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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco has got to have the most frustrating and puzzling housing policy I've ever seen in this country.

No, let's not build any more housing, let's completely stonewall any attempt to redevelop any land whatsoever (except Mission Bay, because it's the San Francisco Yuppie Quarantine Zone). Instead, let's subdivide existing housing into increasingly tiny units.

Because gosh-durnit the cute colorful Victorians are sacred and override all other concerns, including economic stagnancy, transportation nightmares, unprecedented rent increases, destroying traditional neighborhood demographics, and very fundamental quality of life.

Nope, none of that matters, because we're basing a housing policy on whether or not this neighborhood can pass for one from the early 20th century!

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I think your concerns are way overblown. But in a broad sense, yes, San Franciscans have made a conscious decision to pay a premium so that their city doesn't turn into New York.

> economic stagnancy

It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.

> transportation nightmares

I'm not sure what you are referring to here. MUNI is very abundant and isn't too expensive (compared to NYC it's really cheap). There is generally plenty of parking outside of downtown.

> destroying traditional neighborhood demographics

Lol. The Chinese are doing just fine, but I guess you're referring to the former ghettos (Lower Filmore, Hunter's Point, the TL, etc.) that had huge drug problems and violence (It's still there, but siginificantly reduced) Yes, gentrification is unfortunate - but building high rises everywhere would ruin the "culture" much faster (though I would argue the Tenderloin doesn't have much culture to lose) and wouldn't solve the poverty among "traditional neighborhood demographics". What needs to be done, is a lot more needs to be spent on schools and city college and less on low income housing (where people are locked into poverty).

> very fundamental quality of life

That's just a vapid hyperbole. Not building high rises is preserving the quality of life SF is known for. The NewYorkification of SF (started by the Gavin Newsome) is what will ruin the quality of life.

In my experience the people that whine and moan about there not being enough housing in SF are people that don't live there. I think what they're thinking is if there were more teeny tiny apartments then they could afford to live there. While that may be true, then SF wouldn't be SF anymore - and it would only be a short term fix as SF would become just as crowded and expensive as Manhattan.

I disagree, I think potatolicious was pretty on point

> It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.

You have a source on that stat? Rents in San Francisco are up something like 25+% year over year in many areas. Does that sound healthy to you?

> I'm not sure what you are referring to here. MUNI is very abundant and isn't too expensive (compared to NYC it's really cheap). There is generally plenty of parking outside of downtown.

Nope, MUNI is awful. Unless you live relatively close on one of the train lines, you are in for a world of hurt. The average speed of a MUNI bus has been going down continuously over time (due to extra traffic), to the point where it is now like 7mph. That means it takes an hour to go from one end to the other (vs 25 minutes tops to go a similar distance on BART). That means more people get cars, which means the buses get even slower. I'd happily pay the NYC monthly rates if I had an equivalent transit system.

> Not building high rises is preserving the quality of life SF is known for

San Francisco doesn't need to build high rises everywhere in the city, it needs to allow taller buildings (6-7 stories) in more areas without forcing developers to jump through all the hoops they have to right now. Lots of cities in Europe are filled with buildings of that height and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly. Vancouver is consistently rated as having one of the highest quality of life scores in the world and has tons of high rises

> Lots of cities in Europe are filled with buildings of that height and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly.

It's actually pretty common for European cities to limit high-rise condos/office buildings in the city centers (usually with limits around 5-8 stories). To still achieve dense housing, tall condos and office buildings are usually built close to public transit somewhere a bit outside of the city center, plus the suburbs don't start as close in, so there's a bigger urbanized area. The Manhattan/Chicago/Vancouver style of a downtown characterized by skyscrapers isn't very common in Europe; more of a North American invention, particularly in the Chicago/Vancouver form where there's a high-rise downtown that quickly turns into suburban homes within a few kilometers.

The SF equivalent might be to not allow condo towers in SF, but to urbanize the areas a few BART stops out: why are there single-family homes, not denser housing, in San Bruno, West Oakland, and Daly City? But of course, the Peninsula is even more anti-development than SF is, so politically that just trades one source of opposition for another one (to take another example, people have been trying to convince Palo Alto to allow more dense housing near downtown/Stanford/Caltrain for years, but Palo Altoans want to keep it suburban).

I think that's happening to some extent in West Oakland and Oakland more generally, at least. West Oakland's been getting some development, and there's the MacArthur Transit Village being planned at MacArthur.

> Rents in San Francisco are up something like 25+% year over year in many areas. Does that sound healthy to you?

That's in large part because people don't want to buy houses now (b/c of the volatility of the SF real-estate market and a lot of people don't feel it's a safe investment). And yet people are still renting (b/c wages are high).

> San Francisco doesn't need to build high rises everywhere in the city, it needs to allow taller buildings

This is just not a longer term viable solution.

> Lots of cities in europe are filled with buildings of that height (eg paris) and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly.

Paris a great example of where it does NOT work. You have the old center with the culture and the tourists and the traditional way of life (and yes, very very expensive real-estate). The parts that do have apartment blocks are on the outskirts and are poverty stricken monstrosities (with exceptions). People don't even consider them to be part of Paris proper.

Paris is definitely not an example of healthy development.

I concede that SF is an expensive city and lots of people can't afford it. I think that's just the new reality of the city and there isn't any viable long term way to fix it short of actively making the city less appealing to live in. I don't complain that rent in Manhattan is too high. I just don't live there. I personally can't afford to live in SF (though I grew up there and love the city), so I live elsewhere in California. But at the end of the day I don't expect SF resident to change their city to accommodate me.

>It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.

If the population of the country is growing then those people have to go somewhere. You can either suburbanize the wilderness or you can let more people into existing cities, and while I can understand the desire of the people living in San Fransisco not to share the nice things they have I can't say I sympathize.

Well what I'm arguing is that the nice things SF has is contingent on there being less than a million people there. You can't share it, because if you do, then the charm of the city will be lost and it will turn into a bustling metropolis.

You've also presented a bit of a false dichotomy. I think the solution IS to develop smaller cities - that are stagnant and that have room to grow - into larger cities. You can call it "suburbanize the wilderness" but it's not exactly suburbanization because suburbs imply that people still commute to larger city centers. You can look at cities like Portland or something (I don't really know for sure if they're a good example) that develop a local tech field (or other industry), have local companies grow and multiply and they then become an economic center in their own right.

FWIW, according to San Francisco magazine, the median ago for a mission Bay condo owner is 56 and already owns a home somewhere else: not exactly yuppieville.

Do you have a link to the article where this was brought up? And the owner may be 56, but a resident might be much younger.

And how many of those condo's are investment purchases continuously listed on AirBnB?

Honestly I think most of what you wrote is just completely wrong, and I've lived here for six years. What are you referring to with "transportation nightmares"? I drove from Oakland to San Francisco everyday this week and it never took more than 15 minutes. I can get basically anywhere if you combine BART, Muni and Caltrain, so what are you actually referring to?

I'm referring to getting around within the city itself via transit. All of MUNI's light rail lines are gigantic perpetual clusterfuck machines. Their buses are no better.

Getting to/from downtown and to the Outer Sunset easily takes an hour on severely over-capacity rail cars - a distance of a mere 6 miles. At rush hour the cars are literally packed - these are the most crowded transit vehicles I've ever been on on this continent, NYC included.

Their on-time performance is atrocious, frequently late by over 100% of their frequency (e.g., an every-15 schedule routinely results in trains late by more than 15 min).

So not only are the vehicles slow and infrequent, but they routinely fail to show up when they're supposed to. Every major study into public transit use will tell you that schedule reliability is critical to establishing a transportation network - without the ability to reliably make transfers people will simply stop using the system. The last I saw of it, MUNI vehicles were on time only 57% of the time (lateness is defined as being within 4 minutes of schedule, which in any large city transit is a margin as wide as a football field).

Large swathes of the city are entirely not served by anything even pretending to be mass transit - Pac Heights, Inner/Outer Richmond, the Marina, Russian Hill, are all big neighborhoods that are completely disconnected from any form of mass transit, BART, MUNI, or otherwise.

Buses are even worse off than light rail - there have been many efforts to improve the bus system to little effect. Efforts to make commutes substantially shorter (by taking out extremely closely spaced stops) have been repeatedly rejected by members of the public, who will proceed to complain about MUNI anyways.

Literally the only neighborhoods that have effective mass transit are the ones lucky enough to be connected to BART (read: Mission, Bernal, Balboa Park). These are the only neighborhoods that have access to a transportation system that is frequently on-time and actually reasonably fast. The BART has a slew of its own problems, but it's about 10x better than MUNI for getting people around.

SF isn't the worst transit system I've ever had to use regularly (Seattle takes the cake there, just barely), but it's severely under-developed and under-funded for a city of San Francisco's stature and ambitions (i.e., its very open goal of creating a car-free/car-reduced city). I dare say that if you do not own a car in San Francisco you will spend a significant sum on taxis, or Uber, or SideCar, or any of the other services that have been born from City Hall's transportation failure. That or you bike a lot.

They probably believe that restricting development will lower housing costs (and that's probably true in the short term on a neighborhood level). The original reason for Greenwich Village's historical preservation board was the idea that it would keep the area affordable. Didn't exactly go as planned there, though.

Have you actually been to Mission Bay?

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