I’d probably point to the concerted efforts between the housing authorities and the regional VA office that, with combined HUD & VA funding, essentially ended homelessness among veterans in the city first though.
Kinda unfair to compare them to other American cities tbh, it’s always easier to do stuff like this when you can actually build.
No, it's not money, it's something else. "Build Culture" is a good name for it, whatever it is.
It most certainly is a lack of money that prevents building.
The best thing you can do for building is to give smart people a lot of money and get the fuck out of the way.
Relative to cost of living and their median/top level income?
Your complaint is that people are effectively being paid the same as those prior generations.
My general impression is that people haven't changed much, and the American "can-do" spirit is alive and well. There are some problems with zoning laws, and many folks are financially clueless or even irresponsible (don't have savings accounts and such), but to me the limiting factor seems to be capital.
> Your complaint is that people are effectively being paid the same as those prior generations.
I think you might have gotten confused by how the article uses "the same purchasing power" in a few places. It's actually saying (and again, I Am Not An Economist) is that gains from increasing productivity have not gone to the middle class.
In any event, my point is that if people had more money they would build more.
I don't find the "cultural stagnation" thesis very compelling.
Also this whole statistical view of people is flawed. For the kinds of jobs where increased productivity should go to the worker, perhaps it did, and we call them rich now and move the goalpost to exclude them.
As for cultural changes, if you compare to other countries there are clear differences today. I think of government participation broadly as a "theraputic" institution. You contribute to something larger to make yourself feel good. This could mean building things or cleaning up trash etc. In the US however, for the last few generations this disproportionately means vote/protest for social progress agendas (in the eyes of the citizen), such as to impose "fairness" or lifestyle change. People's civic energy is basically channeled into just drama as the fight goes back and forth producing nothing.
I don't think so.
In fact, horrible as it is, being homeless is a great incentive to build (source: I have been homeless). The realisation that everything I depended on to keep me safe and warm had failed, and that I could really only rely on myself to do that, was a life-changer.
Giving people money will keep them dependent. People in that situation don't need handouts. They need the ability and opportunity to improve their situation themselves. For me, that was relaxed rules about hiring casual construction labour. I don't know what a homeless person would need now to improve their situation. But I'm willing to bet it's more likely to be the removal of constraints rather than handouts.
Eventually, one of my relatives died and left my mom some money and she paid for some therapy and some of it worked and I went on to be a more-or-less functioning adult, with a job and home and all that.
YMMV
> Giving people money will keep them dependent.
There's a danger of that for some people, I agree, but I still think that dependent well-fed housed people are a step up from dependent hungry homeless people.
> People in that situation don't need handouts. They need the ability and opportunity to improve their situation themselves.
I say they need both: give them food and a place to live and education or training or therapy or whatever they need to develop the ability and find or create the opportunities. USA is a ridiculously wealthy nation, we could afford take care of our own if we just prioritized it.
> being homeless is a great incentive to build
I believe that people like to build. Look at kids, eh? LEGO bricks?
Frankly I think it's severely messed up that our society uses homelessness as a stick to keep people in line. I.e. "Don't lose your job! You'll wind up on the street!"
Good for them, but not building.
Once you are aware of it, my guess is you’ll see it everywhere.
"The Westerly Condominium" https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Westerly+Condominium/@...
You can see the podium is a base of concrete and above it is 4 stories of wood framing construction. The black parts are already wrapped but you see the plywood in the top right.
I'm not sure how I feel about that particular building.
I don't like it aesthetically (despite being into most Brutalist architecture.) But that's a matter of taste.
It doesn't integrate into the environment very well. For example, the Pacific ocean is right there, but the design seems to ignore that. They should (IMO, IANAArchitect) have designed it so that more residents had better views, and one of the roof-top lounge things should be facing it (with wind breaks or even windows!) And there should be wind-power turbines on the roof, you have a nearly continuous wind coming off the ocean.
Despite all that, I think it's really instructional to compare that block to the surrounding blocks.
It shows what the Outer Sunset could be. It's downright weird that SF's Western coast is so underdeveloped. (Although I prefer it that way. I grew up here and it's kind of nice that the beach isn't all built up like the Marina district, or even Venice Beach in LA, or the waterfront in Seattle, or really almost anywhere.) Part of it is that SF is relatively young. Most places would have converted the area decades ago.
One thing though: I had a friend who lived at 46th and worked downtown, he moved to Oakland and his commute time was cut in half. There are reasons why the Sunset district is so sleepy. You meet a lot of people here that think the city ends at Twin Peaks.
We would have to build some sort of freeway if the Outer Sunset were to be converted to greater density.
The building likely doesn't have a roof deck because code and planning make that a very expensive proposition. Due to more recent planning code changes, roof decks under some circumstances count against the number of floors of housing you can build, so a builder is trading off units they can sell with the amenity value of a deck.
SPUR has an Ocean Beach master plan which you might find interesting: https://www.spur.org/featured-project/ocean-beach-master-pla...
"For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades" https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...