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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

#31

Post by raldi »

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…

To put it another way, when someone can't afford food, we provide them food stamps, paid for by our shared tax revenue. We don't make grocery store owners grant them discounts out of pocket.

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

#32

Post by nnnnnnnn »

The author uses three examples to assert his 11 million number, but he doesn't explain why he believes the bay area should model these growth points.

In the case of Detroit, the boom was driven by many cheap manufacturing jobs available to all. This differs significantly from the fairly specialized and specific technical positions available in the valley. Cheap, uneducated labor isn't seeking out the valley -- in fact the economic incentive is an exact opposite: If you can't earn a high salary, you flee to a cheaper state.

Las Vegas has a booming service industry, which is much more in line with the manufacturing boom in Detroit.

Phoenix is where people go when they flee expensive southern California life. Phoenix is also close to Mexico, and the hispanic population is by far the fastest growing demographic (46% growth vs 17% for all other demographics per 2010 census).

The author of this Forbes article ought to spend more time analyzing the cause of population booms, rather than trying to rely weak and unsupported correlations. What a disappointment.

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

#33

Post by rizzom5000 »

This article seems to have missed or glossed over a number of critical relevant points:

1. Few people on this planet would consider Atlanta, Phoenix or Las Vegas as cities to emulate. They are all excellent examples of unsustainable growth - and to the point where water shortages are a very real future possibility for any or all of the three.

2. The 'nut' of the story is that Silicon Valley needs more engineers, and that more engineers would move there if only the cost of living were less. By this logic, Silicon Valley investors should be able to take a quick drive over to the cheaper Las Vegas, where all the cheapskate engineers must be hiding out waiting for a Silicon Valley investor to show them the way to the riches that can be found building web services and phone apps for sweat equity.

3. No mention of telecommuting? Still a taboo topic? If it's such a problem, maybe one of those start ups should start looking for a solution to that problem - that way engineers could live wherever they wanted and we wouldn't have to contemplate what the Bay Area, Phoenix style, would be like.

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

#34

Post by guelo »

Coincidentally this other article also published today has a similar theme making the case that California's previous prosperity was caused by higher population growth and advocating construction in Silicon Valley. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/14/the_decline_o...

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

#35

Post by Cariapa »

redditmigrant wrote: post #19
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…

I think you are ignoring the fact that Silicon valley is an ecosystem of engineers/product managers/sysadmins etc. all of which a growing startup needs. Hence, while a remote area might have people with ideas, it most likely will not have the eco system to sustain the growth of the startup.

True. But I think his point was that by not investing in other parts of the country, people are not giving a chance for the ecosystem to develop.

I think local culture plays a big part as well. In most other parts of the country people join big large companies and then spend their entire life being the company man or woman.

If I did that I'd cry just like the other guy said he would if the Bay Area got paved over.

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

#36

Post by ars »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #21
ktizo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, plumb…

Why can't the ship generate its own power? Is a power plant can do it, so can a ship - it's large enough to be able to make the generator efficient enough. Load it up with LNG every one in a while - LNG is transported by sea all the time anyway.

If you plan ahead you can pipe the LNG throughout the ship for cooking, and maybe even heating.

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

#37

Post by balloot »

All I know is I have lived in and visited many other places in the US, and the SF Bay Area (and especially San Francisco proper) is hands down the most distinctive and beautiful. Whatever is being done here needs to be done more and not less.

If the author wants to take his ball and stomp off to some urban-sprawly McMansion-filled city that is supposedly more optimal for talent, go right ahead. You have your choice of the vast majority of the country. There is a wonderful lack of regulation and population density out in the plains of South Dakota - just go there and I'm sure all the talent will follow in droves.

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

#38

Post by gobbluth »

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 also love San Francisco, but you have the wrong target in mind. Urban density is GOOD. What sucks is a car-centric culture that forces sprawl.

You want a NYC or European-style transportation system, where it's completely unnecessary to own dangerous, unreliable, expensive automobiles. Cities designed around walking -- like the good parts of San Francisco -- are WAY more human-friendly and memorable. I guarantee that whatever parts of San Francisco you love, they're almost definitely not parts you're forced to drive to.

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

#39

Post by hollerith »

mjn wrote: post #30
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-…

Do any parts of the Bay Area south of San Francisco have rent control? I do not know of any.

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

#40

Post by sliverstorm »

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…

This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs

It's pretty simple. Communities tend to "clump", and people generally aren't willing to commute a really long way so the diameter of each "clump" is limited. Now, this wouldn't be an issue if our population was so massive the entire USA was covered in continuous urban sprawl, but I don't think that would make you happy.

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