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Comment by iancmceachern | Hacker News Reader

Check out this building in SOMA, it was finished, sat empty waiting for permits for 2 years because the City sucks, and during that time the condo market crashed and so now the builder had to hand it back to the lender. Full brand new condo building one block from Oracle Park with like 24 luxury condos in it for 16 mil now:

https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/16/brand-new-san-francisco-co...

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San Francisco has long struck me as the worst run major city in the US. Not just incompetent but almost malicious.

Lots of right wingers like to make it a right/left thing but no, I just think SF seems to be it’s own special snowflake. There are plenty of cities and towns run by left wing types that are much better run in every way.

The impression I get is of a rent extraction cartel that somehow pretends to be super woke and progressive and plays the local politics like a fiddle. The hordes of homeless are a problem they both caused and benefit from since it offers them an opportunity for theatrical altruism and probably a lot of corruption and graft of funds via dodgy non profits.

On that condo building: so it got built then got rug pulled? Look into who buys this distressed property at auction and then see what happens to it. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if it’s someone with connections.

“Uh oh, someone got something built! We’ll fix that.”

The rental market didn’t cause the homelessness.

Most homeless people weren’t renting in SF before they got homeless. These are the people who just gave up in leave. Has nothing to do with rent prices or housing prices.

Truth is, SF is attractive to homeless people because it has nice weather all year round and the politicians tolerate them.

Unfortunately your “truth” is almost certainly false. Actual research shows the majority of homelessness in CA is a result of unaffordable housing and there is no mass migration of homeless to CA (thst also doesn’t make sense…with not even enough money to afford a house in a city where you may have connections and at least know the lay of the land, why would you move to a significantly more expensive city where you know no one and don’t know anything about it…and even if you think the weather is such a draw, then why are there any homeless in SF? Why haven’t they all moved to LA?).

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/06/425646/california-statewid...

> Contrary to myths of homeless migration, most were Californians: 90% of participants lost their last housing in California and 75% of participants live in the same county as where they were last housed.

> The study found that for most of the participants, the cost of housing had simply become unsustainable. Participants reported a median monthly household income of $960 in the six months prior to their homelessness, and most believed that either rental subsidies or one-time financial help would have prevented their homelessness.

You mean there’s a connection between not enough housing and homelessness? I dunno isn’t that pretty far fetched…?

How do you know that? Research usually suggests that the most important factor in homelessness is unaffordable housing.

It's a well known fact homeless people come and stay in California for the mild weather. A lot of homeless are drug addicts and mental health issues. They can't hold down a job being that way. Normal people would just move or leave.

Why are they coming to SF and not all going to LA then?

Of course all the research (admittedly limited, but there is no research showing this “well known fact”) this well know fact is just false.

Progressive capture of most institutions makes a lot of research questionable in this particular world of ideas.

This one seems like a pretty simple question to answer: randomly poll 100 homeless people and ask whether they become homeless in California or came there homeless from elsewhere.

Not hard, not complicated.

Exactly, common sense tells me that surviving the weather is the primary concern for most people if they ever lose shelter.

SF and LA are both in California. There are many factors why they don't ALL go there but LA has a significantly bigger homeless population than Oakland and SF.

The kind of homeless people in SF is not the same as the kind that can't afford housing. The homeless people in SF have given up on life. They're drug addicts. They're violent. They've been homeless for a long time even.

Even if you give them free housing, they'll mess it up somehow. They can't hold down a job. They don't take care of the home. They'll abuse the home until it's unlivable.

If it's truly unaffordable housing, why the hell are they in SF? Go to somewhere that is 1/4th the price. Plenty of places in the US.

Source: Lived in SF for 20+ years.

As far as how the city itself is run and operated, yes.

Separate from that is the experience of living in this city.

My wife and I have walked next to pods of dolphins with our dogs along the Embarcadero, we've listened to countless free concerts under the stars with perfect weather, we've learned what truly good food from around the world is like, we've met so many fascinating people from documentary filmmakers to product designers to dog walkers. It's a magical place not just still today, but especially today.

All this is part of how the city can get away with being so badly run. It can coast on its beautiful location and the network effect of the tech industry.

Detroit in the 80s and 90s is what you get when a city without so much free ballast is badly run. (Though in some respects it doesn’t seem to have been as badly run as SF. At no point did it have anything like the housing affordability nightmare SF has, just bad urban planning and crime.)

They built without permits? And the bank just gets to take it back rather than the govt requiring demolition?

After construction one typically needs to get a certificate of occupancy, a last round of inspections to ensure things were actually built to code before people move in. The article mentions this certificate.

Are you saying that it’s logical, or sane, to demolish a brand new building, built to spec, because the bureaucratic stamps took place out of order?

Source?

Pretty sure thats not what happened in this case

By now I would think most builders can expect 1-2 years for obtaining permits. Not ideal, but it's similar in other large metros.

> By now I would think most builders can expect 1-2 years for obtaining permits

It takes 6 to 12 months in New York [1]. In the meantime, 90-day temporary COIs are issued.

Permitting hell is a California specialty.

[1] https://propertyclub.nyc/article/certificate-of-occupancy-ny...

That is certainly not the case in Austin. There's no reason SF can't replicate that if they even try a little bit.

SF has been actively tarpitting permits for a very long time. The last thing they want is speedy or effective.

"San Francisco's process for issuing building permits is notorious for being one of the most cumbersome in the country. The city takes an average of ten months to issue a permit, compared to six months in Los Angeles and New York City." https://starboardcre.com/editorials/governor-newsom-wants-to....

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