Eh, San Francisco's voters have been drinking crazy water for some time. New developments blocked by renters. Stringent building codes and environmental reviews defended by those who think they're being compassionate to the poor. Scolding tech companies for hiring in the city and then panicking when they stop hiring in the city. This obviously isn't all of them. But it's not like this wasn't predictable over the past decade.
Too much local democracy: "I don't want someone in Sacramento deciding for me" is how you end up with this expression of pure individualism, where Atherton residents who have never taken public transportation in their life can block Caltrain development used by the working mass.
The whole every urban area of North America is a NIMBY nest. Pretty much every city is stuck with swathes of land zoned only for single family homes, with any density needing development agreements and land use change hearings and etc. Some cities are less geographically constrained (more sprawl is possible) or slower growing (the zoning changes can accommodate the growth) but the issue is the same everywhere.
A cookie-cutter, mass-produced home that has no clear architectural style and prizes superficial appearance and size over quality.
Sorry for being facetious, I sound like a jerk, but there must exist a threshold in willingness to devalue what is typically one's greatest asset and more importantly decrease your quality of life. By all means be as selfless and altruistic as you would like but do not expect everyone else to follow suit.
Your argument boils down to "if you allow anything more than a single family home this worst-case scenario is what will come of it".
Most of those issues are issues caused by current zoning practices. If moderate density was allowed almost everywhere, then there wouldn't be this stark divide between the 99 lots that are single family homes and the 1 lot that the developer has spent 12 years getting a development agreement for and needs to build a high rise to recoup the cost. If you can build more housing almost everywhere, you eliminate much of the housing and homelessness crisis. If there are specific land uses that are incompatible with residential areas, that can be addressed.
No one who is pushing for more development wants a chemical refinery in your back yard. But maybe your the house on the corner might get turned into a modest 8 unit apartment building, same as happened widely before the 1970s.
I don't see the point of adding homeless encampments. We already have those. What I want is a Housing First model as it's proven to effectively address homelessness in multiple countries around the world.
But yes, I would love public transit coming closer to my house, I would love a dense living situation that's walkable with cafes, pubs, and shops underneath. I want to live in a so-called "5 minute neighborhood" and/or "15 minute city". I hate having to drive 20+ minutes through traffic lights to do anything.
I wanted these things before I bought my house, but it's too expensive to buy a large enough space for my needs in a place that has all of these things nearby. Not because it has to be, but because zoning laws enforced by NIMBYs enforce it.
It doesn't have to. Housing can be affordable while going up in nominal terms.
Neither do I think most San Francisco homeowners think about housing supply strategically. They're pissed off about a specific view being blocked. Or construction noise. Or their area's average rent going up. (?!?) Alternatively, they're comfortable and can't imagine someone might be better off housed in worse conditions, cheaply, than struggling to make rent in a decked-out flat.
Housing cannot be affordable if it goes up in real terms though. In an ideal world house prices would increase 1:1 with wage growth from an affordable baseline.
There are 2 ways to fix it: either crash the market or introduce policies which will cause either stagnation or below inflation growth in housing prices for at least 20 or 30 years.
There's only one way to do that - a command economy, with all housing owned and doled out by the government. That just doesn't work, anywhere, ever.
You have to work very hard to ignore the fact that some places are more desirable than others to live in, and sometimes those desirable places change. Also, different people have different priorities, desires, and ability to afford both for their housing. How do you accommodate that pressure without 100% control over the entire real estate market?
Nobody's trying to realistically get to the "ideal world". What you want is an "improved world".
House prices and appreciation were basically the same throughout the US until something like the 1950s, when places like CA began to far outstrip other parts of the country. I don't think that CA became a desirable place to live suddenly in the 50s, but perhaps it did?
This is also ignoring sheer population growth, and the unrivaled economic behemoths that have come out of California since the 1950s and produced a ton of wealth for Californians.
Supply and demand, combined with “rugged individualism” valued so highly in the states. That individualism is largely what drives NIMBY mentalities.
Not necessary. A land value tax provides a market-based solution to this problem.
We need a shared definition of "working" then. There are plenty of ways to disincentivize low-density real estate development and incentivize high density and affordable housing, and all of them involve regulation and tax reform to control the market to some degree.
This post apparently assumes any non-free-market structure that "doesn't work" would be a worse outcome than we have currently, where there are more vacant homes than homeless people.
Except for Vienna.
The real underlying problem is a lack of new housing stock, at least partly due to the decade long neglect in the construction trade following the housing bubble collapse.
Yes it can. It just cannot be better than other comparable investments. If single family housing appreciated, on average, 0.25% per year in real terms, we'd likely be looking at an entirely different housing market.
For how long? If housing is a good investment, eventually the cost of housing will outpace the ability of new entrants to the market to afford it. If you're already "in the market", you might be OK. But if you're not, even the down payment may be completely out of reach.
Infinitely. Wages go up in nominal terms, too. What matters is the real housing price hovering around zero. (Slightly above, localized, is also fine if balanced by migration.)
House, as in structure, yes. Home, as in structure + land, probably not. Real wages are higher today than they were in the 80s [1]. One would expect some of that to filter into land value.
While I do get your point, it also has been generally true, for most modern cities for a long time (excluding short term fluctuations). Prices will go up as, as long as city is desirable to live in.
It holds true, long as cities don't collapse, which policies that lead to increasing prices of housing also can contribute to, by making city not desirable to live in.
Maybe when all of this commercial real estate dies they'll rezone/remove zoning and allow people to build where they can.
Sure residents can be NIMBYs but FAANG doesn't want to have their beautiful campuses flanked by the poors either.
I once spoke with a general manager of a large hotel that explained to me how certain levels of vacancy were targeted for this reason. I feel as though the methodology would be somewhat analogous.
Further, there is statistical modeling for sale that indicates what can be afforded in geographic locations. I’d claim that additional housing would be priced to what’s affordable rather than attempting to outbid the lowest listing as housing is a price-inelastic good.
We can then reason backwards on what's the minimum sized landlord that would benefit from artificially restricting supply.
"Investment", VCs are all around the US now and those who refuse to invest outside of city boundaries are going to have a bad time. At this point even setting shop in LA might be cheaper and give you a nicer scenery.
"Talent", hire remotely for the most talent-sensitive positions. Your react app is not rocket science.
The NIMBYs are right, we should stop moving there and stop paying them those extortionate rents.
I wonder how much of this is renters who feel they are just one IPO or acquisition away from being owners.
I don't think they're the ones protesting. One, it's irrational: if a windfall is around the corner, you want prices temporarily depressed. Two, political nihilism and detachment have been fashionable among San Francisco's political middle class for a few decades now. They are more likely to be proudly refusing to vote than attending town halls, speaking to their electeds or participating in protests. (I say this with sardonic affection for dear friends.)
The second point is starting to change. But culture has inertia. It will take time.
Maintain a ratio of residential to commercial and you don't have housing crunches and can keep your city at the density your residents choose.
We must elect pro-growth and pro-tech people who can bring competence to government. There's no other way out of this mess.
We'd love your support! https://growsf.org/donate
I find it curious though that your guide only endorses a single candidate, when the voters can rank multiple candidates.. Surely there are multiple candidates that stand out above the rest, and bringing attention to that set would help get better people into office?
According to the data, crime in SF is lower that it was a few years ago: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californ...
> Drug use and filth is everywhere.
Voters can’t seem to wrap their head around better housing policies to get people off the street. It’s disappointing, the entire Bay Area is guilty of this.
Every time I see something like this I will point out that during the anti-police movement that happened a while back, many police started reducing their activity either because they were told to, because prosecutes would refuse to prosecute, or because they didn't want to be the next person on the news. Many people in the LE community that I knew reduced the proactive policing, because of the hostile nature of it.
Every single one of them predicted that crimes would stop being reported and recorded, and that a year from now everyone was going to point to the fact crime has gone down as proof that things are getting better, when the reality was that people were going to stop using or relying on the police for help because they police wouldn't do anything because they had been instructed not to.
Crime isn't any lower, reported crime is.
The narrative that reported crime is down because of underreporting is very credulous of LEOs, because it's in the interest of police departments embroiled in controversy to make things look bad to justify their own budgets/jobs. Hence all the news stories about how SF is a crime-ridden hellhole. However, the police department's own numbers contradict this and they are forced to lean on "vibes".
They're usually talking about large amounts of more "petty crimes" - because even in the murder capital of the US (currently St Louis) it is 64.54 per 100,000 residents. Just not that many overall and you probably won't actually know someone who was murdered, especially if you're more toward the richer parts of town.
But the other crimes are much more common and you will see them relatively often if they occur. I wonder what percentage of people have seen shoplifting or had a car broken into, etc.
It's more about the "feel" of the city than the "real", unfortunately.
Well, yes, that's the problem. It's a perception easily manipulated, by media breathlessly covering the latest incident, interest groups like police unions making false claims, etc. Americans have a wildly incorrect perception of what crime has done over the last ~50 years.
Put another way, the guy stealing your catalytic converter isn't doing it because he's afraid to kill you or burn your house down. He's doing it because he has every reasonable expectation of getting away with it and getting paid for it.
Catalytic converter thefts are up everywhere, though. Not just in liberal bastions, but in places like Arkansas and Mississippi, too.
Cops saying "if you just gave us more money and toys, we'd stop crime" is a claim that should come with significant evidence to accept.
I don't doubt it. I doubt the cops' unsupported claim that said difference is an effective deterrent against the crime.
We'd need some solid numbers on converter theft rates relative to the car-owning population. But even then the numbers wouldn't be comparable, so it'll always come down to my "common sense" versus yours. My common sense says that when cops see a crime in progress and walk away whistling, it encourages further crime... and also discourages the victim from bothering to report it.
In fact, it looks like murders in San Francisco have been in roughly that range since 2009 (https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/murde...).
[1] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
But the difference between the EMT scenario is that there is that there is a potential that by getting involved you may not go home to see your family that night. In addition if you get involved and something goes wrong, you're going to be the next police officer on the news for "police brutality" and the rest of your life you'll forever be in fear of your life even if you did everything right. Furthermore the job of the police is not to protect citizens or stop crimes the supreme court has ruled as much, the police are an investigative force.
With the DA angle makes it even worse, because you spend the time and effort to arrest somebody and then they are back on the street a day later, what's the point in the first place. To put it other terms let's imagine for a second every day your boss took all the code you wrote and deleted it all, deleted all the backups and everything else, are you going to continue putting your best effort into coding, are you going to make sure the code compiles and the unit tests past? No you're going to do just enough to not get fired.
We can argue it shouldn't be that way but that is the reality of the situation, it turns out when you demonize a large group of people simply because they do their job, and criticize all of them as inhuman monsters and tell people that every single one of them is a bad person they start to lose some motivation.
Citizen: Someone stole my backpack and laptop out of my car!
Police: And?
Peer-reviewed research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20063061/ & https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/183666
i remember having a conversation with a LICSW who did a tremendous amount of work with drug addicted and homeless populations; she explained that when she really needed to, she could "beg, borrow, or steal" a way to find better housing for someone, but that really wasn't the crux of solving the individual's problems, it's only one facet.
even if someone who has untreated mental illness or drug addiction suddenly has a great new place to live, they're not going to stay at that address long if their other needs aren't treated.
i'm not saying there shouldn't be more affordable housing ASAP, or that it wouldn't radically improve some lives, but i get the impression that a lot of folks think homelessness is mainly a housing problem when it's really not so simple, and i think that needs to change if the problems have any chance at getting improved.
Houston has done it, and it can be done: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
There's an entire thriving economy in SF with jobs these people could be doing. What aren't they doing them? If cost of living is too expensive there, why not go to a cheaper city and do work there? If they have skills to be a white collar worker, SF is a great place to do that work and easily afford housing. Why aren't they doing it? Mental illness and drugs dominate the problem by such an order of magnitude that anything else save for harsh imprisonment to get off streets....especially subsidization of their lifestyle, will accomplish less than nothing.
[1] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
I think the data on the page you linked to only goes through 2019.
In addition, anecdotally, there is a decent amount of property crime that is not being reported because it is felt is is not worth the effort as the police are not able to do anything about it.
Is the decrease statistically significant after adjusting for population loss?
Shoplifting and other crimes simply being decriminalized.
https://missionlocal.org/2022/08/jenkins-removed-prosecutor-...
https://missionlocal.org/2022/08/narcotics-enforcement-spike...
https://missionlocal.org/2022/07/mayors-office-takes-hands-o...
Those that were overcome by drugs and mental issues would either destroy the housing or simply leave it or never take free housing.
(yes, there are many homeless that actually do _not_ want an apartment/house to take care of)
homeless? neglected commuters? neglected business owners? neglected public workers? neglected tourists? neglected
I just don't know what sort of people the city wants ?
I am pro-decriminalization but we need to be honest about the effects of chronic drug usage, especially methamphetamine.
Why especially Meth and not Heroin or other opioids?
Only until they come down and go into withdrawal later and need to pay for a fix.
In an ideal world, sure. You can't establish causality here for sure but correlation, definitely.
It absolutely is. The more addictive and mind altering a drug is, the more it contributes to users who contribute to crime and filth. Forget drugs, even high alcohol consumption is directly related to more crime and filth.
But SF poop is not the dog poop.
SEC. 40. DOG TO BE CONTROLLED SO AS NOT TO COMMIT NUISANCES. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person owning or having control or custody of any dog to permit the animal to defecate upon the public property of this City or upon the private property of another unless the person immediately remove the feces and properly dispose of it; provided, however, that nothing herein contained authorizes such person to enter upon the private property of another without permission. (b) It shall be unlawful for any person to walk a dog on public property of this City or upon the private property of another without carrying at all times a suitable container or other suitable instrument for the removal and disposal of dog feces.
Ending prohibition and diverting some resources from police to mental health and preventative services is just a sensible thing to do.
I would imagine mental illness would be a bigger barrier to handling a 9-5 job than drug use.
IIUC, the majority of people that drink alcohol and smoke weed daily work 9-5 just fine.
Is the same true for the majority of people that have mental illness? What are we even considering mental illness?
I don't think the visibly homeless crazy people have mild mental illness. I think their mental illness is a bigger problem then drug addiction if they even have that problem.
Drug addicts can work quite well in the trades (drywall hangers are famous for being meth-heads in some areas) but once "enforcement" starts cracking down on hiring them, they can't find work.
Other drugs are worse on both user and their environment (including alcohol), but they're not the source of the other problems. Rather, we are, when we reject such people and force them to live in squalor with no options.
I don't think _anyone_ has a legitimate justification to be smoking mystery substances on the street corner like I see, but that alone doesn't make them criminals unless _we_ make it so through our policies.
>"Drug use isn't associated with crime and filth until we make it so via harsh city policies."
Now you're saying that legalizing and regulating does not lead to a 'crime spike', which is a very different position.
Researchers seem to believe that it is virtually impossible to lead a functional (non-criminal) life when addicted to certain substances (like certain opiates, methamphetamines, and crack cocaine). From my personal experiences, this seems to be true; are you arguing that people addicted to these substances will lead healthy lives if the drugs are legalized?
For the record, I am in favor of fully legalizing everything, but I don't believe it'll somehow reduce or solve the crime issues.
Hell, having the government pay for your uber if you can blow high enough on the drink-o-meter would probably only cost some billions and save tremendous amounts of lives and money.
No one is a criminal in my eyes for just doing whatever drugs they do. You are, however, a criminal if you run around chasing people on the streets with an axe, screaming at them, and then steal a car[0] (I am aware that this is Seattle, not SF, but the point still stands).
And I honestly don't think that officially legalizing fentanyl or meth or whatever else they were on would have helped, especially since drug consumption crimes are de-facto non-enforced in Seattle (which imo is not a bad thing at all, I am totally fine with consumption not being a crime).
0. https://komonews.com/news/local/axe-wielding-man-apparently-...
The key here is probably the 'depending on the environment' bit. Hashish used to be closely associated with political assassinations, now... not so much. But it could be again, given the right(?) culture.
Not all drugs are equal. You can't drink your way into effectively schizophrenia, but you can get there in no time with the currently available super-potent variety of meth. Some drugs completely wreck your ability to live in a way compatible with holding down a job, which means that you'll pretty quickly have to turn to crime if you want to keep doing them.
What's worked very well in other nations is to literally supply people with as many drugs as they'd like.
The government handles the manufacture and distribution. All of it for free. In return:
1. The government knows who and how many drug users there are
2. Rehabilitation services can be provided. They may even be a requirement for someone to obtain the drugs.
3. Addicts can begin to lead a much more stable life due to a consistent supply. This has positive impacts on the society for many obvious reasons (e.g. little incentive for crime)
4. It is much easier for someone to ween off a drug if quality/supply is consistent.
FWIW, I know a lot of locals who graduated into tech or who were adjacent (EAs, front-office, etc.) and their lives are better for it, but there are lots who weren't appropriately positioned and missed the boat on the whole thing.
I know people thumb their nose on the state, but Florida is open for business.
But the real secret is Puerto Rico and their incredible tax incentives for software companies.
People don't live in SF because they want to live in a detached SFH and stay inside most of the day, I could do that anywhere in the US.
I feel you on the density. But reality is most of California is also suburbia. In Florida there are some smaller towns with some walk/bike-ability.
The Puerto Rico tax deal is the best available for US citizens, still.
You are laughable. The reason the City is in this state is because it pandered to tech firms that wanted the "coolness' without paying anything for it (and if anything, getting special dispensations for their own). They got tax breaks and perks, screwing every small local business and middle class residential tenant in sight, for big tech that didn't and doesn't care.
Only America is specifically designed to prevent any sort of social services, because people have the freedom to come into town to use those services and then leave before it's time to pay the tax for them.
This is why American cities have so many issues compared to European ones. From public transport to healthcare to education to crime, American is designed to be 100% individualistic and that is incompatible with how cities work. Cities are forced to subsidise surrounding areas.
Furthermore look at decaying cities in the 70s. The cities weren't subsidizing surrounding areas by providing services. Instead, many businesses and services straight moved out of cities to surrounding areas. So did many people.
It was only in the 90s when cities became hip again and services sprang back up in cities.
According to your notion, surrounding areas were subsidizing cities in the 70s.
Ever hear of the protests against Google buses? The young people wanted to live in SF but the jobs were down in Silicon Valley. To attract them, the tech giants bused them from SF to Mountain View, Cupertino, Menlo Park, etc...
Was SF freeloading off of Silicon Valley suburbs then? Your notion doesn't stand the test of history and data.
BTW, the busing is still going on.
Also what percentage of tech workers working in SF lived in SF? From my circle it was around 70%. Do you know who didn't live in SF? Often parents and people who couldn't afford to live there.
According to your notion, why isn't the town the employee resides also collecting commercial property tax on where the employee works? That town provides services too.
No more people coming into the city and freeloading.
Go tell people how much SF residents pay for museums and how much they pay if they are low income. Compare that to people who don't live in SF but are low income.
The primary BART connection points are near the Embarcadero. Muni is so slow from the SOMA that it is often easier and faster to walk to/from those BART stops. Oftentimes, instead of MUNI, you saw people with scooters or bikes.
The people going to the other BART stops don't need to connect to MUNI. They could be working for the city and can just get right out and walk a few blocks.
The tech people I knew detested BART and completely ignored MUNI. It was Uber for them.
The tech people I knew detested BART and completely ignored MUNI.
It was Uber for them.
As for Muni (it's an abbreviation not an acronym), every BART station within San Francisco (and the Daly City station) gets Muni service except for Glen Park. The Glen Park station is a short walk from the J.
What has happened is people can move and cities weren't ready for that. Moving things to the federal level is the final backstop against it, but even that eventually runs out.
Just look at the recent big name moves from California to Texas: Joe Rogan and Elon Musk (just two very public names) needed California's support to start their fortunes, now they have them best move to Texas for lower taxes. You can always fly back for the odd meeting, use their educated workforces and infrastructure and save $.
- - Yogi BerraYes there's drug use and filth everywhere. So understand this: they were not special snowflakes, got traumas ripped into them or badly educated or coerced into using drugs. Or, or, or, evicted. Those guys are evicted, you're sneering on them because they couldn't make that landlord totally pleased at the same time as his best friend the boss was totally pleased. Dude fucking impossible rent, like at Stanford economics class they quote $1200, no it's $4000, who knows. Like if the landlord who is a poker player essentially detects you being over a barrel who knows. Like I was talking to an activist this conversation flipped her from NIMBY to YIMBY, I told her look in Santiago there's basically no enforcement of zoning in many places, so people build really high, $200 rent in a good location. She figured they only built housing for rich people in SF, true but then those rich people move to that housing leaving behind empty housing less rich people move into, who leave behind less expensive housing, and so on. Hermit crabs. But not $4000 rent.
So also those people are wretched, which you are not. Some are absurd but they suffer for their drug use not in the future every week. And their public suffering is a service to the landlord in his negotiations which he pays absolutely nothing to them for, I was telling Jonathan Ramos for being wretched on the sidewalk for everybody to treat you like you're invisible, that coercion is worth $3000 a month to the landlord rather than getting bargained down, put in an auction, having to compete against a new building going up right next door (in some neighborhoods there's less of that), the evicteds are valuable to the landlord. Landlord should pay a tax on rent to compensate them for breathing fear into tenants. Like oh my god, if I lose my job I'll get evicted, then I'll get raped! Gasp! Yeah dude people suffering, and from all over America SF takes them all in, because they can survive at night in winter there. You ever worked in construction? You ever stopped a crime? I've stopped 31, no losses, in SF in particular in Chinatown next to the Mission where all those strap-ups do all their advertising on everything about their super-cool credit cards, and advertising platforms. Yes it's cool, no it's not cool.
It is super expensive. Landlord's fault really. And by now the fundamental economics of the city is messed up, though there's plenty of 4 story buildings in place of 60 story buildings.
And you know? Twitter when it was a respectable business (sort of they asked for homework, make them a whole app) stedda censoring a sitting president, no matter what he said, they opened an office in the Tenderloin. I went near there, I think to the Square office which for convenience was adjacent. Dude rough neighborhood, but you gotta let the junkie get something, somewhere, like crack is due to flourine overdose, that's why there was a crack epidemic in America and not elsewhere, and black those hit hardest are very sensitive to flourine. They think it tastes like shit, so that's why they buy bottled water always--an apparently false pejorative stereotype that's true and positive--that's why they don't have every single one of their kids with some psychiatric birth defect. It's the most toxic thing there is, more than plutonium. Corrodes everything, gold even. And it causes sugar cravings, so even for the purpose of better teeth it's counterproductive. That's why there's so many busted fat people in America and not Europe, there's running water in Europe in America? Only brine. Salted on purpose, poisoned hard. Good for your teeth yeah, only reacts with teeth, no other cell, and 97% of the periodic table, literally only 3 molecules that don't react to it in the whole universe.
Eh, flag for human review. Guess it's too strong, this subject. Maybe I'm a little pissed. Must be the salt.
The guidelines ask you not to do this.
I suspect this will inevitably be blamed on greedy capitalist building
owners, but the crazy tax assessors have some blame here, too. They value
these buildings in the hundreds of millions of dollars and asses taxes
based on that valuation - and that was "ok" because the building owners
could extract that kind of value from the buildings by raising the rents.
Now they can't - but the valuation and the taxes owed stay the same. If
they hadn't tried to squeeze every last tax dollar out of the real estate
market in the first place, the buildings wouldn't have become so expensive
to begin with.
Prop 13 ensures that most of these office buildings are not being taxed on the market value of the property. Prop 8 ensures that tax assessments go down when the market value of the property declines. Property tax is not the primary reason rent is so expensive in San Francisco.
But prop 13 had no reason to apply to commercial property anyway, but good luck ever changing that.
It is too expensive to live in the city.
It is too expensive to commute to the city.
It is too expensive to feed yourself in the city.
Crime is rampant. Drug use and filth is everywhere.
Most importantly city has been hostile to tech and business owners.
None of this makes it lucrative for individuals and businesses to go there, which creates this feedback loop that makes it even worse for few that want to.