‘I don’t want to become San Francisco’: Urban woes spur state action on housing | Hacker News Reader

‘I don’t want to become San Francisco’: Urban woes spur state action on housing

politico.com

53 pointsimichael29 comments

Sacramento has "San Francisco" problems in abundance downtown. These are the problematic areas: downtowns. Sacramento is a galaxy of areas much more than its tiny downtown: there are a lot of good areas that are still good. The thing though is Sacramento, like SF, has a problem where naked unhoused people urinate in the middle of the lawn of the main library at the height of rush hour traffic.

The fundamental problems or urban center area that changed are twofold:

1. The quiet quitting (nonenforcement) and understaffing of police departments. Austin TX has a deficit of 200 police officers with no path or budget to remedy this issue and ignore virtually all calls unless they are both ongoing and violent. The result is theft and open season on stores. Stores now have armed security contractors. The ones who can't afford this level of security go out of business. Therefore, high-profit corporate convenience stores are the only ones who stay in business.

2. Elected DA's refuse to prosecute people alleged to have committed theft, property crime, and violent crime because they happen to be poor or brown. This leads to an eye for arrest and indictment of white males in urban centers to balance the stats to fit a narrative.

It should be underscored that the problematic areas are small (except SF and LA) and are addressable without violating anyone's rights. DAs willing to prosecute crime and funding PDs would bring the morale back to LEOs.

Addressing beyond 1. and 2. would require a nationwide federal housing program to voluntarily relocate people to cheaper areas with comprehensive social services that aren't typical of America. Not easy, cheap, or simple but this and 1. and 2. seem holistically comprehensive.

> The thing though is Sacramento, like SF, has a problem where naked unhoused people urinate in the middle of the lawn of the main library at the height of rush hour traffic.

No, it doesn’t.

For one thing, the main library in Sacramento does not have a lawn to urinate in the middle (or any other part) of.

So if someone has seen that happening on the lawn of a main library in some city’s downtown, the one thing I can say for certain is that the city isn’t Sacramento.

I’m guessing, though, that you were just assuming that since, Sacramento does, in fact, have a homeless problem, and a downtown, and a main library in the downtown, you could just assume that some share of the homeless problem is naked and urinates in any given location downtown, and coming up with a colorful description you felt safe with that was not based on any actual observation of, even, the actual library in question, much less anyone urinating there.

Google maps shows that directly across the street from the library is a Federal building with a lawn and five tents of campers or perhaps homeless people, installed on the sidewalk. I take sacnoradhq's word for it, though you are correct in saying the lawn appears to belong to the Federal building and not the library.

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5819397,-121.4950718,3a,75y,...

So I suppose the real truth we've discovered in this thread is that sacnoradhq has never visited the city's public library ever....

Is it simply the case of the majority of SF voters, who somehow locked in real estate years ago, not wanting to increase supply of housing in order to maximize their own wealth? Could one argue that this is democracy working as intended, even if you don't think it's "fair" to certain demographics?

Their wealth will minimize when nobody wants to live there anymore. Homes are only as valuable as there people willing to buy them.

It's true, but what's the political solution to this short of ignoring what your demos wants? Where do you draw the line as far as overriding what the votes are telling you? It's one thing when there's an autocratic central planner thinking 100 years into the future (with all of the dangers or a wise benevolent dictator), and another when society moves one electoral cycle at a time.

I would hope their maximization includes other benefits of living in a community such as presence of arts, local restaurants, school teachers and first responders without commute induced burnout etc.

It doesn't seem that things have gotten bad enough that those services are no longer available and real-estate owners are impacted by it.

Yes, teachers have to commute from out of town, but this doesn't affect the local residents just yet, from what I can tell, the educators are there when you need them, maybe thanks to higher-paying private schools.

The restaurant scene is still strong, prices are through the roof as always and people can afford it just fine.

First responder salaries are pretty good as well, although there are plenty of vacancies: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/san-francisco/?pa...

I don't see how the current status quo will change anytime soon given that the residents don't feel that impacted besides the inconvenience of not being able to shop on Market St anymore. Most of the fancy neighborhood owners (Pac Heights, Russian Hill, Noe, Duboce, North Beach, etc) are still isolated from the urban decay and don't have to worry about finding a place to live. They can let things get worse in other parts of town for a while longer.

The irony is that increasing population density leads to much greater wealth gains for property owners than stifling development.

When neighborhoods get upzoned for higher density, the value of the land rises far beyond what a SFH would command. e.g. now can build an apartment complex on what used to be a SFH. How much would a developer pay for a regularly sized SFH plot in the middle of Manhattan if it were zoned for high rise development?

The reason Bay Area real estate appreciated so much was primarily due to the concentration of high paying jobs, not the lack of building. But now the lack of building is likely to lead to other areas/remote work displacing the centralization of jobs.

I doubt it. I owned a house in SF. For me it was looking at the city. I grew up in the bay area and have been going to SF since the 70's. San Francisco is a beautiful city. Architecturally fantastic. In the 60's, 70's and 80's there were waves of mass fast building of apartment units and much of it is really, really ugly. I would not like to see San Francisco go in another ugly direction just so people can say they have an SF address. Further, I just felt the city could not take a boom in population. Public transportation, road usage already felt maxed out. There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work. You could call me highly skeptical on that front, especially the Bay Area where a car is just so useful even if public transportation is used to get to work.

Another thing is looking at single cities rather than the entire metro areas. San Jose is first and San Francisco second. Where would Manhattan and Brooklyn be on the list if Queens and the Bronx were not there to bring the numbers down? Workers need affordable housing but I'm not convinced they need to be in specific arbitrary lined off areas rather than in the greater metro area with reasonable commute time to work...

> There is a delusion that if they make owning a car expense and difficult, enough people will abandon the idea of owning a car to make it work.

And yet as a software professional making a six figure income in SF, I had so many colleagues and friends who didn't own a car. There are very few places in the US where that would be true, and all of them are cities with transit policies you'd probably describe in the same terms.

Right, that's the older generation speaking circuitously about what the Bay Area can do with land use and conveniently landing on the status quo being best-of-all-possible-worlds. The fact is, the city changes anyway.

More and more newcomers in the past two decades ended up with roommates because of rent. E-bikes changed the game with getting over the hills and a lot of families are using them now, pulling kids and groceries despite the lack of infrastructure. Lots of people opt to get things delivered instead of driving down the peninsula to Colma. On the roads themselves, the self-driving taxis are all over the city every day - and mostly they do work, even if "Cruise gets stuck" is a meme; if they expand to achieve the current market share of Uber and Lyft at the projected cost metrics, SF's auto fleet will be majority centralized and professionally-operated. Meanwhile the fastest expanding public transit in the Bay is the ferry system, which in its current incarnation is largely a product of the '89 quake jumpstarting ridership, and now serves as a link to some relatively distant locales. What the whole Bay Area government did - not just SF - is spend a generation kicking cans down roads and letting real estate prices run up, and the time is ripe for a transformation that leverages all the new stuff.

Right now everything, big and small, good and bad, gets challenged by CEQA and affordable unit requirements. It's an excuse for graft to run through City Hall. But the entire west side of the city has ample room to grow. It is not particularly beautiful as it is - it's just row housing. The transit and traffic problem is just geometry, doing more in less space.

The way in which the city streets are currently designed is "every street is a stroad" - garage curb cuts are everywhere, every inch is available for parking, everything on the grid is a thru street. Many of the garages are not used as garages, they are used as rentals. Most of the delays are from intersections along major corridors, not access to destinations. So in practice, the city is subsidizing a lot of street space as a parking lot, which exacerbates the need for cars and car infra. All you have to do to make the kind of transformation Paris has made and go heavier into bike use is to carve out the block into a cul-de-sac with bollards - a stronger version of what's already been experimented with in "Slow Streets" and "Neighborways" since 2020. You don't get a fight over parking and lane space, but the fast thru traffic goes away and it becomes dead easy to set up a few consecutive blocks like that to create bicycle corridors, while reducing delay along the fast corridor by eliminating conflict points.

There's plenty more, but that's basically where I see things going. A lot of changes will be precipitated by self-driving taxis because adoption of those removes the "owner's rights" element of why constituents vote to keep the streets exactly as-is.

Older generation, eh?

Is San Francisco's tourist industry "Older generation"?

The house I owned was in the Sunset, so pardon me if I don't agree with your assessment of the west side of the city. I have watched property prices since the seventies always go up. My parents bought a house in Santa Cruz for $16,000 and sold for $28,000 and thought they made a killing in real estate. The hippy generation happened in the Haight Ashbury because no one could afford North Beach and they still all had roommates. Of course communes were cool at the time, but still. Anything with an ocean view between the Ferry Building and the Presidio, especially if on a hill, has been unaffordable for decades. Other than momentary blips due to earthquakes and deep financial downturns, property prices have always gone up. Some the greatest jumps in property prices happened during the gold rush. Has the city really changed or do not know enough history of the city to understand that it has always been like this?

Renters get the same weight of vote as landlords (assuming they both are adult citizens and live in the same jurisdiction). The ballot vote is not what stops developments most of the time (although in affluent suburbs like Cupertino, it frequently does).

The “heckler’s veto” of planning boards and the CEQA are what give the few people who severely want to restrict new development an asymmetric power. This doesn’t happen at the ballot box.

That’s not to say that there aren’t problematic measures. CA Prop 13 (1979) was passed by referendum, but SF Rent Control (1979) was passed by SF Board of Supervisors, so both democracy and republic governments both contributed to the current issues.

Re: your first paragraph, my hunch is that:

1. renters are less invested in the local politics given their more flexible and transient nature, therefore they care and vote less than people who have assets and multi-decade skin in the game 2. voters aged 45+ are less likely to be renters, given lowered likelihood of moving with age, and the higher likelihood of having locked in cheap real estate decades earlier. Those voters also tend to vote more 3. therefore renters are far less represented in elections

Entirely possible the above is wrong, there might be data showing otherwise.

I would agree with your points.

But my point was that renters and landlords get the same number of votes each, even if they use them at different rates.

Playing the long game is difficult and benefits people who aren’t starving or trying to hustle just to make rent this month.

> “Every state in the country other than California is saying, ‘I don’t want to become California,’ and every other city is like, ‘I don’t want to become San Francisco,’”

including cities in Socal

love this, never change SF, zoning reform (everywhere else) needs you

Let’s take an inventory of what issues are exclusive to SF:

  - zoning restrictions: no
  - NIMBYs: no
  - too little housing supply: no
  - too much housing demand: no
  - Prop 13 (1979): no (all of Cali)
  - SF rent control (1979) yes
  - CEQA (1970+): no
  - limited space on a peninsula: yes

I’m glad other jurisdictions are learning from the mistakes of San Francisco, but they should learn from all of them, not just the convenient ones to avoid.

NIMBYs: Yes

Residents that vote down local zoning and construction to benefit self real estate assets: Yes

Most of the peninsula zoned for only 2 floors: Yes

Stagnant property taxation providing few incentives to sell: Yes

Multiple housing as investments: Yes

You seemed to have missed the word “exclusive” in my first sentence.

I’m not arguing that SF doesn’t have those things, only that many many other places have them too. Hence it’s more important to look at why SF’s issues are more pronounced than other places with similar policies.

It’s good some cities are looking towards reform, but I disagree with thesis Democrat cities across the US see San Francisco as a cautionary tale. Heavy Democratic areas like Boston metro are stuck in the 1990s. Mayor Michelle Wu is proposing rent control and other MA cities are maintaining onerous inclusionary zoning regs that stifle new construction.

Are you kidding me? There's been so much housing development in Eastern MA in the last 5 years, everywhere I go in Boston, Medford, Malden, Somerville, Cambridge, Wakefield, Arlington and Revere (just to name a handful) have dozens and dozens of those 4-over-1 apartment buildings going up with retail/business in the ground floor and apartments upstairs. They are tearing down old businesses, gas stations and even houses to do this.

Go to Revere beach for example and there are literally 5 or 6 new very large apartment buildings within the 1st 1/2 mile of the beach. East Boston, there's is a massive (10K units) housing development going in at Suffolk downs (and there are a ton of 4-over-1's in the neighborhoods nearby).

I don't think that many single family homes are being built inside of Rt 128, but I think that's an ROI thing. If you have a acre of land are you going to build 2-3 houses (zoning permitting) that maybe will sell for $1M each, or are you going to build 20+ units that sell for $600-800K or more.

Imagine a reputation (real or imagined) so bad that everyone sees you as a cautionary tale.

The thread is still fresh. They’ll flood in soon to tell us how great it is, how we’re hobophobic, and that Breed is a fascist and this is all her fault.

It's almost like there's a motivated coalition of business interests, right wing culture warriors, and conservative media that constantly pushes an overwhelmingly negative image of one particular city into people's news feeds to promote a particular agenda. Or something.

A massive chunk of this sites’ users have lived or worked in the Bay. It’s telling that many of them corroborate the reputation. I have personally experienced it many times, it definitely is a cautionary tale.

This is ludicrous.

We are currently undergoing one of the largest changes in how people live in the developed world since the public housing boom at the end of the Second World War. We are on the precipice of the end of the age of the office.

Apologies because I don't have access to the raw data or know how US Census data is structured but from the 2020 census (I know that I have missed Queens/Staten Island, Jersey City and that Counties don't equate to cities in the US but the portal sucks): COUNTY per sq mile NY, NY 74781 KG, NY 39438 BX, NY 34920 SF, CA 18629 SU, MA 13698 PH, PA 11937 BT, MA 7235 CK, IL 5583

It's the most densely populated county outside of New York.

There are problems in American Urbanism. Single family zoning is a big one. But it's overly reductionist to put it down to single family zoning. The fact is SF has a whole heap of factors driving demand. If you think that it will become more affordable you're wrong. What we will see is the cheapest possible highest profitability developments. Apartments and neighbourhoods for adults with no children and the super wealthy.

There will be no medium density because there is no one group for whom it is maximum amenity. The wealthy don't care because they can just by nice luxury apartments in the brave new world. Individuals/Families with adults and no children and property developers are fine with small apartments. The majority of families would prefer the status quo. You will end up with cheap shitty apartments maxing the quota for affordable housing, luxury many roomed penthouses making up the quota for family dwellings, and you will end up with a city with no children and truly not an improvement per dollar on housing affordability and amenity.

San Francisco is a victim of its own success. Rather than attempt to create demand elsewhere through a rethinking of American Urbanism they want to cram more people into the most densely populated county outside of NYC.

People know adding a lane to a highway doesn't reduce traffic but think adding more apartments reduces rents. The solution to homelessness is clear - arrest them.

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