How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999)

Re:How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) by smoyer on Sunday January 19, 2014 @05:44PM (#7086407)

I don't want to sound callous but ... market forces shape and reshape cities all the time. When the facets of city-life in San Francisco that initially drew people fade away, people will flock somewhere else and the rents will stagnate or reverse. And if San Francisco is losing its allure as an artist's hub, perhaps other places (such as downtown Detroit) are compensating?

I live in a reasonably affluent smaller city and the problem of affordable housing for the "working poor" is about the same here ... but I still haven't seen what I think is a viable solution (developers were compensated for building low-income housing and maintaining low rent for 10 years, but now the rent for those houses exceeds my monthly mortgage).

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Re:How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) by Naritai on Sunday January 19, 2014 @05:54PM (#7086434)

What seems ridiculous to me is that the city that's absorbing the 'artists' is... Oakland! 20-minutes, or one BART stop away! That sounds fine to me. As SF gets bigger, let people overflow into Oakland. I don't see what's so bad about that.

The only people who are really concerned about this are the ones to insist that SF and Oakland are totally different cities. Come on guys, they've been the same economic region for 100+ years, it's time to admit that they're the same city.

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Re:How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) by tachyonbeam on Sunday January 19, 2014 @07:19PM (#7086766)

Yeah, let's pave over that lake and call it a deal.

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Re:How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) by Naritai on Sunday January 19, 2014 @08:18PM (#7086971)

Sorry, what do you have against Lake Merritt?

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Re:How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) by erikpukinskis on Sunday January 19, 2014 @06:15PM (#7086520)

> I still haven't seen what I think is a viable solution

What about cooperative ownership? When an asset is communally owned, it reduces the temptation for people to destroy it for a payout.

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Re:How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) by Naritai on Sunday January 19, 2014 @06:22PM (#7086559)

My biggest concern about communal ownership (ignoring tragedy of the commons) is that such an arrangement is simply undesirable for most people. There is something fundamentally unappealing about buying into a communal arrangement, and I can see why - I can easily think of a few past roommates to whom I'm very glad I was not financially bound in a long-term arrangement.

For example, TICs are declining in numbers in SF, not increasing. If communal ownership were a viable option, we should see the number of TICs increasing.

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Re:How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) by erikpukinskis on Sunday January 19, 2014 @06:29PM (#7086591)

Yes, there are certainly a lot of unsolved problems in communal ownership. I'm optimistic that solutions are out there.

>If communal ownership were a viable option, we should see the number of TICs increasing.

I don't understand how that follows. All that indicates is that some particular operating structures (the specific TICs in place in SF) are not viable on one specific market (SF) in one particular moment in history.

I was just suggesting that in theory communal ownership could solve the problem. How to actually get that to work, in practice, is a problem that entrepreneurs have been working on for decades, and it will take many decades more.

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Re:How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) by bmmayer1 on Sunday January 19, 2014 @08:10PM (#7086944)

Didn't Stalin try this?

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