I'm not advocating taking this to commune-like extremes, but I'm surprised I don't hear more about taking advantage of sharing certain items to maximise living space and minimise costs. Two candidates that spring to mind would be vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Surely it's cheaper to have one industrial-quality version of each shared between 10/15 residents (with some sort of online booking system) than for everyone to have one each and lose the space?
Are you by any chance European? A lot of US apartments do have a shared laundry...I can't think of any of my American friends who have a washing machine.
This is in contrast to the UK, where it's culturally the norm for every flat to have its own washing machine (normally a condensor combi dryer, another thing not so popular in the US). Sames goes for heat: heat if often shared in the US, but here in the UK almost all apartments have individual boilers.
I am sure somebody here must have an explanation for exactly why this cultural difference has developed, because I have no clue!
Perhaps because a lot of buildings in the UK were converted into flats in a rather piecemeal fashion?
e.g. Where we live started out as a 5 floor (enormous) town house with garden and stable block ~200 years ago and was split into 4 properties and then one of these was split into another 2.
Yep - UK, and neither of those things are common over here (I don't know of any at all).
How would the shared heating work, financially? Over here our energy costs are very high so a lot (most?) of our energy bills go on heating and hot water; if you want to save money, you put a jumper on and have a shower rather than a bath. With shared heating you don't have this option, but do the overall savings from greater efficiency (an assumption) make this a moot point?
That's nice and all, and I definitely don't mean to sound like the tough New Yorker I am not, but if that's a "micro-apartment" then I have seen several "nano-apartments" in NYC that wouldn't fit a queen-size bed comfortably, let alone a nice kitchenette like the one in the article.
They're still livable, mind you, for some value of 'livable'.
In other words, if that is considered "micro" nowadays then my standards must be awfully skewed (which they probably are) and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised when I move out of here.
I was going to say - that apartment is definitely larger than many in downtown Manhattan (if you live in one of the older buildings - particularly the old tenement buildings).
That might be 'micro' for Queens or even Washington Heights, but that's certainly not 'micro' for Chelsea or the Village.....
> I have seen several "nano-apartments" in NYC that wouldn't fit a queen-size bed comfortably
My friend had a tough time figuring out how to fit his full-sized bed - ended up deciding that it wouldn't work, and opted for a futon instead.
I live in lower Manhattan. I should measure, but I'm pretty sure my apartment is right around 200 square feet, and when I was looking, there were definitely smaller apartments available. One of my friends' apartments is probably closer to 150 square feet.
Haha, yeah. I used to pay $1500/month for something only a little longer than the one in the article in a basement in Chelsea. It was actually a really nice place in my mind because it was very cheap for the area and I wasn't stuck with a ton of roommates like most of my friends.
FWIW this is actually smaller than many things you'd find in Manhattan (legally). NYC IIRC has minimum allowable size of 300 square feet for an apartment.
I think the main issue with NYC "micro" apartments is that they're often carved out of older units/buildings and shaped very strangely, resulting in less useful space overall than the number you're actually getting.
San Francisco has got to have the most frustrating and puzzling housing policy I've ever seen in this country.
No, let's not build any more housing, let's completely stonewall any attempt to redevelop any land whatsoever (except Mission Bay, because it's the San Francisco Yuppie Quarantine Zone). Instead, let's subdivide existing housing into increasingly tiny units.
Because gosh-durnit the cute colorful Victorians are sacred and override all other concerns, including economic stagnancy, transportation nightmares, unprecedented rent increases, destroying traditional neighborhood demographics, and very fundamental quality of life.
Nope, none of that matters, because we're basing a housing policy on whether or not this neighborhood can pass for one from the early 20th century!
FWIW, according to San Francisco magazine, the median ago for a mission Bay condo owner is 56 and already owns a home somewhere else: not exactly yuppieville.
I think your concerns are way overblown. But in a broad sense, yes, San Franciscans have made a conscious decision to pay a premium so that their city doesn't turn into New York.
> economic stagnancy
It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.
> transportation nightmares
I'm not sure what you are referring to here. MUNI is very abundant and isn't too expensive (compared to NYC it's really cheap). There is generally plenty of parking outside of downtown.
> destroying traditional neighborhood demographics
Lol. The Chinese are doing just fine, but I guess you're referring to the former ghettos (Lower Filmore, Hunter's Point, the TL, etc.) that had huge drug problems and violence (It's still there, but siginificantly reduced) Yes, gentrification is unfortunate - but building high rises everywhere would ruin the "culture" much faster (though I would argue the Tenderloin doesn't have much culture to lose) and wouldn't solve the poverty among "traditional neighborhood demographics". What needs to be done, is a lot more needs to be spent on schools and city college and less on low income housing (where people are locked into poverty).
> very fundamental quality of life
That's just a vapid hyperbole. Not building high rises is preserving the quality of life SF is known for. The NewYorkification of SF (started by the Gavin Newsome) is what will ruin the quality of life.
In my experience the people that whine and moan about there not being enough housing in SF are people that don't live there. I think what they're thinking is if there were more teeny tiny apartments then they could afford to live there. While that may be true, then SF wouldn't be SF anymore - and it would only be a short term fix as SF would become just as crowded and expensive as Manhattan.
I disagree, I think potatolicious was pretty on point
> It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.
You have a source on that stat? Rents in San Francisco are up something like 25+% year over year in many areas. Does that sound healthy to you?
> I'm not sure what you are referring to here. MUNI is very abundant and isn't too expensive (compared to NYC it's really cheap). There is generally plenty of parking outside of downtown.
Nope, MUNI is awful. Unless you live relatively close on one of the train lines, you are in for a world of hurt. The average speed of a MUNI bus has been going down continuously over time (due to extra traffic), to the point where it is now like 7mph. That means it takes an hour to go from one end to the other (vs 25 minutes tops to go a similar distance on BART). That means more people get cars, which means the buses get even slower. I'd happily pay the NYC monthly rates if I had an equivalent transit system.
> Not building high rises is preserving the quality of life SF is known for
San Francisco doesn't need to build high rises everywhere in the city, it needs to allow taller buildings (6-7 stories) in more areas without forcing developers to jump through all the hoops they have to right now. Lots of cities in Europe are filled with buildings of that height and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly. Vancouver is consistently rated as having one of the highest quality of life scores in the world and has tons of high rises
> Rents in San Francisco are up something like 25+% year over year in many areas. Does that sound healthy to you?
That's in large part because people don't want to buy houses now (b/c of the volatility of the SF real-estate market and a lot of people don't feel it's a safe investment). And yet people are still renting (b/c wages are high).
> San Francisco doesn't need to build high rises everywhere in the city, it needs to allow taller buildings
This is just not a longer term viable solution.
> Lots of cities in europe are filled with buildings of that height (eg paris) and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly.
Paris a great example of where it does NOT work. You have the old center with the culture and the tourists and the traditional way of life (and yes, very very expensive real-estate). The parts that do have apartment blocks are on the outskirts and are poverty stricken monstrosities (with exceptions). People don't even consider them to be part of Paris proper.
Paris is definitely not an example of healthy development.
I concede that SF is an expensive city and lots of people can't afford it. I think that's just the new reality of the city and there isn't any viable long term way to fix it short of actively making the city less appealing to live in. I don't complain that rent in Manhattan is too high. I just don't live there. I personally can't afford to live in SF (though I grew up there and love the city), so I live elsewhere in California. But at the end of the day I don't expect SF resident to change their city to accommodate me.
> Lots of cities in Europe are filled with buildings of that height and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly.
It's actually pretty common for European cities to limit high-rise condos/office buildings in the city centers (usually with limits around 5-8 stories). To still achieve dense housing, tall condos and office buildings are usually built close to public transit somewhere a bit outside of the city center, plus the suburbs don't start as close in, so there's a bigger urbanized area. The Manhattan/Chicago/Vancouver style of a downtown characterized by skyscrapers isn't very common in Europe; more of a North American invention, particularly in the Chicago/Vancouver form where there's a high-rise downtown that quickly turns into suburban homes within a few kilometers.
The SF equivalent might be to not allow condo towers in SF, but to urbanize the areas a few BART stops out: why are there single-family homes, not denser housing, in San Bruno, West Oakland, and Daly City? But of course, the Peninsula is even more anti-development than SF is, so politically that just trades one source of opposition for another one (to take another example, people have been trying to convince Palo Alto to allow more dense housing near downtown/Stanford/Caltrain for years, but Palo Altoans want to keep it suburban).
I think that's happening to some extent in West Oakland and Oakland more generally, at least. West Oakland's been getting some development, and there's the MacArthur Transit Village being planned at MacArthur.
>It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.
If the population of the country is growing then those people have to go somewhere. You can either suburbanize the wilderness or you can let more people into existing cities, and while I can understand the desire of the people living in San Fransisco not to share the nice things they have I can't say I sympathize.
Well what I'm arguing is that the nice things SF has is contingent on there being less than a million people there. You can't share it, because if you do, then the charm of the city will be lost and it will turn into a bustling metropolis.
You've also presented a bit of a false dichotomy. I think the solution IS to develop smaller cities - that are stagnant and that have room to grow - into larger cities. You can call it "suburbanize the wilderness" but it's not exactly suburbanization because suburbs imply that people still commute to larger city centers. You can look at cities like Portland or something (I don't really know for sure if they're a good example) that develop a local tech field (or other industry), have local companies grow and multiply and they then become an economic center in their own right.
Honestly I think most of what you wrote is just completely wrong, and I've lived here for six years. What are you referring to with "transportation nightmares"? I drove from Oakland to San Francisco everyday this week and it never took more than 15 minutes. I can get basically anywhere if you combine BART, Muni and Caltrain, so what are you actually referring to?
I'm referring to getting around within the city itself via transit. All of MUNI's light rail lines are gigantic perpetual clusterfuck machines. Their buses are no better.
Getting to/from downtown and to the Outer Sunset easily takes an hour on severely over-capacity rail cars - a distance of a mere 6 miles. At rush hour the cars are literally packed - these are the most crowded transit vehicles I've ever been on on this continent, NYC included.
Their on-time performance is atrocious, frequently late by over 100% of their frequency (e.g., an every-15 schedule routinely results in trains late by more than 15 min).
So not only are the vehicles slow and infrequent, but they routinely fail to show up when they're supposed to. Every major study into public transit use will tell you that schedule reliability is critical to establishing a transportation network - without the ability to reliably make transfers people will simply stop using the system. The last I saw of it, MUNI vehicles were on time only 57% of the time (lateness is defined as being within 4 minutes of schedule, which in any large city transit is a margin as wide as a football field).
Large swathes of the city are entirely not served by anything even pretending to be mass transit - Pac Heights, Inner/Outer Richmond, the Marina, Russian Hill, are all big neighborhoods that are completely disconnected from any form of mass transit, BART, MUNI, or otherwise.
Buses are even worse off than light rail - there have been many efforts to improve the bus system to little effect. Efforts to make commutes substantially shorter (by taking out extremely closely spaced stops) have been repeatedly rejected by members of the public, who will proceed to complain about MUNI anyways.
Literally the only neighborhoods that have effective mass transit are the ones lucky enough to be connected to BART (read: Mission, Bernal, Balboa Park). These are the only neighborhoods that have access to a transportation system that is frequently on-time and actually reasonably fast. The BART has a slew of its own problems, but it's about 10x better than MUNI for getting people around.
SF isn't the worst transit system I've ever had to use regularly (Seattle takes the cake there, just barely), but it's severely under-developed and under-funded for a city of San Francisco's stature and ambitions (i.e., its very open goal of creating a car-free/car-reduced city). I dare say that if you do not own a car in San Francisco you will spend a significant sum on taxis, or Uber, or SideCar, or any of the other services that have been born from City Hall's transportation failure. That or you bike a lot.
They probably believe that restricting development will lower housing costs (and that's probably true in the short term on a neighborhood level). The original reason for Greenwich Village's historical preservation board was the idea that it would keep the area affordable. Didn't exactly go as planned there, though.
These SF "microapartments" are 220 square feet for $930/month. There are 10 square meter (108 square foot) apartments in Tokyo for which the rent is $750/month. This is nothing.
For a one year lease or a month-by-month?
My room is about 100 square foot, for 10,000HKD ($1200) per month short-term.
Once you go for an annual lease you get twice the space.
I was paying 900 CHF for a 60ish square meter apartment in Lausanne about 5 years ago. Today I pay 8000 RMB for a 200 square meter apartment in Beijing, much better, but still pricey by American standards.
For a kilobuck a month, you can buy a 4-bedroom, 2-story, single-family house on a half acre in a lovely suburb of Minneapolis. Of course, you'll also have to buy a down parka, a car to get you to work, a snowblower, a lawnmower, gas for the foregoing...
...and you're not living in San Francisco, which is a deal breaker for some.
I wish my 1-bedroom in Noe Valley was this efficient. One room could have everything useful stacked on top of each other, and the living room could just include badassery.
Man increased urban density flows on to everything including public and private services. I see why these decisions make sense in a vacuum but wonder what they mean in the broader context.
Although 220 square feet isn't a great living environment and certainly not one I would want to be forced to live in long term, I don't think it's unlivable especially if you're only "living" there when you're not at work or school. I live in England and space is quite expensive here if you want to have quality too, for example I pay $2500 per month for ~<600 square feet apartment, an apartment I was looking at in London was ~$4200 per month for 800 square feet (it was a high quality residence). America is very spoiled with space, it would be impossible for me to get a 1500 square foot apartment anywhere in England unless I was willing to live in the middle of nowhere (the only apartment I found this big was 20 miles from the nearest city in a questionable area).
The issue may be that this will raise prices of bigger apartments, but if they're reasonably priced ($1000 per month?) I can't see how this is a big problem. For someone that spends all day inside they might not be ideal, but someone who treats their apartment as their "base" for sleeping and eating and nothing more it shouldn't be a problem.
I understand the appeal of living in a big city with... people and all, but honestly your dollar goes much further outside city limits. $1,000/month for a 220 sqft living space would be met with absolute disbelief around where I'm from (Rochester, NY, USA).
Location really is everything. Around here, you'll get about 2,200 sqft of living space in a less than 10-year old colonial house with a 2.5 car garage, 2+ acres of landscaped yard, for about $1,500/month. That's ownership, and only about 30 minutes from a large-ish metro area (1M in Greater Rochester). Traveling to NYC / BOS / PHL? By car: 6 hours, by plane: 1 hour.
With telecommuting being as accessible as ever, I have a hard time understanding why people pay these prices for such abysmal living spaces.
Sorry. RIT grad, I'm not going to bore everyone with the list of usual complaints about Rochester, lets just say out of all the people I know who are from Western New York and went to RIT, I am still in Rochester. It has one thing, and that's cheap housing compared to where everyone else has gone.
I'm saying that the reason you think Rochester sucks is because people just complain about Rochester sucking without actually doing anything to improve the situation.
Silicon Valley isn't great because of its location, it's because of its people.
In other words, if you don't like like it in Rochester, either make it better (support local tech organizations, be proud to showcase work in Rochester, etc) ... or just leave. Complaining isn't going to do anything.
One of the things I think people who haven't spent a significant amount of time living in dense cities miss is that you do very little "living" in your apartment.
I spend maybe two hours a day awake in my (reasonably large for SF) apartment during the week, tops. The rest of the time I'm at work or out in the city somewhere; I treat the local downstairs basically like my living room.
It's not a lifestyle for everyone, but I consider the entire city my living space and I don't think it's abysmal at all.
That's a good point, and you're probably right about folks who haven't lived in large cities like that. Everyone's experience is different, I guess I was just expressing my own personal experience against the article.
I run an SRO Hotel[1] in SF; my rooms are comparable in size to the thousands of other SRO units throughout the City and are as small or smaller than the units in the article. The only difference with these new units is that it won't be poor people who live in them.
Interesting--I've always wondered who runs SROs, especially since they get a spectacularly bad rep. Have you considered doing an IAmA or something?
The SRO analogy immediately came to mind--I wondered what would prevent these from having the same issues residential hotels have. Is it really just the (reasonable) expectation that setting a artificially high price will drive away the poor?
The bad reputation they/we get is almost entirely due to the (comparatively) low rent. Our client base consists of the poor, students, and people with mental or substance-abuse problems (who tend to be very poor indeed.) Those tenants with addictions or mental illness are the most visible (and obnoxious) of our tenants even though they aren't the most numerous.
Simply: these new units are more of the same, but for wealthier people (and I will be sending in my resume, TBH.)
I think it looks fantastically fun. I want to retire when I'm young and get one of those tiny houses that I could drive around the country. I have a lot of gadgets but otherwise live very minimally (when you move three times a year, every year for 5 years you avoid acquiring "crap").
I am not a fan of narrowly-proportioned, single-aspect micro-apartments. I understand that space is at a premium but should we really consider 220 square feet as acceptable? The size of homes (be they apartments or houses) can have a profound effect on the quality of life for their occupants. Is this type of housing really a long-term solution?
I live in the UK where the design of new build housing is generally poor. England and Wales have no minimum space standards for housing and we are very much the worse off for it. This is in contrast to many European countries that do have minimum space standards. (The exception in England is London which has recently adopted minimum space standards for any homes built with Government money.)
I completely agree that it's not just the size of an apartment that is important but the quality of the space. There's much that can be done to make better use of space in homes: it all comes down to design.
Housing is a topic that's very close to my heart. I write a blog about housing in the UK and wrote some thoughts a while ago about the size of a dwelling and the quality of the space:
should we really consider 220 square feet as acceptable?
Yes. If you don't make much money but want to work in SF/NYC/Boston/etc, your only option is to spend a lot of time driving/commuting from somewhere with cheaper housing. For some people, the choice to waste three hours of their life driving in traffic every day is worthwhile because they get a big house with a yard. But others would be happy to sacrifice lots of living space if it meant that they didn't have to blow 3 hours of stressful commuting.
When cities declare "you can't sell a 220 sq ft apartment", they force that choice on everyone, even people who wouldn't choose it for themselves.
Minimum area standards basically impose a floor on the cost of living. In some American suburbs, this is often explicitly used to keep out the undesirables; you require that each house have at least an acre of land and that the structure take up less than X% of the lot so that prices rise to the point that low income folk or recent immigrants can't afford to live in your town.
Of course it's acceptable. Many people (myself included) have happily lived in such small apartments.
Artificial constraints based on illusory and/or narrow-minded premises are far more damaging.
You're not going to want to live in such a place with 4 kids, the grandparents, and a dog, but for many people it's fine.
It gives people the ability to make a tradeoff between, say, size and location, so one can live in a more interesting area without being a billionaire.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 59.8 ms ] threadThis is in contrast to the UK, where it's culturally the norm for every flat to have its own washing machine (normally a condensor combi dryer, another thing not so popular in the US). Sames goes for heat: heat if often shared in the US, but here in the UK almost all apartments have individual boilers.
I am sure somebody here must have an explanation for exactly why this cultural difference has developed, because I have no clue!
e.g. Where we live started out as a 5 floor (enormous) town house with garden and stable block ~200 years ago and was split into 4 properties and then one of these was split into another 2.
How would the shared heating work, financially? Over here our energy costs are very high so a lot (most?) of our energy bills go on heating and hot water; if you want to save money, you put a jumper on and have a shower rather than a bath. With shared heating you don't have this option, but do the overall savings from greater efficiency (an assumption) make this a moot point?
They're still livable, mind you, for some value of 'livable'.
In other words, if that is considered "micro" nowadays then my standards must be awfully skewed (which they probably are) and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised when I move out of here.
That might be 'micro' for Queens or even Washington Heights, but that's certainly not 'micro' for Chelsea or the Village.....
> I have seen several "nano-apartments" in NYC that wouldn't fit a queen-size bed comfortably
My friend had a tough time figuring out how to fit his full-sized bed - ended up deciding that it wouldn't work, and opted for a futon instead.
I think the main issue with NYC "micro" apartments is that they're often carved out of older units/buildings and shaped very strangely, resulting in less useful space overall than the number you're actually getting.
No, let's not build any more housing, let's completely stonewall any attempt to redevelop any land whatsoever (except Mission Bay, because it's the San Francisco Yuppie Quarantine Zone). Instead, let's subdivide existing housing into increasingly tiny units.
Because gosh-durnit the cute colorful Victorians are sacred and override all other concerns, including economic stagnancy, transportation nightmares, unprecedented rent increases, destroying traditional neighborhood demographics, and very fundamental quality of life.
Nope, none of that matters, because we're basing a housing policy on whether or not this neighborhood can pass for one from the early 20th century!
> economic stagnancy
It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.
> transportation nightmares
I'm not sure what you are referring to here. MUNI is very abundant and isn't too expensive (compared to NYC it's really cheap). There is generally plenty of parking outside of downtown.
> destroying traditional neighborhood demographics
Lol. The Chinese are doing just fine, but I guess you're referring to the former ghettos (Lower Filmore, Hunter's Point, the TL, etc.) that had huge drug problems and violence (It's still there, but siginificantly reduced) Yes, gentrification is unfortunate - but building high rises everywhere would ruin the "culture" much faster (though I would argue the Tenderloin doesn't have much culture to lose) and wouldn't solve the poverty among "traditional neighborhood demographics". What needs to be done, is a lot more needs to be spent on schools and city college and less on low income housing (where people are locked into poverty).
> very fundamental quality of life
That's just a vapid hyperbole. Not building high rises is preserving the quality of life SF is known for. The NewYorkification of SF (started by the Gavin Newsome) is what will ruin the quality of life.
In my experience the people that whine and moan about there not being enough housing in SF are people that don't live there. I think what they're thinking is if there were more teeny tiny apartments then they could afford to live there. While that may be true, then SF wouldn't be SF anymore - and it would only be a short term fix as SF would become just as crowded and expensive as Manhattan.
> It's not some god given rule that cities HAVE to keep growing ad infinitum, especially ones that have limited land. Most San Franciscans are happy with the size of the city as it is.
You have a source on that stat? Rents in San Francisco are up something like 25+% year over year in many areas. Does that sound healthy to you?
> I'm not sure what you are referring to here. MUNI is very abundant and isn't too expensive (compared to NYC it's really cheap). There is generally plenty of parking outside of downtown.
Nope, MUNI is awful. Unless you live relatively close on one of the train lines, you are in for a world of hurt. The average speed of a MUNI bus has been going down continuously over time (due to extra traffic), to the point where it is now like 7mph. That means it takes an hour to go from one end to the other (vs 25 minutes tops to go a similar distance on BART). That means more people get cars, which means the buses get even slower. I'd happily pay the NYC monthly rates if I had an equivalent transit system.
> Not building high rises is preserving the quality of life SF is known for
San Francisco doesn't need to build high rises everywhere in the city, it needs to allow taller buildings (6-7 stories) in more areas without forcing developers to jump through all the hoops they have to right now. Lots of cities in Europe are filled with buildings of that height and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly. Vancouver is consistently rated as having one of the highest quality of life scores in the world and has tons of high rises
That's in large part because people don't want to buy houses now (b/c of the volatility of the SF real-estate market and a lot of people don't feel it's a safe investment). And yet people are still renting (b/c wages are high).
> San Francisco doesn't need to build high rises everywhere in the city, it needs to allow taller buildings
This is just not a longer term viable solution.
> Lots of cities in europe are filled with buildings of that height (eg paris) and it doesn't seem to hurt their quality of life too badly.
Paris a great example of where it does NOT work. You have the old center with the culture and the tourists and the traditional way of life (and yes, very very expensive real-estate). The parts that do have apartment blocks are on the outskirts and are poverty stricken monstrosities (with exceptions). People don't even consider them to be part of Paris proper.
Paris is definitely not an example of healthy development.
I concede that SF is an expensive city and lots of people can't afford it. I think that's just the new reality of the city and there isn't any viable long term way to fix it short of actively making the city less appealing to live in. I don't complain that rent in Manhattan is too high. I just don't live there. I personally can't afford to live in SF (though I grew up there and love the city), so I live elsewhere in California. But at the end of the day I don't expect SF resident to change their city to accommodate me.
It's actually pretty common for European cities to limit high-rise condos/office buildings in the city centers (usually with limits around 5-8 stories). To still achieve dense housing, tall condos and office buildings are usually built close to public transit somewhere a bit outside of the city center, plus the suburbs don't start as close in, so there's a bigger urbanized area. The Manhattan/Chicago/Vancouver style of a downtown characterized by skyscrapers isn't very common in Europe; more of a North American invention, particularly in the Chicago/Vancouver form where there's a high-rise downtown that quickly turns into suburban homes within a few kilometers.
The SF equivalent might be to not allow condo towers in SF, but to urbanize the areas a few BART stops out: why are there single-family homes, not denser housing, in San Bruno, West Oakland, and Daly City? But of course, the Peninsula is even more anti-development than SF is, so politically that just trades one source of opposition for another one (to take another example, people have been trying to convince Palo Alto to allow more dense housing near downtown/Stanford/Caltrain for years, but Palo Altoans want to keep it suburban).
If the population of the country is growing then those people have to go somewhere. You can either suburbanize the wilderness or you can let more people into existing cities, and while I can understand the desire of the people living in San Fransisco not to share the nice things they have I can't say I sympathize.
You've also presented a bit of a false dichotomy. I think the solution IS to develop smaller cities - that are stagnant and that have room to grow - into larger cities. You can call it "suburbanize the wilderness" but it's not exactly suburbanization because suburbs imply that people still commute to larger city centers. You can look at cities like Portland or something (I don't really know for sure if they're a good example) that develop a local tech field (or other industry), have local companies grow and multiply and they then become an economic center in their own right.
Getting to/from downtown and to the Outer Sunset easily takes an hour on severely over-capacity rail cars - a distance of a mere 6 miles. At rush hour the cars are literally packed - these are the most crowded transit vehicles I've ever been on on this continent, NYC included.
Their on-time performance is atrocious, frequently late by over 100% of their frequency (e.g., an every-15 schedule routinely results in trains late by more than 15 min).
So not only are the vehicles slow and infrequent, but they routinely fail to show up when they're supposed to. Every major study into public transit use will tell you that schedule reliability is critical to establishing a transportation network - without the ability to reliably make transfers people will simply stop using the system. The last I saw of it, MUNI vehicles were on time only 57% of the time (lateness is defined as being within 4 minutes of schedule, which in any large city transit is a margin as wide as a football field).
Large swathes of the city are entirely not served by anything even pretending to be mass transit - Pac Heights, Inner/Outer Richmond, the Marina, Russian Hill, are all big neighborhoods that are completely disconnected from any form of mass transit, BART, MUNI, or otherwise.
Buses are even worse off than light rail - there have been many efforts to improve the bus system to little effect. Efforts to make commutes substantially shorter (by taking out extremely closely spaced stops) have been repeatedly rejected by members of the public, who will proceed to complain about MUNI anyways.
Literally the only neighborhoods that have effective mass transit are the ones lucky enough to be connected to BART (read: Mission, Bernal, Balboa Park). These are the only neighborhoods that have access to a transportation system that is frequently on-time and actually reasonably fast. The BART has a slew of its own problems, but it's about 10x better than MUNI for getting people around.
SF isn't the worst transit system I've ever had to use regularly (Seattle takes the cake there, just barely), but it's severely under-developed and under-funded for a city of San Francisco's stature and ambitions (i.e., its very open goal of creating a car-free/car-reduced city). I dare say that if you do not own a car in San Francisco you will spend a significant sum on taxis, or Uber, or SideCar, or any of the other services that have been born from City Hall's transportation failure. That or you bike a lot.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kent_larson_brilliant_designs_to_fi...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak
There's nothing "smart" about SmartSpace :-(
There are other examples around of similar sized spaces that are much better used
...and you're not living in San Francisco, which is a deal breaker for some.
Are you kidding? Tokyo is laughing at SF's face, with its 80 square feet (4.5jō) rooms [1]!
(not that I'd want to live in this kind of arrangement again...)
[1] 1jō = 17.79 sq.ft. 1jō is the standard area for one tile of tatami. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_units_of_measurement#A...
The issue may be that this will raise prices of bigger apartments, but if they're reasonably priced ($1000 per month?) I can't see how this is a big problem. For someone that spends all day inside they might not be ideal, but someone who treats their apartment as their "base" for sleeping and eating and nothing more it shouldn't be a problem.
Location really is everything. Around here, you'll get about 2,200 sqft of living space in a less than 10-year old colonial house with a 2.5 car garage, 2+ acres of landscaped yard, for about $1,500/month. That's ownership, and only about 30 minutes from a large-ish metro area (1M in Greater Rochester). Traveling to NYC / BOS / PHL? By car: 6 hours, by plane: 1 hour.
With telecommuting being as accessible as ever, I have a hard time understanding why people pay these prices for such abysmal living spaces.
That's why organizations such as this exist:
http://coworkingrochester.com/ http://interlockroc.org/ http://refreshrochester.org/ http://rochestermade.com/
If you don't like something about where you live, either change it, or move. Complaining about it for the sake of complaining won't change anything.
It's the people? That move away? So, move away? :)
I had heard of half of those organizations. Thanks for the link. Do you do Barcamp?
Silicon Valley isn't great because of its location, it's because of its people.
In other words, if you don't like like it in Rochester, either make it better (support local tech organizations, be proud to showcase work in Rochester, etc) ... or just leave. Complaining isn't going to do anything.
I spend maybe two hours a day awake in my (reasonably large for SF) apartment during the week, tops. The rest of the time I'm at work or out in the city somewhere; I treat the local downstairs basically like my living room.
It's not a lifestyle for everyone, but I consider the entire city my living space and I don't think it's abysmal at all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
The SRO analogy immediately came to mind--I wondered what would prevent these from having the same issues residential hotels have. Is it really just the (reasonable) expectation that setting a artificially high price will drive away the poor?
Simply: these new units are more of the same, but for wealthier people (and I will be sending in my resume, TBH.)
I live in the UK where the design of new build housing is generally poor. England and Wales have no minimum space standards for housing and we are very much the worse off for it. This is in contrast to many European countries that do have minimum space standards. (The exception in England is London which has recently adopted minimum space standards for any homes built with Government money.)
I completely agree that it's not just the size of an apartment that is important but the quality of the space. There's much that can be done to make better use of space in homes: it all comes down to design.
Housing is a topic that's very close to my heart. I write a blog about housing in the UK and wrote some thoughts a while ago about the size of a dwelling and the quality of the space:
http://homesdesign.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/space-standards-...
Yes. If you don't make much money but want to work in SF/NYC/Boston/etc, your only option is to spend a lot of time driving/commuting from somewhere with cheaper housing. For some people, the choice to waste three hours of their life driving in traffic every day is worthwhile because they get a big house with a yard. But others would be happy to sacrifice lots of living space if it meant that they didn't have to blow 3 hours of stressful commuting.
When cities declare "you can't sell a 220 sq ft apartment", they force that choice on everyone, even people who wouldn't choose it for themselves.
Minimum area standards basically impose a floor on the cost of living. In some American suburbs, this is often explicitly used to keep out the undesirables; you require that each house have at least an acre of land and that the structure take up less than X% of the lot so that prices rise to the point that low income folk or recent immigrants can't afford to live in your town.
Artificial constraints based on illusory and/or narrow-minded premises are far more damaging.
You're not going to want to live in such a place with 4 kids, the grandparents, and a dog, but for many people it's fine.
It gives people the ability to make a tradeoff between, say, size and location, so one can live in a more interesting area without being a billionaire.