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sf is worse than comically mismanaged; to steal a quote from Philip Greenspun, watching san franciscans play at running a city is like watching a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off. We came from nyc and were astounded how bad muni is. Two people who very happily lived without cars were forced to buy one then two cars to live an adult life in sf. How are you supposed to get groceries, run errands, go to the gym, go to the library, etc etc on muni when every errand costs an additional 60 to 90 minutes because of muni. When we lived in Haight, we could bloody walk many places in the city faster than muni could take you there. Taxis, even to valencia at 23rd, just don't come. And muni is not only glacially slow [2], but it's fucking expensive as hell too:

   For every mile Muni runs a bus in this city, it spends 9.21; comparable 
   agencies nationwide pay between 0 and 3. For every mile Muni runs a 
   light-rail vehicle, it throws down 4.37; comparable rail services spend 
   between 2 and 2. [1]

So -- we pay the most and get the worst services. Plus, I've ridden public transport all over the world and never before sf had I regularly felt physically unsafe on public transport.

And the housing. Walk through the mission; while there's definitely beautiful victorians there's also a bunch of cheap shit, no more than two stories, thrown together for as little money as humanly possible in the 60s and 70s that we could tear down and replace with 10 story housing. And landlords are fucking amazing; we ended up in court with multiple lawyers because, for the low low price of $2200/mo, we expected the shower not to leak into our bed and the landlord not to steal electricity from our meter. When we lived in manhattan, people had landlord problems, but it wasn't par for the course. Here, amongst personal friends, roughly 40% have had just horrific landlord problems that ended up with police or court involvement.

And the schools. There's a reason parents are driven out; it's because you either pay for private school or move to the peninsula and get good public schools for your taxes.

[1] http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death-spira...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are...

I'm curious about something. Please note that I know nothing about urban planning or construction or anything like that.

Why doesn't San Francisco expand onto the ocean?

Many sea-locked cities around the world do that. For example, the Hong Kong International Airport was built on the ocean in its entirety [1]. Probably wasn't cheap, but shows that its doable.

I feel like San Francisco can do the same - or something similar at least.

Again though, I know nothing about this sort of thing, and I'm just asking to learn. :)

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_International_Airpor...

1. I assume you mean bay, and historically it has. All of the pink areas on this map: http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/ontheblock/2011/0... are landfill (The blue were marshes)

2. Why not more expansion? Huge environmental costs. A lot of the Bay has already been filled so many locals don't want to continue that route. Additionally, landfill is very expensive AND produces the least safe land for a building to be on during an earthquake (meaning building costs also increase).

There was also the Treasure Island project, but that fell through it looks like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island_development

I'm not a fan of SF's bizarre city politics and NIMBYism, but... where can more housing be built?

Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc. The dense parts of the city like the loin and nob hill are already pretty dense. In semi-dense neighborhoods like SoMa, Hayes Valley and the Mission existing renters have to be given the boot in order for new housing to be built. That actually happens, and the anti gentrification crowd protests being edged out by yuppies, because that is what is actually happening. I'm not sure where the city could put more high density housing.

Build up. The same way every other big city deals with this problem.

http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005...

Yeah, but where? That is what I'm asking.

Bayview. The Mission.

The tenderloin, soma, mission bay, dog patch, bayview. It's not like current buildings were built on empty lots.

Everywhere.

What about earthquakes? How expensive is it to build up in SF when you know that there's a 60% chance, in the next 30 years, of having an earthquake with minimum magnitude of 6.7?

Especially when a buynch of peolpe live on one of the faults, and a bunch of infrastructure goes over one of the faults.

(http://seismo.berkeley.edu/outreach/faq.html)

When you have the property values San Francisco has, even after all the earthquake protection needed, you'll still end up with positive ROI. If it is cost-effective to build 10 story complexes in Mission Bay - on landfull - I can't imagine it not being cost-effective to do the same on Potrero Hill - bedrock.

Isn't high-density earthquake-safe construction a solved problem? It's not like SF has no high-density properties.

Yes, Japan figured this out decades ago. SF NIMBYs just like to pretend it's impossible.

You talk to Japanese civil engineers and they tell you how to build earthquake-resistent tall buildings, which they have a lot of practice with.

From http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=863 , talking about the Kobe earthquake of 1995 (magnitude 7.2):

"Sixty percent of those who died were over 60 years old. The reason for this is that they were mainly the one who lived in the older houses that collapsed. Few people died in new homes. Nearly all the buildings that killed people were built before the enactment of modern building codes in the 1970s and 80s. Many newer buildings were badly damaged but they didn’t collapse."

"Kobe's modern buildings 'seemed to have performed very well,' a former Stanford engineering professor told Newsweek. 'There may have been one or two that have been damaged. But I haven't heard of any that fell.' Every building constructed according to the building codes established in 1981 was unscathed."

I bet there are many, many structures currently standing in SF that would be more earthquake-safe if they were replaced with taller, higher-capacity, but better-engineered modern buildings.

all I can say is, have you seen the existing housing stock in sf? It's not like that much of it is earthquake safe. And landlords have fought like hell to avoid retrofitting [1].

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/14/san-francisco-earth...

Tall buildings survive earthquakes better than low rise (odd but true) Though it does depend on ground in the area.

You really think that if we took the time to work out the square mileage of SOMA, The Mission, downtown, Potrero, and Bayview that the population per square mileage of those areas would be competitive with Manhattan? Anything close to it?

Hmm... I'm not sure I understand what you're asking regarding Manhattan. Do I think SF will ever be like Manhattan? No.

I was just wondering where new high density housing in SF could be built.

My point is that the areas where high-density residential construction would be least "damaging" to the feel of the city are not already very dense; the "dense" areas of San Francisco are sparse compared to other cities.

Brooklyn's probably a better example that won't elicit the 'ZOMG I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN MANHATTAN' response. Twice the density of SF and no heavens-darkening skyline.

Somewhat, but Manhattan is the more accurate example because of its geographic constraints.

I think the fact the constraints happen to be geographical is kind of moot. Brooklyn can't start assimilating the rest of Long Island any more than SF can start building octopus's gardens in the Bay or housing in Daly City.

It's not that Brooklyn would "assimilate" Long Island; gentrification always displaces people no matter what the geography is. The problem with San Francisco is that gentrification is made more painful by geographic constraints.

Moving from SF to Daly City is a big deal.

I guess I don't quite follow what the difference is. Moving from Williamsburg to Jamaica (Queens) is as big a deal, if not bigger.

But we've sort of tangented off, what I meant was 'Agree with you but Manhattan is such an outlier and so evocative that the mere mention of it kind of Godwinizes any argument you're actually trying to make. That I agree with.' That's all.

Moving to an entirely different city puts you into a different school system and often a different, disjoint public transportation system.

Which seems like a or as much of a function of administrative, rather than geographic boundaries so we're completing some sort of talmudic nerdgument circle here and I still don't quite understand why Manhattan is a better or even good example in a comparison with SF.

Thread depth 8 or so, though, call it a draw by mutual confusion?

True. But Brooklyn actually isn't that much more dense than the Mission (36k ppl/sq mile versus 29kppl/sq mile).

http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Mission-District-San-F... http://www.city-data.com/city/Brooklyn-New-York.html

Oh no doubt. And in this specific case, I think 'tptacek was wrong to list the Mission but at the end of the day, that's a nit and given that I likely can't accurately name one neighborhood in Chicago, it didn't really seem relevant to his overall argument.

You can look it up ... :]

People / km^2 (all numbers obviously very approximate, so I've just rounded to thousands):

    Manhattan lower-east-side 35000 pp/km^2
    Manhattan average         26000 pp/km^2
    Hong Kong kowloon         44000 pp/km^2
    Hong Kong island          16000 pp/km^2
    Hong Kong new territories  4000 pp/km^2
    Hong Kong average          6000 pp/km^2
    Tokyo 23-ku average*      14000 pp/km^2
    SF chinatown              29000 pp/km^2
    SF nob-hill               20000 pp/km^2
    SF mission-district       10000 pp/km^2
    SF SOMA                    5000 pp/km^2
    SF potrero-hill            2000 pp/km^2
    SF average                 7000 pp/km^2

* Tokyo population is very consistent; it's not particularly dense in terms of peak density compared to other places, but it retains the same medium-high density across an enormous area...

That's misleading. Hong Kong isn't a city; it's an area composed of multiple cities. Kowloon metro has a density of 43,000 pp/km^2, six times San Francisco's average, over twenty times the average in Potrero Hill.

That's why I gave figures for both overall average and focused central areas (not sure how you found that misleading)... :)

Density figures can be tricky, no matter what the area used, because what's useful for one purpose isn't useful for another. While average density over a large area doesn't accurately reflect living condition in smaller sub-areas, it is useful for other purposes ("is the city full yet?" :). Generally it's useful to have both large-area averages and focused figures for popular subareas, maps to indicate density distribution, etc.

[As I noted in my original comment, Tokyo is notable for the unusual consistency of its population distribution, at least within the central (but still large) 23-ku area.]

You put the aggregate for Hong Kong, which is a region and not a city, alongside the numbers for San Francisco, Tokyo, and Manhattan. Was the point I was making.

Er, sure, whatever. I don't know much about HK in particular, but official designations of "city" boundaries are often pretty arbitrary, and can be downright misleading (e.g. don't reflect the distribution of population/commerce/transportation), so I dunno exactly where to draw the line... When in doubt it seems better to include more information.

[Tokyo "the city" is much larger than HK "the region", but also includes enormous sparsely populated areas... and on a practical level, the entire Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama area is really just one humungous city, with a completely different shape than anything official... deciding where to draw the line is difficult, and depends a lot on what your end goal is.]

It wasn't a big deal either way, I'm just nerding out.

Would better public transit systems (clean and fast trains, with power and wifi, at a reasonable cost) help? You ship people in every morning.

> where can more housing be built?

>Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc.

You've answered your own question.

Well what I meant by that is that they are already privately owned on small lots.

Even if zoning permitted it, it wouldn't work to build a 20 unit apartment building in between two of these: http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/go8f670...

In order to build a denser apartment building, a developer would have to buy up whole blocks of these homes. Which means that clusters of home owners all have to agree to sell their property. Which seems unlikely to ever happen.

> They shouldn't be angry at techies, who, after all, are helping fund the city with their taxes.

That is a specious line of reasoning. What good is funding the city with taxes to the very inhabitants of the city who're forced to pay more for rent, or forced out because they can no longer afford to live in the city?

The way I see it, these techies, and these techy companies have a moral responsibility to use up their resources in trying to effect change on zoning laws, on improving transportation for the general public, etc.

Did you stop reading at the first line of my comment?

tptacek, I disagree with you that these tech companies are completely free of blame. They're not 100% blameworthy, but they're not 0% blameworthy either. I think burning google effigies is a good PR tactic in renewing, or dramatizing the issue in the public sphere to hopefully instigate needed action as concern zoning laws.

Most cities look at large-scale, high-salary employers as a good thing; they go out of their way to solicit them, because high-income employees consume fewer services while paying more into the system, and because those employees are extremely valuable to the local retail economy. Most cities would see techies as a good thing: they ride bikes, they buy expensive local coffee, they eat out all the time, they're statistically very unlikely to mug people or steal cars.

Why does San Francisco not see things that way?

I think I answered that question upthread, but you don't sound convinced.

A friend of mine who lives in San Francisco, when asked what he likes about living there, says "it's a postcard city". I agree, but allege that San Francisco is more interested in remaining a postcard than in being a city.

At the risk of going more off-topic, but nevertheless answering your question: I judge most things on how they affect people at large. Not just high-salary employers and employees usually from stable households, but normal people that make up the cities.

It is kind of a disgusting, spooky thing that we just cater to the well-doing, but ignore the folks who weren't afforded the same opportunities in their lives as the rest of us. It falls on us to level the playing field as much as we comfortably can, so they too can get good education, affordable homes, affordable food. Instead we're depriving them of that, we're displacing them from the homes they've been living in -- there's something very wrong there isn't there.

Generally speaking, improving the tax base of a city should improve education and health care. It doesn't in San Francisco because the city is mismanaged: it spends integer multiples per capita compared to other cities.

Meanwhile, housing is expensive in San Francisco because San Francisco makes it difficult to build high-density housing, which it badly needs, because unlike Chicago San Francisco can't grow "out".

When Wicker Park was gentrified in Chicago, residents got angry, but then they moved to adjoining neighborhoods. It's possible that many of them kept their kids in the same schools; virtually all of them kept their kids in the same school system. Chicago in 2013 could sustain at least 3 more waves of gentrification, waves that would turn Garfield Park into yuppie restaurant districts, without displacing residents outside of the city boundaries.

San Francisco can't do that. Where Chicago has Garfield Park, then Lawndale, then Austin, then a border with a suburb, San Francisco has cold brackish water. When a working class resident of San Francisco loses their apartment, there's a good chance they're not going to be able to remain in the city at all! That makes gentrification in San Francisco far more painful than it is in other cities.

There's a solution to this problem, which is to sacrifice some of the postcard beauty of Bayview and the Tenderloin to allow high-density housing. But for reasons other people have described on this thread, the residents of San Francisco are unwilling to do that. So they suffer, and then scapegoat.

Most cities look at large-scale, high-salary employers as a good thing; they go out of their way to solicit them, because high-income employees consume fewer services while paying more into the system, and because those employees are extremely valuable to the local retail economy. Most cities would see techies as a good thing: they ride bikes, they buy expensive local coffee, they eat out all the time, they're statistically very unlikely to mug people or steal cars.

I was in Austin recently and I definitely felt a much more positive energy out there than in California. At first, it was weird. "Wait, people here want people like us to move in?"

As an economic arrangement, homeownership is (IMO) a less-than-optimal one-- possibly better than renting but only because the government makes it so-- but it's good for civic virtue because when middle-class people can own houses, there's a focus on making the place better for everyone (since you're planning to be there for several years) rather than this zero-sum mentality you get in the coastal star cities.

Owners vs. renters is of course one of the defining class conflicts of San Francisco.

It's especially hilarious in New York, where purchase prices are now 40-50 years' worth of rent. At that level, buying is a terrible economic decision, unless you're doing it for prestige. People are that desperate to join the owning class, I guess.

Is there a generally accepted ratio where it becomes preferable to buy in NYC? You may find sales at 10- to 20-years' rent in the suburbs but I doubt it ever gets that low in Manhattan ever, even during the low points in the real estate cycle. So it seems buying here will always have some speculative component.

I agree that your point about building additional housing was dismissed, but I think the OP is curious as to how that plan would actually benefit the 'original' inhabitants of that area now, after they've moved out. Having lived in SF through both tech waves now, something tells me that if the mission were to implement dense housing, the first batch of people at bay to fill it up aren't going to be the same group of immigrants I remember from the 90's. Thus, is there any hope of friendly coexistence with a dense immigrant community, or are such populations now bound to be pushed into their new densely populated housing in the tenderloin or bayview? Creating more 'ghettos' feels a bit off to propose as a solution to me (not that the city doesn't have a history of it).