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Comment by teacup50 | Hacker News Reader

Seeking to maintain a balanced economy, culture, and community isn't "class warfare"; it's just city planning with a view beyond the next MVP.

You can never build enough housing in a high-demand city without destroying the city; the demand is too elastic, the incentives between neighborhoods/culture and developers too misaligned.

San Francisco's problem is in the externalities levied by the immature VC-valley monoculture; significant increases in market rate housing density bring corresponding increases in the societal/cultural problems underlying this issue.

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Sorry -- define "destroying the city", please, because my understanding is that cities are made of people, not buildings, and not building any new housing tends to prioritize buildings over people.

From where I'm standing, the neighborhood groups preventing any new housing from getting built are the ones destroying the city.

Housing density is only one attribute of a city; livability, open space, affordability, diversity, culture, safety, community -- these are often just as important to the people living in a city, and development doesn't occur in isolation from those issues.

Livability, affordabilty, diversity, culture and community are all adversely impacted when the housing supply is artificially constrained the way it is in San Francisco, and the notion that, for instance, building marginally taller buildings, or legalizing the construction of backyard cottages, is going to have even the slightest impact on open space is absolute nonsense.

There was a neighborhood meeting this week about building over 1,000 units of affordable housing on what is now a parking lot, and the majority of current neighbors expressed a preference for the parking lot. Please, convince me that a massive slab of asphalt is better for San Francisco than making room for 1,000 new working class neighbors.

Perhaps they are homeowners, who want the housing crisis to stay terrible because it keeps their property values high.

Indeed!

"The neighborhood is mostly single family homes, and the people there are very resistant to the idea of “renters” (the code word they use for poor people) living in the neighborhood."

http://sfbarf.tumblr.com/post/116593748570/balboa-reservoir-...

The people that live in a place shouldn't have a say in its future?

There is something of a difference between a neighborhood having a say in its future and a neighborhood having a dictatorial stranglehold on all changes within its bounds. Does the rest of the city have no say? The county? The state? The country?

Would you be OK with this principle if a white neighborhood wanted to enforce a "no black or brown people" rule? How about a "straight people only" rule? How about "no poor people"? This isn't a purely abstract question, but an actual question that has arisen repeatedly in the history of the US. Sunset Towns have been real things.

It's an absolutely silly question; there's a clear difference between zoning rules based on land use, and zoning rules based on discrimination against a protected class.

OK. Let's try again, without the silliness. This is a serious question that requires a serious answer.

There is a difference between a neighborhood having a say in its future and a neighborhood having a dictatorial stranglehold on all changes within its bounds. Does the rest of the city have no say? The county? The state? The country?

Do you think it's OK for a city to tell a neighborhood that they need to accept a certain set of non-discriminatory zoning rules based on land use, even if it's not what the people there want?

> Do you think it's OK for a city to tell a neighborhood that they need to accept a certain set of non-discriminatory zoning rules based on land use, even if it's not what the people there want?

Residents answer to their neighborhood, neighborhoods answer to their district, districts answer to the city, state, and so on.

How to respect individuals, communities, and a plan for the future across all of those lines of responsibility isn't answerable with a simple "yes" or "no"; however, the onus should be on the individuals requesting the change to 1) justify its necessity and value, 2) quantify its cost to existing residents, and 3) recommend mechanisms for remediation or renumeration for externalities imposed upon the local residents by whatever project is imposed upon them to the benefit of the broader populace.

In other words, you don't believe a neighborhood has an absolute dictatorial right to control all changes within its borders. Thank you for your in-principle agreement!

More details on the parking lot: http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/05/08/at_balboa_reservoir...

I think Curbed is being really hard on the narrow streets proposal. City streets in America, and especially in bike-friendly places like the Bay Area, are absurdly wide. We would have much more livable cities without them.

I couldn't agree more. The most magical neighborhoods I've ever seen have had narrow streets that cater to pedestrians first and cars, like, fourth.

http://www.venere.com/blog/images/positano-streets-amalfi-co...

http://www.china-tour.cn/images/Lijiang/Lijiang-Nightlife.jp...

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5159/5889050432_4f8d86e07f_b.j...

Those places all look to have been built way before the automobile was a thing. And while I agree with narrow streets, because they're safer and more aesthetically pleasing etc, you can't ignore that transforming to that design will be a little disruptive in the near term.

My point is that some of the great and beautiful narrow cobble stone streets in, say, Boston or Philly, to use US examples, weren't built to handle heavy street traffic. Transforming high volume automobile streets to the walkable ideal is inevitably going to cause some headaches.

The automobile is rapidly becoming less and less of "a thing", especially in the Bay Area, and cities should get out in front of it.

>You can never build enough housing in a high-demand city without destroying the city;

Out of all the places and times and people who've talked of building more housing as destroying the city, most of them were just rich, white landowners who didn't want immigrants, minorities, and jobseekers ruining their views.

I'm not saying you're any such person, but your position is objectively furthering the interests of rent-seeking landowners as the expense of the marginalized and the exploited. Real equality can proceed only when housing is available as close to construction cost as possible, or better yet, cheap as free.

It's insane to think there's a "right" to live wherever you want.

I live somewhere that's 1) expensive, 2) low-density.

The expense is because the low density makes this a nice place to live; more people want to live here than can fit here.

If we simply allowed development to meet demand, then this place wouldn't be a nice place to live anymore.

The solution is to pay a living wage such that everyone that works here can afford to live here. The solution isn't to socialize housing.

How does your plan address the problem that there isn't enough housing here for all the people who work here to live here? Are you assuming that if there are living wages all around, that there will be enough construction?

Or do you expect people to just live somewhere else nearby?

Supply/demand. If there's not enough housing, companies will either need to pay more, people would need to commute farther, or people will need to choose other cities.

What do you think happens when many cities adopt the same approach? Fix supply, increase incomes, and let markets take over?

Have you considered the possibility of region-wide consequences when supply and demand set in, companies pay better, people commute farther, and live in other cities too?

Austin and Toronto are both desirable world class cities that allow homes to be built for people. Neither of them seem to have been "destroyed". Having affordable housing allows community and culture to be preserved and built on.

Austin and Toronto are 250 square miles. Every time I go back to Austin, everyone is whining about how expensive it is and how bad the music scene has gotten, while half of them want to turn 6th Street into a kid friendly zone.

SF is maybe 35 square miles, once you take out the parks.

Why don't we build new housing in Palo Alto? Or better yet, rezone Stanford or Atherton?

I guess affluent monocultures must be protected.

You can't get housing built in SF, Palo Alto or Atherton for the exact same reason. Using one as a reason to oppose housing in the other is a red herring.

Why don't we build more housing in all those places?

Atherton is about as conservative as it gets. They're the reason BART doesn't run through the peninsula.

> You can never build enough housing in a high-demand city without destroying the city; the demand is too elastic, the incentives between neighborhoods/culture and developers too misaligned.

Come on. Say what you mean. You don't want things to change, because then things would be different and you'd have to have Those People in your wonderful inclusive life.

And that would be bad. So down with inclusiveness!

In many places, yes, density would objectively and significantly decrease the quality of life of all existing residents, and that would be bad.

Fortunately for us all, precious few of those places are in the Bay. The vast majority of San Francisco can't even be reasonably called mid-rise neighborhoods.

But let's not get caught up in that yet. In what way would density "objectively and significantly decrease the quality of life of all existing residents"? From your phrasing, you clearly have solid evidence and objective metrics for your rather strong claim about both significance and universality.

Demand is pretty inelastic when the alternative is being homeless.

Seriously, housing is one of the least elastic markets out there. Everyone needs exactly one home, everything else is secondary.

No, the alternative is living somewhere else. This is obvious to anyone that has watched the rental and housing market in a city across economic boom/bust cycles:

- Bust: Demand dries up from the beleaguered economic sector (e.g., tech in SF after .com crash, finance in NYC post-housing bubble crash). Prices drop. Demand rises, fast, with residents moving in from the boroughs/suburbs.

- Boom: Demand is extremely high from the booming economic sector. Prices increase to match, unmet demand drops as those outside the boom sector move out to the boroughs/suburbs.

Everyone needs at least a portion of a home, not exactly one home.

Families and roommates are obvious examples where housing units and people are not 1:1.

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