One, I don't think asking for some modest thought and compassion in the face of glib, facile plans is the exact problem SF has. But thanks for sharing your feelings so dramatically; I hope it was cathartic for you.
And two, I think things are working out reasonably well for SF. The US has a history of absolutely terrible attempts at grand redevelopment. Read up on our "urban renewal" waves, for example. San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy, and I think it would be monumentally dumb to let another bubble lead to big "solutions" to problems that are transitory.
If you and others would like to indulge that third-world dictator tendency to dramatic urban planning, might I suggest finding someplace else in the Bay Area? San Francisco is less than 1% of the land; there's no particular reason to do it here. Or, better, show us how it's done in, say, Texas, which has plenty of space to develop that nobody is currently occupying.
> San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy
If you think that then I have a bridge to sell you. A nice International Orange one.
SF is a hive of planning idiocy, from dumb height laws, to 1:1 parking requirements, to terrible permit application processes. It's practically a model for planning idiocy at this point.
You do realize that "that sort" restricts the meaning of "urban planning idiocy" to the kind I mentioned in the previous sentence, right?
Assuming you do, then I guess this is just more spleen venting. Anonymous spleen venting of course; I imagine you wouldn't act this way in person: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
I agree, and the maddening thing for me is that my fellow people in the tech industry so rarely say, "Why yes, we are the problem. What can we do about it?"
Thinking the tech industry is the problem is pretty much like saying you get a cold because you go out in cold weather.
It's not true, but it sounds right if you don't look too close.
The tech industry isn't the cause of anything but growth. Growth isn't bad. Growth is totally manageable. It's not like these issues magically showed up in the tech boom of the 90s - it just made them worse.
However what DID cause this: bad urban planning, lack of ability to change, being systemically unable to fix the housing issues over the last 40 years.
Plenty of places cope with growth periods better than SF, but SF doesn't want to cope with them: it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. It can't, but it's been trying for a long time and failing horribly.
This is not a new development. It's not a new problem. The solutions have been the same for a long time but no-one wants to change to fix them.
Growth isn't necessarily bad, but neither is it necessarily good. Some growth is manageable; some isn't.
It appears we both agree that rapid growth is a proximate cause of the problem, and the tech industry is the main cause of that rapid growth. Where we differ is that you think a bunch of other people should immediately change to accommodate you, while you simultaneously refuse to acknowledge their perspective, which is that their previous system was working well enough for them until tech people came along in overwhelming numbers. And that maybe they were perfectly happy with how things are, and feel no particular need to change to suit you.
The rest looks like dickish handwaving to me. If you'd like to just keep yelling at people, stop bugging me. If you'd like to have an actual discussion, then start behaving respectfully.
> Were you even in SF 15 years ago, when the .com bubble popped and housing prices returned to a degree of sanity?
IIRC, one of the notable things about SF in the .com burst was that housing prices did not drop significantly (as they did in outlying areas of the Bay Area), the rate of increase just dropped, as the people who still had good-baying SF jobs moved in from the peripheries and replaced the people who could no longer afford SF because they fell off the gravy train.
My recollection is that housing rental was in between.
It's worth noting that the dot-com bust hit tech hard, but didn't do anything to housing nationally. So it's hard to separate the effect of the dot-com bust with the housing bubble that was starting to inflate at the time. And thinking about who I know who bought property right after the bust, it was people who made money in the previous bubble, which would also have a masking effect.
And two, I think things are working out reasonably well for SF. The US has a history of absolutely terrible attempts at grand redevelopment. Read up on our "urban renewal" waves, for example. San Francisco has mostly avoided or repaired that sort of urban planning idiocy, and I think it would be monumentally dumb to let another bubble lead to big "solutions" to problems that are transitory.
If you and others would like to indulge that third-world dictator tendency to dramatic urban planning, might I suggest finding someplace else in the Bay Area? San Francisco is less than 1% of the land; there's no particular reason to do it here. Or, better, show us how it's done in, say, Texas, which has plenty of space to develop that nobody is currently occupying.