What happened when the San Francisco Bay Area rejected growth | Hacker News Reader

What happened when the San Francisco Bay Area rejected growth

bloomberg.com

Here's the document they quote, but don't link: "Future development of the San Francisco Bay area, 1960-2020". The Internet Archive has a copy.[1] So does Google, but you have to have a Google account to read it. I have a boxed paper copy, with the maps.

Bloomberg focuses on the growth/anti growth mantra. But that's looking at it wrong. This was written by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Their vision for the SF Bay Area was heavy industry, like Pittsburgh. Steel mills in Marin. Aluminum smelter at Tiburon. Great deep-water access for ore boats.

This wasn't unreasonable at the time. The Bay Area had been a major production center during WWII, just 15 years before, with four large shipyards and much heavy fabrication capability. There's still an oil refinery in Richmond. The Corps took that idea as far as it would go.

Five freeways up the Peninsula were to be built. US 101 and I-280 were built, and coastal CA-1 and mountaintop CA-35 were to be upgraded to freeways. Plus another freeway out on stilts in the bay. Another bay bridge near Candlestick was proposed. Possibly an SF-Alcatraz-Angel Island-Tiburon bridge so that there would be a full freeway connection north through SF.

The plan called for filling in the bay below the Dumbarton Bridge and above the Richmond Bridge to get more land.

Their plan was to make the SF Bay Area like Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit.

[1] https://archive.org/details/futuredevelopmen00unit

It's fun to know that in the middle of Sunnyvale, right next to downtown and near many tech companies' buildings, is the big Northropp-Grumman Marine Systems site, that emerged from the Joshua Hendy Ironworks, and which continues to produce heavy equipment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Hendy_Iron_Works

Oh wow! Walk by that place once a week and never thought to go in haha.

There's a Hendy stamp mill on display in Murphy Park around the corner from the factory. It's larger than the one pictured on Wikipedia

> Bloomberg focuses on the growth/anti growth mantra. But that's looking at it wrong

I came away with the impression that the growth planned/proposed by the Corps of Engineers, basically scared opposition groups into pushing for (and obtaining) too little growth/development than perhaps would have happened if SF had gone the middle way.

And they'd never have been able to do that without winning the water wars with the Central Valley ..... instead you get almond milk

> Their plan was to make the SF Bay Area like Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit.

Good job somebody prevented that growth, really.

Indeed. Detroit isn't looking too good these days. Heavy industry did pretty badly in the 1970's and 1980's.

Most people appear to complain about high housing costs in SF, but that's a consequence of many factors. Filling-in the bay wouldn't impact house prices by much.

Post-war urban development is widely criticized for destroying the character and liveability of cities.

Wow this really exemplifies American urban planning.

If only Americans could fathom infill density and public transit as the solution to scaling population centers.

While it's tempting to blame NIMBYism for this, I think it's a more general reflection of America's backwards relationship with urban development.

Hopefully we'll see a cultural reversion back to sanity with respect to urban planning in my lifetime. It would be so lovely to achieve the same convenience and economic potential properly designed cities have enjoyed for decades.

I mean it's not just America. I do however always wonder if it is American urban planning across the world though. Taichung looks like an American city, mostly designed around cars.Taipei highways have so many twists and turns that I know it's not German, but wonder if it's American or French. German urban planning has been "modernized" and somehow it seems worse for anything but cars.

But then look at Tokyo and compare that to Tehran. Both of them with an Urban commuting population upwards of 20 million. Both similar in scale, but one of them an absolute nightmare in pollution(partly due to it being located in a basin, but part of it to the constant traffic and patchwork urban planning) and compare that to the other, where even though it's hilly, a lot of people commute by ebike, there is an extremely fast and efficient public transit system, and driving at high speeds is mostly limited to certain paths/streets.

The problem is what do you with the places who's urban planning was terrible? You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there. And due to its design, very often the just replace it by ebikes simply isn't a viable option.

So, what can we realistically do besides just complaining how shitty it was designed?

Retrofitting is always possible. It’s just not satisfying to know that it takes decades. But as an example Amsterdam started its journey in the ‘70s.

Did Amsterdam destroy low density (say, two floors) housing? I thought they just changed how they used the existing road space.

> You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there.

Use cable cars for public transit. This technology is very adaptable and can be retrofitted relatively easily into existing urban structures.

> You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there

You absolutely can. Of course you don't need to tear down all the housing. Just enough to retrofit a transport corridor. America already did this to build highways. Or you can replace road infrastructure with transit infrastructure.

I suspect the first step might by to make (parts of) residential neighbourhoods mixed use. This wouldn't need to be done in one fell swoop. It could be as simple as allowing a single house to be converted to a commercial properties (say a grocery store).

It's harder to cut up a dense and mixed use neighborhood because the real estate is worth more and there will be more people and money to vote against it.

Boston tried that. They were able to get the project rolling in the poorer parts of town but when they got to the slightly richer ones moneyed interests rallied the Karens and killed it (racism deserves a little credit too, rich white people hate it when you build a highway between them and poor dark people). That was half a century ago. Eventually they salvaged what they could and put a light rail line in the parts of the project that had already been done but still....

Isn't the problem precisely that most of the neighbourhoods aren't dense or mixed use?

The problem is that people won't let them densify without the underlying infrastructure but won't speculatively build infrastructure and won't build it after the fact. We've reached an impasse.

> You can't just tear down all the housing and then build public transit there.

It's what was done to build highways in(to) cities. At least doing it for public transit wouldn't create as large barriers between neighbourhoods, and would provide local mobility for locals.

You don't need to tear lots of stuff down to build public transit: you just have to dig tunnels. It's not that hard. The only place where you need to really tear stuff down is at the stations, and even here much of it can be done under existing structures. This has been done in America before: DC's subway system was built mostly in the 1970s.

What does the adoption of public transportation look like in non-homogenous vs homogenous populations?

What variables are you consideting for homogeneity? Wealth?

You can basically tell which neighborhoods were historically filled with "the wrong kind of people" by comparing the relative quality of Boston's light rail lines...

NIMBY is exactly the word.

It's MY backyard. I've paid dearly for it. Please keep off.

If you want high density development - pick some unoccupied land and build there whatever you want. It will take some effort to attract tax-paying population there, but it's doable: see Canary Wharf, London as an example.

This is an affront to property rights. Your neighbors should be free to build damn near whatever they want on their property.

Surely there is some middle ground here. It’s ingenuous to suggest that nothing someone does on their property has impact on others: - A neighbor who installs a billboard in their back yard is constantly bombarding you with unwanted advertisements. - Your neighbor could be running a loud, unsightly business on their property, diminishing your quality of life and property value. - A hair contrived, but your neighbors could decide they’re unhappy with how lax you are regarding what others do on their property, so to teach you a lesson, they conspire to build incredibly high walls around your home so you can hardly ever see the sun.

I’m sympathetic to the people who want to improve urban planning to make our cities more livable. I don’t think it is correct or fair that they are quick to tell “NIMBYs” no, while they enforce “YIMBY” policies. It’s not symmetric to tell one group of people they have no say in what goes on in their neighborhood simply because it involves stopping something you want, while telling another that they have a say. The only thing differentiating these two camps is that people on each side of the argument are only sympathetic with those on their side.

We've been down that well paved road to hell and the bay area is what it gets us. Mostly unfettered development is the far less evil. If you really don't like it that much then either pay in time (commute) or money (rich neighborhood) to live somewhere else.

Single family homes are a terrible development model. I see no reason to encourage or protect it.

We should replace as many SFH as we can with more practical developments.

I would argue it is less about urban planning and more about local politics. Outsiders of the Bay Area may decry the blatant economic elitism, homelessness, and dystopian reality of San Francisco -- but the local politicians keep getting re-elected.

At some point, the State of California will have had enough. Or a Federal Judge will have had enough. They will essentially say that the State of California needs to wrest power away from local authorities and put power into the hands of appointed outsiders who will re-zone/authorize high density development next door to million dollar neighborhoods. e.g. Peter Thiel and his wife may find themselves next door to high density apartments.

Generalizations like this miss the important successes along the way. In the early 90s San Francisco permitted a particular form of loft development that created a large number of housing units before it was shut down. Then when Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland his promise to build ten thousand new housing units was so successful that there was a period when the price of low end housing got pushed down if only briefly. When Mountain View started to grow robustly the commercial corridor was upzoned for larger buildings and adjacent parking garages were built. There are various other successes and each demonstrates a way out of the current extreme shortage of housing.

The amount of rationalizing and speculation in these comments is something to behold. This article presents a well-reasoned argument supported by data.

I dunno. I find presumed SF area residents soapboxing on how to build metro areas to be extremely amusing. It's like a gambling addict giving financial advice. The warning signs were there years and years ago when gainfully employed people started living in RVs on the street but from my outsider's perspective, absolutely nothing was done.

TL;DR: The growth of Bay Area has stalled, because we don't build enough housing for homeless.

The growth of the Bay Area has stalled because you don't build enough housing.

Homelessness is the consequence of insufficient housing; those who are worst-off lose the game of musical chairs.

Worked out great actually. Less pollution, less crowding and noise, less crime, more nature, cleaner.

Indeed. San Francisco is meant to be a preserve for the upper middle class. Development can happen somewhere poor people are allowed, like Texas, or the inland desert areas of California no one with money wants to live in, that look like Nevada.

Ah yes, all those people just disappeared into the aether.

Literally a matter of, "well if I don't see any of it, it doesn't exist." Like the idiots who oppose dense urban development because of "the environment".

Well I'm happy about open space preservation, but imo that's really tangential to facilitating urban development. A proper investment in urban density (land use) and public transport in the last 50 years would have resulted a vastly superior situation for both economic growth and improved quality of life.

But the bay is in America so that was a long shot.

SF has higher violent crime rates than most other parts of California, which can be attributed to its far higher rates of relative poverty,

The Bay area is more than just SF itself.

The Bay Area was crowded already but for the last 10 years (until maybe the pandemic) all new companies have been flocking to SF. It doesn't make it any better.

That doesn't mean that all parts of the bay area have the same crime rate as SF itself, as the gp implies.

Also, I'm not even sure that SF has a higher violent crime rate than other cities to begin with: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...

> less pollution

Did you read the part in the article about "super commuters"? I used to have about a 4 hour commute when I lived in the bay area. All the cars and gridlock cause a lot of pollution. If the area had built up and built more urban islands where you can go for a week or more without really needing to get in a car, then there would have been less pollution.

> less crowding and noise

If you don't like crowds, go live in the suburbs, but don't force the entire damn region to be one big suburb.

> less crime

What makes you think that? A lot of crime is driven by poverty and desperation. Density allows a greater variety of housing to be available, which reduces poverty.

> more nature

Why? Hong Kong is one of the densest cities in the world, but it's surrounded by nature.

> cleaner

Tokyo is another of the densest cities in the world, and is purportedly spotless. There is literally an "SF poop map" [0].

[0] https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...

"There is literally an "SF poop map""

So this is a map, where people report that they found some poop? Do they also keep track of their reported poop, like status report?

What exactly is the point of that map? Something like a hall of shame? Bringing authorities to do something?

There is an ongoing problem with small crimes damaging quality of life. When Newsom was mayor he set up a reporting system with a 311 front end reachable by phone or web where problems could be reported. This led, among other things, to the problem of trash bins being raided and dumped out being identified.

The poop map has not been that useful as there is limited push for public access toilets and it is not all that accurate but rather more of a map of where people complain about poop which is subtly different. Some public toilets have been installed and more are planned, but these are mostly for touristy commercial areas.

The map itself is mostly political fodder. Conservatives regularly post it with status updates and rage on local internet forums and conservative political forums as evidence that San Francisco is being ruined by policies that are soft on crime. Oddly enough this has not yet convinced the people of San Francisco to vote in representatives who are against Trans people and seek to limit access to abortion.

>less crime

yeah when you decriminalize shoplifting you do get "less crime"

Certainly when you walk the street of San Fran today (while you are stepping over the junkies and dodging piles of human feces) the first thing that comes to mind is how great it worked out. This feeling is only reinforced when you get back to your car to find the windows smashed and your bag stolen.

'Dense in-fill development' sounds great in theory, but the reality is the elderly underlying infrastructure in the bay area is not capable of sustaining even more overbuilding within the larger cities. Far better to build new towns and cities with fresh infrastructure to meet specific needs now that so many of what Richard Florida called the 'creative class' are working from home.

High density low income housing used the be called 'the projects', and don't have a good track record of being pleasant places to live not least because of 'criminal class' inhabitants terrorizing the other residents.

I'm currently in London which I consider to be overbuilt, with the ancient underlying Victorian infrastructure struggling to cope with endless tower blocks of people, streets choked with traffic and tire pollution etc etc.

In the US there is plenty of land to build new towns and cities, why wreck the existing historical places with overbuilding when it would be more economical to build fresh, more sustainably built places for people to live...

Ruining yet more ecosystems by paving them over is pretty much the exact opposite of fresh and sustainable.

Sorry are we trying to build more housing for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, or be “fresh and sustainable”? This is the thing that gets me about so called “YIMBY”s: they’re not so much yes in my back yard, they’re just urban density fetishists typically driven by a degrowth mindset. They claim to fanatically want as much development as possible but never on new land, they just want towering skyscrapers packed like sardine cans and no cars. Then they get upset when nobody supports that but claim it’s just being anti-development. No, we’re not anti development, we just don’t like the one specific narrow definition of development that YIMBYs want.

The irony is that most of YIMBY do not have a backyard.

Once they buy some property and start raising kids, the attitude changes to "yeah, the syringe distribution center is very important... but can we please build it somewhere else?"

I prefer the acronym YIYBY - people like Dean Preston in SF live in large detached historic houses while espousing sardine can overcrowding, bicycles and public transport for the plebs. There is no reason to continue to expand giant historic cities at this point in history, that era is now over.

' The Rise of the Creative Class hit on what now seems blindingly obvious: that the “clustering force” of young creatives and tech workers in metropolitan areas was leading to greater economic prosperity. Don’t waste money on stadiums and concert halls, or luring big companies with tax breaks, he told the world’s mayors. Instead make your town a place where hipsters want to be, with a vibrant arts and music scene and a lively cafe culture. Embrace the “three T’s” of technology, talent and tolerance and the “creative class” will come flocking.' https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/26/gentrificatio...

Ancient history, now replaced by anarchic dystopian urban decay

Frankly I'd rather have the syringe center near me because it's less obnoxious on an annualized basis than having to behave and maintain my property in accordance with "good neighborhood" standards lest Karen narc on me weekly to the point where the city gets sick of being bothered, capitulates and then starts fining me over some BS ordinance.

I'd rather not: BS ordinances suck, but in some sense it's my problem. I know how to solve it.

Syringe center inhabitants, on the other hand, is also a problem for my kids and my dog, who may be not mature enough to handle it properly.

Taking anything in its extreme is bag.

The issue is that we have a very obvious issue with housing and said pricing, if you know a method to solve the problem and keep the status quo + with reducing pollution then everyone and their mother will listen.

Density, in and of itself, is consistently correlated with lower per capita carbon footprint, lower water usage, lower vehicle miles traveled, etc.

You can have development that is sustainable and doesn’t pave over what few habitats we have left.

And the Bay Area hardly needs to be Hong Kong to accommodate more people; San Jose, for example, has a density a quarter of that of Queens, NY, a borough associated with large parks, streets with trees and early-20th century housing. If San Jose could accommodate 3M more people that would easily solve a good chunk of the housing crisis, and you could spread that 3M across all nine counties of the Bay instead of just one city.

People and companies want to move to existing cities, not new planned cities that don't exist yet. Cities grow organically and not in a planned fashion.

What is the definition of "overbuilt," anyway? There is no reason why SF couldn't be built to a high density in the same way that NYC is. You may not like it, and consider it "overbuilt" but there is no issue with the underlying infrastructure that couldn't be solved just like it was with NC.

@fallingknife 'Cities grow organically and not in a planned fashion'.

The reality is that both SF & London grew organically as port cities. There is no reason new cities can't grow organically around the new reality of people living and working anywhere. Access to airports and major road arteries are the only limitations...

And this is what happens when they grow organically. Why build a high rise apartment instead of 12 single family homes for 12 families?

That isn't the problem. The problem is that it is illegal to build the apartment building. That has nothing to do with organic growth.

It's illegal to build because people dont like that it disrupts the status quo which formed from organic growth. Either you build emptier high density units "inorganically" from the start or you build fuller low density units and then deal with it.

You are right: nobody wants to go in the middle of desert and start building a new brave world there for nothing.

With some proper incentives though it's doable. Nice parks. Low taxes. Decebt transportation infrastructure. Cheap housing. Good schools.

Hey, Google, what can we do for you to move your Googleplex with 50k employees to out newly built Heaven on Earth, Oklahoma?

Some parts of NYC such as Staten Island have similar density to SF. How much is enough?

Most people prefer some space and privacy, and don't want to live in a skyscraper. They are going to vote accordingly.

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