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Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

dougmccune.com

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Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#81

Post by nerfhammer »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #73
rhino369 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a couple 45 story buildings will mean you don't have to put up a 5 story building on every corner. Or do both and make it really affordable. You also have to consider that decreasing cost in SF will lead to increased demand.

A 45-story building is much more expensive than 9 5-story buildings and causes localized transportation problems. You really want your housing, jobs, education, retail, and leisure spread around such that people can conduct most or all of their daily affairs on foot.

If you want people to be able conduct all of your daily affairs on foot 45 story buildings are the way to go.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#82

Post by honkhonkpants »

nerfhammer wrote: post #81
honkhonkpants wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 45-story building is much more expensive than 9 5-story buildings and causes localized transportation problems. You really want your housing, jobs, education, retail, and leisure spread around such that people can conduct most or all of their daily affairs on foot.

If you want people to be able conduct all of your daily affairs on foot 45 story buildings are the way to go.

There are examples of that working and there are examples of shorter heights working equally well. I enjoy them both (Manhattan and Paris as examples of the two types) but what SF is doing doesn't really work for me. All the high rise residences are being built in a small area south of Market, but in the same neighborhoods there's nothing to do, nothing to eat, no public spaces. It's not very livable.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#83

Post by cloudjacker »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #60
tomschlick wrote: post #4

As an outsider, the solution to the SF housing issues seem pretty simple... Vote out the NIMBY politicians and replace them with people who will change zoning laws to allow for more building. I'd assume almost no one likes the current situation unless they are a landlord.

The real solution is don't live in SF. Seriously. From what I read here on HN, SF is pretty messed up. So, if someone doesn't want to live somewhere messed up, don't go there to begin with. One can't move near an airport and complain about the noise.

Sure, SF is merely masquerading as a world class city, by the people that live in the area. It has no grip on its elementary problems that actual world class cities have developed solutions for.

But you can have a good time there. Nobody will actually know if you live in an apartment and have startups give you free food everyday, or if you live in a tent under the highway.

Now if you are trying to earn enough to make a downpayment for a place in San Francisco.... thats not in the cards.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#84

Post by amyjess »

dpark wrote: post #77
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real solution is don't live in SF. Seriously. From what I read here on HN, SF is pretty messed up. So, if someone doesn't want to live somewhere messed up, don't go there to begin with. One can't move near an airport and complain about the noise.

> From what I read here on HN, SF is pretty messed up. You probably shouldn't base your impression of SF entirely on the negative articles you read on HN. SF has some serious issues, but it also has a lot going for it. Namely, the job opportunities if you're in tech are great. The weather is great. Lots of the area is beautiful. It's a liberal area (great if that fits your views), including being LGBT-friendly. It's…

> It's got some great culture if you're in tech.

Honestly, I find the culture of Silicon Valley's tech industry to be utterly degenerate. Even if the area was affordable, I wouldn't live or work there in large part because SV puts me off.

I work in tech, I'm LGBT myself (multiple letters of LGBT at that), and the Dallas area is pretty much everything I want in a city.

I honestly don't get why the Bay Area doesn't just expand outward. Sure, you can't go farther west because there's an ocean in the way, but what's stopping it from sprawling north, south, and east? I'm from Dallas, which has experienced booming growth for as far back as I can remember, and we've kept housing prices down without sacrificing suburban culture by simply expanding outwards. Nobody cares that none of the expansion is in Dallas proper; the locals here see each suburb as neighborhoods, not separate cities (albeit, neighborhoods with their own street signage and lane markings, but still). Not just housing; workplaces are moving outwards too. Hell, right now, I live in the burbs, and my workplace is in a suburb that's even farther away from Downtown from where I live.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#85

Post by ramses0 »

dougmccune wrote: post #16
corysama wrote: post #14

Very beautiful, poetic, relevant to a lot of the audience of HN, and props for detailing the tech behind it. Meanwhile... the highest and lowest hex I can spot is 1265 / 457 = a ratio of 2.76 with both endpoints having relatively steep curves compared to the rest of the histogram. With the graph's Z0 set to 457 and Zscale set to an arbitrary ratio, the sculpture-graph conveys the impression that there is a discrepanc…

Very good point! Yeah, please be advised there's artistic license taken and the Z-axis scale is arbitrary (well, not arbitrary, it's linear but stretched and certainly doesn't start at 0). You're totally right that the difference between the lowest areas and the highest isn't really as exaggerated as it appears. The real delta between lowest and highest is about 2.7x. I'd argue though that a difference between ~$500/…

Truly, you'd want to pin rent as 25% of income and then have the height be related to where you would need to be on the U.S. income scale as a percentile to be able to afford it.

ie: You've got a $899,000 home sale, that's supposedly a ~$4000/mo rent, which leads towards a "25% rule" of $16,000/mo income => $192,000/yr => which is supposedly 93.9%-ile.

Going from $4000/mo => $5000/mo, it seems like it takes you to 96.8%-ile.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#86

Post by aetherson »

tomschlick wrote: post #4

As an outsider, the solution to the SF housing issues seem pretty simple... Vote out the NIMBY politicians and replace them with people who will change zoning laws to allow for more building. I'd assume almost no one likes the current situation unless they are a landlord.

San Francisco is the second-densest large city in the United States (after NYC). It is denser than the Tokyo Metropolis (which, note, is not the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, which is less dense yet).

(NYC density: 10,831 people/km^2. SF density: 7,152 people/km^2. Tokyo density: 6,200 people/km^2)

Adding enough additional units to the city to make major changes to its affordability is not just a quick change to zoning laws. It's not just that there are height restrictions. If you made a quick change to height restrictions, you'd still find high density projects are expensive to build and prone to being blocked by the various other obstacles to building that a high-regulation city like SF has. And also, creating and funding big building projects takes time -- and there's a lot of pent-up demand for SF.

AND, if you did add tens of thousands of new dwelling units in SF in the traditionally less-dense areas of the city, you'd totally overwhelm the already struggling transport infrastructure of the city in those areas (and I have no idea about other infrastructure. Could the sewers handle this?).

Should we still lower the restrictions on infill development in SF? Yes. The restrictions are well past the reasonable. Will that in a short period of time make a major change to the affordability of the city? Not unless you hand-wave away the entire reality of SF.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#87

Post by jacalata »

dpark wrote: post #77
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real solution is don't live in SF. Seriously. From what I read here on HN, SF is pretty messed up. So, if someone doesn't want to live somewhere messed up, don't go there to begin with. One can't move near an airport and complain about the noise.

> From what I read here on HN, SF is pretty messed up. You probably shouldn't base your impression of SF entirely on the negative articles you read on HN. SF has some serious issues, but it also has a lot going for it. Namely, the job opportunities if you're in tech are great. The weather is great. Lots of the area is beautiful. It's a liberal area (great if that fits your views), including being LGBT-friendly. It's…

It's a liberal area where people don't care about problems that only affect poor people. A lot more Libertarian than classic left-wing.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#88

Post by andrewbinstock »

cloudjacker wrote: post #83
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real solution is don't live in SF. Seriously. From what I read here on HN, SF is pretty messed up. So, if someone doesn't want to live somewhere messed up, don't go there to begin with. One can't move near an airport and complain about the noise.

Sure, SF is merely masquerading as a world class city, by the people that live in the area. It has no grip on its elementary problems that actual world class cities have developed solutions for. But you can have a good time there. Nobody will actually know if you live in an apartment and have startups give you free food everyday, or if you live in a tent under the highway. Now if you are trying to earn enough to make…

What makes a world-class city? I'd say great architecture, great culture, high-quality museums, good schools, great universities, excellent hospitals. And people who care about each other. San Francisco has all of those.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#89

Post by lordnacho »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #60
tomschlick wrote: post #4

As an outsider, the solution to the SF housing issues seem pretty simple... Vote out the NIMBY politicians and replace them with people who will change zoning laws to allow for more building. I'd assume almost no one likes the current situation unless they are a landlord.

The real solution is don't live in SF. Seriously. From what I read here on HN, SF is pretty messed up. So, if someone doesn't want to live somewhere messed up, don't go there to begin with. One can't move near an airport and complain about the noise.

I was there a couple of times last year. Mostly seemed like any other large city, except it's too low-rise to make sense. Actually not a pretty place, a lot of boring buildings. (Landmarks are different.)

The thing that really stood out to me, however, was that there seems to be a lack of psychiatric care. Almost every day I was there I would run into some guy who was having an argument with an imaginary person. Often a very aggressive argument. Cops even came by once. Not something I often see in Europe, and I've lived in 5 cities in 3 countries now.

Re: Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

#90

Post by aetherson »

branchless wrote: post #13
tomschlick wrote: post #4

As an outsider, the solution to the SF housing issues seem pretty simple... Vote out the NIMBY politicians and replace them with people who will change zoning laws to allow for more building. I'd assume almost no one likes the current situation unless they are a landlord.

Exist and they will lend. The solution is land value tax.

Figuring out the land value as opposed to the improvement value of a piece of improved property is an essentially impossible problem.
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