I know…rent control will make housing magically more affordable, amiright?
Well, part of being a liberal is (usually) being an environmentalist. So I could see where bulldozing every remaining fruit orchard and funky old house to put up tract housing would be an issue. Malvina Reynolds was liberal and she was singing about this issue back in 1962. Population density doesn’t tell the whole story – the geography of the Bay area which is squeezed between mountains and water means that there’s only so much sprawl it can support. Maybe the $2K+ rents are part of the natural process necessary to stop the population influx?
Of course, part of the problem rests with the tech industry and their latest turn against telecommuting, for example, Reddit’s 2014 edict that employees have to move to San Francisco.
The last conservative in SF went extinct in 1985. No one has seen one south of the GG Bridge since. We’re thinking about starting a captive breeding program and try to re-introduce them into the wild.
Don’t get me started on them, environmentalism is another BBQ topic for me to post on all unto itself. For a lot of “environmentalists” it’s more about being a people hating malthusians and nature worshipers. Secular liberals who have given up believing in religion and god as sacred, but traded that status with the particular slice of climate and habitat that exists in this sliver of existence in the life age of the earth, that ONE SLICE cannot be allowed to be meaningfully perturbed by the hand of man, because why?
religious notions of the sacred, secular theists, with gaia stepping in as their lord to worship, dropped down on bended knee. Screw the well being of human beings, if a maggot might be displaced let 10 thousand jobs burn.
I am exaggerating a bit, but only a bit.
When a 60 storey glass box is built in SF, it is long past time to stop the march of the condo.
See Fontana West, San Francisco.
It blocked the bay views of some rather wealthy people. That got the 40’ height limit for residential lots.
The Mission/old industrial/railyard properties now crawling with uber-rich techies were NOT classified as Residential, so no height issues.
SF has a long history of love/hate high-rise.
Somebody bribed the Planning Commission to get approval for that 60 story monstrosity.
AIUI, voters have taken control of such zoning issues, requiring them to be approved by popular vote.
There was some noise in the 80’s and 90’s about Yuppification of the Haight.
Didn’t stop it, just raised prices even more.
Now it’s the Mission’s (traditional immigrant area) turn.
The light rail out to Hunter’s Point means it will be next.
WTF does this have to do with “liberals”? I mean really WTF? What an incredibly stupid title!
This problem was caused by the tech boom and the massive influx of tech money. Alexandra Pelosi, a filmmaker and a liberal (she is the daughter of Nancy Pelosi) made an excellent film lamenting this very issue, and what it’s doing to her city.
I don’t think you should call someone hate-filled or vicious because they don’t want their view obstructed, don’t want their sunlight obstructed, and don’t want all the denizens of a six-story high-rise looking down into their previously private back yard.
Also, it does cost them something, and it doesn’t benefit them. It benefits somebody else–some developer who would never let this happen in THEIR back yard.
When Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man” all the young men in SF drowned.
I think that tall apartment buildings are much more environmentally friendly than funky old houses and fruit orchards. To house the same number of people as an apartment building, you need a lot of old houses, meaning a lot of land, meaning humans encroaching in natural habitats.
So to bring it all around, exactly what kind of housing density is needed to give SF “affordable housing” - and how much of the affordability comes from driving down the net desirability of living there?
It seems to me that adding, say, a third more units would only mean that many more wealthy or well-employed tech weens would move it. By the time you’re to a 50% increase, you’ve got a city that no longer looks or feels like SF - even the radically evolved SF of the later 20th.
John D. MacDonald, in one of his sour comments about the slow destruction of Florida, once said the population would hit million, at which point people would stop coming because it would be no more desirable to live there than anywhere else.
But I guess if we cover the peninsula with high-rise housing, the “little guys” would win, right? Adn then whine that they can’t afford to live in Carmel or Coronado…
I was hoping for a thread devoted to actually hating liberals, and reasons and citations given. For a proper rebuttal.
Instead, I get something misleading and kind of weak sauce.
Title excite, thread disappoint.
Wait, are you talking about Hillary or Trump?
I’m disappointed San Francisco approved the parcel tax. It’s a straightforward tax: $12 per parcel of land. Doesn’t matter how big or small the parcel is. It’s the definition of a regressive tax.
It’s for a good cause: improving the coastal wetlands. But environmentalists let themselves get scammed into passing it, rather than using a progressive funding source.
We need to make it so crowded that no one will want to live there.
You don’t have to cover San Francisco with high rises. But you can’t complain that the rent is too damn high and at the same time not allow any increase in housing stock. If supply stays the same and demand increases, then the prices go up. If you want prices to go down you need to increase the supply, or decrease the demand. If San Francisco is a desirable place to live–and it is–then housing costs are going to continue to increase from the present ludicrous levels to super-whacky-cuckoo-ludicrous levels. And that means that all the service industry people who work for the millionaires who live in San Francisco are all going to have to live in Oakland, so stop complaining about losing affordable housing in San Francisco.
You can make whatever decisions you want, but you can’t avoid the inevitable consequences of those decisions.
It wasn’t just San Francisco, the entire Bay Area voted for it. It passed by 68% the last I looked. It is a way of getting around the limits on property taxes from Prop 13. Yes it is regressive, but $12 is not too regressive, and one can argue that in this case everyone benefits more or less equally from it.
One way of dealing this problem is to build a wall to keep out the Google and Yahoo buses which take people living in San Francisco to Silicon Valley.
And make Google pay for it, of course.
Sure thing, Yogi.
[QUOTE=Lemur866;19390195But you can’t complain that the rent is too damn high and at the same time not allow any increase in housing stock.[/QUOTE]
No, you can’t, and you can’t legislate in cheap housing for everyone.
That it happens to be “liberals” doing this in this instance is meaningless, as con-servatives have tried to wish just as many stupid and impossible contradictions into existence.
Because I like delta smelt better than I like you.