Thinking that an entire city could consist of highly paid tech workers is a fantasy.
And what about families? It's next to impossible to afford to have a family in the city. What will those tech workers do when they want to start a family? Do you really want them all moving to the east bay instead of helping to grow the city?
Why should they? Of course they can commute, just like many highly-paid professionals choose to commute too. Nobody considers a short commute a fundamental human right.
> how far out can they get pushed before it's not worth it any more?
They won't, that's the magic of a free market. Wages/salaries will go up in the city so that it's always still "worth it".
> Do you really want them all [families] moving to the east bay instead of helping to grow the city?
I mean, why not? I live in NYC. Plenty of people I know leave NYC when they want to start a family. Or at a minimum, they leave Manhattan to move out to Brooklyn or Queens.
You can see how ridiculous the argument is, by the fact that its polar opposite sounds the same: "do you really want all the families who would be helping to grow the east bay, moving into downtown SF?"
Look, there are certainly coordination, transit, etc. problems with the Bay Area. And there are income-disparity problems nationwide. But people seem to confuse those with just being afraid of change/gentrification, and that doesn't help.
Things are a bit different in SF. While you have 468 stations, we have 44. Expansion of our public transportation system has been hampered by NIMBY homeowners who have done all they can to prevent it. Rents in areas that surround BART stations (http://www.bart.gov/stations/)are still quite high, except around some of the further out stops (http://rentheatmap.com/sanfrancisco.html). Unfortunately, the further you live from the city, the more it costs to commute to the city (http://www.bart.gov/tickets/calculator/).
So while everyone moving away from the city like folks in Manhattan do would be nice, it's not that easy here.
(Aside: I miss New York public transportation.)
I see that you're bringing up NIMBY, but that should be the area to focus on instead of somehow trying to control the underlying problem through things like rent control.
I personally see the California High Speed Rail system as an interesting option there. If they offer regular rail service and I can reach my work in Silicon Valley within 1 hour then I would consider moving out of Silicon Valley. Especially so if the city is interesting or becomes interesting through the increasing number of people moving there and if they offer Wifi on the train so that I could even start working there.
Our Public transportation system "MARTA" only operates fully throughout two counties in our metro area. The reason for this is that many citizens in the suburbs are afraid of what will happen if they provide easy access for urban "characters" that are presumed to be "bad or unsavory" because they cant afford a car. (I live in one such county)
Every time there are talks of expanding MARTA (train or bus lines) to other counties people come out in protest.
It's actually quite easy for people to not live in the central city, which is why of the 7.15 million people in the SF Bay Area metropolitan area, only a little over 800,000 live in the City and County of San Francisco. The ratio between the population of San Francisco and that of the whole metro area isn't really all that different than the ratio of Manhattan's population to that of the New York Metro Area.
I thought the article proved that people don't live in the city because there isn't enough housing and/or it's too expensive, not because it's easy to live outside the city.
The article didn't prove anything, it started with mistaking anecdote for data, and proceeded to tell a just-so story to explain the anecdote, and then make a series of value claims about what needs to be done based on that just-so story, explicitly grounding those claims in at least one false fact claim (that the three high population bay area cities are the places with "the space" in the bay area to accept a disproportionate share of the region's growth.)
I can actually see it both ways, but you have to accept or reject the argument in it's entirety instead of setting some artificial cap for how much you have to earn to be able to live in SF, which is essentially what's happening today.
And by the way this is a poor free-market argument. If this was a free-market, regulatory actors would act rationally from an economic perspective and allow construction of as many new units as the market can bare.
A car is extremely expensive. Unless you're planning on making the public transportation system usable (which would be a herculean task).
With decent urban planning, the region could maximize its growth potential. Without it, we'll have major issues in the near future.
Developers have done a good job of buying off the media, and the Chronicle has never waivered from its support of those sectors that still advertise in its pages. That's why many of us are not sad to see the otherwise well written paper giving way to Internet new sources that, this article excepted, are less inclined to skew their editorial policy in favor of anything real-estate (-development) related.
It doesn't seem so ridiculous if you follow the money. The author is "executive director of SPUR, a Bay Area nonprofit membership organization" whose directors, advisors and members are comprised almost exclusively of real-estate developers and investors.
The current Berkeley Daily Planet goes in to some detail about this sort of non-profit, http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2013-10-11/article/... as does the Bay Guardian in its "Friends in the Shadows" expose http://www.sfbg.com/2013/10/08/friends-shadows You'll never read these sorts of in-depth articles in the rest of the Bay Area's real-estate advertising filled newspapers.
Furthermore, unless you get stuck out multiple times a week half the rent cost still puts you way ahead. I was paying $1200 with parking for 800 sq ft and a dishwasher right on Lake Merritt. I never felt in danger there.
Living in Emeryville on San Pablo was another story... That was only $600 though ha.
QFT. The thousand-plus dollar difference in rent buys a heck of a lot of "I got stranded" Uber/Taxi rides.
If you lived in SF and this happened, your options would be pretty simple, contribute to the subsidies via your tax dollars or move out of the city.
This seems like a tautology. "A city that seeks income diversity should seek income diversity"... the point is that I and crazygringo do not think that the city needs to seek that; it is a-okay in my book if a city becomes gentrified.
> and it only applies to you if you choose to live in that city.
Okay, I choose to live in Malibu. Sadly I cannot afford it. Who is going to think of poor jlgreco, unable to afford living in the beach community of his choice? Is my desire to live in Malibu less valid than anyone else's desire to live in San Francisco?
Sure, many come from Oakland. Which was the point of the article.
And when I was still in school and knew a lot of people in these types of jobs, many worked two (or more, if part time). And still couldn't really make rent. This is why I never tip below 20% unless the server didn't do their job very well. It's expensive to live here and they have a tough situation.
Also, Bus Drivers don't belong on that list. They are certainly paid more than wait staff, etc.
On the other hand, the market isn't everything, especially in the near-term. The market, for instance, won't create diversity in the city; it will create a monoculture of whatever is working that decade. So, right now, in SF, it will create a monoculture of tech workers as, in Manhattan, it almost created a monoculture of finance workers in the '80s/'90s. Monocultures lack resilience and if NYC hadn't traded its finance economy for a tourist-driven one, it could have been hard times. Booms and busts may be okay from a Liberal philosophy point of view, but it's hell on the people caught in it.
The other thing about diversity is it's part of the reason people move somewhere in the first place. One of the reasons tech has moved from the Valley up into SF is that SF has more diversity, so it's not all tech all the time. It would make sense to try to preserve what it was you wanted in the first place (even if, a la any gentrifying neighborhood, it may be a bit of a lost cause.)
Is NIMBY-ism "government regulation"?
In this context it's worth looking at Aspen, CO. Wages for service workers there have not gone up, and 60-mile commutes on mountain roads are common. I have no theory for why that is, but I do not expect a different outcome for SF.
Not sure what science has to do with this anyway; this is basically a matter of public-policy/politics/economics.
That's what I'm worried about. Populations shift, people move, cities grow. But, if you're running a city, you want growth to be stable and predictable. If you drive out all of your lower-income workers to other cities and "import" your labor, you are setting yourself up for an unstable labor market in the future.
These things need to be planned for, and it doesn't seem like there is a lot of thought being put into it.
NYC is a great example -- millions of people fled the high costs and hassles of living in the city to Long Island, New Jersey and upstate. Companies did too -- there were 10,000 factories in NYC in 1969 and something like 500 in 1999. My family moved from Queens to a town 100 miles north in the bad old days (late 80s) when the principal of the middle school that I was heading to had his car firebombed.
San Francisco's situation is more nimby than NYC. People discover it and love it, but want to close the door for the next guy. As long as times are good, it's a winning strategy. When times turn bad, it will get really bad, just as it did in the 80s in NYC.
the city remained a walkable, urban paradise compared to most of America.
Most higher density cities are even more walkable urban paradises. Plus they have the added benefit of far better public transport than SF offers.
SF: 17620/sq mi
NYC: 27550/sq mi
Paris: 55000/sq mi
Wait, what? There is a reason things are the way they are. People do not want you to live there, affordably. Period. Cities are "designed" to be expensive and exclusive. That, in part is their value.
Whilst I've never seen San Francisco for myself, it sounds like they are trying to buck the trend and go for expensive and exclusive (as you say), with various complicated planning and zoning laws. It is definitely against the norm however.
I questioned your premise that cities were "designed" to be expensive, whereas I believe they merely "become" expensive through basic laws of supply and demand. The reason cities such as London and San Francisco never grow ever taller skyscrapers is because of planning laws and regulations that restrict supply - not, a free market of supply and demand.
London is a good example of such in that it has ancient viewing rights that restrict the height of nearby buildings, the classic case being that no building can be higher than St. Pauls (a relaxed principle nowadays, but still enforced sometimes). This is a major reason why the old houses in London haven't been knocked down to be replaced by a whole skyline of skyscrapers, but instead are massively expensive properties compared to the rest of the country.
Capital cities are a "premium" product, and they are designed to be so. People pay the premium, because they are effective in the task for which they are designed. Where do you think the "demand" comes from? The demand is for the productivity improvements that can accrue to those who control assets that are highly productive. But note the two words: (1) control; and (2) productive. To extract maximum rents, the product must be under control (so expect a class of laws designed to g;tee this). And secondly, expect a design which caters to high-end productivity (ie, networking, and its corralry...social exclusivity).
If you need to brush up on the history of new york and san francisco as 'financial capitals'.
SF may be a financial capital to some degree, but your comment about VC is still off: they're not based in the city, and they didn't take much interest in companies in the city at all until recently.
You can find decent housing in NYC, with pricing comparable to other smaller metro areas in the U.S. like Seattle or D.C. without too much fuss. Same goes for Paris. That's why most people in those cities don't live in the center. Brooklyn or Queens, for example, has a larger population than Manhattan. But only Staten Island has a lower population Density than SF.
The problem with SF is that it has ~Manhattan prices without the number of available units. This means that laughably high housing prices get pushed further and further away from SF proper and out into the Bay Area.
Arguably, if you think of the Bay Area as one city, this makes sense, it's the same in any major city.
It's not so much that someplace like Cupertino or Santa Clara are expensive by themselves, but that you're paying much more for similar housing than you would a similar distance from other similar sized city centers. Yet people move there and saddle themselves with ridiculous mortgages because the alternative is to live in someplace like Stockton.
Dramatically increasing the density of SF proper could make the outer areas and even the East Bay area much more reasonable places to live. However, it would mean lots of people who bought high in the current market would lose their shirts if such a thing were to happen.
I remember the very first time I visited SF, my friend was regaling us with tales of the insane housing prices. No slouch and from a pretty expensive area myself I figured it was just an issue of demand like you'd see in any other big city. But when I actually got to the city I was floored with how low the density obviously was. The solution to the high housing prices seemed idiotically simple then as it does now. Build SF up up up! Areas around every major BART station should also be higher density areas. Relax the density further out from these centers and you'd end up with a much more livable city plan like pretty much every single other city in the country.
By way of comparison, the D.C. metro area (not exactly a well planned urban paradise) has about the same population density as SF Bay Area yet housing can be had for probably around 2/3s the price at comparable distances from the city center.
And there's a greater diversity of opportunity here if you're not just in the tech startup scene. I have a feeling SF will bust when the VC spigot dries up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose-San_Francisco-Oakland...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...
From the city's point of view, there's a problem to be solved in terms of getting different kinds of people in the city.
Because service jobs and because traffic congestion and because all service job related prices.
Some counties and states provide "affordable" housing for people who work in that county if they make below a certain wage and above a certain wage. They basically make it affordable for taxi drivers, waiters, cooks, delivery people and other low paid job workers to live in that area. This way those people are not driving from farther way increasing congestion on the roads and I guess as a side-effect lower the prices in those particular areas (food, taxi, etc).
Now whether that is desirable, it is a net beneficial thing or not or just creates more problems I don't know, I am just presenting one reason some localities do it.
and then another 100,000 people would move in there.
So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can.
Skip as many meals as you want, work as many hours and you want to do that. People can move to different cities you know...
What?! Why on earth would I want my tax dollars subsidizing your rent? I mean, charity to the poor, homeless, etc. is one thing (it's good), but subsidizing your rent so you can be closer to boutique coffee shops? Instead of, you know, helping the truly needy get health care? Or investing in education? Gimme a break.
> If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams
Why does San Fran specifically have to be that place? The Bay Area's a big place.
By the end of the article, the author's right about needing a more integrated metropolitan policy, but this attitude that "everyone deserves to live in San Francisco, even people with no money" gets tiring after a while. Neighborhoods and cities gentrify. People move elsewhere, to the new-and-upcoming-and-more-interesting neighborhoods/cities. Places change. That's just how it is.