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Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

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Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#31

Post by archagon »

habosa wrote: post #18

This article really gets it. It's all about transportation. It will never be possible for everyone who wants to be in San Francisco to live downtown, or even adjacent to downtown. Just like the article said, Manhattan is much denser but no more affordable. But we make it so hard for people to get around. You can take a bus for 45m or take the BART which is overcrowded, unreliable, and has trains that can be as much a…

Transport in the Bay is so, so hilariously bad. I'm in St. Petersburg, Russia right now and the subway here doesn't actually have a schedule. Instead, there's a clock on the wall. If the next train doesn't arrive within 2 minutes and reset the counter, something's not right. The stations cover basically the entire city, and as a result, venturing 5 miles across town feels about the same as going down a set of escalators and then coming right back up on the other side. This sort of thing is par for the course in Europe. (NY too, for that matter.)

How did one of the richest areas in the world go so catastrophically wrong in this regard?

Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#32

Post by cullenking »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #8

So much here resonates with me. I’m sitting in a train right now taking me from a suburb into downtown Portland, OR...an easy commute...only $5 a day gets you unlimited transportation across all of the regional transit services (all part of the excellent TriMet system). I moved here from the Bay Area mainly due to affordability and sane public transit. The Bay Area is an amazing place but it’s imploding under the wei…

"I moved here from the Bay Area..."

At the risk of sounding xenophobic, Portland is going to turn into San Francisco soon enough if people/companies keep immigrating from California and New York, and elected officials keep proposing policies modeled after the Bay Area. I'm not saying "stay away" as I enjoy much of the growth PDX has seen over the last few years, especially the fact we have a much easier time finding good developers these days. I'm just concerned that many of our newcomers had it so bad in regard to traffic and costs of living, that their tolerance for those things will, generally speaking, lift up the floor here in Portland.

So, welcome, but please please please push back against freeway expansions, push for more alternative transit, push for more walkable communities, and all that jazz. PDX can't stay small and easy going forever, but maybe we can avoid some of the pitfalls that have befallen other large metro areas.

Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#34

Post by pascalxus »

How can he sit there and deny the benefits of larger supply? Obviously, if supply increases vastly enough the prices will come down. Sure, maybe not in the first thousand units, but you've gotta build baby build! It'll probably take 10s of thousand of units or even 100s of thousands of units, but it's gotta be done. And sure, it won't be as cheap as the suburbs, but if we get rid of regulations and allow SV to innovate enough, we can automate the building of these tall buildings and allow the price to come down to levels never before seen.

Allowing commuters to cover even longer distances is just another bandaid. One that will just add more environmental damage. The least environmentally damaging commute is the one that happens on foot.

Increasing supply to reduce costs to where EVERYONE can afford the city is the ultimate solution we should strive for, not more lotteries for a tiny percentage.

Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#35

Post by majormajor »

archagon wrote: post #31
habosa wrote: post #18

This article really gets it. It's all about transportation. It will never be possible for everyone who wants to be in San Francisco to live downtown, or even adjacent to downtown. Just like the article said, Manhattan is much denser but no more affordable. But we make it so hard for people to get around. You can take a bus for 45m or take the BART which is overcrowded, unreliable, and has trains that can be as much a…

Transport in the Bay is so, so hilariously bad. I'm in St. Petersburg, Russia right now and the subway here doesn't actually have a schedule. Instead, there's a clock on the wall. If the next train doesn't arrive within 2 minutes and reset the counter, something's not right. The stations cover basically the entire city, and as a result, venturing 5 miles across town feels about the same as going down a set of escalat…

Much of the infrastructure was built when (1) the country was so rich that most of the people with any influence at all had cars and (2) the country was less populated so traffic and parking were less severe problems.

Everybody builds the infrastructure that the then-state-of-the-art calls for. That was roads and freeways for most of the US. It's an accident of history, not an idiotic mistake. Not doing anything about it for the past ten years is the possible mistake, but from the perspective of the people who already live somewhere, and like having relatively lower density, they have just as much right to doing things how they want as the new tech crowd interlopers do.

Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#36

Post by alexandercrohde »

polskibus wrote: post #17

Is it beneficial for the rest of US to save SF? Won't its demise actually improve the lives in the rest of the country/world as businesses spread out after workers or allow remote work?

Great point.

Also worth asking, can a city not just find a comfortable homeostasis? Is it every city's goal to become increasingly dense? Do we measure the "success" of a city on GDP?

I don't. I think the best cities in the world would include Paris, St. Petersburg, Valpariaso, not the manufacturing centers of China or America.

So, define "save."

Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#37

Post by tomkarlo »

habosa wrote: post #18

This article really gets it. It's all about transportation. It will never be possible for everyone who wants to be in San Francisco to live downtown, or even adjacent to downtown. Just like the article said, Manhattan is much denser but no more affordable. But we make it so hard for people to get around. You can take a bus for 45m or take the BART which is overcrowded, unreliable, and has trains that can be as much a…

Honestly, having lived in both NY and SF for years, you need both - a highly dense urban core, and effective transportation from the outlying regions.

If you just add transport, what will happen is what's now happening in Brooklyn - you'll just see rents pushed up further away from the center as the wealthy utilize mass transport to buy up housing a bit further from the core. It ends up with everyone else just being pushed further away until they're again facing a 60-90 minute commute.

Manhattan is able twice as many residents as San Francisco, which means it can absorb a lot of people before they start to spread outwards. It also helps unburden the mass transit system by reducing the distance that the average resident is traveling to work - helping make room for people commuting from the edges. (And to be fair, anyone in NY now will tell you that their mass transit system is having serious problems, too.)

The Bay definitely needs better mass transit - but I'm not holding my breath waiting for Marin, or Palo Alto, to jump on board with the idea of both better transit and more housing.

In the meantime, SF should be doing everything it can to increase housing stock if it wants to remain affordable - and yes, that might mean high rises in the sunset, or near GG park, despite what the author says. That kind of "build housing, but not in a place I have to see it" attitude is a big part of why we have a housing crunch.

Build more places to live, and the cost of living will come down. It's that simple.

Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#38

Post by pfarnsworth »

habosa wrote: post #18

This article really gets it. It's all about transportation. It will never be possible for everyone who wants to be in San Francisco to live downtown, or even adjacent to downtown. Just like the article said, Manhattan is much denser but no more affordable. But we make it so hard for people to get around. You can take a bus for 45m or take the BART which is overcrowded, unreliable, and has trains that can be as much a…

If you read the article, it's not actually about transportation. He's talking about making a political region around the Bay Area that can break NIMBYism by making decisions that affect the Bay Area as a whole.

Interesting idea, but ultimately a fairy tale. It won't happen.

Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#39

Post by polskibus »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #27
polskibus wrote: post #17

Is it beneficial for the rest of US to save SF? Won't its demise actually improve the lives in the rest of the country/world as businesses spread out after workers or allow remote work?

That assumes people can be equally productive no matter their location. Concentration of industry and specialization of regions increases productivity.

Side effects of this productivity increase (which is hard to measure anyway), can completely negate the benefits when looking at the big picture. You create concentration in one area and create a bubble instead of betting on a more organic approach.

Re: Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

#40

Post by ghaff »

krausejj wrote: post #24
polskibus wrote: post #17

Is it beneficial for the rest of US to save SF? Won't its demise actually improve the lives in the rest of the country/world as businesses spread out after workers or allow remote work?

Interesting you mention this - did you see Richard Florida's recent article that says the same thing? https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/the-flip-side-of-nimb... My opinion, however, is that we should do everything we can to encourage prosperity in all our cities, including our superstar cities. If that means more concentrated urbanization in a few places, that's simply a continuation of a trend since 1870 that h…

>If that means more concentrated urbanization in a few places, that's simply a continuation of a trend since 1870 that has resulted in tremendous growth

That's not universally true. Even leaving aside cities with fairly big problems like Detroit, many of the current destination cities saw significant outflow over the course of a number of decades. The current trend for a fair number of (mostly) college-educated millennials to desperately desire living in certain dense urban cores is a relatively recent phenomenon. (Which is part of the reason it's way outpaced things like mass transit infrastructure.)

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