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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Well, it kind of sucks that your options in the US are gentrification or Detroitification. It's part of the price we pay for not having the social safety nets and public investment in infrastructure that other countries have.

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In Canada, similar gentrification is also happening rapidly in Toronto/Vancouver. Detroitification happened on the Canadian east coast (when the fishing industry died). And we have better "social safety nets". I don't think social programs manage to keep cities alive or the same as they were, nor would the overall country benefit from trying harder to do so.

The main difference w/ Toronto vs SF is that Toronto has a liberal condo building policy so more affordable housing is being built by a (relatively) booming real estate industry. Whereas SF's property development growth has nowhere near reflected its population/income boom.

I can confirm this fact in Toronto.

I can still see some seniors living in older neighbourhoods in Toronto but most of them have moved to the suburbs.

I could be wrong here, but I thought much of SF is considered "historic district" or something, therefore new, more dense housing is not being build, thus rents rise like crazy?

You indeed are wrong. Thousands of units of high density housing is being constructed currently.

I don't think he's wrong. All of the new development seems to be along Market (hell in a one mile stretch of Market near my house, there are THREE huge residential developments going up); i.e., you don't see any new high-rise developments going up in the Mission district (which I believe is designated "historic").

And Atlantic Canadian cities are still great places to live because Canada has invested in social safety nets, sane urban development, and not abandoning entire cities. 'Detroitification' is a not-even-wrong way to describe how any population centre in Atlantic Canada has fared.

The Atlantic Canadian cities were never the size of places like Detroit, it's not a good comparison.

The problem in SF is there is no middle class or family housing being built. All these fancy new buildings going up are high margin 4k/mo rent and some percentage of section 8. There's nothing going up even in the range of 1800-2800 1 or 2BR places.

What would probably be reasonable is 1400/mo studio, 2000/mo 1BR, 2800/mo 2BR. What would be ideal is more like 1200/mo, 1700/mo, 2400/mo respectively. Yeah, that's still expensive, but it's a newer building and hopefully older buildings would be around 80% of that. But that's not going to happen.

Some additional policies like penalizing companies for letting new places be unrented for some amount of time, or allowing developers to (temporarily) displace SRO occupants while they demolish and rebuild higher density buildings in the Tenderloin could possibly help change behaviors towards increasing the supply of more modest housing, but that's not going to happen any time soon. In the meantime, the city is fine letting people do what they want at top as long as it benefits the people at the bottom, with no plans to do anything for people in between.

Those rent prices are not even available in places like San Jose (one example: http://www.equityapartments.com/california/san-francisco-bay...)

You can rent a pretty nice 2b duplex in Mountain View for 2.5k. 20 minute bike ride to Google.

Most of the 2 bdr units in Mountain View on Craigslist are well over 2500:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/pen?query=&zoomToPost...

And yet, the riots and looting sprees happen not in San Francisco, but in European countries like the UK, France, and Sweden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Stockholm_riots

Sweden. Not exactly a bastion of savage Randian individualism.

Not to say that generous welfare states are of no value, but the available data suggest they are far from a panacea

That's an inconvenient fact for the standard liberal wisdom to explain. Here's links to information about the French riots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France

and London riots/flash mobs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots

Here's an inconvenient fact: Headline-making civil unrest in Europe is "Tuesday" in the American inner city.

The European riots are only significant because they're unusual against such comparatively low levels of background violence.

That's a gross exaggeration. Until you show me a number of burned out hulks of cars from a "Tuesday" in a US city, it's your stereotypes against my actual examples.

I'd imagine the police having guns in America are a great deterrent for rioters

Although interestingly, both the London and Stockholm riots were caused by police shootings.

I'm curious to what you think the other options are?

Gentrification doesn't mean pushing all residents and culture out of a place - but it typically flows to areas with the least resistance (and location/ proximity).

So if you have an economically desolate area, and gentrification is at one end of the scale with 'detroitification' at the other - what is in the middle?

The whole point of this (and a hundred other) articles is that the US is losing its "middle."

Increasingly, you are either rich or poor. A have or a have not. Most HN readers are haves or (because you are still young) think you will be haves. But life doesn't always turn out according to plan.

I can't express how much I agree to this - but with a small addition: The "middle" is disappearing in Europe also.

The most worrying thing is that if you put 95% of the people on a ship's back, it's going to sink; together with its front.

Not so with an iceberg, unfortunately.

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