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Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

forbes.com

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Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#21

Post by pavel_lishin »

ktizo wrote: post #6
pavel_lishin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like BlueSeed? http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/06/blueseed-startup-ship/ (How do I create a link on HN again? The one place where a "help me with formatting" link would do some good - the reply page ( http://i.imgur.com/R8oS8.png ) - of course doesn't have one.) (Edit: Turns out the "edit" page does have it, and shows that there really isn't a way.)

Oooo.. that's nice, but a pricey way to do it. Buying existing liners, rafting them up and retrofitting would seem like a more achievable aim in practice. You could probably get some off Costa at the moment for less than the market rate.

I admit to knowing nothing about real estate, and even less about ocean liners, but it seems that an ocean liner - even at sub-market rates - would be ridiculously expensive to buy, and then merely ludicrously expensive to operate.

Sure, you're not burning a ton of fuel a minute plowing through dolphins and kelp, but you still need to generate power to operate all of the on-board facilities such as electricity, plumbing, elevators, etc. Would the city allow an entrepreneur to run a fat power cable onto a sitting ship - leaving aside political implications of a big honkin' vessel blocking the ocean view, are there even any regulations written for it?

Based only on what I've read of jwz just attempting to put a door in a nightclub wall, it seems that a hostile takeover over San Francisco, followed by some summary executions of most of the city government and a formal secession from the United States of America would be easier.

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#22

Post by mahyarm »

vannevar wrote: post #12

In short, the reason there’s too much money chasing too few businesses isn’t that the country is running out of people with good technology ideas. It’s just that bad housing policies mean that there’s nowhere for additional people to live. Well, you could spend millions and take years to move thousands more engineers to Silicon Valley. Or you could just get on a goddamned airplane and invest your money more than a fe…

More offices in the East Bay/Berkeley would be an improvement. Maybe a mini air taxi bus to go from one tip to another. (Berkley Airport - San Carlos/Palo Alto Airport - Reid Airport)

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#23

Post by StuffMaster »

DanI-S wrote: post #13

The Bay Area is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and if they turn it into another Los Angeles I will cry. This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs. Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not. Strict building regulations are part of what make this place productive and desirable in the f…

>Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not.

The article was arguing for density, not sprawl. Also that affordability is more important than desirability.

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#24

Post by mjn »

DanI-S wrote: post #13

The Bay Area is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and if they turn it into another Los Angeles I will cry. This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs. Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not. Strict building regulations are part of what make this place productive and desirable in the f…

I would say that building regulations are precisely what is causing the the area to following an LA-style trajectory. San Francisco is one thing, and reasonably dense. But the huge sprawl of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Gatos, etc., is caused by all these communities wanting to be LA-style suburbs with no dense housing, and enacting laws accordingly.

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#25

Post by fusiongyro »

joelandren wrote: post #15

I'll try to be nice here, but the author is a fucking idiot. To posit that the Bay Area can handle the population growth of sprawling and ill-planned Atlanta, Phoenix and Las Vegas is patently ridiculous. The Bay Area is already one of the most dense metro regions in the US and to think that the area could see growth like that without a MAJOR disruption in quality of life is absurd. I also think many engineers, who c…

You're sort of both right. One reason I don't want to relocate to the Bay (despite several offers) is when I do the math, my quality of life is substantially higher here in the middle of nowhere New Mexico on astonishingly less money. If you're not after the glory, it doesn't necessarily make economic sense. Doubly so if you don't like the kind of work that exists in the bay. If the housing and commute time issues weren't so dramatic, I would think about it, but still probably would stay out here.

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#26

Post by mahyarm »

DanI-S wrote: post #13

The Bay Area is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and if they turn it into another Los Angeles I will cry. This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs. Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not. Strict building regulations are part of what make this place productive and desirable in the f…

I was surprised how much of the housing was just... mediocre in SV. Even if everything was $500'000 cheaper.

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#27

Post by DanBlake »

As a new landlord in San Francisco, I can tell you that the biggest issue forcing this is rent control. The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing.

Without rent control, the market is free to compete and suddenly open up a ton of bottled up apartments. The issue is, a family on welfare with a income of 40k a year should not be living in a 4 bedroom apartment in pacific heights for 1k a month. I have no problem with giving affordable housing to those in need, but rent control is not the answer as it places the burden on individual landlords to provide social security.

The biggest gap of people who can live in SF are not the poor (taken care of by rent control) or the rich (dont care/buy homes) but those in between. Run of the road engineers and others who make between 75k and 150k a year. These are the people who are hurt most by san franciscos crazy rent laws.

If rent control was abolished, the one thing you would see is that rental rates would lower significantly as supply starts to balance with demand. Yes, some people would be displaced but the question is- If the city of san francisco wants to provide affordable rental units, why dont they instead just pay lower income people directly, letting them be free to choose where to live?

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#28

Post by mjn »

oscardelben wrote: post #11

I just moved here from Italy, and it's almost impossible for me to get an apartment that's near public transportation. I mean, other than caltrain there's little if nothing public transportation here, and that may be part of the problem too. I certainly can't rent a house in the hills if there's no way for me to get to work from there. I ended up renting from a colleague.

Yes, unfortunately the whole area is built on an assumption that you have a car. Santa Clara County in particular is amazing in that it's one of the few places in the world that has three levels of grade-separated freeways: national highways, state highways, and county highways. The latter (San Tomas Expressway, etc.) were paid for out of the money that Santa Clara County saved by opting out of BART, which is not coincidentally why the public transit is bad.

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#29

Post by maratd »

rsl7 wrote: post #18
DanI-S wrote: post #13

The Bay Area is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and if they turn it into another Los Angeles I will cry. This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs. Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not. Strict building regulations are part of what make this place productive and desirable in the f…

so the high cost keeps out the riffraff?

You're making kittens cry! Stop pointing out the obvious. Nobody wants to hear why zoning and rent control is still around.

Re: Why the San Francisco Bay Area should have 11 million residents today

#30

Post by mjn »

DanBlake wrote: post #27

As a new landlord in San Francisco, I can tell you that the biggest issue forcing this is rent control. The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing. Without rent control, the market is free to compete and suddenly open up a ton of bottled up apartments. The issue is, a family on welfare with a income of 40k a year should not…

From the numbers I can find, I don't think this is true. The biggest population constraint in the Valley by far comes in the form of explicit density constraints, such as minimum lot sizes, not rent control. Palo Alto has no rent control, for example, but is less dense than SF, despite the fact that demand exists for much denser housing to be built (especially near Stanford) if it were permitted. Some kind of scared-rich-person-club mentality going on where they're worried that allowing apartments, or even townhomes, might bring in too much riff-raff, so by law everything has to be an undivided and large single-family home (in a large portion of the total area).
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