> To subsidize affordable homes for 100,000 people would cost $25 billion. So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can.
What?! Why on earth would I want my tax dollars subsidizing your rent? I mean, charity to the poor, homeless, etc. is one thing (it's good), but subsidizing your rent so you can be closer to boutique coffee shops? Instead of, you know, helping the truly needy get health care? Or investing in education? Gimme a break.
> If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams
Why does San Fran specifically have to be that place? The Bay Area's a big place.
By the end of the article, the author's right about needing a more integrated metropolitan policy, but this attitude that "everyone deserves to live in San Francisco, even people with no money" gets tiring after a while. Neighborhoods and cities gentrify. People move elsewhere, to the new-and-upcoming-and-more-interesting neighborhoods/cities. Places change. That's just how it is.
Any thriving city needs a mix of people. If for no other reason, then think out support staff. What about waitresses, cooks, cleaning staff, janitors, bus drivers or any number of low-paying/skill but absolutely needed workers. Where should they live? Why can't they live close to work? And if they need to commute into the city to work, how far out can they get pushed before it's not worth it any more?
Thinking that an entire city could consist of highly paid tech workers is a fantasy.
And what about families? It's next to impossible to afford to have a family in the city. What will those tech workers do when they want to start a family? Do you really want them all moving to the east bay instead of helping to grow the city?
> waitresses, cooks, cleaning staff, janitors, bus drivers... Where should they live? Why can't they live close to work?
Why should they? Of course they can commute, just like many highly-paid professionals choose to commute too. Nobody considers a short commute a fundamental human right.
> how far out can they get pushed before it's not worth it any more?
They won't, that's the magic of a free market. Wages/salaries will go up in the city so that it's always still "worth it".
> Do you really want them all [families] moving to the east bay instead of helping to grow the city?
I mean, why not? I live in NYC. Plenty of people I know leave NYC when they want to start a family. Or at a minimum, they leave Manhattan to move out to Brooklyn or Queens.
You can see how ridiculous the argument is, by the fact that its polar opposite sounds the same: "do you really want all the families who would be helping to grow the east bay, moving into downtown SF?"
Look, there are certainly coordination, transit, etc. problems with the Bay Area. And there are income-disparity problems nationwide. But people seem to confuse those with just being afraid of change/gentrification, and that doesn't help.
You live in NYC. You have a 24-hr public transportation system going between the boroughs that is a flat fare, per ride, no matter where you go. This makes commuting a very feasible and affordable option for those that can't afford to live in Manhattan.
Things are a bit different in SF. While you have 468 stations, we have 44. Expansion of our public transportation system has been hampered by NIMBY homeowners who have done all they can to prevent it. Rents in areas that surround BART stations (http://www.bart.gov/stations/)are still quite high, except around some of the further out stops (http://rentheatmap.com/sanfrancisco.html). Unfortunately, the further you live from the city, the more it costs to commute to the city (http://www.bart.gov/tickets/calculator/).
So while everyone moving away from the city like folks in Manhattan do would be nice, it's not that easy here.
Wouldn't it be a good starting point to work towards a better public transportation system in the Bay Area then?
I see that you're bringing up NIMBY, but that should be the area to focus on instead of somehow trying to control the underlying problem through things like rent control.
I personally see the California High Speed Rail system as an interesting option there. If they offer regular rail service and I can reach my work in Silicon Valley within 1 hour then I would consider moving out of Silicon Valley. Especially so if the city is interesting or becomes interesting through the increasing number of people moving there and if they offer Wifi on the train so that I could even start working there.
This is similar to Atlanta, which is considered a "car centric" city.
Our Public transportation system "MARTA" only operates fully throughout two counties in our metro area. The reason for this is that many citizens in the suburbs are afraid of what will happen if they provide easy access for urban "characters" that are presumed to be "bad or unsavory" because they cant afford a car. (I live in one such county)
Every time there are talks of expanding MARTA (train or bus lines) to other counties people come out in protest.
> So while everyone moving away from the city like folks in Manhattan do would be nice, it's not that easy here.
It's actually quite easy for people to not live in the central city, which is why of the 7.15 million people in the SF Bay Area metropolitan area, only a little over 800,000 live in the City and County of San Francisco. The ratio between the population of San Francisco and that of the whole metro area isn't really all that different than the ratio of Manhattan's population to that of the New York Metro Area.
> It's actually quite easy for people to not live in the central city, which is why of the 7.15 million people in the SF Bay Area metropolitan area, only a little over 800,000 live in the City and County of San Francisco.
I thought the article proved that people don't live in the city because there isn't enough housing and/or it's too expensive, not because it's easy to live outside the city.
> I thought the article proved that people don't live in the city because there isn't enough housing and/or it's too expensive, not because it's easy to live outside the city.
The article didn't prove anything, it started with mistaking anecdote for data, and proceeded to tell a just-so story to explain the anecdote, and then make a series of value claims about what needs to be done based on that just-so story, explicitly grounding those claims in at least one false fact claim (that the three high population bay area cities are the places with "the space" in the bay area to accept a disproportionate share of the region's growth.)
People are talking about this because previously the problem didn't directly affect them. When you make $120k/year and all of a sudden the guys making $60k/year are priced out of the market you feel bad but you can't directly relate. When in turn you get priced out of the market (as is happening in many SF neighborhoods), all of a sudden you feel treated unfairly, and start complaining about how you were once part of the fabric of the neighborhood:)
I can actually see it both ways, but you have to accept or reject the argument in it's entirety instead of setting some artificial cap for how much you have to earn to be able to live in SF, which is essentially what's happening today.
And by the way this is a poor free-market argument. If this was a free-market, regulatory actors would act rationally from an economic perspective and allow construction of as many new units as the market can bare.
>Why should they? Of course they can commute, just like many highly-paid professionals choose to commute too. Nobody considers a short commute a fundamental human right.
A car is extremely expensive. Unless you're planning on making the public transportation system usable (which would be a herculean task).
Honestly, I think that's what the Bay Area needs to aim at. But of course it's probably more impossible a problem to solve, even more so housing issues.
I think this was one of the points of the article - that this isn't a SF specific problem. The entire region needs to get together to start to plan better for growth. Lack of housing isn't a SF problem, it's a problem for the entire Peninsula. (I'm not as familiar with the Easy Bay).
With decent urban planning, the region could maximize its growth potential. Without it, we'll have major issues in the near future.
Not exactly. The free market is also what enables neighborhood preservationists to keep redevelopment out. Well that and the horrid examples of redevelopment 40 and 50 years ago that are getting uglier and less livable by the decade.
Developers have done a good job of buying off the media, and the Chronicle has never waivered from its support of those sectors that still advertise in its pages. That's why many of us are not sad to see the otherwise well written paper giving way to Internet new sources that, this article excepted, are less inclined to skew their editorial policy in favor of anything real-estate (-development) related.
It doesn't seem so ridiculous if you follow the money. The author is "executive director of SPUR, a Bay Area nonprofit membership organization" whose directors, advisors and members are comprised almost exclusively of real-estate developers and investors.
Seriously, a train comes literally every 15 minutes and takes 15 minutes to get to the Mission. If you get stuck there after 12:30 it's only a $50 cab ride bike across the bridge.
Yep. Lived on 14th and Lakeside all of last year. I have been stranded in SF multiple times. The trick is to not take Uber and pay cash.
Furthermore, unless you get stuck out multiple times a week half the rent cost still puts you way ahead. I was paying $1200 with parking for 800 sq ft and a dishwasher right on Lake Merritt. I never felt in danger there.
Living in Emeryville on San Pablo was another story... That was only $600 though ha.
Does this only apply to SF, or should we also subsidize housing for poor people in Malibu? How can I get in on that? I'd love to live somewhere I cannot afford on other people's dime...
> This applies to any city that seeks some form of income and social diversity
This seems like a tautology. "A city that seeks income diversity should seek income diversity"... the point is that I and crazygringo do not think that the city needs to seek that; it is a-okay in my book if a city becomes gentrified.
> and it only applies to you if you choose to live in that city.
Okay, I choose to live in Malibu. Sadly I cannot afford it. Who is going to think of poor jlgreco, unable to afford living in the beach community of his choice? Is my desire to live in Malibu less valid than anyone else's desire to live in San Francisco?
Just to be clear, "income diversity" in this case could/should mean income for the city, as in a diverse tax-base. This is definitely a desirable thing for a city, so that when the inevitable tech crash happens, the city's financial base won't collapse.
Not Malibu, but right next door in Santa Monica they have a crapload of subsidized housing in the most expensive part of town close to 3rd St Promenade and the Ocean/Pier.
Just to give you some perspective, I grew up in Concord which is about 25 miles east of San Francisco. My dad bought our house in the late 60's because that was the closest place to SF that he could afford for our family. He commuted for decades to SF and Oakland by car and bart. I never heard him complain about the commute or how the bay area should do something for his family.
SF is doing just fine with regards to waitresses, cooks, cleaning staff, janitors, bus drivers, etc. Have you heard anything otherwise? Of course, many of these people do not choose to live in SF, or cannot afford to live in SF ,so they end up having long commutes. This does not seem to keep them from taking jobs in SF. If enough of them decide it is not worth it to commute, their employers will entice them to do so with higher wages. You know, the free market and all...
You know many lower income people who are commuting long distances into the city? Really?
Sure, many come from Oakland. Which was the point of the article.
And when I was still in school and knew a lot of people in these types of jobs, many worked two (or more, if part time). And still couldn't really make rent. This is why I never tip below 20% unless the server didn't do their job very well. It's expensive to live here and they have a tough situation.
Also, Bus Drivers don't belong on that list. They are certainly paid more than wait staff, etc.
I'm no libertarian, but how about market forces? As fewer blue-collar workers can afford to live in or close to SF, the labor pool will shrink and wages will go up.
Part of the argument here is that if government regulation has created artificial scarcity: if market forces were at work then more living spaces would be built.
On the other hand, the market isn't everything, especially in the near-term. The market, for instance, won't create diversity in the city; it will create a monoculture of whatever is working that decade. So, right now, in SF, it will create a monoculture of tech workers as, in Manhattan, it almost created a monoculture of finance workers in the '80s/'90s. Monocultures lack resilience and if NYC hadn't traded its finance economy for a tourist-driven one, it could have been hard times. Booms and busts may be okay from a Liberal philosophy point of view, but it's hell on the people caught in it.
The other thing about diversity is it's part of the reason people move somewhere in the first place. One of the reasons tech has moved from the Valley up into SF is that SF has more diversity, so it's not all tech all the time. It would make sense to try to preserve what it was you wanted in the first place (even if, a la any gentrifying neighborhood, it may be a bit of a lost cause.)
NYC traded finance for tourism? Something like 1/3 of the cit is still employed in jobs tied to the financial industry (and it pays over half the wages in Manhattan). I literally can't remember knowing a single person working in tourism when I lived there.
Scientists are trained to look at the data when confronted with a hypothesis.
In this context it's worth looking at Aspen, CO. Wages for service workers there have not gone up, and 60-mile commutes on mountain roads are common. I have no theory for why that is, but I do not expect a different outcome for SF.
Well, a scientist (or other person concerned with the underpinning of fact claims) might note that the supposed exodus that is the factual premise around which the value-based arguments here revolve is not evident except in anecdote, and that in fact SF's population is growing rather than showing signs of an exodus, while Oakland, the supposed destination of the out-of-SF exodus, is shrinking.
Market forces will definitely apply, but my concern is that the market will react too slowly. That by the time the market can react and raise wages the labor pool will be shrunk too much and either services won't be available, or they will be too expensive for even those who could otherwise afford to live in the city. You can't just get a labor force to move back to an area overnight (just like these problems aren't going to appear overnight). So, in order to compensate, the market will swing wildly until it can stabilize.
That's what I'm worried about. Populations shift, people move, cities grow. But, if you're running a city, you want growth to be stable and predictable. If you drive out all of your lower-income workers to other cities and "import" your labor, you are setting yourself up for an unstable labor market in the future.
These things need to be planned for, and it doesn't seem like there is a lot of thought being put into it.
This has more to do with income inequality than housing. The middle-class has largely evaporated (tech workers are probably the closest thing to it now). And, even when there was a thriving middle-class in this country, they didn't really live in places like Manhattan anyway -- they commuted in from suburbs. Building low-income housing is fraught with difficulty. Even if you were to pour money into it, you'd still risk manufacturing slums anyway.
The world is different and has been for years. Nobody gives a shit about your family or community... That's a quaint notions hat died with ethnic/religious neighborhood blocs.
NYC is a great example -- millions of people fled the high costs and hassles of living in the city to Long Island, New Jersey and upstate. Companies did too -- there were 10,000 factories in NYC in 1969 and something like 500 in 1999. My family moved from Queens to a town 100 miles north in the bad old days (late 80s) when the principal of the middle school that I was heading to had his car firebombed.
San Francisco's situation is more nimby than NYC. People discover it and love it, but want to close the door for the next guy. As long as times are good, it's a winning strategy. When times turn bad, it will get really bad, just as it did in the 80s in NYC.
This is easy, change the stupid zoning and density restrictions in SF and the builders will come and capitalize on the pent up housing demand. Increased inventory in the main parts of the city will lower prices elsewhere -- basic supply and demand, no subsidies needed.
the city remained a walkable, urban paradise compared to most of America.
Most higher density cities are even more walkable urban paradises. Plus they have the added benefit of far better public transport than SF offers.
Wait, what? There is a reason things are the way they are. People do not want you to live there, affordably. Period. Cities are "designed" to be expensive and exclusive. That, in part is their value.
On the contrary. Historically, cities are designed to be cheap and high density. The expensive part comes when people expect the same housing standards/square footage as they would get in the country.
Whilst I've never seen San Francisco for myself, it sounds like they are trying to buck the trend and go for expensive and exclusive (as you say), with various complicated planning and zoning laws. It is definitely against the norm however.
This is silly, nonsense. The centre of any major capital...London, Paris, Moscow, New York...like SF is incredibly expensive. The purpose of a capital city is to concentrate wealth and power, so that those who need to exercise it can do so efficiently. People move to SF to network and to have access to VC capital (for example). You should expect to encounter economic rent-seeking when you get there. You also shoud expect to see laws and regulations that keep out people of color and transients (eg, parking restrictions in the hamptons; no BART service south of SF to places like Palo Alto).
I believe you're thinking a bit too US centric if you assume that regulations are there to keep out people of colour...
I questioned your premise that cities were "designed" to be expensive, whereas I believe they merely "become" expensive through basic laws of supply and demand. The reason cities such as London and San Francisco never grow ever taller skyscrapers is because of planning laws and regulations that restrict supply - not, a free market of supply and demand.
London is a good example of such in that it has ancient viewing rights that restrict the height of nearby buildings, the classic case being that no building can be higher than St. Pauls (a relaxed principle nowadays, but still enforced sometimes). This is a major reason why the old houses in London haven't been knocked down to be replaced by a whole skyline of skyscrapers, but instead are massively expensive properties compared to the rest of the country.
I questioned your premise that cities were "designed" to be expensive, whereas I believe they merely "become" expensive through basic laws of supply and demand.
Capital cities are a "premium" product, and they are designed to be so. People pay the premium, because they are effective in the task for which they are designed. Where do you think the "demand" comes from? The demand is for the productivity improvements that can accrue to those who control assets that are highly productive. But note the two words: (1) control; and (2) productive. To extract maximum rents, the product must be under control (so expect a class of laws designed to g;tee this). And secondly, expect a design which caters to high-end productivity (ie, networking, and its corralry...social exclusivity).
Capital city, the area of a country, province, region, or state, regarded as enjoying primary status, usually but not always the seat of the government
If you need to brush up on the history of new york and san francisco as 'financial capitals'.
Alright, if you want to use the term metaphorically, that's ok.
SF may be a financial capital to some degree, but your comment about VC is still off: they're not based in the city, and they didn't take much interest in companies in the city at all until recently.
Footnote [1] If you're going to be pedantic, be correct. Not only is your use of words incorrect (pedantic/ly), the logic is insufficient to be a valid argument (on substance). The seperation of the political seat of power (in both california/sacramento and the us/washington DC) was (as historical fact) done in repsonse to desire for a seperation of political capital from financial capital (her being used in the sense of assets) to minimize potential corruption. The presence of capital (assets) in a city is what makes that a capital (descriptive) city. This is why you can have non-political Capital cities (like NY, SF) without speaking illogically or using incorrect grammar.
Both Manhattan and Paris are more expensive than SF. Not just in rent, but in almost all daily expenses. Adding density does not necessarily solve the problem.
Don't conflate Manhattan and central Paris (the low number Arrondissments) with all of SF.
You can find decent housing in NYC, with pricing comparable to other smaller metro areas in the U.S. like Seattle or D.C. without too much fuss. Same goes for Paris. That's why most people in those cities don't live in the center. Brooklyn or Queens, for example, has a larger population than Manhattan. But only Staten Island has a lower population Density than SF.
The problem with SF is that it has ~Manhattan prices without the number of available units. This means that laughably high housing prices get pushed further and further away from SF proper and out into the Bay Area.
Arguably, if you think of the Bay Area as one city, this makes sense, it's the same in any major city.
It's not so much that someplace like Cupertino or Santa Clara are expensive by themselves, but that you're paying much more for similar housing than you would a similar distance from other similar sized city centers. Yet people move there and saddle themselves with ridiculous mortgages because the alternative is to live in someplace like Stockton.
Dramatically increasing the density of SF proper could make the outer areas and even the East Bay area much more reasonable places to live. However, it would mean lots of people who bought high in the current market would lose their shirts if such a thing were to happen.
I remember the very first time I visited SF, my friend was regaling us with tales of the insane housing prices. No slouch and from a pretty expensive area myself I figured it was just an issue of demand like you'd see in any other big city. But when I actually got to the city I was floored with how low the density obviously was. The solution to the high housing prices seemed idiotically simple then as it does now. Build SF up up up! Areas around every major BART station should also be higher density areas. Relax the density further out from these centers and you'd end up with a much more livable city plan like pretty much every single other city in the country.
By way of comparison, the D.C. metro area (not exactly a well planned urban paradise) has about the same population density as SF Bay Area yet housing can be had for probably around 2/3s the price at comparable distances from the city center.
No way. I live in Manhattan and SF sounds like a nightmare. I have so many options in terms of other boroughs (subway), nice, pre-war suburbs with walkable areas (LIRR & metro north commuter rail), or even another state (PATH train, NJ transit). SF's transit is a joke, even within the city itself (getting from west to east), which is the real problem here.
And there's a greater diversity of opportunity here if you're not just in the tech startup scene. I have a feeling SF will bust when the VC spigot dries up.
But both of those cities have their metropolitan areas measured in tens of millions of people, versus SF in the single millions. SF has the rates of a city ten times its size because its population density is so constrained.
The population of the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose metropolitan Bay Area is 8.3 million [1]. The population of the Baltimore-Washington DC metropolitan area is 9.3 million [2]. That doesn't seem that significant.
People don't deserve to live in San Francisco (i.e. it's not some basic right that needs to be met through subsidized housing), but San Francisco deserves to have a diverse set of people if it is to be a great city, and not just a millionaire enclave.
From the city's point of view, there's a problem to be solved in terms of getting different kinds of people in the city.
You seem to only be able to see the world for the way it is now, and has been over the recent past. Getting stuck on these thinking patterns is self-limiting, much like getting stuck on a programming language like PHP-- both are one-trick-ponies. We thankfully live in a world that, long term, is driven by imagination and possibility. And not always are the "leaders" complete and massive assholes (which is our main immediate problem at this moment in time).
But urban centers are where everyone IS. Its where connections happen and where people are mutually drawn, even if their address doesn't say they live there. The opportunities for a wider range of connections and possibilities are what breathe life into a city--what has allowed San Francisco to make the transition away from industry as gracefully as it has.
Manhattan is the nucleus of New York. San Francisco is the nucleus of the Bay Area. If you lose that center, you end up with the nonsense sprawl that is LA. No common place for people to meet and come together. No way to rationalize or prioritize transit and other public needs.
The solution doesn't have to be subsidized housing. Better public transit allows people to reside further away and still have access to the city's opportunities, and gives everyone more mobility. But if it is becomes impossible for new people and young people to access the city because of pricing or traffic, how can San Francisco continue to flourish? Places change, but ensuring they change in a positive direction takes hard work and intention.
> Why on earth would I want my tax dollars subsidizing your rent?
Because service jobs and because traffic congestion and because all service job related prices.
Some counties and states provide "affordable" housing for people who work in that county if they make below a certain wage and above a certain wage. They basically make it affordable for taxi drivers, waiters, cooks, delivery people and other low paid job workers to live in that area. This way those people are not driving from farther way increasing congestion on the roads and I guess as a side-effect lower the prices in those particular areas (food, taxi, etc).
Now whether that is desirable, it is a net beneficial thing or not or just creates more problems I don't know, I am just presenting one reason some localities do it.
Is it a subsidy to the underpaid, or a subsidy to he corporations that employ them and don't have to pay true market wages. In other boom economies, such as parts of Alberta with its oil industry, it's not uncommon for fast food staff to make $15-$20 an hour and be granted benefits. Why should the taxpaying middle class spare McDonalds this expense?
I've long thought that the bay area's major problem is not necessarily problems with San Francisco proper (though the strong aversion to high-rises while complaining about the increasingly cut-throat and expensive real estate market is hilarious to me), but that the "outer boroughs" are so incredibly unattractive because the transit system is incredibly inadequate.
Living in Queens, Brooklyn, hell even Jersey is an incredibly reasonable option if you live in New York. You trade some commuting time for lower prices, and certainly Flushing doesn't have the same appeal as SoHo. But it's never a question of "oh my god it's after midnight how am I going to get home?" like I experienced when living in the bay area.
It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter.
"It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter."
I've lived in the Bay Area for 30 years and this is my take on it as well. The city of San Francisco (and by that I mean its government) sounds like a 35 year old insisting they are still a teenager. The most interesting thing to watch was that some development "snuck in" in the south of market area and that really really surprised people in terms of people living there. When I moved here SoMa was 'warehouses, drunks, and a train station." Now it is a growing and thriving community of the new executive class. Oops.
"It almost seems like San Francisco has a huge aversion to becoming a metropolis, but the problem is that the city really doesn't have a choice in the matter."
You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't.
> You've hit the nail on the head. Something will have to give, as while rents can go up forever, citizen's income won't.
Since the income of people who will choose to live in the city places an upper limit on market rents, this is pretty clearly untrue -- either rents can go up forever and so can citizen's incomes or neither can go up forever.
I think that, given sufficient transit infrastructure to allow people who can't afford to live in the city proper to commute in to perform essential jobs to support those who do live in the city, that -- whether it is desirable or not -- the situation is more that both rents and the income of residents of the City and County of San Francisco can go up without bound, as residing in the City itself becomes more and more elite/exclusive.
The income of existing citizens will reach an upper limit, and they'll be pushed out by those with much higher income bounds. In San Francisco's quest to preserve its character, its pushing out the very people who create the character, and its turning itself into London proper, where only the very wealthy can afford to reside.
This. Transportation in the bay area is awful. I lived in San Jose and it would take me 2+ hours to get to SF by public transit, even at peak times. If I was in SF after midnight, I was literally stuck for the night. One time I had to take an airport SuperShuttle back to SJC just to get anywhere near my apt. because I tried to leave SF at 11pm on a Sunday. I can't even imagine what would happen if it was that hard to get between Newark and NYC.
San Jose to SF is, by East Coast standards, a pretty long ways. Newark to New York is about 10 miles. SF to San Jose is about 50 - more comparable to New York to New Brunswick or Trenton or Stamford.
Find me a 50-ish-mile distance in the US that is easier to cover by public transit than SF/San Jose. Boston/Providence? DC/Baltimore? Philadelphia/Wilmington? New York/Trenton? Comparable at best, but in all cases, you're generally talking the absolute far edge of regional rail that runs hourly at best.
Ronkonkoma out in Suffolk County is around 50 miles from Penn Station in Manhattan.
Peak LIRR trains take less than 90 minutes, with at least one express train in each direction less than 70. There are 13 peak (arrive 6-10AM) week day westbound trains and 14 eastbound (arrive 5-9PM). The longest gap between trains during the week is westbound between 1:46AM and 4:06AM, eastbound it's 1:21AM to 3:14AM. Otherwise rarely is the gap more than an hour.
The far-end (~50 miles) of the mainline regional rail line in Philly (used to be the R5, I forget what it's called after they renamed it) has half-hour coverage in the mornings for commutes, settling back on hourly during the day. To be fair that is unusually good coverage, but it is certainly possible to do elsewhere.
Part of the difference may be that several of the communities along the R5 near Philly are affluent for the area (or in general, in some cases (Gladwyne)). Transit to poorer areas like Upper Darby isn't quite as nice.
To Paoli (25 miles) they have twice-hourly coverage during commute times. Stretch it out to Exton (30-something miles) and you're down to hourly coverage peak.
Doesn't mean SF has to ape the East coast. There are enough people making the 50 mile commute everyday that a public transport system is worthwhile and can be profitable.
I am pretty sure that if Caltrain went about 10 miles/hr faster, 101 will have fewer cars.
I used to take Caltrain and now drive. The problem is not so much the train being slow, but on reaching your station it's still several miles and a bus ride to your office because the density is so low.
All of those examples except D.C.-Baltimore are from a major city to a suburb or minor city. San Jose is actually a larger city than San Francisco and along the route you'll find half a dozen cities on the scale of Wilmington or Trenton.
San Jose is a bit of a paradox; it's a larger, sprawling city, but it's basically a giant suburb to some extent. It has never been a place for startups, and even most of its resident tech giants are in office parks in suburban areas away from downtown.
That's a little disingenuous, the fastest train from SJ->SF is under an hour at peak times. If you are in Downtown SJ, you can be in Downtown SF in way under two hours, with nothing but your feet and the train ride. San Jose, however, is huge, so its surely possible that a slow bus ride from south San Jose could add 45 minutes to the trip.
It would be nice to have a train leave SF later than midnite, but having taken that train many times, the ridership level is probably break even in terms of costs, at best.
Improving the light rail so that people will actually ride it and that it actually is faster than buses will go a long way towards bettering the situation.
The light rail is way too infrequent, and the worst part is that it doesn't sync up with Caltrain. Why does the light rail not get to Mountain View ~5 minutes before the CalTrain to SF instead of ~30 minutes? The delay is maddening, just synchronize them! It's even worse at night on the way back.
I don't think there's anywhere in the US that has 24/7 public transit that goes 50 miles out from a city. To expect that is unrealistic. You're lucky it even exists, most cities don't even have any transit that goes that far.
I know people who regularly go between NYC and Philadelphia. The distance is about 100 miles, covered in 70-90 minutes (depending on the train). During peak hours trains run every 15 or 30 minutes and even the night-time gap isn't terribly long (stops running at midnight, starts again at 3am). I'm not sure if the Bay Area has comparable density to the DC-Philly-NY-Boston corridor, so maybe achieving the same level of train service isn't possible.
> During peak hours trains run every 15 or 30 minutes and even the night-time gap isn't terribly long (stops running at midnight, starts again at 3am).
BARTs night time gap at the terminus of most lines is, I think, roughly midnight to 4am, so its not all that different.
> I'm not sure if the Bay Area has comparable density to the DC-Philly-NY-Boston corridor
Not even close. The East Coast corridor you name is the most densely populated region of its size in the US, by a wide margin.
That's true, although it's less unheard-of to have 24/7 public transit going ~20 miles out radially, providing about ~40 mile end-to-end coverage. Chicago runs two of its lines 24/7 (Red and Blue), which provide service about 15-20 miles to the N, S, & W. The 24/7 NY Subway, PATH, and LIRR service will take you similar distances.
If BART ran those kinds of distances 24/7, it would at least significantly increase the consistently-reachable zone. There's currently some all-nighter bus service, but it's not a great replacement (slow, nobody knows the routes, etc.).
A guy I work with lives in San Jose and commutes to SoMa every day. He drives on the East side of the bay up to the first BART (Fremont?) and then takes BART to downtown. He says it's never more than 90 minutes.
This is exactly the problem. If people stop thinking of SF as its own city and rather just an expensive neighborhood in the larger "city" of the Bay Area, they wouldn't clamor so much about high costs. It's the lack of good transit connecting all these scattered neighborhoods that is the main problem.
I recently spent some time in SF for the first time, coming from Seattle, and I was amazed to find that the transit is barely on par with Seattle's (which is not a compliment) despite the fact that SF is a much denser, more urban city. Bart is a joke- there's a single line within the actual city.
I lived in Oakland (17th, on Lake Merritt) back in 97/98, coming in from Canada and attracted by the low rent. I got the hell out of there as quickly as possible (moved to Sunnyvale) - Every night consisted me of taking my life into my own hands as I tried to walk the 5 or so blocks from Bart to my apartment.
A week ago, after not having visited for about 10 years, I toured the old neighborhood and was astonished at how much it had changed - it was after dark on a friday night - and there were actually a lot of people out, walking around the lake, restaurants open.
HUGE shift in gentrification of the area. This is a very positive impact of the San Francisco housing situation.
Still not quite safe enough for me to consider a nightly walk home from BART.
Looking for a place in Oakland a few months ago, I was amazed how blasé people were about being assaulted, mugged or having their car stolen. Much as I prefer the EB vibe, I think living under constant threat of violence would stress me out.
About a year ago I was at a dinner party with some friends that live in Oakland, off Lake Merritt. They were all recalling stories about times when they'd been mugged like it was normal!
Another friend of mine tells me about shootings she's seen outside her window as recently as a few weeks ago. She's only a few blocks South of Lake Merritt around 18th and 5th.
I'm sorry but I wouldn't feel at all safe living in that area.
>>> They were all recalling stories about times when they'd been mugged like it was normal!
In high crime areas when you first experience it, you're pretty shocked. As time goes by, it just becomes part of the landscape and part of your life. You learn to live with it.
When I lived on the South Side of Chicago, it was the same way. When I moved in, I was constantly harassed for money by panhandlers and such. I saw people get shot, junkies lying in alleys, all kinds of stuff that make you numb to life in the "big city". I never had a friend who lived in Chicago who hadn't been robbed, mugged, beat up, raped, car broken into, apartment broken into or been in the middle of a drive-by. To a degree, most people felt it was a badge of honor living in such a dangerous place, experiencing these things and living to tell about it.
> To a degree, most people felt it was a badge of honor living in such a dangerous place, experiencing these things and living to tell about it.
The phrase 'badge of honor' strikes me as a phrase unlikely to be used by someone actually at a high degree of risk in a crime-ridden neighborhood. So just how different is the experience for different demographics in a high-crime locale? How divorced from a real, perpetual threat are these 'badge of honor' stories?
Disclaimer this is difficult to cite appropriately because the DoJ & Bureau of Justice Statistics sites are down due to the federal shutdown, taking lots of data with them. Also, it's a HNews comment, which means I'm writing quickly about something I don't actually know much about.
First: parent's comment mentioned the full range of crime, which it's useful to tease apart - violent crime (simple assault), serious violent crime (rape, robbery, aggravated assault), and property crime (car stereos).
As a 20s-30s professional white guy in San Francisco, just about everyone I know has an anecdote or two about scary situations. I know people who have been threatened or worse at gunpoint (very recently!), at knifepoint, and at fistpoint (surely there's a word for that). But statistically, most physical violence my demographic experiences are anomalies. We might live and work and walk in high crime neighborhoods, but we're rarely targets.
Even rape & sexual assault, in which 80% of victims know their attacker, is much more likely to victimize people with <$40k income (and the rate of violence increases the lower income gets). [1]
Other kinds of violence are less likely than rape to victimize acquaintances (50% robbery, 60% aggravated assault), but most of violent crime victims still make less than $35k. It isn't evenly distributed. [2] Put simply, most violent crime occurs between people with lower incomes who know each other. None of this should be too surprising.
Next, property crime. The rates of violent crime and property crime are highly correlated. However, property crime is more equal opportunity. Property crime is more likely to be committed by strangers and target across income groups. [4] So while I'm at relatively low risk of physical violence while walking down scary streets, parking a car or locking a bicycle is much higher risk.
Now, all of this gets more complicated when we consider a large transient population like SF has, but the gist is that more transients leads to a higher rate of burglary, larceny, and robbery than would be expected of an equal population increase made up of other groups, but not necessarily a higher rate of violent crimes unrelated to taking property. [3] The clumping of violent crime by demographic stands.
So, in a sense, I'm agreeing with you - scary neighborhoods do just become a 'part of the landscape'. But only for some of us. This 'landscape' and 'badge of honor' way of experiencing crime is a privilege to those who, relatively speaking, don't have much to worry about. For medium- and high-income individuals with limited or no social ties to other people in the neighborhood, living in a high crime locale is a minor economic problem (potential property loss) easily offset by low rent. There are a whole lot of other quality of life issues correlated with high crime for which I wouldn't judge anyone for wanting to move away from, but the mean streets aren't equally mean to everyone.
The first step to making your city not a crime-ridden violent shithole is to stop treating it like a badge of honor.
NYC is like this to some extent, but not nearly as extreme as the Bay Area.
Reminds of this choice quote from the Onion: "In addition, 3 million New Yorkers reportedly left the city because they realized the phrase "Only in New York" is actually just a defense mechanism used to convince themselves that seeing a naked man take a shit on a park bench is somehow endearing, or part of some shared cultural experience."[1]
The Bay Area is much worse in this regard. It's the sort of place where privileged rich people treat objectively terrible, horrible as some sort of rite of passage. There's some kind of sick, perverse pride in living in a 24-hour The Wire episode.
There is an attitude, a bohemian attitude, a beatnik attitude... that it is more free to live with the junkies and the prostitutes and the gang bangers than to be hiding away behind some gate.
This is what is ultimately being destroyed in San Francisco. A real understanding of what it means to be free.
People used to put up with the same violence in NYC, till they got sick of it and elected mayors who cared about fighting crime more (messrs giuliani and bloomberg). Back in the messrs koch and dinkins eras, NYC was a dump, by and large.
San Jose takes crime seriously and it's constantly up there among the safest large cities in the US.
One can only wish The EB will take crime more seriously. SF is slowly taking crime more seriously. Maybe the EB can lear from SJ and SF a bit.
Undoubtedly some people will raise the issue of profiling criminal behavior[1]. If I had to choose between simmering street violence and occasional police excess (where one can seek redress), I'd choose the latter. Not sure why the EB is so anti-police so much as to spite their own safety. The good of being better policed vastly outweighs, to me, the occasional bad cop. But to each their own.
One phenomenon I don't understand so well. In NYC I'd see people dress us as (wannabe) mobsters (acquire their style), but they were no mobsters, tho maybe they idolized them in some way --they would complain that they'd get flack from the police. Maybe if they didn't try to pretend to be toughs the police wouldn't think they were toughs. I can see some similarities in the 'anarchists' in the EB.
> One can only wish The EB will take crime more seriously.
'wish' is a good term to use here, since I don't see any other way of reducing crime in Oakland since they have no money to provide nearly enough police services, and can't really tax their residents any more since they're already financially overburdened.
That is the most commonly cited neighborhood where people are shocked that there is so much crime. That's a very historically depressed neighborhood, less than the old E. 14th days, but just because there are two streets with cute old 1900's houses does not mean it's safe at night.
East Lake isn't that much cheaper than other options, and a mid-high crime dump. You'll be hard pressed to find a resident who's excited to be there, especially after a year or three.
The startup that I work for is considering moving its office from SF to Oakland due to a rent increase. My boss asked how I would feel about that. I said, "That's fine, as long as the new office isn't in a sketchy neighborhood." His response? "There are no sketchy neighborhoods in Oakland." The denial that some (otherwise intelligent) people live with is amazing.
It really didn't seem like it. Some people seem to think that if you are afraid of crime, then you are a wuss, and I think he might be one of those people (based on this comment and others). He lives on the Oakland-Berkeley border, and seems proud of his lack of concern about the area where he lives. It's probably a lot easier to feel this way if you are tall and male (he is both), but of course neither of those things helps very much when guns are involved.
Or maybe I completely misread his tone and it was a joke. That's possible.
I used to think that too, but then my friend pointed out that it just shifts the problem elsewhere. This is DC, not SF, but the gentrification of DC has meant that a lot of problems (as well as longtime DC residents who can no longer afford the rent) have simply been pushed out to PG County.
It's the unfortunate nature of gentrification. It's also multi-layered; it's not just the middle class pushing out the lower class. The middle class is actively being pushed out of central hubs like San Francisco and Manhattan by the upper class (which is exactly why places like Oakland are themselves gentrifying in the first place).
If any SF residents agree with the sentiment of this article, I'd recommend voting in the upcoming election. Props B & C will allow a project with new housing, retail, and open space to be built downtown. I support the project not because it's perfectly designed, but because it would set a terrible precedent for future development in the city if opponents successfully use the referendum process to block it. Ironically, many of the same people opposed to the project are the ones who are complaining the most about rising rents. Even though the project certainly isn't low- or middle-income housing, it will relieve some of the demand that would otherwise be placed on housing for lower incomes.
Yes, Prop C is a ridiculous attempt to subvert the planning process. For the record, 8 Washington was approved by the Port Commission, Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors. And yet, here we are with this measure.
Another one to watch out for is the Mexican Museum Tower (706 Mission). There have been rumblings that a few of the owners in the Four Seasons Tower don't care for the tall building obstructing their views:
http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2013/07/an_unfriendly_ult...
Depending on the results of the November ballot, we may be seeing more of these.
I'm not anti-development but your last statement is not necessarily guaranteed. These days new units are being sold off-plan before construction to wealthy international non-residents who simply want to park their money. They will remain empty. Unless there are provisions in the permits to prevent this, but it's difficult to enforce.
That is bad if true but if the alternative is for those investors to buy some other units elsewhere it's still useful to build this to prevent them from doing that.
New builds involve dozens of units coming to market at once. Thus, sales and marketing teams can be employed to market the property overseas to these wealthy individuals. It's also far more predictable and doesn't require inspection and such. In some markets, such as Australia (possibly UK, I'm not sure), you don't pay property tax but you do have an upfront stamp duty. This duty is waived for purchases of new developments (another way foreign investors get to pilfer commonwealth countries and take advantage of so many of the benefits of living there without paying much tax at all).
> it will relieve some of the demand that would otherwise be placed on housing for lower incomes.
I don't know if this is necessarily true, in the same way that if you build an extra lane on a freeway you don't inherently reduce congestion - traffic simply expands to fill the available space.
Many people buying these new apartments and condos will be buying as an investment and renting out, which does nothing to help those in housing need.
That's because the increase in supply will be too small to undo the fact that the economy will still be heavily demand-driven. If you want to completely undo that, you need to saturate the demand. However, you can't get from here to there without that intermediate step.
Plus, on the margins, it will still increase supply and drop prices, as the price those can be rented out at are driven by supply and demand. Continue to reliably raise supply, and you'll also lower the value of those investments and cause them to sell out as they cease to be good investments.
The reason why that is an attractive strategy in the first place is that demand is grossly in excess of supply. Fix the root cause, the problem will go away.
San Francisco may not believe in market forces, but market forces believe in San Francisco.
I've always wondered why more people don't live in Oakland or Berkeley, which are both a relatively short commute to downtown SF. The housing prices are significantly cheaper, and especially in Berkeley, there seems to be a strong tech community.
Without going into all of my guesses as to why this hasn't happened in droves, I think one of the larger reasons is the access to cheap transportation back to those areas at night. BART stops too early, so for the younger crowd that likes to stay out, it's too expensive to constantly take a $40-60 ride out of SF. Without the advent of additionally public transportation, would it be economically viable to provide a paid shuttle service to and from SF / Berkeley / Oakland?
Traditionally its because an East Bay to Silicon Valley commute hasn't really worked. Not until Twitter/Zynga/Square/AirBnb started the large SF startup presence has the East Bay really started to benefit from the tech scene.
(note I bought in Berkeley a few years ago, and looking to move to Oakland)
I've never considered Easy Bay because of its much higher crime rate. There is a reason it's cheaper. Maybe things are different now, but I wouldn't know, because I've never considered it.
SF may have crime but its nowhere near the danger level of oakland. IIRC, SF isnt even on the "top 100 most dangerous cities" list, but oakland usually is in the top 5.
So, yes- Big difference. 10x higher chance to get murdered in oakland than SF.
As others have said, painting an entire city with a single brush is doing nothing but tormenting you with a false sense of fear of Oakland and tricking you with a false sense of security in San Francisco.
How is that danger distributed through Oakland? Baltimore and Philly are both typically in the top 25 of those lists, but from personal experience I can say the actual danger presented to any particular person depends very heavily on which neighborhood in the city you choose (compared to Seattle, where as far as I can tell there are no genuinely dangerous neighborhoods). I have even heard similar claims about Detroit from Detroit natives, though I must admit I am a little skeptical in that case.
I guess my point is that a city having a high crime rate does not necessarily put it off limits; it may just mean that particular neighborhoods are off limits.
Once you get used to the nuances of a place then you start to internalize its dangers in this way. I heard and experienced the same logic about threats while in the West Bank. The danger is really overblown, as long you don't drive that road over there...
Isn't it true? "Oakland is fine, just don't go to [bad neighborhood in Oakland]" is just a more localized form of "The Bay Area is safe, just don't go to Oakland" (a premise that most people here seem to accept).
"PA is safe, just don't go to Philly", "Philly is safe, just don't go to North Philly", "North Philly is safe, just don't leave Temple's campus"... etc. It's all just a matter of scale. You could break it down by block if you wanted to.
Well, at some point you're down to the addresses of known murderers, at which point I don't think you'd want to sub-divide any further. "Franky's house is fine, just don't go in the basement".
40-60 ride out of SF? AC Transit Lines 800–899 are All Nighter lines, operating from 1 a.m. – 5 a.m. daily. Some may operate somewhat earlier or later (especially on weekends).
They do, but it's hilariously slow. It's so slow that it's often actually faster to wait for the next morning's Caltrain.
SamTrans runs all-night bus service from SF to Palo Alto, route 397. Once per hour, and the ride takes 2 hours, 15 minutes (!). From there you can switch to the all-night VTA route 22, which goes Palo Alto to San Jose. That's also approximately once per hour, and the trip takes about 1 hour, 15 minutes. With the connection time, you can make the overall trip in about 4 hours.
"Would it be economically viable to provide a paid shuttle service to and from SF / Berkeley / Oakland?"
Perhaps Uber should move from providing premium taxi-like service, and instead offer a 24-hour bus-like service? For partygoers on the weekend, at least?
I think you could definitely be selective in the routes and hours you would operate - I like the idea of charging $20 per person and transporting 50-100 people at a time from major downtown centers (e.g. Civic Center to Downtown Berkeley)
This does happen in droves, but it's more when kids reach elementary school age. SF is a pretty difficult city when it comes to ensuring your kid gets into a decent elementary school, so that's one point at which many people leave. Not to mention that you don't have to go far in any direction (north to Marin, east to Berkeley, south to Palo Alto) and you have fantastic public schools.
The whole western side of the city could really use some development. Nothing there is particularly nice as it is now. A lot of units don't even have laundry machines in the buildings, so people end up spending thousands per month on rent while still using laundromats. The location, however, is amazing given the proximity to the parks and beaches, and there are solid commercial arteries. There's not much character there, and almost everything is relatively new, built within the past century.
There does seem to be a "center of gravity" in SF that is incredibly bizarre to me. For a lot of people, if you live west of Divis or south of 24th st, you might as well be, for all intents and purposes, in Oakland. Seems like a lot of the complacent crowd of SF lives in the Mission/SOMA/Pacific Height/Marina/Russian Hill bubble and never gets out of it.
Yet there is a whole 3/4 of the city that isn't encompassed by that part that is really, really awesome. It may not be "trendy" or anything, but they're full of great neighborhood places and "real" people. I think it's easy for everyone analyzing this situation to forget those places exist.
This comes back to transportation a bit. Living in the outer sunset or outer richmond and commuting to soma or the financial district is either a really long bus ride on packed buses or an N/T/etc fraught with delays getting onto and down market street. It takes me 35 minutes to get from my house in north oakland to work off the embarcadero station. When my wife and I lived in the inner richmond (6th and fulton) it took her 55 minutes to get to her office near 16th and bryant.
I think transit here generally gets a bad rap (my wife and I used the muni basically without issue for 5 years living in the city and loved it), but when considering where to live the commute from (and the colder weather of) the western neighborhoods is a big deal.
Yeah that's totally fair. I live at Geary and Stanyan, and made liberal use of the 38L and 38[A,B]X busses, which cut that time down a lot. I used to go to the gym every morning before work and could be door to door on the 38BX in about 25 minutes most days. If you can get a seat on the busses, I kinda enjoyed the time on my phone or with a book, but that's not always possible too.
I commute by bike now, which is certainly the fastest way to get around the city - perhaps just not the safest or least-sweaty way.
Yup, public transit in areas like Outer Sunset is pretty bad. I've never lived there, but I did stay in a hacker house there once while searching for an apt, and it takes a good 40 minutes on a crowded bus to get to Market St. Also I rarely ever find an Uber or Lyft nearby.
>> If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams,
>> a place a parent can raise kids and not have to spend every minute at work—we have to fix the supply problem.
Why? Why can't it stay the playground of the rich and people who are trying to pursue their dreams can live in <insert name of nearby city>
>> Subsidizing affordable homes for 10,000 families comes at a price of tag of $2.5 billion.
>> So yes, we should build as much subsidized affordable housing as we can.
No. While I am for subsidized housing, I don't feel it should be done in extremely rich areas just for the heck of it. I'm not saying to start housing projects where nobody wants to live, but there's no sense in burning money to build them where costs are extraordinary.
I totally agree with you on subsdization. Subsidizing a few thousand people so they people can live someplace expensive is insane.
OTOH, this and other manifestations of what feels like a binary income distribution is a tricky thing. Rich neighbourhoods are one thing. Rich schools. Rich cities is a new thing. It creates feedback.
>> The gap between London prices and those of the rest of the country is now at a historic high, and there is only one way to explain it. London houses and apartments are a form of money.
I'm not sure that is in the US, but I'd wager the very British notion of the "housing ladder" has much to do with the skyrocketing prices in London. The idea, in essence, is that you buy a house (ideally under market value, but that won't happen, so you buy at value). However, since everything spins around moving up (wherever that may lead you), you now need to move into a better property (or, at least, a property/area that is perceived to be better). Thus, in order to be able to afford that, everybody now tries to "add value" to their places.
This leads to a number of things:
1) The very British sport of "extending" and, really, slapping extensions on absolutely everything.
2) Avoidance of any actual, structural work. Completely modernising a flat (or, worse even, a house) is expensive, i.e. you risk spending a lot of money without the certainty that you will get all of it (and, ideally, more) back.
3) In connection with the point above, this means "adding value" usually really means painting things over, plastering things over and superficially "fixing" (i.e. covering up) the most obvious flaws.
All of the above leads to an upward spiral, where everybody tries to sell essentially the same places for more and more money. Give it two or three rounds on the spiral, and a house that used to be, say, £300,000 is now £400,000, with nicer visible features but the same rotten core.
The other problem with London property prices is that they influence the prices of most of the South-East of England, with certain places (within commutable distance) experiencing the same price-hikes.
This is interesting. With the "remotization" of the workplace where anyone, especially engineers can work from anywhere, instead of moving outward, we're moving inward to these "hubs".
I wonder if this is in part because, now that our work is less social, we want our environment to be geared toward more social, i.e. big cities.
My wife and I are blessed to be bottom-end 1%-ers, and even we could not afford to live in SF, so we moved down into the peninsula. Well, we might be able to afford it if we got a crippling mortgage, but then we couldn't afford day care for our kids, and the 1hr+ commutes would have wreaked havoc on our lives.
You can't raise a family in SF without making enough money to afford a $1.4M house, and spending $2000/month on private school per kid because the SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity).
Test scores don't tell the whole story, and I'll agree that there is some political stupidity, but think it's fair to say that the blanket statement "SF schools have become really horrible (due to SF political stupidity)" is incorrect.
For an urban district, I believe SFUSD has an unusually high number of extremely high performing schools. There are some very bad ones too. You'll see this pattern in the surrounding areas as well. The difference is that owning a house in a high-rent district doesn't get you priority access to that school, they way it does in the burbs. As a result, a lot of people who can afford a 1.4 mil house leave SF if they don't get their top school choice, because in Marin, your high mortgage guarantees you priority access to the good school.
Of course, a lot of people stay in SF precisely because they can get their kid into a 9 or 10 school even though they can't afford the 1.4mil house.
One of my coworkers lives near us, and I believe they were told to list a dozen schools in order of preference. Given the lottery nature of the system, they didn't get into a single one of them, which forced them to go the private school route.
This is a long standing and very intense debate in SF. You can reasonably criticize the "lottery" system, and you can reasonably defend the "school choice" system.
Kind of funny that Reason magazine, not normally a big cheerleader for SF politics, kind of likes the approach.
Anyway, I think it's perfectly reasonable to defend or criticize the assignment process, I just don't think you can accurately claim that SF public schools are horrible.
Many elementary schools are very good to decent. I don't recall any public high schools being very good, except for Lowell, and that's a charter school. SOTA is also decent as well, but again, I believe it's a charter school. I think the claim that SF high schools are on the whole horrible is accurate.
See, this is why I love Baltimore. We've got charm out the ass AND our rents are low.
Quite frankly i'm disappointed in how cartoonish SF's neighborhoods seem. Here's the hippie burner neighborhood, and here's the spanish hipster neighborhood, and here's the rich white boating neighborhood, and here's the dingy chinese black market neighborhood, and here's the financial district complete with skyscrapers and shops that close at 6pm. It's like a dirty spicy version of DC.
You have a very stilted view of neighborhoods here. There's nothing at all cartoonish about any part of the city. Well, Fisherman's Warf, I'll grant you that one. That's as typical a tourist trap as any.
I don't know about charm - I've been to Baltimore a bunch and it's definitely not a city I would want to live in. Heck, my brother had his car broken into while living there and he lived in a nice neighborhood!
Baltimore has a 10.8% unemployment rate, is the heroin capital of America, and is both one of the most dangerous cities in the nation and the world (based on murder rates, but that's mostly gang violence). Getting your car broken into is an expectation here, not a surprise. Some of us leave our car doors unlocked so we don't have to replace the windows.
Car break-ins happen in every city. A single break in is not a good gauge of crime rates. You don't have to be a genius thief to know nice neighborhoods are a better place to steal from since that's where the money is.
I'm pretty sure it has been broken into more than once, and I know plenty of others who have had their cars broken into while they were living in Baltimore as well - it is an unusually high anecdotal occurrence that I have not heard of from my friends living in any other major/semi-major city. One of my friends even had his apartment broken into and all his video games stolen (amongst other stuff) - the same friend also had his car broken into and all his stuff stolen from it, the night before he moved out.
And that doesn't even touch some of the things friends have seen happen, including killings, outright prostitution, and much more.
It's not a city that gives off good vibes, and I grew up spending plenty of time in not so good places in the Bronx and Yonkers. I remember 5 years back or so it was in the top 3 for murders (I want to say #1 or #2, which tended to juggle between Baltimore and Philly - and this was over NYC, which is a pretty amazing stat in itself).
I'm not even sure what "cartoonish" means. Where did you get that assessment?
Having grown up in and around SF for my formidable years, SF has charm but seriously lacks in affordability. I can't imagine what you mean by cartoonish.
Yep. When visiting SF, I tried to walk a lot to see the city change. Going into different neighborhoods felt more like stepping into completely different cities. I'd hear X neighborhood was full of Y, and it was exactly that. Perhaps it blends more once you live there, but I was really struck by the cultural divisions.
Well after seeing those "postcards", cartoonish is becoming clearer. As a child in SF, I remember each neighborhood changing ONLY as you got to the center of each hood. There used to not be any strong demarcation lines, if that makes sense. Perhaps that's grown out of the overpopulation?
When I read this article, I was expecting to hear about people were leaving the SF / Silicon Valley Bay Area. But they're not really leaving, they're just choosing relatively lower rent districts in the same overall economy.
The other commenters, while right about dismissing your cartoonish remark, miss your point - Baltimore rocks from many perspectives (yes, crime is a problem, but not in the cartoonish way people portray Baltimore). If you want a real exodus with a significant change of economic area, move to Baltimore or Detroit or Philadelphia or Austin. I just don't see an 'exodus' when people are changing zipcodes but keeping their basic business landscape intact.
* If you want a real exodus with a significant change of economic area, move to Baltimore or Detroit or Philadelphia or Austin. I just don't see an 'exodus' when people are changing zipcodes but keeping their basic business landscape intact.*
Agreed. San Francisco's in late August as far as the urban cycle of wealth generation => congestion/NIMBY => cultural stagnation => abandon => renewal => ... goes. August. Hot, sticky, little growth. (This might apply to the SF climate, but in most of the US, August is a time of stagnation.) What the young people trying to get established really need is a different season, like Austin's early-May or Baltimore's late-March. (Or Detroit if you can tolerate being between the balls of January.)
If you're 22 and you go to the Bay Area thinking you'll be a VC-backed founder in 5 years and rich enough to retire in 10, then sorry, but you were born 10-15 years too late.
I just bought a house in Berkeley. I wanted to buy a condo in SF, but for the same price of a 2 bedroom condo in SF with 1200 sqft I could buy a house in berkeley with 6700sq ft lot size with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and a huge backyard all to myself. Even if I had all the money in the world, I'll buy rather buy a house in berkeley over a condo in SF.
There are plenty of restaurants around berkeley, and many places to hang out. The only thing I'm missing out if I live in Berkeley is all the awesome tech events in SF.
The article mentions New York. One difference between SF and NYC is that public transport in NYC is at least 10X better. Especially as people spread out, that makes a big difference to quality of life.
Given this, and the recent article on "The London exodus", I'll just leave this new online course here because it may be interesting to some: https://www.coursera.org/course/designingcities
People keep talking about the rising prices, but what is being done? What CAN be done? Its supply and demand. San Francisco will always be expensive because it is a desirable location for certain groups of high-earning people.
Being "progressive" is great, but we live in the real world and if you refuse to do things to lower prices in the name of culture, prices will keep going up. Ironically, this will also hurt, if not destroy, the "culture" that they're trying to protect in the first place.
There's a lot that can be done. The most obvious thing to do is remove rent control and zoning restrictions and push for the construction of higher buildings with more units. Stop living in the past and pretending it's a quaint coastal town.
San Francisco is statistically the second most dense city in the US, wedged into a geographically bounded ~50 sq miles. It's dumbfounding that there were probably more high rise apartment buildings (>20 stories) in my zip code back in NY than in all of SF.
SF and the bay area have an anti-development attitude in general, leading to a predictable supply shortage and thus the crazy rents you have now.
This is how you solve it:
1. Allow development, stop getting in the way.
2. Create punitive pigovian long term unused property taxes to encourage property use. Stop land owners from letting property just sit there unused and discourage using property just as a fancy bank account for the wealthy.
I find it interesting that everyone sees this as a sliding scale with culture on one side and rent on the other. There's a third variable that the city could play with to keep the rent down while not building a single building:
Raise Taxes
If you want to lower prices and you can't/won't increase supply, the obvious solution is to lower demand. Adding a sharp jump in the local income tax at a high income level will free up housing space as wealthy citizens leave the city. The less affluent won't see a tax increase, since it's outside their bracket, but they will see housing become available, lowering rent prices.
Of course, this will be a hit on the economy as all the wealthy individuals leave the area, but it decreases rent while keeping culture constant.
Subsidizing is NOT the answer. This will drive up prices for everyone living above subsidies. The problem is demand WAY outstrips housing supply. In my opinion the one thing that could kill the Bay Area economy is the aversion to residential construction.
Housing stock on the Geary corridor could be easily increased, and even a modest improvement to the transit system in that area could make a big difference.
It is absolutely crazy to artificially restrict residential building in areas where there is high employment demand. It is almost like we want to prevent economic growth.
The US is a crazy place. We complain that there isn't enough economic growth, but when it happens, we put in all kinds of restrictions that limit it.
This is kind of like arguing that the way to fix LA's traffic problem is to build more freeways. For a time congestion will ease, and then before you know it there will just be more cars, and the traffic will return. More concrete, more cars, same problem.
No it isn't. Building high density housing is nothing like building more freeways.
Edit: Many people argue in favor of building restrictions on the basis of environmental concerns, but limiting housing in SF is just pushing more people out to places like Sacramento, which are suburban waste lands and models of inefficiency.
I'm not arguing that urban density is less efficient, but that the increased capacity would simply be filled with more high-paid workers. The city would have to throw up a ton of housing projects to have an effect on the median housing costs. IMHO it would be better to spend that money transforming the transportation and public education systems...
Regarding people moving to Oakland, there has been some people here talking about how bad the crime was there. Then again to me, San Francisco is a really dirty city with a ton of homeless people. I'm from Socal, so I'm not unfamiliar with the homeless, I've just never seen them concentrated like they are in San Francisco.
SF has a lot of homelessness, which seems to be due to a combination of both culture (generally liberal, reasonably good provision of social services, reasonably relaxed attitude to drugs) and climate. As brutal as it sounds, cities like New York will never have as large or visible a homelessness problem for the simple reason you're quite likely to die sleeping rough over the winter.
Put in place a regulation that says all new buildings must be X stories high (20,40,60, whatever.) Along with that, include a regulation that force said buildings to fit in with the neighbhorhood look. UWS and the West Village here in NYC have great examples of extremely tall buildings that are not Jetson's-style eyesores.
Also put in place a regulation that says existing building that can be built higher (while keeping the existing external facade) should be. Where this isn't possible, knock it down and replace it with a building that keeps the old facade.
Change the zoning restrictions and regulations to allow the above, and supply will go up, prices will (eventually) come down, and the neighbhorhood looks will remain similar. Everyone gets some of what they want, and the place stays diverse, vibrant, and does not force local workers to deal with punishing commutes just so they can do their jobs.
The above applies just as much to NYC or any other large city that is holding back this kind of development. As per the UN:
"In 1950, one-third of the world’s people lived in cities. Just 50 years later, this proportion has risen to one-half and will continue to grow to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. Cities are now home to half of humankind." Policies need to change to deal with this new reality.
This article makes an interesting comparison between San Francisco and Seattle.
"San Francisco has produced an average of 1,500 new housing units per year. Compare this with Seattle (another 19th century industrial city that now has a tech economy), which has produced about 3,000 units per year over the same time period (and remember it's starting from a smaller overall population base). While Seattle decided to embrace infill development as a way to save open space at the edge of its region and put more people in neighborhoods where they could walk, San Francisco decided to push regional population growth somewhere else."
Interesting point, but are we comparing apples-to-apples? Here's the wikipedia page for Seattle:
land area is 46.87 sq mi, population density is 17,620/sq mi.
Now, the article did mention "infill" which sounds more urban, so maybe there's a difference in the city and county of Seattle? I don't really know how that works up there. San Francisco is a very rare case where the city and county are the same. The article doesn't seem clear about this - how are we defining "Seattle" for the purposes of this article? If we cherry picked a 142 square mile area around SF, I think we could probably substantial construction and growth. In some ways, the article even goes on to mention this by talking about how SF and Oakland aren't part of the same city, but that this is where the growth is starting to happen.
SF is at the point where there isn't much left to be infilled. There certainly is some, but by and large, you'd have to tear something down to build something up - at least to a much larger extent than cities that get to be defined as a 150 square mile area or more.
I don't think there's much to be done here... but I think people are coming down pretty hard on SF. My guess is that you could easily circle 48 square miles of most major cities with comparable population density that haven't allowed much construction in the last 50 years or so, and you could easily circle 150 square miles around SF that make it look like it has pursued rapid growth policies. The difference is that because of the way borders work in the bay area, SF appears to be hostile to development because the new growth happens elsewhere.
I know i'm comparing apples to oranges here, but seeing as some of the problems are of the same kind (gentrification, middle class getting pushed out), and both the cities as they are today were mostly built in the 19th century...
Paris is 40 sq.mi. and has a density of 55,000/sq. mi (even more if you count out the 2 vast wooden uninhabited areas that take up 10% of the city's surface). Meanwhile it's extremely friendly to pedestrians and still preserves quite a good standard of living for the inhabitants. And the city is mostly a big museum, meaning there are monuments all around town and most of the buildings in numerous parts of the city are protected and thus cannot be redeveloped. Oh and in most of the city you can't build above 25 meters.
In this regard it would seem from a purely outer point of view that there must still be a lot of room for new construction in San Francisco.
The Paris metro is 214km and 303 stations. The San Francisco metro is 167km and 44 stations. The Seattle "metro" is 25km and 13 stations. (With another 5km coming online in 2016)
Seattle's core desperately needs more apartments. My neighborhood, Capitol Hill, has seen an incredible spike in rent prices over the past couple years as (what I can best guess is) a huge influx of new Amazonians have gobbled up all of the inventory. We're seeing new buildings go up at a prodigious rate, and—supposedly—the housing crunch should settle down sometime next year.
But, in the mean time, all of the people I know who work in service jobs (cafes, restaurants, bars, etc.) are forced to double or triple up, fight over the incredibly rare sub-$1000/month rental, or move to another neighborhood. Lots are opting for the last option and it's changing the character of the neighborhood.
Change isn't intrinsically bad. Change is bad when it removes characteristics of the neighborhood that caused people to move there in the first place.
See: Belltown in Seattle. Originally an artist neighborhood (as gentrifying neighborhoods tend to be), now completely devoid of art. Originally featured eclectic eateries and cafes, which attracted wealthier residents who liked the bohemian feel. Nowadays it's high-end chains and a lot of ostentatious lounges/clubs.
It's gotten to the point where Belltown is no longer really a desirable place to live, and the interest is now in Capitol Hill, where there is still an artistic/bohemian scene.
Change isn't bad, but in this case the pattern seems to be: residents move in attracted to X, driving X out in the process, everyone wonders where X went, and this starts the migration to another neighborhood in the search of X... Repeat ad infinitum.
> the interest is now in Capitol Hill, where there is still an artistic/bohemian scene.
For now this is true, but I think many of these people are moving to the CD by necessity where they can still afford to rent or purchase. Of course, the exodus to the CD has had its own issues (http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2011/12/gentrification-ki...).
What I think is very interesting is that the revitalization of the waterfront may change this dynamic by causing more people to move to Pioneer Square thereby relieving pressure on Capitol Hill. I'd actually consider doing this if it wasn't for the muggings, crazy people stabbing soccer fans, and it lacking the fundamentals of a livable neighborhood (e.g. a supermarket).
The CD and Georgetown may be the best long-term solutions for the art community. The former has too much of a crime problem still to gentrify quickly. The latter has something of a permanent noise problem that might make the neighborhood gentrification-proof, or at least put a ceiling on it.
Most NIMBYs don't want to see more development. Not to put words in potatolicious' mouth (err, keyboard), but I think we both want to see more affordable housing (and therefore more density) in Seattle's core.
There is, I have some theories, but so does everyone else I suppose.
The trick with Seattle - and other tech-heavy places - is that the gentrifiers belong to a demographic that is generally not invested in the arts. NYC's gentrification has driven a lot of artists out for certain, but it's also kept many by virtue of the fact that many of its wealthiest are curators and tastemakers of various art media (see: publishing, fashion, music, etc).
The population has a vested interest in seeing the arts stick around.
This isn't a perfect solution, since the "wealthy patron of the arts" demographic is skewed towards certain media and genres, so other artists may yet be left behind. But it's something.
Whereas in a place like Seattle people just don't really give a crap about art. How many Amazonians and Microsofties actually regularly go to art shows? How many have even been on the First Thursday events in any neighborhood?
The first step to successful tech gentrification is for techies to give a shit about the arts. But good luck with that.
> How many have even been on the First Thursday events in any neighborhood?
Few, at best. And it's not just Amazon or Microsoft. I was at a mobile developer meetup in Pioneer Square that coincidentally happened to land on the first Thursday of this month. Nary a word was shared with any other attendee about the richness in the arts happening right outside of our event. Made me rather sad, to be honest.
The character of the neighborhood is what's drawing in a lot of these new people, and it is what they are inadvertently destroying by moving in. The only solution, as I see it, is increasing density and creating more housing that's affordable, whether you're on an Amazon SDE budget, or a bartender budget.
The land area and population density differences are huge, but they're not really relevant unless they are the physical bottlenecks for housing construction in SF, which I presume they are not. Politics (namely, zoning) seems to be SF's bottleneck.
The amount of space impacts the politics as well, though. Seattle's new construction is largely converting ex-industrial zones to residential, not redeveloping existing residential zones, which is much easier to do politically. SF has had that kind of development too: much of SoMA is ex-industrial converted to residential. But there is not nearly as much ex-industrial land in SF compared to Seattle (or Oakland, for that matter).
I disagree, I think there's plenty of redevelopment. Just look at the controversies over allowing development on separate tax parcels, leading to new houses being built in side yards and back yards. There's also (on Capitol Hill at least) plenty of cases where single-family homes are being torn down for townhouses and apartments.
You can't do much "infill" development in SF while you still can in Seattle. That's very much a "physical bottleneck" that must be accounted for when comparing the two cities. In SF, if you want to build something, that means tearing something else down. In Seattle, there is still open space that can be built on. Of course politics plays a role, but lets not pretend that there aren't very real physical bottlenecks to building in SF.
> Of course politics plays a role, but lets not pretend that there aren't very real physical bottlenecks to building in SF.
There's a difference between "physical challenges" and "physical bottlenecks" to building in SF. Of course there are physical challenges. I'm claiming that the physical challenges are not the bottleneck, or in other words, if people were legally allowed to purchase property, tear down existing buildings if necessary, and build new taller buildings, I strongly suspect they would do so.
> Now, the article did mention "infill" which sounds more urban, so maybe there's a difference in the city and county of Seattle?
Seattle is in King County, which has a total area of 2,307 sq. mi. This is clearly referring to the city proper, which is, as you note, still much bigger than the City and County of SF, and much less densely populated to start with.
Presidio is 3 sqm, GG & GGNRA probably about the same, plus Diamond Heights, Vistacion, Merced, Sutro... So more likely mid-30's sqm.
I can well remember a half decade ago when the kids were ranting about the prices in Cupertino, Palo Alto and Menlo Park. I wonder what would happen if folks demanded bulldozing some of those more-expensive-than-SF low-density neighborhoods to accommodate...
It's really refreshing to see some intelligent commentary on the issues SF is facing, as opposed to the mindless tech-bashing that has been going on in the local media.
The only way to have a meaningful impact on housing prices is to increase supply.
This is typical real-estate developer rhetoric "we can continue growing forever". Don't look behind the curtain, though, at the real reason redeveloped neighborhoods are sometimes more affordable i.e., you get what you pay for. IMO not every city is well served by demolishing large tracts of historic buildings for the glass-facade utilitarian apartment buildings predicated on Quonset hut structural engineering principles (cheap, fast, profitable, not to be confused with architecture). Let the developers work where they're needed, Brisbane, Millbrae, SSF, etc. but leave San Francisco's character and beautiful neighborhoods to those who appreciate _living_ in them (vs profiting off of them).
The Examiner did a great article on the damage done to the City by redevelopment of the type this article advocates, in the 50s and 60s. Seems now to be available at USA Today: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-11-09-245099... IMO, if you want to see exactly what Gabriel Metcalf is talking about go to the City's Western Addition and while there ask yourself if it was worth it.
Perhaps if the cities to the south of SF weren't so stultifyingly boring, people wouldn't feel so compelled to live in the city. Imagine you're 25 and single, do you really want to live in low density single-family housing? Hellholes like Fremont? Unfortunately zoning laws and nimbys prevent the construction of livable, high density housing in favor of more suburban prisons.
I used to build mixed-income housing (one third subsidizes public housing units, one third 80% of area median and one third market rate) for a private partnership to redevelop Chicago's public housing. I can tell you this...fail. Does not compute. Does not work--socially (as an experiment) or financially. The best thing to do is to give mayors the ability to build and get city planners (disclaimer: I'm trained as one) out of the way. Affordable housing cannot be built new, but is usually created as a side effect when replacement units come on line and push down prices in existing units. SF will never be able to accommodate all incomes as long as there is no open-source planning guidelines that are geared to meeting this demand and give developers that " by right" to build. On Oakland, I lived there and it is awesome except for crime and politics and shifty characters. Especially the Quantics [sic]. Oakland can be THAT place, if the above happens here as well. It could, conceivably be better (yeah, I said it) than SF.
I used to build mixed-income housing (one third subsidizes public housing units, one third 80% of area median and one third market rate) for a private partnership to redevelop Chicago's public housing. I can tell you this...fail. Does not compute. Does not work, socially or financially. The best thing to do is to give mayors the ability to buget city planners
It's also why I prefer Boulder, Austin, Philly, and even Omaha to SF. It's time for some pioneering spirit, and with location mattering less than ever because of the maturation of collaboration tools, I'm happy to save money and let others spend it.
I like the concept, but there's so much intangible benefit to being in a center of gravity. There seems to be some tipping point where the random possibilities you encounter hit an exponential curve due to so many people doing so many interesting things in close proximity. Unfortunately, it also coincides with expense, crime, and high levels of general inconvenience.
This is too true, while I love where I live for certain reasons, its undeniably true that San Francisco has quite a larger talent pool and chances for things to occur due to the increase in talented people.
Not quite "all" the character... it's great in many ways (awesome biking infrastructure, very affordable housing, great restaurants/bars/coffee), but there's a huge upside to the weather that San Francisco has. Perhaps as a cause and effect situation, Minneapolis also doesn't have the talent pool that the bay area has.
I'm in St Paul myself, much more sedate than either and soon the green line will mean I can visit Brits pub and drink in Minneapolis as well and still have a zombie city to live in.
I thought the seasons were more, construction, and snow preventing construction.
I have lived in Russia, and visited San Francisco once. I have to say, I was more uncomfortable in SF than I ever was in Russia. Personally, I don't see the appeal. Reading this article, it makes me feel the author has on rose colored glasses when it comes to this city.
Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn have a rent problem, but most people commute from the outer boroughs, Long Island, and New Jersey where rent is much cheaper.
I always thought that public transit in the tri-state area was something you could not get anywhere else in the country and this article helps enforce that thought. However, it does bother me that gentrification moves people out of areas they once called home, and I wish this was not the collateral damage of what otherwise seems to be a positive trend. I certainly would not like to have to move because people who can pay more than me move in and force me out of my town. Then again, if moving to the town next door forces schools and services to become better, than maybe it's not so bad. It looks to me like no matter how positive the intentions, supply and demand will always rule along with their friend $$.
I've often thought that while everyone complains about how hard transit is in the bay area, we're kind of screwed by geography.
The Bay is this big asshole sitting right in the middle of everyone. All of our development is spread out in a ring around the bay, which inflates the distance from one place to another. If you took a map and cut out the bay, then pulled all the shorelines together, it would only be 15 minutes to get from San Jose to Oakland or San Francisco. But nope, we have to go in a big damn ring.
Well, what it really is is families and non-millionaires looking to buy. I mean, you can buy studios/1br's for around $300k-$400k (my wife and I have a close friend doing this). But for the most part, it's all cash everywhere and a lot of it.
We are contemplating the exodus in a few years but not so much because of prices, but schools. Before I had kids, I was in step with SF politics / justifications of how things are done here. But, of course, after kids you're like "hey, wait a minute". The school lottery is a family bug spray here. It's not just the fact that you're kid could be:
a) bused to a different area of the city away from the possible school right across the street from you
b) bused to a crappy school across the city
but also that this destroys neighborhoods. When I grew up (in southern california), I went to school with all the kids in my neighborhood. Not here, that would be too simple. So what this does is forces you to east bay or north bay if you don't want to partake in this social experiment and can't afford private school (I won't even mention the fact that even if you can afford private school, there's massive competition to then get into one).
All in all, this puts huge pressure on parents and they have to ask the question "do I want to be part of a social experiment where my kids won't even go to school with other neighborhood kids or do I just want them to go to a good school so they can grow up and then have some sort of normal life"?
So, the reality I see consists of 2 groups (of which we have friends in both): those that can't afford to buy or our outbid on everything and those parents that can't afford or are out-competed on private schools.
That said, I love SF. I've live here for 20+ years. I'll always love it here. Do I hold a grudge towards the city? Nope. I see it mostly as just the way things are and even if some people did have a short time where they were able to stall growth, it won't last forever. The city has to expand and it will. If it doesn't it will die and I just can't see that happening.
I agree 100% with you about the schools problem (and I'm facing it myself.) I've lived in a number of cities and SF has stunned me at the near total lack of school-age children. It's stunning - especially in my neighborhood (SOMA) you just never see kids walking to school in the morning. This has to be the largest drawback to living in SF, and one of the biggest reason middle-income to upper-middle-income families move out of town.
Nice bait-and-switch. The article isn't "The San Francisco Net Exodus", it's "The San Francisco Exodus". Just because there's no net outward migration doesn't mean that the outward migration occurring isn't notable. Note that I'm taking no position on whether the current overall migration situation is good, bad, or insignificant, just that migration of a certain part of a population (in this case, income level) can be worth studying/discussing, even if they're more than replaced by others.
As an example, if migration between Canada and the US increased a thousandfold, but the net migration stayed the same, you can be damn sure I would think it was interesting and worth looking at. Big changes in demographics and migration patterns are always interesting (for better or worse), and net migration is never the whole picture.
Fair enough, but even then, he has nothing to support the idea that the current exodus is any different from the normal inflow-outflow of population that goes on every year in any major city. "People sometimes move out of SF so they can buy a house elsehwere" is considerably less compelling.
I just turned down an offer at Apple because, even with the (by any other standards) generous salary and options, the cost of housing just doesn't leave any room for saving for college, retirement, no less owning a home.
I think you're missing part of the point - are the people moving into SF buying houses/condos or are they renting? I think the point of the article was that housing prices are so high that people can't buy, thus it's going to become a city of renters where properties are only owned by the very wealthy. From a city culture standpoint, I think we would all be in agreement that a city where people own their own homes results in a better environment (more people would be politically active within their district, kids go from K-12 at the same school district thus grow up with a stronger sense of community, etc). I also think we would be in agreement that it's a stronger country when the citizens can afford to buy their own homes rather than rent them from the 0.0005% who can afford to own in SF.
What?! Why on earth would I want my tax dollars subsidizing your rent? I mean, charity to the poor, homeless, etc. is one thing (it's good), but subsidizing your rent so you can be closer to boutique coffee shops? Instead of, you know, helping the truly needy get health care? Or investing in education? Gimme a break.
> If we want to actually make the city affordable for most people—a place where a young person or an immigrant can move to pursue their dreams
Why does San Fran specifically have to be that place? The Bay Area's a big place.
By the end of the article, the author's right about needing a more integrated metropolitan policy, but this attitude that "everyone deserves to live in San Francisco, even people with no money" gets tiring after a while. Neighborhoods and cities gentrify. People move elsewhere, to the new-and-upcoming-and-more-interesting neighborhoods/cities. Places change. That's just how it is.