San Francisco Is Eating Itself
alexcastle.net
alexcastle.net
In the same way, why are people constantly complaining about not being able to afford living in San Francisco? It's one of the hottest cities on the planet right now. I don't get where this entitlement is coming from that people feel that they SHOULD be able to live there without paying the price?
I'm not saying there aren't real societal issues in San Francisco, but I think the entitlement from the people who can't afford to live there doesn't make sense to me.
Yes, we should try to make San Fran affordable as possible. Yes, more housing should be built, etc, etc. However, the entitled way in which the less fortunate approach this situation is what baffles me.
Back before the tech boom we see today, these people, who are now facing eviction, were just moving into their neighborhoods in the city. At this time, they did not face a choice of whether to rent or buy, as some stupid people on HN may be arguing. They only could afford to rent, and rent they did for decades. But these people didn't just park themselves in a bed at night, they established themselves in the neighborhood, building a vibrant community and culture. They opened businesses and started sports leagues and cultural preservation groups. They had kids here, who are now in the local schools. They gave the neighborhoods the very soul that is now so attractive to us tech workers.
Fast-forward to present day, and they are facing challenges from all sides and are fighting to defend the roots that they've planted and communities they've worked hard to establish over the decades, it really has nothing to do with entitlement at all. This isn't a fight over whether someone gets to keep land, regardless of whether they own it or are renting, this is a fight to defend what they've worked for. Really I see the other side as the entitlement fight. We techies think we're entitled to the communities these people established only by paying higher rent. With this attitude, soon enough these very neighborhood we talk about will have no culture, and won't be as desirable.
Really the only solution to this is to build more, so go yell at the people blocking new construction. Screaming entitlement is just making you look like a moron.
This sounds ridiculous. If they (the renters) don't own it, the owner decides who lives there (that's the essence of property). Why should renters get a say in what happens to someone else's property?
The "essence of property" as you state it of having absolute authority of what an individual can do with their property doesn't exist legally -- zoning laws are the first example I can think of that refutes the claim or ideal.
So there's already a legal basis for us as a society having say in what people do with their property. Quite frankly I think a lot of these laws are overstepping their bounds and encroaching on personal freedom. BUT I think there's a perfectly legitimate line to draw when it comes to using your property to provide housing for other people.
When you decide to use your property to make money by renting it out to other people, you are essentially taking on a huge amount of power over their livelihood, and this cannot be stated lightly. So to me this is where we as individuals and as a society need to decide how to govern this territory in a way that's fair for both parties involved, as it is certainly not fair to widely restrict the amount of money someone can make from their property, and it is certainly detrimental to people and communities to upheave members from their homes and established roots. This is where striking a balance makes the most sense for the strength of the community, and the individual stakeholders, and will produce a strong society as a whole.
To me, making the claim of absolute property rights is simply weak. I don't want to deride the most important point, as stated above, but absolute property rights don't really make logical sense to me either, as property is often a hugely restricting resource, and one completely established by precedence rather than contribution per se.
There are currently a host of policies that keep people from doing what they would otherwise very much like to do, which is building new higher-density housing and living in it. That would result in net gains, whereas arguing about who gets to live in SF is pretty much zero-sum. Yet people really seem to like to argue over the latter, and are weirdly quiet about the former.
> Rent control in SF has had perverse consequences for tenants. Don't go in for rent control.
and your conclusion is
> Maybe we should go in for rent control.
I'm not sure what else to say.
You shouldn't be worried about rent control failing to function as a price ceiling-- you should be worried about it functioning exactly as a price ceiling.
It is expensive. That's different from important.
Whether it be intellectual importance, industrial importance, creative importance, etc
It is, however, and undeniably, expensive.
Think of someone like a cook who has lived in SF for years. They came to the city, honed and practiced their skills, and in their own small way helped make SF one of the best food cities in the world. And their reward is "MOVE OUT", or at least live in a crappy situation. And that change happened really fast.
It is human nature that someone in this situation would complain.
I honestly see little difference in the human mentality that lead to the national housing crisis that and the SF housing availability crisis. Yeah, you can say the national housing crisis started very quickly in 2008 and got bad fast, but the truth is that the seeds that lead to that unstable situation were planted long long ago. The same is true for SF's housing crisis.
Rent control is a prime suspect in all this. In the case of NYC, rent control probably makes sense because it's largely hit the limit of how high a city can be built (it's easy to remove a 1-3 residence building in place of a 15 residence building, but hard to remove a 15 residence building for a 30 residence one.) It's easy to argue for 5x increases in housing for a given plot of land, but much harder to argue for 2-3x increases.
Economists generally all agree that rent control fucks up housing markets and reduces the quantity and quality of housing [0]. Most importantly for SF, it removes entire swathes of the existing middle class from demanding more and more housing over the years as the city grows. When you build up your life around 1994 rents, you ignore the housing problem in SF and hunker down in the home you happened upon in 1994. If for whatever reason you're rooted up 15+ years later, the rental rates have changed so much that you can't even afford to stick around and lobby for a solution like making more affordable housing available by eliminating building restrictions and rent control. Worse yet, you're likely to make the market even more distorted by arguing for more tenant protection laws. Had you been participant to the problem since 1994 because you had no rent control, you would have also been participant in the debate asking for more housing to be built each year. This is the exact same mentality that causes banking crises: introduce some extreme distorting policy that disproportionately benefits you in the short term and ignore what is going to happen when the chickens come home to roost in 10-15 years time.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...
By which, rent prices reflect supply and demand (and some other things, but mostly basic supply and demand), there is water on three sides and a park to the South.
The only thing to relieve pressure on prices will be more floor space for residential, and the only space for that is above the existing floor space.
For a long while there will be a lot of profit in supplying the additional demand, so I don't get why profiteering by developers hasn't led to enormous swathes of existing housing being knocked down and 8+ story buildings being laid in their place. And if this is happening, why it doesn't happen at a far more rapid pace.
Is there something preventing developers from doing this?
Are there local NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard!) groups who resist the building of additional residential units?
Are there city disincentives to doing this?
Or is this more a case of waiting for the "big one" and starting over when that happens?
To an outsider, can the question be answered: Why not build up?
Because also San Francisco perceives itself as radical - this is true both in SF tech and outside of it - and perceives mass urbanization as symptom of all that is stodgy, traditional, and old (see: Chicago, New York City, London, etc).
"Manhattanization" is a pejorative with no defense in the city - "being like New York" is anathema to a large number of people, and suggesting that SF should be like other skyward cities is immediately painting a giant bulls-eye on your own head and a guarantee that you'll never be a meaningful participant in civic discourse.
In simple words, SF hates skyward-building because its worst fear is becoming New York City.
To answer your questions more directly:
- The city government, in response to voter demand, opposes most development outside of the downtown core, where there are actually plenty of tall buildings (almost entirely commercial). As a (shitty) compromise they've marked out a section of previously underdeveloped light industry just south of downtown for active development. This is where most of the action is. It's also not connected to mass transit, and there's currently an expensive project underway to build a brand new subway line to connect this area of town. This, despite other parts of SF being underdeveloped and already accessible to transit.
- The population of San Francisco, and this includes the techies, loudly opposes dense developments. San Francisco is well known for its picturesque neighborhoods of colorful old Victorian houses. The long-time residents are loathe to see this disappear in favor of mid-rises or high-rises, and the wealthy newcomers are loathe to lose what is an aesthetic gain. Neither side seems willing to admit that the price of their aesthetic preference comes directly out of their pocket book. Proposals to knock these houses down in favor of denser housing are opposed across the board and across the wealth spectrum.
All of this is official policy: http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/General_Plan/index.htm - specifically this one: "That existing housing and neighborhood character be conserved and protected in order to preserve the cultural and economic diversity of our neighborhoods;"
So long as "character" isn't defined as "3 stories", it should be possible to build to 6 stories whilst maintaining façades, retail space, etc and yet doubling available space and improving the standard of housing that exists (oh man, that dodgy wiring in every place in Mission I've ever stayed).
Do the residents realise the connection between scarcity and price, and that they are able to do something about it?
From the stuff that appears on here, it seems that there is a lot of anger against large companies but little reflection that the root imbalance in supply is caused by policies set by the population (or at least, in their name).
There's some truth to the parent comment (I've said parts of it myself), but it's also misleading. Yes, the city could stand to build up in places, but the people in the tech world are also totally delusional when it comes to choosing where to live and work. Everyone is trying to cram into the same three hipster neighborhoods, and ignoring all of the cheaper parts of town. Price sensitivity is almost completely absent.
Notably, when people here talk about "bungalows" and "three-story buildings", what they're really talking about is the western half of the city (the part west of Mount Sutro). It's true that those neighborhoods are really low density, but it's also true that rents there are already much lower than in SOMA or the Mission. You can move to the Richmond and save hundreds of dollars a month in rent, but nobody wants to do that.
There are good reasons for all of this, of course (transit, weather, etc.), but the point is that it isn't just "zoning laws" that are causing prices to spike here. There's good deal of irrationality on the demand side, too. You'd be surprised at the number of tech people who have never even visited neighborhoods like West Portal, even though they're on major transit lines. If it's not hip in San Francisco, it doesn't exist.
"Everyone is trying to cram into the same three hipster
neighborhoods, and ignoring all of the cheaper parts of
town."
Living in places like the Richmond and the Sunset for example are more isolating than living in Oakland. Living at the top of most of San Francisco's hills is relatively isolating as well. Furthermore, hills aren't conducive to human-powered transportation like biking and skateboarding. Being able to quickly move around via the power of your own two feet via walking, pedaling or pushing is one of the draws of all cities. Every relatively flat neighborhood with great transportation is destined to gentrify.
If you put a BART line under the Geary and California bus routes, all the neighborhoods in the far west would "hipsterfy" as well
That said, complaints about being "isolated" in the Sunset is mostly a lot of butthurt. The entire city of San Francisco is seven miles wide. There is literally no part of this city that could be considered "isolated", unless your definition of "the city" begins and ends in the Mission. And I say that as someone who lives without a car -- there are rail lines that run to the Sunset, West Portal, Glen Park, Ocean View and so on. You're maybe 30 minutes away from downtown, at most. Still, ask a 20-something coder to consider living in the Inner Sunset, and you'd think you'd asked him to move to North Dakota.
No, the real problem is that most of the people flooding into SF are wealthy 20-somethings who will pay nearly any price to live right in the middle of the hippest entertainment districts in the city. They don't want to live near icky married people and children, they don't want to travel more than ten minutes to meet their friends for a drink, and they definitely don't want to go up or down any hills to get anywhere. There are basically two neighborhoods in the city that meet these constraints, and in both, rents are skyrocketing.
What's delusional about deciding a particular neighborhood is nice enough to merit its higher rent? Just because you have a different opinion from the people who live there regarding what they should spend their money on doesn't mean they're delusional.
Therefore, just because you make different decisions than they do, it doesn't mean either of you is deciding irrationally.
1. In Paris, nobody has a chip on their shoulder about a nearby larger city. In SF, sour grapes about all the attention NY and LA get led long ago to our population pretending they don't want to be a big city. (Even though now it's actually within our reach)
2. In SF, a large number of people drive everywhere but live in garageless houses -- or they have single-car garages but own multiple cars. They resist building because they don't want to compete for existing parking spaces.
3. SF lacks a decent underground train system, so anything that puts more cars on the road is hotly resisted, and people believe that a garageless building next to a train station will be filled with new car owners.
Not the techies I know. In my experience, the vast majority of SF techies want high-density housing near excellent transit.
One result of this system is that in California, the needs of the few, or the one, outweigh the needs of the many. Don't want to pay high property taxes? Pass a proposition locking in all existing homeowners', and let the future generations get screwed. Do you live in a tall building next to a parking lot, and you're afraid someone will build there and block your view? Pass a proposition forbidding it! Worried that lack of tax revenue will keep you from getting a raise at your government job? Pass a proposition mandating a certain level of spending on your special interest.
Everything is arranged to prop up the established ones. Seniority is the most important thing you can have -- most statements at public hearings begin with, "I've been living in this city for 34 years, and I think..."
For other examples of status-quo-preserving red tape, google [CEQA] and [SF discretionary review].
Then again, I was walking around SoMa with my family one day not too long ago and found myself stuck on the sidewalk in a large crowd of fratboy types who might as well have been straight out of the caricatures in a bunch of these articles... They were talking about working in the south bay and speculating on real estate. Really annoying kids. I get irritated too.
For example, people quote the ellis act as a frequent way in which people are evicted, and hold it up as proof that long time renters have no security.
But that's not exactly 100% of the truth. Sure Ellis act can be used to do a owner-move-in (for a new owner of a rented house for example), and in theory can be used for condo conversion, BUT San Francisco strictly regulates condo conversions. Specifically buildings with > 6 units cannot be converted to condos:
http://www.andysirkin.com/HTMLArticle.cfm?Article=2
Which means that, for all intents and purposes, renters in a larger building, are just as secure as any property owner.
There are guys in my building who have lived here since the moon landing. One was telling me he had to buy a black-and-white TV to watch it! In our building!
Amazing history here in SF.
(Btw, owner-move-in evictions have nothing to do with the Ellis Act. Separate laws.)
Sorry, but isn't the answer just to change the zoning laws preventing residential buildings over 3 stories from being built in most neighborhoods? This seems pretty straightforward.
There are other constraints. San Francisco traffic, parking, and transit are all fairly strained as it is, particularly in the the denser core of the City (downtown, SOMA, Mission). Access from the outer neighborhoods to the core can be as long or longer than suburban commutes, though bicycles offer a pretty good year-round alternative.
For San Francisco, biting the bullet and allowing additional housing to be built, yes, even housing that is primarily marketed to the nouveau riche and upscale, would likely relieve much of the pressure for the rest of the community.
Another solution, of course, would be to provide more housing and more attractive housing throughout the rest of the region. As Geoffrey Nunberg recently commented icily, Palo Alto is a wonderful place to raise a car (and PA is positively urban compared to much of the greater, or should I say, worser, Silicon Valley). While much of SF is limited to heights of 3 stories, the Valley is, with very, very few scattered exceptions, one. Accepting that it is in fact part of a larger megapolis and acting like it would be a net benefit.
Too would be for employers to locate to other locations accessible via transit. Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, and other stops along BART have the benefit of a commute system with high levels of service and a broad collection region. And yet the bulk of tech jobs continue to be located either along the 101 corridor (a hellhole), in the South Bay, or, increasingly, in San Francisco. With the exception of the last, transit is a barely viable option, and even within SF, unless you're in the dense cores (again: downtown, SOMA, Mission), access to what transit there is down the Peninsula is highly limited. The dedicated company shuttles are an extremely appropriate response to the situation, and the outrage against them wholly misplaced.
Is this a bubble? Probably. Are some of the new arrivals annoying and socially maladroit? Quite. Does that change any of my commentary? No.
San Francisco isn't the only region faced with high housing costs: New York, London, and Mumbai all have similar (and arguably worse) challenges. There are many parts of the world, and numerous of those within the US, which would love to have these problems. Addressing the situation rationally, unfortunately, seems difficult to impossible, and sadly many of the tantrum-throwing children (on all sides of the issue) draw the most attention. Shame on the media for that.
Nothing so frustrating to hear that your dream polity has been realized in your town and you're not invited.
n.b. Not to infringe upon the HN politics rule but, for avoidance of doubt, the above does not describe my personal politics.
AirBNB, Dropbox, Twitter, Uber etc are all thousand people companies and almost all of the employees live in SF.
Symbolism has its own logic, and the thing that becomes emblematic usually is not the most important one physically or rationally.
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"replacing each bus with twenty cars"
You assume that either is this solution or no solution, which isn't necessarily true. In fact I would argue that this proprietary solution makes other solutions less viable. Both from a political and economic standpoint, with less pressure on the government and less usage for any public solution.
And by avoiding the pain of commuting, the shuttle riders raise the ire of everyone who does have that pain.
Many of her arguments, such as they are, seem to follow backwards from the desired conclusion that tech workers are awful and their employers, even worse. For example, consider:
> The Google Bus means so many things. It means that the minions of the non-petroleum company most bent on world domination can live in San Francisco but work in Silicon Valley without going through a hair-raising commute by car ... the corporations of Silicon Valley aren’t much interested in improving public transport, and in fact the many corporations providing private transport are undermining the financial basis for the commuter train.
Of course, if the companies didn't organize shuttle buses, then they'd be accused of ruining the environment by letting their employees drive nine hours every day. "How come the most powerful corporations in the world can't shell out for a shuttle bus", you can just imagine the author asking. Furthermore, suppose Google et al. did lobby California for a fifty mile commuter rail project from SF to SV that serves practically no one but... Google et al.'s employees. Headline: Greedy Corporations Buy Off Transit Authority for Tech Nerd Express, Shift Costs to Public. In general, I'm a big fan of public transit because I think it's a situation where collective action can often improve efficiency. But arguing that Google is destroying civil society by not 'heightening the contradictions' in order to get the transit authority to build a railway to nowhere is kind of rich.
Solnit's discussion of rent control is also pretty amazing. She punctuates her (completely understandable) complaints about the rental market with astonishment that the textbook unintended consequences of rent control persist despite rent control, never considering that they might be due to rent control. Prospective tenants supplicating to landlords, live-in couples occupying two units just to lock in tenancy, landlords dis-preferring long-term tenants, the overall lack of response in the housing supply to demand; these are classic symptoms which noted conservative Paul Krugman diagnoses in the article I linked elsewhere in this thread. If someone wants to write a piece in LRB defending rent control in SF, I'd sincerely like to read it. But you have to argue for it, not simply assume the desirability of a policy which is practically unanimously opposed by the people who study it professionally.
Finally, although I'm of mixed mind about whether I even want to indulge this line of thought, I find it pretty stunning that someone with Solnit's pedigree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Solnit#Early_life_and_e...) presumes to speak for the poor and downtrodden, those "more frail", in a first-person piece called "Diary". It's the same sort of tenor you find on flyers like this one (http://25.media.tumblr.com/3fd37355541474385f8db330e58ebb0f/...). The author, who fancies themselves immersed in "poverty, homelessness and death..violence and degradation", makes it painfully obvious that they have at least one liberal arts degree.
From what I've read so far, it seems to me like the "opponents"* of tech workers in the bay area are basically the cultural ancien regime, upset about losing their cool digs and relative status to a bunch of nerds (Solnit is pretty explicit about this). If that's what this is about, I wish they'd just say it. And if they're genuinely concerned about the legitimately poor,* they should recommend serious proposals, and would probably have the support of many of the "technocrats" Solnit so despises. But mixing and matching leaves me short on both pathos and policy.
---
* I use scare quotes because I still don't understand what they want to do about tech workers in SF, except disdain them so hard. Which, have at it...
* * A group that, by the way, has practically zero intersection with the set of people to whom it would occur to hand out passive-aggressive, Flesch-Kincaided-out typeset essays concluding with "GET THE FUCK OUT OF OAKLAND"
* * * I also suspect I am less outraged than Solnit is that a man cannot make a living as the almost-Poet-Laureate of San Francisco, and must find a cheaper place. I'm not making this up.
That's true, if you're white.
That is, 'coastal' is irrelevant to your point.
Looking at that, the adage seems to hold true -- prices appear to fall off as you radiate away from the heart of the city. There's even a 1BR/1BA near the ocean by the USS San Francisco Memorial for $425k.
> Maybe tech companies don't have to live in overpriced, overhyped coastal cities.
It's the tech companies that made those cities overpriced. The same problems will crop up in any city that attracts a sizable enough contingent of high-paid work. Hell, it's happening to my hometown of Austin as we speak. Throngs of transplants, eager for high-paying work at whatever tech or energy company is calling, take a look at the cost of living reports for Austin and think they've found a match from heaven. They pack up their bags and move, thinking that somehow, Austin won't succumb to the maladies of its predecessors.
But property investors aren't stupid. They start buying up real estate left and right for ten percent over the asking price. Sellers are ecstatic. Owners give considerable thought to joining the sellers and renting elsewhere off of the proceeds. Everyone along the financial chain sees the bandwagon and rents and mortgages rise. The investors and sellers know the money is out there for the taking. And that's all well and good for those with the money. Moving from expensive San Francisco or NYC to Austin leaves you sitting pretty in Austin's (historically) lower costs of living, even if the house you purchase would have gone for 15 or 20 percent less 5 years ago.
But everyone else gets squeezed. Slowly of course. Rent rises like it does every year, but since it's a seller's market, there's no apartment complex to hit up for the same rent you were paying. If you're leasing, your landlord is giving serious thought to adding three or four or five or six hundred dollars a month to his bank account. It doesn't matter that you can't pay; there's a waiting list of interested parties that can. It doesn't matter that you want to stay in a neighborhood with decent schools so your children can have a shot at a better life; the people on the list want that too and have no problem outpricing you. Your paycheck hasn't really risen. The two percent COL raise might have broken even before but it sure doesn't now (assuming you were fortunate enough to even have a COL raise). Traffic has always sucked, but now it's sucking like it's trying to get a golf ball through a garden hose.
The tech and energy workers don't see these problems. They can afford whatever price increases come their way. It's the supermajority of citizens that don't work in office buildings off 360 or MoPac that have to deal with these problems. And when they rightfully insist on nipping this gentrification in the bud, when they fight to prevent Austin from cannibalizing itself into the next Silicon Valley, they get told with a straight face that they aren't "entitled" to their homeland and must step aside so the affluent can have their fun.
The less people who choose to compete for the ludicrously overpaid, relatively straightforward knowledge work that is so much in demand at the moment, the more of it you and me get to break off for ourselves, and the more people will be willing to pay us to do so.
Good thing we can stand the boredom, but it's a living, eh?
Given his profile I'm not suprised he's not interested in programming, but the jump to suggesting that the activity itself is inherently boring is hilarious.
If someone's advertising an apartment as "Glen Park" it's almost certainly going to turn out to actually be in Sunnyside or Diamond Heights.