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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”

#71

Post by tomkarlo »

mc32 wrote: post #59
epistasis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can fault Brisbane just as we can fault every municipality in the Bay Area. That's not short sighted, it's necessary.

They are not a "city" and they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand. San Francisco is but, while they advertise themselves as a city, promote growth, grant tax breaks for cachet employers, etc., they do very little, in terms of creating and building housing for those workers. They demand others do what they themselves are unwilling to do. Now, imagine the opposite, Brisbane demanding Sa…

They are in fact planning to do just that - put more office space in that zone, which will create demand for housing in SF (the nearest major residential area) rather than adding housing. And in the past, they've blocked a proposal that would have added 70K residential units.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-control...

The attitude is essentially, "I've got mine, let's pull the ladder up after me and deny anyone else affordable housing."

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

#72

Post by ghaff »

tomkarlo wrote: post #51
alexandercrohde wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Paris is twice as dense as SF, and denser than any other US city except New York. Increasing density isn't necessarily a goal, but it's a sign of a healthy city - it means people want to live there so much that they're willing to pack together closer in order to be there, and it helps drive the cultural wealth (food, culture, social) that marks the most prominent cities such as NY, Paris, London, Hong Kong, etc.

Manila, Mumbai, Dhaka? Nothing against any of them but they're usually not what people are thinking about when they're extolling the benefits of density. You also need to be careful with city density numbers in general. For example, the 55K/sq. mi. Paris number that gets thrown around is specifically for the core of the core.

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

#73

Post by jra_samba »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #45

The real solution is for companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc to have the COURAGE to create large work epicenters outside of the Bay Area. Create headquarters for tens of thousands of workers in more remote areas with a strong infrastructure, with great benefits for working families. Do what Amazon wants to do with a second HQ, and create demand outside of the Bay Area. If Google created a new HQ in Kansas Cit…

In its heyday HP did this. Look at places like Roseville and Fort Collins. Essentially company towns. And while the going is good, and the quarterly numbers keep going up, everything is great.

But eventually the bad times come, and the employees living in these places are cast off like so many worn shoes, along with their families.

I've seen this. I'm never moving out of the SF Bay Area until well after retirement (and maybe not even then :-). Going to a Kansas City HQ is a gamble that whatever company will always do well. Do you want to gamble your future on that ? Do you want to gamble your family on that ?

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

#74

Post by hardtke »

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…

We are already seeing that Uber/Lyft are causing declines in the usage of public transit, and there could actually be decreasing appetite for public transit investment. Compared to the rest of the US, the Bay Area is actually already pretty good when it comes to fraction of workers commuting by transit (#2 or #3 after New York City and possibly Washington, D.C.). Unfortunately, I find that most people are all in favor of other people using public transportation so that they can drive where they want to go faster. Transit only gains massive adoption for particular commutes where it is substantially faster than driving.

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

#75

Post by GiraffeGlove »

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…

Nice to see someone I can agree with. Sure there's plenty of beautiful Victorian homes in San Francisco, but there's a lot of shitty ones that need to be razed too. SF doesn't need all these 3-4 story, 3-4 BR single family homes with tiny unusable garages - it needs taller denser and modern apartment complexes with a nice park in the middle.

All but about 1/8th of the city is just a sprawling suburb.

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

#76

Post by tomkarlo »

rpearl wrote: post #68
rthomas6 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with buses?

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

If we added bus lanes they way they do in other countries, it would address the traffic problem. But we always favor the lone-commuter-in-car.

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

#77

Post by stellar678 »

mc32 wrote: post #62
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…

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

I didn't say that. 45k is just the midpoint in density between Nob Hill and Telegraph Hill. Seems like a good target for the baylands neighborhood.

Brisbane's city report from 2013 states there were ~6,500 jobs in the city. Add in children, unemployed, retired, etc... and that accounts for many times more residents than can actually live in Brisbane. Which means Brisbane is contributing heavily to the housing problem in the Bay Area.

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

#78

Post by mc32 »

wahern wrote: post #65
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.

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…

I do live here, but I've also lived in the far east. There is no comparison. We see cranes in a few places, mainly SoMa, that is not sufficient. We should see building along geary, van ness, sunset Blvd, third, Octavia, California, etc.,etc.

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

#79

Post by tedivm »

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…

There's a difference between the major park in a major city that is used by thousands of people a day, and that shitty town of 5k people that doesn't want anyone else to move in. Shit, there are more people in GGP right now than there will be all week in Brisbane.

At the same time it's not like Brisbane isn't building. They just aren't building housing, because they want to build commercial so they can get the taxes without having to get the population increase.

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

#80

Post by rpearl »

tomkarlo wrote: post #76
rpearl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If we added bus lanes they way they do in other countries, it would address the traffic problem. But we always favor the lone-commuter-in-car.

It doesn't help with scaling (you can have multi-car trains but it's much harder to have multi-car busses) or max speed, but it would certainly be an improvement over the current situation!
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