I $%^&ing HATE Liberals

The BBQ Pit
1

Especially San Francisco liberals, and I say this as a liberal.
Why you ask, many reasons, but I just read an article that infuriated me.

It relates to Housing in San Francisco, and the refusal of those stuck up latte sipping liberal jerks to allow anyone to accelerate building in their back yard.

This section really got to me:

JEN PASSETTI: It’s insane. The way the rents are jumping, I will have to leave. I can’t afford to stay in San Francisco at the prices that are present.

DUARTE GERALDINO: So you’re going to run a local business, but live way out, outside?

JEN PASSETTI: I mean, what — what choice do you have?

DUARTE GERALDINO: A major inconvenience for Passetti, who could soon have a much longer commute, but a true hardship for her kitchen staff and other blue-collar workers.

NOAH SMITH: Lower-income people are involved in the service economy, and they prepare food, they clean houses, they work on construction and things like that. And these require you to be close to a lot of customers.

DUARTE GERALDINO: So they’re necessarily local.

NOAH SMITH: They’re necessarily local. That’s right.

DUARTE GERALDINO: Smith reasons, when lower-income workers are forced further away from employment, travel costs eat away at their income, adding to inequality.

That last just goes to show how god damned selfish these asshole liberals are, f*ck poor people, I want to keep my precious little view, I want to keep my housing prices rising even faster, I don’t want anyone not more well to do to be able to afford to live near me.
It does not even cost them anything to increase the housing supply, but they won’t let it happen, or resist it at every turn. This causes increased harm to the very people these so called liberals claim they give a damn about, so long as they don’t live too close.

Such hate filled vicious people. I truly despise them. Tell me why I am wrong here.

2

There’s certainly a species of wealthy entitled liberals who are basically Republican-lite. In fact, we’ll probably have one for our next president. Eminently hatable, but would you rather be in my neighborhood with a disturbing number of “Honk for Trump” signs in the yards?

3

The liberals in your cite directly contradict your theory. The only people quoted opposing YIMBY are not even from SF. 2 out of 10

4

Wait, what? All the NIMBYs are liberals? Have you checked?

Maybe it’s a valid viewpoint to say that increasing the population density of an area beyond a certain point makes it a less desirable place to live? I visit the Bay Area maybe once a decade and each time I visit, it’s been more crowded and less appealing to visit. The Bay area traffic is appalling and the surrounding suburbs are hellish to navigate. The Mt. Diablo area, which I visited last time I was there, was a welcome relief from the crowded streets and strip malls. So even as a visitor, I can see some virtue to the argument that maybe the area already just has enough people already. You don’t have to pack in the people until the quality of life plummets.

5

This pitting is weak sauce. It’s missing one key thing, which is any evidence that there’s a correlation between whatever view it is that you’re opposing (and it’s frankly a little unclear what that is) and liberalness. Sure SF has lots of liberals. But it’s not Berkeley or Portland. Are liberal SF residents more likely than conservative to hold that view? Or the other way around? Or is it even? Because it sounds to me like you really should be pitting San Franciscans in general, or more likely, rich San Franciscans.

6

Because of people like my son.

He’s one of those service-industry types, and affordable old houses are being torn down so developers can build huge expensive condos/apartment buildings.

Almost everyone he’s worked with in kitchens, sandwich shops used to live in the Mission District in old funky ‘hippie houses’ that may not be clean, but they were cheap (well, for SF…).

He showed me an intersection where his friends/coworkers used to live. All four corners are now high-rise apartment buildings with rents close to $2000/mo for small apartments.

Oh, bonus: the buildings (built by rich fatcats… probably non-liberals) are utterly soulless and would fit in nicely in any suburb anywhere. Very un-SF.

So, rich conservatives building expensive apartments, poor liberals having to move farther away to find affordable housing (as in $1000/mo!).

The developers are who you should be mad at (and the politicians who let them have their way with a classic city).

7

There’s some validity to that type of argument… some. But (and I’m not sure if that is in fact the argument that people are making in this instance) it also smacks of “I’ve got mine”-ism. That is, no matter how busy or crowded an area was, if it was a nice place to live, the residents could argue “oh, hey, man, gee, this is really too crowded now. Better not let anyone in. I mean, I’m the 1000th person to move here, and with 999 people it was fine, but now that we have 1000, well, really, this is a full as we should get.”
All of that said, I can’t really feel like people who are getting priced out of SF are somehow being treated unfairly unless there is actual corruption or malfeasance going on. If you liked a local band, and could always pay $2 to see their shows, and then they hit it big and now it costs $100 to see their shows, is that unfair? Granted, housing and music tickets aren’t very comparable, but generally speaking someone who was previously living in SF and is now priced out won’t be homeless, they’ll just have to move to (gasp) Redwood City (the horror!).

So it’s an unfortunate situation, and one that is worth working on improving, but as I said, without actual corruption going on, it’s not that anyone is being screwed by the man, it’s just the inevitable result of the law of supply and demand.

8

So someone who owns a house in San Francisco and has been renting it out reasonably cheap, and then is offered a buttload of money to sell it so it can be turned into apartments, is under some moral obligation not to do so? I mean, I’m generally liberal on just about every issue, but I don’t like the idea of any level of government trying to make that illegal.

Not to mention that hi-rise condos and apartments can presumably house more people than funky old houses, improving the housing crunch. In fact, purely economically, this doesn’t make much sense. There’s no way that the incentives exist for a funky-old-house-owner to sell their house and turn it into condos; but not for that same funky-old-house-owner to reburbish the interior and triple the rent. Your son is not being screwed by developers, or landlords, or politicians. He’s being screwed by the law of supply and demand.

What the solution is to this very real crisis I don’t know. If there are good common sense approaches being tried that are being stymied out of NIMBYism, then the place to start is with the people doing the stymying, not people who sold their houses for money.

9

This article makes it sound like the main battle over housing in the Bay area is between people (including a number of progressives) who want to permit more housing development of all types, and older progressives who are against new development except maybe subsidized housing for the poor.

*"Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich.

Those groups oppose almost every new development except those reserved for subsidized affordable housing. But for many young professionals who are too rich to qualify for affordable housing, but not rich enough to afford $5,000-a-month rents, this is the problem."*

BARF indeed.

10

The answer is simple. SF needs to expand. I recommend westward.

11

I understand your complaint, but I fail to see why this is something only liberals support. Do you honestly think conservatives would support policies that devalue their homes, obstruct their views and allow less wealthy/educated people to live in their neighborhoods? It seems like a non-partisan issue. There is always going to be pushback against too much housing in the good neighborhoods due to these issues.

12

Of course they are not all liberal, but go back and remember the source of this nimbyism. San Francisco. What % of them are conservatives?
As for an area not being built to handle a certain density of people, THAT is a valid complaint and concern, but there are solutions to that problem. And San Francisco has a LONG way to go before they are in the highest tiers.

San Francisco could achieve NY class density or beyond, where public transportation is mandatory to get around efficiently in the city center, if current options are insufficient, something that is can be built. It’s an excuse to be exclusive. A dodge, people should stop hiding their true sentiments.

13

The point about focusing on liberals is that I expect BETTER of them than conservatives when it comes to the concerns of the less well to do. I EXPECT more conservative types to have more randian views of not caring if some people can’t afford to live in certain areas due to expense. But these local liberals are using the tools of the state to exclude others from increasing housing capacity.

14

More housing is not what caused that, it was the tech sector using the bay area as their home base. That magnet would have caused the forces of gentrification and increased housing prices and rents no matter what. The ONLY counter force there is to ever increasing costs of living, is increased supply. And that is not being allowed to happen at the proper pace.

15

Like almost every issue in San Francisco, this issue pits one group of liberals against a second group of liberals. I can’t argue with your pitting of the NIMBYs, but since there are plenty of liberals on the other side, it’s extremely misleading to pit San Francisco liberals as a group over this issue.

SpoilerVirgin
San Francisco liberal

16

Anyone who thinks there is any solution to housing cost in cities like SF short of massive rent control and/or subsidies… which are pretty freakin’ lib’ral… is an idiot.

17

$2K/month would be cheap in SOMA where the jobs are. $1K/month is basically free.

18

You’re right, in San Francisco it has to be the liberals who fight against that because that is mostly all that’s there. It’s just that like I said above, I expect better of liberals, ALL liberals. To see any liberal deliberately screwing over the less well to do for their own property values or some other selfish aesthetic concern is a betrayal and affront of what it means to be liberal in my view. I get not wanting riff raff to move in, I expect some selfishness from all human beings, I have it too, but the scale and pettiness of it in San Francisco is off the charts. It’s an embarrassment.

19

Difference being, when good hearted and generous people argue, they are arguing about the means to those ends, not whether or not those goals are worthy.

20

How many people can live in one shabby house compared to a high-rise apartment?

The only way to solve the housing crisis in San Francisco is to build more housing. They aren’t adding any more land to San Francisco, so the only way to build more housing is up. So which is it? A run-down house that can house five people, or a high-rise apartment that can house 200?

If the shabby hippie house can’t get torn down, what happens? It gets bought for seven figures by a tech worker and renovated. In no case does that house remain a shabby crash pad for low-rent hippies.

San Francisco’s problem is actually the opposite of what you state. It’s very very difficult to get permission to tear down an old house and put up a high-rise. If more people want to live in San Francisco, yet the supply of housing cannot increase, what happens to prices? If only there was some sort of economic theory that could predict what will happen!