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Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

latimes.com

381–390 of 488 posts

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's puzzling to me that NIMBYism seems so common among people who identify as liberal. It's clearly just another way of kicking away the ladder and is inherently with the stated goals of liberalism. At least neo-liberals seems to have gotten this one 100% correct.

What I notice in Berlin is a conflation between NIMBYism and desire to solve problems with good planning and not just filling in every yard in the city so no apartments get sunlight anymore.

What you need is simple incremental growth. Let people decide what they need instead of dictating what they need. This means increasing the number of available options. If there is a way to increase options while retaining things like sunlight then you should do that.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#382
post #170
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing new housing to be built to satisfy demand.

"Allowing new housing to be built to satisfy demand." No they don't. Switzerland is one of the most conservative places on Earth, at least culturally, and they have super strict rules on what you can build. The issue has little to do with NIMBYISM really. SF is a relatively popular destination, it's going to be really, really hard to keep people on the very bottom end of the scale in housing there. Vancouver 'built b…

>Switzerland is one of the most conservative places on Earth, at least culturally, and they have super strict rules on what you can build.

It doesn't matter what gets built, just that it gets built and that everyone gets a place to live in.

>The issue has little to do with NIMBYISM really. SF is a relatively popular destination, it's going to be really, really hard to keep people on the very bottom end of the scale in housing there.

If its a population destination and the rest of the country isn't then why would we tell people that they shouldn't come here? What about all those poor people who wouldn't be poor in SF?

>Vancouver 'built built built' and didn't make a dent in affordability - just the opposite, it's one of the most unnafordable places on earth.

Pretty much everyone I have heard talk about Vancouer is that Vancouver failed to build enough housing.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#383
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one of SF’s tech companies can invent a technology that would allow housing to be stacked vertically.

I think it’s more likely that they end up with floating apartments, likely in shipping containers, parked just outside the city’s legal limits.

If SF land is so valuable why not just build more of it?

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#384
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that’s not irony, and cities will often have the highest disparity simply by having more people.

Tokyo is the biggest city in the world. 10x the population of SF. Not that many homeless addicts lying around, and the average skilled worker doesn't make that much. I can name you 50 cities bigger than SF that don't have this problem. So it seems the correlation between population size and 'rich people literally stepping over needled addicts' is not that strong.

Stepping over needles is considered an acceptable tradeoff in SF. That's where the differences lie.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#385
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s more likely that they end up with floating apartments, likely in shipping containers, parked just outside the city’s legal limits.

If SF land is so valuable why not just build more of it?

Same reason you can’t build houses on land you already own. They won’t let you.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#386
post #120
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This the one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_13

No, this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 Basically, home value for property taxes gets assessed once, when you buy the property, and it can only go up by inflation after that.

Just replace them with land value taxes that are assessed for each block or maybe the entire neighborhood. Then split the tax bill based on the area of land owned so that you get a fixed rate per square foot.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#387

I may as well represent a different perspective here. I am not leaving San Francisco. It's beautiful here. I'm excited to see it get weirder. I will always choose to live somewhere that is exciting over somewhere that will be the same forever. Everything about San Francisco has always been "temporary." This city is boom/bust, constantly changing. It's interesting, having a front-row seat to the ways that people and c…

>I will always choose to live somewhere that is exciting over somewhere that will be the same forever.

If you were to ask the local home owners they want it to stay the same forever. In fact, the city isn't changing at all, it's the people that are changing.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on dude. People aren't talking about the "weird" or quirky aspects of SF. We're talking about fucking needles, and human feces in the street. Stop protecting this shit by labeling it as something other than human suffering and a public health disaster.

My friend lived in SF for 3 years, then left for a year. He called me to say, “dude what happened to SF? Apparently it’s all shit and needles now.” I had to explain to him that nothing has changed. He was just reading sensationalized media. I live in SF, I would like the city cleaned up, more accountability for taxes, more focus on tax payers over homeless. But at the same time, SF represents liberalism in the US so…

>Most of SFs biggest problems like affordability are caused by too many people wanting to live there. These are problems other cities are jealous of.

Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? How the fuck can you brag about incompetence? Seriously. This isn't magic. All you have to do is absolutely nothing to achieve this outcome. It's basically the opposite of prosperity. Vancouver is also suffering from this "success". Berlin too. Are they examples of cities to look up to? Hell no.

People are not jealous of your city taking jobs hostage and extorting people who want to live there. After all, the pandemic ruined your cities' ability to take jobs hostage. That's why people are leaving.

When I think of SF I think of hundreds of thousands of people who failed to make it because of gate keeping.

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that plan will backfire. Look at Detroit. Secondly, everyone will draw different conclusions when looking at the same data.

As a Detroiter I'm curios to hear why you think Detroit went the way it did.

According to this talk [0] the reason is that the newly established car industry encouraged a massively unsustainable development pattern that eventually led to the bankruptcy of the city and since its the first city to be built with this pattern it was also the first to fail. Lots of other cities are suffering the same fate. New low density development at the edge of town at the expense of the self sustaining downtown core and then at some point the maintenance costs exceed the tax income and you get a city wide decline.

[0] https://youtu.be/Em7nqDqQ8oM

Re: Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokyo is the biggest city in the world. 10x the population of SF. Not that many homeless addicts lying around, and the average skilled worker doesn't make that much. I can name you 50 cities bigger than SF that don't have this problem. So it seems the correlation between population size and 'rich people literally stepping over needled addicts' is not that strong.

Stepping over needles is considered an acceptable tradeoff in SF. That's where the differences lie.

Right, but isn't that exactly the irony, or at least the hypocrisy? That people with the most liberal sensitivities seem willing to accept this level of visible human suffering for whatever personal benefits they get from living there?

People will stereotype Texans as rugged individualists ready to shoot you for stealing from a fruit stand, or Chinese as some heartless mass that will run you over and go about their day. But I don't see any cities in those places with such visible social problems.

Those drinking the SF Kool-Aid will tell you it's because of the weather being a magnet for homeless people, or some other such nonsense. As if nowhere else in the world keeps temps above freezing year round.

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