/rant
As the article says, it's easy to get worked up about this stuff. I suspect the "but it will be ugly" commenters are actually well-intentioned.
The whole purpose of a city is to put buildings in front of each other!
It's astounding that the negative people think that a city of a million people is "just right", and any larger is a priori wrong. We could build a city this size where there was nothing, but building a city twice as dense is apparently impossible, despite overwhelming evidence of it being possible elsewhere.
/rant
On the other, you have a massive influx of tech workers who have convinced themselves that they must live in this small, overpriced city for their basic livelihood, and that the city should rapidly rebuild itself to accommodate them.
There's entitlement on both sides.
Could San Francisco have higher population density to accommodate the recent surge in housing demand? Sure. It already has the second highest population density in the U.S., but it could be denser. But the truth is there's no way to guarantee affordable housing for everyone who decides they would like to live in a small, in-demand city on the tip of a tiny peninsula. There will always be people who can't afford it.
> But I'm not so entitled as to think that my occaisional aesthetic pleasure is more important than someone else's basic livelihood.
No, but you're entitled enough to think that a city should be rebuilt to accommodate your livelihood, rather than your livelihood determining where you can reasonably afford to live. You're entitled enough to think you must live in SF, and you shouldn't have to consider living somewhere more affordable. If you can barely make ends meet and can't see your kids because you're commute is so long, why subject yourself to that?
As much as I'd like San Francisco's housing prices to come down, I also think rebuilding should be done responsibly and not rushed to accommodate a relatively recent surge in demand.
And this is hardly the first time a US city has experienced growth.
It reminds me of people arguing for higher taxes accusing others of being selfish. Yes, it's completely selfish that someone would like to keep the money they've earned and yet completely selfless that you feel you have a right to it.
Down and down we go into opposite land.
Well yeah. The very concept of ownership is inherently selfish. It means you want there to be a particular set of resources you get to use, and no one else. It's pretty much the definition of selfishness.
Not that I think this is a bad thing, but if you're trying to argue with this particular rhetorical framing, you're going to lose hard.
I think you missed the other half of the sentence:
> and yet completely selfless that you feel you have a right to [the money someone else earned]
There is nothing selfish about property rights. If you make something, and want to use it, that's not selfish. If someone else comes and demands you give it to them instead, that is selfish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
Out of many fallacies, this one is among the top 5 I consider most insidious. By taking advantage of our collective desire for compromise, the un-empathetic, even the sociopathic, can appear reasonable, or at least as reasonable as the side they're vilifying. "No, brah, both sides are wrong! Let's get to that middle ground, which just so happens to allow me to trample upon other human beings!"
Now, perhaps the happiness of the people who live in that highrise and get a spectacular view at a government-mandated affordable price outweighs the pain of the individual who paid market price. But somebody got hurt.
I'd be willing to consider a compromise where developers compensate neighbors for whatever market value is lost from their construction. That seems fair. But even that assumes that the owners had a "right" to the view to begin with, or some kind of ownership over it. Which seems kind of absurd.
It also assumes that new development necessarily hurts property values, which isn't true either. Development usually increases the value.
Although I'd point out that it's not just rich people who appreciate San Francisco's aesthetic.
If they are impairing their neighbors' views, it seem pretty obvious they are actually hurting someone. San Franacisco has already experienced the extreme: Charles Crocker's spite fence on Nob Hill.
On the contrary, the city should rapidly rebuild to accommodate the current residents that the tech workers would otherwise displace. Building benefits everyone, but lower income residents benefit the most.
All of these things are deserving of sympathy and consideration, but.. well, currently they're getting too much of it.
Similarly, billionaire developers like Donald Trump will see his property values drop but that is only because they were artificially inflated.
Looks more like $500,000 now[1]. Although, I have no idea how accurate or trustworthy that site is, it just came up quick from Google.
> or making your schools overcrowded
To which I say, build more schools! With more housing and people comes a bigger tax base and more money to fund infrastructure improvements. I don't know a single pro-construction person who doesn't also vigorously support improving urban infrastructure.
But I'm guessing there are also limits on overall rates because otherwise property tax rates would have gone up to make up for the 'lost' revenue from owners who are grandfathered in.
AIUI, (and I might not understand correctly) that's not quite right.
If you make significant improvements [0] to a piece of land the value of just those improvements are assessed and added to the assessed value of that land. So -IIRC- if the owner of a two-story multi-family dwelling demolishes the building and builds a fifty-story building in its place, his assessed property value would be the same as it would if he had purchased that property with the new construction on it.
[0] Like -for instance- adding on a new room to a house.
Prop 13 caps the rate of property tax increase... only if there is either no new development on a property, or if the property changes hands in one of the ways that triggers the property valuation reassessment.
A city should be strongly encouraging the periodic demolition and/or radical improvement of existing structures... whether they be commercial or residential. New construction and new improvements get taxed at their "market rate" valuation. Given how insane prices are in the area (and how very, very little teachers make), I find it hard to believe that tax revenues from new construction wouldn't cover the costs required to support new families.
> Look at the development in Palo Alto over the last ten years. It's largely commercial and this isn't an accident.
coughredliningcough :)
So now we're stuck in a dichotomy between 4+ stories steel and glass, and the "original" SF Edwardian architecture, which doesn't scale as well as Paris's stone.
There are plenty of quarries nearby, that I’ve seen in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. It would be a better idea to build using reinforced concrete, though.
But even wood is not so limited. Most parcels here are limited by zoning to 2 stories. We could easily build 4-story wooden buildings, and double the city’s density. Some of the oldest wooden buildings are 5-story buildings in earthquake country,[0] and allegedly there are plenty of 10-story wooden buildings that have survived earthquakes in Vancouver.[1]
I think some of the appetite for reinforced concrete is because housing is so difficult to build around here, that it’s only worth going through the effort if the prices are high enough to justify expensive materials. Also, steel and glass allow you to have big windows.
[0] http://gizmodo.com/5846501/how-japans-oldest-wooden-building...
[1] https://www.minnpost.com/earth-journal/2015/07/how-tall-can-...
But if you think it's ugly, that's fine -- you don't need to visit or live there.
One is our increasing indulgence in irrationality, to the extent that we almost celebrate it. I would never have guessed that hard-right social conservatism would still be a dominant force in American politics, much less a booming business. So I got that wrong, and I'm willing to admit that happened because I didn't take the time to understand those who thought differently from myself, or how their social motivations, family backgrounds, and economic pressures are different from my own. So, my bad.
The other is the continuing notion that it's somehow desirable, much less necessary, to cram everyone into a few high-density cities on either coast. From a 1990s perspective, it appeared that the growing availability of fast Internet connections and the rise of online social, technical, and business networking resources was finally going to liberate us from crowded, noisy, polluted urban prisons with endless traffic jams, out-of-control taxes, and multi-kilobuck rents.
It should have become both possible and desirable to do anything from anywhere, from the middle of flyover territory to the north coast of Alaska to the freaking International Space Station. Instead, we just get more of the same complaints. Rent is too damn high, there's too much traffic, and man, San Francisco/Seattle/Austin/New York used to be cool until all these techies/hippies/yuppies/homeless people/Republicans showed up and ruined it.
I'm not willing to concede that my worldview is wrong about this. This time, it's everyone else who's being stupid and needs to get a clue.
Just leave.
Admittedly part of the problem is I, like most of my generation, grew up in the suburbs. Once I turned 18 I couldn't wait to get out.
I could work remote and move back to my hometown or Missouri or Thailand -- but why would I? I'd be sacrificing much of my current life to do so. Of course my opinion would probably change if I had kids, but for now I live in a city for a reason.
But if it's that important to someone that they live in that particular city, to the exclusion of all other possibilities available on the planet, then they shouldn't complain when it turns out that real estate and transportation are limited resources that somebody has to pay for. It's the whining about the costs and downsides that bothers me the most about these articles.
People who act like they don't have a choice, when they do have a near-infinite variety of choices compared to most people on Earth, annoy me.
I whole-heartedly disagree. It's much better to try to change things and improve the world instead of throwing your hands up and accepting the status quo as immutable fact. The truth is that real estate in SF is limited largely by anti-growth laws. People have to pay exohorbinantly high prices for it only because of these laws (for the most part). I think we should try to change those laws and make the region a better place for everyone to live. I don't want to give up and let SF become a haven for the rich (plus the handful of affordable housing lottery winners).
Of course, if it turns out that we can't make the Bay Area into the welcoming, inclusive, fun, and livable place I would love to see it be then, yeah, I'll move somewhere else. Life's too short.
Also, I cometely agree with how surprising it is that cities have surged in popularity for well-paid, technically smart workers. And yet, I really like living in a city for all the reasons the grandparent comment mentioned. Maybe VR will change that value proposition though :-)
Someone in another thread pointed out that if this were the problem, New York would be the cheapest place in the country.
The local anti-growth political sentiment is a problem but ultimately there's just not that much space in SF to expand into, being a peninsula. Any sustained expansion of housing in SF will have to happen vertically, at which point we're back to the NYC example. The additional housing won't be "affordable" unless the developers are forced to build the 21st-century equivalent of Cabrini Green.
Also, as you point out, living in urban areas is a luxury good; as wealth increases (for a large enough segment of the population, at least), they're choosing to use that wealth to live somewhere a bit more exciting than a field in Kansas. I agree they shouldn't complain that it costs more than a house in flyover country, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't complain about a city making it unnecessarily difficult to add housing stock. Those who already live there are, of course, more entitled than anyone to complain about their lack of options when they get kicked out of their rent-controlled unit.
Funny anecdote about "north coast of Alaska." My dad visited the oilfields up there a few times as part of his job. In the early 90s I got a phone call from him on a satellite phone as he watched a midnight pickup softball game after the summer solstice. The delay in the phone connection was really entertaining and fascinating for me as a young-ish kid. I shudder to think how expensive that call was at the time, per minute.
20 years later, I rode up there on my motorcycle. I unclipped my iPhone 3GS from my handlebars, had a 5 bar 3G signal, and called my dad, effectively for free. It wasn't even roaming, because I was in the US! I didn't have to know how it worked, and in fact I still don't. It certainly wasn't a laggy satellite connection. Amazing how times change.
The hyper dense mega city model is a failure for quality of life. Instead, a dense CBD with trains distributing the population to the suburbs, with medium then low density, with shopping zones on walkable strips built around the train stations, is the way to go. Add in good planning, with buses and cycle infrastructure for last mile. And lots of parks.
Melbourne, where the modern concept of suburban living as we know it originated, executes well on this. Perfect, no. But a good framework.
There are countless communities across the US that are aging, as the youth have moved to the metropolis to work. Anyone that can extract money from the internet can benefit from this trend.
Couple that with low interest rates, good credit and a duplex and you can live without paying a cent for housing. This works well in towns with some sort of natural beauty, but few jobs. Grab those tourist dollars via airbnb rentals and take it easy.
You can buy a house in walking distance to the decent downtown of Westerly, RI for 120,000 and hop on an Amtrak train and be in Manhattan in 3 hours.
And if you like sailing, there are some great harbors here, like Mystic.
There are plenty of places to adventure to, Block Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vinyard, Cape Cod.
What are you, a suburban developer from the 50's?
Urban areas often provide a higher quality of life than The Geography of Nowhere. Do some introductory research into urban design. Read some Jane Jacobs. You thought the human desire for community and activity was just going to leave?
To be uncharitable, urban areas are perfect for housing worker drones bereft of ownership rights.
That's what I'd call the suburbs: Nothing to do, no competition, and labor is kept cheap. http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/stuck-in-1950s-subu...
If one cares about resources and climate change it's a non starter: Unless you are productive with the land, sprawl is a horrible waste of resource. (About half of a suburban family's energy use is transportation.)
Meanwhile, as the labor movement gained steam, corporate
leaders were struggling to prevent employees from
unionizing. “In the early 20th century, there was a
limited but influential set of companies engaging in
what is commonly referred to as ‘welfare capitalism,’”
Mozingo explains. “The idea was to prevent turnover
and control workers better by making factory sites that
were tidy, safe, and well-ventilated with good lighting
and all those things.
For what it's worth, I actually agree with a lot of the criticism directed toward campuses like Apple's. It's hard to describe the renderings we've seen in any terms other than dystopian. A building designed to keep everyone looking inward is better suited to a religious cult than to a creative organization.
The premise of the article is that choice is good for workers, and urbanity fosters choice. Corporations creating isolated campuses removes choice and reduces quality of life.
>A building designed to keep everyone looking inward is better suited to a religious cult than to a creative organization.
That's not the intent of the design and the view is pretty much identical for both sides: trees. The point of the shape is to connect as much as possible while creating a secure courtyard. The closest path from one side of the building to another is outside.
Regardless, it's very clear that there's no way to win with these people. No matter what decisions the managers and architects arrive at, there will always be some ankle-biting from noncontributing journalists and academics with political axes to grind.
The point of the shape is to connect as much as possible while creating a secure courtyard. The closest path from one side of the building to another is outside.
Interesting, I didn't know that. My understanding was that the courtyard area would be easily accessible to everyone working there.
If there was a light rail to an urban center and I could get my daily/weekly errands done via walking or cycling, sure.
But the car centric culture of, well, just about everywhere is IMHO grosser than an "urban prison"
Let me guess you write poems for a living?
So I think it's perfectly fine to build a Paris-like building if you must build something. It'll just never happen without legal action.
The sentiment that the Bay Area can't allow more homes to be built offends me, and it hurts even more that people who feel this way are the vast majority of voices that reach city councils, and that they're far more organized during elections.
(Oh, and I do miss Berlin)
Of course, my expectation was that it was more dense than SF, so when I found a source that confirmed it, I was all too willing to trust it. But in retrospect (based on your protest on the matter), the housing itself was quite dense in many areas, but there were many parks and large spaces of open areas between the housing blocks.
Then as now, not everyone is entitled to a nice two-bedroom San Francisco flat for $2000/month. Tokyo has figured that out. Moscow has figured that out. London has figured that out. Why are San Franciscans so slow to catch on?
'Yuppy' mean young urban professional. If you live in SF, working in the tech profession, you're likely some value of 'young,' and therefore a yuppy.
(S)he starts off by stating privilege as a 5th-generation San Franciscan (obviously, the kind who DESERVE to live in the city), and who fled in the tech boom of the 90s. The usual rant about whitewashing and yuppies and artists being pushed out ensues. Of course they don't want more housing built, because then dirty artists from other places would move in -- you need to preserve the history of San Francisco's starving artists, and never let new culture of any kind in.
Except (s)he says, okay, maybe some "affordable" housing should be built. No discussion on the endless problems of how to manage the waiting list for this "bucket" of housing, or what happens when those people become too successful.
And, in the end, (s)he has moved to Berlin, a city almost TWICE as dense as San Francisco. No doubt some NIMBY in Berlin at some point whined about building more housing for these "outsiders", but I'm sure (s)he does not have the critical thinking necessary to recognize that such a special flower could be the same force in Berlin that (s)he whines about happening to San Francisco.