21–30 of 272 posts
AKA offloading the costs onto individuals by forcing them to show up to work the old way. The city needs to pivot to focusing on its full time residents and less of the business sector.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would people want to live in relative expensive housing if there are no jobs in the city for them? Converted apartments are not going to be "affordable" (by say the likes of students, and people just out of college not in finance or tech. Once the white collar workers leave, there is less demand for service workers to live there. Sure maybe some salaried workers like in emergency services and policing might choos…
The housing won't be as expensive if there is mass office to residential conversion, and a large percentage of jobs go remote
Downtown SF and SJC were quite ugly during downturns before tech came to the rescue. Market street until recently was still suffering from blight brought on 40 years ago.
I think this is a blessing. Cities have been designed for commuters instead of the people living in them since white flight in the 20th century. Just look at all of the metrics in the article. It's all about commuters and the city's dependence on them. Now, macroeconomic factors are forcing cities across the country to actually serve the people living in them. And it's great. Yeah there will be growing pains and this…
Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back.
You can’t harangue workers into reversing that, and you can’t browbeat business owners into paying for space that goes unused.
If you assume a lack of business renters being able to occupy the space or live off the people coming do business there, there’s only one customer base left: residential.
“But it’s hard to retrofit”, “we’ll have to redo the laws”, etc. Well, ok. You can wait to see if things will change, but they won’t. Eventually the property owners, and a city in need of tax revenue, are going to have to come to terms with the new reality.
When they do, even if it’s three decades from now, there will be more housing in that area. It will keep the streets filled, it will keep crime down, and it will bring in tax revenue… eventually. It’s anybody’s guess how long that will take, however.
I'm still absolutely furious that SF managed the boom times by handing over massive amounts of cash to landlords and property owners, by restricting construction, that came directly out of the pockets of workers and has resulted in massive displacement. Sure, the tax revenue looked great, but it happened in a way that caused great human suffering by making occupancy in the city zero sum, and awarding it to only those…
More like "enlightened views on wealth preservation." You can follow the incentives on this one. It's not that complicated.
I really hope L Breed and her leadership approve more residential conversions of office spaces in downtown. A few developers are interested but there seems to be a holdup for whatever reason. SF has already had some successful conversions like 100 Van Ness. While I don't think that is a surefire way of fixing dtsf but it is a start. The superdense neighborhood of chinatown and somewhat dense neighborhood of little it…
Why would people want to live in relative expensive housing if there are no jobs in the city for them? Converted apartments are not going to be "affordable" (by say the likes of students, and people just out of college not in finance or tech. Once the white collar workers leave, there is less demand for service workers to live there. Sure maybe some salaried workers like in emergency services and policing might choos…
It was a crazy valuation-driven fashionable thing to have high tech offices in a city center. The whole Bay Area went from being a reasonably efficient place for high tech businesses to an irrational "that's how we do things" consequence of funders wanting everything within a stone's throw of Sand Hill Road. Urban revival is good but it was taken waaay too far and made unaffordable. "Affordable" isn't going to come b…
I really hope L Breed and her leadership approve more residential conversions of office spaces in downtown. A few developers are interested but there seems to be a holdup for whatever reason. SF has already had some successful conversions like 100 Van Ness. While I don't think that is a surefire way of fixing dtsf but it is a start. The superdense neighborhood of chinatown and somewhat dense neighborhood of little it…
I think this is a blessing. Cities have been designed for commuters instead of the people living in them since white flight in the 20th century. Just look at all of the metrics in the article. It's all about commuters and the city's dependence on them. Now, macroeconomic factors are forcing cities across the country to actually serve the people living in them. And it's great. Yeah there will be growing pains and this…
Uhhh have you stepped into SF since 2010? It is an unmitigated disaster. No one wants to live there. Just had a friend that sold his condo and moved to San Diego.