I made a zoning map of SF yesterday. A lot of our city is sprawl, too: one house, one driveway, one garage per lot.

https://dcpos.ch/yimby/zoning

We can get two birds with a stone by building housing: make our city more walkable and beautiful, and also alleviate the housing shortage .

Want to support infill, upzoning, and want to beat the NIMBYs? Consider joining SF Yimby.

It's a small group of ppl who care a lot about this, they're smart and effective, and many of these local issues are right on the bubble around 50% support in low turnout elections. This means, with a bit of activism, you can swing the outcome.

I'd also recommend joining the efforts to put "split roll" (removing the Prop 13 restrictions for commercial property) on the ballot in 2020. The biggest turnouts are in presidential election years and there should be an electrified voter base then. Zoning is often favored by well-heeled incumbents, many who get a free ride on new homeowners, and with a stable tax base cities can begin to invest again in more infrastructure, schools, parks, etc.

https://www.facebook.com/MakeItFairCA/videos/164108883947055...

This is awesome. I'd like to support yimby efforts. Do you have a link where I can see how I can contribute as developer?

Their website is SFYIMBY.org. I work for another organization that does similar work called the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition.

There are plenty of pro-housing organizers in San Francisco if you're willing to get plugged in and volunteer.

Clickable: https://sfyimby.org

@who_is_firing what's your Github?

How do you join?

Add the sfbarf/ sfYimby calendar to your google calendar: http://www.sfbarf.org/

As you can see, there's at least one thing to do per week. Our monthly meetings are the 1st Wednesday of the month but there is a ton of stuff to do besides that.

sfyimby.org !

there are meetings every month, next one should be posted soon. https://facebook.com/pg/sfyimbyparty/events/

Also @foggyeyes69, do you have a Github?

Putting together a list of technologists who care about Yimby stuff.

>Every other American city, except for maybe New York City, is endless chain store filled sprawl which requires a car to do anything in.

Ever been to Chicago, New Orleans, Austin, San Diego, Denver, Santa Fe, Boston, Providence, Miami etc?

Every large U.S. city has one or two more or less walkable neighborhoods. My last two apartments in St. Louis had walkscores of 84 and 93, respectively. But St. Louis is not walkable in any general sense and neither are most of the cities you listed.

Neither is most of the Bay Area.

I agree about Chicago and Boston, and I've never been to New Orleans. However, you can't walk anywhere in Austin.

I went to a CocoaConf in Austin two years ago. I snapped a lot of desire path photos, because my daily walk from my hotel to the conference was mostly devoid of pedestrian facilities, including even sidewalks.

http://m.imgur.com/a/NhaYH

Clearly, people are walking there, but the city doesn't seem to give a shit.

TIL desire path

I mean, if you live and work downtown it's pretty alright.

But then you don't really have easy walkable access to Burnet, East Side, SoCo, etc. I mean, you get 6th. Maybe Rainey depending on where you live downtown.

But yeah, I lived halfway to Bee Cave and worked on 360. That made me much happier than being directly downtown.

I live in Austin (central, Hyde Park area) and walk, bike, or bus everywhere.

Those are probably the only two cities on that list which would be (relatively) doable without cars. Pretty good public transit and significant areas that are fairly dense.

Not New Orleans. Like any city, you can identify areas where you might live and work without a car but you're going to have pretty limited mobility. Public transit is somewhat better than it used to be but it's still fairly limited--now a variety of streetcars but no subway for obvious reasons.

~ fly-over country ~

Chicago, Denver, Austin and, say, Santa Fe are "fly-over country"?

I think you misunderstood the term, it's loosely geographical, and more geopolitical.

HN is, as always, not the perfect avenue for sarcasm.

And yes, I've heard people refer to the Midwest as "fly-over" country, ignoring specifically Chicago, Denver, Austin, Houston, and Dallas.

Seattle is an extremely walkable/bikeable city and has plenty of nature right outside. It also has a very sizable tech population with excellent salaries, especially considering the lack of income tax sucking 10% out of every paycheck.

Oh no it's terrible here, rains all the time, you'd hate it. Should probably stay in the Bay Area.

You're joking, but the weather can really be an issue for some people. For me and my family, it's not so much the rain as the appalling lack of sunshine year round and the early nightfall in winter. And the "Seattle Freeze" is not a myth, either.

As a native minnesotan now living in Seattle, I have to say that rumors of bad weather are greatly exaggerated.

I've heard the only place worse than Seattle is Portland. Filled with cannibals.

I think you misspelled "cannabis" ;)

And traffic is the worst - geographically, it's a natural bottleneck. You're fine if you live centrally, but otherwise it's a crapshoot how long it will take to drive anywhere.

I lolled - the Seattle NIMBY defending against hordes of bay area refugees. :)

Having visited both places, I can hardly blame them! And Eugene is even worse - I left half a leg there, and last I saw there was a running gunfight over who'd get the calf meat.

Maybe if you live downtown, but i visited and couldnt go anywhere without a car. Theres basically no public transport.

Yes, exactly, don't come here! No public transit. No massive collection of rapid rides[0], no growing light rail system[1], and no bus usage just below San Fran and growing [2]. And certainly no huge and growing collection of bike trails [3]. Really there's just rain and coffee here. At least it's some good coffee.

[0] http://metro.kingcounty.gov/travel-options/bus/rapidride/ [1] http://soundtransit3.org/map#map [2] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-sees-b... [3] http://stb-wp.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/09...

Can you please cite your source for the good coffee? I hate when people don't give evidence in their posts here. Seriously, this community is going to hell.

Well I didn't cite because we don't have any. I mean really we have basically no Coffee [1]. I mean, TBH, we are a boring bland place with only big box shops - no record stores or anything unique [2]. You should really just drive through and pay no attention.

[1] - https://www.bustle.com/articles/155686-which-us-city-has-the... [2] - http://www.infogroup.com/defining-the-hippest-us-cities

Seattle has also aggressively ramped up apartment construction with demand. Rents are projected to level next year, which is nice.

the restrictions aren't on the green areas. The city can keep all of our parks and nature and be fine. The restriction are on the building heights and number of units on vast areas of the city that are already developed.

For example, the west portala Sherwood Forest area is essentially a suburb within the city. There are huge lots that are 5000 sq ft when next door neighborhoods you have 1600sq ft lots with 2-3 units. Essentially you have suburb neighborhoods right next to others that have 10x the density.

A developer would love to buy units in those areas and convert to duplexes but is literally impossible to do this.

So again, it's not a question of preserving our parks but a question of preserving our suburbs within the city so rich people get to live in a suburb within the city and watch their property prices skyrocket instead of allowing the city to expand and accommodate the middle class.

Also, the city allows buyers to take what used to be a family home (e.g. 4-5 bedrooms), tear it down and put up a 1-2 bedroom house (more modern, more amenities, e.g. garage, sauna, etc). Why policymakers allow this if they believe there's a supply problem is beyond me - on my block the number of bedrooms has gone down by about a quarter in the last few years as a result...

What's the regulation that allows you to do that ? From what I understood, you aren't legally allowed to reduce the number of units that a property is zoned for.

Units =/= bedrooms. People are replacing units with 3-4 bedrooms with 2-bedroom units that have larger rooms.

The building regulations in SF have done more to encourage suburban sprawl than to discourage it.

Of course if density weren't outlawed SF would look different, but it would still be a very appealing place to live. You could triple the number of housing units in SF and it would be a city of low apartment buildings and townhouses with great views. You could increase the housing supply 10-fold and it would be a city of midrise apartment buildings with a fantastic climate and beautiful parks just outside the city.

Yep, replacing the rowhouses in Richmond & Sunset with 5-story walkups would probably triple the housing supply by itself.

I don't really know much about SF or local utilities. I know agriculture takes up most of California's water supply. But even though a relatively small amount is consumed directly, would there be enough water to substantially house 2x-3x the current population? How much would price spike?

Well, a lot of the people who can't afford to live in SF, but would like to, still live in California, consuming California water. They just live farther out in the north, east, or south bays.

Of course, if SF actually had 3, 5, or 10 times the population it does today then there would probably have to be a lot of infrastructure changes too. But the limit probably wouldn't be available water for residents.

Household water usage, especially for dense housing like apartments that lack yards, is such a small percentage of overall water usage that it's a rounding error. Agriculture and then industry are the main users of water.

I'm living in the bay area right now and I find it one of the most ugly and boring places I've ever seen. Can't wait till I'm out of here. San Fransisco is less boring and ugly, but at night it's crawling with homeless junks and the weather sucks. Silicon Valley is also this endless chain store thing you describe and there's almost no nightlife.

I stopped reading at "The weather sucks"

It's pretty divisive. Some people dream of living a place where they can wear a light jacket all the time. Other people love intense heat.

But it's hard to argue against an average of 1 day of precipitation per month in June, July, August and September...And if you live in the right neighborhood, it's also sunny from 10-4 every day in that period as well...

> But it's hard to argue against an average of 1 day of precipitation per month in June, July, August and September...And if you live in the right neighborhood, it's also sunny from 10-4 every day in that period as well...

Nah, it's easy to argue against that, you just have to had lived in SoCal where it's sunnier and a nice comfortable bit warmer :p

I stopped reading at "I stopped reading"

Restrictions on building probably makes SF more sprawling, not less. Imagine if you allowed people to buy up a block in Sunset District and build 40 story apartment buildings. People wouldn't have to live in Livermoore anymore.

It might just be me, but a neighborhood of 5-story apartment buildings isn't less nice to live in than one of 2-story rowhouses.

I agree with coldtea that this view doesn't match reality. I live in Santa Monica and while there is sprawl in Los Angeles county, I can walk or bike to everything I need, including my work or the beach. The trails of the Santa Monica mountains are close, let alone a couple hour drive to San Gabriel mountains or the Joshua Tree desert.

Never understand why everyone on HN is all "build baby build" all the time.

They pulled out all the stops in Brooklyn (or most of them) and let me tell you it is not pleasant. Unless you like "modern" looking condos that fall apart in five years.

But I guess people don't move to SF for the sturdy quaint old houses. Apparently there's not much love for an urban-looking Brooklyn either. Generic rules.

I guess I would sacrifice the look of my city so that normal middle class people like teachers, policemen, firemen, artists, and minorities could live beside myself and fellow engineers and doctors.

The whole "we need to preserve the architecture of my city" is a first world problem. What comes before that is the ability for the middle and lower class to survive in the city. Cities are living dynamic entities and should be capable of change.

It's also unclear that building more luxury housing (because that is what will be built, there as here) stabilizes rental prices for everyone else.

I can see why it's tempting to think about it as a supply and demand problem. But be realistic about the motivations of developers, too.

And it's not like "affordable housing" requirements work, either, when those are defined relative to average income.

Luxury housing becomes more affordable with time. There are plenty of buildings in New York that were targeted upscale at the time they were built, but are no longer upscale and thus rent to people lower down the income spectrum now versus then.

Fellow New Yorker here. Thanks to all of that construction, rents here have actually decreased over the past year: https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-new-york-rent-tre...

That's why we're all "build baby build": Increase supply enough to meet demand and you can get prices to drop. It's worth it in order to help maintain the existence of affordable housing.