Comment by swalling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swalling | Hacker News Reader

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Lumping centrists who want to solve intractable livability problems with rich right-wing libertarians is the road to failure. Not everyone who wants to stop throwing mountains of money at nonprofits and ineffectual, corrupt city officials is a Peter Thiel/Elon Musk fascist. The more that the left continues to force ideological purity tests like this, the more it will fail.

It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF.

There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

I have never been able to even see SF as a progressive place. It’s progressive in popular rhetoric and that’s it. The goal is to make its rich residents feel good about themselves, not to actually help anyone.

You can’t claim to be progressive if a starter home is a million dollars and if any attempt to change that is opposed at every level. Mostly because of real estate cost, but also other factors, SF has a very wide division between rich and poor. Having a family there on less than $200-$300k is almost unthinkable. I can’t even grasp how working class people live there at all.

In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.

Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities. If nothing is done about housing costs, I don’t think you can call yourself progressive. Anything positive that comes of any of your progressive policies is negated by the poverty and extreme inequality perpetuated by housing. Ultimately you are just running a housing cartel that distributes wealth to property owners.

Edit: it’s a major reason I’m not in Cali anymore. There are numerous reasons our family left but one was realizing that the state is a real estate cartel. Without an “exit event” you will never climb above real estate.

> In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.

Ah the famously progressive Texas where women regularly die because of abortion ban, weed is illegal, and you can’t buy booze on a Sunday, and lawmakers want to overturn Obergefell to ban same sex marriage. Very progressive, much freedom.

> Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities.

Yes, housing costs are often high where people want to live.

Texas is not progressive, which is why it’s such a great way of pointing out the hypocrisy of SF and many other blue cities’ housing policies.

Astronomically high housing costs are a policy choice. They result from high demand coupled with density limits, parking requirements, height limits, zoning, and other things designed to limit supply.

When supply is limited and demand is high prices skyrocket far beyond what a market would normally allow. This is why anti trust and anti collusion laws are important. Housing, at least in many major cities, is effectively a cartel.

It always amazes me when I visit the Bay Area and see how low density it is and how much real estate is wasted for storage lockers, strip malls, ridiculously huge car washes. They’ll let you build anything but housing apparently.

This impoverishes people, especially the working class, and contributes to homelessness and all kinds of other problems, but nobody cares. The residents like seeing their home equity go up. “I’ve got mine, fuck you” is not progressive. A cartel to keep prices high is not progressive.

no dies for not having an abortion.

You're wrong. A lot of what constitutes an "abortion" is taking care of things like stillborn pregnancies and numerous life threatening issues with the woman's uterus. You would learn a lot googling on this topic.

If you want to be anti-abortion, fine, just don't conflate it with the many life-saving procedures currently being swept up in anti-abortion laws and rhetoric.

nope. I know what is an abortion. Abortion is purposely killing a child in the womb. Theres never a medical need to kill your own child.

You might want to start by googling reading lessons. Then work your way up to medical issues.

no argument just a personal attack?

Literally not true

NYC does not suffer this problem for some reason. Yes, of course there are prohibitively expensive neighborhoods in the trendiest areas. But if your goal is to live and work in the city, or to have a reasonable commute in, it is extremely doable on just about any salary, and you can actually reasonably expect to be able to afford a home in the suburbs some day. A one hour drive out of the city is considered “upstate boondocks” and you can still buy a 300k home. Whereas that is barely into the middle suburbs for SF, where houses still start at $800k+.

NYC has higher density and excellent transit, things California refuses to do.

It’s still expensive but as you say it is possible to find reasonable housing that is commutable. Also not having to own a car frees up money to compensate a bit.

I would never expect hot metros to be as affordable as mid tier cities or rural areas, but when it’s extreme to the point of absurdity and there is no way to get relief something more than just regular market dynamics is happening. Markets like SF are only possible with organized restriction of supply, basically a cartel.

SF is already the second-most dense city in America. It’s dramatically more akin to NYC than Austin, LA, and so on. It’s just a lot smaller geographically.

The problem is that all of that density is delimited within a perfect 7x7 mile square. Outside of which is the worst of the worst when it comes to urban sprawl anywhere in the US. What really kills SF is just the complete inability to reasonably commute. Any form of housing anywhere within a 2 hour drive of the city is the most expensive in the country.

> It’s just a lot smaller geographically.

That's actually a fairly important detail. I live in the NYC metro (lived in the city itself for many years) and have visited SF several times. The "city" part of SF is just much, much smaller, and the suburban parts are much less dense.

NYC and its metro are still quite expensive and we have our own problems with NIMBYism driving housing costs up, but I'm always rather shocked at how much more expensive the SF metro is and how under-developed it is.

What SF needs is a bunch of rail way out to its exurbs like NYC. But Cali can’t do that either.

It could also be a lot denser. It should look like Hong Kong or the Tokyo core.

Another interpretation is that SF is the empirical test result of what happens when progressives get the power.

The evidence that falsifies this idea is the fact that policies considered “progressive” in America are just called “universal status quo” in almost all countries with higher human development indexes and lower inequality. In fact some of the fastest growing cities in America, like Austin and Denver, are also famously progressive (not that they are perfect). Seems doubtful even total hegemony by conservatives would fix SF’s problems in short order. The common sense solutions do not fall exclusively on one end of the spectrum or the other.

Centrists dont have a very good track record of actually accomplishing much more than lifting the foot off the accelerator a little bit. I think our problems are intractable right now under the current way we have our economy setup. But left wing solutions are fundamentally incompatible with the people we aim to please the most, so we see this rightward push instead.

It’s unclear from your comment whether you’re talking about things specific to SF or you’re just speaking in generalities. Examples would help.

San Francisco’s problems arent much different than the problems of the rest of America (and this can probably be extended to the entire “West”). Money and people with it run the show and are increasing their wealth unsustainably. Any other reasoning about the situation (“DSA” members in city hall) are excuses.

I agree the macroeconomics are important but to say that the architecture of local political power doesn’t matter is silly. Local elections have really direct consequences for social and economic policy in the city.

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