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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”

#61

Post by ghaff »

stellar678 wrote: post #53
mc32 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faulting Brisbane is myopic. Brisbane could add maybe a few thousand units. San Francisco could add a hundred thousand units, if they really wanted to, but no, instead they blame a town of 3,500 for their problems. It shows how non introspective they are and how willing to blame others they are.

The Brisbane baylands area is a full square mile, which is contiguous with parts of San Francisco and is separated by a 5-lane highway from the current residential part of Brisbane. I live in a mixed SFH/midrise apartment neighborhood in Oakland, and our population density is 24,000 per square mile. So putting 24k people in that part of Brisbane wouldn't even look particularly built up. The Nob Hill, Russian Hill and…

>but don't want the (expensive) responsibility to house all those people that work in town.

That's a common, often unstated problem, in many places. A new family often doesn't pay enough in taxes to cover the services they need, schools in particular. Which puts pressure on everyone's tax burden.

I live in a rural/exurban town in New England and the tax issue definitely comes up in any discussion of approving any sizable development. (The town tends to be against development in general for traffic etc. reasons but taxes are part of it.)

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

#62

Post by mc32 »

stellar678 wrote: post #53
mc32 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faulting Brisbane is myopic. Brisbane could add maybe a few thousand units. San Francisco could add a hundred thousand units, if they really wanted to, but no, instead they blame a town of 3,500 for their problems. It shows how non introspective they are and how willing to blame others they are.

The Brisbane baylands area is a full square mile, which is contiguous with parts of San Francisco and is separated by a 5-lane highway from the current residential part of Brisbane. I live in a mixed SFH/midrise apartment neighborhood in Oakland, and our population density is 24,000 per square mile. So putting 24k people in that part of Brisbane wouldn't even look particularly built up. The Nob Hill, Russian Hill and…

Brisbane does not attract 45k workers to their business parks. Nowhere near that.

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

#63

Post by tomkarlo »

cmontella wrote: post #26

I used to live in the dead center of the city, in the Ashbury Heights neighborhood. It took me literally 1 hour to get to work, down town taking muni (fastest time recorded is 40 minutes without any delays and essentially running the "last mile"). This was the longest commute of my life, and I lived 3 miles from work. It would take me just a little more time to walk there. Biking was faster, but more dangerous -- I g…

That's great, but it seems kind of orthogonal and non-scalable to the problem of the Bay Area housing crisis. Are you proposing that everyone in SF move to places like the Central Valley (driving up price) and start driving around cars (increasing traffic and pollution)? What about folks who don't have the luxury of jobs where they can work remotely?

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

#64

Post by stellar678 »

ghaff wrote: post #61
stellar678 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brisbane baylands area is a full square mile, which is contiguous with parts of San Francisco and is separated by a 5-lane highway from the current residential part of Brisbane. I live in a mixed SFH/midrise apartment neighborhood in Oakland, and our population density is 24,000 per square mile. So putting 24k people in that part of Brisbane wouldn't even look particularly built up. The Nob Hill, Russian Hill and…

>but don't want the (expensive) responsibility to house all those people that work in town. That's a common, often unstated problem, in many places. A new family often doesn't pay enough in taxes to cover the services they need, schools in particular. Which puts pressure on everyone's tax burden. I live in a rural/exurban town in New England and the tax issue definitely comes up in any discussion of approving any siz…

And it's even harder in California where so much of the property tax roll is frozen at tiny values from the past.

Prop 13 can take almost exclusive blame for cities in California giving preference to jobs and retail over housing. It's like a direct incentive if they want to keep their budgets balanced.

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

#65

Post by wahern »

mc32 wrote: post #25
compiler-guy wrote: post #19

"Someone else should make the sacrifice." There's the problem right there. From the article: "Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons." "And we also probably don’t want high rise condos on the edge of Golden Gate Park. San Francisco isn’t New York." I've voted in favor of every housing initiative available to me, but you can't make your favorite part of the Bay Area sacred and…

Faulting Brisbane is myopic. Brisbane could add maybe a few thousand units. San Francisco could add a hundred thousand units, if they really wanted to, but no, instead they blame a town of 3,500 for their problems. It shows how non introspective they are and how willing to blame others they are.

Do you live in San Francisco? For the past 5 years there have been housing projects _everywhere_ across the city. Last year there were 62,000 units in the pipeline (anywhere from approved to under construction). (http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/a-record-62000-un...) I can't find a link, but I think the goal several years ago was to have built 30,000 units between 2015 and 2020, and progress has been okay.

In 2016 San Francisco built twice as much housing per capita (EDIT: per new resident) as the state average. (https://sf.curbed.com/2017/5/4/15543668/san-francisco-new-ho...)

The city could do much, much better. The issue here isn't approvals, per se; it's the high cost of construction, and a big part of that is the concessions that the city (and NIMBYs) squeeze out of developers. But in any event at least the city is _approving_ projects. Compared to every other city in the Bay Area San Francisco is leading. Unfortunately that says more about the Bay Area than it does SF, but in any event SF isn't being hypocritical when it criticizes Brisbane, Palo Alto, etc.

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

#66

Post by guiomie »

cmontella wrote: post #26

I used to live in the dead center of the city, in the Ashbury Heights neighborhood. It took me literally 1 hour to get to work, down town taking muni (fastest time recorded is 40 minutes without any delays and essentially running the "last mile"). This was the longest commute of my life, and I lived 3 miles from work. It would take me just a little more time to walk there. Biking was faster, but more dangerous -- I g…

I live in Lower Haight, and takes me 10-20 minutes. But I agree with you SF or just city life can take a toll.

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

#67

Post by lukasb »

rsync wrote: post #41
compiler-guy wrote: post #19

"Someone else should make the sacrifice." There's the problem right there. From the article: "Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons." "And we also probably don’t want high rise condos on the edge of Golden Gate Park. San Francisco isn’t New York." I've voted in favor of every housing initiative available to me, but you can't make your favorite part of the Bay Area sacred and…

"Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons." Good for them. I mean, probably not, but Brisbane is their town and they should determine their own values and courses of action. The solution to San Francisco needs to occur in San Francisco - not CC county or Marin or Sonoma. There's a lot of very, very distinguished and historic and noteworthy 1-4 story housing stock in San Francis…

Except San Francisco is paying the price for Mountain View and Palo Alto being willing to add jobs but not housing. Arguing "well then those cities should build housing" is true, but misses the point: given that people can commute, city boundaries are sort of irrelevant. It's a regional problem.

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

#68

Post by rpearl »

rthomas6 wrote: post #44
rsync wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Brisbane ... is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons." Good for them. I mean, probably not, but Brisbane is their town and they should determine their own values and courses of action. The solution to San Francisco needs to occur in San Francisco - not CC county or Marin or Sonoma. There's a lot of very, very distinguished and historic and noteworthy 1-4 story housing stock in San Francis…

What's wrong with buses?

Slow, unreliable due to traffic, difficult to scale with the number of people.

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

#69

Post by nerfhammer »

majormajor wrote: post #35
archagon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

the way they want to do things causes ends up causing massive suffering for really no good reason.

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

#70

Post by orcasauce »

stellar678 wrote: post #53
mc32 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faulting Brisbane is myopic. Brisbane could add maybe a few thousand units. San Francisco could add a hundred thousand units, if they really wanted to, but no, instead they blame a town of 3,500 for their problems. It shows how non introspective they are and how willing to blame others they are.

The Brisbane baylands area is a full square mile, which is contiguous with parts of San Francisco and is separated by a 5-lane highway from the current residential part of Brisbane. I live in a mixed SFH/midrise apartment neighborhood in Oakland, and our population density is 24,000 per square mile. So putting 24k people in that part of Brisbane wouldn't even look particularly built up. The Nob Hill, Russian Hill and…

Have you ever been to Brisbane? Most people move there for the small-town feel; I personally tried, but got out-cashed by a Chinese investor. You're not going to convince them to become San Francisco's housing overflow.

Geographic mobility really is a huge hurdle. A lot of business is becoming centralized around major long-distance transportation hubs, San Francisco being chief among them. Live in Concord, but want to work in Los Gatos? Good luck getting there by train. I lived in the Mission and to get to China Basin was a bus to a train to a bus. I opted for the ten minute drive instead of forty-five minutes of transferring. It's embarrassing how much better we could do so much better moving people around. Right now I opt to drive the 101 south instead of taking Caltrain, even though my employer covers the cost, because it would cost me an additional $10 a day to take other trains/buses to get to the Milbrae transfer, and by the time I've driven myself either to 4th/King or San Bruno I could have already been half way to work just driving the whole way. We need to do better.

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