
Google Eyeing Mission Bay for San Francisco Move? - blackjack48
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/11/13/google_eyeing_mission_bay_for_san_francisco_move.php
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k_wisniewski
As an European, I've never understand how is that possible that South Bay is
such a bad place to live. Everything interesting like night life, public
transport even groceries and restaurants are all either non-existent or so far
away that you always have to drive. No wonder everyone wants to live in SF
because there's nothing to do in the South Bay. What is the problem really?
There's a lot of money in there, lots of potential customers, good
geographical conditions, creativity and yet it's so badly planned and
organized. This year I moved to London and there are lots of things to do in
virtually every district. Public transport is amazing compared to the Bay area
and you don't even need to own a car. That's completely impossible in the
Valley and I have no idea why isn't there someone who tries to change that.

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tlrobinson
It's not a "bad" place to live, it's simply suburban, thus younger people tend
to prefer SF.

How would you "change" it? It's just not dense enough to support enough
grocery stores/restaurants that everyone could walk everywhere. There are
small downtown areas of each city where that may be possible but those areas
are going to be expensive.

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jseliger
_How would you "change" it? It's just not dense enough to support enough
grocery stores/restaurants that everyone could walk everywhere._

Given the absurd cost of housing in the bay area
([http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco_zoning_needs_more_density_and_tall_buildings.html)),
you'd generally just reduce or eliminate height restrictions, minimum building
setbacks, and parking requirements. At that point developers will build
structures that increase density and support grocery stores / restaurants.

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jonnathanson
Well, if they're going to move in a bigger way into SF, Mission Bay makes
sense. It's basically a big ghost town. Lots of UCSF-owned medical facilities
and lifeless condos. But plenty of space. And it's relatively close to the
transit hubs in South Beach.

As a nearby resident and worker, though, I'm not looking forward to the
traffic or the added residential real estate crunch. We've got the Giants,
soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge high rises going up, a
huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll have a Google office. Oy
vey.

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rayiner
> We've got the Giants, soon we'll have the Warriors, we'll have a few huge
> high rises going up, a huge Salesforce campus in the works, and maybe we'll
> have a Google office.

Sounds like a boon, not a burden!

Maybe Google should move to somewhere people would be grateful to have them.
People here in Philadelphia would love to see some business and industry come
their way.

~~~
jonnathanson
It's an economic boon, and it brings in a lot of smart people, and it makes
the neighborhood more lively. All of that is awesome. I live in SOMA and
believe me, I _love_ how vibrant it is today, especially as compared to what
it used to be: essentially, a dead zone of warehouses and shipping containers.

I love SF's ability to reinvent itself, to adapt its spaces, and so forth. I
don't think the city gets nearly enough credit for that.

The problems are housing inventory and traffic. The city has not yet figured
out a fantastic way to address either of those issues. Personally speaking,
I'd freaking love a Tokyo-style mega-city of uber-high rises and elevated
catwalks. I'd love for SF to become the dense, futuristic wonderland that
_Star Trek_ envisions its becoming. But a lot of regulations are in place that
seem to prevent that from happening. And there's also the issue of seismic
stability to contend with. SF is not exactly the sturdiest ground on which to
build skyscrapers. But we need more housing, and we need more intra-city
transportation that doesn't rely on the roads (which, if you've ever
experienced gameday or rush-hour traffic in SOMA, you know can become hellish
nightmares).

Essentially, SF is a very small space that experiences high density and is not
(currently) built to accommodate such density.

All said and done, this stuff is sort of a mixed bag for me. I appreciate it
in many respects, but I feel the pain in a lot of day-to-day life. It's not a
binary, net-good or net-bad situation.

~~~
williamcotton
I really like your perspective on this. You seem very open to the idea that
more public infrastructure needs to be built.

I think the first steps that we need to make are towards making the lack of
public infrastructure feel more painful to the new implants. We need to do
away with the private bus fleets and perhaps explore policies that would limit
private and quasi-private modes of transportation like cabs, limos and car
"shares".

Cities without any public infrastructure are terrible places to live and work
in. We need to stop making "privatization" such an unarguable positive in the
tech community. It is at ends with the needs of a population the lives
practically on top of itself.

I'm all for the supposed decentralized and sharing-based economics of services
like Lyft, but we can't forget that these are not democratic institutions. If
we are intending to wholesale replace our existing methods of public
transportation with something like this, we need to make sure that we retain
public oversight in the matter. I believe the colloquial term for this is "to
not throw out the baby with the bathwater".

~~~
jonnathanson
Interesting points. I agree that privatization is not the cure-all it's been
made out to be. I happen to think SF -- the Bay Area in particular -- is both
a public and private success story. It's easy to forget that the rapid
advances SF's private sector has made in the last few decades were largely
built on the back of public-sector investment in sciences and tech companies
in the '50s and '60s. But I digress.

Public transportation can and should get better _within_ the city of San
Francisco, and in my mind, the best place to build it is up. It's tough to
build an intra-city subway for any number of reasons, not the least of which
is the aforementioned seismic issue. Additionally, SF turns out to have been
built largely (predominantly?) on landfill and liquefaction. Subways would be
pretty susceptible to flooding, and would be massively expensive to keep in
operation with all the pumping and maintenance requirements the city would
force on them.

I really like the idea of a skyward-developing SF, though, not being a
geologist or a structural engineer, I'm not sure how that would be achieved in
a city like this one, with its inherent foundation issues. But we're starting
to build a lot of giant skyscrapers, evidently, so perhaps someone's figured
it out?

~~~
williamcotton
I'm sure there are plenty of engineering and architectural solutions to
building upwards.

How about instead of putting our resources in to "seasteading" and other
libertarian ideologies, we put instead explore more humanistic and social
endeavors like Buckminster Fuller's "“Proposed Tetrahedral City"?

The thing with trying to leave and start your own community, be it on a
floating platform in the middle of the ocean or in outer-space, is that it
will still heavily depend on the rest of humanity for support. We don't have
any self-supporting mechanisms for life other than Earth.

The irony is that the idealic hippie communities that were inspired by the
musings of guys like Fuller fail from the same basic principles.

I think the lesson here is that at least for time being, we can't achieve true
self-sustaining communities. An effort needs to be made to interact with
humanity at large, no matter how ideological impure that endeavor is.

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batbomb
Meanwhile SF supervisors have proposed a moratorium on the Ellis act.

If rent was ugly before, I can't imagine what if will be like now.

I get the feeling that the mayor and supervisors only care about displacement,
not _placement_.

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williamcotton
Yeah, it's almost like the city is actually forced to listen to the demands of
the people that live in it...

Maybe if we got rid of democracy then Mayor Ed Lee wouldn't haven't to cloud
his pure ideology with such trivialities?

I mean, how else are we going to be truly free?

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woah
Only solution: Wall around SF. You have to pass the coolness test to get in.
Only artisan puppeteers and activist breadmakers allowed. None of these dorky
tech folks driving up the rents.

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williamcotton
Or how about another solution, compromise?

How about we open up a dialog and get people talking instead of just
gravitating to one sort of ideology or another?

What if we open up the conversation to be more than just a binary opposition
between the privileged nerds vs the privileged artists?

I'm afraid part of the issue is that engineers tend to gravitate towards
binary opposition and reductionist thought.

The tech industry is very good at talking and terrible at actually listening.

~~~
batbomb
I don't know many people who aren't frustrated about the cost of rent in the
city, but that might be because I'm biased towards knowing people mostly under
the age of 40.

I'm torn on the Ellis act evictions. I think something needs to be done about
them, but on the other hand I think landlords should be able to sell their
properties. Without some form of the Ellis Act, landlords will be forever
landlords. Companies like Urban Green Properties are kind of shitty, but the
big problem is that San Francisco has absolutely no plans for placement or re-
placement of residents.

Strictly speaking, SF has a ~1% population growth. That's 8500 people a year.
Theoretically, 2/3 of that is likely non-native, but still there should be
theoretically a net 2k new San Franciscans/year if you account for the numbers
native high school graduates and subtract the death rate.

And I don't think it's just a nerd vs artist thing, I think it's a bit more of
a new adult resident vs established adult resident (which tends to skew to old
vs. young). However, the nerd population tends to make more money and larger
waves, which means they're the obvious punching bags.

~~~
williamcotton
If the nerd population wants to be a less obvious punching bag it needs to do
a better job of integrating in to the community and taking part in discussions
like this.

As for the Ellis Act, I agree that it is indeed a complicated issue, and one
that in it's essence can actually start to question core concepts like
"private property", especially in the context of an urban hub.

Private property is pretty cut and dry in a rural context. However in cities,
complete with a vertical axis and many other types of proximity effects, the
border between public and private tends to get very blurred.

I feel that people who choose to buy property in cities should be aware of
these things. They should know that when they buy an apartment for rental
purposes in a city like San Francisco that it is not like an ordinary
financial investment, rather it also includes obligations to properly house
and care for the people who reside in it.

The people who choose to live in cities have other needs and desires on top of
an expression of personal liberty. Anyone who moves in to a city should not
expect to be able to comfortably bring their existing, external ideals and
lifestyles along with them.

~~~
batbomb
Oh, I agree about the nerd non/anti-assimilation thing, trust me. I might be
on HN, but I work in academia with a vast majority of friends who are
musicians, artists, or also in academia. Most of which live in Oakland.

Of course, if you're an east coast Ivy who hits up mission cliffs on the way
home from your startup in SoMa, well, you're going to have a hard time
integrating with the Salvadoran family that's lived next store for 40 years.
However, I'm not sure who is to blame for any of that. I think the worst part
of it all is this weird form of entitlement where everybody _has_ to live in
the trendy parts, coupled with the money to afford it at whatever cost. Couple
that with the city's desire to restrict any sort of new building at nearly any
cost, well then I think you have a real problem. The only solution I see is to
either adopt a policy of higher density, in-place structure and tenant
replacement (letting tenants move back into a new higher-density building at a
similar cost), do more development along Third Street, or to abandon SF and
try building out West/Downtown Oakland or something instead.

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bsimpson
Would that be a headquarters move, or just an SF office move? IIRC, they may
have to move out of their present space above Palomino, which means they'd be
looking for someplace to put their current SF employees.

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popularopinion
This article is currently linking to a link aggregator, the original link is
here:

[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/11/google-...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/11/google-
to-mission-bay-rumors-
sweep.html?ana=e_du_pub&s=article_du&ed=2013-11-13&page=all)

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cylinder
What does Google do at its Chicago office? I can never quite figure that city
out.

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minimax
Google has a development office in Chicago but I don't think it's very big.
The 600k sq ft of Chicago office space mentioned in this post is probably a
reference to the new Motorola office space in the Merch Mart.

[http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120726/BLOGS02/1207...](http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20120726/BLOGS02/120729809/google-
moving-3-000-motorola-mobility-jobs-hq-to-merchandise-mart)

~~~
arasraj
The new Google space will actually be in West Loop.

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alexeisadeski3
Since when is SF called "The City"?

There is only one "The City", and it ain't in North America.

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douglaswth
As someone who is only familiar with calling San Francisco "The City", I am
curious what city outside of North America you are referring to; please
enlighten us.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
The City of London. Its a nrifgb within London.

