I think the unfortunate thing is that by preventing almost all change for so long, by the time change is going to happen, it no longer makes sense to try to make a gradual change, you have to make a dramatic change.
In less tightly zoned areas, it's pretty common for single family homes to be replaced with two or three story apartment buildings over time. But there's no point in building a three story apartment building in SF, you need to build a 6-10 story building. A 6-10 story building is going to be out of character in a neighborhood of small single family homes; but a smaller building wouldn't necessarily be. In a block that had most of the single family homes replaced with small apartment buildings, a 6-10 story building would probably be OK.
I don't know how to make fair rules that allow for that, though. Nobody can build anything bigger, and everybody can build whatever they want are both easy to apply in a fair manner, but lead to bad results. Maybe allowing to build up to double the median size could work.
> But there's no point in building a three story apartment building in SF, you need to build a 6-10 story building
Strong disagree. I would love the city to be covered in 6 - 10 story apartments at 10.0 FAR with no setbacks, but right now, SF bans apartment construction in 70% of the city, which is largely SFHs currently. Transforming this entire landmass from mostly SFHs to 3 floor 4 - 8 unit buildings would have an enormous impact on the housing crises here.
Additionally, there is a deadzone in building construction between about 6 floors and 12 floors where the costs don't pencil out due to construction costs (changing fromm wooden to steel framing, changes to HVAC, enhanced fire safety requirements etc). The lowest cost buildings to build in cost/unit are "missing middle" housing, of 3 - 6 storeys. Construction costs are ultra high right now (900k+/unit), so building less expensive topoligies is a neccessary part of lowering costs.
You would also need to have better public transportation, so all those people don’t have to drive to work. As it is, it can take an hour to get to work from the Sunset to SOMA. And, if the commute is going to be that long anyway, why not just live in the East Bay and pay less in rent?
Denser housing in areas such as SOMA — where you're close enough to bike or walk to work if you work nearby — could actually reduce the need for better public transit, as more people now have the option to live closer to where they work. Or at the very least, they wouldn't need to transit as far. You bemoan an hour long commute, but thousands of people in the Bay Area whose commute is far worse would welcome it.
And that's not to say that better public transit isn't something worth striving towards; it should be done together with housing. But currently, the area's general attitude is to have neither.
Of course it would, but I’m responding to someone saying “build up the Sunset,” and saying you also need to build up transit. Your criticism is not relevant.
As far as an hour commute goes, if any part of SF could be made as affordable as places like Concord and Vallejo, where those mega-commutes are originating, then I’m sure people would flock to those areas. But I doubt it would be those same people: it would be tech workers living in the East Bay who would want to live in SF but don’t want roommates.
Yes of course you'd need to improve transportation, but the existing built environment of the Sunset is self-sabotaging. It's car-dependent and the cars are in the way of the buses and trains.
Converting some streets, or even lanes, to bus-rapid-transit, could greatly improve things. The BRT on Geary has been slow and horribly managed, but I have a feeling that the current mayor can push things along a lot better if she stays on.
From the fine article: "However, many citizens were rightfully growing frustrated with the department’s actions, particularly decisions to bulldoze thriving neighborhoods to better serve suburban commuters. ... [I]n 1959, citizen activists presented the Board of Supervisors with a petition with more than 30,000 signatures demanding for most of these projects to be halted."
I always prefer to ponder SF's failure to accomodate the current bubble when I'm jogging in the Panhandle. Could that it only have been the 8 lane freeway the suburbs at state wanted.
We'd only have to take a bit of GG Park to build a commuter airport for Moffett.
> "Four floors and corner stores" on every block of the Sunset would make a significant dent in San Francisco's housing crisis.
It would significantly increase the number of fairly well off people currently living in the Bay Area outside of SF could live in SF proper, but it probably wouldn't (without some kind of non-market price controls) do anything about the crisis in SF (and SF is such a small part of the Bay, in terms of total numbers, that the knock-on effects in surrounding communities probably wouldn't do much to affordability in the Bay Area peripheries, either.
There's a huge amount of difference between the apparent demand for housing and the availability of housing; there's also a lot of hidden demand -- people living with roommates who would prefer to live alone if it were more affordable. I wouldn't look for new construction to make things affordable, but to reduce the rate of price increases.
If well-off people are moving into SF, they're most likely making their old units available too. I would predict that SF would remain unaffordable even if it added 10% more units, but surrounding areas might become affordable. Also, other municipalities will likely take queues from SF, if for no other reason than to avoid being in the news for being 'more restrictive than San Francisco', certain restrictive communities excluded.
> If well-off people are moving into SF, they're most likely making their old units available too. I would predict that SF would remain unaffordable even if it added 10% more units, but surrounding areas might become affordable.
Probably not: 10% for SF is a little over 1% for the Bay Area.
> Also, other municipalities will likely take queues from SF, if for no other reason than to avoid being in the news for being 'more restrictive than San Francisco',
Suburban communities are usually more restrictive than the urban center, and that's a huge selling point that they actively market or at least actively market the results of.
Absolutely right. The main driver of Berkeley house price increases isn't because of the sudden desirability of proximity to Cal. Likely upwards of 40% of the working population leaves every morning to go to San Francisco.
It's possible you are right, but the net daytime migration into Berkeley is positive. There are 20k more people during work hours than overnight. Housing prices in Berkeley are high because of regional demand, yes, but mainly because they haven't built any houses while undergoing a sustained longevity boom. Basically the people who live there now have always lived there and their children have to live somewhere else.
They perform a simulation where everybody from Monterey to Marin to Stockton is equally happy living anywhere, and only cares about a handful of neighborhood characteristics. They then add a small amount of housing for individual desirable areas, holding everything else constant, and let people move whereever they will; i.e. if a person in Monterey gets to save $5 on rent for a place in the Sunset that's otherwise identical in "desirability" to their Monterey place, they're likely to move.
Even in this outlandish situation, rents decrease quite a bit. For a 5% increase in supply, there's a 0.5% decrease in rents. A 20% increase in supply, there's a 1.8% decrease in rents.
This study is often cited to make the opposite point: that it's impossible build to decrease rent. However, even small, focused amounts of building result in decreases in rents in this model.
Increasing density in the Sunset with lots of apartments where there are single family homes would have a huge impact, that would be potentially a 100% or 200% increase in supply. That would do a ton for the crisis in San Francisco.
I read the findings you're summarizing differently. Insane prices already indicate that a market is completely defective.
Correcting that condition requires, as noted in the figures, ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE difference in either the demand or supply.
When rents are that crazy there will be an already displaced mass that isn't seen in the focus area of study; the market needs radical, organized, and planned (at least in the broad strokes) re-classification and re-organization of zones.
As a very rough back of the napkin approach, which an actual expert would probably have better initial numbers for, examine the quantity of jobs in the area. To approximate for youth, students, retirees, and the unemployed; double that figure.
(Est) NUM_RESIDENTS ~= 2 * JOBS
Then assume by the time you actually get things fixed the problem will have gotten even worse. So target the overshoot at an additional 25 to 50 percent.
Also, require distribution of housing VERY ROUGHLY according to actual census data of demographics. Just based on the cost of rent I'd say NO PLACE builds enough housing for singles nor enough for 'large families' (not in houses).
Yes, this model is not super informative, but I think it does put a lower bound.
Also, I'm not sure which figures you're refereeing to for "order of magnitude", but recall that their "percentage of supply" change is a percentage of a PUMA, a mere 100,000 person district, not of the whole area. So even holding everything constant in the Bay, and assuming people will move places they would actually never move, a mere 5,000 housing units in one PUMA still makes a difference.
Totally agreed about the need to balance zoning more.
> For example, an analysis that puts a lower bound on the magnitude of rent decreases is here:
It uses a “the greater bay area is a closed universe” assumption, which means it necessarily excludes the effect of any supply increase on increasing people moving into the area, mitigating price decreases. So, it cannot reasonably put a lower bound on rent decreases. At best, it provides and upper bound on such decreases.
I'm not sure that you'd get enough growth in residential units by converting to 3 story buildings with the achievable pace of construction; but I agree it would be a start.
OTOH, if you're right about cost of construction, it's probably also faster to build out 3 stories than taller buildings.
Long time Vancouver councillor Gordon Price put it this way:
"As the rate of change slows down, the perception of change increases."
It explains why areas of the city where development is occurring all the time takes new developments in stride, while in old neighbourhoods even a single family house converting into a duplex is 'radical.'
> But there's no point in building a three story apartment building in SF, you need to build a 6-10 story building
What does this even mean?
If three story apartment buildings were legalized to replace single family homes in SF, that would mean a 5-10 factor increase in population for those locations.
I'm a pretty radical YIMBY, but I'd be content with that rate of increase!
A lengthy but fantastic read. Apparently 1954 was the real turning point (a series of minor ones earlier), and here we are 60+ years later.
Not an insightful, opinionated piece as might be implied by the title. It's a well done historical piece with just enough analysis so as to provide some color yet still appear unbiased.
Not sure if the problem is fixable at this point. It seemingly would require more political will than is available. Too many vested parties.
The article mentions the now unenforceable racially restrictive home deeds and I am curious to know, does anyone who has bought a house in SF recently have a document with such a clause? It would be interesting to see how such an anachronism survives today.
I'm pretty sure that my current house, built in the sixties, in the South Bay has a covenant that has all kinds of restrictions, including one on race. (It might have been a covenant on a different house that we bid on, but got rejected.)
It definitely also has a restriction where we are prohibited from replacing our current house with a new one that has a value of less than $10k. :-)
I was told that removing these kind of restrictions from the covenant is a pretty heavy procedure so nobody goes through the trouble of doing so.
Modifying covenants is really hard - but with good reason. You don't want a heavy-handed HOA to drastically change the rules after you're heavily invested in a property.
Historically, some states have passed laws that allow racial restrictions to be amended out without the usual process, and without the usual filing fees, but even then nobody wants to take on the work (or their own legal fees).
They often turn into that. Unfortunately, in many ares you don't have a lot of choice - nearly all new housing is in an HOA, most established "good neighborhoods" are in an HOA, and not enough housing turns over in non-HOA, non-crappy neighborhoods.
I became president of ours on a promise to reduce dues and shrink the scope of the HOA as much as possible. It's a giant PITA, but less so than if the crazy, bored and power-hungry types took it over. We remind people with truly out of control maintenance issues to clean it up, and will only get more aggressive on super egregious things. As it should be.
I can see situations where they'd be helpful; mostly in areas where local ordinances are either insufficient or not sufficiently enforced.
They also make things like neighborhood "taxes" for fixing infrastructure issues more likely to happen - at least for things everyone agrees are a useful priority (like paved roads).
I always thought that covenants were part of an HOA, but for us, that's not the case. It's regular single family home. The covenant is attached to the tract on which all the houses were built and supposed to be enforced by some neighborhood council... which doesn't exist.
They're still on the deeds in many areas of Marin county, including older sections of Mill Valley. I presume some Marin towns like Ross have almost nothing but restrictive covenants, as it used to be a "sundown town": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
If you look deep enough into the history of any modestly large Amercian city (pop. 250,000 +) and it's surrounding suburbs, you will see a metro area that was and still is being shaped by race.
It's not a surprise that SF's first zoning law was a veiled attempt at curbing Chinese immigrants, it's not a surprise that when the highways were built in Portland, OR the mostly black neighborhoods in NE Portland were razed to make room for cars.
Here is a quote from a recent Cupertino City Council meeting where new apartments, with a % allocated to affordable house, were up for discussion:
“The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.”
American urban policy is filled with slight of hand comments and maneuvers just like this.
A poster has been down-voted to oblivion for pointing out the hypocrisy that the bluest states have the most un-affordable housing, but I do think there is a thread here which highlights the hypocrisy of those who virtue signal for equality but advocate for policies that secure their wealth and make it almost impossible for lower income folks to survive.
> “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.”
Doesn't seem covertly racist to me, but maybe I choose not to see it. It's bad enough on its face so no need to add racism really.
A: they don't like poor people
B: they don't want poor people living near them
C: they want to prop up home values and this would limit that
D: they feel comfortable speaking for cupertino as a whole, so probably a long time resident.
Cupertino is overwhelmingly asian, 63% vs 32% in the county. Cupertino is a very wealthy town (rank 11th nationally in its size range). I think it's completely understandable, without introducing race, that anyone in a wealthy town doesn't want poor people bringing down the neighborhood. (Not saying it is or isn't correct or moral.)
Also just want to point out that Cupertino is not urban.
> Doesn't seem covertly racist to me, but maybe I choose not to see it. It's bad enough on its face so no need to add racism really.
Arguing about whether economic policies are racist is a purposeful distraction. As if screwing over poor black families is completely reasonable as long as you're also screwing over poor white families.
As soon as you make it about race, you divide the poor into separate groups who are nominally at odds with each other even though in practice they have the same interests (e.g. lower housing costs). Then they fight against each other instead of fighting together for lower housing costs. It's a divide and conquer strategy to preserve the status quo.
The biggest indicator of future socioeconomic status is educational attainment. The biggest indicator of educational attainment is wealth.
> Where does the biggest source of material wealth typically come from? Housing!
> Was housing policy racist? Very explicitly so, even in the progressive Bay Area. See: redlining.
> Are some of the policies that stemmed from racism still on the books in major metropolitan areas? Yes! Many of these exact policies are what's keeping from more housing from being built right now!
What policies, you ask? Here's a few.
- Excessively large minimum lot sizes
- High setback requirements
- Very low height limits
- Very high car parking requirements
While many of these requirements sound reasonable on their face, they were in fact implemented to keep out PoC [1]. Now they're used by people on the top of the socioeconomic pyramid to keep those on the bottom out.
[1] Further reading: The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Collectively all these ordinances increased housing prices by limiting density. It meant that PoC couldn't pool their resources and build more on a lot, or just buy a smaller home on a small lot in the first place. Combined with the fact that PoC couldn't get loans approved due to redlining, it was very effective.
Poor white people are significantly less likely to live in cities. This has widespread impact, for example urban populations have more frequent police contact.
That is true, but poor whites are just as likely to be suburban as they are rural. There are also cities that are famous for white poverty; e.g. those in much of the rust belt where Trump got much of his support and places like Spokane and Portland that act as magnets for huge rural regions.
Looking at Ohio Trump got about the normal number of republican votes, just enough to beat 2012 Obama but not 2006 Bush, or 2008 Obama even with a larger population. It's really Hillary that bombed.
2006 George W. Bush 2,859,768
2008 John McCain 2,677,820
2012 Mitt Romney 2,661,437
2016 Donald Trump: 2,841,005
vs.
2004 John Kerry 2,741,167
2008 Barack Obama 2,940,044
2012 Barack Obama 2,827,709
2018 Hillary Clinton 2,394,164
It doesn't really matter but I'll just point out that the poor people they are fearing here are still rich enough to afford an apartment in Cupertino, meaning that they're millionaires. Just likely single-digit millionaires rather than the sort who can afford SFHs in that town.
If I’m understanding correctly the implication is that they’re concerned about the attached low income housing that’s (I believe) mandatory for all new housing developments in California.
> “The idea of Cupertino is to have people living here that are educated with degrees. Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.”
> American urban policy is filled with slight of hand comments and maneuvers just like this.
How do you know they don't actually mean it? People can be as biased against low income neighbors as against neighbors of races different than their own.
Well for one as soon as a counter example to what they nominally are complaining about comes up they suddenly break out in "no not like that". If they can never be pleased when their nominal reasons are satisfied and/or their web of objections are inconsistent it is clear something else is at play and that something else is usually racism.
Look at Harvard and their shifting metrics for instance among others. At first the standardized tests were there for quality nominally for "the right people" for instance including deliberate cultural bias to the country club set as a shibboleth - even the most well read student in the "classics curriculum" wouldn't really know small sailcraft vocabulary and practical nautical backgrounds long moved onto motorboats. Then Jews started doing too good on them and they started adding other criteria like being "well rounded".
For instance, wealthy asians move in and they now complain about it being "unaffordable" despite previous issues with affordable housing. I have heard about California public transit upgrades facing resistance with obvious dogwhistle opposition about how train lines will bring in crime. When a train is a goddamn terrible escape vehicle given its linearity and predictability even without it featuring its own police force. Meanwhile and anyone with a truck and crowbar can reach and burglarize and moving truck rentals are both cheap and good camouflage.
Race and low income are inextricably linked because of racist past policies, which fund schools vastly differently based on property values, which provides very different access to education, which provides very different access to opportunities in the future.
This particular commenter? I think they were 14 and just really stupid (edit: according to the Cupertino mayor, who was asked about a similar comment at 45:45 here [1]). So maybe not racist. But having spent enough time talking to adults who also talk like this, if you talk long enough the racist undertones become overtones. It's baked into our society, so though it's completely unacceptable to reveal these racist attitudes, the classist attitudes are slightly more acceptable.
It's definitely a dogwhistle to others, even if this particular commenter was not intentionally dogwhistling.
Curious who you're referring to as "this particular commenter"? The quote in question was from a Cupertino resident at a recent city council meeting, and he's a 60 year old white man.
As a side note - my wife grew up in Cupertino, and I'm there every day to drop off my kid at his grandparents. Race & class is complicated here. When my wife was in elementary school, it was about 50/50 White/East-Asian. It's now roughly 80% Indian within the school system, and the only whites around are senior citizens.
I tend to think that Silicon Valley is intensely classist and not all that racist - low-income whites get judged a lot more harshly than high-income Indians. So on that level, it's entirely possible that the commenter meant exactly what he said, with no dog-whistles involved. Another way of looking at it, perhaps, is that Chinese, Japanese, and Indians have become "white", at least within Silicon Valley, even though the latter actually have brown skin. But doesn't that dilute the meaning of "white" so much that it basically becomes meaningless, and that we should just call it classism rather than racism?
> Another way of looking at it, perhaps, is that Chinese, Japanese, and Indians have become "white", at least within Silicon Valley, even though the latter actually have brown skin. But doesn't that dilute the meaning of "white" so much that it basically becomes meaningless, and that we should just call it classism rather than racism?
This is actually really interesting because in America the boundaries of who is "white" and who is not has constantly shifted from a social standpoint.
There was time that Italians, Jews and Irish were not considered white (as in Anglo-Saxon or Nordic white) but this obviously isn't the case today.
South East Asians will probably never be considered "white" socially because of skin tone and cultural differences, but I'd argue it might be more important to be considered "not-black" or "not-Hispanic" than anything in America.
> This is actually really interesting because in America the boundaries of who is "white" and who is not has constantly shifted from a social standpoint.
This is very, very misleading. You know it’s very misleading, as shown by your next paragraph but plenty of people actually believe there was a time when Italians, Irish were not considered white. There wasn’t. There was a great deal of prejudice against non-Anglos, Nordics emphatically included but there was never legal discrimination against them authorised by legislation in any state or at a federal level. That’s not true for Black people or Asians, both East and South Asians.
The entire shifting boundaries of whiteness literature is based on trying to muddy the difference between whether people were central or liminal members of a group with the question of whether they were members of the group at all.
> How about the US Census? Jewish people generally answer “white” on it.
So do most Hispanics, who are clearly outside of the sense of whiteness applicable in most common conversation contexts.
To be fair, the census has a separate question to distinguish Hispanics, which allows their data to be used, on that point, in a way which accords with the common usage, where race and ethnicity are more of a blend cover than two orthogonal ones. And it didn't do that with Jewish identity.
But these days it's not hard to find people who care intensely about white identity and see that they don't consider Jews part of the tribe.
Well, it's either this or "Other". It's not like a lot of Jews identify as Black, American Indian, Hispanic or Pacific Islander. Technically, Israel is in Asia so they could choose Asian, but I think they understand that's not what is meant here.
Believe me, I know. This was not a serious proposition, it was a joke. Unfortunately, I made a critical error by not writing a disclaimer before it "JOKE IS TO FOLLOW" and not adding a footer "THE TEXT ABOVE WAS A JOKE" after it. Oy vey.
People who explicitly care about whiteness (KKK, neo-Nazis etc) do.
The "I'm not racist, but ..." majority - which is the real driver of systemic racism - doesn't. In fact, so much so that "Judeo-Christian values" became the standard way to describe the culture of that crowd, and it's a formulation that is specifically intended to include Jews.
>Curious who you're referring to as "this particular commenter"? The quote in question was from a Cupertino resident at a recent city council meeting, and he's a 60 year old white man.
Oops. By "this particular commenter" I meant the Cupertino resident. I (think?) I had heard about that comment or a similar one on a podcast (Gimme Shelter) that interviewed the Cupertino mayor the day after all that debacle, and I thought the mayor said that the commenter was 14 and that his mom had asked for permission for him to show slides. I hope I didn't completely misremember that.
60 years old? Then yeah, probably intentional dog whistle. I'd give the ignorance of youth a bit more of a pass.
Oh no, please don't think I'm trying to give the sentiment any cover. I think it's an extremely ugly sentiment, that is very common and that few are willing to openly state.
Youth can both reveal the truth of what people think, as well as not be fully aware of all the possible interpretations of what is being said.
> This particular commenter? I think they were 14 and just really stupid. So maybe not racist. But having spent enough time talking to adults who also talk like this, if you talk long enough the racist undertones become overtones. It's baked into our society, so though it's completely unacceptable to reveal these racist attitudes, the classist attitudes are slightly more acceptable.
I'm not from America, and my own country is 99.9% white, so this is all foreign and very interesting for me. I'm wondering to what degree racism is about the actual race (physical traits) and to what degree about the socioeconomic traits that correlate with race. For example, I wonder if a typical white racist person would stil prefer a white drug addict or criminal as a neighbor over say someone like president Obama.
Many of the traits that distinguish African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S., and which people react to, are not correlated with socio-economic circumstance but rather race and culture.
I grew up in the D.C. suburbs in the 1990s (when people were less guarded about this stuff) in a Virginia town that was at the time almost entirely white. I remember hearing how PG County (a majority African american county just east of DC) was the "ghetto" and "scary." How did you know? Well there were "youths" with "baggy pants" listening to "gangster rap" and speaking in "ebonics." It was only a couple of decades later when I moved nearby that I realized how racist that view was. PG County is, in fact, solidly middle class county that happens to be 2/3 African American. Yes, the teenagers speak in African American vernacular (at least to each other) and dress in a certain style, which is different than how white teenagers of the same socio-economic class would speak and dress, but odds are that their parents work for the federal government or one of the nearby hospitals. Nonetheless, my classmates thought that the area was "ghetto" based on those outward traits.
That's why the Trayvon Martin shooting was such a big deal in the U.S. Martin was solidly middle class, the son of a white collar government worker and a truck driver. There's tons of kids in PG County who look just like him, who have parents that make $80,000 household income. But lots of people find those kids "scary" and "ghetto." Not because of their socio-economic status, but because of their race and their cultural expression.
IMO it's mostly about class, but it seems like it's mostly about race because there is a correlation between class and race (at least, if you count Asians as white, which is nonsensical, but what many people seem to want to do these days). The neighborhood I live in is right next to an extremely poor neighborhood (both are mixed race, but majority white). Most of my neighbors are a lot more comfortable with the middle class black/asian/latino people in our neighborhood than they are with the poor white people in the neighborhood next door.
There are studies that show that when Americans are shown pictures of white people and black people doing the same act, they perceive the black person as more threatening [1].
It's difficult to quantify, because it's hard to distinguish between what someone claims as justification and their actual motivations. Having grown up in a part of the US where racism has a long and strong history (South Carolina, where the American Civil War began), my own experience is that racism has changed its face. Old-fashioned overt, visible racism is less prevalent due to a wider shift in culture. Overt racism is publicly condemned and considered an embarrassment, but that doesn't mean it has gone away and it lurks just beneath the surface. I know and grew up with tons of people who are without a doubt strongly racist, but they find other justifications to present in public.
It's somewhat of a secret language, where certain phrases sound ok on the surface but have racist connotations. For example, "urban" or "inner city" is often a code word for "black". I have a rather racist uncle for example, he often rails about how the Democratic party has a strong grip on the "urban" vote, while the real America is the "rural" population, who are of course all true patriots and thus Republicans. Of course he is perfectly aware that political lines are not so neatly divided by population density, but that's because what he actually means is "urban" == "black" and "rural" == "white". Intentions are obscured, so everything gets fuzzy.
Going back to the Cupertino city council meeting, it makes it really hard to know what they really mean for sure. This is all based on my own experience, but I've seen enough cloak and dagger racism to know it's definitely a possibility. I think they would absolutely prefer an affluent black person over a poor white drug dealer, but on the other hand I would bet that for a significant number of the residents if you say "poor", the image that pops into their head is a black person.
It's also worth mentioning that this is a political issue, given that there is a pretty strong racial gap between political parties. I think that's where a lot of this doublespeak lingo came from, as a way to discuss race in politics (which, practically speaking is important) without sounding racist.
All that said, I think that the prevalence of sincere racism has definitely decreased significantly, so it's not all bad. Edit: I should also add, this is not universal on the American right, I know plenty of conservatives who aren't racists, nor is it only white Republicans who are racists.
There is a famous Lee Atwater (Republican strategist) quote that illustrates this perfectly. There are some ugly words in it that I will not censor, because our history is ugly.
Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger".
I don't think your rural/urban example is a good one.
A lot of the time people mean exactly what they say. Many rural folk would be happy to see city folk pushed off a cliff. The race thing is just an unfortunate correlation.
I also think that a lot of rural racists only have beef with city people but they're unable to properly articulate that so race just becomes a proxy they direct their hate at instead.
That's why it's ambiguous without context, because it can plausibly be covered up with a non-racist interpretation. In my uncle's case I know that is what he means from context, and I've seen those terms used similarly by others. There are certainly legitimate conflicts and grievances between rural and urban populations, but that's not what he means in this situation.
In my experience, with something that extreme %99.999 of people prefer Obama over the white drug addict. But racism is on a spectrum, it's not a yes/no thing. Most of the existing racism is far more subtle, like fears over foreigners, or the different and the new. The full-on give-me-white-drug-addict-over Obama is usually only constrained to the super rare neo-Nazi breed of racism.
Different cultures are also quite shocking. So even if that new family that moved in makes just as much money, has just as much education, but cooks different foods that smell funny to you, or talks in different ways, or puts on different displays, that can greatly impact acceptance.
I mean, I can't say that I don't have some racist attitudes, because over my life time I've discovered that some things that I thought were perfectly reasonable non-racial preferences end up getting really intertwined. Especially because I grew up in a very white area, with almost no history of the racial prejudices that affect parts of the US, I didn't understand how racism played out until I was in an area with more diversity, and it was a learning process to even spot it, or figure out what was insulting or derogatory, since I had so little experience with it. But because so much of the racism is not the neo-Nazi type, is more subtle and probably less conscious, it's important to not be too moralizing about it, because moralizing just entrenches it. Instead of beating someone up over it, it's far better to show how the attitude has negative effects, and how there can be positive effects from not having that attitude.
Of course, when people are speaking in codes, like they do in these meetings about "preserving neighborhood character," all that goes out the window. The article goes through lots of great examples of how even in the past, the racism was perpetuated with the cover of other excuses.
>which fund schools vastly differently based on property values, which provides very different access to education, which provides very different access to opportunities in the future.
Spending per student is often significantly higher in urban areas that have a larger proportion of poor students than in tony suburbs. Of course those urban schools probably need to spend more because they often need to compensate for less supportive home environments. Nonetheless, the correlation between per student spend and educational outcomes is quite weak in most places.
Those statistics are tricky to get right, in order to compare apples and apples you have to account for all sources of funding and/or subsidy, and also normalize across all services provided (and their need). Some of the spending studies I've seen are done very sloppily.
>Race and low income are inextricably linked because of racist past policies
Not just racist past policies, but also racist present social dynamics. Racial biases affects income when people don't visit restaurants with black waitstaff [1,2], when businesses make up excuses to decline black job applicants [3,4], when doctors fail to recognize the suffering of black patients [5], when colleges provide less support to black students [6], when black people are given harsher sentences for the same crimes [7], and when in so many cases these biases (which people are usually aware of IMO, even if they say they aren't) affect people's behavior in the world of friendship and dating and ultimately percolate back into the trajectory of people's careers. For a particular example of the last point, my own programming career in San Francisco started partially because of a friendship that formed through an online video game community when I was in high school. Friendship-forming is an unassailable personal freedom, but that doesn't mean it can't mediate unfairness.
People nowadays love to talk about "subconscious" racism and "persistent inequality", but this may perpetuate the false belief that volitional racial prejudices have mostly gone away -- they have not.
Your mistake is that you choose to see everything in terms of race. Not everything is a "racist dog whistle". If someone doesn't want poor people in their town, it's because they don't want poor people.
Cupertino is a melting pot of individuals of many different racial groups, they just all happen to be very wealthy. That's it. Your compulsion to consider everything in racial terms is itself racist and it clouds your judgement
On an individual basis, you really don't know, this is why to come to a conclusion that policy methods are discriminatory you need to look at large scale patterns.
This shows a bit with regard to voter rights in America. If you look at the history, most state level voter laws are designed in a way to suppress the vote -- but these laws are championed as ways to "stop voter fraud" among other things.
The individual who made this comment may or may not have racial bias, but I'd love to see how the Cupertino city council has dealt with other policies which may change the racial make up of the city in the past.
Interestingly, this isn't restricted to white people. I recently listened to an episode of a podcast (Planet Money, iirc), about housing prices and NIMBYism, and some pro-housing activists attended some council meetings in a largely Latino neighborhood in the Bay Area, and were met with lots of hostility as new developments were seen as leading to gentrification and destroying the Hispanic culture of the neighborhood.
It's not really the same thing when you are worried about gentrification. While culture is a part of it, the biggest issue is that many do not own in poorer neighborhoods. They rent. And they know that gentrification will slowly push them all from their homes as rents creep upward.
So, it's not that white people will ruin the Hispanic culture, it's that having no Hispanic residents will ruin the Hispanic culture.
It's an entire book dedicated to this hypothesis, with a bunch of evidence. It's difficult reading because it pisses you off to hear about how horrible people were (and are), but it's a very good book.
> you will see a metro area that was and still is being shaped by race.
In NYC, a major example is Robert Moses' Cross Bronx Expressway which "conveniently" cut through large swathes of minority neighborhoods. But it's not just the metro area. It's the entire country if you consider the extermination of the natives and the formation of the reservations ( easily the poorest regions of the western world today ).
> A poster has been down-voted to oblivion for pointing out the hypocrisy that the bluest states have the most un-affordable housing
Sad to say, that's to be expected. I had someone go through my history and downvote all of the comments. It's strange that people are so invested.
> Bringing this in would bring a lot of probably lower income people, and that would definitely bring down our median average household income.
Isn't that a mathematical truism? If you build lower priced housing, then people with less income would be able to afford it. If people with less income buy these houses, average income among house owners would necessarily decrease - that's what the average means!
Those threads are amazing. I live on the border between a middle-class overwhelmingly AA Chicago neighborhood and one of the wealthier Chicago suburbs, and you'd think you'd get stuff like this on all the forums, but I've never seen anything like this before in any forum.
“One resident said he feared low-income, high-density housing would bring in “uneducated” people. “A lot of other residents and I are concerned that this would make the current residents of Cupertino uncomfortable, and would split our city in half,” he said.”
..it was far worse that you could imagine. It was something like a 9 hour meeting
Remember how SF emptied out after the last dot-com crash? That may happen again. Real estate investors I know in SF say things have peaked. Outside the Bay Area and some coastal areas near LA, California's population is not increasing much.
We are 10 years into an expanding economy into one of the longest expansions ever. Interest rates are near all time lows and despite this the US it’s starting to spend more on interest than the military. Commercial real estate loans amortize over 30 years but need to be refinanced every 5-10 years so if rates go up.... Is it a good idea for SF to accommodate the tech bubble? There have been other tech bubbles and many country level and regional single industry bubbles in the past. Why is this bubble different? Not changing zoning and reducing the risk of SF turning into a sea of unfinished projects seems like the rational thing to do.
General political comments like this, even if they're meant to be insightful, have a completely predictable effect of sparking political flamewars. Since this is completely predictable and this isn't a political flamewar site, please don't.
Common tactic here on HN is to call politics you disagree with "political." I was even banned for this reason: for leaving "political" comments in political threads. Why not just be honest about it being different from your politics? One way to prevent all "flamewars" is to prevent all opinions that can be deemed offensive - and doesn't a quick appraisal of history reveal the issues with this oppressive strategy?
Even in tech companies, you silence opposing opinions about how a technology should work and you potentially ruin the company. I've seen this in startups many times - the problems that we read about after a startup has failed were raised early on by certain members, often who were ignored, fired, and ridiculed for having such opinions.
It's a common tactic to declaim grandiloquently about why one was banned but never supply the links so people could make up their own minds (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linkless%20martyr&sort=byDate&...). If we were really as arbitrary as you claim (edit: or whatever it is you claim), the pattern would be the opposite: people would be rushing to post their links, revealing how badly they were treated.
You were banned for posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17491521 and ignoring our requests to stop. Any fair-minded reader can see that comments like "who brainwashed you bro" violate the site guidelines independently of your political views.
I'm not claiming that it is arbitrary; quite the contrary. There is a very narrow range of acceptable views on HN - and your reply only underscores that fact. People call posts "political" in a political thread when they disagree - and rarely feel the need to present evidence for their own views.
And since you brought it up - in a manor so truncated - that post of mine that got me banned was 90% about how biological gender does exist. This emphasizes my point about how narrow the range of acceptable opinions are here on HN. None of the words composing the portion that you've quoted are even mean or offensive - and yes, I was implying that propaganda must be used to make someone argue so confidently without evidence against what even establishment biologists overwhelmingly believe (that biological gender exists). And furthermore, since you bring it up, another post of mine on a similarly "political" topic was met with with this supportive reply:
"Speaking as a gay minority, I totally agree with your comment."
So within the code of conduct, I assume you are referring to, "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I started off sarcastically, but you ignore the rest of my post which is substantive. The comment I replied to began with the words, "race does not exist." If you search on scholar.google.com for the terms 'race' and 'biological' you get 2,640,000 results. And is it really so radical that I met a comment dismissive of the discussion within 2,640,000 peer-reviewed search results with sarcasm?
But admins decided to cherry pick support or lack thereof for my comments, and then censored me. I don't know if this will be seen either since I am shadow banned - and the commenter who alerted me to the fact that I was shadow banned was then banned as well (for making that comment). After being banned I Googled for other people banned from HN from posting outside of the acceptable range of opinions and I found a load of them - and I don't think HN audience would appreciate that you're deciding to follow this censorship tread that we're seeing on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and many more. HN is framed as a more open community, but my experience here reveals a safe-space of increasing proportions.
You were banned, or rather your troll account was banned, because of a long history of posting crappy comments (by the standards of the site guidelines, which include no political criteria) and ignoring our multiple requests to stop. It's just that simple, and anyone who bothers going back through the history can see it.
It's not uncommon for people who were banned to fancy themselves a political dissident and go on about how repressed they are. But the truth is less glamorous: moderation is janitorial work, and the stakes are trivially low.
I'm confident that the HN community supports how we sweep the barn, because if they didn't, we'd never hear the end of it. And what we see is just the opposite: the community flags comments like these ones, from all political quarters. Even your comment upthread was flagged after I unkilled it, so I had to unkill it again.
Lets just completely ignore the Republican governors in California's history to set a narrative.
How can you simultaneously blame New York, Massachusetts and California for housing prices when they all have different housing strategies? You're clearly just pushing an anti-liberal message with no substance.
Their strategies all have a common component: lots of government involvement in what people build and do on their property (the presence of regulation is but one aspect of involvement, how that regulation is implemented matters a lot, see TFA for examples).
Not wanting lots of government management of something is only anti-liberal because modern "liberals" in the US have hitched their horse to the big government wagon.
CA and NY don't have more significantly regulations about what people can build and do on their property than Texas and Oklahoma. We simply have more reasonable zoning restrictions, like not allowing housing in areas designed as floodplains, or schools and housing within a few hundred feet of an oil refinery or fertilizer plant or other industrial facility susceptible to explosive accidents.
Parts of California, like the SF Bay Area, have more restrictive zoning laws. This is not true of the state as a whole, and generally the restrictiveness of zoning laws is highly correlated with the per capita household income of an area, not with its political leanings. (In LA, for example, the most restrictive zoning laws are found in Palos Verdes, the most conservative part of the city but also one of its wealthiest. Commercial buildings are generally limited to 2 stories in the few areas where they even allow commercial development. Contrast that to Beverly Hills, an equally wealthy neighborhood that leans significantly leftward that allows for significant commercial and mixed-use developments. )
Regulation and involvement are two different things. Many cities are basically shall-issue when it comes to permitting. Others hand out variances like colleges hand out condoms.
I'm saying that regulating zoning in an of itself is something all cities do but they do it to wildly varying extents (e.g. SF vs. Houston) and it doesn't correlated as directly with population as you're saying it does. It's also possible to regulate something (i.e. have zoning rules) but still take a very hands-off approach.
Except for one term in the mid-90s, where Republicans had a brief 1-seat majority in the Assembly, Democrats have had complete control of the Legislature (and therefore, policy and spending) for almost 30 years.
While there is some truth in what you say, it isn't very strong. The Red States typically have just as much zoning. They just have a smaller population and a much larger undeveloped area. (An ocean next to your city cuts the amount of land near your city in half. Mountains on the other side do the same to a lesser extent.)
NIMBYism, greed, and hypocrisy can be found everywhere, regardless of political party. It is consistent throughout human history. Combating injustice is an everlasting struggle.
Regardless of if theres a equivalence there or not, he's right that Texas and Georgia are in the unusual position of both having a ton of jobs and very reasonable housing market.
Granted SF is space constrained, but there is no excuse for other parts of Cali to be so expensive.
There's enough exceptions to this broad constraint though that partisan lean may not be a terribly relevant factor. As an example, Kalamazoo, Michigan is one of the cheapest cities according to several surveys, and the city is a modest left lean in a modest left state. (I actually can't think of too many hugely expensive cities in the Midwest, to be honest...)
Basically, without data comparing several possible relevant variables along with the actual statistical correlation the factor represents, these types of discussions are IMHO useless.
SF is not currently space constrained, only area constrained. They could build upwards if they wanted, but most of the city doesn’t allow buildings over 4 stories. Building up and having a functioning public transportation system would at least allow more people to live in SF, if not solve the housing price problem.
Sure those places are “liberal” unless a working class person is also a gay man who is afraid of being beaten to death in the streets.
I associate the housing crisis not really with liberal hypocrites but rather with ineffectual old ways of being “green”. Tons of Boomer environmentalists think you can save the planet by recycling, driving a Prius, and not wearing furs. That’s why the hot issue in Berkeley is plastic straws when they are undergoing a severe housing shortage. The fact is that installing a family in an existing dense, walkable city is the greenest thing that can be done. Being a NIMBY and having your Prius serviced by a mechanic who commutes three hours each way from Turlock is not green at all.
You won't be beaten to death in Red states. They will make you feel unwelcome/uncomfortable, but they are not so violent as to beat you to death.
Yes some people are that violent. However such people are everywhere. You are more likely to find them in the blue states just because the population density is higher.
Note that the tables seem to differentiate between
The state with the most hate crimes was California, at 931. California's population is 40 million. Next up is New York, at 595 incidents over 20 million citizens. Pretty close per person to California. (.000023 vs .000029, someone check my math).
Next up... Ohio, 442 incidents to 10 million citizens. .000044. Michigan, 399 to 10 million. Kentucky, oh Kentucky, 206 to 4.4 million.
I'm sorry but I am from Oklahoma and you are incorrect. Gay people are regularly beaten, threatened, have their houses burned, and are even murdered. It has been less than a year since drive-by shootings at LGBT organizations in both Tulsa and Oklahoma City.
"In March, the Tulsa headquarters of Oklahomans for Equality was the victim of a similar incident. Security camera video caught a white truck drive by and fire more than a dozen times at the center early in the morning on March 6."
Even if homophobes are just as present, blue states have a more accommodating legal framework to prosecute them.
LGBT persons are not a protected class at the federal level: look at a map of states that include it as a protected class, and nearly all the states that don't include it are red. http://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws
"Steven Nelson died after he responded to an online ad promising a sexual encounter. He was instead attacked by Kelly Schneider, who yelled homophobic slurs while kicking him repeatedly with steel-toed boots, then stripped and robbed him in the pre-dawn darkness near Gott’s Point, prosecutors have said."
And yet here you are responding to a person who said that he was actually gay, and telling you that you are exaggerating. How about you let the people you are talking about speak for themselves?
That was kind of my "meta" point. Social liberalism and economic liberalism have diverged. "Blue states" are more socially tolerant and liberal but have become strongholds for Plutocrats where everyone below the upper middle or "professional" class is paying >50% of their income to real estate or is priced out entirely. "Red states" tend toward the socially reactionary but offer an economic environment that's overall better for average working middle class people. You can afford a place to live and the general cost of living tends to be a lot lower.
This is an over generalization. Red state or blue state, where wealth centralizes, poor people are priced out. Notice that the cities with the highest wealth gaps are not exclusively in blue states.[1]
Likewise, expensive blue states like MA and CA have plenty of places to find affordable housing, they just don't happen to be in the middle of Boston or San Francisco.
But this has nothing at all to do with social issues or land use policies- the land is cheaper, simply because the demand is lower and the supply is higher.
LA has been building a lot of housing the past few years; DTLA itself nearly 50,000 units built/being built over a 3 year window. The problem wasn't zoning.
Unlike Texas, Oklahoma, or Kansas, we have these things called "earthquakes" that can cause significant amounts of damage and death and our building codes are more rigorous to minimize those risks. This also makes it more expensive to build housing--but that's a good thing. You don't want a ton of people living in shoddy houses that will collapse and kill them.
Per the ACS, Los Angeles County had 3.49 million homes in 2016, and 3.45 million homes in 2013. If your numbers for DTLA are accurate then nowhere else in the county is building anything.
(Just to keep up with US population growth Los Angeles County needs to build over 30k homes every year.)
While a few notable buildings opened up in downtown during that 2013-2016 time period (i.e., 8th and Grand, One Santa Fe in the Arts District, the Whole Foods Lofts, the Last Italian Fortress), most of the units in downtown have only recently come onto the market, i.e., in 2017 and 2018.
Some of the biggest developments in the Arts District and South Park are still under construction, and the biggest developments only broke ground this summer.
If you look at Los Angeles you can clearly see that the problem is zoning. The only high rises are in the downtown area. It looks almost comical. The vast majority of the city is zoned for single family homes.
LA has no single center of gravity. We have high rises in Downtown, along Wilshire in Korea Town, in MidCity/Beverly Center, Beverly Hills, Century City, Culver City. LA has hundreds of multi-unit apartment and mixed use buildings. Between downtown and the beach, most of the area is zoned for multi-unit residential with multi-unit buildings scattered between single-family blocks. Only a few neighborhoods are entirely single-family homes.
Liberal doesn't imply that they care for the working class; in Marxist terms, they're still bourgeoisie, just with a somewhat socially liberal bent. Money is still more important than anything else.
Regional slurs, like national ones, are not allowed here. HN has readers in nearly every part of the US (and the world), and they have as much right to respect as you do. Please don't post like this again.
No one is pretty clearly a description of quantity, not a description of the people. I'm not sure why you would try to apply such an absurd and uncharitable interpretation to what I said, but if anything is toxic in this thread, it's that.
I get that you were talking about quantity, but the figure of speech which describes millions of people as "nobody" has also a belittling aspect to it. This is the aspect I'm talking about.
Well, I simply disagree that the fact that a word has another, unintended meaning has any bearing on its use. I don't really see why it should, or why that would be a productive or useful social rule to impose.
I'm not making a point about population density, I only did so because others brought it up first. Demand for housing in the urban areas of SF and LA is much higher than anywhere in Texas. Note that I used the word 'demand', not 'density'.
I don't think you even know what your point is. Population density of an entire state has absolutely nothing to do with "nobody" wanting to live in the state. If Alaska decided to merge with California the population density would plummet and would fail your criterion despite the fact that no people actually moved.
I disagree, intent matters a great deal. My conservative friends in Texas don't actually want poor people / immigrants / etc housed, it's a part of their value system - "If they want housing, they should work for it!" thinking. My liberal friends in San Francisco hold the opposite mindset, they want everyone housed, working or otherwise, even if it's done in their own neighborhood.
Policy needs work, I agree. My conservative friends like to mock me, blame the Democrats, or just the entire concept of liberalism, for every problem in San Francisco. Maybe they're right, but I've heard strong arguments that many problems we face are hangovers from old-guard republican policy:
I've also heard arguments that a lot of this boils down to just Prop 13, sponsored mostly by Republicans, particularly anti-tax activist Howard Jarvis but also Paul Gann.
Anyway, I think finger pointing is boring and useless, and as someone who's social circle is split in third between the deep south, the not so deep south, and the capital of liberalism in America, I've learned to address these kinds of discussions with "point your finger at what you think the solution should be instead." Saying "blue states suck at building cities" is just another form of Ad Hominem - what specifically is the problem, and what specifically do you think the solution should be?
> My liberal friends in San Francisco hold the opposite mindset, they want everyone housed, working or otherwise, even if it's done in their own neighborhood.
That may be true for your friends, but the revealed preference of SF residents as a whole does not agree.
I was invited to a tent-covered block party in SF by a friend active in politics and the Asian-American scene. I was told that the party was being thrown by a Chinese family that owned something like 30% of SF property. I have no way of verifying this.
My point being that money, in one way or another, caused the housing crisis, and it may not have anything to do with liberal vs conservative, zoning, regulations, or prop 13. SF is an iconic city, and money will always flow there. Meanwhile, virtually everyone I knew in SF was a renter, and most of them were in tech. The only ones I knew who owned had pre-IPO Google money or made it to Google Staff positions.
In less tightly zoned areas, it's pretty common for single family homes to be replaced with two or three story apartment buildings over time. But there's no point in building a three story apartment building in SF, you need to build a 6-10 story building. A 6-10 story building is going to be out of character in a neighborhood of small single family homes; but a smaller building wouldn't necessarily be. In a block that had most of the single family homes replaced with small apartment buildings, a 6-10 story building would probably be OK.
I don't know how to make fair rules that allow for that, though. Nobody can build anything bigger, and everybody can build whatever they want are both easy to apply in a fair manner, but lead to bad results. Maybe allowing to build up to double the median size could work.