Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks • Hacker News Board

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#231

Post by specialist » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 10:34 AM UTC

zeruch wrote: post #86

Aloha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop 13 is one of the legs of the stool of most dysfunction in California. Some of these are gonna spark controversy but term limits, the recall and ease of passing propositions are some of the other ones. The legislature is no longer professional enough to govern, so the people do it at the ballot box, at the behest of whom ever has the most money to spend. The fact that California is a single party state because of…

Terms limits are a red herring. They punish good and bad candidates, and don't actually help the problems with the elected class: campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering. Wanna know what its a "single party state"? Because one of the major parties, up until Pete Wilson, acted like a real party, then became a caricature (the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys…

> Terms limits are a red herring.

Yes and: Disempowering legislators empowers administrators and lobbyists. Power is zero sum.

I supported term limits until I saw first hand how agency heads run circles around legislators.

Now, I advocate making legislators more powerful, more independent, and therefore less dependent on lobbyists, contributors, and agencies.

Make legislating a real, full time job. More resources for staff, to help mitigate infoglut and provide real constituent services. Etc, etc.

> campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering.

Absolutely. I advocate pretty much all the good government reforms. Public financing of campaigns, approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies, restoring fairness doctrine, open government as default (eg something like data.gov for most everything). Etc, etc.

PS-

Lawrence Krubner's blog Demodexio is really good. Dives into nonobvious, nonsexy, common sense fundamental structural reforms for democracy, elections, and policy work.

So far, Krubner's advocacy matches my own experiences and observations. Here's just one great example:

Should the votes from voters combine on a per-issue basis, rather than a per-party or a per-candidate basis? [2022/05/13] Why did Kenneth Arrow think that Approval Voting would do a better job of bringing to the surface the real concerns of voters?

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-the-votes-from-voter...

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#232

Post by sofixa » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 11:16 AM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #150

blagie wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction would have been different 2 years ago. Pre-COVID, I worked on a few 100% remote teams, and it worked great. COVID didn't do what I expected. Instead of online learning moving into the mainstream, we got emergency crappy online learning, and the world burned out on online learning. Everyone now believes it can't be done. All the businesses I worked with switched to WFH, equally poorly. In my current job,…

I don't really know anyone who (openly) believed that online learning was going to be successful. Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day. Expecting 7 year old kids and teenagers to sit in front of a computer screen and suffer through what effectively amounts to 7 hours of meetings is asinine-…

> Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day.

And even then. Do you remember in the early 2010s with the rise of edX, Coursera and co when one of the founders was predicting that in 20 years almost all learning will be online, universities will ho bankrupt and close with less than 50, including the online ones, remaining?

The reality is that the vast majority of adults can't be bothered to maintain their motivation and finish an online course. The stats on course completion rates are abysmal. I've been there, of course, I have enrolled into probably more than 10 different courses, all of which sounded very interesting, but none of which i was motivated to see through the end.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#233

Post by kkfx » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 11:25 AM UTC

julianeon wrote: post #24

I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. 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. Yo…

Honestly, not knowing SF (European with very few visits in the USA so far) my point is for all cities build demand time, years, decades in general, things change normally not that fast but change anyway and adapting cities to different (changed) societies it's next to unfeasible.

Surely, something can be done, normally with big effort compared to the final outcome, but not more than that.

In the very past was easier: rate of change was FAR slower, cities was built with rocks and some wood, the very same rocks can be "moved" to build something different and woods can be sourced nearby. The city was able to rebuild itself. Normally after some catastrophe. Modern cities tend to be steel and concrete, not easy to be "reused" especially locally. As a result modern cites need to be rebuilt from the ground today and IF we accept such enormous challenge when they'll be rebuilt will probably be not good anymore because tech and so business/needs are already changed.

In the recent past the idea of a thriving city was simply: we have living places and commerce concentrated, if tomorrow a certain family of shops became obsolete and disappear others will occupy the same places with minor changes, like we do not have anymore the need for stearic candles but at their place light bulb shops arrive, we do not have much classic restaurants and at their place small kitchen for ready-made food delivery take their place etc. That's effectively worked for a certain amount of time. Factories are outside, they have room to change, agriculture have room to change and people live in cities.

Now such model is in crisis, climate change force new kind of homes, it's not just a matter of changing windows and some appliance. New small homes are easier to rebuild, you crush the old one, build another at the same place. Tall buildings are another story and most cities are made of tall buildings especially downtown.

That's the real crisis, it's not a matter "due to remote work some offices are empty and activities around them can't survive": no one take this places because it's not anymore a simple "economical shift" in the same model.

Since we dream a future of flying cars density for economy of scale will be FAR LESS dense than now and that's give the ability to change, cities can only be small/medium and on-purpose, like classic manufacturing districts.

The really unpopular part is the fact that in such model too many will be new poor and of course they do not like such idea, we do not like that being not so sure for ourselves since even wealthy today a big shift might be hard to sustain.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#234

Post by sofixa » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 11:28 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #229

littlexsparkee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18.7 as of April https://socketsite.com/archives/2022/04/visualizing-all-the-...

These numbers seem tiny. Even if it all converts into 1000 sq ft residential homes, 18,000 new homes will not be enough to solve the housing shortage. Definitely would help a ton though, and I probably shouldn't be hopeful of a single solution here.

1000 sq ft (92 sq m) is a quite decent family apartment. For young singles or couples without kids, half of that is pretty decent. 20-25-30k new homes is nothing to sniff at, even if it won't solve the full problem.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#235

Post by Gigachad » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #217

Gigachad wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both. Some media spends every minute talking about it and some will completely ignore the topic even when its central to the topic being discussed. Also with social media, most people are seeing this themselves and bypassing commercial news.

It can't be both; crime cannot simultaneously be up and down.

Reporting of crime can be. Some news ignores it while some news overhypes it.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#236

Post by epistasis » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #22

adam_arthur wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The housing won't be as expensive if there is mass office to residential conversion, and a large percentage of jobs go remote

I agree it will come down from $4000. But if I were a service worker, I'd balk at $2500 (let's say it even went as low as that) if I could get it cheaper elsewhere. Hayward, Oakland would be cheaper. 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 don't understand what your contention is here, but my best understanding is that you think that there's nobody who could afford these apartments with jobs in SF, and that they would sit empty. Is that correct?

If I got that correct, then I would first say that there are massive numbers of people who want to live in SF who have been kept out by the $4000 prices, and lowering it to $3500 or $3000 would bring in far more people.

Further, thinking only in terms of service workers and tech workers misses a lot of what goes on in the city, there's a ton of people in between.

But even if I'm wrong, then having a huge number of vacant apartments is really good news for all renters in the city. It puts pressure on all other landlords to power prices. It changes the market segmentation, and drives improvements in prices or apartment quality for all market segments adjacent to whatever price the conversions initially target. There is no downside to a bunch of vacant office space converting to vacant apartments.

One problem with mass conversions, and in general the way that SF has done planning—zero change allowed for decades then dumping a bunch of new stuff in a small area—is that it takes a long time for the new neighborhood to gain all the character of a neighborhood, for example the little shops, the community groups, etc.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#237

Post by Fatnino » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

julianeon wrote: post #24

I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. 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. Yo…

Those residential units would be full of people remote working so the satellite businesses (cafes and what-have-yous) could theoreticaly stay in business.

The reality is that a building owner doesn't want to lower the asking rent because it will devalue the building. They make more money owning a building with high rents than they lose having it sit empty. Nobody actually checks if these "high value" real estate properties on paper are actually occupied.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#238

Post by Aloha » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #226

Aloha wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare the quality of legislation passed before term limits to after (the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits), I remember the difference. The current system encourages "make a name for yourself than move on to bigger and better things" and prevents the legislature acting as a base of political power - that gets in the way of long term thinking. To the rest of your comment - I th…

> Compare the quality of legislation passed before term limits to after After is generally better, at least than in an equal time period before, though I don't attribute it to term limits, which were a bad idea. > the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits The last major structural reform to state government was when it was finally made modestly governable by the repeal of the superm…

What did Schwarzenegger reform?

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#239

Post by tootie » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

diogenescynic wrote: post #73

tootie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly this seems like unmitigated blessing that there's so much spare real estate to alleviate the monstrous shortage of housing. SF was a vibrant, thriving city with a ton of character before it became the new Babylon of the technology era. It could stand to lose 50,000 tech bros and let some families and earnest weirdos move back in.

>Honestly this seems like unmitigated blessing that there's so much spare real estate to alleviate the monstrous shortage of housing. It's pretty unlikely that office space/buildings will be retro-fitted for residences.

Sure it's going to take a lot of political will and some cultural shift, I'm just saying it's very possible if they seize the opportunity.

NYC is in a similar boat although seemingly less severe. The mayor is just saying "go back to the office" so it's certainly an uphill battle.

Re: Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

#240

Post by blagie » Sun, Jun 12, 2022, 3:32 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #232

zdragnar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know anyone who (openly) believed that online learning was going to be successful. Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day. Expecting 7 year old kids and teenagers to sit in front of a computer screen and suffer through what effectively amounts to 7 hours of meetings is asinine-…

> Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day. And even then. Do you remember in the early 2010s with the rise of edX, Coursera and co when one of the founders was predicting that in 20 years almost all learning will be online, universities will ho bankrupt and close with less than 50, including t…

It's worth noting "the founders" were mostly figureheads who took over from the actual founders through power plays, and knew nearly nothing about online learning, or much of anything other than corporate politics.

The original founders built platforms which worked pretty well. In the end, MOOCs were videos and multiple choice questions. No one can stomach that.

The original Stanford AI course, from Norvig/Thrun, did pretty okay. Coursera steamrolled Udacity by building a massive number of crappy courses.

The first edX course, 6.002x, mis-attributed to Agarwal but mostly built by Sussman/Mitros/Terman, did even better. Within a few years, edX was run by corporate types who did massive numbers of crappy courses.

The actual founders had bold plans for how to make the platforms and courses even better, but those never panned out, due to politics, incentives, etc.

Good online can be really good.