111–120 of 212 posts
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.
Complex problems often look simple from a distance. That doesn't mean they are.
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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 la…
NYC density in FiDi is 27,812/km2 actually. There are TONS of places in SF that are much lower than this.
The point is, the meme in HN is that San Francisco is some weird spread out suburb like, I don't know, Houston (1,414 people/km^2). It's not. It's already quite dense. Could it be denser? Obviously yes. Could it QUICKLY become SO MUCH denser that it radically changes the affordability of the city? Only in the fairy land where you ignore every part of reality that's inconvenient.
I guess I don't buy that the home prices are dividing the landed gentry in Noe valley from pac heights as much as the rich elite from everyone else who's not buying homes in SF.
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Astroturfing is when they send out of a bunch of professional advocacy designed to look "grassroots" in the sense of "just ordinary people who care about the issue". I don't see how "a legit neighborhood group asking residents to contact their officials" fits that model; why do you say it's astroturfing?
I thought the key ingredient of astroturfing is the concealment of the source of the message. The idea is to make a centralized effort appear to not be centralized. I would say that providing templates to contact public officials would qualify as astroturfing. And yes, I would extend that attribution to many advocacy groups whose proposals I agree with.
Telling the existing John/Jane Q. Public, who already agrees with you on the issue, to actually do something based on that agreement, is just regular activism and doesn't connote the "aha! caught you" aura of an astroturfing allegation.
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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.
You can't go wrong with what the experts seem to agree on, right?
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High rises are one thing but they are not the way to solve SF's housing shortage. One 5-story building on one corner of every block in the sunset would easily relieve the shortage. Geographically speaking most of SF already suffers from poor quality of life. Except for the northeast quadrant of the city, SF is dominated by flat, boring, ugly zones of car-centered banality. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7398485,-122…
The problem with building mid sized apartments everywhere, is that now you have to be involved in political fights everywhere. With high rise buildings, all you need to do is convince ONE place to build a bunch of them. Perhaps in a place such as south SOMA, which is packed with industrial warehouses that could be replaced with apartment sky scrapers. Nobody is going to be gentrified when the old dirty warehouses in…
FWIW, the city thinks that warehouses and auto body shops are an important part of its jobs plan for non-techies. Apparently it pays better than working in the service industry.
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Right, the notion that there is no room in SF is a complete lie. The Sunset and the Richmond could be completely razed to the ground and rebuilt at mid-rise density.
Wow, do you read what your writing? Razing a neighborhood like some sort of conquering force?!
https://hoodwork-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/story/i...
http://www.janetdelaney.com/south-of-market/
http://oaklandplanninghistory.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/1/1/181...
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NYC density in FiDi is 27,812/km2 actually. There are TONS of places in SF that are much lower than this.
But in fact the financial district is not all of NYC. And there are plenty of places in SF that have higher than its overall average of 7,100/km^2. The point is, the meme in HN is that San Francisco is some weird spread out suburb like, I don't know, Houston (1,414 people/km^2). It's not. It's already quite dense. Could it be denser? Obviously yes. Could it QUICKLY become SO MUCH denser that it radically changes the…
We know this because there are currently places that are 27k.
Those place in NYC that are 10k could ALSO be much more dense if the NIMBY didn't stop them from being so.
And yes, it could be done quickly. Just stop preventing developers from development. The market would LOVE to make tons of money by massively expanding.
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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. Ofte…
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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.
