Hacker News Reader

Comment by eistrati | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting read, but also very sad. I think the local authorities in San Francisco are the ones that have to wake up and invest quickly into growing up the infrastructure to accommodate the influx of talent. Otherwise the exodus will hurt everyone and it's already happening (e.g. http://qz.com/627414/tech-workers-are-increasingly-looking-t...)

View on HN

The housing situation has been in the same state with the same dynamics for over 20 years even before the first bubble started in 2000.

The vast majority will simply never be able to afford a house there. The only way that could possibly be attempted would be to build massive condos everywhere like you see in some Asian cities. That would kill the character of SF. No one wants to have a huge condominium plunked down into there neighbourhood and I can't blame them.

I don't want to turn this into yet another housing debate. SF (and especially SV) is generally low density. You can easily double the density and you would be nowhere near Manhattanization.

Come to Switzerland. Four to five story apartment blocks everywhere; quiet, green, safe, underground parking everywhere, gorgeous and huge flats at reasonable prices, and despite having a pretty high population density it feels way less crowded than my old terrace in the UK.

Four to five story apartment blocks is what a large portion of SF is already. The peninsula is just very tiny and everyone wants to live there. The only large scale development that developers want to do is massive condos. Its a goldmine compared to anything more reasonable. Keep in mind this is in the USA the property developers here could give 2 craps about keeping the city an interesting and livable city.

Which is why you have zoning which is what people complain about. In addition, it's a lot easier in general to find a relatively undeveloped area and build high-rise condos there than increase the height of multiple blocks of an existing neighborhood by a few stories.

There are probably areas in the Bay where you could build some sort of tech worker arcology if you really wanted to do so and spend enough money. But I doubt people would really want to live there.

The other thing about the SF character that many don't talk about: the tech sector may be here to stay, or not, but tourism has been a large part of the SF economy for a century. Don't kill a long term industry by over building for another industry of uncertain longevity...

> The only way that could possibly be attempted would be to build massive condos everywhere

But that's exactly what they've done in the past, look at the rows and rows of houses that people live in now and are part of "the character" of SF

Row houses and small apartments are quite livable and make neighbourhoods that have green spaces and character. You have to factor in that property developers do not want to build that sort of housing unless they are restricted from building massive condos. So property developers would rather build small apartments and houses on virgin land in the suburbs where the land is cheap and they can cut corners. There is nothing stopping Developers from building modern apartments in SF. They are just to greedy to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com