[incadenza]

I remember when I lived there everyone was so against the “manhattanization” of the city, so it was a big uproar every time a new building went in. I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable

[SllX]

A collective delusion that we can have our cake and eat it too.

In my early 20s I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable. Got a lot of proposals that essentially boiled down to “control who can live here, kick out everyone that doesn’t fit and cap the city’s population”. Don’t ask me how, I never got a straight answer whenever I pointed out the problems. People can express what they want, they can’t usually tell you how they would obtain it.

[bob33212]

Complainer: 'Homelessness is a mental health problem, they shouldn't be arrested for sleeping and shitting on the sidewalk.'

Me: 'Please go ahead and convince that homeless person to go to a Doctor's office, after you set up the appointment, and then follow up to make sure they take their medicine every day.'

Complainer: 'Well, that is the job of a social worker, not me'

Me: 'Are you going to go hire the social worker and let them know that they need to do this?'

Complainer: 'That is the government's job, not mine'

Answer: 'So you are going to vote for someone who says they will fix this, and that is about all you are going to do?'

Complainer: 'I'm very busy'

[devenblake]

> Homelessness is a mental health problem, they shouldn't be arrested for sleeping and shitting on the sidewalk.

Yes.

> Well, that is the job of a social worker, not me

Yes.

> That is the government's job, not mine

Yes.

>> So you are going to vote for someone who says they will fix this, and that is about all you are going to do?

Yes I will. I pay my taxes, it's not my fault the government wastes my money on the military and law enforcement. When there are candidates that pledge to fix this I donate to them and vote for them.

[sidlls]

You're attempting to mock someone for not personally taking on a problem of society. That's uncharitable to say the least.

[prepend]

I read it as mocking continuing to elect public officials who are not acting accountably to solve the problem.

SanFrancisco spends lots on homeless programs [0], more than almost every city, but they are ineffective. So government is failing at this problem.

[0] https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-home...

[sidlls]

No argument from me re: government failing. There are so many failures regarding housing and other issues up and down the bay area. It has got to the point where I question whether the rich culture that does exist is worth the quality of life trade.

[whimsicalism]

? This seems to be shoehorning some disagreement you had about homelessness into an unrelated discussion.

[TheCoelacanth]

You don't see the connection from homelessness to housing affordability and the connection from housing affordability to the illegality of building affordable housing?

[imtringued]

>In my early 20s I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable. Got a lot of proposals that essentially boiled down to “control who can live here, kick out everyone that doesn’t fit and cap the city’s population”.

At some point you have to ask yourself what problem is supposed to be solved if people come up with ideas like that. I mean, the reason why affordable housing is a problem is precisely because lack of it kicks out people, controls who can live there and caps the city's population.

So basically you have a person that wants the symptoms of unaffordable housing but also the virtue signalling that they "solved" the problem. Considering the entire state of California is following the path of San Francisco this is not an answer.

The reason why people come up with nonsensical things like "induced demand" is because the entire housing market of California is under a prisoners dilemma. Staying silent is building housing. Betraying the other is not building and coming up with random ideas to sweep the problem under the rug. Everyone is betraying each other so any specific city who ends up building will face the brunt of the population growth. Every city has to build for this to work and that means statewide reforms in California.

[SllX]

> At some point you have to ask yourself what problem is supposed to be solved if people come up with ideas like that.

You’re giving my friends too much credit. They just don’t like outsiders.

Most people, surprisingly, don’t take an engineering mindset to solving everything, nor do they want to, and even get offended if you do it too much. This past time of mine among many other things taught me that lesson the hard way.

[ricardobayes]

Another collective delusion is the overpopulation we are experiencing. And it's accelerating. 8 billion people now. Global population was 1.6 bil 100 years ago. Let that sink in. It is a massive problem because due to advertising and media every one of this 8 billion wants to live like a first world middle class person. It is not sustainable.

[prepend]

Check out how population growth rates level off as people get to “first world middle class person.”

[SllX]

5 days ago, not sure how I missed this one before.

So a few points on this:

1. Depends how you define overpopulation. Can we still feed all of us? Yes. Do we? No, because while we can easily grow enough food, 50% more than our current population at least, people still starve, just not due to lack of food in the world. I think when we get to the point that we’re seeing a mass die-off of humans because of resource exhaustion, you can start calling us overpopulated. This is not to discount the possibility that we may become overpopulated, but I don’t think we know where that threshold actually is yet.

2. That said, population does tend to level off once the people of a country are well off enough, and so some countries are facing population contractions. Even within countries which are technically growing, subsets of their populations have leveled off and part of the difference is being made up in immigration. We may never actually reach overpopulation if that trend continues.

3. This is the part I hate when discussing population concerns. Let’s throw away my arguments above that we are probably not overpopulated, and suppose you are right. Then what? Genocide? Eugenics? Voluntary societal suicide either directly or by mass scale vasectomy? Just do nothing until something gives?

Acceptance of the idea that there are too many people leads you down to a much more uncomfortable conversation.

Also: all of this is off-topic. San Francisco could support plenty more people. Both California and the United States grow enough food to be net exporters, and California specializes in cash crops. Doing so would require upzoning. Upzoning would lead to neighborhood change, and that’s really the thing San Franciscans are fighting against. Every single time the Earth’s population vs carrying capacity is brought up in the context of San Francisco’s seeming inability to build more homes, it is a distraction.

We could, but we make it as difficult and expensive as we can to keep people out because San Franciscans taken as a whole don’t like outsiders and don’t like change. We’re not the only populace or locality that doesn’t like these things, but we are some of the whiniest and most hypocritical.

[lightgreen]

> I never got a straight answer whenever I pointed out the problems

What are the problems?

[closeparen]

The main problem with "control who can live here" is that you would generally like children born in the place to be on the shortlist, but this would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Cities and states can't privilege natives over migrants.

Rent control and the heritability of Prop 13 are the best California can do to prioritize incumbents. They do work somewhat, but the next generation of natives is still as screwed as prospective migrants re: forming their own households in the place, at least while their parents are still alive.

[nitrogen]

Cities and states can't privilege natives over migrants.

This is causing huge problems in Utah right now. Great if you have a house (or condo/etc) you don't want, bad if you have a house you like because you might get taxed out of it, terrible if you want a house. Every house and condo has dozens of unconditional cash offers on day one.

[throwaway0a5e]

Every state that winds up being the target of affluent people fleeing a major urban area winds up with this problem.

It's really a shame that any evenly applied attempt to privilege existing residents (not necessarily property owners) runs into legal issue.

[codekansas]

Good, as it should be. The idea that you should get priority to live somewhere just because you were born there runs totally counter to America's founding principles. Building more housing to house more people and create more opportunity is the only morally conscionable way forward

[closeparen]

Every family on a quarter acre was not a sustainable plan anyway, I'm not sure how much of a "shame" it really is that the economics are crying out for more compact, walkable communities.

[lightgreen]

> this would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause

There's a lot of places where very few people can afford to live. Like Manhattan for example.

> Cities and states can't privilege natives over migrants.

If native own property they can continue living there as long as they wish.

[closeparen]

San Francisco would like housing to remain scarce but be allocated to its favorite people, who are quite distinct from those with the highest ability to pay. This part is best achieved by an immigration policy. But that’s not allowed, so they’re stuck with imperfect substitutes. We can protect our favorite people from displacement, but it’s harder to make homes that change hands flow to them vs. tech workers.

[Dracophoenix]

I'm sorry I don't follow this point. Who exactly are these "favorite people" exactly, and how does California expect these "favorite people" to, overlaps notwithstanding, compete with those with the highest ability to pay all while being able to keep the state budget in tact?

[kodah]

What are "favorite people"? I can't find any way to see this phrase in a positive light.

[jen20]

> If native own property they can continue living there as long as they wish.

Provided they can afford to pay the ever-rising property taxes. Your take may apply in some places, but it is certainly not universal.

[olliej]

Who gets to decide who is kicked out? at some point there will be a bunch of people born in the city who want to buy a house but can't but of the cap. You have to consider (and policies like this don't) what happens even if no one moves into the city. In that scenario the population will still rise, until it hits the cap, at which point people have to leave.

At that point where do they go? Presumably other cities will be allowed such caps so they can't move to those either.

Then there are historical population control tools like redlining, and racist applications of eminent domain used to remove "undesirable" (a euphemism for black) neighborhoods.

By placing a cap on population you ensure that the victims of that discrimination never have the opportunity to return to the places they used to live - and as an added bonus you get to claim that your policy isn't racist because it has no stated racial bias.

Say your rental lease is up, and the only place you can find to rent is Colma. Now you've left SF are you ever allowed to return. What if someone else moved into SF while you were away thus taking your position under the cap? Honestly if anything this possibly right here could easily cause rental and housing prices to go up even more.

Then there's SF's claim to be an open and welcoming multicultural city - you can't claim that well disallowing new residents, and so new cultures, from entering.

The only real way to reduce hoisin cost is to build more housing. Where and what type you build are the only actual questions that you need to answer.

[scotty79]

> what happens even if no one moves into the city. In that scenario the population will still rise, until it hits the cap, at which point people have to leave.

Don't we have birthrate below replacement levels?

[lightgreen]

> racist applications of eminent domain used to remove "undesirable" (a euphemism for black) neighborhoods

I'm sure white trash neighbourhoods were not welcome there as well.

Anyway, I'm not ready to continue conversation where everything is considered racist, sorry.

[klyrs]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/living/article/Anti-Asian-and-an...

Only, there are still racially restrictive covenants on many properties to this day. Yes, in San Francisco. Thankfully, they're unenforceable, but the evidence is writ large on the legal system. And no, they didn't forbid white people from living anywhere -- if you've got reams of evidence to contradict that, show it.

Deeper dive into the history:

https://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/system/tdf/haasinstitute_...

Frisco isn't special here, for example, Seattle's timeline (including these covenants still being on the books) is pretty much the same

https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants.htm

[olliej]

The Bay Area (the area this article is about) was heavily redlined, and almost all (maybe actually all?) uses of eminent domain for 580 and the MacArthur maze in the Bay Area were in predominantly black neighborhoods.

[Sebb767]

Not the OP, but the ones that come immediately to mind is that a) capping the population will reduce the market and therefore increase prices and b) if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich [0] one way or another, making the market even more competitive.

[0] Unless the place is not actually worth striving to live in, but in that case you probably don't have a rent price problem.

[lightgreen]

> reduce the market and therefore increase prices

Why is that a problem?

> if you start limiting the people, the ones remaining will most likely be the rich

Why is that a problem?

[dghlsakjg]

> Why is that a problem?

Shelter is one of the few goods which a society necessarily needs. The alternatives (being homeless) are unacceptable. People give up food, electricity and healthcare before they give up shelter.

It's fine at a micro scale (oceanfront is expensive, but a few blocks away is affordable), but causes incredible problems at a macro scale as the bay area demonstrates (people not able to live within 50+ miles of their support networks). It is VERY hard to uproot an entire life and move to an area where cost of living is lower, especially when you are poor. People in poverty form informal local support networks (neighbors watching kids, friends that can loan you $5 to top up your phone), making it that much harder to move to a lower cost area.

[TulliusCicero]

> Why is that a problem?

This is like asking why high prices for food or health care are problems.

It's a necessity of life, man. Do we really need to explain why basic necessities being very expensive is bad?

[Sebb767]

> Why is that a problem?

The grand-grandparent stated:

> I enjoyed challenging my friends on what they would do to make the city more affordable.

So, when the solution results in increased pricing, his challenge was inherently failed.

[milkytron]

> to make the city more affordable

It doesn't achieve the goal, in fact further distances it.

[SllX]

What’s the problem with:

1. Picking who is worthy of living in San Francisco as determined by the City and County of San Francisco

2. Removing current residents that don’t fit the criteria

And 3. Controlling who may then migrate in?

You tell me, Ford. You tell me. I have faith that you can do it. I’ll give you exactly one hint: San Francisco is not a country.

[lightgreen]

> 1. Picking who is worthy of living in San Francisco as determined by the City and County of San Francisco

No it is decided by the free market.

> 2. Removing current residents that don’t fit the criteria

Only those who rent. People who own property can continue to live there as long as they wish.

[SllX]

I think you’re misunderstanding my original post, and thus presenting an argument you want to make in an incomplete and easily misunderstood manner.

I apologize for the sarcasm in light of this. Cheers!

[kar5pt]

How are you going to keep people out of the city without raising prices? Also how is that fair to people who didn't have the privilege of being born in a nice city?

[scotty79]

The problem of that solution is that the person proposing such solution lands on the list of people to kick out.

Then suddenly it's not a good solution for him anymore.

[nunez]

i.e. basically an affluent suburb

[voidfunc]

> I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable.

It is easy, there is no absolutely no desire to keep housing "affordable" by anyone that owns property in SF.

This is a problem through the US. Property owners vote and do things that are in their favor while renters and people that are trying to enter the market scream it is too expensive.

[throwaway0a5e]

There are plenty of property owners who want housing to remain dirt cheap so that the kind of people who need dirt cheap housing stick around and the kind of people who don't need dirt cheap housing don't show up and bring their zoning and their bylaws and their opinions with them.

[smabie]

Current renters are part of the problem too: they lobby for rent control. The people who are really fucked are people who want to move to a city and rent or buy.

[joshuamorton]

You can do both. Manhattanization is perhaps bad, but low-mid rise, Brooklynization or Barcelonazation or even Missionization of more of the city would help vastly. The highest population density parts of SF are Mission and Haight and similar midrise mixed use areas, they're significantly denser (50-100% more) than Richmond and Sunset.

Imagine fitting an extra 100K people without adding any buildings higher than 3 stories.

[majormajor]

Manhattan is hardly affordable. Development alone is hardly an answer for affordability. Most development projects in the US are designed to increase growth and demand, not to decrease price. Increased growth and demand actively work against affordability, so if your development is contributing to increased demand as much as it is to supply, it's not helping.

It's like how building wider freeways doesn't solve traffic. Demand is not independent of what has been built.

[wahern]

Induced demand is predicated on the consumer not having to internalize the costs, which is the case for the poster child of induced demand--non-toll, public freeways.

The problem in the Bay Area isn't induced demand, almost by definition. Rather, the demand already exists, and that's precisely why costs keep skyrocketing despite very low supply growth. The only way out of the situation other than by increasing supply is to cut demand to live there by, e.g., bombing tech headquarters and unleashing roving bands of human culling robots so that people would have less motivation to move here.

An example of actual induced demand in the Bay Area might be homeless housing in San Francisco. Since circa 2005 SF has built enough units of homeless housing to house every homeless person enumerated in the circa 2005 homeless census. But the number of homeless on the street has stayed the same--which is to say, the total number of homeless has approximately doubled since that time, w/ half now living in city-built housing. Arguably this suggests that there may be something like a set carrying capacity of unsheltered homeless in the city, and no matter how many units of housing you provide, you'll always have that number of homeless on the streets.[1] Though, this is obviously just a conjecture. People argue vociferously about the origins and motivations of the homeless in SF. I certainly won't claim to have any concrete answers. But at least such a conjectured phenomenon would be consonant w/ the theory of induced demand.

[1] To be clear, the induced demand in this scenario is demand for the free housing units, not spots on the sidewalk.

[majormajor]

> Rather, the demand already exists, and that's precisely why costs keep skyrocketing despite very low supply growth.

If the costs are skyrocketing doesn't that mean demand has been going up, not that it already existed at these levels?

How many more tech offices are in SF now than fifteen years ago? Has the city's commercial growth policies been considering in sync with their residential growth policies? Or have they let the one fan the flames of the other? They should've preemptively bombed the tech headquarters, to tweak your suggestion. ;)

But my money says that even if they had unleashed a bunch more residential construction fifteen years ago, it would've only been accompanied by even more business and commercial growth. Coastal hub cities have a fundamental demand aspect with how cheap cross-country (or even global) travel is these days - there is a lot of built-in appeal that's going to attract people there, even if only for second homes or investment housing, etc, and keep a lot of pressure on the price floor.

[wahern]

I'm sure demand has also been going up, though I don't know how to disentangle that from inflationary effects--same number of people wanting to live here, but w/ access to more wealth. In any event, it only drives home the point that the relationship between demand, supply, and price isn't something you can just will away, like an alternate universe Jane Jacobs applying Marxist economics.

AFAIU, San Francisco has built more market and non-market housing than any other city in the Bay Area, despite being geographically quite small. Unfortunately, that's a relatively low bar in the context of the Bay Area considering so many cities just refuse to up-zone anything, or approve projects in up-zoned areas.

[olliej]

I disagree here as I've seen numerous examples of autonomous robots blocking sidewalks and crossings such that people with disabilities are unable to pass. Also who gets to win the contract? Are they using locally made small batch robots? If not, why not?

Have we consider the use of organic cullers instead?

[wisty]

You're talking about "induced demand". Induced demand is not so high for housing. I might decide to drive 15 minutes to get a hotdog from Costco is the traffic isn't too awful. I probably won't buy an extra house just because it looks like a better deal than before. It does exist to some extent, but it's nowhere near as big a deal as for roads (at least in the short-medium term), at least I think that's the currently thinking on it - https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper25811.ht...

[majormajor]

It's not induced demand through increased housing stock, it's city development that becomes a cycle of residential/commercial/business development (or all-in-one mixed development), all of which have feedback loops into each other.

Simply going for growth-at-all-costs gets you a more crowded but still expensive city. That may be better for the people running the cities and their budgets, but it's not clear to me it's better for anyone else than having things spread out to more places across the state or country.

[kelp]

Sprawl is probably worse for the environment overall. More driving, more land taken over. More density also reduces that.

[moultano]

NYC has one of the lowest rates of housing starts per capita in the US.

[majormajor]

So density alone is not the answer, only ever-increasing density would be?

That seems an insanely dystopian outcome.

[akvadrako]

I think it's been tried and what you get is Tokyo. I wouldn't say dystopian but it's also one of the most expensive cities in the world. Apparently the average apartment is about $2000/month.

[pochamago]

That's the average price for a two bedroom apartment. You can easily find much cheaper options, the average one room apartment in Adachi ward is nearly a quarter of that.

Edit: Just for comparison, the average two bedroom in San Francisco is $3500, and that's down $1000 from last year

[imtringued]

Tokyo is very big. If the only apartments you can find are that expensive then you either want to live in a certain ward or you aren't looking hard enough.

[akvadrako]

I said it's the average price, obviously about half are cheaper.

[moultano]

If the price will bear it that means people want to live there more than elsewhere. Don't impose your idea of dystopia on other people.

[vmception]

I listened to everything that people told me they miss about San Francisco

and they are absolutely correct that this gentrifying transplant (aka anybody that signs a new lease, shrug) would find San Francisco unappealing

I mean I find it unappealing now too, but would have found it more so unappealing

Every single currently desirable neighborhood was an undesirable neighborhood within the last 30 years. "But the culture and the artists are gone" yeah, so is a gigantic abandoned highway through Hayes Valley replaced by ice cream shops eeeeeverywhere. There isn't a coherent consensus, just angst.

[asveikau]

> Every single currently desirable neighborhood was an undesirable neighborhood within the last 30 years.

This kind of thing is true of many (most?) cities in the US.

(Well, I don't know about every desirable neighborhood. Pacific Heights is going to be nice on either side of 30 years.)

[vmception]

Sort of but the other US cities aren’t longing for a worse iteration of the city while simultaneously blaming the last decade or two on a 100-year long pricing trend but acting like its recent

[dghlsakjg]

There was a period after forced integration/busing, and the advent of suburbs where housing in cities was very much not a sure thing upward trend like it is now.

If you go to a lot of cities in between coasts the revitalization of downtown areas is most definitely a "last decade or two" trend.

[asveikau]

I think the thinking about American cities in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s was pretty different.

Remember that New York nearly went bankrupt in the 70s. Then the crack epidemic in the 80s. Crime was much worse and cities were seen as undesirable.

[lotsofpulp]

> I never quite understood how to square that view with the desire to keep housing affordable

It’s more of a desire to “keep housing affordable [for me without decreasing quality of life by attracting more people]”.

[olliej]

I'd argue it's more "keep housing affordable without reducing the value of my home".

I recall seeing some article in which people were arguing that a council relaxing zoning laws to make more/cheaper housing possible was a "government taking" as it would reduce the value of their homes. Unfortunately I don't recall where/when so I can't guarantee it's not my mind merging unrelated stories.

Or (because it's insane) the onion :D

[imtringued]

It's quite selfish because there is a savings glut. Lots of reasons why people cut consumption but those savings have to go somewhere and this leads to low interest rates which then fuel the housing market. If the housing market crashes but the savings glut doesn't disappear then the housing market will recover within a year. If you did the obvious thing, namely building more housing then some of that money would have a place to go instead of just driving up the prices of existing houses.

[phendrenad2]

It's simple, the people who are against "manhattanization" do NOT want to keep housing affordable.

[closeparen]

This is "de-manhattanization" - as buildings reach end of life they will have to be replaced by more suburban forms, in 100 years San Francisco will have turned into Palo Alto.

[ruined]

housing isn't affordable in manhattan either so

[jedberg]

Because building up isn't actually any cheaper. As the building gets taller, the construction costs go up per sq foot, not down, and so does ongoing maintenance.

[smabie]

I mean, you build a building as tall as necessary to maximize the total return of selling or renting. Saying that it costs more per sq ft to build each additional story is kind of missing the point.

[imajoredinecon]

Rent controls!

[aaronbrethorst]

I assume this is meant to be read in the same tone as "The Aristocrats!"

[ralusek]

That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery, in addition to all sorts of perverse incentives/disincentives for landlords and tenants alike, rather than a place where the people who are most willing/able to pay to live there are the ones that do. Rent control is one of the worst solutions to any problem.

[majormajor]

> That just turns the city into a firt-come-first-serve lottery

That's how property ownership works, after all. Extending the same benefits to renters has a lot of obvious appeal even if it does nothing to fix overall price increase trends.

[ralusek]

No it's not. If I walk into SF with 2 million dollars, there are more than a few people who would give up their 1 million dollar house for that amount of money. My desire and means to live there would just have to exceed their own.

If someone is in a rent-controlled situation, they were simply lucky to get there first, and there is no mechanism in place for anybody else to rotate into that position.

[kar5pt]

Yeah, property _ownership_ not property renting. They work differently for a reason. When housing prices rise, owners are incentivized to sell. When rents rise on rent controlled buildings, renters are incentived to stay put, even if they don't need the space. This incentivizes building owners to not maintain the buildings since they know renters won't leave anyway.

There's tons of ways to make housing affordable without resorting to policies that have been rejected almost unanimously by economists.

[umeshunni]

I hope you're being sarcastic.

[imajoredinecon]

I was! Looking at the reception, the single exclamation mark evidently wasn't quite enough to connote that. Ah well.

[vineyardmike]

I'll give you a direct answer that no one wants to say, but disclosure, I no longer live in SF due to work. I also don't own land or have a financial incentive to have high prices.

TLDR: I would rather have SF as it is now (because i like it now and dislike change) than an affordable SF. "Manhattanization" is worse than the attempt of keeping it affordable.

I would rather (to a limit) have an expensive SF than an SF that has more people in it. The manhattanization is not likely to drive down prices significantly. I read a article (cant find source) that said there would need to be ~4x the number of rental units in the city before prices fell meaningfully due to supply/demand. Even if the actual number isn't true, demand is so high that i don't believe any achievable increase in housing would help at any meaningful way.

If you accept the premise that prices won't go down (this is an assumption of course), you need to consider if more people would be better. Of course more people can enjoy it, and that is good, but here is why i think it will make the city a worse city:

SF is great in many ways. There are so many parks, all so close together so its very fun and walkable. So many restaurants and shops all so close. Walking SF is a joy compared to many cities, where most of SF is great for walking while some cities only have a few neighborhoods that are great for walking. This is my opinion on SF, not all agree.

The "manhattanization" of SF would destroy some of that by changing the "street view" details of the city. Sure, its just more people and likely no fewer "things", but bigger facades that change less "per foot" are more boring - bigger buildings tend to have fewer doors and things per foot of sidewalk frontage. Not universally true, but often true. Also, SF has some great historic architecture, and that would get lost as new building destroy the existing "feel" of a neighborhood. Some neighborhoods this would be good, but some are great how they are, and new buildings should improve not deteriorate the beauty of the city.

[kelp]

I have some understanding of your view. However, it often makes me think of living in a museum. Wanting to make the whole city like a museum.

But museums are full of dead things.

[vineyardmike]

Sure, i agree. Not everything needs to be saved, but some things should be. We have museums full of modern art, and museums with 4k year old Egyptian stuff. Often the same museum.

I think i may have overstate the "save the old". Its not just about age, although we should save nice things that are old. Its primarily that "big" buildings (new or old) tend to be less human-scale than smaller ones (new or old).

[webdood90]

There is not a better example of a NIMBY than this

[vineyardmike]

Look, just being honest. Yes, that's exactly what it is. Many people just don't want to admit it.

[incadenza]

I hear you. I get where people are coming from in a general sense. On the other hand, it strikes me as a kind of provincialism. I feel like the same argument could have been made in 1930s San Francisco: “ok everybody, time to hit the pause button, I like it here now!” But on the other hand people should have a say in what their cities are like and how they develop.

[imtringued]

If you want a city for enjoyment then realize that this is something only the rich can afford. The poor don't have enough money to afford an increasing level of luxury.

Ok, but this requires governments to build competitive cities where the less well off can thrive. The way California is going is that literally every city is thinking the exact same thing you just said. There is nowhere to go.

[jariel]

How is it remotely hard to understand that someone doesn't want their neighbhourhood and greater neighbourhood plowed into the ground and replaced with skyscrapers?

They can disagree about it sure, but it should't be remotely hard to 'understand'.

America is a very large places, there are tons of places for people to build out and build up if that's a primary issue.

The most vertical city in the US - NYC - is one of the least affordable.

In fact - the 'most dense' places tend to be the least affordable, paradoxically.

So even in the event affordability becomes a primary concern, even then the answers may not be more obvious.

More than likely getting different companies to move to adjacent areas might be a more suitable problem to the affordability crisis.

Surely Morgan Hill, Pleasanton, Fremont or Santa Rosa could equally opt to 'build up'.

[imtringued]

Yes, San Francisco is a perfect city, it shouldn't change because it was already perfect in 2020 and by keeping it that way it will stay perfect in 2120. Anything you do will only make it worse.

[jariel]

People can chose to manage their communities as they wish, if you're not a resident, it's basically none of your business.

If SF residents want to knock down homes to build parks, or build skyscrapers, all the power to them.