buss

> or whatever you call those horrendous boxes with mismatched facades

It's called the "most affordable design compliant with the city's design requirements". It's always the planning department. Architects don't want to build ugly buildings, but it's the only thing that's legal.

Many cities mandate at least 4 different facade materials and that the massing be broken up. So we end up with a mishmash of materials and colors and an undulating blocky facade.

Thank you for your donations! All of my work is in a volunteer capacity, so your donations help pay for our office space, pay for the few full-time staff we employee, and fund outreach, education, and direct advocacy to move municipalities in our direction.

Your summary is correct. Most of our donations are small dollar from individuals. A few people donate more, and that's because they agree with what we're doing and they have the means to contribute. We're grateful for all support, and donations never influence any of our decisions about what to advocate for.

I fight for both market rate and subsidized housing in high-opportunity cities because it's the easiest way to life people out of poverty.

Being able to live near high-income jobs is the most direct path to the middle class in America. If we want people to not live in poverty, then it makes sense to subsidize their access to opportunity. That means subsidizing education and housing.

I've had fun nights talking with friends about starting a city. It's really fun to think about how we'd design the city to maximize opportunity, but there's no getting away from the value an existing city provides. Fixing a city with already high opportunity is just fundamentally cheaper than starting a city from scratch. All we need to do is win a few elections -- we're talking less than $100MM. A new city that is aiming to compete is a $100B+ project.

As engineers we often think the best way to fix something is to build a new version. But this is rarely true in institutions. Think of governments as legacy systems: they've been built up over time and have a ton of hacks keeping it running. Think of Spolsky's generally good advice: "Don't rewrite code" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

It is easier to fix an old and broken system than to replace it wholesale. Let's focus on fixing government instead of replacing it.

Thanks! 100% agreed that zoning is just redlining. We've given municipalities the ability to discriminate based on wealth rather than race, but wealth is a proxy for race in America: https://www.thebalance.com/racial-wealth-gap-in-united-state...

What do you mean exactly? SF races all have contribution limits of $500 and it hasn't helped.

What campaign finance reform would solve regulatory capture, because low contribution limits isn't helping.

In San Francisco, at least, YIMBY is the organization that is organized around ending regulatory capture in housing, and The Neoliberal Project (in SF YIMBY Neoliberal) is organized around broader dismantling of regulatory capture.

We mobilize people in support of reform-focused politicians and have even started running our own (Sonja Trauss in 2018 and myself in 2020).

Happy to talk more about it -- steven.buss@gmail.com Happy to talk more about it

I just bought a used/refurbished one from Madison seating for about the same price as I could find a used one on CL in SF (~$400). I've been using a Leap for years at the office and swear by them.

That's not induced demand, that's a standard demand curve. The price drops and more people buy it.

Induced demand is "adding supply increased the price"

Yes, I unironically want 4 million new homes in San Francisco.

The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.

There's absolutely zero evidence of "induced demand" for housing. And all available evidence suggests that 1: SF & CA have huge shortages of homes and 2: Building more is a good solution.

Please see this non-exhaustive list of things which all show building more housing leads to housing affordability.

* http://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-nei...

* https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/12/02/how...

* https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...

* https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...

* https://medium.com/land-buildings-identity-and-values/what-i...

* https://fee.org/articles/why-isnt-rent-in-tokyo-out-of-contr...

* https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/new-construction-...

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...

* https://medium.com/@eddiesun/no-vacancy-the-housing-crisis-l...

* https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1165339989774749696?s=...

Thanks! It was a real bummer when he dropped out. I donated to his campaign and have a friend who was organizing for him down in LA. At least he made UBI mainstream!

I'm not sure calling it unfair is necessarily correct, but the incumbents use ballot props to increase their name recognition. It works like this:

- A Supervisor puts a proposition on the ballot - organizations funnel money into the campaign for the ballot prop - then when the ballot prop advertises they include names of the people running for office

It's why SF has _so_ _many_ ballot props: they are the legal way to bypass the fundraising limits we imposed on individual electoral campaigns. Ironically, if we repealed our campaign finance limits, there'd be less dark money and far fewer ballot props.

I don't have a ballot prop to attach my name to, so I have to do old-fashioned campaigning (with some modern, high-tech things, too :)

We're growing a lot! YIMBY Action just brought in People for Housing Orange County and Peninsula For Everyone as affiliate clubs. We're in the process of expanding into Denver and NYC.

The demise of Scott Wiener's SB50 this year has certainly been a disappointment, but we try not to pin our hopes on any single solution. It took us 50 years to get where we are, and we expect it'll take at least 10 to get out. That will be a combination of local, state, and federal action.

The thing I've learned being involved in SF politics and YIMBY for the past few years is that politicians don't make change. They don't shift the discourse. Instead, it's grassroots movements like YIMBY Action that build a parade that politicians then jump to the front of. (Of course, this isn't true for Scott. He's one of the few true believers!)

We're building a passionate and vocal community that can do the on-the-ground organizing necessary to make politicians court us. The way forward it to continue building a voting bloc. You only have as much power as the people you can turn out to vote.

I'll be there! SF YIMBY will probably put on a happy hour or something

Agreed 100%

I'm very involved with YIMBY Action here in SF: I'm on the board of both YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law, and I'm also running for local office in the current election: https://buss2020.org

If you have any questions about YIMBY, send them my way!

1 month to repair a freeway for single-occupancy cars. Over twenty years to make a single lane of Geary Blvd buses-only (and still not done!)

We have the ability to do things quickly, but our government made it illegal unless there's an emergency.

If you're tired of shit like this, you gotta vote for people who want the city to be more tech-friendly and have sensible rules. In particular, vote for me ;) https://buss2020.org

This looks a lot like stereotypical behavior seen in many captive animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypy_(non-human)

FTA:

"Many stereotypies can be induced by confinement; for example, cats pace in zoo cages.[11] Pregnant sows whose feed is restricted bite at their stalls' bars and chew without anything in their mouths.[12] In laboratory rats and mice, grooming is the most common activity other than sleep, and grooming stereotypies have been used to investigate several animal models of anxiety and depression.[13]

Examples of stereotypical behaviours include pacing, rocking, swimming in circles, excessive sleeping, self-mutilation (including feather picking and excessive grooming), and mouthing cage bars."

Amazon's last mile delivery is a significantly worse experience than FedEx, DHL, or UPS. I put their service about on-par with USPS, which is to say: full of people lying about attempted deliveries.

With both USPS and Amazon I get notified of successful delivery hours or days before the package actually shows up, or attempted delivery when I was home and nobody used the callbox. They're making a huge mistake by not prioritizing the delivery experience; it is eroding customer confidence and loyalty.

I'm a 33 y/o male and just found out last week that the eligibility range has been expanded, so I opted to get the vaccine. It's a three dose course over a few months. Everybody should do it!

I agree that it _shouldn't_ take that long. This project was first started in 2011. Construction won't start until some time in 2020 (optimistically).

From https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/sf-transit-board-approves-ca...:

> Better Market Street will be implemented in three phases: Market from Fifth to Eighth streets is phase 1, Market from Fifth to Second streets is phase 2, and Market from Van Ness to Octavia Boulevard will comprise phase 3.

> The second phase will also include the construction of a loop in the Financial District for the F-Market & Wharves historic streetcar...

> Phase 1 is scheduled to stretch at least until 2022, according to the project’s website. The construction of the streetcar loop is expected in 2023, and future phases of the project are dependent on identifying funding

So 1/3 of this project is projected to be finished by 2022. And the other two portions of market street don't even have funding or a timeline yet. We will be lucky if it's finished by 2026 (no delays, no recession puts funding in jeopardy, etc).

By the time everything is done, it may be _20_ _years_ to build protected lanes. In the meantime, we have sharrows and intermix with taxis.

It'll take a decade to build the full protected lane for bikes. But banning taxis would improve safety overnight.

All of the press releases state that cars are banned. In fact, taxis are still allowed (except for Uber and Lyft). As a daily bike commuter on Market street, this is hugely disappointing. There's very few cars on Market already, and taxis are the most dangerous of those left.

This is exactly right. Most of the problems in cities aren't due to technology, they're due to bad governance. Our solutions need to be political, not just technological.

Pretty much every time

Here in San Francisco, CLT won't be legal for buildings over six floors until about 2023 because of dumb policies. California uses the International Building Code as its base building code and then modifies it based on particular laws we have here. This modification & ratification process takes about two years. Then San Francisco does the same thing, adding another two to three years (because surely _our_ engineers are better than a consortium of the world's best structural engineers...)

The 2018 International Building Code provides codes for tall CLT structures, which won't get adopted in the CA code until late 2020, which won't get adopted in the SF code until late 2022 or 2023. At that point, developers can start applying for permits for CLT buildings, which takes about four to five years. Then add two years of construction.

So SF won't see CLT structures over six floors until about 2030. Makes you realize how unseriously we're taking climate change when the only carbon-negative structural building material in existence won't exist here for another decade.

One of the myriad reasons I'm running for office here in San Francisco. We've created a completely broken system that's akin to generational theft by boomers from their own children. Time to build more housing. buss2020.org

> Is it the municipal regulations

The answer to these questions is almost always "it's the law." Most cities have habitability requirements that mandate minimum sizes and required rooms. What'll end up happening, as happens here in SF, is that the residents will throw up a temporary wall in the living room to split the rent further.

The answer lies somewhere in https://library.municode.com/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinan...

> But the dramatic rise in rents also coincides with national developers starting to eye the areas around public universities as a growth market. Real estate companies bulldoze aging buildings to put up the kinds of amenity-rich, luxury apartments that might appeal to upper-middle-class parents looking for a safe, comfortable place for their student to live but which students from lower-income families such as Martinez’s couldn’t possibly afford.

This fundamentally misunderstands how the market works. Consider the counter-factual: had the developers not come in and redeveloped aging structures into modern buildings, those old structures would be just as expensive as the new ones due to a shortage. Yet another piece that demonizes people who actually build homes while not considering what happens when we _dont_ build homes. Just look at SF for what the reality of not building looks like.

I'm an engineer; I wrote the piece in the OP. I'm running for DCCC and am a political activist. We exist! Support my campaign :) https://buss2020.org/donate