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Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

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Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#91

Post by PhasmaFelis »

mc32 wrote: post #21
x0x0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an sf suburb. I talk to local homeowners in the dog park at night and they're all wildly opposed to density, often with a nice core of racism too (I'm white so white people say some wild shit to me; you hear references to "those people" and it's not that deeply coded.) The only thing that cheers me about all the nimbys where I live is all their kids are getting kicked out. Seriously. In 20 years when their…

To be fair, lots of people who are minorities who live in gentrifying neighborhoods also tinge their conversation with racism. To presume one "race" should be less or more prone to racism is problematic, as if they are or should be better than they show.

People in gentrifying neighborhoods always blame the people moving in for, apparently, bullying the poor helpless landlords into increasing the rent. I'm really not sure how that mindset propagates, but the landlords must love it.

Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#92

Post by rtpg »

mc32 wrote: post #21
x0x0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an sf suburb. I talk to local homeowners in the dog park at night and they're all wildly opposed to density, often with a nice core of racism too (I'm white so white people say some wild shit to me; you hear references to "those people" and it's not that deeply coded.) The only thing that cheers me about all the nimbys where I live is all their kids are getting kicked out. Seriously. In 20 years when their…

To be fair, lots of people who are minorities who live in gentrifying neighborhoods also tinge their conversation with racism. To presume one "race" should be less or more prone to racism is problematic, as if they are or should be better than they show.

The situations are radically different. The reason gentrification is even a thing is because of the massive wealth imbalance between whites and minorities. It's not "oh my god these people are going to ruin my culture" it's "Oh great the people are flying in to price me out of my home in 3 years."

Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#94

Post by Turing_Machine »

Apocryphon wrote: post #35
hugh4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the state is what allows you to be alive at all, because without it you'd probably have been killed by or enslaved by roving Mad Max style marauders. Therefore you owe your life to the State and they can demand anything at all from you and you shouldn't complain. Right?

Welcome to the social contract

You (and others on this thread, on both sides) are pretending that there's no gradation between "roving bands of cannibal looters" (the "Mad Max" scenario) and "Tyrannical government controls every single aspect of your daily life" (the "1984" scenario), when in fact there is a very large amount of space between those two scenarios.

That is a fundamentally dishonest argument.

There are honest discussions of exactly where the boundaries on government power should lie, but this isn't one of them.

Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#95

Post by sampo »

hugh4 wrote: post #87
bsder wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is the irrational and unnecessary concentration of opportunities in that area. The concentration is not irrational. That's the problem. The concentration is driven by the fact that you will , not might, get laid off at some point if your job is in the tech sector. So, what happens is that everybody thinks about where their next job is going to be while getting hired for their current job. If I somehow m…

Trouble is that San Francisco is a terrible place, geographically, for a large and ever-expanding industry. It's a tiny sliver of land on the end of a peninsula. There's only three roads out of town and no room to expand. Austin is much more suitable, it's surrounded by nothing on all sides. Sooner or later the global hub of the computer industry has to shift away from San Francisco to somewhere there's actually some…

> Trouble is that San Francisco is a terrible place, geographically, for a large and ever-expanding industry.

So a bit like Hong Kong, Singapore, or Manhattan?

Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#96

Post by sampo »

refurb wrote: post #75
zyxley wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am lucky to have rent control. Right now, if I move away, I wouldn't be able to afford moving back. SF-style widepsread rent control seems like part of the problem to me, in the sense that it hides the true extent of market distortions from many people living in the area (especially the demographics most likely to vote), while incentivizing weird and unethical behavior to circumvent it by developers who could proba…

SF-style widepsread rent control seems like part of the problem to me You raise a good question. What would rent in SF look like without rent control? Thinking through the process, I imagine something like: 1. Rent for everyone would have gone up over time 2. Renters would have been slowly forced out as rent increases exceeded their incomes 3. However, it's likely that there would have been a lot more units opening u…

> I'm certainly not saying that a "no rent control" situation would be ideal

Quoting Paul Krugman from 15 years ago:

"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand."

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...

Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#97

Post by philsnow »

mc32 wrote: post #89
myblake wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do too but I wonder if Lafeyette is as much to blame as say Mountain View. While they're almost certainly not building new housing as fast as the area population grows, it's not clear that they're building office space instead, whereas many of the communities in the South Bay are doing just that. Still, it sounds like this is meant to be a more general attempt at proving the concept.

If you ask me, I'd say the bay area needs a regional government, something not too dissimilar from NYC with a mayor and boropresidents of in this case, countyptesidents for each county. What I mean is in a way it could be argued we need to annex counties or the cities and make them into more integrated governing bodies with improved policies and coordination to serve the needs of this region's population and economy.…

I've been thinking this for years; the bay area has significant local concerns that span 6-10 counties (out of 58 in the state). In particular the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, and Alameda would do very well to work together more, and spend more on regional transit, but it seems that it's always The Local Politics Show, Brought to you by Metcalfe's Law. It's impractical to bring matters to the state level; a lot of the state doesn't even particularly like the bay area, so why should they care about the issues here?

If there were a super-county made up of the bay area counties that had the power to enact and enforce law, and serve as a venue for regional debate, discourse, and decision-making, I think the long-term economic health of the region would be more secure.

Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#98

Post by philsnow »

sampo wrote: post #95
hugh4 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trouble is that San Francisco is a terrible place, geographically, for a large and ever-expanding industry. It's a tiny sliver of land on the end of a peninsula. There's only three roads out of town and no room to expand. Austin is much more suitable, it's surrounded by nothing on all sides. Sooner or later the global hub of the computer industry has to shift away from San Francisco to somewhere there's actually some…

> Trouble is that San Francisco is a terrible place, geographically, for a large and ever-expanding industry. So a bit like Hong Kong, Singapore, or Manhattan?

I like to link to this photo [0] when this discussion comes up. I don't think SF will ever look like this, unfortunately.

[0] http://7-themes.com/data_images/out/69/7008405-hong-kong-sky...

Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#99

Post by joelwilliamson »

Retric wrote: post #58
brudgers wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general [1], people who hate developers and/or development live, work, shop, and worship in places developed by developers. Someone subdivided and sold the land. The infrastructure of deeds, insurance and mortgages that makes the contemporary housing markets possible exists because development has and continues to take place. [1]: In the United States.

IMO, there is a reasonable complaint that people who live somewhere for 30 years might be continuously paying for infrastructure that's only needed because more people moved into the area. Basically, when an area needs to build a new school to accommodate new people that cost is split among everyone not just the new people. Then in 10 years when they need another school you pay for it again etc. This results in devel…

Are there no development fees in the US? In Canada, municipalities will levy fees on developers to pay for all the new infrastructure. In some cities, this also helps keep taxes low for other residents by paying for operating costs as well.

Re: Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco’s suburbs

#100

Post by khuey »

Retric wrote: post #58
brudgers wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general [1], people who hate developers and/or development live, work, shop, and worship in places developed by developers. Someone subdivided and sold the land. The infrastructure of deeds, insurance and mortgages that makes the contemporary housing markets possible exists because development has and continues to take place. [1]: In the United States.

IMO, there is a reasonable complaint that people who live somewhere for 30 years might be continuously paying for infrastructure that's only needed because more people moved into the area. Basically, when an area needs to build a new school to accommodate new people that cost is split among everyone not just the new people. Then in 10 years when they need another school you pay for it again etc. This results in devel…

Given how the property tax structure in California massively privileges incumbent property owners over newcomers, I'm not very sympathetic to this line of argument.

Most Bay Area cities also have rather large development fees.

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