Hacker News Reader

Comment by guywithahat | Hacker News Reader

I agree, and I'm not sure why people are downvoting you. SF is slightly more dense than Jersey City, so it should look like a slightly more built up version of Jersey City, not a bunch of single family houses and homeless on the streets. The built up portion of SF is tiny compared to the rest of it

There should be federal laws protecting your right to build to prevent cities like SF from preventing the construction of housing to try and push out poor people

View on HN

And the single family homes are shit! They are not seismically sound, they have poor to no insulation, single pane windows, 2x4 framing, rusting rebar destroying the foundation walls, and sketchy electrical. SF is supposed to be pro environment. If they were, they would permit the demolition of a lot of crappy unsafe houses and they'd build some new buildings that are actually up to modern standards.

Source: lived in midtown terrace for years in a serial-numbered home from '56. everything was bad. No functional ground in the electrical panel, plenty of paper-jacked BX wire. actually no insulation. My 1000 sq ft of living space in SF used as much energy in the winter as my 4k ft house in Colorado does, and the climates are way different.

Almost any home built in 1956 is going to be under-provisioned with respect to utilities and insulation by today's standards. I doubt this is specific to San Francisco.

my point was that it is non-economic to retrofit these homes, rather than just building new buildings. You'd spend more time permitting a seismic and environmental retrofit and still get a worse result and still only house one family.

i hope it's not surprising to you that some homeowners do pay to upgrade their place so it's actually maintained over time. if you don't do that obviously things will get worse, not better in 60+ years! I'm not sure why you think this is a SF phenomenon.

so no, not all SFH in SF are shit.

So tearing down existing extremely expensive houses and building new, even more expensive taller homes is the solution for the homeless? This is wrong on so many levels and would result in the continuation of homelessness and could eventually lead to people / voters feeling there is no solution at all.

Yes.

You're not seeing the full picture because you're not looking at the problem long-term. The cheap housing of today is the expensive stuff built 30-40 years ago that has depreciated. I drive by mansions built in the early 1900s that have become apartments for college students.

Houses depreciate as tastes in style and location shift over the years. I've walked through ghettos where the buildings have beautiful Italianate brick work that probably cost a fortune to build new.

In 30 years, those trendy apartment buildings you see popping up all over will be subsidized housing.

Building taller (we're talking 5 stories, not 100) apartment buildings results in more apartments on the same land. It's not rocket science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com