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

sfchronicle.com

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

#81

Post by 88913527 »

Aloha wrote: post #41
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: How much of this caused Prop 13? We bought a home in the Bay Area a few years ago. We considered the pros/cons of moving out of state and one pro of staying here was Prop 13 in California. We plan to retire in this home and figured Prop 13 will help make our post-retirement living expenses negligible. I only recently had the realization that Prop 13 could cause some serious problems like cities bein…

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…

Per-student spending in most California counties is comparable to that of Alabama and Mississippi: https://flowingdata.com/2016/04/21/school-district-spending-...

Money can't fix everything but spending 33% below the median probably is a sign of underinvestment.

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

#82

Post by paulcole »

DantesKite wrote: post #44
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…

> Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. Keith Rabois said one of the the major reasons he moved was because of crime.

No post body was provided.

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

#83

Post by spoonjim »

tootie wrote: post #54
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 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.

LOL see what happens to those free dog and cash for the homeless programs when the tech bros move out

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

#84

Post by hazyc »

systemvoltage wrote: post #23
1270018080 wrote: post #3

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.

Do you even live here? Walk around the Marina, Pac Heights, Presidio, Noe Valley, etc etc and tell me with a straight face that it's an "unmitigated disaster". If you can afford to live here (i.e. you can afford to avoid 'downtown') then you would realize that it's one of the nicest cities in the world.

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

#85

Post by hindsightbias »

jen20 wrote: post #37
ajmurmann wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely insane that the government has any say in what a building gets used for. I can see some arguments why the government has a say in constructing a building in the first place, but controlling what it's used for is just planned economy, communist hubris!

Ironically the most conservative areas are the ones who fall the hardest for the communist hubris, which is why you can’t get a beer without driving in so much of the USA.

They think govt is bad, wait til they paint their house blue in their gated HOA communitiy.

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

#86

Post by zeruch »

Aloha wrote: post #41
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: How much of this caused Prop 13? We bought a home in the Bay Area a few years ago. We considered the pros/cons of moving out of state and one pro of staying here was Prop 13 in California. We plan to retire in this home and figured Prop 13 will help make our post-retirement living expenses negligible. I only recently had the realization that Prop 13 could cause some serious problems like cities bein…

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 like Nixon, Reagan, Deukmajian, Schwartzenegger etc all got elected) but now comprise less than 25% of the state registered voters (although many are now independents with a center-right lean) and the GOP leadership in the state are utterly oblivious clowns who live in rural bubbles like the Northern areas that want to start a neo-fascist Confederate Idiocracy with Eastern Oregon and Southern Idaho, or urban derp-bubbles like West Orange County and Torrey Pines, who just want brown people to tend to their golf courses and think Ayn Rand is one hot bitch. The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because the Koch-knobs and Trumpkins that "lead" the opposition are as inane and insane as they are.

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

#87

Post by Gigachad »

nemothekid wrote: post #66
nathanaldensr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are living in an age of media ignoring elephants so large they've burst through the very walls of the house.

It's strange that crime is simultaneously all the media ever talks about while also being elephant the media ignores. San Francisco is constantly lambasted mad max where the walgreens owner is being shaken down by the local crime syndicate but it's somehow an open secret that you only read about in top secret government files.

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.

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

#88

Post by hindsightbias »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #45
starik36 wrote: post #16

A large article and not a single mention of crime.

I started to think that, but actually the last section of the article, is about crime. I think it’s quite weak however, crime is in my humble opinion the very central reason for the decline of downtown San Francisco.

Since correlation is causation, I blame WFH policies for higher crime.

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

#89

Post by acchow »

kqr2 wrote: post #12
forthwall wrote: post #5

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…

S.F. has nearly 16 million square feet of vacant office space. Why can't it become housing? https://archive.ph/znGkU

16M square feet is last year’s estimate. Wonder what the figure is today

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

#90

Post by zeruch »

claytongulick wrote: post #64
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

They are indeed part of the problem. Once people get it out of their heads that California is a pure "blue" state and has in fact had a complex political history with a lot of moving changes, including many by the GOP, than it rapidly becomes less obviously a red or blue issue, but a very deeply purple one with no one lacking exposure.
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