prioritised over the community. When the goal is to prevent individual harm, at any cost, then naturally there is little change because someone is always around to object.
San Francisco has been electing progressives from top to bottom since forever. They identify themselves, run and get elected as progressives, they implement policies and get re-elected, so they are progressives.
Not taking responsibility is something progressives also are known for :)
Yeah it's strange how it hasnt had a conservative mayor in power since the 50's and city council has been solidly blue for God knows how long.
And people are claiming it's not progressive?
Certainly it has a lot of open minded people in it, but it has awful housing policy, mediocre transit for a city its size, historically some of the most brutal police behaviour and crackdowns, and an incredibly stark wealth divide. Many of these things get reflected in policies about land use too, to which the things this article is talking about are likely second order effects.
I mean, realistically table stakes for progressive utopia have to include universal health care, which I guess makes Hawaii the only state that's even at the table.
> “Zoning is racist and made by people like me who live here to increase my profit on my property. That’s [pro-housing activists’] line…tell that to the folks in Bayview-Hunters Point, the largest single family home owning area in the city.” > >It seemed to be lost on the group, which consisted of eleven white people over the age of forty, that minority homeowners might be clustered in that area in part because of redlining and racist zoning laws that restricted access to other neighborhoods.
https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fi...
The politics are truly cursed in SF and nothing makes sense, and all rhetoric is hidden behind several layers of misdirection and retribution for long-held grudges.
You left out some important context there. The full quote from the article is:
"For a club that sees themselves as progressive, it is ironic that they are such strong advocates for strict zoning rules, a practice rooted in racism and designed to segregate neighborhoods.
This was actually a running joke in the meeting, which began when Welch sarcastically stated, “Zoning is racist and made by people like me who live here to increase my profit on my property. That’s [pro-housing activists’] line…tell that to the folks in Bayview-Hunters Point, the largest single family home owning area in the city.”"
It's as if the author realized nobody would read his article about patio dining, and went back and made it about how progressivism is destroying patio dining instead, because... California.
If this was about actual progressivism then you'd see any number of East Coast blue states mentioned, which they aren't.
Outside dining in the PNW was(prior to Covid) and is chugging along just fine.
Though I critique SF all the time for not actually being progressive, or left for that matter, at least where it counts for local politics and material effects that could be achieved by their politics before The Revolution, I sometimes think the author has it right. It's better to say that everybody that adopts a label gets to define it. Unless there's a really strong faction with the label that reject the politics of the others, we are left with SF "progressives" being "progressive," even if outsides find them hypocritical and counterproductive to the movement.
Is a Catholic priest who abuses children actually "Catholic" or merely wrapping themselves with the image?
In the end that's a semantics argument which doesn't seem to do much to solve the underlying problem.
Here's a great example: https://www.johnlocke.org/good-for-thee-not-for-me-robert-re...
"Robert Reich, a left-wing professor at the University of California Berkeley who served as labor secretary during the Clinton administration, is very concerned about income inequality. He urged Wall Street executives to “invest” in cities by funding low-income housing projects. He also praised a “promising initiative” to promote the construction of affordable housing units in San Francisco.
Reich is not so keen, however, on a proposal to tear down a dilapidated building in his Berkeley neighborhood and replace it with a 10-unit development that would include low-income housing.
Reich and some of his wealthy neighbors are imploring the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the dilapidated structure, known as the Payson House, as a Berkeley landmark in order to stop the proposed development. In a letter to the commission, Reich said the proposed housing units would destroy the “charm of an older era of Berkeley” and likened the developers’ actions to “the illegal practices and corrupt politics of the late nineteenth century.”
Insisting that they are just saying that as an excuse because they don’t like town houses seems uncharitable at best. Considering the sources pushing this story I’d call it more like a bad-faith political hit job vs. Prof. Reich. E.g. your link is from a far-right “think tank” in North Carolina full of climate denialists, funded by Art Pope, GOP megadonor and close friend of the Koch brothers. Not exactly the people I would trust to fairly evaluate Berkeley’s decisions on which buildings should be landmarks.
In any case, the city council decided that the house isn’t important enough to qualify as a landmark, and the project is going through; the building will be torn down.
The neighbors will say whatever they can to stop the building without regard for truth or basic decorum. Their class interests are extremely conflicted, and such duplicitous bad-faith use of law is endemic in wealthy white neighborhoods like this.
See, for example:
https://twitter.com/cselmendorf/status/1468608996185501700?s...
The lying about true causes is so ingrained that a power-broker wrote it all out publicity in a local magazine, and thought it was self defense.
Developers will also often happily tear down irreplaceable historical landmarks if they can profit, but that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily acting in bad faith.
Which is why there is a city process involved. (In this case, deciding in favor of the developer.)
The irony is that by dragging down property values rent control would actually reduce this type of behavior.
The building is architecturally mundane and inefficiently built (SFH) . It is around 150 years old, which is quite new as far as 'old' buildings go. It also doesn't look that nice (subjective personal opinion)
Usually, 'historic significance' is a thinly veiled attempt to grasp at straws for blocking any densification.
In most cases, these sort of
Historical buildings should be protected, but I don't know how to formally define that. The best I can come up with is the market: if you actually cared about it you would put your money where you mouth is and buy it out (perhaps with a group of like minded to create a foundation), and protect it as you see fit for as long as people continue to protect it. Of course this mostly eliminates the poor, but for the most part I'm not sure it matters as anything that is historic probably has at least one rich person who cares.
Scrapping 3/4 of the private vehicles there and investing in frequent high quality public transportation would make the city dramatically nicer.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how valid this couching is any more. A lot of what was historically perceived as "third world" started from a POV that was 1950s - 1970s America, where the rest of the world was still either under communism or recovering from the ashes of WWII.
Today, there are many hundreds of cities & states in Asia that far outshine many US and European cities & states in "developedness". The problem is that the leadership in these Western places refuse to realise they can't keep relying on historical achievement to compete in the 21st Century.
Hawaii (and others) need to buck up.
That is history: English is a living language, and today first world mean rich industrialized nation (developed), and third world means poor industrialized nation. Those Asian nations in todays English are first world countries even though they weren't Nato or Warsaw pact which is what third world meant in 1950-1970.
"Frequent high quality public transportation" is great for dense urban cores, which doesn't remotely describe Honolulu.
This does, however, assume that zoning near stations is also adjusted to allow this, which is something that many US cities including the Bay Area are notoriously bad at.
Wandering around this mall was one of the only things to do growing up other than watch TV and mess around on the internet: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0657829,-83.986029,3799m/dat...
Everything else cost money or was too far away. I think underdeveloped imagination is why so many people can't see that better transit options would have the same effect, but with increasing density rather than increasing sprawl.
is plenty dense for good public transportation. Density is useful, but it is overrated. The important part is the public transport system go when and where people need, lacking that people won't ride and thus you get a vicious circle that people blame on low density but in fact is just bad service is driving people away.
Is this close enough?
> Healthy San Francisco, created by City Ordinance in July 2006, is San Francisco’s health access program for the uninsured, the first of its kind in the nation. Healthy San Francisco is not insurance, but provides uninsured San Francisco residents access to affordable basic and ongoing health care services, including primary care through a medical home, as well as specialty and inpatient care, diagnostic and mental health services, and prescription drugs. All uninsured adult City residents who are not eligible for other public programs are eligible to enroll in Healthy San Francisco, regardless of immigration status, employment status, or pre-existing medical conditions.
Source: https://healthysanfrancisco.org/wp-content/uploads/Kaiser-Su...
That also feels like a kind of "no true Scotsman" clause, an "ah well, but those aren't _American_ progressive Utopias".
The San Francisco electorate, by and large, would likely call themselves "very progressive", probably more so than any other major city in the country. Almost all of the significant power brokers, all the way up to the governor's office, in San Francisco politics would call themselves "very progressive". In that sense, San Francisco's government represents the one of the purest embodiments of what is a real political bloc or viewpoint or movement, one that calls itself "progressive", and what it might hope to achieve. Friedersdorf wants to call this politics "progressive" too; you object, and say this "American progressiveness", and the utopia created in its image to the best of its abilities, has little to do with "real progressives" and what their utopia might be like. But either way, I think what I'm trying to get at is - regardless of what you want to call it, it's real.
And I think there's something to be said for, "Conor Friedersdorf is an American, writing in an American magazine, about American politics" that makes it reasonable to highlight that distinction, or default to an American understanding of the term. I'm not trying to say that "Nordic progressiveness" isn't better than "American progressiveness", or that it isn't good or workable, but I'm hesitant to say that it's "truer" than "American progressiveness" - that's the fallacy.
(and, for what it's worth: highlighting a real distinction is certainly a rhetorical feint, and maybe a case of moving the goalposts, but it's not the same as No True Scotsman, where the distinction is, as Wikipedia puts it, "rhetoric [that] takes the form of emotionally charged but nonsubstantive purity platitudes")
But to be clear, I do like this reply a lot. And also to be clear, I'm Canadian, and in most respects like the way Canada is more progressive (in any sense, really) than the US, and think both of us would be better off if we were more like the Nordic countries. So I think it's valuable to ask, then: why is it that, Sweden, say, is more successful at producing good "real" "progressive utopias" than San Francisco?
In other words, while I think it's important to recognize the significance of self-identification, doing so while ignoring incredibly evident hypocrisy is a kind of solipsism.
I have considered moving to the USA (which is a viable option for me, for reasons that I wont go into here), and the question "but, which state?" always stops me. I start with the revealing question "what's the guns-to-healthcare ratio there?"
In the words of US/Canadian author William Gibson:
"People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary"
The only thing about it that's progressive is its social culture, in some ways, such as how it's a very LGBT-friendly city. That's all that comes to mind.
Or, one of
a) They're not really, deep down, as progressive as they claim to be.
b) it's not possible, _within the USA as it currently operates_.
c) Related to b, power to "create a progressive city" doesn't actually lie with the "supermajority" of voters, but with a few powerful people who are fine with things the way they are.
I suspect, with no evidence, a bit of all of these.
I think the label is tongue in cheek. You would agree that San Francisco has the most "progressive" policies of any American city, and therefore if there was a "progressive utopia", SF would be the closest to it?
As another person in this thread mentioned I think the one exceptional standout is LGBT issues, and even that's largely because of a motivated local queer community and even then it's also the city where Harvey Milk was shot.
Public transport is a classical progressive issue, also trying to curb police violence. In general I would agree, but the "progressive" strategy for policy makers seems to be more talk than action.
Part of the problem I think is that American-style land-use policies create a very bipolar concept of density. Everything has to be either SFH or high rises and the middle gets squeezed out. Both of these I think favour big developers: either big enough to buy large tracts of land to build houses on or big enough to afford the capitally intensive process of building large scale buildings. Other parts of the world seem to be less keen on both kinds of housing and also often manage to have healthier cities by most metrics.
Also, broad home ownership as a kind of free market mechanism for wealth transfer has been a big push, but I think the results are pretty mixed in practice. It worked for a while, particularly while family incomes were growing thanks to the workforce growing post-WWII, but it's also likely that it contributed to creating a new kind of wealthy elite that has become protective of itself, and that manifests particularly badly in California where property tax law is... comically absurd?
I dunno. Leftism existed before there was literally any hope of "everyone owning a home." Landlords are also deeply problematic from a left or progressive perspective, but I don't think that means the answer is the opposite.
Also, in practice, it doesn't really seem like developers are that keen on building "thousands of units". They seem much happier to build hundreds of really expensive ones. But it's hard to tell what they'd do without modern zoning laws.
Home owners are not a wealthy elite and if they have become that you might want to address this problem.
I'm also just plain not sure I buy anything like the idea that home owners have greater investment in their communities in any particular ways that help 'less fortunate' people. I'm not sure what you're even thinking of there. At this point, thanks to housing price inflation, most homeowners wind up tying up substantial assets into debt service, which is about as far from something that helps the local community as you can get imo.
I'm not strictly against home ownership, I am one myself. I just don't think you've really presented a compelling argument (nor am I aware of one) that they are somehow the true embodiment of progressivism.
> I'm not strictly against home ownership, I am one myself.
I am not surprised. I believe your form of progressivism is pretty protective of your own status but you deny it to yourself. Will you sell your home and rent an apartment in high density housing? Do you want that?
Right now I am in a situation where I need a space for quite a few people to live together (5 adults), and where I live that's not really feasible in a high density rental (there is basically no such thing as a >3bdrm apartment in my city), nor is it possible to do so and also commit to certain environmental goals that we have as a group. This has a lot more to do with the politics of where I live than it does with my own politics, though.
"You criticize society, yet you participate in a society hmmmmmmm."
As for investment in the community, what kinds of investments do you have in mind? How do those investments specifically help "less fortunate people" as you claimed? I'm genuinely curious what you mean by this, as it doesn't reflect my experience in any way, but you seem unwilling to get specific. Again, mostly my experience is NIMBYism, for eg. when the people in the urban condo building I lived in objected to a halfway house existing a block and a half away.
At any rate, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I'm not always perfect in my praxis or whatever. I think I have a lot to learn about how to be a better person in a community. I am privileged in many ways and I do what I can to use that privilege for good, but I'm sure I fail frequently to do all that I could theoretically do.
San Clemente is nothing at all like a "progressive utopia" - it's voted solidly Republican for decades including in 2020 [1].
The author then goes on to tip his hat to a progressive politician from San Francisco for authoring a bill to extend outdoor dining:
"State Senator Wiener is correct when he observes, “If a city had come forward before the pandemic and said, ‘Let’s dramatically expand outdoor dining,’ there would have been a lot of pushback. Like, ‘Whoa, what’s going to happen to the neighborhood? We need parking.’ This is not a mysterious unknown now. Not everybody likes it, but most people do. They love it.”"
"Wiener’s bill authorizes the extension of temporary permits for outdoor dining, which are ultimately under the control of a state alcoholic-beverage commission..."
... all of which flat out contradicts the click-baity headline that the issue has something to do with progressivism. It's not about progressivism in the slightest.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Clemente,_California#Gover...
The youtube channel, Not Just Bikes, showed that in the 1970s, much of the Netherlands was car centric and claimed there were death threats by store owners who thought that getting rid of the parking spaces would deprive them of their customers. According to the channel the opposite was true. Removing the cars increased the number of people on the streets significantly and business for those stores increased.
I have no idea if that would work for San Clemente. It's not some $800k person city like Amsterdam. It's a 64k person city slightly isolated beach community with a 5-6 block long shopping street lined with parking.
https://goo.gl/maps/H6wyLdguSjcGKMACA
Assuming it could get the foot traffic it would be 10x nicer with no cars and more outdoor seating but they'd still need some place to put the visitors (off the main street parking structures/lots)
As expected by most sensible people, the opposite happened. More space for customers means they can access shops without cramming through busy footpaths, and enjoy the street itself more, spending more time there. Now it has more capacity and the businesses that opposed it seem to be doing very well.
Yes, like the regulation that sidewalks have to be clear enough for someone in a wheelchair to pass through?
It's barely progressive, the fact it's labeled as that is an indictment on the author or on America if that's what passes for one.
With a constituency, there is no such universal agreement on what is desirable.
Politics is the messy, ambiguous, and incomplete process of deciding which X is most desirable.
The author knows this.
The author's argument is that San Francisco's progressive ideals often look past reality and end up undermining its own goals.
The problem is the patchwork of regulation, multi-stage enforcement, and ability for competitors and activists to introduce painful delays and reviews at each stage. Streamlining is desperately needed, and public review should be more limited in scope and timeline.
Contrast this with cities in Europe where people just hang out, like for free, all around the town at rivers, parks, bridges and have a good time. It always feels like European cities place a premium on such public places, on the idea that a good time could be had without going to a commercial venue.
I guess this is why US cities feel weird to me... somehow compartmentalized and commercialized, even oppressive. I realize you are not supposed to walk "around town" in the US. Rather, you pick a target (Bar, Restaurant) and then go drive there. And that's fine. I also know public consumption is frowned upon. But look at people sitting at the Seine or Canal St. Martin in Paris on a summer evening... sharing spaces between open-air restaurants, sidewalks and just public spots. It's a far cry from "rowdy drunkenness" that US Americans frequently imagine, and (to me), something is just missing without this public life.
And even more extreme version of the US model can be seen in newer parts of rapidly growing cities like Dubai and many new developments in Istanbul and the like: Here, the city amounts to a system of isolated complexes, separated by highways or roads and with little walkability. Residential areas are also often physically shut off from the public. The closest you get to a normal space is a Mall. I find just being there makes me depressed. Other's don't mind at all. Weird.
Edit: More of what I mean in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbxQHjcctZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbxQHjcctZk
Except that one of the nice things in European parks is that they have outdoor cafes, bars, food sellers, etc, i.e., commercial venues. I sometimes get the impression that the US doesn't think public parks should have any commercial elements, thus contributing to their lack of life...
Is this US-specific? What prevents policing public spaces?
Also, many toilets in Europe charge a fee, which both allows for better maintenance, and keeps out casual visitors; a PITA but keeps them clean and free of much antisocial behaviour, but more practical in high-traffic areas, not so much in quieter areas - though a lot of the problems seems to be in high-traffic urban areas.
I see a well-designed, clear, and not-very-dense set of guidelines for building and maintaining an outdoor dining space. You could probably squeeze everything in this document into 10 pages of terse prose, but that would be far less intelligible. Friedersdorf is just being his typical contrarian self in order to get contrarian clickthroughs.
There's some really great content in this document: pages 29-30 explain in very clear terms how to attach your parklet to an existing street, and include clear, helpful diagrams. Pages 37-39 explain in great detail how to make your parklet accessible to people using wheelchairs, and even include helpful architectural diagrams and photographs.
If the original PDF had been submitted instead of Conor's contrarian clickbait, I imagine that most of the comments would've been about the terrific guidance around best practices.
These headlines are clickbait. I wish The Atlantic was better than this, but I know it's not.
The Democrat party is barely a left-leaning party. You have famous national examples like AOC and Bernie who are very progressive, but by and large, most Democrats are happy to accede to corporate power and regressive policies when it actually matters. What is considered "radical left" here in America is basically centrist by the standards of the rest of the world.
Of course there's no progressive utopia. That's what utopia means: "no place". But California is incredibly progressive compared to other states in the US.
BTW, here's another piece on progressive hypocrisy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw
I have to think that any restrictions on that are local, not statewide. Personally, I can't think of many places in LA where I'd want to sit right next to the street, and even less a parking spot on one. The city just wasn't built to accommodate that and it's silly to think public parking should be converted for that purpose.
Honestly, this sounds more than just a bit snobbish to me.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street
I lived in NYC for a decade and know plenty of city residents, none of whom make this distinction. I really hope this doesn’t turn into a case of niche experts redefining a common word and then insisting that people using the normal definition are somehow wrong or less precise.
What are the normal definitions of "road" and "street"? What words would you use to describe the differences that Strong Towns is referring to?
The wikipedia article gp linked and I quoted says that street is another word for road and is usually used for paved roads. I’d say that that is consistent with how i’ve seen people use those words.
And of course using words as they are commonly used doesn’t make people bad or stupid. Similarly, using a non-standard definition of a word in some narrow setting doesn’t make the people doing that bad or stupid. But it’s silly for people in that latter group to behave as if the definition they’ve made up is the REAL one that other people just don’t know about.
ETA: I don’t think I have a word for what they’re calling “streets.” Which makes sense; I’m sure if there were an existing word for this, urban planners would just use that instead of repurposing “street.” If it were up to me, I probably would have chosen a different word, since this usage is so at odds with the norm, but I don’t think it matters much as long as the usage is consistent within the discipline itself.
This feels to me like recently gentrified neighborhoods wanting to keep the "riffraff" out.
Taxpayers own that street. That's why it's silly to give a business that space. A flip side of this is I pull up in my "Food Truck" and park there and sit all day selling my food in front of the restaurant that's in a building just on the other side of the sidewalk. And while I'm at why not set up some tables and chairs on the sidewalk in front of that restaurant?
If it's me that's "doing these conversions" no one should object, right?
The idea that there is no "pay to play" going on in local politics is absurd. But the public is not getting anything for their tax dollars in return when that happens under the table and no fees are placed in the local Gov's coffers.
What do you think those restaurants would do if the city allowed catering trucks to sit in those parking spots for free and serve food right outside a their front door all day and night?
What if I own a business next door to them? How does that not inconvenience my patrons?
This is flashback to what we used to call "Yuppies" back in the `80s. I lived in LA then. Not much has changed there except the gentrification of places like Venice Beach.
> Aaron Peskin, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, compared parklets to beaches, “arguing that anyone should be free to sit down in a parklet and enjoy a cup of coffee,” Eater’s Becky Duffett reported. “But, in practice,” she continued, “countless restaurant and bar owners have called into these hearings and shared complaints with their supervisors, saying they are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, they have spent tens of thousands of dollars on parklets, and are having to clean out urine, feces, and needles every morning.” A theoretical comparison to public beaches is one way to see the issue. But isn’t buying a coffee as a condition of occupying a section of asphalt a lower barrier to entry than having to own a car and feed a meter?
It seems totally disconnected from the rest? Are they having to give up these due to pointless red tape or are they just fighting to exclude non-paying customers from using this part of the street? Is "you can't just act like you own part of the street when you don't" the red tape they want to get rid of?
I'm all for taking back the street but this argument isn't going to convince anyone who wasn't convinced already.
Also this has to do with progressive policies exactly how?
Stuff like this makes me realize how alien USA is.
What? Make the current rule changes permanent? How come this is not considered as "a way" and dismissed out of hand? I'm genuinely amazed at the lack of imagination here. 5th graders could solve this problem.
Imagine thinking this with a straight face.
How could it be harder to move civilians and a wooden plank compared to a locked SUV? Aha
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."
"Eschew flamebait."
A lot of outdoor dining is much larger and more obstructive than a wooden plank. I see entire structures, planters, electrical power, heat lamps and fire 'pits', etc.
> Imagine thinking this with a straight face.
If we approach unfamiliar ideas curiously, we can imagine part of factual reality that is outside our conceptions: people know things we don't and have legitimate motives we haven't considered. I know almost nothing about outdoor dining; it would be interesting to hear from a restauranteur and city planner.
This is an extremely healthy mindset, I'm glad to see it here. I only hope this way of thinking can spread.
He has a point though: treating every idea 'curiously' will kill an endevour by a thousand cuts.[0] To the point, attempting to apply these standards retrospectively would result in a very different and much worse current day. For starters most of San Francisco would still be part of the bay. I can't even imagine the horror and outrage at proposing to fill in the bay to increase the footprint of downtown? And yet considering we aren't chomping at the bit to return SF to nature I can't help feel society has decided it was the right thing to do.
[0]How does outdoor dining affect the patterns of migratory birds? Better fund a study. For each restaurant, so the individual facts. Are you a 'bird advocate' who thinks the aforementioned study was a sham? Sharpen your legal pencils because the state is very interested to hear and debate your case.
I really wish this sort of thing was hyperbole.
That is a strawperson, and not related to curiosity. Curiosity is what I described above (at least by my definition). I don't see what that has to do with your examples.
> To the point, attempting to apply these standards retrospectively would result in a very different and much worse current day. For starters most of San Francisco would still be part of the bay.
What standards are we applying retrospectively? Outdoor dining rules would cause SF to remain part of the bay?
> [0]How does outdoor dining affect the patterns of migratory birds? Better fund a study. For each restaurant, so the individual facts. Are you a 'bird advocate' who thinks the aforementioned study was a sham? Sharpen your legal pencils because the state is very interested to hear and debate your case. / I really wish this sort of thing was hyperbole.
Can you provide actual evidence of it happening in reality?
The hypocrisy[1] of the current status quo is that we live in the benefit of decisions made in a far more carefree manner that would never pass muster today (e.g. filling in the SF bay.)
>https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...
[0]The endemic absurdity which makes it expensive to build, and by extension live in CA and the Bay Area.
[1]Never mind anti-pragmatism.
Landromat -> apartment, except it casts shadows on a school playground after school hours.
>https://sfplanning.org/standards-bird-safe-buildings
'bird-safe building requirements
>http://www2.oaklandnet.com/oakca1/groups/ceda/documents/webc...
Some permitting requirements including treatment for migratory birds. I expect you can find some news of delays over lawsuits from environmental groups over things easily
You might be right and there's little or no safety issues to worry about, but the data needed to assess that opinion doesn't exist yet.
They continue to evolve now, with fire deaths dropping significantly over the past 40 years despite population increases as construction methods and building materials get better [2]
I think it's fair to say that there's a legitimate safety concern in allowing structures not built to normal codes for a permanent structure to become permanent without some sort of review. Although I think that simple street dining-- absent these structures that weren't intended to be permanent-- should be much less of an issue. If a restaurant just has tables & chairs out there then I don't see much of an issue as long as they don't obstruct normal pedestrian traffic.
[0] https://www.creia.org/the-development-of-our-building-codes
[1] https://www.tenement.org/blog/lives-gone-in-a-puff-of-smoke/
[2] https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?genericContentID=34...
One is a locked SUV whose windows are designed to be broken easily and safely in case of emergencies, pop into neutral and push out of the way sort of quickly (depending on whether or not there's even enough time to do that, but I digress). This SUV has wheels whose direction you can adjust in order to to help maneuver the vehicle easily.
The other is a structure often built considerably longer than even a few SUV lengths, weighed down so that guests and weather don't move it, and made out of material that is considerably less easy to break through in an emergency situation than the aforementioned tempered/laminated safety glass. Said structures may even contain even more hazards - eg, gas-powered heat lamps - than you would find in a traditional parking space. This structure is bulky and doesn't have wheels to help change the direction you want to move it in.
>Imagine thinking this with a straight face.
The irony...
Not doable in most modern cars without the key.
[EDIT] The more I think about this the more it bothers me. Being able to shift even if the car is partially disabled—including, quite possibly, whatever's responsible for reading a modern electronic key—is really important for safety, and also for generally dealing with a disabled car after it's come to a stop, which can also be safety-related if you're trying to, say, get it off a busy highway. Especially being able to get into neutral. That there's any possible way that failures in not-strictly-necessary-for-shifting systems could block that seems crazy to me.
But playing devil's advocate, assuming that no modern car can be popped into neutral without a key, a car is still much more favorable than many parklets. You can easily break the glass to run firehouses through, or you can more easily run the hose over/under/around it because it's a smaller object than an outdoor dining space. Emergency crews can run between parked cars, but there often aren't any such opportunities in a 16-foot parklet.
a) buildings weren't made of wood, and
b) people didn't keep setting fire to them.
(Source: SF resident for a few years - someone even burnt down my hardware store! As I was going there for a screwdriver!)
I'm actually curious what the fire department itself has to say about it.
Typically, they are the ones carrying fire code inspections.