381–390 of 407 posts
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This happens all the time (#2), it's literally happening to me right now. Look at the map of Ellis and Owner Move-In evictions in SF. Thousands of people are being displaced.
154 Ellis Act evictions last year. I know its sucks but I wouldn't say it happens all the time http://sfist.com/2016/03/29/report_evictions_continue_to_inc...
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I think NYC is already there. It's so easy to find a tech job in NYC. Maybe it's even easier in SV, but I've never missed not being in SV. There's such a variety here. Plenty of startups, all the tech giants, and plenty of tech/IT jobs at "regular" companies, consulting opportunities, etc... And it's not _just_ tech -- plenty of other industries are headquartered in NYC. By contrast I can't think of any other industr…
so I've lived in both. The size of the campuses in Silicon Valley literally cannot fit in NYC. No comparison. Its fantastic that Google bought a block of Manhattan for 1 billion dollars, but Google's Mountain View campus is ALL of Mountain View. These are sprawling districts that cannot fit inside of a skyscraper. The next fundamental difference is the variety of VCs. NYC cannot replicate this, and there is nothing e…
Is that a definite? I mean, most of Mountain View and its tech campuses are sprawling suburbia (e.g. vast fields of asphalt and grass with a building sprinkled here and there). It's amazing what can fit in a well-designed commercial district.
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The cost of living is definitely infinitely higher than living in the midwest but you certainly can find fields and forests (and actual mountains!) in the SF area. For example, the minute you cross the Golden Gate bridge, you are in Marin County, a county with a rich agricultural history, amazing natural places like Muir Woods (the setting for the ape's home in the latest Planet of the Apes), and 85.5% of it's land p…
^ this is true. I was born and raised in south bay area and went to school in Berkeley. The Bay Area is an ecological treasure trove. But over the years I've seen the hills dotted with houses, untouched swamp land (great for the local wildlife) turned into generic commercial offices, and roads developed deeper into the outskirts. Noise and air pollution is getting worse. Parking and congestion is a nightmare anywhere…
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If it made economic sense for them to create job centers outside of the Bay Area, they would. This gives one an idea of just how great the economic advantage of locating in the Bay Area is.
Or just an idea of how the herd mentality can so utterly overwhelm common sense.
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so I've lived in both. The size of the campuses in Silicon Valley literally cannot fit in NYC. No comparison. Its fantastic that Google bought a block of Manhattan for 1 billion dollars, but Google's Mountain View campus is ALL of Mountain View. These are sprawling districts that cannot fit inside of a skyscraper. The next fundamental difference is the variety of VCs. NYC cannot replicate this, and there is nothing e…
"These are sprawling districts that cannot fit inside of a skyscraper." Is that a definite? I mean, most of Mountain View and its tech campuses are sprawling suburbia (e.g. vast fields of asphalt and grass with a building sprinkled here and there). It's amazing what can fit in a well-designed commercial district.
Google employs 19,000 people in Mountain View currently
The Twin Towers in NYC each held 25,000 people on a daily basis.
Two buildings in NYC could accommodate the populations of two tech giants that sprawl across entire south bay towns. So several of NYC's average sized and planned skyscrapers could do a fine job. And there is room every direction away from Midtown Manhattan to replicate new robust building clusters.
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You're right, you can't have anything like that in SF. (Well, there are some pretty nice forests nearby.) You also can't have any of the culture and city life that a major city like SF has. You see easily 10x as many people in a day in SF than you see all week in a semi-rural town in the Midwest. There's 10 cafes within a 10 minute walk. The nightlife is extensive and amazing. The restaurant scene, world class. And t…
I don't think the nightlife is extensive and amazing in san francisco. Everything closes @9pm and there is nowhere to go!
Certainly "extensive and amazing" is open to debate (can't hold a candle to NYC for example)... but objectively there are vastly more options than a small midwestern city.
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First, you are looking at the wrong time scale. Second, population growth is not the same as demand. In just a few years SF has experienced a massive surge in demand, i.e. the price new residents are willing to pay for housing.
Well of course population growth isn't the same as demand, that's the point! What davidw was observing was that there's plenty of cities that do better at satisfying the demand for housing than San Francisco does. You can have a growing population in the same area while demand goes down, if you're building enough new housing to offset the demand. The examples davidw and I have been citing here show cities that have f…
You've simply ignored my point about the rate of growth in demand. That introduces a new factor, which is the need to control displacement of lower-income people and maintain healthy economic diversity.
Also, the issue here is not that SF is opposed to density. SF has many high-density neighborhoods and virtually all new construction is higher density. The issue is how hard the city should negotiate with developers to set aside price-controlled units to maintain economic diversity.
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A 2% chance today, right? Increasing the supply of affordable housing should improve those odds. What's at stake here is how much affordable housing the city for negotiate for with developers. Critics argue this state bill undercuts the city's negotiating position.
Doesn't the bill only apply to developments with at least 10% onsite affordable housing? Is the city really going to negotiate a higher amount than that?
Basically this state bill is a developer move to undercut SF's negotiating position, as they have more political influence at the state level.
[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...
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"Sadly, Marin County is "the boss-level kingdom of California NIMBYs" Cross the bridge, take a left, and drive out to the national seashore. Have lunch in Pt. Reyes. Drive back out to the 101 through the Nicasio horse country. Thank you, thank you, Marin County NIMBYs. Thank you.
I don't think most housing advocates want to pave over parks and things like that, but want to add some options where there is already a town . Also, as kind of an aside, Marin NIMBY's pretty much killed mountain biking in its birthplace, which I also find sad.