The normal result is people end up living a near homeless lifestyle. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084971/Hong-Kongs-c... 200$/month * 20people = 4,000$ per room.
Why wouldn't they just move somewhere else if they're not rich enough to stay there? SF isn't the only city in the Bay Area, after all; it's surrounded by many other cities. My whole idea is to make it so service workers don't want to live in SF or work there either, causing services to either just not be available, or to cost an absolute fortune, seriously degrading the quality-of-life for SF residents. If you make…
The surrounding cities are still ridiculously expensive
Well eventually it's going to have a real problem if service workers can't afford to live there. What are they going to do, pay maids and janitors $30/hour to entice them to commute 4 hours a day? There's lots of places where the real estate values are very high, and poorer people are completely priced out of the area. Those places don't have a problem with that, because districts where lower-income people can live a…
>Personally, I think they should probably outlaw rent control (it'd probably have to be done at the state level). That's probably enabling SF to maintain itself this way, by giving lower-income people a place to live nearby. Eliminate rent control and those rents will go through the roof, pricing them all out of the city. Then the landowning residents can suffer without any services. Ah, the FULL ACCELERATIONISM opti…
I'm not trying to get the working classes to revolt, I'm trying to get them to abandon that place and go work somewhere else. If SF is so expensive that working classes simply can't live there or live close enough to commute, then what happens to the city? How does the city manage when it can't find anyone willing to clean the streets, take out the trash, etc.? Or what if they have to pay people outrageous wages to do that to entice them to work there? If a local convenience store needs to pay people $60/hour to work there, that's going to result in some high prices. If a local restaurant needs to pay the cooks and waiters $60/hour, a meal there is going to be quite pricey. If the police and teachers need to be paid $200k, taxes are going to have to go way up to pay for that, and those taxes are all paid by the residents. Many people might not want to move there when they find out the property tax has now been set at 300% (because all the existing property owners are grandfathered to a much lower rate). What'll that do to the realty prices and rents?
A lot of people who do not own (i.e., renters) in SF also do not want high rises. They feel like SF would have a long way to go before all of the foreign money runs out and those apartments would become affordable to them. In short, they don't think more building will benefit them in terms of housing, but will instead be bad for them in terms of quality of life, e.g., more people and traffic, etc.
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…
> There's nothing in this photo worth preserving. In the Midwest, if someone built that photo (exactly) it would get called a strong downtown urban design, and the builder would be praised for creating "missing middle" housing.
Well I heard there's a couple of nice towns in the midwest, like Chicago :-) Even in the most reactionary fringes of the midwest people are starting to realize that exurban sprawl isn't working. See for example http://newsok.com/article/5505468
Chicago is the best city in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin. They have nothing to compare. I'd live there except the lack of mountains, lack of an ocean (surfing doesn't work on the Great Lakes even though they're beautiful), and freezing winters + hot humid Summer's would kill me. I can't go back to that. West coast; best coast.
I can see the problems in that picture. +street five times too wide +snout houses with huge garages and driveways but few yards and porches +low rise housing with one floor devoted to parking in a high demand area +not nearly enough trees +no street corner retail But if you think that's bad, you should see 98% of the United States where it's much worse than the worst of San Francisco.
Those homes have yards, porches, and trees in the back (check the overhead view), and often rooms on the same floor as the garage (which is one car wide). This set-up is clearly not ideal but it's more efficient than the large unused front lawns present in most US suburbs.
It's also how they do it in Montreal and parts of Europe. Check out "Avenue de Chateaubriand, Montréal, Québec H2S 2N8, Canada" . They even have alleys for pairing and the bins so those don't have to sit out on the street (there is also street parking in some areas).
How do you square the narrative "units in these high rises would be bought out by investors and so no one would get to rent them" with "these high rises would attract too many people and too much traffic to the neighborhood"
+1. If the problem is that absent foreign investors are buying up all the housing stock, maybe we should make a 100 story tower on some parking lot in SOMA and sell each floor as a $5M luxurious penthouse unit with the stipulation that the buyer must reside out of the country. Boom, we just took a bunch of those foreign investors out of the market without increasing traffic and decreased the annual US trade deficit b…
I think the best argument for building more is to keep SF weird. A lot of people are sad SF has changed so radically; become less artsy. These same people argue against building up, in the misguided notion that it will destroy their lovely city. But imo what's destroying SF is not high rises but anyone on a sub $100k salary has to live somewhere else. It's becoming a mono culture. And at the end of the day bitching a…
I imagine high rises will only make the city more tech-broey, not weird — opposite of what the current residents want.
Chicago and Manhattan have lots of high-rises and are not monocultures. Portland is super weird (they take pride in it) and has some high-rises. Why would none of those models work?
>Personally, I think they should probably outlaw rent control (it'd probably have to be done at the state level). That's probably enabling SF to maintain itself this way, by giving lower-income people a place to live nearby. Eliminate rent control and those rents will go through the roof, pricing them all out of the city. Then the landowning residents can suffer without any services. Ah, the FULL ACCELERATIONISM opti…
I'm not trying to get the working classes to revolt, I'm trying to get them to abandon that place and go work somewhere else. If SF is so expensive that working classes simply can't live there or live close enough to commute, then what happens to the city? How does the city manage when it can't find anyone willing to clean the streets, take out the trash, etc.? Or what if they have to pay people outrageous wages to d…
The problem is that people who make less than dis figures live there too and probably wouldn't like that very much. The people who do make six or seven figures and live there also wouldn't like that too much. Plenty of tech people are involved in the rent control activism stuff.
Why wouldn't they just move somewhere else if they're not rich enough to stay there? SF isn't the only city in the Bay Area, after all; it's surrounded by many other cities. My whole idea is to make it so service workers don't want to live in SF or work there either, causing services to either just not be available, or to cost an absolute fortune, seriously degrading the quality-of-life for SF residents. If you make…
The surrounding cities are still ridiculously expensive
I think that as bad as it is now, it could get a LOT worse before it gets better.
Can you name many other world-class cities where one needs a car to comfortably survive? I've been to many such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris, and London, and most people don't own cars in any of those.
"There are 2.6m cars registered in London. 54 per cent of London households have at least one car." -- http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar... "Tokyo has the lowest number in the nation–0.46 cars per household" -- http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/08/18/number-of-cars... I can't find cars per household for Paris, but cars per adult appears to be around 0.5, ( https://halshs.archives-ouve…
Re: HK, not sure if this is cause or effect but the taxis there are much more plentiful and much cheaper than the US. The current conversion looks to be 10HKD = $1.29 USD. A 3-mile cab ride in HK is 60HKD, or about $7.74 ( http://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/city_result.jsp?country=Hong... )
If we scale that to a 10-mile trip, assuming no waiting or traffic, which with SF is $33/hr extra, and in HK it's no charge (just by mileage) IIRC (having them wait is ~$12.38/hr):
SF: ~$31.05
HK: 150HKD=$19.35
This combined with their seriously great subway system ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR ) make it very practical to not own a car. You take the subway for short and medium trips, and hop in a cab at the end to get out to a relative's house in the middle of nowhere.
