What's the Matter with San Francisco?
citylab.com
citylab.com
I think our progressive politics IS to blame: for deluding San Franciscans into believing such a thing is possible.
It's the ol' iron triangle. In this case the corners are something like "Affordable, desirable, no growth, pick two"
Actually it is possible. But the irony is that the person who came up with best idea that would have fixed/prevented this problem, has now been ostracized as a "fascist" by the left-wing tech community: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formali...
If circa 2007, San Francisco itself had been turned into a join-stock corporation, with all the existing residents given shares, then all residents would have grown wealthy as the city grew rich. Furthermore, the government would have had an incentive to allow new housing, since that would increase total tax revenues, and thus increased dividends for all residents. Right now, the politically powerful have no incentive to improve new building, since they do not directly benefit.
The irony of the "fascism" dig on this thread is that the source you've provided appears to be this person literally arguing for privatization in order to create a corporatist autocracy. By that way: that's the solution to San Francisco's problems you find promising? Or am I misunderstanding you?
I think the author's "practical" political ideas are comical and worthy of ridicule, but that they alone don't make the author problematic. The virulent strain of scientific crypto-racism that seems to run through their writing though; that's a problem for me.
The joint-stock form of government works extremely well for companies that make software operating systems, so I would like to see it tried for companies making physical operating systems (a city being an operating system for people). I don't go as far as moldbug's proposal (and I'm not sure if Moldbug goes as far as Moldbug's proposal, he always likes to frame the debate by making the most extreme argument in one direction). I don't want the corporation to operate the courts or to run the army. There should be an independent court system and the city government would have to follow rule-of-law. But in general, I think formalizing ownership over the city would lead to more pareto optimal solutions, and I think that would be good for the existing residents.
With a shareholder system, home owners also have a dividend paying share in the city government. The government pays dividends out of the profits of property taxes. New construction increases property taxes, since new high rises pay a lot more tax than old row homes or vacant blocks. Thus, the owner-shareholder will also gain money from new construction. Conceivably, the city could charge a supplementary "new construction" tax to make the numbers balance out so that home owners would always net gain from new construction. This might not be perfect, the surcharge would discourage building to some extent, but it would be a lot better than the state of affairs right now.
It would be unwise to give all new residents shares, for the reason that you point out. But you would want them to be able to buy shares at market rates. And maybe you also give shares to some class of people who move in, reside a long time, do a certain amount of volunteering, etc.
The problem is really about how real-estate is now securitized and bought/sold primarily as investments rather than living/working quarters.
I'm afraid it's hard to change. People who paid so much for their Valley homes certainly do not like the idea of the supply dramatically increasing and their pleasant, small communities becoming drastically urbanized. And I understand that.
But the progressive nature of this area has always seemed face value to me as an outsider who travels to this region often. It's incredibly nice here but I believe it is time to begin building lots of high rises (scaled for quakes) in some city near SF and urbanizing areas while creating mix zoned housing and commercial similar to what you'd see in NYC. It's time for an experiment like that in the Valley somewhere.
viz Mountain View: they just authorized something like 3.4 million ft2 of office space between LinkedIn, Google, etc while supposedly they're giong to add 1.5k to 5k housing units. In the future. Where are the other, say, 15 to 20 thousand people going to live? Mountain View doesn't give a shit, but a bunch of them are going to have to life in sf, because that's where there's housing.
I jest... partially. Atherton is horrible for the whole area.
With a location near Palo Alto/Stanford and the region I would bet it becomes unbelievably high in demand.
Obviously this could never happen there!
So the next time someone complains about how expensive the city is I should point across the bay at Marin and say "that's your trade off"?
[1].http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/23/imagine_hopping_on_...
The problem is the legal situation where a lot of people and organizations that stand to gain from stopping development can veto it.
In other words: We don't need better people, we need better laws.
As a resident of a growing city, I find it somewhat puzzling and inconvenient that it's taken as an article of faith that large city growth is a good thing. Growth is good, but it's also bad: it brings congestion, filth, and higher housing prices. Even with the development of affordable housing, housing prices still rise. Furthermore, the traffic associated with high-density houses places a strain on the transit system and other public infrastructure and services that the city is usually unequipped to handle. Transit is often upgraded far too late, long after congestion has negatively impacted the lives of residents. It's happening to me right now in my city: coworkers have reported their commute rising considerably over the past year.
So as the resident of a city who is happy with the way that it was, and is increasingly unhappy with the way it's becoming, what I'm wondering is: why should I not vote to block and prevent this growth? A lot of city politics talks as if growth is naturally a good thing that should always be pursued, but talk far less often of quality of life for residents. Growth often comes at the expense of current residents. (Gradual growth is healthy and necessary, but excess growth harms everyone.)
If discouraging high-density housing means higher housing prices, but buys me less congestion and a higher quality of life, then that seems like a good tradeoff to me as a resident. Otherwise, I get higher housing prices and more congestion and a worse quality of life. Cities should serve their current residents first, and prospective future immigrants second.
I suspect that the strategy that San Francisco residents are pursuing is a strategy designed specifically to make it expensive to live there, to discourage further immigration that they do not want.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Because all you can vote to block is the growth in housing - you can't block the influx of people. So then demand continues to rise while supply stagnates... and prices keep skyrocketing as a result. And that doesn't freeze the city into being exactly what it's like now - as more low-to-mid income people are priced out, the city WILL change in character and in culture. Discouraging high-density housing gives you higher prices AND a much less diverse city.
Either way you cut it, there's no way to freeze San Francisco like a time capsule. It's going to change, the question is how do we maximize how much of that change is for the better?
(Btw, I think wanting the city to stay exactly how it is currently is fundamentally a NIMBY / selfish attitude - 'I got here first, but no one should be allowed to come after me and change things any further').
Because you don't want to be Detroit.
Is that really true? San Francisco, as much as I love it, never struck me as a particularly forward-thinking place when it comes to public transportation, bike-friendliness, healthcare, or housing policies. Compare it to any European city (e.g. bike lanes in Amsterdam, transit in London, health care in Switzerland, or Germany in housing policy), and San Francisco looks pretty weak. The only thing it really has going for it is its population density and diversity.
Don't get me wrong, I adore this city. But I feel like it has succeeded despite its policies, not because of them.
(Though I'd certainly quibble with the article's notion that SF's transit-first policy has been a shining success story so far).
I very strongly agree with this article. Diversity does not survive in expensive areas and I strongly believe that is worth preserving in San Francisco. I understand the problems rent-control causes, but if it were removed and all residential areas jump up to market price then diversity would be completely destroyed. That might not mean anything to a lot of people who work in tech(the feeling I get when I talk about it with coworkers), but I think it means a lot.
Arguably true.
> I understand the problems rent-control causes, but if it were removed and all residential areas jump up to market price then diversity would be completely destroyed.
As a matter of theory, it's hard to see that rent control actually protects diversity. And emperically, it's absolutely not doing that, in San Francisco or in other cities which have tried it.
Here are you choices:
1. Remove restrictions on building. Housing will be plentiful, diversity will be expanded, but what currently makes the city special will be lost (and maybe it'll end up even better, but it'll certainly change). 2. Maintain restrictions on building. Housing will be scarce, diversity will be lost, but the city won't change.
Rent control is entirely orthogonal to this. IF you have scarce housing, then you must allocate it among the people who want it. One way to do this is via the market. If you do not like the way the market will allocate it, then you can cap the rents and allocate it in some other fashion. But as a society, we are extremely bad at allocating things fairly (hence why we rely on markets so much; it's not that they're very good, it's that we're really crap).
Which means that the way housing under rent control will inevitably be allocated isn't going to preserve diversity. Rent control makes the lucky few who get to live in the city even luckier, but it doesn't tell you who ends up being one of those lucky few. But we know, from decades of experience, that the lucky few end tend to up being the already privileged.
Notice that San Francisco—with strong rent control laws—is actually not a diverse city. Oakland—with weak ones—is one of the most diverse cities in the US. Similar patterns can be seen across the US. Your assumption that rent control aids diversity is supported neither by theory nor evidence; the fact that rent control could enable the poor to afford to live in a city doesn't mean that it will. And it doesn't.
What really helps diversity is having a lot of housing relative to the number of people who want to live there. San Francisco has scarce housing.
Given this, I think rent control is fairly ineffective at preserving diversity, but I like it because it means that people can't be forced to move all of a sudden because their landlord puts the rent up by $500 a month. I don't believe that the already astronomical rents in SF would go much higher if rent control was abolished anyway.
That said, building more housing obviously helps. As does making nearby cities nicer places to live.
It's just a supply/demand problem. We should to increase the amount of housing available in SF to lower prices so we can bring in the new generation of creatives, freaks and outcasts. We've got a big hill to climb, and there would be a lot of apartment towers going up, but SF could do it.
As far as rent-control goes, there's a moral argument to be made. What makes the person who's already living in SF more deserving of a place to live than the person who wants to move to SF? Rent-control is fundamentally anti-immigrant.
How does anyone expect to have affordable housing with a growing population if, effectively, only 16% of the entire housing stock is allowed to be allocated to new arrivals at market rates? It would be another thing if some form of subsidized-rate housing was also offered for newcomers to SF, but instead what we get is a tiered system in which existing residents are set against newcomers, with landowners being the only ones to really benefit.
Nit pick: If all these units came out on the open market, it would mean a substantial lowering of the market price.
It would also mean that a lot more people could live in SF, both because more people would share existing apartments, and because many of the apartments now empty would be rented out.
By extensively rezoning vast swaths of downtown industrial land to residential Vancouver got around these problems SF is currently encountering for a few decades.
Who deems that unlikely? Isn't that the widely-accepted answer?
* I moved here 5 years ago, so I admit to "being part of the problem."
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-housing-is-so-expensiv...
Bikes of San Francisco: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4084/5112789301_da50dca4bd_b.j...
As hipness goes, a big theme of hipsters is to work really hard at looking like you aren't trying and don't care. Throw on some second-hand-store clothes to ride up the hill on a crappy, completely inappropriate bike to a very expensive dive bar to overpay for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and a dirty well whisky because that's how much you don't care.
I live in a similarly diverse area where people of all backgrounds hang out. The surrounding cities are ethnically homogeneous yet this one is not. Individualism, despite some of the shittier aspects of human behavior it can bring to the table, broke people up from being in ethnicity X and thus area X to being defined by sexuality, political leaning, consumption habits and expressive tendencies, seeking those who had similar traits. Ignoring any narcissistic aspects, defining people by those traits has the benefit of producing better social liquidity.
When you restrict the supply of something scarce or the demand for it goes up, the price increases.
In this case the "something" is housing. It's essentially illegal to build anything in the bay area which means the supply isn't changing much. But the demand is skyrocketing. Therefore the price is skyrocketing.
This would all be fixed very quickly if it was legal to buy some land, demolish what's on there, and build a skyscraper instead. San Francisco would look like Manhattan within two years.
If you study the 1906 earthquake, you find that a lot of people suddenly didn't have homes. They were all rehoused within a couple of weeks. Today, being illegal to build anything, and with rent controls on what does exist, we'd have a lot of homeless people for a long time.
We all want everyone to have a nice life, and we intend well with these laws. Economics concerns itself with what actually happens when you incent people though, not what we intend by those incentives.
A crowded, hyper-expensive, tourist trap with limited housing that most locals avoid? Good goals.
"This would all be fixed very quickly if it was legal to buy some land, demolish what's on there, and build a skyscraper instead."
"Economics concerns itself with what actually happens when you incent people though, not what we intend by those incentives."
Simple narratives make for good rhetoric but poor action. Especially when those narratives are driven by what I'm assuming is your libertarian politics.
You just described SF.
Texas: makes fun of Californians who constantly preach about inequality; creates a pretty equal, egalitarian society that most citizens feel comfortable in.
Perhaps there's a substantive point to be made about California and Texas, but flat-out tribal/ideological provocation is the opposite of that, and not ok here.
> I used a bit of tongue in cheek snarkiness to drive the point home
But the dynamics from the outside are different. The snark doesn't "drive the point home"; it calls attention to itself, obscuring your point.
Of the people who read that, some will not experience it in a tongue-in-cheek way; of those, some will feel hurt and angry; some will typically respond with incivility—feeling justified, since they were provoked. These provoke others, and down the tedious spiral we go. Maybe it's their problem for being offended, but when is that not the case? The thread goes up in flames anyway.
This problem is intrinsic to a large semi-anonymous internet forum. Think of it like a campground in an area that's high-risk for forest fires. You'd automatically be careful there, to protect the shared space.
HN's solution to this problem is to require comments to be civil and substantive. A thoughtful comment like your reply here raises the whole quality of the discussion. You obviously have some nuanced things to say about this topic. Please give us the nuances.
The Gini coefficient of CA and TX are extremely similar [1]- CA is ranked #44 in the US, and TX is ranked #43.
However, social mobility of the poorest percentiles is significantly higher in Californian cities [2]. In fact, of the major US metropolises, the top four best cities for social mobility of children in the bottom quintile are: San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego, in order. [2] Social mobility in Texas is significantly lower, and extraordinarily lower throughout the rest of the southern US. (Texas is a nice exception)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...
McCarthy's blacklists were justified because of widespread Communist infiltration?
Slavery was just a side issue in the Civil War?
No mention of Jim Crow or the Ku Klux Klan?
Four major thinkers who greatly influenced the Founding Fathers were Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Moses?
Science doesn't really fare well with the Texas State Board of Education, either.
Of course, the hard part is obtaining a middle-class income in Texas.
I grew up in California but moved to Houston half-way through high school. The school I wound up in in Houston was light-years better than the one I left in California.
I disagree. I've worked for a couple "limousine liberals" in New York. So has my wife and so have many of my friends. Many of the limousine liberals are assholes (not that he's very liberal, nor is he wealthy, and he's also fictional... but think of Frank Underwood). Sure, they vote Democratic, but they're nasty, elitist people who will hurt your career for any reason or no reason at all, and who put a lot more stock into meaningless social prestige (connections, pedigree) than typical conservatives. Their liberalism is mostly an air they put on in order to make themselves socially acceptable since they can't hide their wealth. (That's not to say that all wealthy liberals are like that. The type certainly exists, though.) Frankly, it's at the point that I don't really care about a person's macropolitics. Some of my favorite people are conservative (I think they're wrong, but that's another issue) and some of the worst people are nominally progressive (and probably sincere in their support for left-of-center politics). As with religious belief, some expect a correlation between position and ethical character, but the actual correlation seems to be near zero.
Frankly, I think that this was intentional. It has nothing to do with being "a conservative" or "a liberal". This NIMBYism is about maintaining high house prices; it is about being a selfish piece of shit. It just gets a leftist veneer because these people are good at coming up with an argument that other people will listen to. End of story.
I think the progressive anti-growth sentiment is earnest; it’s people honestly trying to protect their city from unwanted change.
That's the opposite of "progressive". They're leftist, but that's not the same thing as being progressive. Kim Jong-Un is a leftist. So was Stalin. So are many of the Euro-rednecks
The U.S. is different from Europe in that our mouth-breathers, kooks, racists, regressives, and assholes are more numerous on the right of the economic spectrum... to the point where tropes are made of it. In Europe (and in NYC and San Francisco) the authoritarian nutjobs and the xenophobes and the anti-progress crowd is more evenly split between the left and right.
Some component of the Bay Area housing evil is ill-thought-out liberal politics (see: legacy rent control systems that don't allow rents to rise even with inflation) but much more of this stuff is exclusionary than people will admit to.