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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

When I got to visit SF, it was a lovely, magical city and it inspired me to buy $300 worth of books related to my interest in someday becoming a city planner (or something similar).

The problem is I can't possibly afford to live there. If you can live there, cool. For many people, it's just too expensive to make it into a nice experience.

All those restaurants nearby are only cool if you can afford the high cost of housing and have enough money leftover to still eat at restaurants without worrying that you are cutting your own throat in terms of retirement savings or something.

In short, it's great if you are wealthy enough. It's not for most other people, even if they find parts of it enchanting.

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I feel the biggest city planning lesson you can learn from SF is don't end up like SF where prop 13 keeps big parking lots in the middle of downtown unreasonably cheap, while NIMBYs are empowered to stall new apartments for years/decades.

This was a lot of years ago. Probably 19.5 years ago.

I left California more than 2.5 years ago. I don't plan to return to it.

Those things are great and also why I love SF. The problem is as I’ve gotten into my mid-late 30s those things I enjoyed in my 20s aren’t as magical as they used to be.

Most of this has to do with settling down and thinking more about a family than myself and career. My body also can’t recover from those nights in SF as well as I get older.

SF is a Peter Pan city though, you can stay young there forever and do fine. I know people who still go to the same bars and hang out with the same crowd they did a decade ago.

Curious, what books did you buy? I’ve been getting interested in this sort of thing lately.

I bought some book that was a bunch of excerpts from classic urban planning works. I bought a book called "Seeing like the state." I bought a book about the Clemente Course in Humanities (there is a website for this these days).

I no doubt bought other stuff. I also enjoyed "How buildings learn" but I don't think I bought it that day.

I run r/CitizenPlanners and there are some links there to videos and what not.

For anyone interested, Scott Alexander wrote a longish review of Seeing Like A State: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...

Personally I found the book a bit long and repetitive: although the examples were varied, each was used to restate the same basic point. But that may be my own problem. After all, if you're trying to support a generalisation using case studies, it's not enough to breeze through one or two and assure the reader that others exist; you need to go into detail about as many as you reasonably can.

If interested in urbanization and the particular problems SF is running into today, I would highly recommend Progress & Poverty by Henry George. Fairly dense at first but it lightens up.

It was written in SF post-gold rush to answer the question of why the obscene wealth generated by the gold rush resulted in abysmal quality of life and skyrocketing inequality in SF. Sadly relevant these days.

Seconded, if you get inspired you can also visit /r/georgism

Check out 'Order without Design' if interested in urban planning.

Also depends on when you started renting. I know people paying $700 a month in SF for a one bedroom but they moved here over a decade ago.

Also people who bought houses long ago pay almost no property tax. Prop 13 is rent control for landowners.

SF is a good place to be if you got in sooner than later.

Just like a Ponzi scheme!

If the number of renters exceeds owners statewide [0], Prop 13 will become a victim of it's own success. It helped existing homeowners stay in place so well that growth that otherwise would've occurred did not, and the minority of remaining homeowners will lose their property tax benefits.

[0]: There's a slight tilt towards owners (54%). If property prices continue to become less affordable, it seems reasonable there will be less owners in the future. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/california#housing

The good thing for homeowners is that renters don't vote. On top of that - many renters are also ineligible to vote in CA. (Cause no citizenship)

If prop 13 were to die, you'd think it'd be this year with all the budget problems coming up. It won't though. Politicians would face a mass exodus even if they kept in an exception for primary homes/business-locations. There's no way they'd all stay in office.

There actually is a measure on the ballot to modify prop 13 this year: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Tax_on_Commercial_and_Ind... — as you said, this is the year for it to pass.

I wonder if this will have any effect on housing. As it stands, it seems like this will do nothing and only affect commercial real estate. So, likely, a lot of small businesses that have held the property for decades will close shop. I expect to see a lot of expensive commercial real estate be vacant for years if this passes.

> I expect to see a lot of expensive commercial real estate be vacant for years if this passes.

It'll be much more expensive to hold commercial real estate without it yielding income, so it should reduce the commercial vacancy rate.

It’s a good first step. The effect should be to make property tax for commercial/industrial property much fairer between entities who bought the properties decades ago vs. those who bought recently.

This can (a) raise a whole lot of revenue, relieving local/state budgets so they can hopefully stop needing as many stupid short-term workarounds which have proliferated the past few decades, and (b) allow future commercial property taxes for newly purchased commercial properties to be lower than they otherwise would be, encouraging more turnover, especially for underused properties.

The obvious follow-up would be to also change the law for residential properties owned by large-scale landowners (say, companies which own large apartment complexes or dozens of homes).

> If prop 13 were to die, you'd think it'd be this year with all the budget problems coming up. It won't though. Politicians would face a mass exodus even if they kept in an exception for primary homes/business-locations. There's no way they'd all stay in office.

Prop 13 is a voter-passed Constitutional Amendment and, therefore, can only be repealed by the voters. So, the politicians that would be voted out for repealing it are...the voters.

People who rent, can't vote in the US??

No, I think op is asserting there's a correlation that renters vote less than owners

Many renters in CA are also not US citizens.

It must have been well over a decade ago. When I was looking in 2011, an average 1 bedroom was $2200.

I know people who have moved here a decade ago and they are paying 1600$ for a small one bedroom apartment in SOMA. For 700$ it must have been the tiniest of studios.

I just moved out of SF. I was paying $1600/month for 24 sq meters studio in the Tenderloin with no kitchen. My next neighbor was paying under $300, having moved into the building in the 80s with a starting rent of $85/month.

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