I'd say that's a pretty safe bet. The mad levels on income inequality are doing their part to obscure exactly what people's interests are in both the short- and long-term.
"But do landowners have majority voting power in SF? If not, then maybe some people aren't voting to their interests."
It is implied (and sometimes expressed) that "NIMBY" outcomes in elections like this are illegitimate and not "true" democratic outcomes.
I reject this notion. I am very much in favor of urban in-fill in San Francisco and increased density in many parts of the city - but not at the expense of democratic processes.
Agreed, if you are going to have democratic processes you must be willing to accept their outcomes, even when the results are not in your favor or grossly against your interests.
I can't verify with real numbers but my mental model is that votes on housing are not representative of the population.
SF has a very high foreigner population that cant vote. They are moslty renters. US renters also might not live enough time in the city to register, be politically active, or end up moving due to lifestyle or economic reasons. And of renters you will have those that have rent control, which end up in tandem with owners about de-regularization.
Im sure that if you put up a vote landowners and rent-controlled renters have a concentrated interest, and renters and foreigners dont have representation even if they are the majority. If you took all renters of SF in the last 6 years you might get a higher number than landowners but they cannot fight it politically.
So I adhere to the notion of unrepresentative democratic outcomes.
They need to be inthe city on voting day, and whatever the vote is they dont have the same level of intensity of interest than the homeowners.
Lets look at the big picture: if everyone that lived in san francisco in the last 10 years voted to build more or to stop building, what would be the resulting of such a vote?
I think the answer is obvious. And the fact that it isnt, is just lack of representation.
Well, now you're moving the goalposts, but doesn't everybody have to vote where the voting devices are? Beyond that, your hypothetical is pretty loaded.
Of the group of people available to vote in the city, homeonwners will have a higher participation than renters that can vote. Becuse the latter need to match their residency with the vote, and even then, they dont know as much of the issue as the local, and even then, they dont have the same interest. (the time horizon of a renter could be 2 years, of a landlord its decades).
Thats why I devised that mental exercise: if you gathered up all the poeple that lived over 1 year in san francisco in the last 10 years, which one do you think is in the majority? pro-supply, con-supply?
The last time I registered to vote after moving I was able to do it the week I moved, when I went to the DMV to get my driver's license. I would imagine it's similar in the Bay Area.
I think it's reasonable not to allow foreigners to vote on local political issues, just as we do on national ones. I wouldn't expect to have a say on political issues in countries I'm not a citizen of. Otherwise you don't have any skin in the game. You can just leave if you don't like the way things are going.
I think part of the problem is there aren't clear policy proposals to solve housing issues so it's hard to get people to support them. Plus the good land is already developed so you'd have to use eminent domain or something to build affordable housing.
> I think it's reasonable not to allow foreigners to vote on local political issues, just as we do on national ones. I wouldn't expect to have a say on political issues in countries I'm not a citizen of. Otherwise you don't have any skin in the game. You can just leave if you don't like the way things are going.
Countries have fought their independence fighting under the concept of "No Taxation without representation".
Reasonable or not I can assure you that foreigners pay the highest rents, have the least rent-control and less land in San Francisco.
I'm not sure I agree about foreigners paying the highest rents, since it really depends what groups of foreigners you're talking about. SV tech employees? Maybe. Refugees? Definitely not. Rent control and land ownership are probably true, but again, that's true of foreign nationals working anywhere, not just in SF or the US.
I think we fundamentally disagree on whether foreigners should have a say in local politics, so we can't really have a productive conversation on this topic while we remain divided on that issue.
> I think we fundamentally disagree on whether foreigners should have a say in local politics, so we can't really have a productive conversation on this topic while we remain divided on that issue.
Not if you cop-out to Refugees, how many are they, 1000?
Rental prices increases affect everyone and affect every single foreigner migrating into the bay are. It also affects people from other states, and those also cannot vote. When the situation becomes untenable they leave the city.
The implementation of democracy can never be absolutely representative, anywhere, and in this situation that 'leaky implementation' is obvious.
If you're a citizen you can vote just by proving you live in the district you want to vote in. The only people being excluded are non-citizens who I don't think should have the same say in local politics as citizens because they can return to their home country if they don't like the effects of the policies they help to enact.
I guess that makes sense on the national level, but couldn't you say that same thing about citizens voting in local politics? They can just move to a different city or state. I don't see a difference right away, but I'm interested in another take on it as far as where the line should be drawn on who gets to vote or not.
Yeah, I think that's a fair criticism. I guess to be logically consistent I'd have to be on board with not letting people vote unless they've lived in an area long enough or own property or something (requiring property ownership seems like a bad idea). I'm not sure how I feel about that though. I guess one thing I can think of is that if you're a citizen you at least nominally share many American values, which is not necessarily true for someone who is just here for career reasons.
Your reasoning doesn't make any sense. The criteria for people to have a voice in local politics shouldn't be a test as to whether they share in "American" values, whatever that means. If you had all those neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottsville move to SF tomorrow, who are US citizens but presumably (hopefully?) don't share in American values in your view, they would have the ability to vote in local elections.
People who pay rent and establish a residence should have a voice in their local(city) elections. Full Stop. Immigrants were allowed limited voting rights in State elections until the 1920's when very anti-immigrant sentiments lead to laws that prohibit that kind of voting.
> You can just leave if you don't like the way things are going.
That applies to local politics for everyone though, it's just as easy for a citizen to move to another city. I'm an immigrant to another country. I'm married, I have kids. I pay taxes. I can't just leave, I very much have skin in the game. Meanwhile the native youth are leaving in droves to bigger cities.
I like the system Sweden has - national elections are for citizens only, but local elections are open to anyone who lives in the municipality and is either (1) a Swedish or EU citizen, or (2) has lived in the country for 3 years
> Im sure that if you put up a vote landowners and rent-controlled renters have a concentrated interest, and renters and foreigners dont have representation even if they are the majority. If you took all renters of SF in the last 6 years you might get a higher number than landowners but they cannot fight it politically.
What's interesting about this situation is that there are likely many people that work in SF that would vote for expanding housing but cannot vote because they don't live in SF, presumably because they cannot afford to. The system reinforces itself.
> SF has a very high foreigner population that cant vote.
The voter laws also exclude people like me. I work in SF and would love to live in SF, but because of the high rental prices within city limits I'm living in Brisbane instead. I consider myself a natural part of the San Francisco constituency but have been disenfranchised by the city's artificially high cost of living.
They do, but there's a wrinkle. Specifically, it's not fully correct to equate NIMBYs and landowners in SF. SF has plenty of renters who are also NIMBYs, having been convinced that the only way to preserve their lifestyle is to oppose everything.
But they should care. Rent control is like gold hand cuffs. Eventually you face a very high chance of being trapped in a dammed if you stay (wrong location, not enough room, etc.) and dammed if you move (huge increase in rent) situation. Building more housing, in sufficient numbers, should alleviate this problem.
That effectively means that one's vote counts fivefold to tenfold as much... which makes not voting, while complaining about the results, exceptionally perplexing.
It was disheartening to see Jane Kim vote against sb827. The detractors moaned that it would usurp local authority over development. As someone who has to put up with the effects of insane housing policy, I'd rather see the state step in here. The local governments and NIMBYs are already failing us.
People decades ago said exactly what you're saying and that's how we got local regulation. It turns out local regulation just entrenched the problems more deeply.
I've yet to hear a good reason why recursion is going to solve the problem instead of entrench it at the next level up.
Housing supply is in part a collective action problem. Lots of people will benefit from development somewhere else, but lose out from the local effect of development down the block. If the net effects of a development are positive, but the negative effects are concentrated whether local power can block the development, less development will happen and people are worse off overall.
But she changed her position and held rallies opposing 827 saying allowing more housing near public transportation was not the answer nor going vertical. She says “we are not against housing" and "this is not the right way to build” but her actions prove different. I have not seen any solutions from her
NIMBYs are not the sole problem. Vancouver and Seattle, and their suburbs have had a lot of construction happening for the past decade, yet housing costs in both cities have spiraled out of control.
Dunno about Vancouver, but NIMBYs are a huge problem in Seattle. Jump into the comment section of any local neighborhood news blog post discussing development and you'll see what I mean.
NIMBYs are a huge problem in Seattle. Depending on how you count, roughly 80% of the city is zoned single family[0]. Construction isn't happening fast enough. In 2016 Seattle only gained 0.4 housing units for every job[1].
I recently heard homeowners referred to as a cartel on a podcast. It was definitely thought provoking. Is there any way to create a home ownership system where existing homeowners are discouraged from making it harder for other people to get homes?
Homeowners invest their own money, at significant interest rates, to obtain a place to live. They do of course have an interest in protecting that investment - with increased density comes increased crime, stressed parking, and other problems.
To call homeowners a "cartel" as if they're extorting their local community for protection money is inherently misleading.
A cartel just means colluding to limit supply to increase profit for cartel members. There is nothing in the definition of a cartel that requires violence or illegality.
Not just supply, cartels are a group working together to manipulate markets in a variety of ways, also including:
Hold prices for their own suppliers artificially low by agreeing a price cap and refusing to pay more. They rely on suppliers having nowhere else to sell. e.g. British supermarkets have been repeatedly accused and sometimes IIRC convicted of operating a cartel to demand unfairly low prices from food producers.
Agree to split geographies so that there's effectively no competition to supply and each member of the cartel has local monopolies in all or most territory. This should be familiar to US folks who want High Speed Internet outside of a major city.
All agree never to offer a product which would hurt the overall market but be profitable for the first to offer it. Some have claimed the long delay in electric cars coming to market is evidence of this sort of cartel.
Cartels are illegal in much of the world (but ordinary laws don't apply to sovereign entities). If you're ever part of some big industry insider meeting and the lawyers make everybody agree not to talk about prices, future products or other commercial issues it's not because they're commercially sensitive, it's because your executives could do jail time if a court decides your group is a cartel.
> with increased density comes increased crime, stressed parking, and other problems.
Increased density does not increase crime. There's no evidence for this. There are very dense places with low crime and very low density place with lots of crime.
"stressed parking" is probably true, but part of the point of increased density is that you have less need for a car.
>Increased density does not increase crime. There's no evidence for this.
I think I agree with you, but you are over simplifying the issue. Increased density does not increase crime per capita. It does increase crime per other measures of crime intensity (crime per square ft?). https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student-works/pressure-cooke...
Accusing me of dog whistling seems to be an extremely bad faith interpretation of anything I said. There is absolutely a well supported, highly researched and discussed relationship between density and increased crime rates and that you simply dismissed my point reeks of preconceived notions that you aren't attempting to actually grapple with.
Unless you are an anarcho-pacifist, you have accepted that there are some legitimate uses of violence, so just because they don't think you should be able to frack next door to them doesn't mean that they don't think violence is involved in keeping you from fracking next door to them.
A land value tax works well, by removing the gains from land appreciation. This taxes the land value but not the property value, so the land owner captures the value of their improvement but not the value of rising land prices generally.
If you think about a land owner in SF, they didn't really do anything to earn the value of the appreciation of their land. They might have improved their house but the land value went up because of the tech boom.
In such a scenario, at the state level, you would also reduce or eliminate other taxes like the income tax and sales tax.
Supported by such diverse economists as Paul Krugman, Milton Friedman, and Joseph Stiglitz.
Anti-cartelling usually works by trying to prevent agreements, associations etc. from forming, it is taken as a given given that the players have some incentive to do that. You can't do this for towns, because the association already exists in the form of the local government.
That doesn't you are wrong to look at it from a incentive point point-of-view. It's just that thinking in terms of cartels might not help you much.
If you think of city/town governments as legal cartels then can't you think of the approach in SB 827 as an action by the government to regulate what the cartels can/can't do? The analogy probably falls apart if you push it any farther but it is interesting to think about.
Yep, the cartel model is probably good for understanding things like SB 827. Of course the straightforward interpretation is also correct: the bill was an argument about what powers different levels of government should wield.
Perhaps the cartel idea gives guidance here: power should be held at a level high enough that the electorate doesn't represent the interest of a cartel. (Since as we all know, special interests never have special access to the corridors of power at high level).
And even if he could override NIMBYs, the number of laws and processes and procedures in place that prevent more building are absolutely staggering. Not to mention, the middle class is leaving. By the time we get rid of all the crazy regulations, the middle class will be gone and there will be no one left to build this stuff up ~ someone's got to wield the hammers (labor cost will be too high).
SF has a lot of bodies with veto powers over any building project (like neighborhood councils) and there's a lot of legal levers to pull. There's a lot more to it than just the city's planning commission.
We need to reform that. There are too many ways for NIMBYs to throw obstacles in front of new development, which hurts everyone, and helps mostly the rich who already own property.
Right on cue - YIMBY/SFBARFers respond to any HN headline with the words San Francisco and Housing with their strawman argument "NIMBY'S".
Nevermind the fact that the question here is about homelessness which is exacerbated when you lobby to mow down affordable SROs and rent controlled housing so some developers can rebuild luxury condos in their place.
How exactly will that help the homelessness problem?
More housing (even luxury) increases supply thus lowers prices. That means that someone living in a studio might move to a 1 bed, leaving the studio vacant, thus increasing supply as people move up — a process that is only possible with a greater supply.
And rent control actually leads to shortages as mobility is reduced because of people staying in places longer than they would have otherwise. It also disincentivizes creation of new housing.
You really can build enough housing to lower prices. Tokyo has. You can get a small Tokyo studio apartment for $700 per month. [1]
This is because they build housing. San Francisco, London, New York, and Seattle all don't build housing and prices go up. [2]
If housing were easier to build people would build more affordable housing. No developer cares if they build expensive housing or affordable housing, they are maximizing return on investment. Turning a 1 story house into a 3 story house for a 30% return makes developers just as happy as developing 20 luxury condos for a 30% return.
And even those luxury condos provide housing for people who would otherwise buy old condos and renovate them. As long as the housing is more dense and there is more of it, prices will come down.
One thing I haven't heard discussed, and would like to, is the notion that there might be (effectively) an unlimited number of people willing to be homeless in California.
Which is to say, you might be able to "solve" homeless problems in Denver or Salt Lake or St. Paul - and there have been some very interesting and encouraging policy moves there, especially in Salt Lake City. This might be because there are only so many people willing to be homeless in St. Paul. Or Green Bay or Denver - because of the cold and snow.
What does it mean if the stream of homeless into SF/LA/SD is, effectively, unlimited ? How would that change our proposed solutions ?
I think it's incredibly insensitive to assume that just because the weather is nice that people are fine being homeless.
Homelessness is by and large a product of mental health issues, and a lack of a good mental health system.
>only so many people willing to be homeless...
right, because so much of the homeless population just needs to try harder. If this is how people really see the issue it's no wonder that its still an issue.
How would you explain homelessness in countries with much better access to mental health services? Homelessness is a combination of issues like mental health services, housing prices, social safety nets, and much, much more.
The real question scares people to even think about: what is the real price of ending the homeless epidemic and are we as a society actually willing to pay it? What if housing prices had to cut in half and taxes had to double? What if funding had to increase by 50x? What if 1:5 families had to accept a homeless person into their spare bedroom?
> Homelessness is a combination of issues like mental health services, housing prices, social safety nets, and much, much more.
The elephant in the room is drug use. Nobody wants to admit it, but most of the problems that the non-homeless experience with the homeless are related to drug use and mental health issues.
I think it is an important concept to understand that the state of california cant reasonably fix this.
If san francisco opened a state mental hospital for its homeless population, then all california counties would send people to them. And if california did, then all states would.
Mental health does need some sort of federal solution.
> If san francisco opened a state mental hospital for its homeless population, then all california counties would send people to them
Well, why not take that first step? I see the "we need more mental hospitals" solution trotted out over and over again but it seems that these cities spend a fortune doing everything for the homeless _but_ tackle mental health.
Is your concern really that creating mental hospitals would attract too many homeless, moreso than the current policy of providing free drug paraphernalia, safe places to do drugs, lax drug law enforcement, lax attitudes towards panhandling, shelter, good weather, etc.?
That the cost of a single mental patient can rack up tens of thousands of dollars a month. Multiply by 10k homeless, you get a fiscal hole, and then you might end up with more nominal homeless on the streets because they are sent to the facilty that cant take them.
I think that's an uncharitable interpretation. The tradeoff isn't between homelessness and not-homelessness, it's between being homeless in Denver and being homeless in SF. There are cities which literally put their homeless on a bus to the Bay Area [0].
I am saying that to whatever degree someone is already homeless, they may be less willing to stay somewhere with life threatening weather than somewhere without it.
I agree with you that these people are mentally ill.
"right, because so much of the homeless population just needs to try harder"
Its not about the weather but about the liberalism found in CA coastal cities (Santa Cruz has the highest homelessness per resident). This means more willingness to give to panhandlers which invites more to the area.
Very few people are "fine" being homeless anywhere and I don't think this is what OP was trying to say. But if you're choosing between being homeless in Chicago and being homeless in LA or San Francisco, one of the options is much more attractive. There's a reason that newspapers in San Francisco don't have to report the number of people who froze to death each winter, which absolutely happens each year in Chicago.
I spoke to a homeless guy I often saw around many years ago as we were approaching winter in Michigan. I asked how he fares during the winter. He laughs and tells me that they mostly migrate South or West. That's right! They head to Florida or California. I still tipped him and sure enough I didn't see him winter time but he was back around June.
There are many studies, but one I read farther back said about ~50% of SF homeless had lived here more than 10 years and most (70 or 75%) had lived in homes before. Which seems logical thinking about 2007 rent pricing.
So yes, there's a significant crowd that will move here for the services/weather/won't get harrassed by PD, but there's also probably a larger crowd of people just hanging on who are getting squeezed out of their apartments over time.
I'm skeptical. Growing up in Los Angeles, I basically never saw Central American immigrants living on the streets. As members of the very lowest rungs of the lower class, these are the people you would expect to see living on the streets if housing costs were the driving force behind homelessness.
Back in the day (before the housing bust) a tour of Mission or Sunset real estate listings would contain "unpermitted structure in back yard" (not basement). They weren't storage sheds, they were housing with a/c units in the window. Bunk beds or cots in them.
A lot of their work dried up after the housing bust. It was also one thing to house the non-resident (and non-rent controlled) worker cooking at the neighborhood restaurant or working construction vs what we think of as indigent street homeless.
Many of those units are still there, but today's owners are probably less open someone in their back yard.
There's also a trait in some cultures of taking care of their own and multiple families living together. My neighbor told me my predecessors were 6-7 FOB Irish youth, bunk beds in the living room.
I believe that's because the vast majority of immigrants, Central American and otherwise, are here because they want to build a better life for themselves and their families. They are by large self selected for above average ambition and work ethic, whether they came by visa or illegally.
> and most (70 or 75%) had lived in homes before. Which seems logical thinking about 2007 rent pricing.
> but there's also probably a larger crowd of people just hanging on who are getting squeezed out of their apartments over time.
Careful with how "lived in homes before" is defined. Is that "has ever lived in a home before" or "lived in a home and was forced out by increased rent"? The former is something true for just about any person and doesn't mean much WRT the issue.
The highest estimate I can find is 1.5 million homeless in the United States, those who use some shelter during a year. The total number of chronic homeless seems to be 150,000 in the US. [1]
The bay area has a population of 7 million people. Just as a thought experiment, we could easily double that population by moving to SF Mission style density in more parts of the bay area. That is 3-4 story wood frame houses with first floor retail and parks. This would house all of America's homeless, and another 5 million people as well.
The physical/engineering/resources part of housing aren't the constraint.
In SF the homeless problem that I perceived was individuals living on the main street, sleeping on boxes, smelling of alcohol, only partially dressed, walking through traffic, screaming randomly (schizophrenia?), or setting up tents in Soma.
I have no doubt these problem-individuals are absolutely unemployable. I'm not sure how building more million-dollar houses relates to fixing the homelessness problem.
Is somebody debating giving million-dollar houses to the homeless?
Mark Leno, London Breed, Jane Kim, and Angela Alioto each propose an approach to "homelessness" and an approach to "insane rents/house prices." They are separate issues. No one of any consequence is debating giving million-dollar houses to the homeless.
Salt Lake City's homeless population has gone up dramatically recently. In part because homeless people have heard how good the resources are here and are coming in from other cities faster than they can be taken care of.
But that actually supports your point that there might be more people willing to be homeless in certain areas than can be adequately taken care of.
This is a very misleading stat and often repeated by SF leaders to divert tax money to the problem. The way the question is structured is that "where were you living before being homeless" and the answer would almost 100% be SF. Because you move to SF and may be spend a month in SRO and become homeless.
If you open it up to further ideas like sanctuary cities (from immigration law) and reduce all barriers to entry, then yes there is probably an unsatisfiable number of people looking to live in the bay area. The weather is nice, the jobs pay well (and employers demand you be here, not remote), there is great food and beautiful places to be.
I hadn't decided who to vote for, this helps. There is no more urgent problem in the bay area than housing and there is no way to fix it other than by building more housing.
I suspect, as in Vancouver, a lot of foreign-originated dirty money is getting parked in SF real estate, where the structures sit vacant.
One of Vancouver's innovative approaches was a special tax assessment on vacant structures.
I honestly wonder what percentage of SF, including its commercial office space, is simply a vehicle for money laundering. Switzerland and the Cayman Islands have nothing on Uncle Sam when it comes to real estate opacity.
As someone who knows a few property owners in San Francisco this is a common thing. People in tech make peanuts compared to who is holding property in the city. Most of these wealthy people don't rent because rent control will bring down the value of their property (you can't evict the tenants).
We're talking about international levels of wealth, these same people have multiple pieces of property in Hong Kong which makes San Francisco look dirt cheap.
Are the people you know single or two home owners? I’m talking about multi home owners in the Bay Area (4+) with property in the most expensive cities in the world. That’s a very different social class than a Bay Area home owner.
The ones who do rent usually hire an agency to take care of the headaches for them.
You can see this in the rent-to-buy ratios. While high in the Bay Area, it's nowhere near the out-of-control bubble levels of Vancouver and, to a lesser extent, Toronto. Housing prices are high in the Bay Area because people actually need to live here.
There are plenty of companies that will take care of finding tenants, doing maintenance and generally handling landlord responsibilities, in exchange for a cut of the rent. Since the rent is quite a lot of money, it would be crazy to leave a building vacant unless you're planning to spend time in it.
If you robbed a bank and had a nice big pile o' cash, how smart would you be to put it in a bank and collect interest on it?
You jeopardize (or devalue) the asset by trying to play landlord. By leaping after $80k/year, you may cost yourself $500k/year appreciation in the asset.
>You jeopardize (or devalue) the asset by trying to play landlord. By leaping after $80k/year, you may cost yourself $500k/year appreciation in the asset.
Unless your tenant literally burns the building down and you don't have insurance, I'm not sure how this works.
A building that would otherwise be subject to rent control or other tenant protections is worth less than the same building that is empty of tenants. By leaping after 80K/year you can massively decrease the value of an empty building, or a building that is likely to soon empty, or a building that can be condo converted without Ellis acting anyone.
It's not dumb. Their goal is capital preservation, not income. And once a renter is in there they're extremely difficult to evict if the owner ever wants to move in or sell.
It's not crazy. Plenty of people do that because they believe the property will appreciate in value at a reasonable clip, they will get a huge depreciation tax benefit, and they will not have to deal with tenants or wear and tear.
Vacancy rates are units that are un-rented or unsold. The problem is parking money (using real estate as a bank account and not actually living in the community) - popular in Vancouver and NYC. The condos are literally 50% dark all the time but not 'vacant' as in part of the avaiable housing supply. Drives up prices.
You are not accurately interpreting the statistics you cite. Vacancy rates do not take into account units that are bought and never put into the rental market.
Some London boroughs tried taxing empty properties to discourage this. Owners of empty properties just paid the tax. In most cases British law still lets them hide their identity, which is of course why passively owning London property is so preferable over, say, actually doing anything where their identity (as gangsters, foreign leaders who've looted their country to enrich themselves, etcetera) might be revealed.
Jason Calacanis makes comments about this from time to time on his podcast. There's some pretty nontrivial problems with the whole NIMBY stuff, and it seems like it will likely have to involve some seriously legislation that I think might be more at the governor / state senate level. The homelessness problem is something that no one has solved really well and is perhaps even more complicated than the housing crisis itself (though they're part of the same challenge in many ways).
This is one of those big daunting problems that feels increasingly make or break for SF as a whole, and given it the size and complexity of the problem, will likely involve a very disruptive and painful change to address.
If I'm taking a bet here, I think it's more likely that they don't handle the problem effectively and the workforce and economy distribute out of the system, followed by a sudden and severe real-estate market correction, and then the growth will settle and flatten for a while
This is only true if you think it's okay that people born in California can't afford to start families there. The state's housing regulations favor older, established people and wealthy newcomers over people born in California. If you really want to make that tradeoff, then go for it, but I don't think most people view the issue through this particular lens.
That's kind of the whole point. Is the city full and now only open to the wealthy and people who got lucky enough to buy houses > 5 years ago (or get locked into rent control > 5 years ago), or should it be allowed to grow to welcome new people from around the country and world who want to move here in search of better opportunities? Because people who have lived here 3 years or less by extension includes everyone who doesn't live here yet (as well as basically everyone under 25 unless they grew up here).
I would also push back on the "deciding whether to stay for 2 more years" part - sure, maybe young people tend to plan 2 years ahead at a time, but they're really deciding if it's a place they want to settle down in permanently. If they stay 2 more years they may well end up staying 20 more.
So I don't think it's at all a stretch to say this is a make or break issue for the city.
I'm on my third or fourth iteration of watching the waves of carpetbaggers make their way through the city, which is a 150+ year tradition, mind. Not only do the loudest complainers not know enough about homelessness in SF to demand a simple solution that doesn't exist, they're going to be the first people to find a reason to leave. From all outward appearances, they just want to complain.
One of the tragic tropes of San Francisco is that people often and loudly think homelessness just needs to be "fixed," and that it just takes getting the right person into office to do so. But there ain't no silver bullet and these issues are complicated.
It seems like SF has been moving in good directions as far as dialing down the "arrest the homeless" strategy propounded by carpetbaggers offended that the sidewalks don't remind them of Topeka, the evolution of Navigation Centers, and other homeless-directed policies.
Frankly, zoning and development issues seem easy compared to homelessness. It's popular to dehumanize those without money, so the ideas only trickle in. Flint, MI still has poisoned tap water, after all.
> The city’s zoning laws are among the most restrictive in the country. They limit the height and density of new buildings and give local residents, often property owners, the ability to severely delay new development. Most of the city’s land area, particularly the posh western bits, is zoned for single-family homes, which now comprise one-third of its housing stock. Almost all the city’s land faces height limits of 40 feet, or about three storeys. The result is a city where rents are sky-high but buildings are not.
That is the central problem, and more government regulation on top of an already insane amount of red tape and restrictions will not fix it. You must allow developers to develop
Why can't tech companies out-muscle NIMBY's and get 30-50 story residential buildings approved? After spending time in different parts of China, it seems asinine that most buildings here don't exceed ~4 stories.
We're not in China where the Government can decide to do whatever it wants. People in the community will vote on issues and elect officials into office who they think serve their interests. It is a common attitude of "I'd rather have no housing than more housing for people like them". Despite all the media the majority of people in Bay Area communities don't work in tech.
My landlord actively seeks people from the Bay Area to rent to and if they're not from here they're going to pay more rent especially if they work in tech. You're paying the tech transplant tax.
People in the community probably want their slummy airbnb's and garages to rent keep renting for astronomical rates.
Also, we're not in China but the population density issue is the same. If the jobs are in one location, you don't actively prevent new housing or better public transportation.
The question you're really wanting to ask is "why don't tech companies want to be good corporate citizens?"
It's because of profit. Amazon opposing the per-employee tax that would provide critical city services should help explain exactly where their priorities lie.
Did you read the response of Amazon and other companies? It was less "we want higher profits" and "you have enough money, you're just spending it in the wrong places".
Ahhh yes. And Amazon has no incentive to mis-characterize the reason they want to lower their tax burden. I dislike the waste of tax money on defense boondoggles. I still pay my taxes.
Ed Lee proposed a plan a while back to not base business tax on what we pay our employees but to look at company's revenue/sales amount, and sector. For example schools would have a lower business tax.
He also proposed instead of a flat tax, it would be progressive like income tax. Larger companies would pay a higher effective rate than small ones in the same sector but the Board of Supervisors didn't approve.
The City of SF has trust of over $24 billion and also administers a defined benefit retirement plan for ~65,000 current & retired employees of SF. And the President of the Retirement board who manages 24 Billion I believe is not someone from Goldman or finance background but a police officer?
SF priorities: Get electric bikes and scooters out of SF but create an unsafe city and homeless to walk around naked and dropping their poop and needles everywhere is okay
NIMBYs and all the regulations that prevent building are far far more powerful than anything else. Not even god himself could get anything built here. I suspect it's because there are multiple layers of regulation, it's not just one ruleset, it's many many things: CEQA, zoning, NIMBYs, lawsuits against developers, etc, etc.
Not to mention, stopping construction is a majority held opinion. In voting pamphlets, politicians actually brag about how much construction they've stopped: I can only imagine it's because the majority agrees with that.
> Not even god himself could get anything built here.
Approximately 64,000 housing units, 31 million sq.ft. of commercial space & 25 hotels with 4685 rooms are now in the SF new construction pipeline - with 5700 units, 10 million sq.ft. and 5 hotels currently under construction. https://www.paragon-re.com/trend/new-housing-construction-in...
Upzoning might seem like an obvious preference for tech companies and sometimes they act on this preference. It's useful to remember, though, that they have countervailing short-term preferences for single-family zoning.
Tech companies themselves have many internal constituencies (managers, line programmers, service workers). Since these companies are extremely not democracies, it's very easy for the preferences of a small valuable constituency (executives and managers) to override the preferences of a larger commoditized constituency (new grad engineers and janitors). Valuable internal constituencies are already compensated enough to buy a single-family home and generally don't want density.
It would be difficult for e.g. Facebook to publicly support upzoning in Menlo Park when half the NIMBYs in the room are relatively valuable mid-level engineering managers at Facebook. So we don't see these tech companies in general putting big resources behind really transformative upzoning projects.
Haven't SF tech companies, their employees and their voting habits done enough damage to SF as it is?
One can only hope other cities with emerging tech industries act proactively to prevent current-Californian tech residents flocking from the problems they've caused to cause the same problems in these new cities.
They haven't done enough "damage". That's why the problem leaked from the traditional 'silicon valley' (south bay) area, crept into SF, and now 700 sq ft apartments in fucking orinda and richmond are $2000+. We can't wait for the nimby's to die off -- get rid of prop 13, rent control, zone everywhere in SF for 30 story buildings, before you can't even afford an aparment in Antioch and Tracy.
I live in Mountain View and it's been very interesting to watch the fight between Google and MTV play out. Google very much wants to build more and denser housing (and more office space) and it's just a constant fight with the city.
Google owns some land that had previously been developed for dense residential until the city council changed their minds. They've just been sitting on it for the last few years. Finally, the city council is approving 10-12 story residential (which is unheard of in the Bay Area), but they're still bickering over the details.
The crazy part is that Google wants Google employees to live in Google-owned housing next to Google. This should be a no brainer. Every Google employee that lives next to their place of employment takes another car off the road, has another person walking to work. But people are arguing it would create more traffic.
But do fair housing laws allow a developer to limit rental property to its employees? I presume they could use an "includes room and board" salary model, but that would mean eviction upon a break in employment.
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
> In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
Put these two items together and the short answer to the question in the title is, "No."
As mentioned in the article, we already spend one quarter of a billion dollars on homelessness in SF. That's not a typo: 0.25 * 10 to the ninth power.
> San Francisco’s programmes, which cost $250m per year, are praised by many campaigners against homelessness. Still, the city could spend its money more efficiently.
There's plenty of money, even after:
> About two-thirds of its homelessness budget goes on rent subsidies and “permanent supportive housing”.
So ~$170m for housing (never mind that folks aren't homeless if they live in a house) still leaves ~$80m to deal with a few thousand people.
> Early intervention is often much cheaper.
Yes. Something like 60% of EMS response downtown is related to issues with a small handful of people. The ambulance drivers know them by name.
- - - - -
Last but not least, a random thought in re:
> Jeff Kositsky, the city’s director of homelessness services, cites the example of a driver for Lyft, a ride-hailing service, who nearly fell into homelessness after his car was damaged. The city kept him off the streets by simply paying off the cost of his car.
What? As an S.F. resident this doesn't seem right. I appreciate that this guy isn't homeless, that's great, I'm not disturbed by that. The thing that I find unsettling is why didn't his car insurance pay for it? Or Lyft for that matter?
But then I have to remind myself that this is the city that passed a law to just give money to certain businesses if they were considered "Legacy" enough. I'm left-leaning but that blew me away:
> The registry is open to businesses and nonprofits that are 30 years or older, have been nominated by a member of the Board of Supervisors or Mayor, and in a hearing before the Small Business Commission, prove that they have made a significant impact on the history or culture of their neighborho...
The Economist is ignoring the fact that the city administration in San Francisco is now extremely busy, and I mean 24/7 busy, cracking down on electric scooters that - unlike needles, human excrements, tents and substance abuse - are a real problem that needs a resolution ASAP.
As soon as this insurmountable plague has been eradicated, the city administration will finally have time to talk again about the things that matter, like: Should Vaillancourt Fountain be finally removed or not? Or after introducing the soda tax, is it finally time for a burrito tax? Of course really anything that would prevent them from fixing the real problems that are affecting SF.
SF needs its own Rudy Giuliani and its own Broken Windows policy[1].
> The Economist is ignoring the fact that the city administration in San Francisco is now extremely busy, and I mean 24/7 busy, cracking down on electric scooters that - unlike needles, human excrements, tents and substance abuse - are a real problem that needs a resolution ASAP.
Don't discount the virtue signaling that's going on here. It's an election year, and tech is still a reasonably good whipping boy for voters. Of all my friends, the non-tech ones seem much more likely to vote than the tech ones. Many of my tech friends in SF aren't even registered to vote here.
> Many of my tech friends in SF aren't even registered to vote here.
I'm a transplant to NYC and I'm generally pretty critical of complaints about transplants -- try living in a city nobody wants to move to and get back to me on which is worse -- but this does make me think hard about the ways in which the people who move to a new city for short-term opportunity might not care at all about its long-term viability.
The "alt-right" absolutely did not invent the phrase 'virtue signaling', though one could probably make a (shaky) argument that they're guilty of deploying it most uncharitably.
I don't think this is the place for that discussion though.
I also don't think this is the place for trying to shut down the conversation based on who is associated with a word or phrase used. If there's something wrong with it's use in this context, "debt" should make that case, rather than trying to police the language.
I was struggling to find a way to state this as well but choose to shut up when words eluded me. Is the phrase "virtue signaling" sometimes deployed by people with shitty intent? Yes.
That doesn't mean the phrase has no value at all and I think in the context used its usage above was perfectly apt. If one thinks otherwise they ought to articulate a counterpoint instead of expecting all discussion on the point to stop because of their own personal hangups with bad actors.
Something something nuanced political debate is dead
Nuanced political debate may not be dead, but it is certainly being shot at. This is the second time today I've seen someone trying to end a conversation on HN because they labeled a participant as "alt-right". (There was more justification in the other case - the participant may well have been an active alt-right leader - but someone wanted them to be shunned for their off-HN identity, not for what they said here.
It's disturbing. Some people (and from what I'm seeing, it's people on the left) want to simply silence other people (on the right) rather than actually answer them. I guess it's less work that way, and maybe more satisfying as well. It's less productive, though - you miss a chance to convince the audience, and you miss a chance to persuade your opponent. You gain the chance to make the audience make sure they never say the "taboo" words in the future, though... but that's more of a totalitarian approach than a reasonable tactic for a free people.
I do want to shut it down at the first scent of a malformed, intellectually stunted alt-right-prescribed viewpoint as it’s tiresome to constantly need to successfully shoot down the barrage of canned Shapiro/Peterson/Bannon-esque rebuttals to every left-leaning viewpoint or policy. Alt-right viewpoints are simply noise at this point akin to listening to the distant echoes of thousands of YouTube videos simultaneously.
So when I see the tired phrase “virtue signaling” I think “uh oh here we go...”
One does not need to apologize for having raw nerves in this political climate. That's understandable. It's hair trigger word association and bad faith presumptions of complicity with "the other" for reasons as shallow as expressing dissent without real substance or political vigor that some seem to be growing fatigued with.
I won't sit here and promulgate respectability politics just say that when one ignores their own political baggage and hubris it passively signals to everyone watching it's fair game for them to do so as well.
Nodding in agreement. Though I feel lately there's segments of all political stripes that don't care about making good points and just want to win, and be seen winning.
Reminds me of a Hunter S Thompson quote about a high water line of political fervor, where people thought they were winning, that they were right simply because they had done nothing more than show people how angry they could be.
Of all my friends, the non-tech ones seem much more likely to vote than the tech ones
Interesting. I realize I'm asking you to spitball, and that's fine legitimately curious to hear something outside the box but why do you think that is?
Seems to me an unlikely division when it comes to voter participation, or at least a very unexpected one.
I'm not sure, but it's been a little surprising to me as well. For the past month any time I've had a conversation with someone who had an opinion about politics and policies in SF, I've asked them if they have voted yet, or if they're going to vote; and while nearly everyone has had an opinion, only two people in tech out of probably two dozen have said yes. Of the remaining lot, a bunch have said they never registered to vote for a variety of reasons ("I forgot to", "Oh, I need to do that sometime", "I don't want my information getting sold", "I still don't have a California driver's license", etc).
On the other hand, friends not in tech (much more varied population by job; artists, food-service & bar industry, construction, medical) were much more motivated to tell me not only what their opinions were, but how they were voting (or had already voted) and why.
It's possible that this will change nearer to the mid-term, but it doesn't seem like primary elections get people that excited.
It's a great question though, and I'll start asking more deeply about it because I'm curious now as well!
Last night I stumbled by a group of older (than me, all clearly retired) folks talking about Unions at my local pub. Interested, I sat down and quietly listened in-they didn't seem to mind.
At one point though I spoke up about how surprised I was that we haven't seen more tech workers unionizing in areas that aren't San Francisco, Cupertino or Austin. The "leader" of the pack so to speak,went on to talk about all of the amenities tech giants offer like day cares and dog parks on campus, laundry facilities etc and then he capped it off with "but none of that stuff pays your rent in San Fran".
Bringing it all back around, I do genuinely think about this sort of stuff a lot and I wonder if there's something to be said of a tech culture that gives it's employees so much that they passively lose something that binds us all to the connective tissue of citizen engagement.
I only bring it up because I've noticed the exact same phenomenon you have: lots of very smart, well paid tech friends who confessed to not even bothering to vote despite very huge opinions about everything political and an even larger eagerness to display their "wokeness" on social media.
It's my poorer blue collar and service industry friends I see online asking for rides to the polls, and are the ones who ask ME "did you vote today?"
> I'm not sure, but it's been a little surprising to me as well.
When you have the income to:
1. Rent a comfortable apartment pretty much anywhere in the Bay Area, without fear of rising rent displacing you. (Keep rent within a third of your income)
2. Pay for a private solution (Rideshare, Private commuter buses, tech company shuttle) to the broken transportation infrastructure, dirty streets, and the homeless problem of the Bay.
3. Have a fiscal safety net in case something happens to your income.
4. Have the insurance needed to withstand the occasional curve-balls of life.
then you've mostly averted the endemic problems of the Bay Area. SF's gov't is incompetent, and private solutions have alleviated most of its systemic issues for its moneyed classes. Of course people in tech won't be as motivated to vote, they're insulated from all of the problems.
There's a growing sentiment (growing being an understatement, Google/Apple buses have been smashed/blocked for years now) that tech's private market solutions are priced to only help their own out. Until this perception changes, they're going to want to vote with their rage.
They’re priced to clear markets so that functioning goods and services are actually available at their stated prices. Whereas for some reason populists prefer public transit that’s uniformly abysmal and “affordable housing” that no individual applicant has a reasonable chance of winning.
My comment wasn't meant to be political. I'm just talking about the perspective. I'm not sure about you, but if my housing, transportation, and livelihood were threatened, I'm not going to sit back and say "oh oops looks like I'm on the other side of systemic issues, public failure, and market clearing, that's just the way the world works".
Public transit in cities that aren't SF is not 'uniformally abysmal.'
One of the reasons for it, is that in cities with working transit, both the rich, and the poor, newcomers and decades-established people take the bus/train. When people with influence are using public transit, it stops being shit.
Pointing at Muni, and saying: "Look, you fools! Public transit doesn't work!" is a bit like pointing at Somalia, circa 2009, and saying: "Look, you fools! Rule of law doesn't work!"
Another being that community organizers and concerned citizens were sufficiently disenfranchised and disempowered that greedy developers obtained permission to destroy pre-existing communities, open space, and neighborhood character to create built environments that are dense enough for good public transit to be cost-effective. In some cases, this happened more than 1000 years ago, so no one minds anymore.
>When people with influence are using public transit, it stops being shit.
Is there any evidence for this? Has a population ever actually forced its leaders to ride shitty public transit, and subsequently seen a turnaround?
Most New York professionals rely on the subway, and it's falling apart anyway.
Everything you described is why I'm terrified of my hometown Indianapolis (where I plan to move back in a couple of years and set down roots by buying a house) courting Amazon for HQ2. Having lived in one overpriced tech hub I'm not ready to fight that fight again, and I don't necessarily trust a tech giant's presence among the Unigov central Indiana experiment to provide much for anyone but folks who feed the monster.
Probably straying close to striking the heads off of poppies by saying this but it's a real concern I have while simultaneously wanting to see my hometown thrive.
Now you're set. They will mail you a ballot in the mail for every election. You mark the cards, put them in the envelope, and drop them in the mail. You usually have ~3 weeks to research each proposition and candidate.
On the micro level, voting is completely irrational. The chances of your individual vote deciding an election is usually incredibly low, so going to the polling booth has a very low RoI. In a practical sense, voting is just a bad use of your time. Anecdotally, it seems that tech people are far more likely to think in these terms.
This micro-level rationality leads to a big problem on the macro level. People who see politics as a matter of principle aren't likely to be swayed by the low RoI of going to vote. They'll exercise their democratic rights, come hell or high water. You end up with an electorate that is disproportionately driven by principles and ideals rather than pragmatism.
When did such a creature exist? He's still the dude that married his cousin and, after divorcing her, left his second wife using a mayoral press conference. There's been a lot of lunacy around Giuliani for three-four decades at this point.
What's sad is, at this point in my life, I accept that politicians are psychologically unstable just as a matter of course. Politics has a very natural selection bias. Philosophically, I'm of the opinion that the best leaders tend to not want to be leaders.
With that in mind, perhaps the only thing that's redeeming about Giuliani is that he was remarkably successful in cleaning up NYC.
But SF actually doesn't need that policy. Everyone was leaving NYC pre Giuliani because it was a hellhole that was completely undesirable to be in. After NYC became gentrified and the crime went away the city began regaining its population.
SF doesn't have this problem, despite all the dysfunction, homeless, and small time crime (it's no where close to being as dangerous as NYC in the 1980s) people have a strong desire to live here. No one is going to bring in a broken window policy because it doesn't matter to the people living here right now. There's still high demand, locals are making money if they got in when it was right. It doesn't matter.
In their eyes there technically isn't a problem, the problem is for people who aren't on rent control and who moved here from other places. The locals here don't really care about that because they know if you leave someone is going to replace you. It's also easy for them to point the blame on new industry for causing homelessness not lack of new development. I don't see things changing.
I read somewhere that the problem with scooters is that homeless people poop on them. The article was blaming scooters' startups - not even mentioning that the real problem is that homeless people are pooping on the street and sidewalks.
I do not think the city administration is the only guilty here. We are in such a strange bubble here ...
As far as I know, we don't have ravening hordes of scooter-poopers (regardless of housing status). Some folks pooped on them as a statement, pics went around.
Yes, especially in SOMA, where both the homeless and the scooters are plentiful, one encounters poop. But otherwise, there's no real relation.
The scooters are somewhere between annoying and a menace, depending. I tripped over one two days ago; there's a dark stretch on my block, so of course that's where someone dropped the damn thing.
My issue is with people who think the commons is there to be exploited. If your business is going to occupy and use public space, it needs to do so only with the consent of those impacted. It not, why shouldn't I start occupying the sidewalks to hawk my goods and services, too? Why stop there - there's a lot of street to take over, too, not to mention all those parks, just waiting to be DISRUPTED!
I find it especially ironic that the homeless, forced to live on the sidewalks, are being blamed for problems with scooters, whose owners are competing with the homeless for the space.
Haven't taken part, but I have no issue with the folks who have been destroying the scooters. It is a useful form of feedback.
"SF needs its own Rudy Giuliani and its own Broken Windows policy[1]."
1. I always wondered how certain dictators got so many moral people to look the other way. These days it crystal clear. Some people, most people, look for the easiest fix for a complex problem. As long as they aren't the ones raking up dubious tickets, and being thrown to the ground because of the way they look.
2. My hope is San Francisco never becomes NY.
Solutions: Maybe it's too late? There's a palatable anger among the disenfranchised.
A start would be provide portable toilets.
Don't like seeing turds in front of your doorstep?
Give them a place to relieve themselfs.
Just ports potties? Nothing fancy.
Heaven forbid I even talk about giving the homeless one place they can pitch a tent without breaking a law.
Then--start taxing luxury condos--heavily. (They build these palaces to get around Rent Control.)
In all honesty, I'll be glad when tech takes a nose dive. Your Founder's came in with play money(low interest policy that benefited the billionaires), and made the locals life more stressful.
Those of you that don't have understanding parents will feel what it's like to be treated much worse than a rabid animal.
So yes--I'm waiting for the day I see on HN, "U-haul ran out of vechicles to rent.
San Francisco has always been a strong union town. It's always had jobs. My hope is it Never becomes, or thinks, like New Yorkers.
(You put a rat in a stressful environment. The rat will survive, but I don't want to be around it. And yes--I notice the New York way of thinking, and find it deplorable. We're not suppose to stereotype, but I just don't like it.)
Guiliani happened to be in office when crime rates are falling drastically and uniformly nationwide, the current best explanation for which is the de-leading of gasoline. Whether anything he and Bratton did mattered to that drop is very much an open question; that it involved hassling ordinary citizens and unconstitutional tactics isn't.
The Roe vs Wade effect was a very good hypothesis for a while, but it doesn't explain at all the runup in crime rates before abortion was legalized, nor does it replicate in other countries that legalized abortion.
For further reading on the lead-crime connection, this [1] is a decent survey article.
Here in Seattle we have the $12 million per mile bike lanes, and the mayor's latest proposal, beds for the homeless at $12,600 per bed. The city government spending is so cost-ineffective it's clear they'll never solve any problems.
And yet they also whine for a head-tax because they apparently don’t have enough money. That’s why I oppose head-taxes because they don’t even spend the money they have responsibly; I certainly don’t want them to have more. It’s like feeding an addict.
I am rent controlled. It is the only reason I still live in SF. I would love for more housing to be built that I could afford to buy. In the meantime, I would also love to be able to move into a rent controlled single family home, even if that raised rent prices %5 (estimate of effect of rent control on rent prices from other poster). It's the stability I crave. I know too many people who rented a single family home and then their rent tripled over night.
Here's something that has been making me scratch my head lately.
San Francisco has had a Democratic mayor from 1964-now. It's widely regarded as the farthest left city in the country besides maybe Berkeley across the bay. Most Democrats/leftists want to reduce wealth inequality and are proponents of more taxation, welfare, etc.
Yet, San Francisco is one of the most economically unequal cities in this country [0]. So what's up? Why have the city's Democrats been so unable to help the poor if that's really something they believe in?
Democrats always say that if you elect the Republicans then the city will belong to the rich and powerful. But that's what we have now...
Note: I am a Democrat, I already voted for SF mayor this cycle and I voted for a Democratic candidate.
> Note: I am a Democrat, I already voted for SF mayor this cycle and I voted for a Democratic candidate.
Would you mind elaborating on why you voted Democrat this time, after having just pointed out that for the last ~60 years a democratic mayor failed to live up to the virtues they espouse?
Not trying to be sarcastic. Generally curious if you considered republican but decided against it for some reason... Or if you just hardline vote one way?
I think the point was that habosa isn't some Republican demagogue trying to score points on the Democrats. That is, habosa is saying, "Don't dismiss my point as just a political harangue. I'm dis-satisfied with my own side here. Why are we doing this?"
I would guess that the answer to your question is that someone can see a lot of problems with their own side, and still think that their side is better overall than the other side. Just a guess, though; I don't speak for habosa.
1) Theres not a serious/viable candidate from another party.
2) I do believe that the candidate I voted for has good ideas on the issues I care about, despite the party's previous failures.
It is a two part problem. The first part is money. City budgets are tiny compared to state budgets which are tiny compared to the federal budgets. The second part is the ease of moving between cities. If any city sets up a program that is truly fantastic for poor individuals, poor people from neighboring areas will move their and overload the program. Combine these two and it is hard to create large scale programs on the city or even state level.
It is misleading to cite an overall budget total without considering the context. San Francisco has a larger population than a number of states and that population grows when you include the commuting population which is less of a factor at the state level. There is also the simple fact that liberals generally prefer a larger government than conservatives. San Francisco is one of the most liberal cities with one of the largest city budgets. You shouldn't compare it to some of the smallest and most conservative states with the smallest state budgets.
Either way, my original comment was that it is hard to create these program "on the city or even state level".
SF pop is 870,887. Budget for 17/18 is 10,106 millions, which make it $11,604 per capita: that means more budget per capita than most states, except Minnesota, Washington, Kentucky, Wyoming, Oregon, and North Dakota.
Your first point was
City budgets are tiny compared to state budgets which are tiny compared to the federal budgets.
which is simply not true when speaking of SF.
You shouldn't compare it to some of the smallest and most conservative states with the smallest state budgets.
You're saying I should cherry pick the data so SF doesn't look that bad in comparison?
because they aren't there to help the poor. i really wish people would get it out of their heads that the Democratic party is the people, the poor, the downtrodden. They are very much at their core the same as the Republican party. they are party of specific people who have money who can use this money and influence to continue the careers of those who in turn dole out rewards.
when you pretty much have the press locked up you can turn any story good or bad to your favor. when you need to look like you care you can trot out look good but limited impact programs and check off the box in the list.
the problem is not easy to fix and there is a desire to not fix it because the problem is political currency. just like race strife is political currency. your question about SF can be applied to any large city which has had decades of Democratic control, why isn't problem X fixed?
because the feel good solution isn't what is needed and it only exist as a bullet point in a campaign. it isn't a matter of money, lord knows the promises to public employee pensions plans proves the states and cities had the money. it just went to reward those who keep them in power.
the best voter is one who votes out whomever doesn't deliver and flips the control party to party or faction within each cycle till control returns to the people. however politicians and the press are very adept at exploiting fears and hate of the people and know how to put one group against another. you fall for it every single time, do the honest look into your choices.
> Yet, San Francisco is one of the most economically unequal cities in this country [0]. So what's up? Why have the city's Democrats been so unable to help the poor if that's really something they believe in?
Because even as recently as 2005, there were still some really rotten sections of San Francisco that had yet to be gentrified. So, you still had lots of people with lower income living in certain areas.
All those areas are now basically gone so it's actually becoming critical.
San Francisco is unequal. It is also driving away all its poor people, because they can't afford to live there. (The homeless, clearly, are the exception.)
I am not one to claim that what I want is complete equality. Or even anything close. But the richest city in the richest state should not have thousands of people living on the streets and rents so high that nobody working a low or middle tier job can afford to live within an hour, let alone raise a family.
If SF decided to fix the homeless situation by providing them with psychiatric care and/or housing, all, then all the homeless around the country would start heading to SF and they would end up subsidizing it for the whole country. Even as it is, the nice weather and tolerance makes it attractive for homeless to move there, hence the inequality.
There needs to be a national solution to the drug addiction and (lack of) mental care that the US is suffering from.
This article is a bit unfair to Kim and Leno. It says they are "cooler" on housing than Breed, but that's not really accurate. They all want more housing. The policy difference is over how hard to negotiate with developers for working class housing.
The only quote from Kim is this: "If I’m going to give you ten additional storeys, I’m going to want you to increase your middle-income housing programme."
You can debate whether a purely free market approach will address this effectively, but it's inaccurate to characterize fighting hardest for low- and middle-income housing now as a "cooler approach". Cities need housing for service industry workers -- especially as more professionals move in.
The problem is, Kim doesn't seek to maximize below-market-rate units produced -- she instead seeks to maximize the percent of all units produced that are below-market-rate.
In other words, given a choice between building 1,000 market-rate units and 200 BMR, or building 100 market-rate units and 100 BMR, she'll pick the latter.
See, for example, <https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/20..., which refers to "Supervisor Jane Kim's proposed ballot measure that would more than double the amount of affordable housing that every market-rate project over 25 units has to provide" and how "it would destroy the businesses of both market-rate and affordable developers", and yet, "Kim is standing by her proposal".
Your example is from 2016. She ended up compromising at 18%.[1] It doesn't support your characterization. In her district she's facilitated the most new housing construction by a long shot.
Your second citation is anonymously written and of questionable quality -- check the comments.
Not exactly. "Under the agreement, the 18 percent rental level will be in effect until January 2018, when it will rise to 19 percent, and then 20 percent in 2019. The condo requirement would rise to 21 percent in 2018 and 22 percent in 2019."
"A study by the city controller found that a rate higher than 18 percent would likely slow housing production and reduce the amount of subsidies for affordable units."
"Even with the reduction, the levels are the highest concessions required for affordable housing among any major city in the United States."
"Peskin and Kim had pushed for a 24 percent requirement"
"To date, only two single-building projects without public subsidies have agreed to 25 percent affordable housing"
Your primary source appears to be the San Francisco Business Times. Kim actually supported inclusionary housing "up to the maximum feasible amount analyzed by the controller," not beyond it.[1]
And none of that supports your exaggerated claim that Kim would prefer 100 units over 1,000 units. She's overseen the construction of the most housing in the city.
I did a secondary analysis, which you can see here: https://github.com/sbuss/sf-planning-pipeline/blob/master/Ne... -- scroll down to "Break down by project type" which shows how the category of housing that Jane Kim's Prop C affects has cratered, while the other categories are stable or growing.
Even 18% (now 19%) can't be done at the majority of parcels in the city. I guess it's fine for SOMA, which has the highest land values and transit connectivity of any part of the city, but it doesn't work elsewhere.
Can you help me understand why she changed her position on SB827 and held rallies opposing 827? She says she is "not against housing & this is not the right way to build". Her actions prove different. I have not seen any solutions from her. She is not building enough to compensate for the growing economy.
Like @raldi notes any apartments -- of any height ! -- are illegal to build in 78.6% of SF: http://sfzoning.deapthoughts.com/ . what are her solutions to fix this then?
She's approved more housing in her district than anywhere else in the city combined, so that's a little unfair. And she has answered exactly your question, if you care to take a look:
Kim’s position is that the city isn’t currently driving a hard enough bargain - that restrictions should be tightened to allow even less construction than the status quo.
No one is proposing public funding on a level that would build the hundreds of thousands of homes needed. It’s not a choice between a public and free-market solution. It’s a choice between setting a different goal for the regulatory climate (maximize units vs. preserve small-town character) and implementing token feel-good measures that help a couple thousand people at most.
Fix that, and you'll fix the city's housing and homelessness problems. It wouldn't take ugly skyscrapers, just 4-to-6 story apartment buildings like they have all over the most beautiful cities in Europe.
Whenever I tell people “the fix to SF’s housing problem is to upzone the Sunset to allow 5-story buildings full of studio & 1-bedroom apartments with little shops on the ground floor and improve transit, so that 20-somethings aren’t forced to sleep in bunk-beds 5 people to a rented 2-bedroom house with a back yard they don’t use and ride Ubers to work in heavy traffic”, they look at me like I’m crazy, and insist the solution is stricter low-income housing requirements and stronger protections against eviction.
This “world class city” is zoned to be a sleepy beach town.
Doesn’t help that the whole rest of the Bay Area is mostly zoned the same way.
There's tons of vacant ground floor retail spaces already. In the Amazon and on-demand era, viability is tough if you aren't moving primarily liquor and lottery tickets. Even fast food isn't viable in much of SF (something like 9 McDonald's alone have closed in the last few years... including the longstanding one at 3rd and Townsend).
TBF, SF has build a fair number of housing compared to the Bay Area. It is cities like San Mateo, Palo Alto, and Mountain View that are primarily to blame for the housing crisis.
No. These are human issues. Humans can't get certain resources. Humans don't want to build new things. Humans don't want certain people to have housing. Changes in leadership do not heal these. Never have.
263 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadIt is implied (and sometimes expressed) that "NIMBY" outcomes in elections like this are illegitimate and not "true" democratic outcomes.
I reject this notion. I am very much in favor of urban in-fill in San Francisco and increased density in many parts of the city - but not at the expense of democratic processes.
SF has a very high foreigner population that cant vote. They are moslty renters. US renters also might not live enough time in the city to register, be politically active, or end up moving due to lifestyle or economic reasons. And of renters you will have those that have rent control, which end up in tandem with owners about de-regularization.
Im sure that if you put up a vote landowners and rent-controlled renters have a concentrated interest, and renters and foreigners dont have representation even if they are the majority. If you took all renters of SF in the last 6 years you might get a higher number than landowners but they cannot fight it politically.
So I adhere to the notion of unrepresentative democratic outcomes.
As of 2017, California has same-day voter registration. They can register on voting day.
Lets look at the big picture: if everyone that lived in san francisco in the last 10 years voted to build more or to stop building, what would be the resulting of such a vote?
I think the answer is obvious. And the fact that it isnt, is just lack of representation.
Thats why I devised that mental exercise: if you gathered up all the poeple that lived over 1 year in san francisco in the last 10 years, which one do you think is in the majority? pro-supply, con-supply?
I've never heard this before. Cite?
I think it's reasonable not to allow foreigners to vote on local political issues, just as we do on national ones. I wouldn't expect to have a say on political issues in countries I'm not a citizen of. Otherwise you don't have any skin in the game. You can just leave if you don't like the way things are going.
I think part of the problem is there aren't clear policy proposals to solve housing issues so it's hard to get people to support them. Plus the good land is already developed so you'd have to use eminent domain or something to build affordable housing.
Countries have fought their independence fighting under the concept of "No Taxation without representation".
Reasonable or not I can assure you that foreigners pay the highest rents, have the least rent-control and less land in San Francisco.
I think we fundamentally disagree on whether foreigners should have a say in local politics, so we can't really have a productive conversation on this topic while we remain divided on that issue.
Not if you cop-out to Refugees, how many are they, 1000?
Rental prices increases affect everyone and affect every single foreigner migrating into the bay are. It also affects people from other states, and those also cannot vote. When the situation becomes untenable they leave the city.
The implementation of democracy can never be absolutely representative, anywhere, and in this situation that 'leaky implementation' is obvious.
People who pay rent and establish a residence should have a voice in their local(city) elections. Full Stop. Immigrants were allowed limited voting rights in State elections until the 1920's when very anti-immigrant sentiments lead to laws that prohibit that kind of voting.
But that does not make voting on housing representative of its population.
It's the other way around. A foreigner living in SF shouldn't be able to vote where they came from. They should in SF.
And by foreigner I mean non-citizen. I think if you want to influence policy you should have to have something at stake.
Are you in favor of not collecting taxes from foreigners then?
That applies to local politics for everyone though, it's just as easy for a citizen to move to another city. I'm an immigrant to another country. I'm married, I have kids. I pay taxes. I can't just leave, I very much have skin in the game. Meanwhile the native youth are leaving in droves to bigger cities.
I like the system Sweden has - national elections are for citizens only, but local elections are open to anyone who lives in the municipality and is either (1) a Swedish or EU citizen, or (2) has lived in the country for 3 years
What's interesting about this situation is that there are likely many people that work in SF that would vote for expanding housing but cannot vote because they don't live in SF, presumably because they cannot afford to. The system reinforces itself.
> SF has a very high foreigner population that cant vote.
Remember, this is SF we're talking about. Long term they're not going to let a lack of citizenship stop someone from voting: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526703128/non-citizens-will-s...
EDIT: 75% of rental units & 45% of total
I've yet to hear a good reason why recursion is going to solve the problem instead of entrench it at the next level up.
[0]https://fancybeans.com/2018/01/24/65-57-35-how-much-seattle-... [1]http://blog.employmarket.com/2017/03/13/2016-metro-area-empl...
Homeowners invest their own money, at significant interest rates, to obtain a place to live. They do of course have an interest in protecting that investment - with increased density comes increased crime, stressed parking, and other problems.
To call homeowners a "cartel" as if they're extorting their local community for protection money is inherently misleading.
For instance, Canada has a legal maple syrup cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Quebec_Maple_Syr...
Hold prices for their own suppliers artificially low by agreeing a price cap and refusing to pay more. They rely on suppliers having nowhere else to sell. e.g. British supermarkets have been repeatedly accused and sometimes IIRC convicted of operating a cartel to demand unfairly low prices from food producers.
Agree to split geographies so that there's effectively no competition to supply and each member of the cartel has local monopolies in all or most territory. This should be familiar to US folks who want High Speed Internet outside of a major city.
All agree never to offer a product which would hurt the overall market but be profitable for the first to offer it. Some have claimed the long delay in electric cars coming to market is evidence of this sort of cartel.
Cartels are illegal in much of the world (but ordinary laws don't apply to sovereign entities). If you're ever part of some big industry insider meeting and the lawyers make everybody agree not to talk about prices, future products or other commercial issues it's not because they're commercially sensitive, it's because your executives could do jail time if a court decides your group is a cartel.
Increased density does not increase crime. There's no evidence for this. There are very dense places with low crime and very low density place with lots of crime.
"stressed parking" is probably true, but part of the point of increased density is that you have less need for a car.
"other problems" is dog whistle.
I think I agree with you, but you are over simplifying the issue. Increased density does not increase crime per capita. It does increase crime per other measures of crime intensity (crime per square ft?). https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student-works/pressure-cooke...
http://theipti.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/covariance.pdf
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/13030.html (non-primary)
Damn right you're using violence to gain a profit.
When you violate zoning they don't ask nicely you know.
Batshit crazy. A Georgian land taxer who is just as batshit as all their fellow travellers.
The person that compares homeowners to a cartel was Paavo Monkkone. He is a professor of public policy and urban planning at UCLA.
If you think about a land owner in SF, they didn't really do anything to earn the value of the appreciation of their land. They might have improved their house but the land value went up because of the tech boom.
In such a scenario, at the state level, you would also reduce or eliminate other taxes like the income tax and sales tax.
Supported by such diverse economists as Paul Krugman, Milton Friedman, and Joseph Stiglitz.
Good overview here: https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2015/04/01/why-henry...
and
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/henry-georges-lan...
That doesn't you are wrong to look at it from a incentive point point-of-view. It's just that thinking in terms of cartels might not help you much.
Perhaps the cartel idea gives guidance here: power should be held at a level high enough that the electorate doesn't represent the interest of a cartel. (Since as we all know, special interests never have special access to the corridors of power at high level).
(Planning Commissions generally can make recommendations but the ultimate power lies in a City Council)
Nevermind the fact that the question here is about homelessness which is exacerbated when you lobby to mow down affordable SROs and rent controlled housing so some developers can rebuild luxury condos in their place.
How exactly will that help the homelessness problem?
And rent control actually leads to shortages as mobility is reduced because of people staying in places longer than they would have otherwise. It also disincentivizes creation of new housing.
Greater supply is needed. That’s the bottom line.
Every time I hear "we need to protect poor from eviction by evil tech workers" I want to scream.
Yeah sure.. tech workers who make 150k+ are dreaming about moving in a shitty house in East Bay.
Boulding more affordable housing looks great in a political ad, but does not do shit to resolve the crisis
This is because they build housing. San Francisco, London, New York, and Seattle all don't build housing and prices go up. [2]
If housing were easier to build people would build more affordable housing. No developer cares if they build expensive housing or affordable housing, they are maximizing return on investment. Turning a 1 story house into a 3 story house for a 30% return makes developers just as happy as developing 20 luxury condos for a 30% return.
And even those luxury condos provide housing for people who would otherwise buy old condos and renovate them. As long as the housing is more dense and there is more of it, prices will come down.
[1] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/average-rent-in-japan...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...
https://m.fang.com/zf/sz/AGT_206834195.html?listtype=1&lists...
Which is to say, you might be able to "solve" homeless problems in Denver or Salt Lake or St. Paul - and there have been some very interesting and encouraging policy moves there, especially in Salt Lake City. This might be because there are only so many people willing to be homeless in St. Paul. Or Green Bay or Denver - because of the cold and snow.
What does it mean if the stream of homeless into SF/LA/SD is, effectively, unlimited ? How would that change our proposed solutions ?
Homelessness is by and large a product of mental health issues, and a lack of a good mental health system.
>only so many people willing to be homeless... right, because so much of the homeless population just needs to try harder. If this is how people really see the issue it's no wonder that its still an issue.
The real question scares people to even think about: what is the real price of ending the homeless epidemic and are we as a society actually willing to pay it? What if housing prices had to cut in half and taxes had to double? What if funding had to increase by 50x? What if 1:5 families had to accept a homeless person into their spare bedroom?
The elephant in the room is drug use. Nobody wants to admit it, but most of the problems that the non-homeless experience with the homeless are related to drug use and mental health issues.
If san francisco opened a state mental hospital for its homeless population, then all california counties would send people to them. And if california did, then all states would.
Mental health does need some sort of federal solution.
Well, why not take that first step? I see the "we need more mental hospitals" solution trotted out over and over again but it seems that these cities spend a fortune doing everything for the homeless _but_ tackle mental health.
Is your concern really that creating mental hospitals would attract too many homeless, moreso than the current policy of providing free drug paraphernalia, safe places to do drugs, lax drug law enforcement, lax attitudes towards panhandling, shelter, good weather, etc.?
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
I am saying that to whatever degree someone is already homeless, they may be less willing to stay somewhere with life threatening weather than somewhere without it.
I agree with you that these people are mentally ill.
"right, because so much of the homeless population just needs to try harder"
I never said that, or anything that implied that.
So yes, there's a significant crowd that will move here for the services/weather/won't get harrassed by PD, but there's also probably a larger crowd of people just hanging on who are getting squeezed out of their apartments over time.
A lot of their work dried up after the housing bust. It was also one thing to house the non-resident (and non-rent controlled) worker cooking at the neighborhood restaurant or working construction vs what we think of as indigent street homeless.
Many of those units are still there, but today's owners are probably less open someone in their back yard.
There's also a trait in some cultures of taking care of their own and multiple families living together. My neighbor told me my predecessors were 6-7 FOB Irish youth, bunk beds in the living room.
[edit - link below]
Careful with how "lived in homes before" is defined. Is that "has ever lived in a home before" or "lived in a home and was forced out by increased rent"? The former is something true for just about any person and doesn't mean much WRT the issue.
"According to the city's homeless survey, 71 percent were actually living in San Francisco when they lost their homes."
The bay area has a population of 7 million people. Just as a thought experiment, we could easily double that population by moving to SF Mission style density in more parts of the bay area. That is 3-4 story wood frame houses with first floor retail and parks. This would house all of America's homeless, and another 5 million people as well.
The physical/engineering/resources part of housing aren't the constraint.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
I have no doubt these problem-individuals are absolutely unemployable. I'm not sure how building more million-dollar houses relates to fixing the homelessness problem.
Is somebody debating giving million-dollar houses to the homeless?
But that actually supports your point that there might be more people willing to be homeless in certain areas than can be adequately taken care of.
London Breed for mayor it is.
One of Vancouver's innovative approaches was a special tax assessment on vacant structures.
I honestly wonder what percentage of SF, including its commercial office space, is simply a vehicle for money laundering. Switzerland and the Cayman Islands have nothing on Uncle Sam when it comes to real estate opacity.
We're talking about international levels of wealth, these same people have multiple pieces of property in Hong Kong which makes San Francisco look dirt cheap.
The ones who do rent usually hire an agency to take care of the headaches for them.
That's not the case. Vacancy rates in San Francisco are very low, at 3.6%: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2015/04/16/san-fran...
You can see this in the rent-to-buy ratios. While high in the Bay Area, it's nowhere near the out-of-control bubble levels of Vancouver and, to a lesser extent, Toronto. Housing prices are high in the Bay Area because people actually need to live here.
I don't think we're measuring the real figure of merit here.
If you robbed a bank and had a nice big pile o' cash, how smart would you be to put it in a bank and collect interest on it?
You jeopardize (or devalue) the asset by trying to play landlord. By leaping after $80k/year, you may cost yourself $500k/year appreciation in the asset.
Unless your tenant literally burns the building down and you don't have insurance, I'm not sure how this works.
This is one of those big daunting problems that feels increasingly make or break for SF as a whole, and given it the size and complexity of the problem, will likely involve a very disruptive and painful change to address.
If I'm taking a bet here, I think it's more likely that they don't handle the problem effectively and the workforce and economy distribute out of the system, followed by a sudden and severe real-estate market correction, and then the growth will settle and flatten for a while
My sense is that it's "make or break" only for people who have been here for three years and are trying to decide whether to remain for two more.
IMO, they should.
I would also push back on the "deciding whether to stay for 2 more years" part - sure, maybe young people tend to plan 2 years ahead at a time, but they're really deciding if it's a place they want to settle down in permanently. If they stay 2 more years they may well end up staying 20 more.
So I don't think it's at all a stretch to say this is a make or break issue for the city.
Nothing is "make or break" for a city like SF.
One of the tragic tropes of San Francisco is that people often and loudly think homelessness just needs to be "fixed," and that it just takes getting the right person into office to do so. But there ain't no silver bullet and these issues are complicated.
It seems like SF has been moving in good directions as far as dialing down the "arrest the homeless" strategy propounded by carpetbaggers offended that the sidewalks don't remind them of Topeka, the evolution of Navigation Centers, and other homeless-directed policies.
Frankly, zoning and development issues seem easy compared to homelessness. It's popular to dehumanize those without money, so the ideas only trickle in. Flint, MI still has poisoned tap water, after all.
That is the central problem, and more government regulation on top of an already insane amount of red tape and restrictions will not fix it. You must allow developers to develop
The conclusions to this certainly made sense to me. Were they debunked or forgotten?
My landlord actively seeks people from the Bay Area to rent to and if they're not from here they're going to pay more rent especially if they work in tech. You're paying the tech transplant tax.
Also, we're not in China but the population density issue is the same. If the jobs are in one location, you don't actively prevent new housing or better public transportation.
It's because of profit. Amazon opposing the per-employee tax that would provide critical city services should help explain exactly where their priorities lie.
He also proposed instead of a flat tax, it would be progressive like income tax. Larger companies would pay a higher effective rate than small ones in the same sector but the Board of Supervisors didn't approve.
The City of SF has trust of over $24 billion and also administers a defined benefit retirement plan for ~65,000 current & retired employees of SF. And the President of the Retirement board who manages 24 Billion I believe is not someone from Goldman or finance background but a police officer?
SF priorities: Get electric bikes and scooters out of SF but create an unsafe city and homeless to walk around naked and dropping their poop and needles everywhere is okay
Not to mention, stopping construction is a majority held opinion. In voting pamphlets, politicians actually brag about how much construction they've stopped: I can only imagine it's because the majority agrees with that.
Approximately 64,000 housing units, 31 million sq.ft. of commercial space & 25 hotels with 4685 rooms are now in the SF new construction pipeline - with 5700 units, 10 million sq.ft. and 5 hotels currently under construction. https://www.paragon-re.com/trend/new-housing-construction-in...
Tech companies themselves have many internal constituencies (managers, line programmers, service workers). Since these companies are extremely not democracies, it's very easy for the preferences of a small valuable constituency (executives and managers) to override the preferences of a larger commoditized constituency (new grad engineers and janitors). Valuable internal constituencies are already compensated enough to buy a single-family home and generally don't want density.
It would be difficult for e.g. Facebook to publicly support upzoning in Menlo Park when half the NIMBYs in the room are relatively valuable mid-level engineering managers at Facebook. So we don't see these tech companies in general putting big resources behind really transformative upzoning projects.
Haven't SF tech companies, their employees and their voting habits done enough damage to SF as it is? One can only hope other cities with emerging tech industries act proactively to prevent current-Californian tech residents flocking from the problems they've caused to cause the same problems in these new cities.
Google owns some land that had previously been developed for dense residential until the city council changed their minds. They've just been sitting on it for the last few years. Finally, the city council is approving 10-12 story residential (which is unheard of in the Bay Area), but they're still bickering over the details.
The crazy part is that Google wants Google employees to live in Google-owned housing next to Google. This should be a no brainer. Every Google employee that lives next to their place of employment takes another car off the road, has another person walking to work. But people are arguing it would create more traffic.
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
> In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
- - - - -
Second, SF city politics, always a bit freaky in the best of times, has gotten really weird since Mayor Lee passed away. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/us/san-francisco-mayor-br...
- - - - -
Put these two items together and the short answer to the question in the title is, "No."
As mentioned in the article, we already spend one quarter of a billion dollars on homelessness in SF. That's not a typo: 0.25 * 10 to the ninth power.
> San Francisco’s programmes, which cost $250m per year, are praised by many campaigners against homelessness. Still, the city could spend its money more efficiently.
There's plenty of money, even after:
> About two-thirds of its homelessness budget goes on rent subsidies and “permanent supportive housing”.
So ~$170m for housing (never mind that folks aren't homeless if they live in a house) still leaves ~$80m to deal with a few thousand people.
> Early intervention is often much cheaper.
Yes. Something like 60% of EMS response downtown is related to issues with a small handful of people. The ambulance drivers know them by name.
- - - - -
Last but not least, a random thought in re:
> Jeff Kositsky, the city’s director of homelessness services, cites the example of a driver for Lyft, a ride-hailing service, who nearly fell into homelessness after his car was damaged. The city kept him off the streets by simply paying off the cost of his car.
What? As an S.F. resident this doesn't seem right. I appreciate that this guy isn't homeless, that's great, I'm not disturbed by that. The thing that I find unsettling is why didn't his car insurance pay for it? Or Lyft for that matter?
But then I have to remind myself that this is the city that passed a law to just give money to certain businesses if they were considered "Legacy" enough. I'm left-leaning but that blew me away:
https://www.sfheritage.org/legacy/legacy-business-registry-p...
> The registry is open to businesses and nonprofits that are 30 years or older, have been nominated by a member of the Board of Supervisors or Mayor, and in a hearing before the Small Business Commission, prove that they have made a significant impact on the history or culture of their neighborho...
As soon as this insurmountable plague has been eradicated, the city administration will finally have time to talk again about the things that matter, like: Should Vaillancourt Fountain be finally removed or not? Or after introducing the soda tax, is it finally time for a burrito tax? Of course really anything that would prevent them from fixing the real problems that are affecting SF.
SF needs its own Rudy Giuliani and its own Broken Windows policy[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
Don't discount the virtue signaling that's going on here. It's an election year, and tech is still a reasonably good whipping boy for voters. Of all my friends, the non-tech ones seem much more likely to vote than the tech ones. Many of my tech friends in SF aren't even registered to vote here.
I'm a transplant to NYC and I'm generally pretty critical of complaints about transplants -- try living in a city nobody wants to move to and get back to me on which is worse -- but this does make me think hard about the ways in which the people who move to a new city for short-term opportunity might not care at all about its long-term viability.
Ew please refrain from echoing alt-right invented language here.
I don't think this is the place for that discussion though.
I was struggling to find a way to state this as well but choose to shut up when words eluded me. Is the phrase "virtue signaling" sometimes deployed by people with shitty intent? Yes.
That doesn't mean the phrase has no value at all and I think in the context used its usage above was perfectly apt. If one thinks otherwise they ought to articulate a counterpoint instead of expecting all discussion on the point to stop because of their own personal hangups with bad actors.
Something something nuanced political debate is dead
It's disturbing. Some people (and from what I'm seeing, it's people on the left) want to simply silence other people (on the right) rather than actually answer them. I guess it's less work that way, and maybe more satisfying as well. It's less productive, though - you miss a chance to convince the audience, and you miss a chance to persuade your opponent. You gain the chance to make the audience make sure they never say the "taboo" words in the future, though... but that's more of a totalitarian approach than a reasonable tactic for a free people.
So when I see the tired phrase “virtue signaling” I think “uh oh here we go...”
Sorry if I’m triggered by it.
I won't sit here and promulgate respectability politics just say that when one ignores their own political baggage and hubris it passively signals to everyone watching it's fair game for them to do so as well.
And the noise just gets louder as a result.
Reminds me of a Hunter S Thompson quote about a high water line of political fervor, where people thought they were winning, that they were right simply because they had done nothing more than show people how angry they could be.
Interesting. I realize I'm asking you to spitball, and that's fine legitimately curious to hear something outside the box but why do you think that is?
Seems to me an unlikely division when it comes to voter participation, or at least a very unexpected one.
On the other hand, friends not in tech (much more varied population by job; artists, food-service & bar industry, construction, medical) were much more motivated to tell me not only what their opinions were, but how they were voting (or had already voted) and why.
It's possible that this will change nearer to the mid-term, but it doesn't seem like primary elections get people that excited.
It's a great question though, and I'll start asking more deeply about it because I'm curious now as well!
Last night I stumbled by a group of older (than me, all clearly retired) folks talking about Unions at my local pub. Interested, I sat down and quietly listened in-they didn't seem to mind.
At one point though I spoke up about how surprised I was that we haven't seen more tech workers unionizing in areas that aren't San Francisco, Cupertino or Austin. The "leader" of the pack so to speak,went on to talk about all of the amenities tech giants offer like day cares and dog parks on campus, laundry facilities etc and then he capped it off with "but none of that stuff pays your rent in San Fran".
Bringing it all back around, I do genuinely think about this sort of stuff a lot and I wonder if there's something to be said of a tech culture that gives it's employees so much that they passively lose something that binds us all to the connective tissue of citizen engagement.
I only bring it up because I've noticed the exact same phenomenon you have: lots of very smart, well paid tech friends who confessed to not even bothering to vote despite very huge opinions about everything political and an even larger eagerness to display their "wokeness" on social media.
It's my poorer blue collar and service industry friends I see online asking for rides to the polls, and are the ones who ask ME "did you vote today?"
When you have the income to:
1. Rent a comfortable apartment pretty much anywhere in the Bay Area, without fear of rising rent displacing you. (Keep rent within a third of your income)
2. Pay for a private solution (Rideshare, Private commuter buses, tech company shuttle) to the broken transportation infrastructure, dirty streets, and the homeless problem of the Bay.
3. Have a fiscal safety net in case something happens to your income.
4. Have the insurance needed to withstand the occasional curve-balls of life.
then you've mostly averted the endemic problems of the Bay Area. SF's gov't is incompetent, and private solutions have alleviated most of its systemic issues for its moneyed classes. Of course people in tech won't be as motivated to vote, they're insulated from all of the problems.
There's a growing sentiment (growing being an understatement, Google/Apple buses have been smashed/blocked for years now) that tech's private market solutions are priced to only help their own out. Until this perception changes, they're going to want to vote with their rage.
One of the reasons for it, is that in cities with working transit, both the rich, and the poor, newcomers and decades-established people take the bus/train. When people with influence are using public transit, it stops being shit.
Pointing at Muni, and saying: "Look, you fools! Public transit doesn't work!" is a bit like pointing at Somalia, circa 2009, and saying: "Look, you fools! Rule of law doesn't work!"
Another being that community organizers and concerned citizens were sufficiently disenfranchised and disempowered that greedy developers obtained permission to destroy pre-existing communities, open space, and neighborhood character to create built environments that are dense enough for good public transit to be cost-effective. In some cases, this happened more than 1000 years ago, so no one minds anymore.
>When people with influence are using public transit, it stops being shit.
Is there any evidence for this? Has a population ever actually forced its leaders to ride shitty public transit, and subsequently seen a turnaround?
Most New York professionals rely on the subway, and it's falling apart anyway.
Probably straying close to striking the heads off of poppies by saying this but it's a real concern I have while simultaneously wanting to see my hometown thrive.
Weird spot to be in.
Go here: http://registertovote.ca.gov/
They will mail you a confirmation of registration. Once you receive that confirmation convert yourself to a permanent vote-by-mail voter.
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San Francisco Permanent Vote By Mail:
1. Go here: http://sfelections.org/tools/regupdate/regupd.php
2. Enter your details, then check the "Become a permanent vote-by-mail voter" checkbox.
3. Click Print, then Save to PDF. Attach your signature electronically (or print it, sign it, and scan it with your phone)
4. Email the PDF to SFVote@sfgov.org
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San Jose Permanent Vote By Mail:
1. Go here: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/VBM/Pages/Permanent.aspx
2. Print the form and fill it out
3. Mail it to the address indicated
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San Mateo Permanent Vote By Mail:
https://www.smcacre.org/vote-mail
--
Now you're set. They will mail you a ballot in the mail for every election. You mark the cards, put them in the envelope, and drop them in the mail. You usually have ~3 weeks to research each proposition and candidate.
If you live in a different county you'll have to check with them how to become a permanent vote-by-mail voter, or use the state form and mail it to your county registrar: http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov//vote-by-mail/pdf/vote-by-ma...
This micro-level rationality leads to a big problem on the macro level. People who see politics as a matter of principle aren't likely to be swayed by the low RoI of going to vote. They'll exercise their democratic rights, come hell or high water. You end up with an electorate that is disproportionately driven by principles and ideals rather than pragmatism.
New Yorker here. You want the pre-lunacy Giuliani. Just thought it's worth clarifying.
With that in mind, perhaps the only thing that's redeeming about Giuliani is that he was remarkably successful in cleaning up NYC.
I am not a US citizen, but during the years I spend in SF it became painfully clear how backwards SF policies are.
Rich displace poor? Solution: limit construction of medium and high income apartments.
Traffic jams? Let's regulate the shit out of corporate busses that essentially substitute public transportation.
Etc etc etc..
It is really sad to see that logic is loosing to populist ideas.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-to-consider-b...
Yeah, what we need is busted heads, unconstitutional policing and questionable associations with organized crime.
SF doesn't have this problem, despite all the dysfunction, homeless, and small time crime (it's no where close to being as dangerous as NYC in the 1980s) people have a strong desire to live here. No one is going to bring in a broken window policy because it doesn't matter to the people living here right now. There's still high demand, locals are making money if they got in when it was right. It doesn't matter.
In their eyes there technically isn't a problem, the problem is for people who aren't on rent control and who moved here from other places. The locals here don't really care about that because they know if you leave someone is going to replace you. It's also easy for them to point the blame on new industry for causing homelessness not lack of new development. I don't see things changing.
I do not think the city administration is the only guilty here. We are in such a strange bubble here ...
As far as I know, we don't have ravening hordes of scooter-poopers (regardless of housing status). Some folks pooped on them as a statement, pics went around.
Yes, especially in SOMA, where both the homeless and the scooters are plentiful, one encounters poop. But otherwise, there's no real relation.
The scooters are somewhere between annoying and a menace, depending. I tripped over one two days ago; there's a dark stretch on my block, so of course that's where someone dropped the damn thing.
My issue is with people who think the commons is there to be exploited. If your business is going to occupy and use public space, it needs to do so only with the consent of those impacted. It not, why shouldn't I start occupying the sidewalks to hawk my goods and services, too? Why stop there - there's a lot of street to take over, too, not to mention all those parks, just waiting to be DISRUPTED!
I find it especially ironic that the homeless, forced to live on the sidewalks, are being blamed for problems with scooters, whose owners are competing with the homeless for the space.
Haven't taken part, but I have no issue with the folks who have been destroying the scooters. It is a useful form of feedback.
1. I always wondered how certain dictators got so many moral people to look the other way. These days it crystal clear. Some people, most people, look for the easiest fix for a complex problem. As long as they aren't the ones raking up dubious tickets, and being thrown to the ground because of the way they look.
2. My hope is San Francisco never becomes NY.
Solutions: Maybe it's too late? There's a palatable anger among the disenfranchised.
A start would be provide portable toilets.
Don't like seeing turds in front of your doorstep?
Give them a place to relieve themselfs.
Just ports potties? Nothing fancy.
Heaven forbid I even talk about giving the homeless one place they can pitch a tent without breaking a law.
Then--start taxing luxury condos--heavily. (They build these palaces to get around Rent Control.)
In all honesty, I'll be glad when tech takes a nose dive. Your Founder's came in with play money(low interest policy that benefited the billionaires), and made the locals life more stressful.
Those of you that don't have understanding parents will feel what it's like to be treated much worse than a rabid animal.
So yes--I'm waiting for the day I see on HN, "U-haul ran out of vechicles to rent.
San Francisco has always been a strong union town. It's always had jobs. My hope is it Never becomes, or thinks, like New Yorkers.
(You put a rat in a stressful environment. The rat will survive, but I don't want to be around it. And yes--I notice the New York way of thinking, and find it deplorable. We're not suppose to stereotype, but I just don't like it.)
For further reading on the lead-crime connection, this [1] is a decent survey article.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
I read this in about the same light as if I read that all three candidates believe in homeopathy and intelligent design.
San Francisco has had a Democratic mayor from 1964-now. It's widely regarded as the farthest left city in the country besides maybe Berkeley across the bay. Most Democrats/leftists want to reduce wealth inequality and are proponents of more taxation, welfare, etc.
Yet, San Francisco is one of the most economically unequal cities in this country [0]. So what's up? Why have the city's Democrats been so unable to help the poor if that's really something they believe in?
Democrats always say that if you elect the Republicans then the city will belong to the rich and powerful. But that's what we have now...
Note: I am a Democrat, I already voted for SF mayor this cycle and I voted for a Democratic candidate.
0: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/15/income-inequality-in-...
Would you mind elaborating on why you voted Democrat this time, after having just pointed out that for the last ~60 years a democratic mayor failed to live up to the virtues they espouse?
Not trying to be sarcastic. Generally curious if you considered republican but decided against it for some reason... Or if you just hardline vote one way?
I think the point was that habosa isn't some Republican demagogue trying to score points on the Democrats. That is, habosa is saying, "Don't dismiss my point as just a political harangue. I'm dis-satisfied with my own side here. Why are we doing this?"
I would guess that the answer to your question is that someone can see a lot of problems with their own side, and still think that their side is better overall than the other side. Just a guess, though; I don't speak for habosa.
https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/CSF_Budget_Book_2017...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
It's larger than 13 states' budget.
Either way, my original comment was that it is hard to create these program "on the city or even state level".
http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-pop...
SF pop is 870,887. Budget for 17/18 is 10,106 millions, which make it $11,604 per capita: that means more budget per capita than most states, except Minnesota, Washington, Kentucky, Wyoming, Oregon, and North Dakota.
Your first point was
City budgets are tiny compared to state budgets which are tiny compared to the federal budgets.
which is simply not true when speaking of SF.
You shouldn't compare it to some of the smallest and most conservative states with the smallest state budgets.
You're saying I should cherry pick the data so SF doesn't look that bad in comparison?
If I'd answer honestly, I'd be downvoted to hell. That's what's up.
when you pretty much have the press locked up you can turn any story good or bad to your favor. when you need to look like you care you can trot out look good but limited impact programs and check off the box in the list.
the problem is not easy to fix and there is a desire to not fix it because the problem is political currency. just like race strife is political currency. your question about SF can be applied to any large city which has had decades of Democratic control, why isn't problem X fixed?
because the feel good solution isn't what is needed and it only exist as a bullet point in a campaign. it isn't a matter of money, lord knows the promises to public employee pensions plans proves the states and cities had the money. it just went to reward those who keep them in power.
the best voter is one who votes out whomever doesn't deliver and flips the control party to party or faction within each cycle till control returns to the people. however politicians and the press are very adept at exploiting fears and hate of the people and know how to put one group against another. you fall for it every single time, do the honest look into your choices.
Because even as recently as 2005, there were still some really rotten sections of San Francisco that had yet to be gentrified. So, you still had lots of people with lower income living in certain areas.
All those areas are now basically gone so it's actually becoming critical.
Show me a city with low inequality, and I'll show you a city that's driven away all its poor people.
There needs to be a national solution to the drug addiction and (lack of) mental care that the US is suffering from.
Zoom in on the upper tail of a power law, and what do you see? Another power law.
Both support the already-rich.
The only quote from Kim is this: "If I’m going to give you ten additional storeys, I’m going to want you to increase your middle-income housing programme."
You can debate whether a purely free market approach will address this effectively, but it's inaccurate to characterize fighting hardest for low- and middle-income housing now as a "cooler approach". Cities need housing for service industry workers -- especially as more professionals move in.
In other words, given a choice between building 1,000 market-rate units and 200 BMR, or building 100 market-rate units and 100 BMR, she'll pick the latter.
[1] http://kalw.org/post/mayoral-candidate-jane-kim-takes-afford...
As predicted by the city economist, after this passed we saw a huge drop in the production of both BMR and market-rate units: https://medium.com/yes-in-my-blog-yes/the-25-inclusionary-ra...
Your second citation is anonymously written and of questionable quality -- check the comments.
[1] https://hoodline.com/2017/05/supervisors-reach-compromise-on...
"A study by the city controller found that a rate higher than 18 percent would likely slow housing production and reduce the amount of subsidies for affordable units."
"Even with the reduction, the levels are the highest concessions required for affordable housing among any major city in the United States."
"Peskin and Kim had pushed for a 24 percent requirement"
"To date, only two single-building projects without public subsidies have agreed to 25 percent affordable housing"
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/05/18/sf-...
And none of that supports your exaggerated claim that Kim would prefer 100 units over 1,000 units. She's overseen the construction of the most housing in the city.
[1] https://48hills.org/2017/03/real-facts-affordable-housing-de...
Even 18% (now 19%) can't be done at the majority of parcels in the city. I guess it's fine for SOMA, which has the highest land values and transit connectivity of any part of the city, but it doesn't work elsewhere.
Like @raldi notes any apartments -- of any height ! -- are illegal to build in 78.6% of SF: http://sfzoning.deapthoughts.com/ . what are her solutions to fix this then?
http://www.sfexaminer.com/sb-827-postmortem-lets-build-housi...
No one is proposing public funding on a level that would build the hundreds of thousands of homes needed. It’s not a choice between a public and free-market solution. It’s a choice between setting a different goal for the regulatory climate (maximize units vs. preserve small-town character) and implementing token feel-good measures that help a couple thousand people at most.
Fix that, and you'll fix the city's housing and homelessness problems. It wouldn't take ugly skyscrapers, just 4-to-6 story apartment buildings like they have all over the most beautiful cities in Europe.
Whenever I tell people “the fix to SF’s housing problem is to upzone the Sunset to allow 5-story buildings full of studio & 1-bedroom apartments with little shops on the ground floor and improve transit, so that 20-somethings aren’t forced to sleep in bunk-beds 5 people to a rented 2-bedroom house with a back yard they don’t use and ride Ubers to work in heavy traffic”, they look at me like I’m crazy, and insist the solution is stricter low-income housing requirements and stronger protections against eviction.
This “world class city” is zoned to be a sleepy beach town.
Doesn’t help that the whole rest of the Bay Area is mostly zoned the same way.
That could be taken and with the method in this paper:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8835
The added cost by zoning in area could be calculated. It'd be absolutely massive.
Perhaps someone already has.