Comment by temp453463343 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temp453463343 | Hacker News Reader

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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

> 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.

> 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.

>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.

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