KQED looks back at other booms in San Francisco including one in the Haight and elsewhere.
Author James Tracy co-founded San Francisco’s Eviction Defense Network. He says it’s humbling to realize that, after all the sit-ins, trips to jail and meetings with city leaders, San Francisco remains one of the least affordable cities in the U.S. There were no Google buses to block back in 1999, but he says what’s happening now is essentially the same story.
“It is a little bit too familiar,” Tracy says. “I’m hoping that 10 or 20 years from now, we’re doing a piece on all the great solutions to the housing crisis that San Francisco was able to put forward.” READ MORE.
Here’s a lengthy summary of the recurring patterns in San Francisco’s housing situation:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
A handy solution would be a CA state law requiring cities to impose “marginal workdesk/apartment parity”.
The way it would work is as follows: if, say, Mountainview is to get 10,000 new workers because Google is expanding it’s HQ, there must be 10,000 new apartment spots (a studio would count as 1 spot, a 1br would count as 1.25 spots, etc.) created in Mountainview. The “free market” or the concerned company could construct these apartments – it doesn’t matter. But the permits for office space in city X would be contingent on new housing in city X. No exceptions.
In addition to the tragedy of cultural autoclaving, the absurd cost of housing will sooner or later suffocate economic growth in the Bay Area, so business interests should be as motivated to deal with this as the grandma worrying about eviction/banishment.
The nauseating and hypocritical nimbyism of cities like Palo Alto and Mountainview must be crushed from above.
Each day, 100,000 people commute out of SF to the burbs, and 500,000 people commute into SF from the burbs.
So it isn’t the burbs that do not have enough housing. It is the city.
What is the source of this statistic?
Plenty of people commute into the city for shopping, services, entertainment — this is a natural state for cities which provide a higher density of everything. Part of this is also transport options which in general favor travel to wards the city but only to a select few destinations outside of — again much room for improvement.
There are now multiple reports of a housing deficit on the peninsula along with regulations and attitudes preventing more housing from appearing there. Having more housing all around is only a good thing, even if some regions take a small hit in ‘exclusivity’.
I don’t recall but it was an on a transit-related article so I have no reason to doubt it. After all, BART’s design is predicated on getting suburban workers into downtown SF.
And it was talking about commuting. folks coming into the city for shopping and entertainment typically do not leave home in the early hours.
The Peninsula has some NIMBY issues, I feel sure. But overall the city has too little housing for its workers, while the burbs are a net provider of homes for SF workers.
Welch rarely gets anything right but he makes one good point here i.e. that people in San Francisco want the city to remain exactly how it was on the day they arrived here.
He’s right. The roots of the regressive NIMBY movement are mired in a kind of cloying nostalgia not for a single, collective vision of what the city is, but rather highly idiosyncratic, individualistic and subjective views of how the city was when they arrived. Or, more likely, how they remember it as being through rose-tinted glasses.
This explains at a stroke the hopeless naivety and irrationality of many who have a knee-jerk resistance to any change. Any why policies never make people happy. It’s like trying to tell your grandparents that the good old days were really bad, which in many ways they were.
The fact is that SF hasn’t changed that much, except insofar as it has had to create a taxbase to sustain the highest per capita public spending of any major US city. SEIU opposes all this development while relying on it to fund their overly generous benefit packages. While the hippies who bought a home decades ago rely on gentrification to boost their RE valuations all while pretending to hate it.
Meanwhile the rest of us work hard to make sure the bills get paid and the lights stay on. And that involves progress, growth and development.
Ed Lee won a landslide mayoral election race running on a “build, Ed, build” platform. If you don’t want the voters to decide this, then whom? A few aging hippies who own SF RE?
“Meanwhile the rest of us work hard…”
Yes, putting up hundreds of posts per week on Mission Local is hard work. How can one man work so hard? Hats off to you, John: your model of hard work is one for all the loser-lefty-whiner-renters to emulate!
Not to mention all the extra calories spent pontificating, bombasting, hyperbolating, strawmanning, redherringing, ad homineming, and just general all round lying — all that hard work must keep you in really good shape.
It’s really too bad that you don’t devote the same kind of effort to writing about the topic as you to do launching personal attacks on those who do.
If taking risks and committing capital to provide housing for people isn’t hard and honorable work, then I do not know what is.
And I have never lied here. I have no need to.
“And I have never lied here. I have no need to.”
Two lies, right there.
TwoBeers, when all you have left is insults, everyone knows you have lost the debate.
Try contributing instead.