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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”

#251

Post by bradleyjg »

DrScump wrote: post #237
bradleyjg wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? The subdivisions of California are creatures of state law, either statutory or constitutional. An initiative can modify statues or the constitution. There are three limitations on them (Art. II, section 8, (d), (e), and (f)) but I don't see how any of them would apply here. Do you see a federal constitutional or statutory doctrine that would prevent it from doing so?

An initiative can modify statues Stat utes . Any strong hammer can modify a stat ue . But seriously, yes, statute law or the state Constitution can be modified by initiative. The latter requires more qualifying signatures than the former, but once it's on the ballot, simple majority is all it takes. But the status of cities also involves the city's charter (not all cities are charter cities, but most major ones are).

Surely city charters don't stand as barriers to municipal consolidation when the tool at hand can modify the state Constitution?

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

#252

Post by ende »

gojomo wrote: post #103
ende wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, when SF and Oakland were both attempting to annex every neighboring town in proximity, SF had designs on consolidating all the Bay Area municipalities under a system similar to NYC's boroughs.

More details on what coulda, woulda, shoulda been: http://hoodline.com/2017/03/that-time-san-francisco-tried-to...

Aha! I was looking for that article. Thank you!

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

#253

Post by cvwright »

cullenking wrote: post #235
cvwright wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the risk of sounding xenophobic, Portland is going to turn into San Francisco soon enough ... It is already in the process of doing so. > please please please push back against freeway expansions ... And this attitude is the reason. I don't know why people think that adopting the same anti-growth, anti-construction, anti-roads attitude that has made San Francisco so unaffordable for regular people will have a di…

Nothing in my comment was anti growth, the only thing you can point to that's close was anti freeway expansion. And freeway expansion does not ultimately solve congestion. Without massive billion dollar road changes, widening freeways, as is proposed right now in pdx, just shifts the congestion around. We can look at a dozen large metro areas with 16 lane freeways and commute times are still insane. Pump that money i…

Nobody is seriously suggesting a 16-lane freeway in PDX. The freeway expansion that's being proposed is to remove an awful bottleneck on I-5, where it cuts down to just two lanes in each direction near the Rose Quarter. The entire rest of that road is three lanes.

This is on the major US West Coast interstate highway, going through the largest city in the state. I know of 100k person towns in the middle of nowhere that have better highway infrastructure than this.

On everything else you mention, we are in agreement. The increased density of the inner East side is hopefully going to play a big role in keeping costs down and avoiding massive sprawl as the city grows.

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

#255

Post by rovolo »

xapata wrote: post #243
rovolo wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to 'Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary' (2010) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003122412448050 , around 10% of (hetero) couples met at work as of 2010, down from a peak of 20% in 1990. It is the fourth most common method behind friends, bars, and online. Just the graph: https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/internet-dating.pn...

There's some overlap, as one can be friends with coworkers and go to bars with them.

The paper aims to categorize how people met rather than how their relationship developed. This is how they describe their criteria for categorizing relationships (the paper is focused on internet dating, but the same criteria would be used for coworkers):

>By meeting online, or meeting through the Internet, we mean that a couple’s relationship began with an online interaction and then developed into a personal and physical relationship. We coded couples as having met online only if the online interaction was crucial to their having met, regardless of how the couple communicated once they had met. … If the couple first met decades earlier, fell out of touch, and then rediscovered each other through Facebook, that would be “meeting online” for our purposes.

Based on my reading of their criteria, the relationship would be categorized as 'coworker' if they either knew the person at work prior to visiting the bar, they were introduced at the bar through a coworker, or a work event took place at a bar.

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

#256

Post by akgerber »

s73ver_ wrote: post #129
akgerber wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tradeoff is that if you make anything resembling Bay Area wages in Kansas City, you can pay off a lovely older house in a walkable neighborhood in two years or so.

The first wave might. However, I'm guessing housing prices would adjust.

A midsized city, when willing to sprawl, build upward, or both, will have housing prices that max out around the cost of construction. Have you ever looked at real estate listings in Houston?

Plus the supply of cheap walkable neighborhoods in the Midwest is very high.

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

#257

Post by akgerber »

winter_blue wrote: post #193
akgerber wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manhattan is more affordable. There are plenty of 1-bedrooms available right now under $2000: https://streeteasy.com/for-rent/nyc/area:102,139,135%7Cbeds:... Brooklyn is still twice as dense as SF, and much more affordable.

Just curious -- why did you exclude midtown from your StreetEasy search? (I happen to live in a $2.5k studio just a couple minutes away from Byrant Park. I picked it because it made my commute to work a 9 minute walk.)

Tried to list all of short-commute Manhattan and just missed it.

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

#258

Post by akgerber »

ryuker16 wrote: post #219
akgerber wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manhattan is more affordable. There are plenty of 1-bedrooms available right now under $2000: https://streeteasy.com/for-rent/nyc/area:102,139,135%7Cbeds:... Brooklyn is still twice as dense as SF, and much more affordable.

When I looked into moving to New York, I saw similar rents and figured something was up. Are these sub $2k places across from a public housing complex, rat infested, or just scam listings that magically have a new price once you call>?

Public housing is not available to you. Some are probably rent-stabilized. Many are high-floor walkups in tenements. Many buildings in Manhattan have rats. Craigslist has scams but Streeteasy usually doesn't as ads there are paid, though it usually doesn't have the cheapest apartments either.

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

#259

Post by Ciao_a_tutti »

kendallpark wrote: post #57
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?

I had the same thought when reading the article. NYC became NYC partly because of the need for physical proximity of businesses. For example, there was a time when you HAD to be physically present on Wall Street to exchange stocks. In the 21st century, how great the need for physical proximity in the tech industry? Sure, it's convenient to have a ton of skilled devs in one place, but does that convenience outweigh th…

Hi, I read your comment here -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152917.

Are you still developing your software, and is it downloadable?

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

#260

Post by tomkarlo »

DrScump wrote: post #234
tomkarlo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You emphasize the 70K , but the Brisbane Baylands proposal in your link is for 4,400 units.

Sorry. The link was to support the first sentence (and my main point) which is to refute the parent post's statement that "they are not attracting talent and or companies' which create the demand". Brisbane is planning to do exactly that in this case.
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