The San Francisco Exodus
theatlanticcities.com
theatlanticcities.com
What?! Why on earth would I want my tax dollars subsidizing your rent? I mean, charity to the poor, homeless, etc. is one thing (it's good), but subsidizing your rent so you can be closer to boutique coffee shops? Instead of, you know, helping the truly needy get health care? Or investing in education? Gimme a break.
> If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams
Why does San Fran specifically have to be that place? The Bay Area's a big place.
By the end of the article, the author's right about needing a more integrated metropolitan policy, but this attitude that "everyone deserves to live in San Francisco, even people with no money" gets tiring after a while. Neighborhoods and cities gentrify. People move elsewhere, to the new-and-upcoming-and-more-interesting neighborhoods/cities. Places change. That's just how it is.
and then another 100,000 people would move in there.
So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can.
Skip as many meals as you want, work as many hours and you want to do that. People can move to different cities you know...
Thinking that an entire city could consist of highly paid tech workers is a fantasy.
And what about families? It's next to impossible to afford to have a family in the city. What will those tech workers do when they want to start a family? Do you really want them all moving to the east bay instead of helping to grow the city?
On the other hand, the market isn't everything, especially in the near-term. The market, for instance, won't create diversity in the city; it will create a monoculture of whatever is working that decade. So, right now, in SF, it will create a monoculture of tech workers as, in Manhattan, it almost created a monoculture of finance workers in the '80s/'90s. Monocultures lack resilience and if NYC hadn't traded its finance economy for a tourist-driven one, it could have been hard times. Booms and busts may be okay from a Liberal philosophy point of view, but it's hell on the people caught in it.
The other thing about diversity is it's part of the reason people move somewhere in the first place. One of the reasons tech has moved from the Valley up into SF is that SF has more diversity, so it's not all tech all the time. It would make sense to try to preserve what it was you wanted in the first place (even if, a la any gentrifying neighborhood, it may be a bit of a lost cause.)
Is NIMBY-ism "government regulation"?
That's what I'm worried about. Populations shift, people move, cities grow. But, if you're running a city, you want growth to be stable and predictable. If you drive out all of your lower-income workers to other cities and "import" your labor, you are setting yourself up for an unstable labor market in the future.
These things need to be planned for, and it doesn't seem like there is a lot of thought being put into it.
In this context it's worth looking at Aspen, CO. Wages for service workers there have not gone up, and 60-mile commutes on mountain roads are common. I have no theory for why that is, but I do not expect a different outcome for SF.
Not sure what science has to do with this anyway; this is basically a matter of public-policy/politics/economics.
Why should they? Of course they can commute, just like many highly-paid professionals choose to commute too. Nobody considers a short commute a fundamental human right.
> how far out can they get pushed before it's not worth it any more?
They won't, that's the magic of a free market. Wages/salaries will go up in the city so that it's always still "worth it".
> Do you really want them all [families] moving to the east bay instead of helping to grow the city?
I mean, why not? I live in NYC. Plenty of people I know leave NYC when they want to start a family. Or at a minimum, they leave Manhattan to move out to Brooklyn or Queens.
You can see how ridiculous the argument is, by the fact that its polar opposite sounds the same: "do you really want all the families who would be helping to grow the east bay, moving into downtown SF?"
Look, there are certainly coordination, transit, etc. problems with the Bay Area. And there are income-disparity problems nationwide. But people seem to confuse those with just being afraid of change/gentrification, and that doesn't help.
A car is extremely expensive. Unless you're planning on making the public transportation system usable (which would be a herculean task).
With decent urban planning, the region could maximize its growth potential. Without it, we'll have major issues in the near future.
Developers have done a good job of buying off the media, and the Chronicle has never waivered from its support of those sectors that still advertise in its pages. That's why many of us are not sad to see the otherwise well written paper giving way to Internet new sources that, this article excepted, are less inclined to skew their editorial policy in favor of anything real-estate (-development) related.
Furthermore, unless you get stuck out multiple times a week half the rent cost still puts you way ahead. I was paying $1200 with parking for 800 sq ft and a dishwasher right on Lake Merritt. I never felt in danger there.
Living in Emeryville on San Pablo was another story... That was only $600 though ha.
QFT. The thousand-plus dollar difference in rent buys a heck of a lot of "I got stranded" Uber/Taxi rides.
Things are a bit different in SF. While you have 468 stations, we have 44. Expansion of our public transportation system has been hampered by NIMBY homeowners who have done all they can to prevent it. Rents in areas that surround BART stations (http://www.bart.gov/stations/)are still quite high, except around some of the further out stops (http://rentheatmap.com/sanfrancisco.html). Unfortunately, the further you live from the city, the more it costs to commute to the city (http://www.bart.gov/tickets/calculator/).
So while everyone moving away from the city like folks in Manhattan do would be nice, it's not that easy here.
(Aside: I miss New York public transportation.)
It's actually quite easy for people to not live in the central city, which is why of the 7.15 million people in the SF Bay Area metropolitan area, only a little over 800,000 live in the City and County of San Francisco. The ratio between the population of San Francisco and that of the whole metro area isn't really all that different than the ratio of Manhattan's population to that of the New York Metro Area.
I thought the article proved that people don't live in the city because there isn't enough housing and/or it's too expensive, not because it's easy to live outside the city.
The article didn't prove anything, it started with mistaking anecdote for data, and proceeded to tell a just-so story to explain the anecdote, and then make a series of value claims about what needs to be done based on that just-so story, explicitly grounding those claims in at least one false fact claim (that the three high population bay area cities are the places with "the space" in the bay area to accept a disproportionate share of the region's growth.)
Our Public transportation system "MARTA" only operates fully throughout two counties in our metro area. The reason for this is that many citizens in the suburbs are afraid of what will happen if they provide easy access for urban "characters" that are presumed to be "bad or unsavory" because they cant afford a car. (I live in one such county)
Every time there are talks of expanding MARTA (train or bus lines) to other counties people come out in protest.
I see that you're bringing up NIMBY, but that should be the area to focus on instead of somehow trying to control the underlying problem through things like rent control.
I personally see the California High Speed Rail system as an interesting option there. If they offer regular rail service and I can reach my work in Silicon Valley within 1 hour then I would consider moving out of Silicon Valley. Especially so if the city is interesting or becomes interesting through the increasing number of people moving there and if they offer Wifi on the train so that I could even start working there.
I can actually see it both ways, but you have to accept or reject the argument in it's entirety instead of setting some artificial cap for how much you have to earn to be able to live in SF, which is essentially what's happening today.
And by the way this is a poor free-market argument. If this was a free-market, regulatory actors would act rationally from an economic perspective and allow construction of as many new units as the market can bare.
It doesn't seem so ridiculous if you follow the money. The author is "executive director of SPUR, a Bay Area nonprofit membership organization" whose directors, advisors and members are comprised almost exclusively of real-estate developers and investors.
The current Berkeley Daily Planet goes in to some detail about this sort of non-profit, http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2013-10-11/article/... as does the Bay Guardian in its "Friends in the Shadows" expose http://www.sfbg.com/2013/10/08/friends-shadows You'll never read these sorts of in-depth articles in the rest of the Bay Area's real-estate advertising filled newspapers.
If you lived in SF and this happened, your options would be pretty simple, contribute to the subsidies via your tax dollars or move out of the city.
This seems like a tautology. "A city that seeks income diversity should seek income diversity"... the point is that I and crazygringo do not think that the city needs to seek that; it is a-okay in my book if a city becomes gentrified.
> and it only applies to you if you choose to live in that city.
Okay, I choose to live in Malibu. Sadly I cannot afford it. Who is going to think of poor jlgreco, unable to afford living in the beach community of his choice? Is my desire to live in Malibu less valid than anyone else's desire to live in San Francisco?
Sure, many come from Oakland. Which was the point of the article.
And when I was still in school and knew a lot of people in these types of jobs, many worked two (or more, if part time). And still couldn't really make rent. This is why I never tip below 20% unless the server didn't do their job very well. It's expensive to live here and they have a tough situation.
Also, Bus Drivers don't belong on that list. They are certainly paid more than wait staff, etc.
NYC is a great example -- millions of people fled the high costs and hassles of living in the city to Long Island, New Jersey and upstate. Companies did too -- there were 10,000 factories in NYC in 1969 and something like 500 in 1999. My family moved from Queens to a town 100 miles north in the bad old days (late 80s) when the principal of the middle school that I was heading to had his car firebombed.
San Francisco's situation is more nimby than NYC. People discover it and love it, but want to close the door for the next guy. As long as times are good, it's a winning strategy. When times turn bad, it will get really bad, just as it did in the 80s in NYC.
Because service jobs and because traffic congestion and because all service job related prices.
Some counties and states provide "affordable" housing for people who work in that county if they make below a certain wage and above a certain wage. They basically make it affordable for taxi drivers, waiters, cooks, delivery people and other low paid job workers to live in that area. This way those people are not driving from farther way increasing congestion on the roads and I guess as a side-effect lower the prices in those particular areas (food, taxi, etc).
Now whether that is desirable, it is a net beneficial thing or not or just creates more problems I don't know, I am just presenting one reason some localities do it.
the city remained a walkable, urban paradise compared to most of America.
Most higher density cities are even more walkable urban paradises. Plus they have the added benefit of far better public transport than SF offers.
SF: 17620/sq mi
NYC: 27550/sq mi
Paris: 55000/sq mi
Wait, what? There is a reason things are the way they are. People do not want you to live there, affordably. Period. Cities are "designed" to be expensive and exclusive. That, in part is their value.
Whilst I've never seen San Francisco for myself, it sounds like they are trying to buck the trend and go for expensive and exclusive (as you say), with various complicated planning and zoning laws. It is definitely against the norm however.
I questioned your premise that cities were "designed" to be expensive, whereas I believe they merely "become" expensive through basic laws of supply and demand. The reason cities such as London and San Francisco never grow ever taller skyscrapers is because of planning laws and regulations that restrict supply - not, a free market of supply and demand.
London is a good example of such in that it has ancient viewing rights that restrict the height of nearby buildings, the classic case being that no building can be higher than St. Pauls (a relaxed principle nowadays, but still enforced sometimes). This is a major reason why the old houses in London haven't been knocked down to be replaced by a whole skyline of skyscrapers, but instead are massively expensive properties compared to the rest of the country.
Capital cities are a "premium" product, and they are designed to be so. People pay the premium, because they are effective in the task for which they are designed. Where do you think the "demand" comes from? The demand is for the productivity improvements that can accrue to those who control assets that are highly productive. But note the two words: (1) control; and (2) productive. To extract maximum rents, the product must be under control (so expect a class of laws designed to g;tee this). And secondly, expect a design which caters to high-end productivity (ie, networking, and its corralry...social exclusivity).
If you need to brush up on the history of new york and san francisco as 'financial capitals'.
SF may be a financial capital to some degree, but your comment about VC is still off: they're not based in the city, and they didn't take much interest in companies in the city at all until recently.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose-San_Francisco-Oakland...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...
You can find decent housing in NYC, with pricing comparable to other smaller metro areas in the U.S. like Seattle or D.C. without too much fuss. Same goes for Paris. That's why most people in those cities don't live in the center. Brooklyn or Queens, for example, has a larger population than Manhattan. But only Staten Island has a lower population Density than SF.
The problem with SF is that it has ~Manhattan prices without the number of available units. This means that laughably high housing prices get pushed further and further away from SF proper and out into the Bay Area.
Arguably, if you think of the Bay Area as one city, this makes sense, it's the same in any major city.
It's not so much that someplace like Cupertino or Santa Clara are expensive by themselves, but that you're paying much more for similar housing than you would a similar distance from other similar sized city centers. Yet people move there and saddle themselves with ridiculous mortgages because the alternative is to live in someplace like Stockton.
Dramatically increasing the density of SF proper could make the outer areas and even the East Bay area much more reasonable places to live. However, it would mean lots of people who bought high in the current market would lose their shirts if such a thing were to happen.
I remember the very first time I visited SF, my friend was regaling us with tales of the insane housing prices. No slouch and from a pretty expensive area myself I figured it was just an issue of demand like you'd see in any other big city. But when I actually got to the city I was floored with how low the density obviously was. The solution to the high housing prices seemed idiotically simple then as it does now. Build SF up up up! Areas around every major BART station should also be higher density areas. Relax the density further out from these centers and you'd end up with a much more livable city plan like pretty much every single other city in the country.
By way of comparison, the D.C. metro area (not exactly a well planned urban paradise) has about the same population density as SF Bay Area yet housing can be had for probably around 2/3s the price at comparable distances from the city center.
And there's a greater diversity of opportunity here if you're not just in the tech startup scene. I have a feeling SF will bust when the VC spigot dries up.
From the city's point of view, there's a problem to be solved in terms of getting different kinds of people in the city.
Living in Queens, Brooklyn, hell even Jersey is an incredibly reasonable option if you live in New York. You trade some commuting time for lower prices, and certainly Flushing doesn't have the same appeal as SoHo. But it's never a question of "oh my god it's after midnight how am I going to get home?" like I experienced when living in the bay area.
It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter.
You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't.
Since the income of people who will choose to live in the city places an upper limit on market rents, this is pretty clearly untrue -- either rents can go up forever and so can citizen's incomes or neither can go up forever.
I think that, given sufficient transit infrastructure to allow people who can't afford to live in the city proper to commute in to perform essential jobs to support those who do live in the city, that -- whether it is desirable or not -- the situation is more that both rents and the income of residents of the City and County of San Francisco can go up without bound, as residing in the City itself becomes more and more elite/exclusive.
The income of existing citizens will reach an upper limit, and they'll be pushed out by those with much higher income bounds. In San Francisco's quest to preserve its character, its pushing out the very people who create the character, and its turning itself into London proper, where only the very wealthy can afford to reside.
Citation re: London: http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/09/mapping-gentr...
I've lived in the Bay Area for 30 years and this is my take on it as well. The city of San Francisco (and by that I mean its government) sounds like a 35 year old insisting they are still a teenager. The most interesting thing to watch was that some development "snuck in" in the south of market area and that really really surprised people in terms of people living there. When I moved here SoMa was 'warehouses, drunks, and a train station." Now it is a growing and thriving community of the new executive class. Oops.
Find me a 50-ish-mile distance in the US that is easier to cover by public transit than SF/San Jose. Boston/Providence? DC/Baltimore? Philadelphia/Wilmington? New York/Trenton? Comparable at best, but in all cases, you're generally talking the absolute far edge of regional rail that runs hourly at best.
Peak LIRR trains take less than 90 minutes, with at least one express train in each direction less than 70. There are 13 peak (arrive 6-10AM) week day westbound trains and 14 eastbound (arrive 5-9PM). The longest gap between trains during the week is westbound between 1:46AM and 4:06AM, eastbound it's 1:21AM to 3:14AM. Otherwise rarely is the gap more than an hour.
Ref: http://mta.info/lirr/Timetable/Branch/RonkonkomaBranch.pdf
I am pretty sure that if Caltrain went about 10 miles/hr faster, 101 will have fewer cars.
This is vastly, vastly better service than Caltrain SF-SJ.
BARTs night time gap at the terminus of most lines is, I think, roughly midnight to 4am, so its not all that different.
> I'm not sure if the Bay Area has comparable density to the DC-Philly-NY-Boston corridor
Not even close. The East Coast corridor you name is the most densely populated region of its size in the US, by a wide margin.
If BART ran those kinds of distances 24/7, it would at least significantly increase the consistently-reachable zone. There's currently some all-nighter bus service, but it's not a great replacement (slow, nobody knows the routes, etc.).
It would be nice to have a train leave SF later than midnite, but having taken that train many times, the ridership level is probably break even in terms of costs, at best.
A week ago, after not having visited for about 10 years, I toured the old neighborhood and was astonished at how much it had changed - it was after dark on a friday night - and there were actually a lot of people out, walking around the lake, restaurants open.
HUGE shift in gentrification of the area. This is a very positive impact of the San Francisco housing situation.
Looking for a place in Oakland a few months ago, I was amazed how blasé people were about being assaulted, mugged or having their car stolen. Much as I prefer the EB vibe, I think living under constant threat of violence would stress me out.
Another friend of mine tells me about shootings she's seen outside her window as recently as a few weeks ago. She's only a few blocks South of Lake Merritt around 18th and 5th.
I'm sorry but I wouldn't feel at all safe living in that area.
San Jose takes crime seriously and it's constantly up there among the safest large cities in the US.
One can only wish The EB will take crime more seriously. SF is slowly taking crime more seriously. Maybe the EB can lear from SJ and SF a bit.
Undoubtedly some people will raise the issue of profiling criminal behavior[1]. If I had to choose between simmering street violence and occasional police excess (where one can seek redress), I'd choose the latter. Not sure why the EB is so anti-police so much as to spite their own safety. The good of being better policed vastly outweighs, to me, the occasional bad cop. But to each their own.
One phenomenon I don't understand so well. In NYC I'd see people dress us as (wannabe) mobsters (acquire their style), but they were no mobsters, tho maybe they idolized them in some way --they would complain that they'd get flack from the police. Maybe if they didn't try to pretend to be toughs the police wouldn't think they were toughs. I can see some similarities in the 'anarchists' in the EB.
'wish' is a good term to use here, since I don't see any other way of reducing crime in Oakland since they have no money to provide nearly enough police services, and can't really tax their residents any more since they're already financially overburdened.
and elected mayors who cared about fighting crime more
It's not at all clear that the drop in the crime rate since the 90s can be solely attributed to greater policing.
NYC is like this to some extent, but not nearly as extreme as the Bay Area.
Reminds of this choice quote from the Onion: "In addition, 3 million New Yorkers reportedly left the city because they realized the phrase "Only in New York" is actually just a defense mechanism used to convince themselves that seeing a naked man take a shit on a park bench is somehow endearing, or part of some shared cultural experience."[1]
The Bay Area is much worse in this regard. It's the sort of place where privileged rich people treat objectively terrible, horrible as some sort of rite of passage. There's some kind of sick, perverse pride in living in a 24-hour The Wire episode.
[1] http://www.theonion.com/articles/84-million-new-yorkers-sudd...
This is what is ultimately being destroyed in San Francisco. A real understanding of what it means to be free.
In high crime areas when you first experience it, you're pretty shocked. As time goes by, it just becomes part of the landscape and part of your life. You learn to live with it.
When I lived on the South Side of Chicago, it was the same way. When I moved in, I was constantly harassed for money by panhandlers and such. I saw people get shot, junkies lying in alleys, all kinds of stuff that make you numb to life in the "big city". I never had a friend who lived in Chicago who hadn't been robbed, mugged, beat up, raped, car broken into, apartment broken into or been in the middle of a drive-by. To a degree, most people felt it was a badge of honor living in such a dangerous place, experiencing these things and living to tell about it.
Glad I moved out after a year or so.
The phrase 'badge of honor' strikes me as a phrase unlikely to be used by someone actually at a high degree of risk in a crime-ridden neighborhood. So just how different is the experience for different demographics in a high-crime locale? How divorced from a real, perpetual threat are these 'badge of honor' stories?
Disclaimer this is difficult to cite appropriately because the DoJ & Bureau of Justice Statistics sites are down due to the federal shutdown, taking lots of data with them. Also, it's a HNews comment, which means I'm writing quickly about something I don't actually know much about.
First: parent's comment mentioned the full range of crime, which it's useful to tease apart - violent crime (simple assault), serious violent crime (rape, robbery, aggravated assault), and property crime (car stereos).
As a 20s-30s professional white guy in San Francisco, just about everyone I know has an anecdote or two about scary situations. I know people who have been threatened or worse at gunpoint (very recently!), at knifepoint, and at fistpoint (surely there's a word for that). But statistically, most physical violence my demographic experiences are anomalies. We might live and work and walk in high crime neighborhoods, but we're rarely targets.
Even rape & sexual assault, in which 80% of victims know their attacker, is much more likely to victimize people with <$40k income (and the rate of violence increases the lower income gets). [1]
Other kinds of violence are less likely than rape to victimize acquaintances (50% robbery, 60% aggravated assault), but most of violent crime victims still make less than $35k. It isn't evenly distributed. [2] Put simply, most violent crime occurs between people with lower incomes who know each other. None of this should be too surprising.
Next, property crime. The rates of violent crime and property crime are highly correlated. However, property crime is more equal opportunity. Property crime is more likely to be committed by strangers and target across income groups. [4] So while I'm at relatively low risk of physical violence while walking down scary streets, parking a car or locking a bicycle is much higher risk.
Now, all of this gets more complicated when we consider a large transient population like SF has, but the gist is that more transients leads to a higher rate of burglary, larceny, and robbery than would be expected of an equal population increase made up of other groups, but not necessarily a higher rate of violent crimes unrelated to taking property. [3] The clumping of violent crime by demographic stands.
So, in a sense, I'm agreeing with you - scary neighborhoods do just become a 'part of the landscape'. But only for some of us. This 'landscape' and 'badge of honor' way of experiencing crime is a privilege to those who, relatively speaking, don't have much to worry about. For medium- and high-income individuals with limited or no social ties to other people in the neighborhood, living in a high crime locale is a minor economic problem (potential property loss) easily offset by low rent. There are a whole lot of other quality of life issues correlated with high crime for which I wouldn't judge anyone for wanting to move away from, but the mean streets aren't equally mean to everyone.
[1] http://www.johnbriere.com/jts%20csa_cpa%20paper.pdf
[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_p2h8Wl...
[3] http://glmw.info/research/files/Nicholas_McAndrew-article_1....
East Lake isn't that much cheaper than other options, and a mid-high crime dump. You'll be hard pressed to find a resident who's excited to be there, especially after a year or three.
Or maybe I completely misread his tone and it was a joke. That's possible.
Another one to watch out for is the Mexican Museum Tower (706 Mission). There have been rumblings that a few of the owners in the Four Seasons Tower don't care for the tall building obstructing their views: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2013/07/an_unfriendly_ult...
Depending on the results of the November ballot, we may be seeing more of these.
I don't know if this is necessarily true, in the same way that if you build an extra lane on a freeway you don't inherently reduce congestion - traffic simply expands to fill the available space.
Many people buying these new apartments and condos will be buying as an investment and renting out, which does nothing to help those in housing need.
Plus, on the margins, it will still increase supply and drop prices, as the price those can be rented out at are driven by supply and demand. Continue to reliably raise supply, and you'll also lower the value of those investments and cause them to sell out as they cease to be good investments.
The reason why that is an attractive strategy in the first place is that demand is grossly in excess of supply. Fix the root cause, the problem will go away.
San Francisco may not believe in market forces, but market forces believe in San Francisco.
Without going into all of my guesses as to why this hasn't happened in droves, I think one of the larger reasons is the access to cheap transportation back to those areas at night. BART stops too early, so for the younger crowd that likes to stay out, it's too expensive to constantly take a $40-60 ride out of SF. Without the advent of additionally public transportation, would it be economically viable to provide a paid shuttle service to and from SF / Berkeley / Oakland?
SF may have crime but its nowhere near the danger level of oakland. IIRC, SF isnt even on the "top 100 most dangerous cities" list, but oakland usually is in the top 5.
So, yes- Big difference. 10x higher chance to get murdered in oakland than SF.
I guess my point is that a city having a high crime rate does not necessarily put it off limits; it may just mean that particular neighborhoods are off limits.
"PA is safe, just don't go to Philly", "Philly is safe, just don't go to North Philly", "North Philly is safe, just don't leave Temple's campus"... etc. It's all just a matter of scale. You could break it down by block if you wanted to.
Oakland is not the whole East Bay.
Oakland, Emeryville, Richmond, and San Pablo have high crime rates, sure.
The rest of the East Bay, not so much.
(And, of course, the East Bay isn't the only place one can commute into San Francisco from -- the Peninsula exists, too.)
It's far wiser I think to use sites like http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Oakland-California/crime/ to evaluate on a more granular level.
As you can see, there are areas of high crime density on both sides of the bay.
SamTrans runs all-night bus service from SF to Palo Alto, route 397. Once per hour, and the ride takes 2 hours, 15 minutes (!). From there you can switch to the all-night VTA route 22, which goes Palo Alto to San Jose. That's also approximately once per hour, and the trip takes about 1 hour, 15 minutes. With the connection time, you can make the overall trip in about 4 hours.
(note I bought in Berkeley a few years ago, and looking to move to Oakland)
Perhaps Uber should move from providing premium taxi-like service, and instead offer a 24-hour bus-like service? For partygoers on the weekend, at least?
this is literally the startup I am working on
I describe it here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6428246
You can signup for the interest list here
I'll be updating and launching new things this week.
Yet there is a whole 3/4 of the city that isn't encompassed by that part that is really, really awesome. It may not be "trendy" or anything, but they're full of great neighborhood places and "real" people. I think it's easy for everyone analyzing this situation to forget those places exist.
I think transit here generally gets a bad rap (my wife and I used the muni basically without issue for 5 years living in the city and loved it), but when considering where to live the commute from (and the colder weather of) the western neighborhoods is a big deal.
I commute by bike now, which is certainly the fastest way to get around the city - perhaps just not the safest or least-sweaty way.
Why? Why can't it stay the playground of the rich and people who are trying to pursue their dreams can live in <insert name of nearby city>
>> Subsidizing affordable homes for 10,000 families comes at a price of tag of $2.5 billion. >> So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can.
No. While I am for subsidized housing, I don't feel it should be done in extremely rich areas just for the heck of it. I'm not saying to start housing projects where nobody wants to live, but there's no sense in burning money to build them where costs are extraordinary.
OTOH, this and other manifestations of what feels like a binary income distribution is a tricky thing. Rich neighbourhoods are one thing. Rich schools. Rich cities is a new thing. It creates feedback.
>> The gap between London prices and those of the rest of the country is now at a historic high, and there is only one way to explain it. London houses and apartments are a form of money.
This leads to a number of things:
1) The very British sport of "extending" and, really, slapping extensions on absolutely everything.
2) Avoidance of any actual, structural work. Completely modernising a flat (or, worse even, a house) is expensive, i.e. you risk spending a lot of money without the certainty that you will get all of it (and, ideally, more) back.
3) In connection with the point above, this means "adding value" usually really means painting things over, plastering things over and superficially "fixing" (i.e. covering up) the most obvious flaws.
All of the above leads to an upward spiral, where everybody tries to sell essentially the same places for more and more money. Give it two or three rounds on the spiral, and a house that used to be, say, £300,000 is now £400,000, with nicer visible features but the same rotten core.
The other problem with London property prices is that they influence the prices of most of the South-East of England, with certain places (within commutable distance) experiencing the same price-hikes.
I wonder if this is in part because, now that our work is less social, we want our environment to be geared toward more social, i.e. big cities.
You can't raise a family in SF without making enough money to afford a $1.4M house, and spending $2000/month on private school per kid because the SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity).
http://www.greatschools.org/california/san-francisco/schools...
Test scores don't tell the whole story, and I'll agree that there is some political stupidity, but think it's fair to say that the blanket statement "SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity)" is incorrect.
For an urban district, I believe SFUSD has an unusually high number of extremely high performing schools. There are some very bad ones too. You'll see this pattern in the surrounding areas as well. The difference is that owning a house in a high-rent district doesn't get you priority access to that school, they way it does in the burbs. As a result, a lot of people who can afford a 1.4 mil house leave SF if they don't get their top school choice, because in Marin, your high mortgage guarantees you priority access to the good school.
Of course, a lot of people stay in SF precisely because they can get their kid into a 9 or 10 school even though they can't afford the 1.4mil house.
Kind of funny that Reason magazine, not normally a big cheerleader for SF politics, kind of likes the approach.
http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-...
Anyway, I think it's perfectly reasonable to defend or criticize the assignment process, I just don't think you can accurately claim that SF public schools are horrible.
Quite frankly i'm disappointed in how cartoonish SF's neighborhoods seem. Here's the hippie burner neighborhood, and here's the spanish hipster neighborhood, and here's the rich white boating neighborhood, and here's the dingy chinese black market neighborhood, and here's the financial district complete with skyscrapers and shops that close at 6pm. It's like a dirty spicy version of DC.
Having grown up in and around SF for my formidable years, SF has charm but seriously lacks in affordability. I can't imagine what you mean by cartoonish.
http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/1958-moving-to-san-fra...
http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/2138-moving-to-san-fra...
And that doesn't even touch some of the things friends have seen happen, including killings, outright prostitution, and much more.
It's not a city that gives off good vibes, and I grew up spending plenty of time in not so good places in the Bronx and Yonkers. I remember 5 years back or so it was in the top 3 for murders (I want to say #1 or #2, which tended to juggle between Baltimore and Philly - and this was over NYC, which is a pretty amazing stat in itself).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Baltimore_neighborhoods
Baltimore has a 10.8% unemployment rate, is the heroin capital of America, and is both one of the most dangerous cities in the nation and the world (based on murder rates, but that's mostly gang violence). Getting your car broken into is an expectation here, not a surprise. Some of us leave our car doors unlocked so we don't have to replace the windows.
The other commenters, while right about dismissing your cartoonish remark, miss your point - Baltimore rocks from many perspectives (yes, crime is a problem, but not in the cartoonish way people portray Baltimore). If you want a real exodus with a significant change of economic area, move to Baltimore or Detroit or Philadelphia or Austin. I just don't see an 'exodus' when people are changing zipcodes but keeping their basic business landscape intact.
Agreed. San Francisco's in late August as far as the urban cycle of wealth generation => congestion/NIMBY => cultural stagnation => abandon => renewal => ... goes. August. Hot, sticky, little growth. (This might apply to the SF climate, but in most of the US, August is a time of stagnation.) What the young people trying to get established really need is a different season, like Austin's early-May or Baltimore's late-March. (Or Detroit if you can tolerate being between the balls of January.)
If you're 22 and you go to the Bay Area thinking you'll be a VC-backed founder in 5 years and rich enough to retire in 10, then sorry, but you were born 10-15 years too late.
Being "progressive" is great, but we live in the real world and if you refuse to do things to lower prices in the name of culture, prices will keep going up. Ironically, this will also hurt, if not destroy, the "culture" that they're trying to protect in the first place.
San Francisco is statistically the second most dense city in the US, wedged into a geographically bounded ~50 sq miles. It's dumbfounding that there were probably more high rise apartment buildings (>20 stories) in my zip code back in NY than in all of SF.
This is how you solve it:
1. Allow development, stop getting in the way.
2. Create punitive pigovian long term unused property taxes to encourage property use. Stop land owners from letting property just sit there unused and discourage using property just as a fancy bank account for the wealthy.
Build vertically. Look at Tokyo if you need ideas of super density.
Raise Taxes
If you want to lower prices and you can't/won't increase supply, the obvious solution is to lower demand. Adding a sharp jump in the local income tax at a high income level will free up housing space as wealthy citizens leave the city. The less affluent won't see a tax increase, since it's outside their bracket, but they will see housing become available, lowering rent prices.
Of course, this will be a hit on the economy as all the wealthy individuals leave the area, but it decreases rent while keeping culture constant.
Housing stock on the Geary corridor could be easily increased, and even a modest improvement to the transit system in that area could make a big difference.
It is absolutely crazy to artificially restrict residential building in areas where there is high employment demand. It is almost like we want to prevent economic growth.
The US is a crazy place. We complain that there isn't enough economic growth, but when it happens, we put in all kinds of restrictions that limit it.
Edit: Many people argue in favor of building restrictions on the basis of environmental concerns, but limiting housing in SF is just pushing more people out to places like Sacramento, which are suburban waste lands and models of inefficiency.
1) Build higher. A lot higher.
2) Massively increase supply.
Put in place a regulation that says all new buildings must be X stories high (20,40,60, whatever.) Along with that, include a regulation that force said buildings to fit in with the neighbhorhood look. UWS and the West Village here in NYC have great examples of extremely tall buildings that are not Jetson's-style eyesores.
Also put in place a regulation that says existing building that can be built higher (while keeping the existing external facade) should be. Where this isn't possible, knock it down and replace it with a building that keeps the old facade.
Change the zoning restrictions and regulations to allow the above, and supply will go up, prices will (eventually) come down, and the neighbhorhood looks will remain similar. Everyone gets some of what they want, and the place stays diverse, vibrant, and does not force local workers to deal with punishing commutes just so they can do their jobs.
The above applies just as much to NYC or any other large city that is holding back this kind of development. As per the UN:
"In 1950, one-third of the world’s people lived in cities. Just 50 years later, this proportion has risen to one-half and will continue to grow to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. Cities are now home to half of humankind." Policies need to change to deal with this new reality.
"San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it's starting from a smaller overall population base). While Seattle decided to embrace infill development as a way to save open space at the edge of its region and put more people in neighborhoods where they could walk, San Francisco decided to push regional population growth somewhere else."
Interesting point, but are we comparing apples-to-apples? Here's the wikipedia page for Seattle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle
land area is 142 sq miles, current population density is 7,402/sq mi .
For San Francisco, we get:
https://www.google.com/#q=wikipedia+san+francisco
land area is 46.87 sq mi, population density is 17,620/sq mi.
Now, the article did mention "infill" which sounds more urban, so maybe there's a difference in the city and county of Seattle? I don't really know how that works up there. San Francisco is a very rare case where the city and county are the same. The article doesn't seem clear about this - how are we defining "Seattle" for the purposes of this article? If we cherry picked a 142 square mile area around SF, I think we could probably substantial construction and growth. In some ways, the article even goes on to mention this by talking about how SF and Oakland aren't part of the same city, but that this is where the growth is starting to happen.
SF is at the point where there isn't much left to be infilled. There certainly is some, but by and large, you'd have to tear something down to build something up - at least to a much larger extent than cities that get to be defined as a 150 square mile area or more.
I don't think there's much to be done here... but I think people are coming down pretty hard on SF. My guess is that you could easily circle 48 square miles of most major cities with comparable population density that haven't allowed much construction in the last 50 years or so, and you could easily circle 150 square miles around SF that make it look like it has pursued rapid growth policies. The difference is that because of the way borders work in the bay area, SF appears to be hostile to development because the new growth happens elsewhere.
Seattle is in King County, which has a total area of 2,307 sq. mi. This is clearly referring to the city proper, which is, as you note, still much bigger than the City and County of SF, and much less densely populated to start with.
There's a difference between "physical challenges" and "physical bottlenecks" to building in SF. Of course there are physical challenges. I'm claiming that the physical challenges are not the bottleneck, or in other words, if people were legally allowed to purchase property, tear down existing buildings if necessary, and build new taller buildings, I strongly suspect they would do so.
But, in the mean time, all of the people I know who work in service jobs (cafes, restaurants, bars, etc.) are forced to double or triple up, fight over the incredibly rare sub-$1000/month rental, or move to another neighborhood. Lots are opting for the last option and it's changing the character of the neighborhood.
So what? What's wrong with change?
See: Belltown in Seattle. Originally an artist neighborhood (as gentrifying neighborhoods tend to be), now completely devoid of art. Originally featured eclectic eateries and cafes, which attracted wealthier residents who liked the bohemian feel. Nowadays it's high-end chains and a lot of ostentatious lounges/clubs.
It's gotten to the point where Belltown is no longer really a desirable place to live, and the interest is now in Capitol Hill, where there is still an artistic/bohemian scene.
Change isn't bad, but in this case the pattern seems to be: residents move in attracted to X, driving X out in the process, everyone wonders where X went, and this starts the migration to another neighborhood in the search of X... Repeat ad infinitum.
For now this is true, but I think many of these people are moving to the CD by necessity where they can still afford to rent or purchase. Of course, the exodus to the CD has had its own issues (http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2011/12/gentrification-ki...).
What I think is very interesting is that the revitalization of the waterfront may change this dynamic by causing more people to move to Pioneer Square thereby relieving pressure on Capitol Hill. I'd actually consider doing this if it wasn't for the muggings, crazy people stabbing soccer fans, and it lacking the fundamentals of a livable neighborhood (e.g. a supermarket).
I know it's not as easy as that, but there's something odd about the situation you're describing.
The trick with Seattle - and other tech-heavy places - is that the gentrifiers belong to a demographic that is generally not invested in the arts. NYC's gentrification has driven a lot of artists out for certain, but it's also kept many by virtue of the fact that many of its wealthiest are curators and tastemakers of various art media (see: publishing, fashion, music, etc).
The population has a vested interest in seeing the arts stick around.
This isn't a perfect solution, since the "wealthy patron of the arts" demographic is skewed towards certain media and genres, so other artists may yet be left behind. But it's something.
Whereas in a place like Seattle people just don't really give a crap about art. How many Amazonians and Microsofties actually regularly go to art shows? How many have even been on the First Thursday events in any neighborhood?
The first step to successful tech gentrification is for techies to give a shit about the arts. But good luck with that.
Few, at best. And it's not just Amazon or Microsoft. I was at a mobile developer meetup in Pioneer Square that coincidentally happened to land on the first Thursday of this month. Nary a word was shared with any other attendee about the richness in the arts happening right outside of our event. Made me rather sad, to be honest.
Isn't this NIMBYism, just from a different demographic?
Paris is 40 sq.mi. and has a density of 55,000/sq. mi (even more if you count out the 2 vast wooden uninhabited areas that take up 10% of the city's surface). Meanwhile it's extremely friendly to pedestrians and still preserves quite a good standard of living for the inhabitants. And the city is mostly a big museum, meaning there are monuments all around town and most of the buildings in numerous parts of the city are protected and thus cannot be redeveloped. Oh and in most of the city you can't build above 25 meters.
In this regard it would seem from a purely outer point of view that there must still be a lot of room for new construction in San Francisco.
I can well remember a half decade ago when the kids were ranting about the prices in Cupertino, Palo Alto and Menlo Park. I wonder what would happen if folks demanded bulldozing some of those more-expensive-than-SF low-density neighborhoods to accommodate...
The only way to have a meaningful impact on housing prices is to increase supply.
The Examiner did a great article on the damage done to the City by redevelopment of the type this article advocates, in the 50s and 60s. Seems now to be available at USA Today: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-09-245099... IMO, if you want to see exactly what Gabriel Metcalf is talking about go to the City's Western Addition and while there ask yourself if it was worth it.
Though we do only have two seasons - winter and construction.
I thought the seasons were more, construction, and snow preventing construction.
I have lived in Russia, and visited San Francisco once. I have to say, I was more uncomfortable in SF than I ever was in Russia. Personally, I don't see the appeal. Reading this article, it makes me feel the author has on rose colored glasses when it comes to this city.
The Bay is this big asshole sitting right in the middle of everyone. All of our development is spread out in a ring around the bay, which inflates the distance from one place to another. If you took a map and cut out the bay, then pulled all the shorelines together, it would only be 15 minutes to get from San Jose to Oakland or San Francisco. But nope, we have to go in a big damn ring.
If there was really any net "exodus" going on, landlords wouldn't be raising rents 25-30% each year.
We are contemplating the exodus in a few years but not so much because of prices, but schools. Before I had kids, I was in step with SF politics / justifications of how things are done here. But, of course, after kids you're like "hey, wait a minute". The school lottery is a family bug spray here. It's not just the fact that you're kid could be:
a) bused to a different area of the city away from the possible school right across the street from you b) bused to a crappy school across the city
but also that this destroys neighborhoods. When I grew up (in southern california), I went to school with all the kids in my neighborhood. Not here, that would be too simple. So what this does is forces you to east bay or north bay if you don't want to partake in this social experiment and can't afford private school (I won't even mention the fact that even if you can afford private school, there's massive competition to then get into one).
All in all, this puts huge pressure on parents and they have to ask the question "do I want to be part of a social experiment where my kids won't even go to school with other neighborhood kids or do I just want them to go to a good school so they can grow up and then have some sort of normal life"?
So, the reality I see consists of 2 groups (of which we have friends in both): those that can't afford to buy or our outbid on everything and those parents that can't afford or are out-competed on private schools.
That said, I love SF. I've live here for 20+ years. I'll always love it here. Do I hold a grudge towards the city? Nope. I see it mostly as just the way things are and even if some people did have a short time where they were able to stall growth, it won't last forever. The city has to expand and it will. If it doesn't it will die and I just can't see that happening.
As an example, if migration between Canada and the US increased a thousandfold, but the net migration stayed the same, you can be damn sure I would think it was interesting and worth looking at. Big changes in demographics and migration patterns are always interesting (for better or worse), and net migration is never the whole picture.