Why does everyone have to squeeze into San Francisco and the peninsula? Can't you tech workers gentrify West Oakland at least? Guess a few street thugs are a force more powerful than million dollar home prices. I bet those guys are really proud of the chaos they create that forces all of you to avoid their neighborhoods.
When I moved to Menlo Park in 1987, there was automatic weapons fire from Whiskey Gulch every weekend. It was all liquor stores and bars, hence the name. The fried chicken outlet there had full transparent bulletproofing, heavier than some banks. East Palo Alto was Murder City, USA. Tiny Whiskey Gulch, about three city blocks, had the highest murder rate per square mile in the US. I thought I was moving into a declining area, so I rented a house, instead of buying.
That was fixed by leveling the entire area, removing a freeway offramp, and replacing the liquor stores and poor people with a Four Seasons hotel and a large office building housing a law firm and medical offices. The final solution to the underclass was thus implemented.
When Facebook moved to Menlo Park, house prices went through the roof.
Yes. On the way to work I got mugged three times, before having acid thrown in my face. Oakland is a burning hellhole, stay the fuck away if you value your life and property.
Did you miss the part where BART is packed every commute hour? There are huge numbers of people in Oakland and the rest of the east bay. But the most efficient transportation system is one that doesn't have huge rush hour stresses, i.e. ones where people live close to where they work. So if the offices are getting built in SF, then so must be the housing.
This is actually what happened in parts of Westchester and Connecticut. All the executive staff were commuting from their suburban homes to their various headquarters in NYC, then they realized they could just move their office instead.
It was also the case that if you wind the clock back not all that many years, relatively few of the people working for, say, IBM (especially at the executive level) actually wanted to live in Manhattan.
Obviously the Bay Area as a whole has a problem with housing prices. (It has for a very long time but it's become extreme relatively recently.) But one of the big issues with housing prices in "prime" cities is that professionals weren't clamoring to live in them until quite recently.
Look at Boston/Cambridge as well. Teradyne was probably the only significant tech company with a major office in Boston until the dot-com/bomb and it later moved out. All the growth in Kendall Square and Seaport is recent. It's no wonder urban housing and transit hasn't kept up.
If you look at small-to-mid sized law (or other professional) firms in the Bay area, you see a lot that have 2 offices: One in FiDi, one in Walnut Creek (or somewhere similar). Guess where the partners are all spending any day that doesn't require a client meeting? :)
...And why didn't their employees want to move from those sky high San Francisco rents? I hear rents are really cheap in West Oakland! Back we go to my original point.
This is the problem. Embrace edge cities, people. There's no reason to expect hundreds of thousands of people to commute to a downtown area. Scatter the businesses throughout the suburbs, dammit. Start locating new startups not just in Oakland but even farther out, in places such as Walnut Creek or Santa Rosa. Hell, maybe a tech influx could get the crime down in Stockton.
Have you paid no attention to that happened in the past century? The sprawl and traffic and unsustainable scaling?
Why should cities not be allowed to change and have their density spread? The heart of a city is its density and population mass. It didn't become the perfect amount of population when the current residents arrived, never to be changed again. A city that does not change is dead.
I live in Dallas where everything is suburb outside of a very tiny urban core, and I absolutely love it here. I adore sprawl, and I want more of it. The only reason I'm even considering moving out of town this year is because the state legislature is becoming increasingly hostile to trans people (and being trans myself, this personally affects me), and even then I'm planning on moving to either SoCal or Vegas, both of which are full of sprawl.
And traffic isn't a problem if the city is designed right. The idea is that each suburb is an edge city with plenty of businesses. In Dallas, for example, it's not uncommon for people in an inner-ring suburb to commute to an exurb, and when people do commute farther inwards, it's typically people commuting from an exurb to an inner-ring suburb. The long commute form exurb to downtown doesn't happen that often here. Street layout helps, too: we have arterials on a grid system, and all arterials are six-lane divided highways. Freeways are placed at regular intervals on both the north-south and east-west axes to segment the city into bite-sized chunks (just go to Google Maps: Dallas looks like a sequoia because of the way the multiple loop roads are laid out). Five-layer stack interchanges are used to cut down on the bottlenecks in freeway interchanges.
Cities are antiquated, noisy, dirty, and crime-ridden. Suburbs are much more comfortable places to both live and work.
Good for you, glad you like it! People who share your opinion have a plethora of places to choose from! It's not for me.
For those of us that want to live in particular cities because of the city itself, supply is far below demand. Some of current residents are trying to keep supply low. That's what we're objecting to.
The problem with this is couples who get jobs in different edge cities (or buy/inherit a house then change jobs). I personally ended up in Pleasanton because I work in SV and my wife worked in Walnut Creek; public transit options aren't great out here so we each add to traffic with our single-person cars. If our jobs were in SF (or even Oakland), I'm confident we'd be living lower-impact lives right now.
That's what you have in DC and it's a total clusterfuck. Nobody wants to move just because they change jobs, and spouses won't limit job choices just to be in the same suburb as each other. So you have people commuting in random directions through inter-suburb roads that weren't designed to handle it.
Agreed things are a mess there traffic wise further out - but -
Part of the problem with DC metro is that the suburbs where it would make sense to expand the roadways are full of multi-million dollar homes owned by rich politically connected people (not just several hundred thousand dollar homes owned by mere mortals), plus you have the 4 'local' state governments (dc,md,va,fed) plus cities (e.g. chevy chase, arlington, etc) and bazillions of agencies (e.g. park service) throwing their hat in the ring too..
E.g. hypothetically, why should the northern tip of DC (and therefore the fed) pay to improve a congested road full of traffic between rockville and chevy chase? and why is my mansion being demolished and not yours etc.
The fires are unfortunate but Oakland has approved a lot more market rate housing than SF or surrounding cities have, in part because rents have been appreciating more quickly than in SF. Oakland also wants to do more for housing.
Yeah, it seems like despite all the market distortions, the most fundamental issue is the notion that San Francisco can fit everyone who wants to live there.
