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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the pain is self-inflicted in San Francisco's case, from idiotic zoning. I'd day Chicago is a reasonably interesting place, interesting enough for 3 million people to live there, and our real estate is pretty affordable.

The problem with SF and NY is that the people living there are selfish and want to pull up the ladder behind them. They like their cute little low rise buildings and won't allow new high density housing to be built.

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An enemy of restrictive building codes is converted to an ally the moment the ink on the title is dry.

In fact, the person most harmed probably becomes the more ferocious defender of the zoning restrictions. Because they paid the highest prices, they stand to lose the most by voting away the restrictions that contributed to those astronomical prices.

Actually, this may be how policies like the mortgage deduction or prop 13 can get so entrenched. They may be unfair, but the only thing that seems even more unfair to new buyers is that the benefits would be taken away only after they've paid the heavy toll.

Possibly. I think part of it is cultural though. My wife grew up in a little Midwestern town with 2,000 people. It's got this perfect little 10x10 street grid, because the townspeople wanted to be prepared for when it became a bustling metropolis. I think some people see development as a source of pride, and others are more whimsical and see it as losing the character of the community. And I don't think the mix of those attitudes is uniform across the country.

We can fix it, though.

Eventually there will be enough tech workers able to vote in the city that we can push through changes to the zoning rules.

We just have to:

a) get to that point and

b) be politically engaged enough to actually go and do it.

The SOPA reaction has given me hope about b).

I've been taling with friends about organizing a voting bloc to get fellow tech workers in SF to vote on critical issues that affect our lives (rent control, zoning, homelessness, transit). Such an important part of the city's revenue base is virtually unrepresented in policy decisions.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED: shoot me an email at dan@dangrover.com and if there's enough interest, I'll try to coordinate a meeting/discussion!

I can only hope you're right. The history of the supes though is that they pander to the people who want to "conserve the rich history and diversity of the city". It sounds nice, but what it results in is paralysis and band-aids (for example in the provisions to grant building permits is to build "affordable" housing.) So the builders build million dollar condos (who only few can afford) and the below-market condos -who only the near destitute qualify for). That leaves most people competing for the few actually (non subsidized) affordable places, which due to pressures are the leftovers (substandard inventory -old, needing repairs, lousy areas, etc).

I have little respect and some disdain for the supes . They have driven the city's progress into the ground. Anywhere else, these policies would have driven the place into a Detroit West, but they get propped up the the surrounding valleys' wealth.

I could only wish the city was governed a bit like SJ --without the sprawl.

But do the tech workers actually want zoning changes?

If we stay in the grow-or-die culture that we've been in for the past 15 years, then the other option is to move. You can't grow if you can't hire, and you can't hire if your employees don't have any place to live.

I don't know if you can fix it, or at least not in the short term, no matter what kind of critical mass you get. Housing stock has a lifecycle of 50-100 years. Anti-development policies can create a "housing stock debt." In New York, which doesn't apply rent stabilization to any housing built since 1974, 60% of housing units are still rent-stabilized!

New York hasn't grown nearly as fast as San Francisco, so most of the existing housing stock is adequate.

Everybody has a price at which they'll sell, and as more people arrive wanting housing more property owners will get offers from developers that are too good to turn down.

This very ladder-pulling-up is written into law as rent controls. Although typically presented as a way to ensure that widows and orphans are not priced out by gentrification, rent control is actually a tax on 'people who have moved recently': landlords can and do get stuck with permanent tenants for decades who are now paying 20% of the market rate for their apartment, sometimes less than what it costs to even maintain the apartment. To compensate, they have to raise the rent as much as possible when a unit becomes available, to make up for the cost of carrying the far-below-market units with the permatenants. Anytime you move into or within San Francisco, you're subsidizing the people who haven't moved recently.

Bingo. See here: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... for more.

SF is on a peninsula and Manhattan's an island. Chicago is relatively low-rise as well, but there's a lot more land in back of it. I hate the SF planning process, but there's no question that the city's growth is partly constrained by geography.

Yes but over 1/3 of the city population is concentrated in the lakefront neighborhoods. Everywhere you look there are shiny, new condos and apartment buildings.

I am thinking of moving to the Chi and was surprised that rent is less than half of the average bay area price. A lot of craigslist ads even tell applicants that they require a check for eviction court as part of their deposit. In total contrast to SF's rent controls.

(1) Nobody calls it that.

(2) Definitely move here. Chicago is a fantastic city and the reason you don't hear about it more is that it's underrated.

If there's a kind of neighborhood you're interested in living in, I'm happy to help point you in the right direction. You should have no trouble finding a place.

Obviously you have several factors in play, and available land is one of them. But both SF and Manhattan would be cheaper than they now are if they had Chicago's more liberal attitude towards development, construction, and rent controls. Not as cheap as Chicago in the limiting case, but still cheaper. Indeed, even if SF had only New York's somewhat more draconian attitude towards development, it would be a lot cheaper than it is now. Rents in SF are comparable to Manhattan even though Manhattan has half the land area and twice the population.

SF's growth is limited far more by humans than it is by nature.

Seconded. Dogpatch east of 3rd is virtually uninhabited, and is a 15 minute walk from SoMa. Boggles the mind.

There is also the sunset which has good food, cheap rent, and the M, L, K and N to get you places.

But the issue here is there is nothing good in soma besides jobs. In the weekend, I don't want to go to soma. I want to go to Northbeach or the mission or the castro.

All that being said, I haven't lived in Dogpatch, so it could be fantastic.

Would you rather pay for transit twice a week or five times a week? And dogpatch is relatively nice, especially if you include Potrero Hill which is a short walk away.

Well, I don't commute to Soma but yeah, fair point. As I once was told, live where you work or where you play.

There's even semi-useful transit on 3rd!

That's a stretch :) taking the N back into the city is an exercise in rage suppression more often than not.

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